Never Going Back - A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk - <AUTHOR> http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/09/never-going-back-a-week-of-not-eating-lunch-at-my-desk/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I like to eat lunch at my desk, other times I eat in the dining area with co-workers, and other times I eat out. Why does it need to be an all or nothing proposition? There are days when I'm very busy on a problem and I don't want the distraction of taking lunch so I'll either eat it at my desk or eat something low impact like a protein bar/shake. Alternatively when I get stuck on a problem I'll take a longer lunch and get away from my computer for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an excellent point. To answer your question: I don't think it needs to be an all or nothing proposition.

For me, I had acquiesced to _always_ eating at my desk; convincing myself I was making the best decision _for me_.

I know myself well enough to know there are aspects of my life I'm not good at regulating or balancing. I also know that I'm good at convincing myself of things that aren't in my best interest. Experiments like this are useful to me for that reason.

I discovered that I was wrong about what I thought I wanted from this particular aspect of life. This discovery was important enough, for me, to make a clear cut decision to alleviate the chances of convincing myself my old routine was a good one.

An analogy that comes to mind is how some people stop smoking cigarettes: cold turkey isn't for everyone, but for those who know it is, they go for it and they stop and they feel better for it. There's science to show eating lunch at the desk is unhealthy. I've found I tremendously enjoy the alternative and the benefits that come with it. So, I've gone cold turkey. But that doesn't mean it's for everyone.

<comment><USER3> >An analogy that comes to mind is how some people stop smoking cigarettes: cold turkey isn't for everyone, but for those who know it is, they go for it and they stop and they feel better for it.

While it's a bit tenuous to compare where you eat your lunch with a long term physical addiction, it's worth noting that the _vast_ majority of people who quit "cold turkey" fail. Indeed, I'll broaden that and say more casually that when people make public pronouncements, using absolute words like never, their failure rate comes within a measurement error of 100%.

Cliffbean says in another post that such absolutism is "an attempt by many people to play against their own psychology.", and I absolutely agree with that, although my take tends to be much more cynical than theirs: It is an attempt to essentially shackle future you with the fickle and short-term observations of current you. Future you, most people eventually learn, _doesn 't really care_ much what current you thinks, and will reassess in the future based upon new information.

Which is how we see an unending stream of these disposable lifehack "one week in" observations, always presented as if it's profoundly revealing information that has changed the speaker forever. In a month you can write a "Why I was always eat at my desk", detailing the unhealthiness of take out food and the great financial savings you've enjoyed, the benefits of taking a moment to relax and unwind, and on and on.

Everyone is different. We all have different social patterns, different diets, different behaviors. Do what works best for you, and what works best for you will undoubtedly change over the years. Life is dynamic and is a constantly changing set of circumstances and situations.

But if I have one piece of advice for you, it's to never use the word never. Unless you're telling someone to never use the word never. The only result of making never declarations is that over time your word starts to lose any value.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand. I quit smoking a few months ago. I can't imagine _any_ other way than firmly attempting to never smoke another cigarette any more, ever.

Now that particular resolution might not be 100% successful. Maybe I will succumb to another cigarette some day. But there's a difference between setting a certain _goal_ , and what counts as succeeding at it.

If I tell myself, I can quit smoking but I'm allowed to smoke a cigarette every now and then, _that_ is setting myself up for failure. I know because that's how I failed previous attempts. Even a single cigarette for me re- triggers the physical addiction, and will make the 2-3 weeks after that extra hard to control and not relapse. That occasional single cigarette would just be making it extra hard on myself to follow through, and the extra willpower needed when I allow myself that, is not worth the supposed pleasure of that one smoke.

(btw I am aware that there also exist people who can actually manage to quit but smoke one cigarette every 2-3 months or so. makes me wonder whether they ever were really addicted in the first place, but that's another question, plus I'm not here to judge anybody. What I do know is, that I am not one of those people)

So I resolve myself to the goal of "no cigarettes anymore, ever", in order to achieve a 99.9% cigarette-free life. But I am sincerely aiming for that 100%, because I'm a bit fed up with the whole addiction thing, experienced it, seen it, learned from it, I'd like to see it fade away to memoryland.

Maybe though my overcoming nicotine addiction is the _only_ thing that is so important to me that I'll allow myself to say "never again". I wouldn't say this about not eating at my desk, for instance, it's too small a thing to make such a big claim about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I never eat lunch at my desk because I think it's inconsiderate to my coworkers. They should not have to smell or see what I am eating, let alone hear me crunch into chips or an apple.

<comment><USER6> I find this quite ridiculous, people are not these fragile creatures that can't see, hear or smell anything other than the usual office sights, sounds and aromas. I think you're over thinking this. Unless you're eating weird stuff like boiled lungfish or whatever then I suspect nobody is paying the slightest attention to you eating chips or an apple.

<comment><USER7> You've clearly never sat next to someone in a quiet office, who is crunching on fistfuls of banana chips for an hour with their mouth open. I swear it would _echo_ , those things are so loud. Maybe it's the whole mouth-open thing that does it. But not everyone manages to eat discreetly, or even 'normally'.

In a loud office, it might not be so bad, but when the office is otherwise quiet, it keeps you from concentrating at all. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. cr-cr-cr-cr- CRUNCHCHCHCHCH.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes, at my office, someone decides to make popcorn.

I never hear them eating it.

But, on the other side of the office, the smell encroaches, stirring the taste buds with delicious promises. And then I look up, curious. And then I realize what happened. And then my stomach goes, "Oooh, that's a good idea."

And then it's too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just the opposite. I have eaten my lunch at my desk almost every day for years and can't imagine anything else.

      - I crave LONG periods of time for coding...
      - By noon, I'm really getting rolling. I hate to stop.
      - I always plan & pack my lunch exactly like I want.
      - I love how everyone else is gone & I'm alone.
      - No one I know eats like me...
      - I'm tired of explaining/debating food choices.
      - I hate standing in line or waiting for my waiter.
      - I hate "small talk" over lunch.
      - I leave early, before traffic.
      - I still exercise more than anyone I know.
      - If I want a break, then I surf or email.
      - My favorite hour of the day.

</comment><comment><USER10> I use my lunch periods to get away from the forced socialization of our open- office plan. In fact, that one hour when everyone is down at the cafeteria is usually my most productive hour in the day: I can get stuff done without disruptions or interruptions.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Blog posts like this aren't useful. Either it's about prescribing a certain behavior for others, which is obviously a waste of time because we all have different values that lead to equally valid/subjective choices, or it's just intended to describe one person's decision tree, which isn't of general interest. Blogging like this feels like it's driven by narcissism either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I found my mind wandering to other things and realized that I was actually enjoying my food a lot more; remarking internally on how the bread actually taste in the sandwich."

jesus christ what

<comment><USER13> i know right

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised he doesn't mention what I think is the #1 reason for going out for lunch: spending time with your coworkers that is not necessarily work focused.

All the reasons he gives seem pretty weak: if you need a break, you can step outside the office for a walk or a coffee or even go read on a bench for 20mn without the activity being necessarily lunch.

Eating lunch at your desk has benefits, such as allowing you to go home sooner or doing things at your computer that are not work related but which you enjoy doing (e.g. reading HN).

The moral here is not "Always eat at your desk" or "Always eat outside" but "Don't always do the same thing".

<comment><USER15> I decided to have zero "out of work focused" conversations with my co-workers at my new job. It's the best decision I made. Office politics was always against me because I was speaking with my co-workers about things I do outside of work. I learned that co-workers are no my friends. They are sometimes enemies

<comment><USER14> False dichotomy. It's true that they are not your friends but it doesn't mean that you should never interact with them, nor that you wouldn't enjoy (and maybe even learn from) spending time with them.

You spend more time with your coworkers than with your family, so cutting this entire part out of your life for some nebulous principle is not socially smart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can imagine the Onion article - "Man Leaves Dark Building During Day, Is Surprised He Likes Sunshine"

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm from Brazil, where we have lunch on restaurants every day. Very very few people have lunch at the office and even fewer at their desks.

When I first went to the US I was appalled by people eating at their desks, today I live in the UK and it's common for people to have lunch at their desks, may it be sandwiches or salads they brought from home. I still can't do it.

Reason being I have to breath fresh air, disconnect from the office and have my own personal meal time to sit down and enjoy a meal leisurely. I usually invite people to have lunch with me and I can see that they look almost uncomfortable sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've done a month of exact opposite. Sometimes I didn't eat either.

Catch up on WWDC, wrote some cool hacks, update some libraries, write some tests for someone elses library, do some pull requests.

Lunch itself is a waste of time, adding co-workers that might eat slower than you where social conventions requires you to stick around (because they are kind enough to do so).

I rather just avoid that whole mess.

Besides, lunch was invented so I could watch WWDC in peace.

I am also lucky to work in a place where no one gets upset or questions it.

I actually like the company of my co-workers, but lunch is me being productive.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't want to spend my precious lunch hour being social. Desk lunches are one of the best perks of being a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER20> I pack a lunch nearly every day. I tend to get hungry 30-45 minutes before most of my coworkers, and I eat lunch at my desk because I don't want to sit by myself in the empty break room. Off topic: the amount of money I save by packing a lunch versus going out is awesome. I also tend to eat a bit healthier as a result.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is one of the bits of advice I used to give new hires in NOC and Security: "Sometime things are crazy and we may not get to eat on time or may need to eat at our desks. Don't eat at your desk when you don't have to. Get away for a few minutes for your health and sanity."

Unrelated (ish) but much more important: "Don't cook fish in the shared microwaves!" At the current place, all of the microwaves have signs exhorting everyone to "Please cover your food!".

</comment><comment><USER22> Another point to consider is that eating at your desk could be a major source of illness: your phone, tablet, mouse, keyboard, etc., are all great sources for all sorts of germs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Putting that into greater perspective with some data: studies have shown your desk environment to have _400 times_ more bacteria than toilet seats.

<comment><USER23> Should we be worried by that? I presume there's some qualitative differences between desk-dwelling bacteria and toilet-seat-dwelling bacteria.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. To be honest, when I was doing my research I was able to come across multiple quotations of a study talking about these numbers. However, attempts to actually find a copy of the study in question led me to two different dead links. It's why I didn't bring it up in my blog post. I simply couldn't find a copy of the source; as compelling as a statement regarding toilet seats may be.

I hate that it's so hard to find a copy of an academic study.

Should you a find a copy of the study that explored and expounded upon this, I would love to see a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A somewhat different perspective exists in India. Most large corporations (and a large number of startups too) dissuade people from eating at their desks. Because most Indians love and eat cooked food, which, well, tends to give off the odours of cooked food. An entire floor eating cooked food at their desks will inevitably lead to a lingering odour that settles over everything & everyone.

So many of us have two options - eat out at a nearby eatery, or eat your prepared lunch at the internal cafeteria.

Personally, and in my circle of friends, we've gone from preferring eating out to preferring eating cooked meals that are either bought at the cafeteria or brought from home.

Maybe it's our preference for cooked food, which after a few years of eating out, will always be healthier if you get if from home. And because many of us have the "luxury" of being able to hire cooks who come in the mornings/evenings.

There are of course many Indians who prefer eating out, but as they get older (read: 4-5 years of working), they start realizing that home-cooked food is a better proposition. Which is why you'll often find a broad cross-section of employees - from an entry level person to CXOs, bringing cooked food in insulated containers as lunch.

</comment><comment><USER25> It is one of these American cultural differences that we never imagine about other cultures: People eat lunch at the desk, instead of socializing; drinking alcohol outdoors is against the law; police can pick you for loitering...

</comment><comment><USER26> I almost always take lunch, even when I'm very busy. Indeed, especially when I'm very busy. I always found it tremendously invigorating to get out of the office and walk around outside, particularly when I worked in Manhattan where you could totally drown yourself in the crowd and push out work thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's funny, I almost never used to eat lunch when I worked in an office. I'd go have lunch outside of the office with coworkers. Now that I work remotely from home I eat at my desk close to 100% of the time. I rarely try to do actual work while eating, opting instead to stay hands free and watch a pycon talk or part of a documentary or something, but the article definitely resonates with me.. Most of my lunches are interrupted by questions in team chat and I end up feeling rushed back to work and not like I've had an effective break. I think I'm gonna try eating out today :)

</comment><comment><USER28> I actually never bring my lunch to work, entirely for this reason. We don't have a cafeteria, and if I don't force myself to step away from my desk for an hour I'm never going to.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a forest near my office, and I like to drive up there during lunch and walk for 30 minutes.

<comment><USER30> I used to work in Santa Barbara a block from the ocean so I'd go swimming at lunch. Other times I'd get Tacos Rajas from La Super Rica.

At my current job my desk is pretty attractive compared to the surroundings so I prefer that. Also, I can pack a pretty good lunch for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How about a look into how much more money you spend by going out to lunch everyday?

<comment><USER32> Eating lunch out every day can definitely get expensive, and people don't realize that. Of course, you don't have to buy your lunch in order to not eat at your desk. Assuming you have a place you can go (in this guy's example, a park), you can always bring something from home. Or, if you need something more exciting than what you can make at home, do like this guy:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/02/liberate_you...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/02/liberate_yourself_from_the_kitchen_become_a_guerilla_chef_.html)

...and then bring it somewhere other than your desk to eat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At first I thought this was going to be a soylent story. I'm glad it's not. Thumbs up for the enjoyment of eating.

</comment><comment><USER34> I bring a book to work. When I'm not eating with coworkers, lunch is when I forget I have a job and read.

</comment><comment><USER35> It blows my mind that someone had enough motivation to write a big post on just why eating at desk is bad.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've have never eaten lunch at my desk in 3 decades, I refuse. I need that time away to clear my mind. EIther I go out or eat in the company cafeteria (if it has one) or if I had to eat in some kind of lunch space.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thank you. However I must confess that I am conscious of the decisions I make, and I am capable of evaluating the impact those decisions have on me and my particular circumstances.

The outcome of this is :

Some days I am full of energy and clarity and I eat at my desk and keep working.

Some days I am tired, stressed or for some other reason can't focus, and then I might go out and eat in a park and take my time.

Some days I have friends who want to meet for lunch.

Some days my colleagues want to go out for lunch as a group, typically Friday.

Some days I go eat in the common area because I am eating something smelly.

Some days I skip having anything substantial at lunch and go home early.

</comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone else not care even if they did lose productivity to lunch...

</comment><comment><USER39> Would you like a cookie for coming to the realization that you're an adult and can make adult choices about your daily behavior?

...why of course, you can eat that cookie wherever you like

</comment><comment><USER40> I read this as I was eating lunch at my desk... nothing spices up a meal like a guilt trip. Yeah ok, maybe I should go take a real break.

I usually try to take a real lunch, but it is tempting to get a bit of extra time back during midday. It ends up being a slippery slope where it silently goes from once-in-a-while to all-the-freaking-time.

I also probably end up physically leaving my desk, but spending my whole lunch spinning the wheels in my head and that's probably just as problematic.

</comment><comment><USER41> My team normally all leaves the office to go eat as a group in the dining room at noon every day. I wouldn't have it any other way.

</comment><comment><USER42> I take a 2 mile bike ride home, hang out for a bit with the cats, and watch some Hulu before heading back. I cherish my lunch breaks.

</comment><comment><USER43> I eat lunch in my dining room with my family (remote work is the best!)

In my previous job, I would eat lunch out whenever I was in the main office. Otherwise, the owner would decide it was just the PERFECT time for a meeting...

In my satellite office I would eat at my desk, though. In my lone office in the back of a warehouse.

</comment><comment><USER44> One of the best decisions I ever made at my prior job. I'd take a solid hour for lunch outside, typically with colleagues. Additionally, 2 colleagues and I took a 45 min walk at 330pm everyday. I'd argue that I was significantly more productive by doing this and much much happier.

</comment><comment><USER45> Go out to lunch 20 years now. I have to get out of the office for an hour to keep my sanity.

</comment><comment><USER46> Lunch and dinner breaks are my most treasured time periods on many days. Whenever I remember the good old times at university, I think of my walks outside the library - and along the seashore - while taking a rest from studying to eat dinner.

<comment><USER46> I should add that browsing Wikipedia while eating lunch has made me a nutrition expert, to the surprise of many people. Eating lunch at the desk can also have its advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A book(physical) is essentially all you need to mentally get away.

</comment><comment><USER48> I bike for 75-90 minutes in the middle of the day, so I don't have much time for lunch. I eat while working after my bike ride.

That said, I agree with a lot of what the author has said.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've never heard that, but I never do it anyways. Why sit at my desk when we have ping pong, pool, pinball, or arcade games?

<comment><USER50> For me its because I want my lunch to be as short as possible. I want to jam my food down my throat and finish what I'm doing. If I am going to relax it won't be at the office. I have much more fun things to do at home. For me work happens at work, and play happens at home. I keep as strict of a line between the two as I can.

That's just how my mind is set up though and I get why others like to relax and unwind throughout out the day.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket just buy some cigarettes and take breaks often

<comment><USER13> just wait until HN finds out nicotine is (technically) a powerful nootropic

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> But... when would I read Hacker News?

</comment><comment><USER52> Sitting the whole lunch period is a bigger problem. Grab a take away, then go for a walk.

</comment><comment><USER53> Its always great stepping out for lunches. Welcome to the real world!

</comment><comment><USER54> Nice post Dave, keep the posts coming!

</comment><comment><USER3> The word never is seldom (but not quite 'never') advised, and shines brightly as a warning sign. It appears far too often among these shallow lifehack type articles.

In this case someone realized that that they have options about where to eat. While this may seem a tad cynical, in a week they will be back at their desk.</comment>


Introduction to AOLserver, Part 1 (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html <comment><USER2> Current up-to-date AOLserver fork is NaviServer:

[https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/NaviServer](https://wiki.tcl- lang.org/page/NaviServer)

Tcl has SafeTcl, that can be used to run untrusted code:

[https://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/safetcl.html](https://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/safetcl.html)

For smaller usage, there is Wapp web framework that is TCL+SQLite:

[https://wapp.tcl.tk/home/doc/trunk/README.md](https://wapp.tcl.tk/home/doc/trunk/README.md)

Importing Git repo to Fossil [https://fossil-scm.org](https://fossil-scm.org) SQLite database uses much less disk space. Fossil can have Wapp etc CGI server extensions integrated:

[https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/serverext.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/serverext.wiki)

For syncing between Git and Fossil:

[https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki)

[https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrortogithub.md](https://fossil- scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrortogithub.md)

For packaging Tcl apps to single executeable, there is Tclkit:

[https://blog.tcl.tk/52](https://blog.tcl.tk/52)

</comment><comment><USER3> The early prototype of HotBot aka Inktomi was done in AOLserver (then called NaviServer). I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, Tcl was the new Perl and embedded scripting was the new CGI.

For production scaling, we rewrote it in multi-threaded C++ running on Sun hardware. This was not only pre-AWS but you had to build your own machine room, which meant severe constraints on budget and physical space: getting a world-scale service into a single rack was the difference between success and failure.

Anyway, AOLserver and Tcl rocked, other than performance, no complaints at all for this use.

<comment><USER4> HotBot was my go-to search engine before Google got popular, so thanks :)

The article seems to imply AOLserver ran pretty well (28,000 hits per second in the late 90s), and AOL used it with their users. How many hits were you getting that it didn't work? Or was it the nature of the workload (presumably db queries for search results) that were the bottleneck?

<comment><USER5> You had to write C code for anything compute-intensive. TCL was precompiled to VM and was as fast as TCL can be. aol.com ran it for a while. Eventually other properties like digital cities used it with a bunch more optimizations that I wasn't directly involved in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great to see some discussion about this ecosystem. I literally started playing around with NaviServer just 9 days ago. It's definitely worth a glance. There are a lot of great utilities built right in: database connection pooling, a key-value cache, and more [0]

Tangentially related, I've been making my way through Greenspun's Software Engineering for Internet Applications [1] and have especially found the metadata section to be enlightening [2]. I like to think of myself as a competent engineer, but this quote hit too close to home

 _If you 're programming one Web page at a time, you can switch to the language du jour in search of higher productivity. But you won't achieve significant gains unless you quit writing code for one page at a time. Think about ways to write down a machine-readable description of the application and user experience, then let the computer generate the application automatically._

[0] [https://naviserver.sourceforge.io/n/toc.html](https://naviserver.sourceforge.io/n/toc.html)

[1] [https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/](https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/)

[2] [https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/metadata](https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/metadata)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. Blast from the past. Greenspun's company ArsDigita used to run free web development boot camps. I did one of the boot camps back in 2000. It was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing.

Apparently, there was also an ArsDigita University, which ran for a year:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita_University)

</comment><comment><USER5> I worked for Doug as an intern at AOL and eventually led AOLServer development for a few years. It was a cool project and it's neat to see it here !

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, good memories. I was into Greenspun's writings, ArsDigita, AOLServer, OpenACS. Even managed OpenACS releases for while. Lots of good people there at that time, with concepts that only later became mainstream: application servers, database connection pooling, templating, user-registered tags, decent databases (mysql wasn't included in that list).

We ported the ArsDigita Community System to PostgreSQL, added a lot of features into it with the subsequent addition of .LRN, a learning-management system the Berklee School of Music funded IIRC, and many other things.

Aaron Schwartz, Ben Adida, Don Baccus, Michael Cleverly, and many many others besides myself (Roberto Mello) were contributors.

</comment><comment><USER9> I actually did some AOLserver / tcl development in 2007. MapQuest was still running off of it for the core site before the big java rewrite.

To think that if AOL had open sourced it before Apache got popular the early internet history would have looked different.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember AOLserver was evaluated at company that I worked for. They were using Roxen at the time and decided to stay with that. I remember both AOLServer and Roxen had such amazing features, that Apache felt like a huge step backward. But of course, Apache worked well one smaller servers,

Not often you see a 22 year old commit:

[https://github.com/pikelang/Roxen](https://github.com/pikelang/Roxen)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxen_(web_server)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxen_\(web_server\))

[https://roxen.com](https://roxen.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> fwiw, his, 'Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing' is pretty cool.

<comment><USER12> Reading that 15-odd years ago got me started with web development.

<comment><USER13> Me too! But more than 20 years ago. And it mainly helped me get beyond simple CGIs into database connections.

I love that the whole book was online but also in a very slick coffee table format. With a bracing sense of humor and not afraid to try and distill very technical topics for less technical people. There is something of the DIY, can-do, participatory side of 90s computer culture in there. Deeply.

<comment><USER6> >There is something of the DIY, can-do, participatory side of 90s computer culture in there.

I've really enjoyed reading Greenspun's stuff and this is a great way to describe his writing style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aww, AOLserver and OpenACS. Some of the best sites I worked on were OpenACS sites. In fact if fact when they shutdown Uptime, I ported his AOLserver/Oracle code to AOLserver/Postres and ran Uptime, from my home, on a Sparc pizza box for years.

AOLserver and TCL are still on my mind for new projects. Just haven't pulled the trigger .. yet ..

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like one could describe OpenResty as a spiritual successor to AOLServer/NaviServer. "Take a well-engineered, low-level-coded web server, and plop a powerful, lightweight VM into it" seems to be fruitful ground.

</comment><comment><USER16> AOLServer is still valid but outdated and so NaviServer is the now the newly active maintained version of AOLServer, taking it back to it's roots.

TCL is a fun language and integrates well with most including perl and python. To be able to call a procedure based on a URL adds none of the frustration that MVC brings that I've found.

If your looking to pick up a new language to toy with; I would recommend TCL as an language to take a poke at. It does have an old unixy feel to it, but I've found it's mature and very solid. OO is also possible.

Nothing could be simpler when everything is a string, it leads you down a path of voodoo and creativity.

      proc displayHackerNews {} {
      set hn "Hacker News" ;#Set the variable (hn) with "Hacker News"
      puts $hn ;#Prints the variable ($hn) to terminal
      } ;#end procedure

      displayHackerNews ;#execute the procedure
       % Hacker News

If statements are easy

      set hn ""
      if { $hn eq "Hacker News" } { puts $hn } else {
         set hn "sad face"
         puts $hn
      } ;#end if

Loops are fun

      set hn "Hacker News" ;#Set a variable
      while { $hn eq "Hacker News" } {
        puts "$hn" ;# print "Hacker News" to terminal in an infinite loop
      } ;#end loop

Multi-threading is a breeze.

      set MyThreadID [thread::create {
      puts "Hello from my new thread"
       thread::wait
      } ;#end code-to-run
       ] ;#end thread

And finally, a if-switch-threaded-loop

      set hn "Hacker News"
      if { $hn eq "Hacker News" } {set switch "hn" } else { set switch "" }

      switch $switch {
      hn {
      set MyThreadID [thread::create {
      proc displayHackerNews {} {set hn "Hacker News" ; puts $hn} ;#end procedure

      #set aCounter to zero, if aCounter is < 7 execute displayHackerNews procedure
      for {set aCounter 0} {$aCounter < 7} {incr aCounter} { displayHackerNews }
       thread::wait
      } ;#end threaded-code
      ] ;#end thread
      } ;#end switch-case

      default {puts "sad face"}
      } ;#end switch

Not a spokesperson, I just like TCL.

NaviServer: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/naviserver/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/naviserver/) | [https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/NaviServer](https://wiki.tcl- lang.org/page/NaviServer)

TCL/Tk: [http://tcl.tk/](http://tcl.tk/) | [https://wiki.tcl- lang.org/page/Tcl+Tutorial+Lesson+0](https://wiki.tcl- lang.org/page/Tcl+Tutorial+Lesson+0) | [https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tcl- tk/index.htm](https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tcl-tk/index.htm)

<comment><USER17> Any thoughts on why TCL isn't more popular?

<comment><USER18> The syntax is quite simple, with only a few rules of evaluation -- too simple for those used to the Algol family, too complex for smug lisp weenies.

Then you had the RMS flame war, back when he was still considered influential for programmers.

Then they kinda missed the boat when it came to packages. Never got something like CPAN going, whereas Python and Ruby did.

I can't remember exactly, but I think there wer some corporate shenanigans, too, with the whole Sun/Scriptics situation and Java stealing its milkshake, weirdly enough.

Speaking of siphoning off milkshakes, Lua did this for the scripting part. Syntax that was a bit more regular, implementation that was even easier to embed (and don't get me wrong, Tcl is/was pretty great there).

And nowadays, you either get lucky with some specific niche, or it's hard for a dynamic scripting language.

I still like it. Heck, I like my Tk bisque, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a cloud engineer today with about a decade of experience. I mainly build and maintain K8s clusters for those who've made the unusual choice of going with EKS.

That being said, I did not understand until I was 17 that you could...just open a browser...and the internet was on.

As AOL rolled out broadband to its previously dial-up customer base, they did not want to confuse their very technically unskilled customers. So just like dialup, where a PPP connection has to be made initially, they preserved the concept in broadband. You still had to click all of the buttons as if you were signing into AOL. This also had the advantage of keeping people on the AOL browser.

<comment><USER20> Why is EKS unusual? I've found GKE to be wayy easier, but wasn't aware it (or --something else?) was more popular.

<comment><USER21> IME most AWS users stick with AWS primitives rather than hosting those services themselves on a k8s cluster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Those heady pre dot-com crash days. I think he was one of the first people to get screwed over by his VCs as well. A trailblazer in so many ways.

</comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone else notice John Ousterhout's name pop up in the article?

He's the same person who created RAFT and the first implementation of log structured file system, among other things. That's one hell of a career.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout)

</comment><comment><USER24> Our startup in the late 90's, had a similar product, uBusiness.

Also using a mix of TCL, C and Apache.

Later on, we created an IDE using VB 6.

Although using TCL was a great experience, it also taught me that not having a JIT/AOT compiler just doesn't scale, as every performance bottleneck just got rewritten in C.

In the end the product got rewritten into .NET.

<comment><USER18> Rewriting bottlenecks in C is pretty much the design philosophy of Tcl. Ousterhout argued that even with dropping down to that level, all over productivity was high enough (and not every developer would need to know the nitty gritty).

In that respect, I think it wasn't other languages that ruined that party, but IDEs, which made working in the more performant B&D languages less painful.

<comment><USER25> The main problem I see with this philosophy, is that Tcl and C are two completely different languages

So switching from Tcl to C, I think might require two teams in most organizations, one writing in Tcl and another writing in C

For large organization, this is probably not a big problem, but not so for small teams

This is why I had high hopes for gradually types or optionally types languages, but it seems this doesnt really work in practice, Raku is not fast, Dart (as far as I understand) dropped gradual typing, it remain to see if Red will make it work

<comment><USER26> Raku is not fast for mostly different reasons.

Right now one of the slow parts is the regex/grammar feature. So code that uses that feature is a bit slower than it needs to be. The compiler uses the regex/grammar feature, so your code compiles slower than necessary. Since this feature has mostly been left alone for years, it makes sense that it is a bit slow. Hopefully someone will volunteer to improve this soonish.

Much of the slowness is actually caused by the dynamic design of the language. (Which are perhaps its most awesome set of features.)

As for the slowness caused from dynamic typing, it mostly goes away after the runtime type specializer built into MoarVM gets a chance to optimize it. This is the step before the JIT, and it is actually more important than the JIT for performance. (It also optimizes the dynamic features noted above.)

The type specializer could in the future make it so that bog-standard Raku code is eventually as fast, or faster than bog-standard C. (The runtime type specializer has more information available to work with than a C compiler could ever hope for.) Of course hand optimized C would probably still outperform Raku at that point, but you can also hand optimize your Raku code.

There has already been one report of Raku (Perl6 at the time) being faster than the C/C++ equivalent for one workload. There have also been several important optimizations since then. (I'm fairly sure the slowness of the C/C++ version had to do with copying strings and looking for null terminators of strings, neither of which Rakudo on MoarVM does.)

\---

For more information watch the videos of, or read the slides from:

"Escape analysis and related optimizations for Perl 6" -- Jonathan Worthington (jnthn)

and

"Perl 6 performance update" -- Jonathan Worthington (jnthn)

(If you are only going to watch one, make it the latter one.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim I think Rateyourmusic still runs on AOLServer.</comment>


Ask HN: Why my story got dead? - <AUTHOR>

I have submitted a story(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355112) here but it got dead. Please let me know the reasons why it got dead. <comment><USER2> (For benefit of other readers, I think [http://www.techieapps.com/googles-new- feature-data-locking-o...](http://www.techieapps.com/googles-new-feature-data- locking-on-spreadsheets-and-more-effective-search-for-users/) is what the OP's submission linked to.)

I didn't see your story before it was killed, so I can't speak for anyone who actually flagged it. But these are my thoughts:

The article is poorly written. It contains numerous grammatical errors and may have been machine-translated from another language, possibly for SEO purposes.

The article is not very substantive, nor is it very interesting.

I would not have flagged it myself, but I would have downvoted it had I been able to.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not dead. It's pining for the fjords.

Sometimes, especially with new users, these things just happen. Develop a bit more Internet points and you wont hit the spam filter as much, I don't think.

Also note that I remember hearing that links to certain domains get flagged automagically.

Finally, in the future email an admin instead of posting an Ask thread about these types of issues.</comment>


A $30 device that can gain a unauthorized access to your car or garage - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/meet-rolljam-the-30-device-that-jimmies-car-and-garage-doors/ <comment><AUTHOR> "It works against a variety of market-leading chips, including the KeeLoq access control system from Microchip Technology Inc. and the High Security Rolling Code generator made by National Semiconductor. RollJam is capable of opening electronic locks on cars from Chrysler, Daewoo, Fiat, GM, Honda, Toyota, Volvo, Volkswagen Group, Clifford, Shurlok, and Jaguar. It also works against a variety of garage-door openers, including the rolling code garage door opener made by King Cobra."

<comment><AUTHOR> How about Auto Locksmiths?</comment></comment>


Big Bang Abandoned In New Model of the Universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25492/ <comment><USER2> "Periodic" Cosmological models without a Big Bang are not new. They are easily extracted form the usual equations under certain conditions and it's one of the typical exercises you do in an intro do cosmology class.

What seems to be new here is that this specific model seems to explain something that has yet to be well understood. This is a big win for this model but it can easily mean that it happens to capture part of real mechanism in that specific aspect while making unrealistic assumptions elsewhere (like the possibility of there not having been a Big Bang).

It will be interesting to see how this model affects our current understanding of the universe. It might be a complete change, or just an incremental one. Odds are on the latter one but the former makes for much better blog posts... ;)

<comment><USER3> "making unrealistic assumptions elsewhere (like the possibility of there not having been a Big Bang)"

I'm not sure I agree with this line. Copernicus made the "unrealistic assumption" that heavenly bodies and motions were not spherical, and Galileo made the "unrealistic assumption" that earth wasn't the center of the Earth.

This type of thinking hampers scientific progress.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and George Smith made the "unrealistic assumption" that the moon was made of cheese, and John Doe made the "unrealistic assumption" that dogs communicate telepathically...

While there are certainly a handful of "unrealistic assumptions" that have lead to scientific breakthroughs, giving credence to an idea simply because it is unrealistic is... well... unrealistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Shu's idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two."

This is already true in Special Relativity. This MIT TR article is so shallow it shouldn't be linked to.

<comment> saint-loup No Arxiv paper should be talked about on any non-academic website.

<comment><USER6> For what reason? Generally HN people are against censorship.

<comment><USER5> It's not censorship, it's just a social seperation of professional concerns. Non-physicists have no chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, in fact most physicists don't have a chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, even the ones from their own field. (I'm saying this as a physicist.)

In this case, the MIT TR writes about a _bleeding edge, unpublished_ paper written by a non big-name physicist that will most likely be discarded and never be talked about in 6 months.

The author is from a "Institute of Statistics" and the paper was written in Word with double-space formatting. That means the author is probably not a physicist, and non-physicists have a very low chance of being able to grasp the problems with current models and propose better ones, not to mention accounting for all the astro observations coming out every day.

Looking at the actual paper as somebody with a cosmology background, what he's saying is:

1\. Let's take the classical Einstein equations

2\. Let's see what happens if c, the speed of light, is not constant, but a function of time c(t)

3\. Hm, but to _not break the original_ equations let's also make G be a function of time G(t) such that c(t)^2/G(t) is fixed

4\. Hm, but then in the derivations, where there are derivatives wrt. to time new dc/dt and dG/dt terms appear

5\. and so on

There is no new physics in this paper, it's just a routine derivation with a twist. The TR blogger is probably not a physicist and/or has not read it, he just pushed out some generic bullshit about space and time.

There's no point in talking about this paper for non-professionals. First, professionals have to reach concensus whether this makes any sense and is compatible with observations (the former part is easier, the latter takes longer and more people). Once a result passes these tests, then it makes sense to tell people about it.

If the TR wants to push out some sciency newsitem, they could for example talk about recent Higgs data from the Tevatron, which is bleeding-edge fresh but fairly uncontroversial, as it is a measurement and has gone through the Tevatron team:

[http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2010/07/higgs-still-at- large...](http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2010/07/higgs-still-at-large.html)

-

Reply to scott_s (for some reason I can't reply to the comment): I agree, total seperation is not good. It's not good if all the physicists involved are pure academics, because it allows for sub-optimal incentives to dominate. I believe the good model is fOR physicists with no academic incentives (positions, grants) to also take part in the discussion, eg. somebody working at Morgan Stanley or doing a startup. This model would be similar to programmers donating their time to open-source projects. (The academic counter-argument which easily wins out today is that if you're not working in the field, you don't understand the issues and don't have a say.)

<comment><USER7> Very minor nitpick:

> Non-physicists have no chance in hell to understand arxiv papers

You mean "archive physics papers": mathematicians are usually non-physicists and sometimes understand the arxiv math papers. I used the arxiv for months before I found out it had physics papers too (and that in fact it was started for physics papers).

<comment><USER7> Damn iPhone autocorrect: I meant "arxiv physics papers¨, not "archive ..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was wondering what the theory had to say about the cosmic microwave background. The answer: "we don't know yet".

Still, it's great that someone tries to find new perspectives to look at. I wish them good luck in their findings.

</comment><comment><USER9> Without to much of a technical knowledge in the area (plenty of interest just not to the paper reading level) I have been sceptical of dark matter as an undetectable equation balancer. Any good research into dark matter that I should read that puts forward a better case than balancing equations?

Another problem we have, is that we have one point of observation into the unimaginably big universe. Given our limited view overfitting the data to support some model is likely.

<comment><USER10> The present theory concerns the elimination of dark energy, not dark matter. The existence of dark matter has been demonstrated beyond any doubt through observations of a collision between two galaxy clusters. In a nutshell, the clusters were mostly made up of high-energy plasma, and when they collided almost all of the plasma remained at the point of collision due to electromagnetic interactions between the gases. However, the dark matter in the clusters, which was previously difficult to observe independently, passed through the point of the collision (that is, through each other) as though nothing had happened. The electromagnetic interactions trapped the visible baryonic matter in one spot while the dark matter drifted off into space, allowing us to observe it independently via the effects of gravitational lensing.

<comment><USER11> You know, you could drop your comment directly into a Star Trek the Next Generation script and it would fit right in.

By the time I got to the end, I was reading it in Geordie LaForge's voice in my head.

<comment><USER5> Here's a funky explanation with buckets of water and balls, with the astro photos to go along:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRtGUCLjQ3w>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I will have to think about this theory for a while since it contradicts something that I have accepted for a long time (big bang). I'll be visiting my Dad in a few weeks, and I will enjoy getting his take on this (he is a physicist and a member of the national academy of science).

I do like that it fits better with conservation of energy, and I was never comfortable with using dark matter to explain away inconsistencies between the big bang model and some observations.

It will be interesting to see how much traction tis new theory gets in the next ten years or so.

<comment><USER13> Be sure to mention it's completely preliminary, non-peer-reviewed, and posted on arxiv.

<comment><USER14> Especially in high-energy physics and in (I think) cosmology, the community is small enough that the arXiv is basically the primary means of communication. Peer review is everyone looking at the article and talking about what they mean. Published journal articles become more of a way to "keep score" to help outsiders make hiring decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this means our Big Bang generation will be mocked like the Earth-is-flat believers?

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth>

_The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1][2] During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead. Flat-Earth models were in fact held at earlier (pre-medieval) times, before the spherical model became commonly accepted in Hellenistic astronomy.[3]_

<comment><USER17> Very interesting. I was one of those people with the misconception. How did the ancient greeks think that we were glued onto the planet? Gravity was something Newton defined? Am I having another misconception?

<comment><USER18> The prevailing model of the universe at the time was a sphere with the Earth at the middle. In this model, the term "gravity" and "weight" meant something like "the natural level of this object".

Rocks had "low" weight, thus falling to the ground and fire had "high" weight, thus rising to the sky. Being composed of "earth" and "water", we stuck to the surface of the Earth because that was our natural place.

A lot of this model was carried over into Medieval science, but it changed over time to adapt to new discoveries, until it finally broke around the time of Galileo & Copernicus.

C.S. Lewis wrote a very interesting little work on the Medieval worldview called _The Discarded Image_ that goes into some of this. He was writing mostly as a literary historian, but covers the scientific understanding to the extent that it informed literature. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discarded_Image>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting. Reminds me of Paul Steinhardt's Ekpyrotic model that proposes our universe is the result of two colliding three-dimensional worlds: <http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/>

For anyone who actually read the paper, if there is no big bang and no beginning, what does this model imply about the universe 14B years ago?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Was sorely tempted to write in a new headline: "Taiwanese physicist's theory threatens much-loved TV show, common understanding of the universe."

<comment><USER20> When I read the headline, my first thought was about the show.

<comment><USER21> I wondered how they'd introduce such a theory to the show. May be one of Sheldon's opponents comes up with it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of a quote from James Hutton, the "father" of geology in relation to _deep time_ :

"we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end"

</comment><comment><USER23> I've never accepted the big bang as an explanation for the beginning of the universe. It's an explanation of how the universe ended up in it's current state, but still doesn't explain how all that matter came to be in the first place.

This new theory I can at least kind of wrap my head around, there is no beginning and no end... i don't know why but it makes more sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Shu's idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other."

This is not a new idea. This was in my high school physics textbook in 1998, and it was an old textbook.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what we could do with the prediction that singularities are not possible?

Ob: Does the theory explain inflation? Could it be used to formulate an FTL drive.

</comment><comment><USER26> I may get downvoted for this, but the Big Bang Theory is a great example of "scientific faith", the prevailing existence of _faith_ amongst people claiming to be scientifically rigorous. People who make the absurd claim that it is meaningless to speak of what happened "before the Big Bang" because there was no "before."

I've spoken with, and heard many professors speak of the Big Bang Theory as accepted fact, when in fact it is not, and not only that, but it has very serious, fundamental problems:

\- It flies in the face of logical reasoning. Something cannot come out of nothing.

\- The point above actually has a physical law. It's called the First Law of Thermodynamics, and the Big Bang Theory is in stark violation of it.

That's not to say it's completely invalid. There could have been a Big Bang, in fact it's very likely there was, but that doesn't mean it was the "start" of anything, other than rapid expansion, or, converting into mystical terms, a reincarnation.

The Universe will always be here. It has always been here. It cannot go away. It is indestructible and everlasting. The mystics understand this, and so does anyone who understands basics physics.

<comment><USER27> Physicist here. Although I am not really a "cosmologist," I have studied cosmology, and have spent a lot of time pondering the the big bang because I think it is interesting, and because so many people like you misunderstand it.

The universe did not come from nothing. Consider the following two claims:

* The universe has a finite age.

* The universe has always existed.

Both of these claims are true. It might seem that if something has always existed, it must have existed for infinitely long. No so. At every time in history, the universe has existed, even though the age is finite.

Your intuition might disagree. But recognize your intuition has been developed under very peculiar circumstances on the surface of the Earth. You should be skeptical of your own intuition when studying things outside of your usual experience. In this case, human intuition says two things:

* There was always something before.

* There was always something 5 minutes before.

In ordinary human life, both claims are true. That's what your intuition says. But for the universe as a whole, only the first claim is true, and the second claim is false. Even though it is true that there was always something "before" (for any time you give me, I can divide that time in two and give you an earlier time), it is nevertheless not true that there was always something 5 minutes before (pick 4 minutes after the big bang, and 5 minutes earlier than that is simply undefined [1]).

Big Bang theory is a self-consistent, meaningful mathematical theory. It does not fly in the face of logical reasoning. Rather, it is a spectacular case-in- point of the power of logical reasoning to describe and explain the universe.

Your second point is that the Big Bang disobeys the first law of thermodynamics, which is the conservation of energy. False. You are assuming there was a period of time when there was no energy, and then suddenly energy came into being. That's not what happened. The energy has always been around, for all time, and thus the first law is not violated.

[1] It so happens that "negative time", or even time t=0, is equally as meaningless as Elephant Time or Verb Time. They are all undefined.

<comment><USER26> I understand perfectly well your point of view, you don't need to lecture me on it, I've heard it many times before, as I alluded previously.

      The universe did not come from nothing. Consider the following two claims:
      * The universe has a finite age.
      * The universe has always existed.
      Both of these claims are true.

This is a perfect example of the reasoning I described, thank you.

Here's the other bit:

      [1] It so happens that "negative time", or even time t=0, is equally as
      meaningless as Elephant Time or Verb Time. They are all undefined.

I understand this concoction you've formulated, but it isn't very convincing. There's absolutely no evidence that this interpretation of the word "always" is true, and further, it's a violation of Occam's Razor. It would be simpler to take "always" literally, but you are in fact, through what amounts to simple verbal trickery, changing its meaning.

You can state it's "meaningless" to speak of t=0, but you provide zero backup for this, other than it satisfies your fantasy.

You can state it's "meaningless" to ask what happened X minutes before the Big Bang, but again, this is only in the service of satisfying your fantastical theory.

Meanwhile, back in the Universe and the realm of Logic, it's very _meaningful_ to ask what happened at "t=0", because such a state did exist. It even existed in your Big Bang Theory, which states there was an "initial state."

It is highly improbable (if not provably impossible), that such an "initial state" is realistically feasible, and it certainly violates Occam's Razor. Your "initial state" has no explanation. You in fact vehemently object to any attempts at an explanation, deriding them as "undefined." This is faith in its purest form.

Sorry, but I think you are a very religious man and don't realize it. Thank you, however, for the wonderful illustration of my point, I can use it as a historical example of the problem. :-)

<comment><USER26> To those downvoting me, you're welcome to speak up. This is a game of logic, and I was hoping that this community could keep the religious knee-jerk reactions down to a minimum. :-\

<comment><USER27> FWIW, I did not downvote you. But you still do not seem to comprehend the fact that the standard theory assumes time is finite. In order to disprove such a theory, you cannot just assume that time is infinite, because you are assuming the conclusion. If you convince me that you actually understand this, I will continue responding to you.

<comment><USER26> _FWIW, I did not downvote you._

I know, HN doesn't allow downvoting of responses. :-p

 _But you still do not seem to comprehend the fact that the standard theory assumes time is finite._

Really? I thought I was very clear in demonstrating that I understood this through and through, hence the accusation of faith. I did not simply use an assumption that time is infinite as disproof, in fact I did not disprove BBT at all in my response, but merely gave reasons why I thought it was extremely unlikely to have a start.

<comment><USER24> You sound like a crackpot. You don't sound like you understand physics. You also sound cranky. If you want to have a discussion, you should stop using grandiose language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It sounds as if the universe is a giant pulsating amoeba.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why not just admit we don't know?

<comment><USER2> Research always implies not knowing... If it's already known, there is no need to research it.

However, it also implies wanting to know. The consequence of your comment seems to be that we should not research because we will never know and that goes against the entire body of knowledge collected by Humanity over the last 10,000 years.

<comment><USER29> The entire body of knowledge collected by humanity over the last 10,000 years is one of war, famine, and neglect for others. We can do better.

<comment><USER30> _We can do better._

We already have, unfortunately ignorance will always shield you from the wealth of knowledge that exists beyond your contempt for human nature.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Model 3 production aims for 6k units per week in June after upgrade in May - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/04/17/tesla-model-3-production-goal-6000-units-per-week/ <comment><USER2> I wish these productivity recommendations could be applied at my company (From Elon's memo in the article)

> Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations:

> – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get > worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you're certain > they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very > short.

> – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an > extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the > urgent matter is resolved.

> – Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you > aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone > stay and waste their time.

> – Don't use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at > Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits > communication. We don't want people to have to memorize a glossary just to > function at Tesla.

> – Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job > done, not through the "chain of command". Any manager who attempts to > enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working > elsewhere.

> – A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to > solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in > order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to > talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks > to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to > someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must > be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.</comment>


Google Automatically Adds Scroll to Text Fragment to Search Results on Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://tldrmarketing.com/seo/google-automatically-adds-scroll-to-text-fragment-to-featured-snippets-in-serps-on-chrome/ <comment><USER2> I honestly dislike this feature, because it leads to very messy looking urls with lots of url escapes in them, as well as the whole `#:~:text` thing: (you might need to click on the url to see the escapes)

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198590/what-is-a- bi...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198590/what-is-a-bind- mount#:~:text=A%20bind%20mount%20is%20an,the%20same%20as%20the%20original).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google has been criticized by some experts for implementing the feature in Chrome by default since the feature can have some privacy issues. Here is a tweet [https://twitter.com/pes10k/status/1229835239565905921](https://twitter.com/pes10k/status/1229835239565905921) by Peter Snyder Security Researcher @ Brave and another comment from David Baron from Mozilla [https://github.com/mozilla/standards- positions/issues/194#is...](https://github.com/mozilla/standards- positions/issues/194#issuecomment-566719528).

And it looks like Google is now automatically adding Scroll To Text Fragment to Featured Snippets in Search results, this basically means that if you are on Chrome and click on the Featured Snippet they can automatically scroll and take you to the section of the page where the snippet was lifted from.

Try searching for [https://www.google.com/search?q=Will+emojis+and+HTML+tags+wo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Will+emojis+and+HTML+tags+work+with+FAQPage+Schema) on Chrome Desktop. I was able to trigger them from Australia.

Another interesting thing is that it __only happens in Chrome __, Edge and Firefox did not show them and in some cases, the Featured Snippet did not appear as well, kinda makes the SERPs on other browsers feel quite inferior IMHO.[https://www.google.com/search?q=faq+page+Structured+data+typ...](https://www.google.com/search?q=faq+page+Structured+data+type+definitions) – try clicking on different browsers.

Even when the Featured Snippets are shown in these other browsers they don't get the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment. [https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+to+text+fragment](https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+to+text+fragment) – try clicking on different browsers.

Obviously these other browsers don't support Scroll To Text Fragment so it's pointless to show them right, well in the case of Firefox yeah but Edge runs on Chromium and Scroll To Text Fragment actually works on it. Try clicking on [https://tldrmarketing.com/about- us/#:~:text=Does%20Konami%20...](https://tldrmarketing.com/about- us/#:~:text=Does%20Konami%20mean%20anything%20to%20you%3F) on Edge.

From what I can see all Featured Snippets are getting the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment on Chrome desktop, would love to see examples when it's not.</comment>


Show HN: Numerai – A global AI tournament to predict the stock market - <AUTHOR> https://www.numer.ai/ <comment><USER2> Curious what your thoughts on this are: [http://globalslant.com/2015/06/black- box-trading-why-they-al...](http://globalslant.com/2015/06/black-box-trading- why-they-all-blow-up/)

TLDR: Essentially black box trading inevitably fails because they're all trying to do the same thing. At a certain point everyone tries to liquidate, or buy, or perform same trades at the same time which can lead to a blow up.

I wonder if getting around this assumes some sort of diversity in algorithms/ML approach, and if that diversity is a realistic assumption

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the link, looking fwd to reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone put in layman's terms the passage below? please. Assuming the reader has some machine learning experience but no financial knowledge. Thanks

#### numerai_training_data.csv Use this dataset to train your machine learning algorithm. The first fourteen columns (`f1` - `f14`) are integer features. Column `c1` is a categorical feature, column validation indicates a dataset that you can use to validate your model, and target is the binary class you're trying to predict.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're looking at the training dataset, you'll see these 17 columns:

"f1" \- "f14" are feature columns, represented as integers. They are inputs for you model.

"c1" is also a feature column, represented as a category. Feel free to ignore it if you're not sure how to best use it.

"validation" is a binary 0 or 1 that just says: 'if you want to validate your own model, so you can test your accuracy on your own machine, you may want to use the rows that have 1's here.'

"target" is the expected output. For this training data it is provided, for the tournament data you come up with it.

Does that help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perfect timing as I'm about to start putting some time and resources into researching some good stocks and investments.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not exactly in the spirit of data science when the features are unknown and every integer is sort of a black box. Any insights?

<comment><USER5> Here's a baseline XGBooost system that scores 0.51... AUC: [https://gist.github.com/alvations/b754bffe1dab515d9af7](https://gist.github.com/alvations/b754bffe1dab515d9af7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the advantage of an order preserving encryption scheme over choosing an arbitrary mapping for each data column and applying that to the data?

</comment><comment><USER7> Cant wait to see the fierce competition!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer any questions

</comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait to compete!

</comment><comment><USER9> what is the target group for tournament participants?

<comment><AUTHOR> Data scientists will probably perform best, but it's open to all

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Niiiice, I like it

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome idea!

</comment><comment><USER12> The future.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not bad

</comment><comment><USER14> cool</comment>


SQLAlchemy vs Other ORMs - <AUTHOR> http://www.pythoncentral.io/sqlalchemy-vs-orms/ <comment><USER2> Am I weird for preferring raw SQL over query abstractions like these ORMs expose? IMHO SQL is a perfectly fine language. I do however like letting a library do all the dirty work of turning SQL query output into objects. There's a good talk from this year's PyCon that shows SQLAlchemy's core library and how it gives a nice closer to raw SQL interface to a database: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSdzUxRYpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSdzUxRYpA)

<comment><USER3> It's an interesting question but I want to make a meta point.

I came here to read people's thoughts on the article but the top comment shifts the debate onto a wider topic.

This happens all the time on HN and is something I find slightly irritating if I'm actually interested in the topic itself. It's like that person at a dinner party who always changes the subject onto what THEY want to talk about.

I'm not blaming you - it's the fact that your post is the top one and the one most commented on that derails the original topic - which is a group decision.

Oh well. Democracy in action I suppose.

<comment><USER4> So find, upvote, and participate in — or, if necessary, _create_ — a thread that offers the kind of discussion you're hoping to see. Coming into a thread that's not the discussion you wanted, and being all, "But _guys_! We should be talking about _$other_thing_!" is an even more annoying dinner party guest, IMO.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I was aware of that as I wrote the post. :)

In my defence - the $other_thing is the _actual_ article though.

It's also that there are some predictable topics. Every post about a new Google product has someone bringing up the Reader shutdown and every post about ORMs has someone talking about how much they prefer raw SQL...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A Python ORM that stands out of the pack is Pony: [http://ponyorm.com/](http://ponyorm.com/)

<comment><USER6> Agreed. It is the most Pythonic ORM by far. Unfortunately it will never be as popular as its less restrictively licensed counterparts.

<comment><USER7> An ORM which decompiles Python generator bytecode and turns it into SQL? Never heard of it before, but that's precisely the kind of insanity I like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> With the addition of custom lookups and transforms in Django 1.7* I'd be curious to know where it still falls behind other ORMs. I've only needed a couple of bits of raw SQL across a dozen or more Django projects.

* [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/custom-look...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/custom-lookups/)

<comment><USER8> I've been working with Django for 5 years. In my experience, Django's ORM is pretty good for the common cases (specially when your query maps one-to-one to a single model), but for anything that you need a bit more flexibility (dealing with scalars, GROUP BY, a custom JOIN) you're on your own with raw SQL, which gets unmaintainable quickly since you can't chain it with QuerySet and suddenly you're not compatible with the rest of the codebase.

SQLAlchemy is more interesting in that it doesn't hide SQL away, just provides an API for it. Underneath everything you're still dealing with strings (you can just print most objects, like queries, columns, expressions, SQL functions, etc), so you're less likely to be suddenly incompatible with the rest of the API when doing something that deviates a little more from the common cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had to use ActiveRecord last week after a year straight of using SQLalchemy and it was downright painful. doing anything beyond simple CRUD is near- impossible without writing raw SQL. i used to like ActiveRecord more when I didn't understand relational databases, but now I don't understand how anyone who's ever used SQL directly in their life could tolerate AR.

<comment><USER10> ActiveRecord supports lots of stuff through arel ([https://github.com/rails/arel](https://github.com/rails/arel)).

Are you sure you understood how to use the full functionality? What was missing (besides CTEs)?

<comment><USER9> maybe this has changed, but arel's documentation last time i used it was about as good as the rails documentation, so it was wildly incomplete/inaccurate.

for example, last week I wanted to a bulk INSERT. maybe arel can do this (though I highly suspect it cannot since this isn't a part of relational algebra at all), but that's kind of worthless if i can't find any evidence of how to do it without reading the arel source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to see a comparison with non-Python ORMs. I've used Sequel for Ruby and it's _wonderful_ but, even though I've used SQLAlchemy as well, I don't have a sense of pros and cons of their respective general approaches.

</comment><comment><USER12> I use SQLAlchemy for just about everything won't suffer too much from the expected ORM overhead. I've found it to be powerful, intuitive, and well suited to larger projects.

Are there many other Python developers working directly with libpqxx though? I've recently started exploring the idea of moving some of my relatively stable, postgres-specific code into a dedicated library and would be grateful for tips or words of caution. My hope is that this approach will wind up being useful in cases where I'm coding against a large body of pre-existing stored procedures.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've used Doctrine 2 with PHP, and am yet to find another ORM like it in any language. It stands out as unique (to me) in that you just write plain old classes which don't need to know about the ORM. You write a separate schema which Doctrine reads and then uses proxy objects for the mapping.

Am I the only person that finds this preferable to coupling your objects with the ORM?

<comment><USER12> It's been a while, but I enjoyed using Castor before other approaches became so widely adopted in the Java world. Does it seem conceptually similar at least?

[http://castor.codehaus.org](http://castor.codehaus.org)

<comment><USER13> From the very little I read of the documentation, it seems like a similar concept -- mapping the objects to the data is done _outside_ of the objects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Too bad the idea of on-the-fly ORM never really caught on in the Python community ([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pybean/0.2.1](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pybean/0.2.1) not my project btw).

I believe this is a better way to approach the mismatch between the object model and the relational model.

<comment><USER15> some people love this idea, and for many years we've had a product called SQLSoup ([https://sqlsoup.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](https://sqlsoup.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)) which does exactly this on top of the SQLAlchemy ORM, and the docs for pybean look quite similar.

However I don't have the resources to maintain this very old project right now (it's only about 500 lines, anyone can pick up the source if they cared).

A more SQLA-centric version of this idea is recently released as the automap extension ([http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/orm/extensions/automap....](http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/orm/extensions/automap.html)) which includes the "map everything on the fly" step plus relationship support, and you then use traditional Query patterns with it. Reaction to it has been mixed, depending on where the user is coming from.

<comment><USER16> Slick ([http://slick.typesafe.com/](http://slick.typesafe.com/)) seems to support this as well in a type-safe manner, but personally I'm not too keen on having the compilation depend on having a stateful database available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No mention of Active Record vs Entity Mapping ORMs? Are there not many Entity Mappers in existence? The only popular one I know of is Symfony's Doctrine (in PHP land)

<comment><USER18> I think you'll find examples of each in the OP, and most of them follow the Entity Mapper-style.</comment></comment>


How not to deal with customer feedback - <AUTHOR> http://attepicfail.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> What did he expect? He contacts the CEO, knowing that it's _not_ going to be read by the CEO, but his support staff at best, and _directly insults_ the support staff ("$12/hour Executive Relations college students")

They didn't even send him a form letter C&D, they just warned him that if he kept pestering the CEO of a major corporation with his personal issues, they would.

Judging by the name calling he does in the letter, I would guess the executive relations staff had already politely implied that he shouldn't be contacting them.

Never thought I'd be saying this, but: I'm siding with AT&T on this one.

</comment><comment><USER3> He should send a cease and desist letter to AT&T telling them not to have their Executive Response Team call him again.

He _did_ specifically tell them not to call him.</comment>


2010 SoftBank 30 year vision document: its a wilde ride [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/philosophy/vision/next30/press_20100625_01_en.pdf <comment><USER2> 20 year old me would've rolled eyes so hard I'd be looking straight into my throat, but 40 year old me appreciates a deck like this because I've learned over time that vision like this does matter.

Interesting tidbit I found about Soft Bank. They pay their employees to have kids, upwards of $40k if you have your fifth.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the slides,

>5 turning points of SoftBank

>1981 Big bet after one month of business foundation

>1983 Fight against illness

>1994 IPO, ventured into US

>2001 Start broadband business

>2006 Acquired Vodafone KK

Lol, what about the one-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity in Alibaba, which they took probably by chance, and pretty much MADE the modern SoftBank.

<comment><USER4> Alibaba hadn't gone public yet when these slides were made, though, so had Softbank actually gotten any return on that investment yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Telepathy seems like an outlier here

</comment><comment><USER6> It's the perfect ugly design to communicate a pretentious and empty vision.</comment>