Ask HN: Do you reuse components from your previous projects? - <AUTHOR> What methods or tools do you use to reuse components/parts of your previous projects? Do you reuse components in most of your projects or just in some specific area like web development? <comment><USER2> Reusable components of any nontrivial complexity are, for the most part, a pipedream. Unless you have a dedicated team maintaining and extending them, it immediately becomes more of a hassle than anything. Documentation is slim, edge cases aren't completely thought through, and configuration is never sufficient. Visual design patterns can absolutely be standardized. But the actual implementation as we all know changes ever so slightly from project to project in ways that can almost never be forseen. I'm all for component driven UI architectures, but the idea of being able to reuse anything complex between projects and teams has never really worked out in my experience unless it is a highly active open source project, or something you built yourself and fully understand.

<comment><USER3> This is so true.

I have a junior developer who is hellbent on extracting little chunks of things to be "reused" on future projects but we work at a marketing agency that does a lot of bespoke design.

Sure, sites might have a collapsible FAQ section, but when the design is so wildly different from project to project, it takes more time to overwrite things than to start from scratch and write the 3 lines of jquery to get the section to toggle open and close.

I totally understand component driven UIs but marketing outside of generic landing pages is not a productive area to spend your time creating abstractions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Up until a year ago or so I used to extract often-used components (I was mostly doing Android and Java/Kotlin stuff back then) into seperate libraries that I then included everywhere locally (because publishing to Maven was a huge hassle). Then I realized this was a problem both in terms of versioning (breaking changes) and for collaborators who had to set up the extra library exactly like I did on their system.

Nowadays I still copy code sometimes or re-use binaries if the builds are reproducible and I can safely streamline them but I don't try to properly extract anything anymore.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey, check out this code snippets manager: [https://snipper.app](https://snipper.app)

I use it on daily basis for storing my code snippets.

</comment><comment><USER6> Code reuse is a powerful feeling of productivity in programming, however in many cases the pains outweigh the gains.

After making several npm packages, I've learnt that you need to put yourself in another frame of mind to reuse code. Here's some concrete steps in order to create _good reusable components_.

0\. Ask yourself if this is this worth the overhead of code reuse???

1\. Think from the perspective of the user of the component (because you will be the user in most cases), what's the most logical way to use and customise this thing?

2\. Simplify the _getting started_ as much as possible, it's much harder to reuse if it's complex to add to a project.

3\. Remove as many dependencies as possible, this makes it simpler, lighter weight and allows more options for users of the package, (they can use different versions etc..).

4\. Try to make an MVP and iterate on it.

5\. Strive for backwards compatibility where ever possible.

There's probably many more good points I'm missing, but that's a few that I think are important.

</comment><comment><USER7> Identify when you're solving a problem that isn't a one off. Solve it in a way that also works for the other situations you expect it is needed (i.e. make absolutely everything that's unique to this first implementation a configuration item outside the unit or callable via an abstraction/extra interface from the specific use). This is easier to do if designing something for multiple places at once. i.e. Make it modular from the start. This requires more work up-front.

I work in embedded so we reuse: device drivers, MCU abstraction layers, communication protocols, key (to our business) areas of application level logic.

Reusing components is about reusing design, which ultimately means you're reusing/extending a specification as well. If up front you can define the specification to be standard for a bunch of projects you can plan for a lot of reuse and justify the upfront work.

</comment><comment><USER8> For React projects I have a "super-set" of components based on material-ui. Small stuff that I find myself reusing and helper functions for validating/formatting.

I keep them in private github repos and gists, i won't probably ever publish them since its a different "quality-standard" for documentation and code quality than doing something for myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes.

I've lost count how many times I've implemented Google Tag Manager or Google's product feed on the ecommerce sites I build and maintain. Sometimes its a standard install (I should get around to building a collection of libraries for stuff like this). Othertimes it's a totally customized bespoke setup that tracks things down to individual clicks on every page (a good flag that the client is on its last legs).

Similarly, for those sites, I have a collection of Python scripts that translate between CSV and the standardized XML imports that the ecommerce platform uses (SFCC). I almost certainly have to modify it a bit for different heading names, but it works pretty well.

When I use Java and need to search through XML, I built a class that searches for a specified child element, because the NodeList class isn't iterable (can't be used in a for each).

</comment><comment><USER10> I make (web app) components with only minimal regard for cross project reusability. I don't add any features to them that I don't need for the current project, but I do try to keep them small and decoupled.

I find that liberal use of copy-paste _across projects_ is way cheaper than building up a library of well thought out, generic components even in the long term.

If you have ten concurrent projects that need the same components at the same time it could make sense to build them up as privately published libraries. Otherwise it's unlikely that the overhead and rigidity of that approach will pay off if you only have one or two projects that you're actively working on at any given time.

</comment><comment><USER11> As soon as I use the same code twice, I try to make it into a generic component. The same logic twice becomes a function. The same concept twice becomes a package in a shared library.

Emphasis on "try": Some languages make it difficult to avoid code duplication in certain situations. (Looking at you, Go...) I allow code duplication if it's more readable than trying as hard as possible to refactor out common parts.

For Go-based API-driven services, we have collected some of these reusable modules and functions at [https://github.com/sapcc/go- bits](https://github.com/sapcc/go-bits).

<comment><USER12> Rule of three [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_prog...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_\(computer_programming\))

<comment><USER13> The thing I've never understood about this is how to track 3 times. I can remember something twice, but the third time, I'm drastically less likely to realize it.

Also, this seriously breaks down when multiple developers are working in the same area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, definitely. Not as consistently as I'd like to, but I definitely do. I mostly work on the JVM platform, and use Maven or Maven compatible build tools, so I tend to split shared code out into independent projects at some point, and push them to a private Artifactory instance, and then depend on them just like any other 3rd party dependency.

To the extent that I do any work in other languages (Javascript, etc.) I do less of this because I'm less familiar with the tooling that is analogous to Maven/Artifactory.

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://wordsandbuttons.online](https://wordsandbuttons.online) started as an experiment in unchitecture. Every page is a copy-paste of previous pages. On the plus side: no dependencies, every page is self-sufficient, and the code evolves freely from page to page.

On the downside, it's impossible to maintain it without automation. If I want to change something in several copies, I have to write a script to do this for me.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on the component. Have a favorite circular list I've used 100 times. Had a video rendering library I used for multiple embedded display devices.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think this is going to be heavily industry / platform specific.

Web devs like to release generic reusable parts as open source. Often in the hope that someone else will help maintain them.

Whereas finance and game development like to keep custom tools and libraries that may give them an advantage in house.

</comment><comment><USER18> I use Bit for web projects :

[https://bit.dev/](https://bit.dev/)

</comment><comment><USER19> In my job setting there are certain non-trivial aspects to accessing data. I have used code reuse successfully and it has benefited my team.

I follow a rule of 3, if I have to do something at least 3 times, I refactor the code into a reusable component.

</comment><comment><USER20> I code in React and what I usually do is that I copy & paste core code for some basic components like html `input` tag.

I would make use of a tool where I could "store" such components.

<comment><USER21> really? its as easy as putting it on github and publishing it in npm.

<comment><USER20> It just feels as such a hassle and overkill to maintain another repo/package just for a few components.

Another problem is that usually, I realize I want to change the basic component while I'm using it in a different project. So now I have to open another workspace, update it, and publish. Then `npm update` in the project where I'm using my component... I just feel it should be much easier.

<comment><USER22> Git submodules might be worth considering. It's like having the dependency copy pasted into your project so you can modify it. Different projects can pin to different versions of the submodule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not as consistently as I'd like to, but I definitely do

</comment><comment><USER24> Religious copy paste

<comment><USER25> (W)e (E)njoy (T)yping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's the mark of a good programmer, reuse!</comment>


Judge orders defendant to decrypt PGP-protected laptop - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10172866-38.html

<comment><USER2> That is some Pretty Good Privacy.</comment>


Apple Files Patent Suit Against Samsung Over Galaxy Line of Phones and Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110418/apple-files-patent-suit-against-samsung-over-galaxy-line-of-phones-and-tablets/ <comment><USER2> > > _[http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/files/2011/04/apple-v.-samsu...](http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/files/2011/04/apple-v.-samsung-2.png) > _

I think they have an actual case here. That's about as blatantly-copying as you can get without making a _complete_ knock-off that's _designed_ to fool people.

<comment><USER3> There's only so much variation you can have once you've decided that most of the surface area of a phone is going to be taken up by a touch-sensitive screen.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, exactly: Samsung was FORCED into using the exact same number of icons, arranged in the same 5 rows of 4 icons, in the exact same shape. Also forced into a 4-icon shaded bar at the bottom with the 4 key icons in said bar, and forced into using a near-identical "phone" icon in the exact same place, because after all, a light-green phone icon with a diagonally-slanted depiction of a phone handset was the only possible way to go. Samsung was also clearly forced into using the exact same means of depicting multiple screens of icons.

Come on. Samsung clearly didn't even TRY to distinguish their product, here. This is about as obvious as it gets.

<comment><USER5> The 5x4 layout seems pretty unremarkable -- should each phone manufacturer have to trademark their own layout (n,m), for nonzero integers n,m? Will small players be forced to adopt button grids like 21x1 if they can't license actually-usable arrangements?

I don't think it's reasonable that a simple silhouette of a phone, used as an icon to represent a phone, is trademarkable. The color is more interesting, until you look at wikipedia and see that mobile phones were using almost the exact same iconography -- phone silhouette over light green background -- at least as far back as 1989:

Nokia Mobira Cityman

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#First_mobile_phones>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_150_and_nokia_1100.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_150_and_nokia_1100.jpg)

The only difference is that the icon has been rotated and now has a shorter aspect ratio. Also the silhouette is now white instead of black.

<comment><USER6> >I don't think it's reasonable that a simple silhouette of a phone, used as an icon to represent a phone, is trademarkable.

Trademarks are an interesting case, though. You can trademark common ideas, especially if you're the first one to get the trademark for that specific use. They're extremely focused in that they can only be used in a specific way. MS' trademarks on Windows and Word, for example, only apply to operating systems and word processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. That's almost as if someone would take the original Xerox Parc computer designs and, you know, build a copied computer of and sell in their own name.

<comment><USER8> IIRC, Apple licensed GUI elements from PARC.

<comment><USER9> Considering they filed a suit against Apple for infringement, I don't think that was the case.

<comment><USER10> New York Times [1] -- March 24, 1990:

 _"A Federal judge today dismissed almost all the closely watched copyright lawsuit filed by the Xerox Corporation against Apple Computer Inc. [...] Even if Xerox prevails on the one count it can still pursue, it cannot win much because the judge threw out all the counts seeking damages, attorneys involved in the case said. [...]

Xerox had sought to have Apple's Macintosh screen copyrights declared invalid, contending that they were fraudulently obtained because Apple had failed to tell the Copyright Office about Xerox's prior work. Xerox also accused Apple of unfair competition, saying that Apple's claim to Macintosh screen technology had made it difficult for Xerox to license its technology to other companies."_

I think the Wikipedia article on _Apple v. Microsoft_ says it best:

 _"Xerox's lawsuit appeared to be a defensive move to ensure that if Apple v. Microsoft established that "look and feel" was copyrightable, then Xerox would be the primary beneficiary, rather than Apple."_

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox- s-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-suit- against-apple-barred.html)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any clue why Apple is beating around the bush and not going after the main source (especially since this is just finishing off the trifecta of suing the main Android OEMs). While Samsung has been pretty blatant in their ripoffs of the iPhone design, I'd have to imagine they are better suited to fend off Apple than Google in this field and the suit is somewhat biting the hand that feeds Apple supplies. Are they just trying to make it known that "You go Android and we sue"?

<comment><USER12> > Any clue why Apple is beating around the bush and not going after the main > source

Because Google is not actually doing anything infringing.

Google is writing code, but software patents in the US do not apply to abstract code. They apply to specific devices. So if a patent is being infringed, it is done by the phone manufacturers and shippers, and not Google.

If that sounds odd, then it is, but that is how the patent system currently works.

<comment><USER13> Also, the button layout that they complain about isn't necessarily stock android. It's a UI modification Samsung put on top of things. This is stick android 2.3, for example: [http://www.itsagadget.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2010/...](http://www.itsagadget.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2010/12/Android-2.3-Home-Screen.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would all the knee-jerk comment posters actually click through and see that it's not an 'Android' lawsuit.

<comment><USER15> except the Samsung Wave, running on Bada and similary looking to the iPhone is not cited in the lawsuit...

<comment><USER16> The Wave2 looks very unlike an iPhone. I would never mistake the two.

However, the Samsung i9000S (Galaxy S) looks very much like the iPhone (3GS) and on casual observation may be mistaken for one another.

It takes a lot to get trade-dress lawsuits won, so I expect this will only put pressure on Samsung to do what Apple wants, and is not intended to actually win.

(which, btw, shows how broken the legal system is, since cases are more used to bully smaller players than to win on merits)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Patent-a-geddon continues. I wonder if this is an artifact of the great expiring due to start in 2015 of various silly patents.

<comment><USER18> Source? Considering software patents are continuously filed and granted, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

<comment><USER17> The great surge of technology patents started around 1990 and had really picked up steam by 1995 [1]. Patents, unlike Copyrights, are not 'renewable' in the sense that once their 20 year term expires they revert to the public domain by law. Further, now that folks have successfully litigated bogus Patent Marking [2] you can't use an old Patent number on your design to intimidate folks into not copying it.

So while filing rates continue to be high (although as you see from the linked graph issue rates have been falling) the patent office has become better educated about what should be and what shouldn't be patentable (not perfect yet but its getting noticeably better, if only because patent examiners are entering the market who grew up in a digital age).

So a side effect is that when the patent claims for issued patents expire, that's it, no more revenue. You can perfectly legally implement the RSA key exchange algorithm now (as an example) without infringing on any patents. This was speculated to be the primary reason that RSA Data Security Inc was trying to get people signed up to use their _Copyrighted_ implementation of same, since if you licensed the copyrighted code, and then decided to stop paying them license fees and implement it yourself they couldn't sue you for patent infringement but they would want to go through your code to see that you hadn't used large parts of their software in your new design. That approach was unavailable if you hadn't been given access to their source code.

So starting in 2010, and accelerating until 2020 _all_ of those patents that were issued between 1990 and 2000 will revert to being public domain. It is one of the reasons I predict a tech boom in 2015 - 2025 :-).

I did not anticipate however that prior to their death that these companies would go all out in try to extract some, possibly any, value from them by suing the pants off everyone. I don't _know_ , but I suspect that this is at least partly responsible for the current fracas.

[1] <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=patents+us>

[2] [http://blogs.forbes.com/docket/2010/09/02/patent-marking- law...](http://blogs.forbes.com/docket/2010/09/02/patent-marking-lawsuit- trollers-get-a-boost-with-brooks-brothers-opinion/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ""Samsung's Galaxy Tab computer tablet also slavishly copies a combination of several elements of the Apple Product Configuration Trade Dress," Apple says in its suit, noting that Samsung's tablet, like Apple's, uses a similar rectangular design with rounded corners, similar black border and array of icons."

Ah yes, rectangles with rounded corners, the presence of black borders, and the ability to have icons.

But joking aside, the samsung one sold in Korea does look very similar.

</comment><comment><USER20> Trade dress concerns trademarks, not patents.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is actually a pretty good example of patenting "product" and not "process". No comment on if this is good or bad, but we should probably decide explicitly if we're going to grant monopolies on entire kinds of products. It seems more like a trademark issue than a patent issue.

<comment><USER6> >No comment on if this is good or bad, but we should probably decide explicitly if we're going to grant monopolies on entire kinds of products.

That's exactly what the patent system was intended for, though. If you invented a new product, you were granted an effective monopoly on that specific invention for a certain amount of time(now 25 years in the US).

<comment><USER21> I was under the impression that it was something more like "method and process for making a better mouse trap" and not "any old thing that catches mice". We're to the point now that mouse trap makers are suing the breeders of cats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone here notice that this suit basically comes right around the time that a credible iPod Touch competitor arrives?

Maybe there's another "line in the sand" that Apple had set for the Google/Android that just got stepped over?

<comment><USER10> As far as I know, the Galaxy Player isn't even on the market yet [1]. However, it does very much look like an older generation iPod touch. It even has the same color scheme and metal rim.

iPod touch: [http://media.obsessable.com/media/2008/09/12/575/apple- ipod-...](http://media.obsessable.com/media/2008/09/12/575/apple-ipod- touch.jpg)

Galaxy Player: [http://www.samsunghub.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/12/galaxy-...](http://www.samsunghub.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/12/galaxy-player.jpg)

But no, I don't think the release of the Galaxy Player has much to with it. I'm willing to bet Apple would've sued Samsung anyway, as Apple has been hunting Android handset makers since early last year.

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/16/samsung-galaxy- player-4-a...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/16/samsung-galaxy- player-4-and-5-hit-the-us-this-spring/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Apple is lame. They claim Nokia is suing them with dumb patents and then proceed to sue others with their dumb patents...

<comment><USER23> Frankly, those images are rather damning. The devices and the interface are too similar for Apple to just let this slide. If anything I would say Apple _has_ to do this to avoid setting a very dangerous precedent.

<comment><USER24> Those images are not that damning imo. Both phones are rectangular and thin. Does Apple have a monopoly on rectangular, thin phones? My G1 would look the same if it were thinner.

Does Apple have a monopoly on icons arranged in a grid? If so, the Windows desktop and many other interfaces are at risk.

<comment><USER23> It's trademark... No you can't go on individual features, like being rectangular, or a grid of icons, or thin, but once you put that all together in a certain way, you start getting into design trademarks.

Samsung's phone is close to the same dimensions AND has the grid of applications AND has that grid at the same dimensions AND has the "dock" AND that "dock" has 4 applications AND the phone has a single "home" button at the bottom AND the speaker at the top is thin and rectangular... as the iPhone.

Yes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when you start confusing consumers as to who's is who's, you're no longer in the "flattery" area.

<comment><USER25> I believe you only can stand on the "dock" issue, not including it having 4 apps, as the grid constitutes that number. EVERY other point can be found together on phones pre-dating the iPhone.

<comment><USER26> Even if the concept of third-party prior art applied to trademark disputes, there would have to be a pre-iPhone product that exhibited _all_ of those features for it to be a good defense. Merely showing that each feature had appeared before in some product would not be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's some pictures from the Palm OS a few years before iOS:

<http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6542>

I guess if the issue is that the grid has to be 4x4 w/ a black background. But otherwise, this looks like the standard paradigm for app launching on mobile phones.

<comment><USER10> And here's a screenshot of Apple's Newton OS, which came out three years before Palm released its Pilot in 1996.

<http://pdadb.net/img/os/newton/newton_os_2.0_all_icons.png>

The lawsuit isn't just about Samsung using a desktop metaphor. They copied all sorts of hardware and software characteristics from the iPhone.

<comment><USER27> Are they suing using the Newton UI patent? I don't think so. Shipping and patenting 10 years later doesn't help. In fact this Apple could be prior art against itself.

This just weakens Apple's position.

<comment><USER10> My point is that Apple _isn't_ suing just because Samsung chose to use a home screen filled with icons.

From the article:

 _"It's no coincidence that Samsung's latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging." an Apple representative told Mobilized._

And from the WSJ article about the same topic:

 _Alan Fisch, an attorney with Kaye Scholer LLP in Washington D.C., said, "By sheer volume alone, this is a substantial assertion of intellectual property rights."_

<comment><USER27> Except it also looks a lot like the HP iPaq 100 series that predates the iPhone. A full screen touch device with no keyboard and rounded corners. The 200 series came in black.

Apple's alleged "trade dress" is the evolution of the touch device w/ no keyboard.

<comment><USER10> _Apple's alleged "trade dress" is the evolution of the touch device w/ no keyboard._

You're one of the few people who have actually seen Apple's court filing? I'd appreciate it if you'd share it with me. My email address is in my profile.

As for the iPAQ 100 & 200: they aren't phones, they came after [1] the introduction of the iPhone [2], and I personally don't think they look anything like Samsung's Galaxy S or Apple's iPhone:

[http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/ppct/2007/IPAQ-200-highres.j...](http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/ppct/2007/IPAQ-200-highres.jpg)

[1] iPAQ 100 & 200 announcement: September 6, 2007: [http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/06/hp-unleashes-ipaq- series-...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/06/hp-unleashes-ipaq- series-100-and-200-pdas/)

[2] iPhone announcement: January 9, 2007: <http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/>

<comment><USER27> You are right on the date. Off by some months that year... in any case, just to make sure I'm not off again, we can just go back to an early iPaq, such as the 3100.

[http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2001pmc/pr2001012902...](http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2001pmc/pr2001012902.html)

[http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10680_div/1068...](http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10680_div/10680_div.html)

Announced in 2001. A mere _six years_ before the iPhone was announced. Sure, doesn't look exactly like the iPhone, but if one can't see that the evolutionary footprint wasn't established, they aren't looking very hard.

Put it another way, if you show me an iPaq in 2001 and say in 10 years phones will look like the Samsung Galaxy my response would probably be, "disappointingly little will change over 10 years".

<comment><USER10> _doesn't look exactly like the iPhone_

I agree completely. And if we're going that far back in time, I'd say that Apple's Newton MessagePad was closer to the iPhone than the iPAQ 3100 was.

So there we are, back where we started. I propose we just wait until we know exactly what Apple is suing Samsung for. To name one possibility, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple uses one of its multitouch patents against Samsung.

<comment><USER27> Well let's continue the discussion when the filing is released. :-)

<comment><USER10> Sooner than I had expected, here it is:

<http://cdn0.sbnation.com/podcasts/apple-samsung-lawsuit.pdf>

Nilay Patel did a write-up:

[http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung- analys...](http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung-analysis/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apple invented the phone, the idea of representing applications as icons in a grid, and the idea of having quick access to specific applications.

Those features have existed in countless other operating systems, and DEs? Blasphemy.

</comment><comment><USER29> Singularity should not ben pattentable. Like 15 years ago i described how myspace future phone would be like: no physical buttons taking space, a gps, runs linux, and a thinnier form than my current ipaq. So, after a decade after the first ipaqs the samsung galaxy from where i am typing finally arrives.</comment>


How often do you see nepotism/ethnic bias in Software industry? - <AUTHOR> Starting to see quite a trend these days. People being denied of jobs not because of their skills but they are not of the same ethnicity from that of manager/interviewer. Apparently, being from the same country is a huge push in getting that job.
Not sure if this information is relayed all the way up to the CEO but the trend is definitely there mostly in managers/Sr. Engineers playing politics.
How often do you see this at your workplace ? <comment><USER2> This is a concern across most industries, not just software as hiring managers are more likely to identify with people who share their background. This is reasonable to some extent. When interviewing non-native speakers, their ability to communicate with you can be a major factor in whether to hire. If you can't communicate well with the person, they're unlikely to do good work. That said there's been a problem in the US startup scene where after the emphasis on culture fit, many companies end up only hiring people that look exactly like themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, they don't give any feedback on interview and claim that they provide "equal opportunity" regardless of race, ethnicity.

<comment><USER2> Very few companies provide feedback on interviews because it opens them up to legal liability. In general when feedback is given it is because there is a specific singular reason they rejected the applicant. That's pretty rare, most companies will be choosing between multiple qualified applicants and will be deciding on based on secondary factors including salary requested, likelihood that the applicant will leave after x amount of time, trainability, and culture fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is quite common, indeed. But the only solution is to build grassroots cooperatives that do not work _for_ money.

Historically, racism and slavery by the European nations started as a means of doing more business exploiting people who were precisely considered not to be people back then (notably by the Catholic church).

These intersections between racism and capitalism (and many more oppression schemes) are now well-studied, but they still exist.

In France, where nazism is slowly winning the battle on the political spectrum (with the fascist party gaining votes and the socialist ruling party adopting an incredibly authoritarian and nationalist stance), there's a resurgence of both racist and capitalist feelings :

\- veiled women can be insulted on the streets, cops beat up refugees and rroma kids, many youths feel like the Jews are responsible for capitalism

\- "working more for earning more", "you get what you deserve", the recent exploitative labour-law reforms

And this is not just about France, look at what's happening in the US, in the UK, in Germany, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, Japan

Everywhere, the bigots and the exploiters are allying to stop any alternative to this fucked up society.

Now is the time to stop doing business, and attack capitalism and racism FRONTALLY.

<comment><USER4> LOL. People are seeing their cultures being sold away and are angry

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the advantage of being white but my name clearly gives away my Eastern European heritage.

Literally every job I've had has been in a country other than that of my birth - from an unofficial farmhand job when I was a pre-teen to my first QA job in Australia to my subsequent engineering role in Sweden. The positions in Australia and Sweden were both obtained via an online application followed by an in person interview. None of the interviewers or recruiters I've dealt with knew me prior to my application. So far I personally have not experienced the kind of discrimination you describe.

I do hear however that here in Sweden it is often more a matter of people who are Swedish having an easier path into _management_ positions. On the other hand I've been asked if I would like to move toward a management path in the past, so the opportunity was certainly not being denied based on my nationality. How far I'd have gotten I don't know as I opted for a different route.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've personally never seen racial discrimination* (in Australia, and have dodged around a lot of companies). That said, I've not been in a hiring position often, but sometimes.

If anything in Australia, the companies I've experienced have leaned towards 457 visa workers, which I suspect work out pretty cheaply for them (and are invariably Indian).

* Edit: With strong emphasis on the hiring process. I'm not saying racism isn't alive and well in Australia beyond that.

</comment><comment><USER7> To be fair, a startup in the US might prefer hiring employees from the US simply to avoid the administrative and financial overhead of the visa sponsorship process. In that particular case it doesn't seem fair to call it "ethnic bias." I don't see anything wrong with that. I generally believe that as an American company, you should hire an equally qualified American worker over a foreign worker seeking visa sponsorship.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should've clarified better. I am talking about cases where visa is a non- issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aside from my other comment though, what you've described I think is basically human nature.

Nepotism has been a factor for centuries; perhaps shining a light on it as the Internet is trying to do, will help people understand what's going on in a larger way.

Some might say it's too late now though.</comment>


Fossil Versus Git - <AUTHOR> http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki <comment><USER2> _Git features the "rebase" command which can be used to change the sequence of check-ins in the repository. Rebase can be used to "clean up" a complex sequence of check-ins to make their intent easier for others to understand. From another point of view, rebase can be used to "rewrite history" - to do what Winston Smith did for a living in Orwell's novel 1984._

This is FUD. Git never erases history; it merely moves mutable _refs_ around. When you rebase a branch called "master", nothing is rewritten: a new immutable commit history is created, and the ref "master" is moved from pointing at the old history to pointing at the new history. The old history still exists in all its glory at "master@{0}". (And when you change that, it goes to master@{1}, and so on.)

If git didn't have the concept of refs, then this would never even worry anyone. Once you have commit ab387df, it's refers to the same sequence of changes for all eternity. What master points to may change out from under you, but the history never goes anywhere.

The only way to "rewrite history" is to delete every copy of the repository ever made, which is exactly how you would rewrite history with Fossil or Subversion or anything.

(And now, if I may, a digression. I've noticed that the "rewriting history" aspect of Git makes for a good personality test. It's strongly polarizing -- the people that think source control is designed to be documentation love it, and the people that think source control is an audit mechanism hate it. Control freaks hate git, and long-haired hippies seem to love it.)

<comment><USER3> I'm not familiar with other DCVS tools, but I have delved pretty heavily into the history rewriting capabilities of git. Git is just a power tool. It won't ruin your day like rm -rf will, but it will give you enough rope to rappel your way down into ontological horror.

I have been using it to write extended tutorials on my local system. I may find a bug at step 45 that needs to be fixed back at step 2. I am pretty sure that git was never designed for me to do this, but it can be done pretty safely, in a way that I can recover from.

Now, is this method of going back and fixing things in the past a good idea for general software development? Absolutely not! If I wrote a bug in march, it serves the team rather poorly to go back and replace every commit in the master branch with a new one that doesn't have the bug. And that's why I feel it's accurate to call it rewriting - sure, git keeps enough data around for you to recover from any boneheaded edit you may make to a branch, but from the perspective of a teammate you're still going back and modifying history. It's still confusing. You're still creating new commits out of their commits that have the same name, but different contents.

<comment><USER4> You're not looking at the possibility that someone may do a bunch of development locally, then use rebase to clean it (the local changes) up before pushing it out to a central repository (or merging it into master). If you're really paranoid that someone will use rebase to screw up master, you can use a tool like gitosis or gitolite to manage permissions on a central repository. You can say that no one has permissions to push things to master that are not fast-forwards.

Scenario #1:

      I'm working on a feature branch. I have a number of discrete changes
      that I'm making. I attempt to keep each of these changes in its own
      separate commit. After completing 10 such changes, I realize that I
      introduced a bug in change 3. I commit the bugfix with the same
      commit message title as change 3, but with a "squash!" prefixed at
      the front of it. Now when I'm finished with my changes on the
      feature branch I can run "git rebase -i". git-rebase will
      automatically position the bugfix to change 3 next to change 3 and
      set it up to be squashed into the change 3 commit. Then when I merge
      my changes into master there are only commits for changes 1-12,
      instead of 50 commits covering all of the minor bugs that I fixed
      with my undeployed code.

Scenario #2:

      Rewriting commit messages. This is one that I use all of the time at
      work. I use a commit message template that has "Reviewed-by: ???" at
      the bottom. When I do all of be topic branch development, I don't
      get someone to review each individual commit prior to commiting it
      (as that would defeat the purpose of a DVCS... might as well go back
      to SVN at that point and managing chunks of changes prior to commits
      with something like `quilt`). So now all of my commit messages have
      "Reviewed-by: ???" on them. Prior to merging the changes back into
      master, I can use git-rebase or git-filter-branch to go back and
      edit my history to change "Reviewed-by: ???" to "Reviewed-by: Bob"
      on my commit messages.

<comment><USER5> Often when pairing we'd commit with messages like "WIP: 1" "WIP: 2" etc. push pull switch machines (remote pairing) get checkpoints in there. Then before pushing to the main branch we'd roll all that up into one commit with a very helpful message. Boom solves a great workflow problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look, new projects should have these pages, and they SHOULD be passionate and biased.

However, shit like this makes me stop reading:

"Git has a huge user community. If following the herd and being like everybody else is important to you, then you should choose Git."

<comment><USER7> It also backs this point up with yet another abuse of the most misquoted poem ever, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

The poem isn't actually in praise of making unusual choices — it's about rationalizing the choices we make so that they seem more intelligent and important than they actually were. In the text of the poem, the narrator goes to great lengths to make it clear that he can't tell any difference between the paths in front of him. So he decides to choose one arbitrarily, and tells us that years from now, he'll _tell people_ that he took this little-traveled road and that set the course of his life.

<comment><USER8> He kinda contradicts himself. "Then took the other, as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear;" seems to imply that the one he took was indeed "less traveled"; but then, immediately, "Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,". It doesn't seem to me that there's any Right Answer to the question: Are we supposed to understand that the path he took really was less- travelled, or not?

My reading of the last stanza differs from yours: he's not saying that he'll tell people, falsely, that it set the course of his life; he's saying that although he couldn't see any good reason for choosing one over the other, as his life goes on it'll turn out that it made a big difference.

The thing that intrigues me about this poem (which, actually, I don't much care for despite its fame) is the title. "The road not taken". That's not the perhaps-less-worn path he _did_ take, it's the other one. Without that title, if you asked me which path was more the subject of the poem I'd have said without hesitation: the one he took, which "has made all the difference". But no: the spotlight is on that sigh with which Frost will be telling the story, the regret (if that's the right word) that he couldn't try them both. I think.

<comment><USER9>
      TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, ...

      [Road "First", aka "Scary Road"]
      And looked down one ... To where it bent in the undergrowth; ...

      [Road "Other", aka "Happy Road"]
      Then took the Other, as just as fair,
      And having perhaps the better claim, ...

      Oh, I kept the First for another day!

In other words, "I didn't take the First road; I took the Other road."

Substituting, this brings us to, "I didn't take the Scary Road; I took the Happy Road."

Then, the key is...

      Though as for that the passing there
      Had worn them really about the same, ...

This means "both roads were equally traveled". So therefore we must extrapolate into the future. Take a thousand average people. Not entrepreneurs; think more along the lines of Grandma. Now show them a Scary road and a Happy road, then ask them to choose. Which one are they more likely to select?

I'd say the Scary road is the one "less traveled".

      I shall be telling this with a sigh, ...

Why would he sigh if he were not lying?

      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
      I took the one less traveled by

This means he claimed to have taken the "less traveled" road, which is the Scary road. But he took the Happy road.

Therefore, the poem is about a lie.

<comment><USER10> Why would the first road be "scary" and then the other be "just as fair"? "Fair" is a positive description.

If both roads are just as fair as each other, there isn't one scary one and one happy one, there's either two scary ones or (more likely) two happy ones.

Anyway, shouldn't it be ONE road diverged in a yellow wood? If TWO roads diverged, that would make four.

The poem is about a man who, "years and years hence", will be remembering his life, and up there near the top of his memories to tell people about is how he chose which of two almost identical paths he took when walking in a wood, once, and they were roughly the same. Does that sound like the sort of memory someone who would pick a scary road would choose to reminisce about? Does it sound like the sort of tale a habitual liar would tell? No to both. It sounds like the sort of tale a really boring person with no interesting memories would tell.

He was walking through a wood, not trying to get anywhere in particular and not caring where he went. It was probably quite pleasant, and it wasn't the hundred acre wood or the Lord of the Rings evil forest, both roads came out the other side of the wood and then he went home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fossil is a great little SCM, written by the author of SQLite. This is probably the most controversial page on the fossil-scm.org site. It is intended, I think, to be provocative - don't take the bait. :)

Instead, explore the other documentation on the site and see whether it's an SCM for you.

Zed Shaw wrote a perfectly reasonable post about why he uses it:

<http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1276624594.html>

Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1433387>

Also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809493>

<comment><USER10> When did Zed Shaw write that? I can't see a date tag on the entry; He uses Fossil "these days", is that 2011 or 2006?

<comment><USER12> Looks like the blog url is a timestamp, 1276624594.

      ruin:~$ date -r 1276624594
      Tue Jun 15 13:56:34 EDT 2010

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, and News/Blog features. These additional capabilities are available for Git as 3rd-party user-installed add-ons, but with Fossil they are integrated into the design."

Am I the only one who's actively suspicious about this kind of thing? With Git, I can use whatever wiki, ticketing, documentation, and blog features I want. I don't want my VCS to be a Lotus Notes for software development.

<comment><USER14> Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?

Not that it's difficult (it is) but it is a complete waste of people's time. If I want to fiddle with every aspect of my development tools, maybe I'm not Fossil's target.

Next time I need to set a small coding project (I attend a few OSS hackfests every year), I'll definitely consider Fossil instead of git.

<comment><USER13> _Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?_

No, I just use GitHub. Is there a hosted Fossil service that's as easy to use?

<comment><USER14> When the project allows me to go hosted, then the problem is already solved. Thrice. When it does not, but I still need versioning, a wiki and some issue tracking and I don't feel like sporting my masochist hat, good news for me: there's now a tool that does it all and it's a single binary that needs no setting up.

And I don't know if there's any hosted Fossil service around, easy to use or otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMO the "Sharding versus Replicating" section sounds a little bit like someone is trying to sell me on a centralized VCS after I've already switched to and enjoy DVCS.

And further down in the same section, it sounds like the author has confused Git itself, with the way Git is used developing the Linux kernel. Just because the Linux kernel devs use Git in a particular way doesn't mean Git encourages any one particular model over another.

Does anyone know of a more technically accurate and less biased comparison?

<comment><USER16> WRT selling you on centralized VCS after you've switched to and enjoy DVCS:

That was my immediate reaction, but I realized that there is a third thing. In a way, a git-like DVCS in most workflows still retains some of its 'centralized' state - that is, some repositories are the only repositories with certain branches etc. and often there is a specific repository on a server that has all branches "that matter" (such as a github account). As mentioned, Kernel developers need this to reduce clutter/noise and establish arbitrary hierarchies (that are, in a sense, centralized).

This "third thing" is, in a way, even more decentralized than old-school CVS/SVN- in that all repositories truly become equal. I'm not saying it's better than git-style-DVCS- it's certainly not if you need an ad-hoc high branch-volume hierarchy- but I do think that it's an underdeveloped use-case that's neither centralized nor adhoc distributed that might (maybe not as Fossil per se) be very useful to many workflows.

Put another way- how often do git workflows have you push/pull from multiple remotes when you're ready to deploy (or at all)? In the vast majority of workflows that I've seen and used you generally have one authoritative remote. Something like Fossil would make it so that a push/pull to any remote is effectively the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fact that fossil has "Versioning, Tickets, Wiki, and Blog/News", really puts me off this, actually.

I'm not massive into the unix philsophy, but this seems like bloated: they should be separate things, even if they're interconnected imo.

<comment><USER18> This is from the author of SQLite, which I would say is pretty bloat free, so I would think that he has applied the same development style to Fossil.

I've stayed away from fossil as an SCM because it doesn't have the traction that others do (I personally prefer mercurial), but I have used it a few times where I needed a wiki and bug tracker, setup is about as simple as you can get.

<comment><USER19> The bloat in this case is not necessarily dependencies or size of code base. It's features, and compared to other VCS's that don't have a wiki, bug tracking, an entire web server etc on board by default.

<comment><USER20> The value of having tickets directly (which are fossil artifacts) be able to reference/link-to other artifacts (checkins, events, other tickets) is something that maybe needs to be tried to be fully appreciated. When repos are clones, _all_ that info travels w/ the repository, so there's never a broken record of what's happened. The webserver is also _really_ handy for interfacing the repo. It serves it's purpose well, and I personally wouldn't wish it away. Whether it's something as simple as an ad-hoc "fossil ui" to run the server and load a view into firefox for a quick glimpse at the timeline, or running it fulltime so a dev. team can get a better clue of their branching/merging, it's a nice feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The lack of a 'rebase' function is considered a feature of Fossil, not a bug."

It's not as if rebase is commonly used. It's there for those rare instances when you, say, remove a file that it turns out you don't have the copyright for and need to purge it completely, or that huge binary file some newb (ok, it was me) committed a while back that's not needed and makes cloning take 10 minutes.

Fossil looks really exciting to me- I've used git a ton and like it but don't really delude myself into thinking it can't be disrupted. But, seriously, you're missing a critical feature; instead of trying to patronize your would- be future users by defensively stating that it's a "good thing and we're proud of this missing functionality"- you could simply state something along the lines of "In general we think not having the equivalent of rebase is a good thing, but should you seriously need something like it, this is opensource and we'd love for you to contribute..." etc.

[Edit: I'm referring to git-filter-branch etc. to remove those things, not the rebase command per se, but in context of the original page's "Immutable==good" argument I interchanged the two]

<comment><USER21>
        It's not as if rebase is commonly used.

This is widly incorrect. Powerusers of Git use rebase _extensively_ , pretty much every patch that makes it into Git itself has been rebased at least half a dozen times.

I rewrite my history constantly, because when writing code I commit all the time, then I squash commits together later and give them proper commit messages.

I wouldn't use any SCM tool that wouldn't give me this functionality. The result of recording all history permanently is that users will just not commit their incomplete work, meaning that it'll be in their working tree instead of tracked in some form by the repository.

<comment><USER22> Agreed, without rebasing the history for projects with lots of developers quickly becomes a mess.

> Fossil deliberately avoids rewriting history. Fossil strives to follow the > accountants philosophy of never erasing anything. Mistakes are fixed by > entering a correction, with an explanation of why the correction is needed. > This can make the history of a project messy, but it also makes it more > honest.

I'm not sure how keeping garbage like "oops, fix typo" out of history is lying to your fellow developers-- a VCS should be aiding development, not forcing others to see your little mistakes.

<comment><USER23> It's not just "oops, typo", but also "oops, someone checked in something proprietary." Being able to scrub the version history before you publish it is more or less is almost a requirement in certain environments.

<comment><USER20> This is actually solved in fossil via "shun". The case of publishing a password or credit card numbers or $seriousMistake will be attributed to an artifact. Applying "shun" to that artifact will prevent it from being pushed to remote repos, and, on repo rebuild (a local operation), that artifact will be completely removed from the repository (locally). The list of shunned artifacts is maintained forever however, so if the artifact is re-introduced via a pull from some other repo, the shun that was previously applied will still be in effect, and keep the artifact from being further propagated by this repo.

<comment><USER24> So fossil _does_ have rebase?

<comment><USER20> I'm not a git expert, but iiuc, git rebase is a way to re-present a subtree as a single checkin, or otherwise re-work the commit tree to clean it up. It's also a big part of git culture.

In fossil, there _is_ such a thing as a private branch that will not be pushed/pulled when repos sync w/ ea. other, but the owner of that private branch can ultimately merge the work, and it will appear as a single atomic commit (ie: a single checkin, not all the multiple artifacts describing the whole of the work in the private branch). I'd think that's the closest thing to rebase that fossil has. Even in that case, though, there's no explicit moving of artifacts; when the work is merged to a public branch though, all the work appears as the condensed net change, in a single checkin.

Otherwise, culturally speaking, re-working of the tree is -not- the way the repository is handled. Errors are fixed w/ corrective checkins, and both will show in the history.

jrockway sheds some light on git rebasing here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524993>) though, which I'll look into myself to come to understand. Before, I thought rebase was more 'destructive' than what that description indicates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fossil would have to be _much_ better than Git for me to take a serious look. I'm not interested in micro-optimizing every single piece of my toolkit. Git is the DVCS with all the momentum and mindshare and it does what I need it to do. I have bigger fish to fry.

</comment><comment><USER26> Some NetBSD are considering moving to Fossil. It's notable that Fossil's license is BSD while Git and Mercurial are GPLed. Some interesting pages pop up while search "NetBSD Fossil", like <http://www.sonnenberger.org/> or interesting quote from Fossil's author in [http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech- repository/2010/01/18/msg0...](http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech- repository/2010/01/18/msg000350.html) :

"I suppose my biggest concern with Fossil and NetBSD is how Fossil might scale. We use Fossil on projects with a 1GB or larger check-out and with thousands and thousands of files. But I didn't really design fossil for truly huge projects."

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm all for competition, but how do they come across saying that Git is complex while Fossil is intuitive? Is it possible to still be intuitive while still being a "complex" system? I'm not exactly a Git master, but I have had absolutely no troubles using it after getting everything setup.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know whether fossil has a staging area? I tried but could not find it. Google didn't really help either.

<comment><USER29> Fossil does not have a staging area. Instead, like Mercurial, it encourages you to stash things you do not plan to commit.

<comment><USER30> if you stash everything you're not committing, then the working copy becomes the staging area, and the stash becomes the working copy. how is that any different?

seems to me both systems have a method of choosing what to commit, in git you can choose to stash or stage, in the others you can only stash since they "don't have a staging area". git++ for having both options.

<comment><USER31> Git has many commands which allow fine-grained manipulation of the staging area; stashes are a crude afterthought in comparison. The problem is that highly encouraged workflows like "git add --patch" inevitably lead to toxic commits which were never tested because they never truly existed in the workspace.

<comment><USER32> Commits aren't dangerous until you push them. You can very easily rebase out a committed patch after you've tested it.

<comment><USER30> with great power comes great responsibility :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This does not make me interested in Fossil.

<comment><USER34> That's too bad. Though I mostly use mercurial, when it's appropriate and I get to choose, I've played with fossil and it is quite a nice package. Super easy to setup, fully featured, easy to use, and does what I want. Before you shitcan the whole idea, why not play with it for a few minutes?

<comment><USER35> It would help if at least Fossil could use a Git repository (similar to the git plugin for Mercurial).

No point in having different projects using multiple version control systems.

<comment><USER36> There is when they have significantly different properties/workflows. I happen to think Darcs is supremely good for web development (probably not at facebook scale though)--it's the triviality with which you can cherry-pick patches that makes it wonderful to fast track bug fixes up to the live site while sitting on bigger, more untested changes.

I use Git when I'm releasing binaries to people (because I like its tagging better) or when I have to track some upstream code and merge in some local changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fossil is also one of the few options when you're working on windows without admin rights. Saved me from being completely without vcs in a couple of previous job posts.

</comment><comment><USER38> Github to git, is like Tarpit to fossil :)

Too bad tarpit.com is taken :(

<comment><USER39> how about labrea.com then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> ... or just go install your own gitorius, and continue benefiting from all the tooling support you already enjoy.</comment>


Historians Uncover Slave Quarters of Sally Hemings at Jefferson's Monticello - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/thomas-jefferson-s-enslaved-mistress-sally-hemings-living-quarters-found-n771261?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma <comment><USER2> Weren't there 7 adult males living in Monticello who were Jefferson's relatives during the same time period, who would show up on DNA testing as being equivalent to him? I thought that the proof of it being TJ was later admitted to be not accurate enough to exactly pinpoint him?

<comment><USER3> It has always annoyed me mightily that people accept this as a foregone conclusion that Thomas Jefferson is the father.

Historians condemned the original report by a lone graduate student which seems to be accepted as an absolute fact. Jefferson had a brother, Randolph, who was always at the plantation when Thomas was there who is documented to have had children with dozens of other slaves. Why wasn't that even considered?

DNA tests only proved that a Jefferson male was the father, not Thomas Jefferson. There were 25 Jefferson males alive at the time who could have been the father. Only Randolph and Thomas were at the plantation every single time that Sally Hemmings got pregnant.

[http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-case-of- jefferson...](http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-case-of-jefferson- and-hemings/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a couple of things I find interesting about Sally Hemings that always gets glossed over in comment threads. First is that Hemings was 3/4 white, and second, that Hemings surviving children were all free as adults.

<comment> red-indian Jefferson did in fact give Madison and Eston their freedom in his will, but attached them as indentured apprentices to John Hemings until they reached their 21st birthday.

(William) Beverly and Harriet both ran away from Monticello after their 21st birthday. Jefferson's policy was one of "non-pursuit" for slaves who had reached adulthood and chose to leave. They were not explicitly freed and were not given letters of manumission. They only remained free the rest of their lives because they passed as white and did not disclose details of their origin in their new homes. In the case of Harriet, Jefferson arranged for her to be given $50 and passage.

This solution for slaves that could pass to do so arguably was better than one of manumission. As white people, they faced fewer threats in their live to their freedom than freed slaves did. Freed slaves and blacks born free both, even in the north were periodically captured and re-sold into slavery, as is documented in Solomon Northup's autobiography "Twelve Years a Slave".

<comment><USER5> I am a (mostly) white American with some African-American ancestry, including several freed slaves. You're absolutely correct that freed slaves were always at risk of being re-enslaved in slave states and even sometimes in states where slavery was theoretically outlawed.

The solution that one of my slave ancestors and free seamstress wife came up with was for her to buy his freedom from a plantation owner. They then carefully recorded the bill of sale from this purchase in the country book of sales each time they moved, which was how a genealogist was able to track down their movements (and from his research[1], I connected a known branch of my family via primary sources, which was later re-confirmed by DNA testing). Clearly, this meticulous record-keeping was done as a shield against re- enslavement, although they likely still lived in fear.

This branch of my family crossed the race barrier some time around the civil war, but evidently only somewhat, because rumors followed that family into the 20th century, leading to claims of native American ancestry to explain their darker skin (as it turns out, according to DNA testing, I have ~3% African ancestry but 0% Native American ancestry).

Also, while it is true that freed slaves and their ancestors that crossed the race line faced fewer threats to their freedom than those who didn't, their life was often still full of risk to both life and property since their status was often known to many in the community. One son of the family I mentioned above made good as a trader, and became (the then equivalent of) a multi- millionaire. He married a white woman and lived a long life, and upon his death willed his considerable estate to his son, my 4th g-grandfather (wife had passed).

Unfortunately, one of his wife's nephews moved to annul the will and have the estate passed to him as next of kin, on the grounds that the heir was the product of an invalid marriage, as it was between a black man and white woman. The lower court ruled in favor of the nephew, but it was overruled in one of the first rulings of the reconstruction era SC Supreme Court. Alas, the legitimate heir never managed to recoup much of the estate in spite of the ruling, probably because no one would enforce it.

I'm sure this type of thing was quite common back then, and only grew worse as the region entered the Jim Crow era.

1\. [http://www.martygrant.com/genealogy/familydata/grpf1652.html](http://www.martygrant.com/genealogy/familydata/grpf1652.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for posting. I don't know nearly as much about my ancestry as you do of yours, though I haven't particularly looked, but I too grew up with the tale that I had some Native American ancestry, 8 generations back in my case. 23andMe, however, says I'm .4% African, and, like you, 0% Native American. Since .4% is exactly what you'd expect after 8 generations, I think it's the same kind of situation.

Ironically, I recall my mother's father, now long dead, as being rather virulently racist, but in retrospect it seems likely he's the one my African ancestry came through.

<comment><USER5> Yep, both of my "Native American" family branches turned out to be in fact African American.

You should look into your ancestry, you may be able to track it down. Just be sure to depend only on primary documents (birth certificates, death certificates, family bibles, wills, census rolls, etc) and perhaps some very convincing secondary sources (like newspaper accounts, or academic works). There's a lot of misleading "genealogy" that people have done in the past 50-75 years, and particularly in the past 10 years in the genealogy forums.

<comment><USER7> Wonder if this phenomena is related to the "Big Chief" culture in New Orleans. It seemed the African transplants to those areas describe themselves in ways that seem more like Native American to the uninitiated.

[http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/mardigrasindians.html](http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/mardigrasindians.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm afraid that's not it, but rather (probably for the reasons I outlined above), people who crossed the race line made up fake ancestry to explain their "different" appearance without admitting to African heritage. I know some families also claimed to have Middle Eastern or Italian heritage to explain their dark features. It's sad, but they did what they felt they had to do to preserve their safety and standing in the community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good read today, and includes some interesting discussion of Jefferson's moral role given his slave ownership: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/03...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/03/jeffersons- last-public-letter-reminds-us-what-independence-day-is-all-about/)

</comment><comment><USER9> For anyone looking for a good book on Jefferson, [https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-Power-Jon- Meacham/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-Power-Jon- Meacham/dp/1400067669/)

The competition between Jefferson and Hamilton is also detailed in [https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Hamilton-Ron- Chernow/dp/159...](https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Hamilton-Ron- Chernow/dp/1594200092/), and it doesn't paint such a great picture of Jefferson. (Alexander Hamilton lived one of the most incredible lives ever. Anyone interested in history needs to read this book)

<comment> aaron-lebo Both men's lives are pretty amazing. Jefferson had some really unfortunate parts (views and actions on race), but I struggle to find too many people who were as enlightened as him but also held power.

That book, anyway, is really sympathetic towards Jefferson. I started reading the Hamilton book but haven't gotten through it, Hamilton seems a little more power-hungry and less moral.

Though not sure if that's bias. It seems like modern media and scholarship has thought more highly of Jefferson than Hamilton. In _John Adams_ , Stannis (just kidding, Jefferson) is the equal, Hamilton isn't very sympathetic. The Chernow book has turned Hamilton's perception a bit.

What is an objective view on the two?

<comment><USER9> > Hamilton seems a little more power-hungry and less moral

Hamilton _was_ power hungry, but not for the typical reasons. For instance, he did not make a fortune for himself, while Jefferson lived an extremely lavish lifestyle, while on large debts. Hamilton was incredibly ambitious, but it seems he genuinely did want to improve the lot of all Americans.

Hamilton seems less moral? How so? Hamilton did not have slaves, for instance. Both men had affairs, with Hamilton's dirty laundry aired as the first national scandal, while Jefferson took his secret to his grave.

> It seems like modern media and scholarship has thought more highly of > Jefferson than Hamilton

It seems the tide may turn on this, and maybe it already has. At the very least, Hamilton's modern ideas certainly won the day.

<comment><USER10> > while Jefferson took his secret to his grave

James T. Callender reported on the Jefferson-Hemmings affair.

<comment><USER9> Yep, same guy who reported on the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal. Difference is Hamilton confessed, not a lot of people probably believed Callender on Hemmings. Callender was also on Jefferson's payroll specifically to pen rabid attacks on Hamilton. Very interesting dynamic there: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2016...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2016/08/james_callender_the_attack_dog_who_took_aim_at_alexander_hamilton_and_thomas.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So it's interesting this is only coming out now, I wonder what took so long? But now is a better time than still later.

And it's good to remind white people (like myself!) of the moral inconsistencies these popular figures of American history held. Yes, it does weaken their message and other supposed great work and actions, in my eyes.

Further I'd like to point out that emerging from the darkness of repressed history is the understanding that many of who white people think of as native American were actually what we would call now black, or African American. The modern African American/Black is the true aboriginal of America. Look at any other inhabited place in history and you will find an aboriginal people that is highly melinated.

<comment><USER12> > it does weaken their message and other supposed great work and actions

Jefferson's personal failings do not diminish at all the great ideas, work and actions he did. Americans have benefited enormously from them.

Similarly, Einstein's contributions to physics are not diminished by his bad treatment of his wife.

[http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein- imposes-o...](http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-on- his-first-wife-a-cruel-list-of-marital-demands.html)

<comment><USER13> I think there's a difference; Einstein did not try to hold himself up as a moral exemplar, or at least, arguing so would be difficult.

(I'm ignoring the moral difference here between being a jerk and literally owning slaves, which is also huge.)

It's much easier to argue that Jefferson held himself as, and is seen today as a moral leader; to the extent that you see Jefferson as a moral leader, owning slaves really does diminish his authority in that area, in ways that having moral failings of the same magnitude would not diminish a person's contributions, say, to science. (Jefferson did make some contributions in that area, too, but compared to Einstein, or to Jefferson's contributions elsewhere, they were minor.)

I personally think one can be a terrible person and a great scientist; Can one be a horrible person and a great moral leader? My gut says that you can't, that your own moral failings compromise your greatness as a moral leader in ways that your own moral failings can not compromise your greatness as a scientist. though I can see valid counter-arguments in both cases.

For that matter, I'm not sure that scientific failings can compromise your greatness as a scientist. I think scientific contributions are interesting and important in part because we have this framework for dealing with scientific ideas that can take good and provable ideas from a source that spews a lot of (probably) false and unscientific ideas. I'm thinking here of Tesla, who unquestionably was a great scientist and who's work we use every day, but who also had a lot of ideas that didn't pan out, and many that one could argue were... crazy.

I think our framework for dealing with moral and ethical contributions is dramatically weaker. We do have such a framework for legal contributions, but even that is a lot weaker than what we have for scientific contributions.

<comment><USER12> Do you think that "All men are created equal, ..." is invalidated because Jefferson owned slaves?

Do you think the Lewis & Clark expedition was valueless because Jefferson owned slaves?

Do you think the Louisiana Purchase is of no consequence because Jefferson owned slaves?

Given his accomplishments and contributions:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson

which would you say are invalidated because he owned slaves?

<comment><USER14> It's not from Jefferson that we get "All men are created equal", but John Locke. Even the words Jefferson used to retransmit this thought were borrowed.

The idea that the Louisiana Purchase is inconsequential because of Jefferson's personal history is nowhere to be found on this thread.

<comment><USER12> The words do indeed go back to others. But Jefferson distilled them into a potent form and put them on the founding document of a nation (at the very personal risk of his life).

Nobody had done that before.

<comment><USER14> What is it that you think he was saying? He was most certainly _not_ saying that Africans were created equal to "whites". He didn't even believe they were the same species.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Company-Wide Process to Combat Recruiter Spam - <AUTHOR> http://blog.underdog.io/post/87218805432/the-recruiter-blacklist-a-company-wide-process-to

<comment><USER2> Recruiting is broken... And now devolved into secret lists of "Who's Cool & Who's Not".</comment>


The Who, What, & Why of Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling – Rollups - <AUTHOR> https://our.status.im/lets-rock-n-rollup/ <comment><USER2> I love to read this and its worth it very formative.

Thank you!</comment>


Lorentz violation at high energy [astro-ph/0505267] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505267 <comment><USER2> For those of you (like me) who had a WTF reaction and knew that that somewhere in your life you had a passing acquaintance with Lorentz symmetry, this is a pretty readable discussion of Lorentz violation: <http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/19076>.

IANAP, but here goes. Lorentz symmetry states that the laws of physics are the same for all observers in non-accelerating frames of reference. It is an axiom of special relativity. Finding that it can be/has been broken brings on all kinds of new physics and ways to test them.

If you understand this, feel free to jump in with a real explanation. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Submitted on 12 May 2005 (v1), last revised 11 Jun 2005 (this version, v2)

</comment><comment><USER4> From the abstract: "We consider here the possibility of quantum gravity induced violation of Lorentz symmetry (LV)." The paper is such that they mights as well have considered the possibility of gremlin induced violation of LV: it purely theoretical speculation. Mathematical masturbation: look what fun results we can derive if we make this exotic assumption.</comment>


Seeking feedback on photo sharing app for news (Android/React Native) - <AUTHOR> http://newslinn.com/app <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

I'm curious to read more about the app's uptake by journalists mentioned on the landing page. I've come to think landing pages are about the only way to break out of standardized format of the app store where good and bad apps look very similar and think there's an opportunity to tell people _why_ it's worth the time to go to the app store and wait for the install.

My caution [since it's in the title] would be that only among a segment of software developers and then mostly when a project is open source, the technology stack is marginally relevant...no matter how much it matters to the developer after spending months working with it. I mean for the typical lay person, even "uses the cloud" doesn't matter because conceptually it's just part of their phone.

Good luck.</comment>


Show HN: Fun Learn – Amazon Alexa is your kid's English Teacher now! - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fun-learn <comment><USER2> So conflicted on this. The technology looks really promising. But I really worry about the NECESSARY human interactions that are being replaced by technology. On the one hand, it's technology that's going to help people learn valuable skills. On the other, it's going to eliminate necessary human interaction that's unlikely to be replaced by anything =(</comment>


California Assembly OKs bill to tax online retailers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/05/31/state/n143717D26.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Two things:

1\. how will this impact Californian affiliates?

2\. this is baffling- do our politicians not take Econ 101- higher taxes will not bring the state higher revenue in the long term.

<comment><USER2> Econ 101? So would it mean that zero taxes bring same revenue as 10%?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Of course it should have been done long time ago. Otherwise onlines have unfair advantage.</comment>


The Expensive Art of Living Forever - <AUTHOR> https://www.topic.com/the-expensive-art-of-living-forever <comment><USER2> "Advanced artificial intelligence, they hope, will allow us to make exact copies of our minds that will live indefinitely in networked computer systems."

I've never understood this mindset. If I asked you: "hey, here's proof that all the data that comprise your personality, memories, etc. have been copied to a computer, may I now give you a lethal injection?", why on earth would you say "yes"?

It's not the particulars of what I'm experiencing (my memories, my personality, the sensations I call "my body" etc.) that are interesting to me; it's the sheer fact _that_ I experience.

I fear this will degenerate into an unproductive debate about what consciousness is or is not, so maybe it's better to just nod politely.

<comment><USER3> The sensations you call your body change over time, until there's nothing but fatigue and pain left. If someone offered to let you resume consciousness on artificial hardware after your body had ceased to function, you might take them up on it.

In fact, some of my eldest relatives are in high spirits but also looking forward to death, because they have religious convictions about a wonderful, energetic, pain-free afterlife.

<comment><USER4> If I make a perfectly identical clone of you, and then shoot you dead, will you resume your consciousness in that clone?

Why?

Alternatively, if I shoot the clone, will the clone resume its consciousness in you? By what process?

<comment><USER5> The strange places this leads arrive almost immediately. Are you the same person after you take a nap? Doesn't your consciousness basically dissolve and then reconstitute itself when "you" wake? What about from second to second, between moments of inattention? Are we relying on the "stability" of your constituent atoms? On some "arrangement" of them? On a particular locus of sensation (the goo in your brain pan)?

What if we "clone" you by copying every other atom into a "left" clone, leaving the original in the right, and doing the reverse on the alternating atoms? Which resulting "clone" is you?

This way lies madness. Possibly twice.

<comment><USER6> > Are you the same person after you take a nap?

Yes.

> Doesn't your consciousness basically dissolve and then reconstitute itself > when "you" wake?

Yes.

> What about from second to second, between moments of inattention?

Yes.

> Are we relying on the "stability" of your constituent atoms?

Yes.

> On some "arrangement" of them?

Yes.

> On a particular locus of sensation (the goo in your brain pan)?

Yes.

> What if we "clone" you by copying every other atom into a "left" clone, > leaving the original in the right, and doing the reverse on the alternating > atoms? Which resulting "clone" is you?

My father replaced the handle, and I replaced the blade, but it's still my grandfather's axe?

Neither. You ripped my brain in half, I am dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think what dismays me about this article is that it contains exactly the kind of profound vacuity that passes, inexplicably, for wisdom about the possibility and impact of life extension and the character of those who are interested in it. It's difficult to know where to begin.

First, and most glaringly, death is not a solution to overpopulation, in any sense. It hasn't worked so far, for example. Additionally, there was a great video by Numberphile, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj0E0a0mlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj0E0a0mlU), where he shows that the current 1.1% global growth rate results in us overpopulating _the Universe_ in something like 9000 years. Sooner, rather than later, we will face a real population crisis, even in the face of 80-year lifespans. Growth rates absolutely will come down, one way or the other, in a way that will be functionally indistinguishable from outlawing procreation.

Second, transhumanists, and the subset of truly whacko pseudoscientific transhumanists (however large a fraction you think that is), represents not nearly everybody who is interested in longevity, nor do they characterize, at all, the entirety of those populations. I wouldn't characterize Aubrey de Grey as a transhumanist, for example. The smear doesn't stick, even if we were to allow smear tactics as legitimate.

Third, and finally, there is absolutely no guarantee that life extension technology will be expensive. None. Further, there is no reason to think that its cost would not decline over time, indefinitely. How much could an Alzheimer's vaccine actually cost, once every 50 years, lets say? How expensive could a CRISPR therapy be? If it were routine and assembly-lined? What about the decline in lifestyle cost after one has paid off one's mortgage and taken care of all the other mostly one-time expenses?

As thinkers, we truly need to do much, much better than this article.

<comment><USER7> About your 3rd point, recent results (clonal haematopoeisis, single cell genomics) do in fact suggest that life extension interventions will be highly technical, ongoing and very expensive.

<comment><USER8> I agree with highly technical and ongoing. I'm agnostic about "very expensive." Initially very expensive, sure. But how much of the expensive stuff can be eventually automated and routinized? I'd guess "a lot," since that's my general guess about the future, and in that case the cost would fall a lot as well. If I'm wrong -- and I could be wrong; many predictions of widespread automation have been premature -- then I agree that the costs could remain very high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People who think that rejuvenation therapies are only for the rich are not paying attention.

Look at first generation senolytic drug candidates that clear ~25% of senescent cells in mice, varying by tissue type. These vary from $100 per dose, for things like dasatinib plus quercetin, to a few thousand dollars per dose where you need a biotech company to one-off synthesize it for you, such as foxo4-dri. One dose is needed every few years - more than that won't help further.

The story will be the same for glucosepane cross-link breakers.

The trend in this type of technology is towards engineered small molecule / enzyme / peptide / etc that will cost next to nothing a decade after it is introduced, and can in any case be manufactured to order in China and shipped in if the patent holder decides to try charging monopoly rates. Alternatively, gene and cell therapies that can be mass produced, all the complexity baked into that manufacture, and then administered by a bored clinician. The cost will be similar to present day biologics, which are largely in the $1-10k/dose range. Again all of these treatments will be once-every-few-years, not any more frequently. That is the point of damage repair as a strategy - you only need to do it as often as the damage builds up. There is no point in doing it any more often.

</comment><comment><USER10> "white"

If transhumanists were almost exclusively ANY OTHER ETHNICITY would the writer still have pointed it out?

Not trying to derail the thread into a race war, I'm just fatigued by the double-standard that keeps showing up in modern journalism.

</comment><comment><USER11> That may just be the way the article is written, but I find all these people to be a bit too much self-centered and maybe too much on their bodies, in my opinion. There is more to old age than just the body. I personally think that if everyone could live forever (in flesh or not, maybe just in a sort of library/archive), the biggest advantage would be that experiences are retained.

It is just a shame to think about the amount of knowledge that is lost every time someone dies. And the effort needed to train the next generation. On one hand, that means we get to imagine better ways of teaching, on the other hand, we have to spend more time studying, or just accept that we won't know everything perfectly (and be more specialized than our ancestors were).

This specialization is only compatible with technological improvement if we can delegate more of the low-level task/knowledge to computers/AI, or if population keeps increasing (which isn't really sustainable, long-term). The alternative is stagnation, or regression in some fields to progress in others.

Edit: I can get some people not agreeing to this view, but this was meant at the starting point of a discussion, not a general truth. Could the downvoters at least share their view of the topic?

</comment><comment><USER12> "In a world where a growing class of retired Americans are living in poverty and perpetual, insecure, backbreaking labor during what should be their retirement years, transhumanist visions of a future of "infinite abundance" (We'll just 3-D-print food! Everyone will move to space!) aren't inspiring, but perverse. Transhumanists are also almost exclusively white, as is borne out by the older, moneyed demographic at RAADfest. "

I find this attitude tiresome. The author is attempting to shame his subjects for daring to look beyond today's problems and for their demographic makeup. Everything does not have to be looked at via the lens of societal privilege. Can't we just let people dream of the future without saddling them with current day baggage.

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." ― John Locke

<comment><USER13> I think there is good reason to be concerned about moving into a future where the wealthy get to live forever (or at least for a very long time) while the poor live short lives of labor. I don't think the author is saying that what they want is wrong, just that we should think through the implications of such a future when we already have such high inequality.

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." -William Gibson

<comment><USER14> The future where only wealthy get to live forever is indeed very bleak, but there is a future worse than that: the one where everyones life is short (like now).

<comment><USER4> You're assuming that:

1\. A world where Ghengis Khan or Emperor Tiberius, or Joseph Stalin were still alive today....

2\. Would be no worse from the world we have, except a few powerful people would have not had to die.

The interests of the wealthy and powerful are not aligned with those of the rest of us. Death is one way in which dynasties and despots lose power - moreso if they have multiple successors.

<comment><USER14> I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely.

First of all that would assume rejuvenation is very costly, more costly than raising a child, which is unlikely.

Second, the despot doesn't work alone, he needs to have other people who do all the killing, and these people are going to want to not die as well. All of the despots you mention had a large base of supporters, and it is difficult to remain a supporter on you are going to die for no good reason.

Third, since the technology is not a magic ring to just hide, people who fight against the despot would be able to use the it as well, and next to despots gaining more experience, you'll have people fighting agains them living longer and having more chances to fight.

What i think is more likely, is a softer concentration of power, where rich people keep money and power for much longer, but poor people are still kept content with a small chance to get rich themselves.

<comment><USER4> > I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology > to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely.

That's not an assumption I'm making. Death resets ossification and concentration of power every couple of decades, regardless of whether rejuvenation therapy would be available to the top 10%, 1%, or 0.001%, or whatever. The problem is not the therapy, or even who gets it, the problem is what happens when it is available.

The problems that immortality causes are social, not technological. People with wealth and power tend to accumulate more wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. When they die, it is distributed among their successors. A slow, and inefficient form of trickle-down, if you will.

Ever hear the expression "Science advances one funeral at a time"?

Well, so do politics, except that they have a far more dangerous (to us) positive-feedback cycle.

> Third, since the technology is not a magic ring to just hide, people who > fight against the despot would be able to use the it as well, and next to > despots gaining more experience, you'll have people fighting agains them > living longer and having more chances to fight.

Life isn't an RPG where you punch wolves to get experience points, having a therapy that lets you live longer doesn't help after you starve to death in a GULAG, and most revolutionaries are young men with little to lose. You couldn't have picked a better example of asymmetrical technology if you tried. (Well, I suppose there's also the surveillance state, and drone armies...)

<comment><USER14> > "Science advances one funeral at a time"

This is mostly due to age related brain function degradation, most scientists now have to relearn and try new things several times in their middle age. Unfortunately many lose that ability with the age, but retain the power they have gained before that.

If scientists could retain the abilities of their young brain for longer, science would benefit greatly from improving the ratio of learning/working time.

In general i agree that without death resetting ossification and concentration power would take longer, but is the death of billions of people worth that? Is the current interval the perfect one, or maybe we should intentionally create antibiotic resistant bacteria to make it faster again.

If no why is intentionally hindering the development of life extension any different than trying to destroy the effects of life extension we achieved so far?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dancing Pigs or Externalities? Measuring Rationality of Security Decisions [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06542 <comment><USER2> From the introduction, explaining the colourful title:

> Prior work has proposed two simplified theories of the human in the loop: a > rational actor who chooses to ignore security behaviors because the costs > always outweigh the potential losses, and an irrational actor who chooses > "dancing pigs over security every time" because they neither understand nor > care about security risks [Herley, 2009]. While these simplified models of > user behavior can help to provide high-level insights, our aim is to define > a more realistic medium between these two extremes: _a semi (or boundedly) > rational security actor with predictable, but not always utility-optimal, > behavior based on risks and costs._</comment>


Video: Paul Graham at Startup School 08 - <AUTHOR> http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-school-08

<comment><USER2> The video starts about a minute too late, so you miss one of the best PG quotes: "Everybody, stop using the Internet!"

It turned out he didn't mean it that way -- he was just asking the audience to stop using the wireless network so he could access his presentation -- but it was still pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER3> Startup Bootcamp at MIT will have some similar talks. It's on October 12th and is totally free.

<http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Darn. I have a wedding the Saturday prior in PA, but unfortunately won't be on the east coast during this event.

<comment><USER3> I'm figuring out how to stream it. Check the homepage next Monday if you'd like to watch.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be huge. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Irrelevant but I quite like the Omnisio interface.

<comment><USER5> Using the Omnisio site makes me wonder what ever happened to that tech. I'm guessing it was just a talent acquisition after all.

<comment><USER6> who bought it?

<comment><USER7> [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/30/google-acquires- omnisio...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/30/google-acquires-omnisio-to- spice-up-youtube/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey!! Thanks to whoever brought these back to life - I was unable to access the SS08 videos at Omnisio for many months (basically, ever since the sale).</comment>