UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right? - <AUTHOR> https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right <comment><USER2> So the article seems to imply you should store all timestamps as UTC (with an additional timezone string ID). But for events in the _future_ that needs to happen on a specific "wall clock point in time", it might be better to actually store the yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss as a string with a timezone next to it, because timezones can and do change often unpredictably. If you pre-calculate what "4.00pm next August 1st" is as a UTC timestamp today, and the timezone rules are updated between now and then, your UTC timestamp may end up being incorrect. I guess you could have an additional "precalculated-utc-timestamp" column but regularly re-calculate this from the "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss + timezoneID" (especially when you upgrade your Olson tzdata).

<comment><USER3> Actually the meaning of a date like:

2018-05-26T13:45:21+02:00

Will never change, regardless how many time zone changes you may have. What does change is the method to compute the time difference. So can you say how many days, hours, minutes, seconds ago that was from:

2043-02-12T11:15:16+02:00

You won't be able to, because then you have to account for leap seconds, etc.

Also "next Tuesday" does have to take into account the time zone as you may need to deal with daylight saving time.

However "next Tuesday" is not a date-time, but a relative difference from where you are now and by pre-calculating _you lose information_.

Also relevant, in such cases storing the time zone doesn't help because the user himself might travel and next Tuesday at 7:00 can remain the same, no matter what time zone you're talking about.

<comment><USER2> It depends. It could be a meeting in a particular city at 4pm local time. A "+02:00" or "-05:00" specifier is insufficient because the government of the particular city/country might change the time zone rules between now and when the event is to occur. So you really need to store "2018-08-01 16:00:00 America/Argentina/Buenos Aires" for example, because maybe after 2018-06-01 they decided to go for "-05:30".

<comment><USER4> Indeed. There's a concept of relative physical time

a) "I'll be there in 12 hours", implication being that if there happens to be a DST change, it doesn't matter.

and relative calendar time

b) "I'll meet you 15:00 next monday".

Both of which are valid.

What's interesting is: which of these is most useful in programming, generally? Which should the APIs make easier, or even cater for at all?

I would submit that most applications only care about "physical time"[1], but specifically [b]logging[/b] is actually _really_ interested in calendar time. Fortunately, with logging there's so much volume that you can usually tell pretty easily when there's been a discontinuous time event -- it's a pain in the ass to rebuild timestamps, post hoc, though.

[1] Calender-type application is actually pretty niche IME. Opinion may vary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _If you 're like me and immediately said ohhhhhhhhhhhh, so THAT'S why > there's twelve hours in a day! and immediately followed it up with: wait, > why the fuck are they using twelve instead of ten? ..._

> _It 's most likely because you have twelve joints in your hands: three in > each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb. I thought that was pretty > nifty to discover. Like, I had never looked at my hands before, really. > Hands are really wild, when you think about it._

Probably not. This explanation of duodecimal is really farfetched and I'm pretty sure it arose from someone staring at their hands desperately trying to come up with a way to count 12 on their fingers to explain this. (Ten fingers and two feet seems as likely.)

Clocks are (probably) divided into (two sets of) 12 hours for the same reason feet are divided into 12 inches. Because it's convenient for everyday use. Subdivisions of 1/12th suck for complex math (if your number system is decimal anyway), but are great for lay use. 12 subunits captures halves, thirds, and quarters, all of which are very intuitive and very common in everyday use.

12ths are handy enough that we have a special word for "12 of something" (dozen) even though our numbering system is decimal.

<comment><USER6> I might not be remembering my History of Math correctly, but my recollection is that the Babylonians used Base 60, and 12 is an even subdivision of that. I also recall other Asian number systems having base 12 in some capacity, so there may be something to the counting methodology he outlined if it showed up in a few separate parts of the world.

Counting that way on one hand and then using the other hand to tally the groups would give you 5 sets of 12 or 60.

<comment><USER7> Wait, doesn't that just give you 25?

<comment><USER6> No, counting to 12 using the sections between your knuckles of your 4 fingers using your thumb on same hand will give you 3x4 and then 5 of those is 60. If you were doing fingers as a single digit, you'd get 25, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" Did you hear about the clock maker who was the first to add a second hand to a clock? His first prototype was a complete failure, but he got it working the second time."_

Very funny, but here's the real reason ([https://www.etymonline.com/word/second](https://www.etymonline.com/word/second)):

> second (n) from Old French _seconde_ , from Medieval Latin _secunda_ , short > for _secunda pars minuta_ , "second diminished part," the result of the > second division of the hour by sixty (the first being the "prime minute," > now called the minute).

Etymonline.com is awesome. I use it several times a day.

<comment><USER9> One of my most visited and favorited website. Donate to the author.

<comment><USER10> The author's bio is great:

\- [bio]([https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/bio?ref=etymonline_f...](https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/bio?ref=etymonline_footer))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having dealt with that crap… _that should be an interesting read_

 _scroll scroll scroll_ nod nod nod _scroll scroll scroll_

> Recurring events

Whelp, shit just got very very real, and I actually disagree with Zach here:

> If someone held a gun to your head and demanded in the next week you either > 1) programmed a comprehensive system that included full support for > recurring events, or 2) invent full-scale ready-to-go-to-market cold fusion, > then you should abolutely start brushing up on atomic physics.

You should just beat yourself with the gun (or whatever the nearest heavy implement is) immediately, no cause to prolong the pain, you're not Harold.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. I've lived through this scenario (implement recurring events based on a calendar system in very little time). And even though I definitely had a longer runway than a week (a whole month! on top of the work that I already had on my plate), I would still agree to take the beating immediately if I was presented with that situation again.

Yeah, sure, I "got it done" but it was very challenging to maintain for a while. And, of course, I learned well after the fact that what I had designed and implemented had basically, rather poorly, implemented some existing solution / FOSS library (I had essentially written some pieces of the Ruby gem ice_cube without realizing it) that I hadn't been able to find via Google at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Postgres have done a really good job here. It not only understands offsets (which most devs think are timezones) it also understands timezones. What's the difference?

GMT-8 is an offset. America/New_York is a timezone.

This becomes important when you want to schedule a meeting on the east coast of the USA in April - Europe and the US change DST on different dates. But if you tell postgres you want a time in a particular zone it will do the calculation correctly. If you use an offset you might turn up an hour late.

<comment><USER14> What's the point of unqualified offsets like that anyway? You either use UTC or a local time in the appropriate tz.

<comment><USER15> They are useful for when you want the semantics of UTC but still a human readable time. One example is logs that people will actually read. People have a hard time doing mental math but 14:00-05:00 is just as valid as 19:00+00:00 and easier for people in Eastern Time.

It's also useful for disambiguating a local time:

2018-11-04T01:45-05:00 America/New_York 2018-11-04T01:45-04:00 America/New_York

That said, I do think they are _mostly_ around for less noble reasons: they are way easier to serialize than actual time zone rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Properly storing timezone-aware times

I'd just like to point out that a lot of RDBMSs support storing date and time alongside timezone information directly without using two separate fields. SQL Server has datetimeoffset, PostgreSQL has timestamp with time zone, and Oracle has timestamp with time zone. I think MySQL does as well, but I seem to recall something strange about it. Or maybe that's just me expecting MySQL to do something weird.

Similarly, most programming languages have support for datetimes with time zones.

It's still all a huge pain in the butt, but you don't need to use two fields and ensure that you use both all the time. Also, you can meaningfully compare datetimes within the same database without translating the timezone if its all in one field.

Also, of course, remember that a even a time with timezone without a date attached to it is inherently ambiguous.

<comment><USER17> Erp. This sentence made me wince.

 _Times don 't have timezones_ \- places have timezones. The idea that time handling is made easier by attaching timezones to times is the cause of so many headaches. Correct time handling involves understanding place - the place where things happen, the place where the user is observing them from, the place where a clock displays a particular time.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that's kind of an issue with the ANSI standard. It specifically allows time with time zone.

Some RDBMSs only support datetimes (timestamps) with time zone, but if you want to aim for complete ANSI compliance you're supposed to allow time with time zone. PostgreSQL, which allows that data type, specifically points out in the doc that you shouldn't use it:

> The type `time with time zone` is defined by the SQL standard, but the > definition exhibits properties which lead to questionable usefulness. In > most cases, a combination of `date`, `time`, `timestamp without time zone`, > and `timestamp with time zone` should provide a complete range of date/time > functionality required by any application.

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/datatype- date...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/datatype- datetime.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic but I wonder how you handle time where dilation is present. For example if a spacecraft travels to mars and there is mars local time, plus time dilation from the journey, when does a transmission start from a reference frame? Not UTC related for sure! Or is it? And then what happens if someone else goes there in a different orbital pattern and the dilation is different.

and then there is the question of how you would represent a recurring calendar entry between both places.

<comment><USER19> This is a very old problem and not limited to spacecraft. If you sail around the world eastward, each of your days is slightly shorter than the days of your countrymen and by the time you get home, you will have experienced a full additional day-night cycle. I think the solutions would be the same: separate timekeeping standards where it makes sense, like Mars, and frequent corrections to spaceships' clocks to keep in step with a universal standard like UTC as sailing ships used to do[1].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Gun#Time_signalling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Gun#Time_signalling)

<comment><USER20> That was part of the plot of Around the World in 80 Days...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Love this article, but one thing it skipped on was more in-depth on Leap Seconds.

You see, UTC, is kinda like another human-made-up timezone. Humans made up some rules, and UTC is a 37 second offset from TAI / International Atomic Time:

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

<comment><USER22> Right? And that that 37 second offset will change from year to year? I was waiting for the bombshell, that some minutes actually have 61 seconds in them, and some have 59 seconds (though it occurs to me that I don't know if astronomers ever add or subtract more than a second for any given clock adjustment).

<comment><USER23> The goal is to always keep UTC within one second of UT1. Short of very drastic events I don't think it will ever be neccessary to introduce more than one leapseconds in a fairly long time interval. And even if it was, I would think that they would do seperate leapseconds events some time apart.

<comment><USER24> There are two official primary times a Leap Second can occur. December 31 and June 30. There are provisions for more slots, but they're not really expected to ever be used.

Like most things associated with time Leap Seconds are a huge headache to implement properly on computers. If you want some fun watch what various NTP servers around the world do when Leap Seconds roll around. You will see clocks that start to drift for 15 minutes before jumping to the right time, some that wait until 8AM local time on the following day to correct, and some that just go crazy. And of course you have Google's clock smearing across most of a day.

IIRC there was one major earthquake that caused a sooner than expected Leap Second adjustment.

Fun fact: GPS, NTP, and many similar timing formats have flags in the signal that warn clients of upcoming leap second events. Few receivers pay attention to them however.

<comment><USER25> > If you want some fun watch what various NTP servers around the world do when > Leap Seconds roll around. You will see clocks that start to drift for 15 > minutes before jumping to the right time, some that wait until 8AM local > time on the following day to correct, and some that just go crazy. And of > course you have Google's clock smearing across most of a day.

As a note, clock smearing is a non-standard hack invented by Google, because most programs are too broken to handle the leap second warning event and inserting/deleting a second properly, per designed. And you shall never add a clock smearing server to the www.pool.ntp.org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Four days ago I saw an excellent presentation about the trickeries of time, dates, and timezones at DjangoCon Europe. It was by Russell Keith-Magee and is short, to the point, and super informative: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qabriMQ1SYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qabriMQ1SYs)

I recently ran into a completely novel time bug while working with Excel file for GoodGrids. In Excel files, date and time values are stored as epoch time. But you can not tell what time a particular number represents until you check whether the file was made with Excel on Windows or on the Mac. It turns out, the developers chose a different start of the epoch on these two platforms.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that time is simple from any one perspective, but complicated when you try to handle all possible perspective. Try to explain the complexities of time to someone who does not travel, resides in the same timezone all of their life, and does not need to coordinate with anyone outside of their timezone. For them, the rules that govern time are pretty easy.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have been thinking a lot lately that we are trying to solve class of XY Problem.

Universal time is in part about trying to order events in a strict order. Probelm is, nobody observed that order. Later we infer things about the system based on this chronology but it's completely fictitious and we have to stretch our brains to explain the state of the system.

The Java Memory Model, and subsequently several other languages, agreed on "happens before" semantics. We don't care what order certain things occurred in as long as these key events happen in the right order. Because those events _cause_ the other events or are _caused by_ them. Some transactional models have a flavor of this as well. This write happened based on a decision made by observing all of the transactions up to N, which may or may not result in a rollback because N+1 overwrote a read value.

I can't help thinking that our logs should show something like "customer saw their balance was $102.75 and withdrew $100, and on another server a payment for $55 was honored around the same time, which is why they are now overdrawn". The two events were independent, and maybe we should remember them the way the distributed system experienced them.

Or maybe that's even harder to reason about than the fiction we use now...

<comment><USER28> Every bank I've ever been a sucker-err-customer of seemed to use whichever order results in the most fees.

Not the only reason I use a credit union these days.

<comment><USER29> There used to be a law against that in the US, but the GOP repealed it early in Trump's first year.

<comment><USER30> What was the law name or number?

<comment><USER29> Federal Reserve rules published under regulation E.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My favorite date quirk not mentioned in the article or here yet is the month of September 1752. If you're on a *nix/Mac machine, try this command:

      $ cal 9 1752

What you'll see is:

         September 1752
      Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
             1  2 14 15 16
      17 18 19 20 21 22 23
      24 25 26 27 28 29 30

No, there's not a bug in `cal`, this is correct ;)

<comment><USER32> That was fun. So what happened in 1752?

edit: I should have searched ([http://mentalfloss.com/article/51370/why-our- calendars-skipp...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/51370/why-our-calendars- skipped-11-days-1752))

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Probably around this time your first boss's ancestors were also discovering > minutes as a good way to make sure your ancestors got to work on time: > "You're exactly 56 minutes late today, Holman, what the fuck is wrong with > you? Go shave the sheep!"

OK, I guess this is a joke, but this actually began to happen during the Industrial Revolution, when factory owners were obliged, as part of worker training, to teach workers how to read a clock.

</comment><comment><USER34> > [1883] ... a bunch of rich, white railroad tycoons met at a fancy Chicago > hotel to agree on a standard timezone so their trains would work better > together...

The Brits did this for their railroad in 1847. Time balls were used to synchronise clocks before telegraph and radio.

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

On clock accuracy, I was reading last night about time dilation due to gravity, and the difference in time rates from points less than one meter apart in height on earth have been experimentally verified.

<comment> cup-of-tea Indeed, I thought it was well known that Britain was the first to standardise time and that it was done for the railway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One thing I'd love to know is how the heck as software devs will we manage a future moon or Martian colony with its own set of discrete time zones...

Admittedly you can't schedule a phone call or chat since the latency is too great but if you wanted to schedule an event to occur in say a software system on both planetary bodies at the same time your software or time library would need awareness of celestial mechanics...sounds like a fun problem :)

</comment><comment><USER36> In my 20 years of working with software and distributed architectures, no problems have been harder than working with time zones and calendars.

It is truly nightmarish stuff. I am convinced you could run a very profitable consultancy specializing in debugging date and time related problems in people's systems.

<comment><USER37> That would be profitable, but I'm not convinced anyone could stomach that job without going insane. Maybe a year if you were extremely hardy, but I'd be running for the padded cell after 3 months of dealing with nothing else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Egypt was the first ones to really start doing this: they had a duodecimal > system already, so that's why it was split as base twelve, or our two parts > of twelve hours in a day. If you're like me and immediately said > ohhhhhhhhhhhh, so THAT'S why there's twelve hours in a day!

The reason why we use numbers like 12 and 60 and 360 in time and length, from ancient times onwards to today, is because these numbers have many divisors, meaning that they can be divided many different ways without needing decimals.

12 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 (i.e., it can be divided in half, into thirds, fourths, sixths). By comparison, you can't cleanly divide 10 into thirds or fourths without using decimals.

60 can be divided a whole bunch of ways: it can be divided by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30,60. The same is true for 360 (e.g. degrees in a circle).

Even in the modern era, where we understand decimals and everyone is trained on them, it's _convenient_ to be able to perform common operations on common units without having to involve decimals. It's convenient that an hour can be divided into three 20-minute periods, or two 30-minute periods, or six 10-minute periods, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ironically, the article is dated "Spring 2018", which for half the planet doesn't happen yet :)

</comment><comment><USER40> There are only two types of time systems:

1\. TAI, and systems that have a fixed 1-to-1 mapping to it (e.g., GPS).

2\. Systems that are generally _unable_ to calculate how many seconds will elapse until your next birthday. UTC is in this category.

Articles like this spend a lot of time on the varying degrees of insanity in category 2. But I would rather start with category 1 and negotiate any additional complexity from there.

<comment><USER41> The exact start of my birthday depends on where will be at the time. It starts and ends at midnight in the current timezone. With some clever time zone jumping my birthday could start twice or more in the same year. Also if I was born on February 29, you need to move it Feb 28 or March 1 on non-leap years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > This stuff moves a lot, too: the tz database (also known as the Olson > database), which is the listing of timezone rules we use as programmers to > calm this chaos, gets updated many times a year.

Without looking it up, I would say the last change happened when North Korea decided to sync its timezone with South Korea... or have they reverted that since Trump cancelled their summit?

<comment><USER43> I think it's one of the more recent changes.

It's actually pretty cool- all of this is discussed on the tz mailing list, so you can see how it all works yourself! [https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/)

<comment><USER44> Thanks that's a great link. Indeed as you said I'm learning quite a lot about how it works just from this thread which started about the Western Greenland timezone!

[https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2017-December/025606.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2017-December/025606.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I really enjoyed this.

And I think no one mentioned the very related Computerphile video yet: "The Problem with Time & Timezones " [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm- gesOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)

Same topic, equally entertaining (not AS geeky though).

</comment><comment><USER46> We could've all switched to Swatch™ Internet .Beat Time™ by now, but nooooo, we wanna stick with all this mess instead!

:P

</comment><comment><USER47> If you think calendar apps are a pain try television broadcast automation... frame accuracy instead of per second, with fractional frame rates (29.97, 23.98, fps) and a mix of content of different frame rates on the same playlist and conversion to different frame rate on the way out, plus operators in a different timezone than the channel and the need to handle timezone changes without messing things up on air.

I have nothing to do with it but this is an open source automation project I have bookmarked with some of those functions:

[https://github.com/jaskie/PlayoutAutomation/blob/develop/TAS...](https://github.com/jaskie/PlayoutAutomation/blob/develop/TAS.Common/SMPTETimecodeExtensions.cs)

Lots of hassles.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you want a technical audience to read your page, get rid of the videos and unnecessary animations.

<comment><USER49> > It's so predictable that developers will pooh-pooh having to write timezone > code, almost as much as it is predictable that some clueless commenter on > Hacker News will complain that this page has autoplaying video on it. And > then someone will calmly quote this passage in response, quietly pleased > with themselves that the initial commenter was rude and certainly didn't > read the post at all. Then a third person will chime in on the thread saying > the author was playing you all like a fiddle anyway, and the real problem is > that the post was way too long to start with.

I guess I get to play the part of the second person…

<comment><USER50> The author played us all like a fiddle.

<comment><USER51> He's playing my laptop like a fiddle, too, a really high-pitched one: all the videos are keeping the CPU at 100% CPU so I had to downclock everything to keep the system below 64°C.

So: the first time I ever found a paragraph like the one the GP has quoted, happened on the same site I've ever been on where the autoplaying videos are making my whole system (including typing this comment) lag worse than any other site I've been on.

At least it gave me one good idea for the Extension I'm Making One Day™: watch the CPU and if the current page is killing it _and_ it has autoplaying videos and/or CSS animations, automatically kill both.

In the meantime, I had to close the article as it was unreadable. (Wow, getting my low typing latency back is wonderful!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Implementing recurring events is a nightmare. Also working with potentially 4 different timezones in a single situation is terrible. We have instances where we need to display a time in a browser but we have to take into account the browser's timezone (fuck JS Date objects), the call center agent's timezone, the supervisor they are talking to's timezone, and the participant they are talking about's timezone. I hate time. I wish we would just go to a seconds- based time system ("I'll be done with this in about a kilo-second", "I work just under 28 kilo-seconds a day").

</comment><comment><USER53> Lemme tell you about a fun little bug in the TFS Build system. You can create build definitions, you can set the schedule for those builds. You can, for example, schedule builds that run at a certain time of day every day (or every weekday or every Tuesday, or whatever). That build information is then stored in an internal representation which is actually used for scheduling. And that internal representation, it uses UTC times. Can you see the bug here already?

So, your build system will be scheduling daily builds at the same time every day, and then suddenly after a DST change those builds will be an hour off from when you expect them. But here's the even more fun part. If you simply happen to edit and then save one build definition after the DST switch then it'll be saved with a different UTC time (due to the different UTC offset) and it'll run at the correct local time of day.

</comment><comment><USER54> Probably not a good time to propose decitime, I guess. (No pun intended.)

Day is the basic measure. Deciday = day/10\. (=~ 2.4 hour) Centiday = day/100

Either could be used in place of the old fashioned hour.

Milliday = day/1000 (=~ 84 seconds)

Milliday seems like a good replacement for the traditional minute.

Centimilliday to replace seconds? It's a but unwieldy but could be abbreviated as cmd (similar to the commonly used 'sec.')

Years are a little troublesome. However with sufficient energy input a Kiloyear could be made to be 3 years. With sufficient precision (and perhaps occasional correction) it could resolve that leap year and occasional leap second issue.

There would be some ramifications. For example the Newton is defined in terms of seconds so there are some units beyond pure time that would also require revision.

Let's get rid of this madness of 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds. And 365.2425 days was just plain wrong from day 1.

<comment><USER55> I can't tell if you're being serious...

<comment><USER54> Only slightly. Changing the orbit of the earth to achieve a 333.333 day year is not feasible b y any foreseeable technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Great description of pains I've been feeling the last 5 years in my daily life. Just one comment on colors, I can read the whole post but when I switch or look somewhere else my eyes have a hard time adjusting to all those crazy colors I just saw. Maybe I'm broken.

<comment><USER14> Cone receptors saturate when you look at the same hue for a period of time and loose sensitivity for a while. It's known as retinal fatigue or cone fatigue and causes after images. It's normal and used in several optical illusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> > (My all-time fave is RFC 2606, thanks for asking! I'm in awe of that > absolute unit. Where would we be without that banger? We'd be in complete > fucking chaos, that's where.)

RFC 2606 ("Reserved Top Level DNS Names") not RFC 2616 ("Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1")? I would have gone with the latter.

Related: I just noticed Cloudflare's DNS service (22.214.171.124) follows the suggestion in RFC 2606 and resolves *.localhost to 127.0.0.1. That can be handy for local web development etc. There are some other wildcard domains that resolve to 127.0.01 but I usually can't remember them.

<comment><USER58> xip.io is one service that will wildcard for any IP address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> That was an efficient way to heat a battery.

<comment><USER60> Same here. About a quarter way through the article I figured out what the hell my system was running; then, halfway through, I had enough. I disabled Javascript and reloaded the page. No dice. Page renders perfectly including videos. I scrolled a little faster and skipped parts from there on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Obviously it all depends on the application:

Birthdays (as the article mentioned) are not points in time and mean different things depending on where you are, so best stored as a year-month-day combo without any zone information.

Past times are not that big of an issue actually, just use UTC and convert to local time to display, but calendars schedule for the future, and you can't always calculate a future time in UTC.

In e.g. distributed system where monotony and ordering is important UT1 would actually be even better than UTC, as UTC has occasional jumps (hence the workarounds, like googles skewed NTP)

</comment><comment> mark-r The Olson database is great, but I wish it included more cities. I hate having to know the mapping from city to time zone and time zone to city. Quick, what's the zone to use for Columbus, Ohio?

</comment><comment><USER62> Wow... this site completely freezes my mobile browser dead in its tracks.

</comment><comment><USER11> > The Happy Monday System, which honestly I just loved based on the name of it > alone. Shows how Japan has moved their holidays schedules around just to > make people happier with a longer weekend.

In countries with significant amounts of legal leaves (e.g. most of europe), tuesdays and thursdays are also very nice as "burning" a single leave day provides for a 4 days weekend (and 3 days week). French even has an expression for this: "faire le pont" (bridging between holiday and weekend).

<comment><USER63> Independence Day, in the USA, is always celebrated on July 4. One year in seven this creates some awkwardness: which weekend is "Fourth of July weekend" if the 4th of July is a Wednesday?

2012: [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/serious...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/seriously- how-annoying-midweek-fourth-july/326316/)

2007: [https://www.inc.com/news/articles/200706/independence.html](https://www.inc.com/news/articles/200706/independence.html)

1990: [https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/04/garden/and-thank-god- it-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/04/garden/and-thank-god-it-s- wednesday.html) (NYT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This article covers a lot of important points, but I must nitpick one in particular. GMT is not a timezone. Europe/London is a timezone. GMT is solar time which is distinct from UTC as a time system. The purpose of leap seconds is to track the difference between TAI and GMT which results in UTC (i.e. UTC = TAI + leap seconds).

Since everything is relative, my preference for recording accurate historical time is microseconds since TAI0. Everything else prior and future is an estimate.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've seen a few systems mixing up their clocks, sometimes using the database server clock, sometimes the web server clock, sometimes the user's local clock. Whatever clock you're using, be consistent about it.

Users can and do configure different time zones than where they're actually located, e.g. if someone in India is working with a team in the UK, they'll probably have Indian time on their local clock, but select UK in their user profile.

Also, some people travel.

</comment><comment><USER66> I really think we need a standard way to handle linear time that is not effected by leap seconds but can be mapped between back to calendar time (UTC)

The Unix Epoch does not handle leap seconds (time just rewinds). Google's time smearing approach is a great hack, but trades one issue for another.

This is a niche case in high resolution time, auditing and security considerations.

</comment><comment><USER67> Shouldn't past datetimes be stored as nanoseconds offsets from EPOCH and future datetimes be stored as local time?

In this way, we can tell the exact time something happened in the past, no matter how timezones/DST changes, but we can also have future events stored according to people's expectations.

</comment><comment><USER68> "Physicists are still debating on whether or not time actually exists in the universe."

I'm not aware of any physicists debating this. If time didn't exist, there wouldn't be a physical dimension for it, and everything would be at a fixed position in 3-dimensional space.

<comment><USER69> >If time didn't exist, there wouldn't be a physical dimension for it, and everything would be at a fixed position in 3-dimensional space.

It's not necessarily the case. Maybe the universe is just an tangled graph of events. Maybe the dimensionality of spacetime only emerges as an asymptotic behavior of this graph and it breaks down in small scales. In this view time doesn't exist at a microscopic level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I would be interested to see a proposal for a standard for establishing planetary time with the feature that you can easily convert from one planet to the other, but I have no idea how you would do that. What happens when we move to Mars with Elon? UTC would not be practical.

</comment><comment><USER71> > Definitely check it out if you get really excited about reading whitepapers. > Also get yourself checked out if that's actually the case.

Highlight of the article! Even though I disagree with certain bits, the article in itself helps explain how to think about programming time in a project.

</comment><comment><USER72> A tiny bit of good news recently was North Korea getting rid of their fraction-of-an-hour different time zone and harmonizing with South Korea. Sadly, Australia and New Zealand are still some of the few holdouts with stupid pointless not-on-the-hour time zones :(

</comment><comment><USER73> > UTC isn't directly used by people (unless they're really weird).

I find it best to stick with UTC. Otherwise there's too much ambiguity. Especially when we're all pretending to be somewhere that we're really not.

</comment><comment><USER74> My current time is:

        1527698540

That seems easy enough for any application to deal with. Perhaps let each app or user convert that back to their ISO 8601 of preference.

</comment><comment><USER75> The one that has been a problem for me is comparing hourly breakdowns for DST. How do you compare last week vs a day with 25 hours in it

<comment><USER43> There's a lot of really weird edge cases like that. A lot of the times you sort of have to make a judgement call.

There are cases where you _have_ to make a judgement call, one way or another. Take the case where I invite you to a weekly meeting at 2pm. You live in a place with DST, I don't. DST happens and... is the meeting at 2pm, or 3pm, or what? Google Calendar (and many others) basically say whoever owns the event wins, so our "regular" meeting time would track however _you_ go through life (at least in terms of DST), so times might change for you but not me, and vice versa.

Anyway, yeah, there's some really odd interactions once you start digging deeper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> We're going to need a new data type: spacetime

<comment><USER26> I don't know if you were trying to make a joke or not, but you are absolutely right! With space travel, both are needed to tell time. Things get even more complicated quickly. Albeit, things like 15 minute timezone offsets from UTC will become a terrestrial problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> We have had some issues with timezones and DST... Time is not fun. Funny well written article - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER78> Full screen images as a lead are the most annoying thing that can happen, right?

Wrong:

> zachholman.com/video/utc-title.mp4

</comment><comment><USER79> Could you start making websites which are readable? Jumping icons, moving background, flickering colors, gray letters on colorful backgrounds - all that makes me hard to read... so I'm sorry, I'm not going to read that.

</comment><comment><USER80> I thought the 12-hour thing came from Mesopotamia, not Egypt.

</comment><comment><USER81> I was blown away by the design on this blog, super slick!

<comment><USER82> Yet over here I am finding the design to be terrible, lacking good user experience, and overall terrible to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> This is tougher to get then time in general relativity...

<comment><USER84> I always figured if spacetime was relative, why don't we just report the location we are at and that local time? If I know I was in Lower Manhattan at 2:00pm on November 19th, 2007, somebody else can just do a little math to figure out when that actually was compared to their own local time and place. All times are interpretive. UTC just seems like a giant hack to try to avoid the interpretation.

<comment><USER85> Who's clock is correct though.

<comment><USER84> Whatever the town clock is set to.

I'm surprised the author didn't mention Railway time. The standardization of time did not begin in the USA in 1883, it began in England in 1840. Before then, sundials, and later a local mean time, was used to determine local time. Railroads published almanacs with different local times, and instructions on how to reset a watch along a route to know what time it was. However, the small changes in time, or even differently timed sunsets, created problems and accidents, so to solve this they used the newly invented telegraph service along the railroad's telegraphic lines to synchronize clocks to the official time at Greenwich. This method to synchronize time then spread to India and then the United States. It was in 1880 that a law passed in Great Britain finally made the new time official across the whole country.

However, as the attached article shows, neither GMT nor UTC solve everything. When humans are involved there will always be mistakes unless things are simplified for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Link all back to sidereal clock time...

</comment><comment><USER87> Lost me at "rich, white railroad tycoons". What on earth does skin colour have to do with anything in this article?

</comment><comment><USER88> Elementary my dear Watson.

In all seriousness, a great collection of advice on time. Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER89> never worked on spacecraft then ... ;)

TAI if you can work it out :)

</comment><comment><USER90> Obligatory Erik Naggum essay -- possibly his best ever: [http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html](http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html)

</comment><comment><USER91> This article is inspirational.

</comment><comment><USER92> The author expected this comment, but i'd still like to note that this website saturates at least one core of my laptop, more depending where I scroll.

<comment><USER93> There are tons of autoplaying videos, and each one takes a few % of my CPU. The biggest difference for me was the one just after the heading "Who needs December 30, 2011 anyway".

Turning off autoplay (e.g. media.autoplay.enabled in Firefox) fixed it. You can still play each video by right-clicking on it.

<comment><USER94> The autoplaying videos are a pain, I couldn't find "media.autoplay.enabled" in my Preferences menu in Firefox, and this in the article calling me "clueless" doesn't help:

> it is predictable that some clueless commenter on Hacker News will complain > that this page has autoplaying video on it

<comment><USER93> Type about:config into the address bar and then search in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> > Base ten is lit and doing everything in twelve feels so uncivilized …

It's actually the reverse: base twelve is more elegant than base ten[0]. The only reason we think otherwise is that we're used to using base ten.

0: ½ in base twelve is .6; ⅓ in base twelve is .4, not .333333…; ¼ is .3; 1/6 is .2, not .166667

<comment><USER43> I actually had something similar to this in my notes but didn't get around to adding it. Basically, 60 minutes seems kind of arbitrary for an entire system of time (at least to me!) and then I realized that once you split it down into half, thirds, quarters, etc., it's basically the best numbers to use for informal conversations about time. That was pretty illuminating when I read about that; thanks for pointing it out here!

<comment><USER96> They're called Highly Composite Numbers (or anti-primes) [1], meaning they have more divisors than any smaller number.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typo note to author: therefor should be therefore.

<comment><USER97> I know that 'therefore' is the way it's normally spelled, but I always thought it was goofy: all the other there-compounds (which are cognate to German's da- compounds) & where-compounds (cognate to German's wo-compounds) don't change the spelling of their prepositions: thereafter, thereon, thereat, whereafter, whereon, whereat &c.

I also don't understand why modern English doesn't take advantage of them like modern German does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> 11/10 - xkcd had alt text

</comment><comment><USER85> Sound track to accompany article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwYX52BP2Sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwYX52BP2Sk)

</comment><comment><USER99> Sadly I didn't have enough time to read the whole article...

But I wish we could all just use one time. For some, midday would be 12, and for others it might be 19, but we already all use the same dates regardless of whether February is winter for one location or summer for another.

<comment><USER100> "You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform..." [https://qntm.org/calendar](https://qntm.org/calendar)

<comment><USER99> Until software is uniformly correct with respect to timezone rules and auto- location-updating, there will be more problems with the current system than there would be with a fixed UTC-only system.

I'll take "better" even if better != perfect.

<comment><USER101> Most people's lives don't revolve around software. Software is a tool that shouldn't require turning people's lives upside down to work in its way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Italy's rarest pasta - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161014-the-secret-behind-italys-rarest-pasta <comment><USER2> As a Sardinian this is the first time ever I hear of this pasta, and I'm truly shocked of how it's made, it really sounds like lots of work.

Now I'm super curious about it, but the preparation in sheep broth and pecorino is one of the best combinations to have with pasta IMHO, very promising.

Btw if you've never been to Sardinia make sure you visit at least once in life, you won't regret it :)

<comment> ezequiel-garzon As an aside, if you don't mind, how close is Sardo to Latin? Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo). Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I've never heard of this language, is it specially known for being particularly close to Latin or something? Why would you expect it to be any more mutually intelligible with Latin than any other modern Latin dialect is? (I mean French, Spanish, etc.)

<comment><USER4> From TFA: _Residents here still speak Sardo, the closest living form of Latin._

<comment><USER3> Ah, I must have skimmed it too quickly to notice that. Thanks!

Anyway, I doubt it is close enough to Latin to be mutually intelligible, as all modern Romance languages are derived from Vulgar Latin, which is known to be very different form the written Classical Latin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes me think strongly of Matthew B. Crawford's books ("The World Beyond Your Head", "Shop Class as Soulcraft"). He focuses directly on difficult techniques like this, things that require both intellectual focus and physical technique to master - craftsmanship. He believes that this is the finest work we can do. Pure intellectual abstraction doesn't exercise our minds fully, we need to engage with the physical world and its complexities as well.

Think about it - this is so incredibly sensitive to the exact consistency of the pasta dough, it must change by temperature, humidity, time of day, barometric pressure... to make it work, she just has to _feel_ the pasta, to know pasta in a way that can only be done with years of manual effort.

That's why they can't build a machine to do it. They can't control the conditions well enough.

<comment><USER6> I fail to believe such a machine cannot be made. I do however believe it may not be economical to do so. If it can be measured then why cannot it be reproduced? None of the values you listed cannot be measured and accounted for.

She has three listed ingredients, however I am curious how much perspiration is in the final product, surely her hands impart something through the skin contact.

Finally the drying process would have its own effect, after preparing it how much of a difference is there between it and another pasta? What exactly do they consider the differences? Is it purely texture, if so then just the preparation of the final dish can affect what you will perceive

<comment><USER5> You should read Crawford, then. Read Sidney Dekker's "Drift into Failure" as well. Complexity is the problem. Complex, evolving, interacting conditions. You can't just measure in a vacuum when you have many interacting variables.

What you're talking about is the result of the reductionist intellectual tradition. And it's been fantastic at many things - it built our modern world. But it _cannot_ solve every problem. Not everything humans do can be reduced to simple measurement and process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blocked in the UK. Can someone help us read our own website?

Edit: why is this at -3? You guys are assholes.

<comment><USER8> You downvoted since our machine learning algorithm predicted you were about to call us assholes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> have they tried getting chinese la mien chefs to duplicate her work?

Also relevant: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Compu...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Computational_Complexity_of_Chinese_and_Italian_Noodle_Making)

<comment><USER10> In the spirit of famous-English-chefs-unable-to-make-thin-noodles, here's Gordon Ramsay unable to make la mian: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw)

<comment><USER11> Do they always cut his shows such that it's impossible to tell what's going on, or is that one just extra mutilated?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you've never had handmade pasta in Italy, you're missing out.

My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:

* She mixes the flour, water and salt * That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine. * She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes. * Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up. * They get cooked. * At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.

I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that, and then it's _gone_ in a few minutes it seems like.

<comment><USER13> > I feel guilty eating them

If you want to honor her time you shouldn't waste a moment on guilt, you should just let the taste of the pasta linger as long as you can, until it is interrupted by something else besides guilt!

You can get back all of those moments she put in by savoring the dish. That's the beauty of well made food: it will tell quite a story in your body if you let it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hello! Author of the story here. Really appreciate all the interest and wanted to jump in on a few questions in the thread.

Taste? It's delicious. The pasta is so thin that it really melts in your mouth. I've tasted it many times now and think that the trick is to not put in too much pecorino.

Sardo? As many Sardi on this thread have correctly pointed out, Sardo is a separate language from Italian, as opposed to a dialect. Like Italian, Romansch, and Spanish, it's rooted in Latin. There are many variations of it and each region speaks a different version. Barbaricino (what they speak around Nuoro) is considered the least Italian-ized version of it. There are more than 500 words that are nearly identical to Latin (domus, janna, etc) with more distant words (stemming from Sardinia's earliest indigenous population) that often refer to geological formations or animals (giara, marxani, nuraghe, etc).

</comment><comment><USER15> What I am about to say is no solution, but: I can't quite understand why don't people don't begin by trying and make a basic YouTube video about this subject.

Don't want the tradition to fade? Spread it as much as possible.

<comment><USER16> Sure.

Here's Jamie Oliver attempting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk) (this might be the video linked in the article, that one failed for me). It doesn't seem very easy.

<comment><USER17> It's great to see the pasta-making in action, but damn, that guy is annoying.

<comment><USER18> Whether that's true or not I don't think your observation adds much to the conversation.

<comment><USER19> Wow, what I nice way to counter the micro aggression of the parent post. Well done, I'll be stealing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Video of it being made [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRLaO1G5A0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRLaO1G5A0)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the video, really helps me understand the process.

However she's not folding it eight times. A commenter on the video mentions that she's doing it wrong, strings are huge.

<comment><USER22> In that case have some [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKN9MajEVOQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKN9MajEVOQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like a similar process to hand-pulled cotton candy, just with pasta instead of sugar.

here's how to make that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU)

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot of embellishments in the article.

The pasta can be found at the San Francesco di Lula festival, which can be comfortably reached by car. Only a few pilgrims may do it on foot, some barefoot, as a form of devotion, but these days it's increasingly rarer

</comment><comment><USER25> >Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn't.

You can tell that Eliot is a pessimist; because if they couldn't design a mechanism to make this pasta on the first visit, it must be impossible!

Admittedly though, it does seem like a lot of work.

<comment> yoz-y I find it quite annoying that many outlets (be it articles, TV documentaries or tourist guides) always try to point out how something arcane can not be reproduced by modern technology or that the "knowledge has been lost". But it seems like people like the narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> With all the talk of the loss of manufacturing jobs maybe they can instead talk about making this pasta. It might get some people to start producing it in the US.

</comment><comment><USER27> The name of the pasta in the article is: Su Filindeu

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you think the process could be automatized? from my naive perspective, that doesn't seem a tremendously difficult task.

<comment><USER29> From the article:

"Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn't"

<comment><USER30> I expect it certainly can be automated, but there's an ROI to be considered. If it was just a matter of new dies and some process tweaks using existing machinery, it absolutely would be done and that's likely what the Barilla people were trying for.

If new technology has to be developed to match the manual process, that's far a riskier proposition just for the purpose of adding yet another box of pasta in fancy grocery stores.

It probably makes far more sense, economically, for a small number of elite chefs to learn and replicate the technique for their restaurants. I am sure folks are trying.

<comment><USER13> > I expect it certainly can be automated

Why would you expect that? Many processes are resistant to automaton.

I would be surprised if it could be automated. The amount of nerves and muscles in the hands is enormous, and many of the materials have no artificial equivalents. Cameras don't even get you close because you need to see inside the dough to make measurements. And quite a lot of the process isn't observed at all, it's modeled in the chef's head and hands. Things like the ratio of muscles around her fingers encode reactions to data coming in from nerves. Very difficult to study let alone replicate. A process like hand pulled pasta seems like the absolute worst case for automation.

<comment><USER30> I'm not suggesting it would be easy, but there are many manufacturing processes that routinely do things which are staggeringly difficult and sensitive in all kinds of domains. It really is a matter of understanding the process and compensating for the things a machine can't do in the same way as a human.

I posit that the ROI for such an endeavor would be disappointing in that all you will have is another type of fancy pasta. That would sort of take the magic and cache out of the dish as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If I wanted to replicate this, I'd try to get a machine to make the strands and then lay them by hand. Laying pasta that thin in an accurate way with a robotic arm requires amazing computer vision and such, but pulling dough in exactly this certain way is machineworthy.

<comment><USER32> I'd almost expect the opposite. According to the article, most of the difficult comes from managing the consistency of the dough. Salt water and water need to be added throughout the pulling process to prevent tearing. The laying process could probably be achieved by a loom-like machine: thread the string around knobs at the edge of the disc, and then cut around the outside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> And all I can think of is stupid greentext about Pepe.

<comment><USER34> Well they probably do crack the tiniest bit of rare pepe on their rare pasta. (Pepe is Italian for pepper.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> [deleted] I'm guilty of only reading half the article.

<comment><USER36> Read closer:

>Recently, she's begun making su filindeu for three restaurants in the area – and in the process, offering non-pilgrims a chance to taste it for the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Bit out of the way for me in Massachusetts but looks delicious.

</comment><comment><USER38> Google cache to the rescue for UK users:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0MegUJ:www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161014-the- secret-behind-italys-rarest-pasta)

<comment><USER39> Thanks. But more generally WTH? How does their policy make any sense?

For non uk people: """BBC Worldwide (International Site)

We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com. """

<comment><USER40> The BBC is forbidden from undertaking any commercial activity within the UK in their charter. While obviously quite integral to the way the BBC works and is able to work, this is a weird side-effect of that restriction.

<comment><USER41> Reminds me of the situation in Germany, where private publishers and TV networks managed to successfully shoot down some of the better ideas of how to use public television. Result is that public television networks are forbidden to produce in-depth articles accompanying their reports and may only expose free internet access to their shows within tight limits. The compromises reached seem more and more like "you may produce content using public money as long as you make sure the content stays sufficiently sucky".

<comment><USER40> The BBC charter is being renewed soon, and there is certainly a faction within Government that is trying to push the BBC in this direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As this is a link to the BBC, I thought this might be talking about the spaghetti tree incident of 1957: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti- tree_hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax)

</comment><comment><USER42> Didn't know there are BBC pages that you cannot see in the UK! [http://i.imgur.com/rUaBZPy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rUaBZPy.jpg)

<comment><USER43> The international part of the BBC is funded by ads. The simplest solution to not make British citizens pay for it is to block it. Apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> [http://pastebin.com/AZ2kda1e](http://pastebin.com/AZ2kda1e)

Because the BBC can kiss my arse if it thinks anything it produces isn't mine.

</comment><comment><USER45> I find it reprehensible that the article is blocked to UK users. BBC worldwide wouldn't exist without license fee payers, yet they feel like they can block content from us.

<comment><USER46> A weird consequence of the BBC charter. The article has ads on it, so they're obliged to adblock it for you. Apparently they gave up maintaining the separate ad-free version: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/online/website_changes](http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/online/website_changes)

<comment><USER45> I'll write in and complain about this for sure; I pay a tax to see and fund the BBCs content and directly or indirectly that pays for BBC worldwide to exist. It's like saying I funded a startup and they did well from that and set up a subsidiary with the money and that subsidiary blocked me because of this. It wouldn't be defensible.

<comment><USER43> I think there are laws that would prevent BBC worldwide being funded by tax payers.

<comment><USER45> The license fee differs from a tax how? In who it is paid to?

<comment><USER43> Sorry, I should have said license fee payers, but that isn't as catchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> why is this in HN

<comment><USER48> Because it's the exact opposite of Soylent.</comment></comment>


Why I'm Eating Dinner for Breakfast - <AUTHOR> http://blog.diiq.org/post/3030890353/why-im-eating-dinner-for-breakfast-i-woke-up

<comment><USER2> It's a very healthy thing to do. Most folks eat an unhealthy breakfast when they do eat one. Eating a good breakfast is helpful in kickstarting the metabolism for the day.

</comment><comment><USER3> Debunked reasoning: You still eat X calories per day, you still use Y calories per day, storing or using fat depending (mostly) on the difference between X and Y. The relative timing of consumption and use have a demonstrably negligible effect.

<comment><USER2> I would encourage you to read further on nutrition, particularly in books like Grossman and Kurzweil's books (Fantastic Voyage and Transcend), as well as Tim Ferriss's 4Hr body (which discusses a case of someone losing weight by changing the timing of their food consumption).

Not all calories are equal.

Starting off the day with a good breakfast can jumpstart the metabolism.

<comment><USER3> Hence the 'mostly'. I'm saying that the relative efficacy of that approach is lower than generally believed. It's woods-for-the-trees, IMHO.</comment></comment></comment>


Brain Reorganizes To Make Room For Math - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38793/title/Brain_reorganizes_to_make_room_for_math?

<comment><USER2> Beware of the causal claims. Sure, kids and adults rely, to differing extents, on different regions. That's true of almost every domain. Real world pressures - active and passive learning - are influencing the activity and connectivity patterns throughout life. For instance, older individuals compensate for decreased brain functioning by shifting activation to other, supporting regions. Folks are reluctant to call that "reorganization". It's a change in activation (as this study shows) without a clear change in structure (which this study doesn't appear to show).

Here's a good review of recent number work: <http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/feigenson2004.pdf>

Another involving specifically the parietal cortex: [http://www.unicog.org/publications/HubbardPiazzaPinelDehaene...](http://www.unicog.org/publications/HubbardPiazzaPinelDehaene_InteractionsNumberSpace_NatRevNeurosci2005.pdf)

Andreas Nieder and Earl Miller have also shown some really cool effects for how number relies on specific response properties of individual neurons in non-human primates:

[http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/N...](http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/Nieder_Miller_PNAS2004.pdf)

[http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/N...](http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/NiederMiller2004JCognNeurosci.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I started having weird dreams while I worked for 72 (almost consecutive) hours on some coding projects. I started having these weird dreams about robots assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass their own classes. It was weird as hell.

But yeah, I could see how the brain could change neurologically for math.

<comment><USER4> That happens to me occasionally when I work really hard on something. A couple of years ago I was doing math almost constantly for a few weeks, and by the end I was dreaming about problems every night. I felt like I was going insane, since after I started having those dreams I was thinking about math almost continually.

Dreaming about something usually indicates that I'm about to get a lot better at it, though, so it's kind of nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will be a good follow-up area of research to see how much of that brain reorganization from early childhood to adulthood can be influenced by experience, that is by good education. Here's a link

[http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary- Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics- Understanding/dp/0805829091/)

to a very informative book about math education and how it can be better. I strongly suspect the brain reorganization happens better and faster for learners with good math teachers rather than lousy math teachers.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have seen some Bangladeshi immigrants in Japan speaking Japanese fluently. They got to Japan well in their twenties. Necessity, mother & invention come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> For some reason I read this headline as "Rails Reorganizes To Make Room For Merb."

Guess I need to lay off the eggnog.

</comment><comment><USER8> Intresting. This also indicates that teaching kids math is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> Teaching kids almost anything (worth teaching) is a good idea. By the time kids grow over 10, large portions of their learning abilities are gone. For example, consider languages. Kids growing up with multiple languages learn them with ease, but for most adults, learning a foreign language is nearly impossible.

The early years are a person's best chance to expand their minds.

<comment><USER5> It's an open area of research (mentioned in some recent HN threads, in fact) whether all areas of learning have the same plasticity in adult life. It does appear, in the interest of efficiency in using language, perhaps, that language learning plasticity drops sharply after puberty. (Although I got good enough in Chinese to work for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter, even though I didn't start learning the language until age seventeen.) On the other hand, a lot of other skills can be learned to very high levels indeed after surprisingly late starts.

Children also need time to play, and maybe one of the most important things start-up entrepreneurs can figure out is forms of play for children that bolster or increase their plasticity for learning what they need to learn as they grow up.

<comment><USER10> There was a hypothesis in Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ that children's ability to learn languages is not an innate, magical part of being a child. Rather, it's because learning languages is _hard_ , and so people will avoid doing so whenever they have a choice. Everyone learns a first language because otherwise they can't communicate. People who have to speak one language at home and one at school (or a language with one parent and a different language with another parent) end up speaking two languages. But the reason people don't learn languages late in life isn't that they can't: it's that they don't need to, and their attention can be better spent on other things.

My dad spoke and sang to me a little bit in Chinese when I was a toddler, but it never stuck. I suspect this is because I could always revert to English and he'd talk back to me in English, so there was no reason for me to learn Chinese. Some of my cousins - the ones whose parents were more strict about speaking Chinese at home - did end up picking it up.

Similarly, this also explains why immersion works, why immigrant ghettoes prevent language acquisition, and why people retain accents. If you're dropped in a foreign culture and have to learn the language to survive, you'll manage it whether you're 10 or 60. If you have other people who speak your language that you can depend on, there's much less reason to learn a foreign language. And if you can speak well enough to be understand (as most people with accents can), there's no reason to improve that last 10% (which, in true 90-10 form, takes 90% of the effort) to make yourself sound like a native speaker.

<comment><USER11> There's more to this.

Toddlers are not inclined to perform tasks that are _hard_. So, they don't really make a choice about learning a language or not, neither is it based on necessity: before and after language acquisition, a baby would receive attention and protection. Before anyone says anything about reinforcement, kids with delayed language development (up to around 7) can be mute for years regardless of any coaxing. This is a special case though -- the brain seems to delay its pruning, almost as if to "wait" for the speech centers to kick into gear when speech begins.

Toddlers are _innately_ imitative. Speech acquisition can be viewed as an imitative behavior, akin to, say, reaching out and grabbing something, kicking a ball, what not. The remarkable thing is that by observing something happening, they know how to control the analogous functions in their own bodies. I mention this as an alternative to this "necessity to communicate" idea: it could be largely the result of imitation, with the ability to communicate as a byproduct.

Finally, early languages take precedence over later languages. It could be because the early development of concrete operations, and later, abstract thought, rely on the available (i.e. first/native) language to "bootstrap" more complex thought processes. So the first language gets used non-stop. Then the second language comes in. Let's say you study it as an adult, and work real hard on it. When we fire a neural signal though, the wirings for the first language are so much stronger that they enjoy a lopsided privilege in access speed. In this sense, the later languages will never quite equal the earlier ones, by far.

So while I'm not saying anything against the adult ability of new language acquisition (and by this I mean a different set of phonemes and grammar -- in- family languages like Italian to Spanish won't count), I would say there is something quite magical about the child learning their first language(s).

<comment><USER10> How do bilingual native speakers (i.e. learn multiple first languages) fit into this? Or people who're immersed in a second language early on, eg. my dad's a native Cantonese speaker, but he went to dual Chinese (Mandarin) and English schools where all instruction was in those languages, and so he speaks all three with minimal accent.

<comment><USER11> If memory serves, there are different levels native multilingualism. If you learned multiple languages in parallel, they end up sharing space on the neural structure. I would believe this is "true" multilingualism.

If you learned one separately from another, after the first was stable already, the new language will occupy an adjacent region (somehow I think this is because the region is still growing).

All languages will be functionally native (assuming early enough acquisition and abundant practice for all), but in the latter case, you would still expect a slightly weaker signal for the later languages. But in both cases, I would just count all native-level languages as first languages, taking "minimal accent" as the litmus test (some people slip through, and in my experience those people had amazing ears and were gifted with languages in general).

This is just anecdote, but from all my friends who have began learning English at a different age, their accents seem to follow a general pattern of later acquisition -> stronger accent. While this seems obvious, for those who learned English around 12-14, you get an interesting effect of native-level fluency, but just at certain places, you can tell it isn't their first language. And usually, at least for my friends, you can tell about what age they started learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm taking a class on psychological development of mathematics in children next quarter. I'll bump the thread and keep y'all posted.

<comment><USER13> "bump the thread" doesn't work here, but would a version of it be useful? Should a story's comment activity over the past X hours be a factor in how it ranks?

<comment><USER14> He could always post and link to it when submitting a story. Or just use a new story completely and link to this as a reference for the "why"</comment></comment></comment>


MacArthur Fellows for 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5410503/k.11CB/Meet_the_2009_Fellows.htm

<comment><USER2> Maneesh Agrawala was my Info Vis professor in graduate school. His work on auto generated route maps, photography and 3d illustrations is pretty amazing, take a look at his portfolio.

Berkeley site: <http://vis.berkeley.edu/~maneesh/>

MacArthur bio: [http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458001/k.92B8/...](http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458001/k.92B8/Maneesh_Agrawala.htm)

<comment><USER3> wow</comment></comment>


Things to Do to Become a Social Influencer - <AUTHOR> https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/10-things-a-social-leader-does/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have been following Julian Stodd's blog lately and he has some valid points about Social Influence, Social Learning and how we are in a Social Age surpassing the digital age. Sharing it to a wider audience as I think this is a valid topic for current times when we are seeing Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms wielding so much power.</comment>


Going All-the-Way with the Client-Server App Concept - <AUTHOR> http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/going-all-the-way-with-the-client-server-app-concept <comment><USER2> I agree -splitting the app into client- and server-side pieces is like cutting a banana long-ways. Also there's the performance problem. The web link has erratic latency resulting in: hesitant response to form entry, lack of hour- glass support, unpredictable page updates. When it works its fine; when it lags its dang irritating. Worse, its hard to even code the app to accomodate lag: the app lags when LOADING the next phase of the app, so "nobodys home" when it lags to even respond to the lag with a progress bar or hourglass or whatever.</comment>


Study: Coffee unrelated to alertness, Stimulating effects may be illusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm <comment><USER2> The results are interesting, but there's a methodological limitation the article isn't emphasizing as strongly as it should.

An illustrative analogy: Suppose you organize a group of people who often take painkillers for headaches, and a group that takes painkillers only rarely. You find that headaches of the regular painkiller-takers are no better with their painkillers than the non-painkiller-takers are without painkillers. Can you conclude from this that painkillers have no long-term effects on headaches? You can't, because the reason the first group was taking pain killers in the first place was probably because they have bad headaches, while the second group doesn't. The painkillers just bring them into parity.

The problem is the two groups the coffee study compares were not assigned their subjects randomly. They're made up of people who choose freely to drink or not drink coffee. The fact that regular coffee drinkers are no better with coffee than non-drinkers are without coffee doesn't necessarily mean that coffee has no long-term effect. It could well be that non-drinkers already have endogenously whatever benefits caffeine provides, and drinkers do not, and coffee brings them up to parity.

In other words, the current study has nothing to say on what happens to people when their long-term coffee drinking habits are changed from what they would normally prefer them to be, and so you can't infer much about the benefits or drawbacks of such changes. You could control for this by assigning people randomly two two groups, have one group drink coffee regularly for a few months while the other abstains, and then repeat the experiment performed here. The results of this modified experiment would determine whether current ad-lib drinkers should stop drinking coffee and whether current non-drinkers should start.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly what I was going to say. It could be that high caffeine users are biologically predisposed to need frequent doses of a stimulant to maintain a level of alertness that is merely normal for the general population, like some kind of ADHD spectrum disorder.

But that's probably just the drug talking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline is a little misleading. For regular and heavy coffee drinkers, the study suggests that a cup of coffee merely brings the person out of caffeine withdrawal, and does not provide any stimulation. Since caffeine withdrawal makes you groggy and less alert, it means that regular caffeine drinkers have to consume caffeine just to reach the level they would have already been at if they weren't consuming caffeine regularly.

For people who don't currently have a tolerance for caffeine, it most certainly does provide stimulating effects.

It also seems like the study gave participants the equivalent of a single cup of coffee. If you need more than that for your buzz, looks like you'd have been out of luck.

<comment><USER5> This line of reasoning often leads to the suggestion that you shouldn't bother drinking coffee. I think it's exactly the opposite.. Most things that give me as much pleasure as coffee does are actively damaging me. If coffee is a break-even prospect, then it may just be the world's greatest vice.

<comment><USER6> I drink coffee because it's correlated with a 70% lower chance of cirrhosis of the liver, and I'm pretty sure liquor doesn't have a placebo effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you drink caffeine, you should probably spend an hour or two at some point learning the basics of how it works.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Mechanism_of_action>

Long story really short - you've got this hormone called adenosine that tells you when you're tired. Andenosine floats around and attaches itself in your brain to an andenosine receptor. As it attaches, you feel tired.

Caffeine is shaped similarly to andenosine, so it sort of "blocks" the andenosine from getting to the receptor. You're still tired, you still need rest, but you don't _feel_ tired. So that's the tiredness-removal effect of caffeine, it's stopping the andenosine from getting to the receptor.

Now, your body kind of minorly panics at this and secretes adrenalin - y'know, adrenalin, like when you get excited or sacred? Yeah, that one. When andenosine gets cut off, your body perks up like something is happening and releases adrenalin. So there's the energy boost.

Over time, your body start naturally producing more andenosine to compensate, hence, you need caffeine just to feel normal. And your body starts to realize that you don't need the adrenalin, so you start to produce less of it when having caffeine. If you've ever gone a while without caffeine and then had a coffee, you remember how off the wall hyper you got? That slowly fades because your body starts producing more andenosine (the sleepy hormone) if you're a habitual caffeine user, and less adrenalin.

There's more to it than that, but that's some of the basics. Wikipedia's got some decent stuff, a few minutes here and there skimming on this sort of thing is time well spent.

<comment><USER8> this is interesting. caffine never does a damn thing to me, which leaves me wondering what part of the chain is broken & why...

I wonder if there's any tests i can do to learn more about myself in this regard.

<comment><USER9> Some people have a gene that causes them to metabolize caffeine much more quickly than others. I found this out by taking the 23andMe DNA test and discovering that I have this gene, which makes sense as it seems that I'm less affected by caffeine than others (although I make up for it by drinking more).

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1A2>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am no coffee drinker, but I'm surprised that they think their results are conclusive based on a single instance of a placebo administered. Especially when the results are so neurological, that surely the brain compensates the first time a placebo is given -- and gradually (like with any neurotransmitter-affecting chemical) gets rid of its self-generating effects.

'Tests on 379 individuals who abstained from caffeine for 16 hours before being given either caffeine or a placebo...'

Seems like -- cue Pavlovian response, but in your brain.... I'd be more impressed if they were given the placebo/caffeine for a week and still performed the same on the tests..

<comment><USER11> Read the article more closely, no Pavlovian response occurred:

"The medium/high caffeine consumers who received the placebo reported a decrease in alertness and an increase in headache, neither of which were reported by those who received caffeine. However, their post-caffeine levels of alertness were no higher than the non/low consumers who received a placebo, suggesting caffeine only brings coffee drinkers back up to 'normal'."

<comment><USER10> I see now, thanks. So:

      For medium/high caffeine consumers:
       placebo -> decrease (and headache)
       caffeine -> 'level 1'
      Non/low caffeine consumers:
       placebo-> 'level 1'
       caffeine -> 'level 2'

(where level 2 > level 1).

However, I still think there might be some confusion in using a single instance for testing, esp. testing alertness. There might be a large withdrawal symptom going on in the brain that first time that makes alertness more difficult in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can sort of see this; if I've already had caffeine, any warm beverage seems to continue the resulting productivity flow. It's nice at night because I can be awake as long as I want to be, but then be able to sleep when I come down from the flow state.

Incidentally, yesterday I decided to take a 200mg caffeine pill. After that, I saw several new colors that I have never seen before. And I solved some problems that had been bugging me for a few weeks, and implemented them, and watched TV, and read a book. And slept well.

Caffeine may be bad for spiders building webs, but I'm not convinced that it's useless (or bad) for humans.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd just like to point out that illusions are often as good as the real thing.

If your brain believes you are more alert, chances are, to all intents and purposes, you will be more alert.

<comment><USER14> You mean like the way drinkers think alcohol makes them wittier and more charming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about non-addicts? I very rarely drink caffeine (just midterms and finals, basically) but I'm pretty sure that when I do, the effects are no illusion.

<comment><USER16> Same here, in fact I try to keep my tolerance of caffeine at such a level that whenever I have to pull through I can get by with coffee. It really helps and don't think it's a placebo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It may also be that it's not just the coffee for some of us. I have a whole ritual early in the morning around making my coffee. I grind the beans, put on the water to boil. And I brew the coffee in my French press. After I've had a couple of cups of coffee at the beginning of the day, I feel really good and ready to start my day. The expectation and enjoyment of that cup of coffee should be factored in.

<comment><USER14> That is one reason why, when I tested my response to caffeine last fall and early winter, I used decaf coffee, regular coffee, and coffee with added caffeine (pills) to test for an effect. [http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2010/01/drugs-and-their- no...](http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2010/01/drugs-and-their-non- effects.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article mentions nothing about how they measure alertness. How objectively can this possibly be measured?

It seems to me that the measure of alertness may only be indirectly measured in by task specific performance. So there may be driving alertness, data-entry alertness etc...

On the other hand, even if all the chemical effects are quantifiable, so the measure is "objective", does that really mean anything for different individuals?

Also, for a given task, it may turn out that I need the anxiety producing effects of caffeine just to care enough to perform the drudgery.

Whew! Time for a second cup.

</comment><comment><USER19> For some weeks after I stopped drinking coffe each time I had a cup of, say, barley coffee (which is caffeine free) I would get a buzz. It's an interesting experiment that demonstrated, to me, the strength of the placebo effect.

</comment><comment><USER20> So basically, being a coffee drinker I control when I feel alert and when I feel groggy. Sounds good to me. Before I was a heavy coffee drinker I was at the whim of my body's rhythms.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a depressing article. I like drinking coffee, and now it turns out that it's making me groggy and un-alert by default.

I think I've noticed this at weekends - I drink lots of coffee at work all week, and then at the weekend I'll maybe desist for a day, and end up not doing anything productive. Then when I have a cup, I am suddenly infused with get up and go. I really need to cut down :-/

<comment><USER22> I'm thoroughly addicted to coffee by now, and I'm not sure it's so bad, as long as the experience of buying-making-drinking the coffee is a good one, involving fresh beans, happy, independent coffee purveyors, zen coffee-making, and good-tasting coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Baloney.

</comment><comment><USER24> My world has just been destroyed.</comment>


Show HN: My first app. An iOS client for Hacker News in Swift - <AUTHOR>

I finally released my first iOS app following the excellent tips give on https://designcode.io/.I have open sourced the app https://github.com/NikantVohra/HackerNewsClient-iOS. I know there are lots of Hacker News Clients on App Store but I made this app just to learn something new and not with the motive of competing with anyone.I would love to get the feedback of the HN community on this app. The App store link for the app is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hn-app/id983203003?ls=1&mt=8. <comment><USER2> Not going to lie that ui actually looks pretty sweet. Do you have experience prior in coding or UI/UX design? Also how much did you 'glean' from the book. I was looking and it looks very informative but similar to what you designed. Still, bravo

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually some of the UI was designed by me but most of it was inspired by the app designed in the book. I do not have much experience in UI design. I learnt a lot from the book. Thanks for the appreciation :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The HN app I previously used was rendered useless by not updating to the recent API. I was looking for a new HN app but couldn't find a decent one, despite the fact that there are so many. Your app looks really fresh, I'm looking forward to try it out when I go to the toilet :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :). Do give your feedback after that :)

<comment><USER3> Ok tried it and I like the UI but there are some show stopping bugs for me. Top Stories and Recent Stories were empty. Also on my 5S the WebView is too large so I have to scroll to see the whole screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok points noted. will take care of these in the next version :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, Indeed the good UI.

@nikant: I had plan to create Mac client for HN using swift. [https://github.com/asm-products/ycbar](https://github.com/asm-products/ycbar)

willing to help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah sure. I would love to help :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice design but some serious show stoppers.... only show HN is working

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks great! Love the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)</comment></comment>


Steve Job gets $1 and Tim Cook $59 Million  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/apple-coo-tim-cook-made-59-million-last-year-after-filling-in-for-jobs.html

<comment><USER2> Apple is the company that Jobs founded and whilst he was ousted (and sold his shares) at the time, I'm sure that it will always be his 'baby'. He obviously loves what he does and doesn't need the money anyway. I can't remember where I read it, but he leads a relatively frugal lifestyle in comparison to his peers. Do what you love I suppose :)

<comment><USER3> He should have received right at $250,000,000 in dividends on his Disney stock since selling Pixar. He's certainly not hurting for cash, frugal or not.

<comment><USER2> Sure, he's certainly not going to need the money from Apple, but it also shows where his passion is that he still accepts $1 from the company and hasn't sold any shares. Whilst not everyone agrees with his methods or what Apple stands for, there's no denying the success that Apple has become since he came back on board and was the catalyst for huge change and growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be more interesting if it were "Joe Blow, CEO of ABC Widget Co."

Steve Jobs is such an outlier, we'll still be reading his quotes with Einstein's and Yogi Berra's in 150 years.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tim Cook is worth every penny.

</comment><comment><USER6> Your title is misleading because you're comparing Job's annual salary with Cook's total compensation. If you read the fine print of the article, it clearly states that Cook's annual salary "remained at about $800,000."

Later down, the article also shares that Jobs "holds about 5.5 million shares in the company and hasn't sold any since rejoining." If you wanted to extrapolate Job's current worth based on Apple stock, it would be roughly $1.8 bil. ($334 / share * 5.5mil shares)

Anyway, I'm not sure what you were trying to point out with this article, but I don't think Job's is being short-changed. The $1 salary is mainly a PR stunt.

<comment><USER7> But Jobs received no stock this year. Cook received tons ($52.3 million to be exact).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Steve jobs knows what is the difference between owning a company and working for a company. When you are an employee you get a fixed salary, when you own a company you get whatever the company makes.

<comment><USER9> I believe in that philosophy, personally, but I doubt it has anything to do with why Steve Jobs takes a $1 salary. It's not as if Apple would suffer if he were to take a bigger salary.

I think it has more to do with the "Zen" of Steve Jobs. The bottom line is that Steve Jobs doesn't do it for the money, and he has all the money he'll ever need.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=9zzvMOF4PEwC&pg=PA44...](http://books.google.com/books?id=9zzvMOF4PEwC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I object to any executive making $59 million of the _stockholder's_ money. It either goes back to the stockholders or is reinvested into company operations.

<comment><USER11> one could argue that giving the executives those shares _is_ investing into company operations.

<comment><USER10> It's just investing in the executives. Actually investing in company operations means spending money to get things, not giving away money. Giving Tim Cook a ton of money doesn't actually get Apple anything. He could quit tomorrow and Apple wouldn't feel it at all.

<comment><USER12> _He could quit tomorrow and Apple wouldn't feel it at all._

If any C-level executive at any corporation could quit tomorrow and the company wouldn't feel it at all, that executive needs to be fired. Employees are an investment like anything else.

<comment><USER10> It's a rare employee who is not expendable. Tim Cook is not that employee.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FBI, Intel Chiefs Decry "Deep Cynicism" Over Cyber Spying Programs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/fbi-intel-chiefs-decry-deep-cynicism-over-cyber-spying-programs/ <comment><USER2> They are not helping themselves when they maintain that they haven't done anything wrong.

When NSA's intelligence director Clapper can lie to Congress without even a reprimand it's obvious that there are no true checks and balances.

They are going to find it hard to go back to "trust us" when they abused that trust and don't seem inclined to change.</comment>


Show HN: Kubestone – Benchmarking Operator for Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://kubestone.io/ <comment><USER2> How do you disentangle the performance effects of load generation from the target system? It looks at first glance to all be colocated in the same cluster.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use taints, tolerations, affinity and anti-affinity of k8s to schedule the load-generator to a different node than the one contains the service under test.

The load-gen and the service does not need to be co-located in case of REST (drill) and PostgreSQL (pgbench) based load testing.

In case of pure network benchmarking (with iperf & qperf) currently only the same cluster is supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting, thanks for sharing!

Any plan to include other load generators, such as JMeter [1] or Locust [2]?

1: [https://jmeter.apache.org](https://jmeter.apache.org) 2: [https://locust.io](https://locust.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Created two issues to track this request:

[https://github.com/xridge/kubestone/issues/159](https://github.com/xridge/kubestone/issues/159)

[https://github.com/xridge/kubestone/issues/160](https://github.com/xridge/kubestone/issues/160)

<comment><USER3> thank you, I might take a stab at it later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just so as you know, there's something funky going on with your domain. I'm on mobile right now, so I'm not sure what, but I can't resolve it on my home network, I expect it's something perhaps to do with dnssec.

<comment><AUTHOR> Until then, could you please give the following page a try? [https://kubestone.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://kubestone.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> That works. I'll try checking if my pi-hole is killing it.

<comment><USER4> So, my pihole thinks the DNSSEC is "bogus" rather than the normal "insecure" when there isn't a signature. I'll investigate more on my end.

<comment><USER5> [https://dnssec-analyzer.verisignlabs.com/kubestone.io](https://dnssec- analyzer.verisignlabs.com/kubestone.io)

This looks no different than STRIPE.COM (which, of course, is also not signed).

[https://dnssec-analyzer.verisignlabs.com/stripe.com](https://dnssec- analyzer.verisignlabs.com/stripe.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, what problem are you solving with this? Who's the target audience, and why is this useful for them?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea came when we tried to optimize Cluster filesystem (CEPH via Rook) for K8S. During this exercise we needed to test both PV&PVC performance, as well as TCP latency and bandwidths.

Target audience would be Kubernetes and OpenShift administrators who would like to measure and tune their installations. It is convenient for them as one CR can be used to describe the performance measurement.</comment></comment>


Samsung Says It's Shipping 28-Nm Embedded MRAM - <AUTHOR> https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334410 <comment><USER2> Everspin has been one of the major players in MRAM for a while. I wonder if they are using the Samsung process for their products. If I recall correctly I think Everspin was a spinoff of Freescale (formerly Motorola, now NXP). It was probably 7 or 8 years ago when I saw a presentation touting the commercially viable STT technology, and it always seemed to be just another year away.

It seems aerospace and SSD manufacturers(write cache)are pretty popular areas. It provides really fast write speeds combined with power loss tolerance and recovery of write logs and cache that DRAM and Flash alone can't provide. It's also natively Rad Hard and nearly "write unlimited" which makes it good for a lot certain niche applications where the budget can tolerate it because it ain't cheap (2MB is nearly $30 in quantity). [1]

[1][https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=everspin](https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=everspin)

<comment><USER3> Everspin is partnered with Global Foundries for their latest generation MRAM, but I believe they still operate their own backend processing facility for older generation memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're curious like I was, it appears that MRAM is susceptible to higher than usual magnetic fields, but shielded to prevent interference up to a certain tolerance.

"Everspin MRAM products are designed to be highly immune to magnetic fields normally found in commercial, industrial or AEC-Q100 Grade 1 applications. However, if there is concern that an MRAM device is expected to be in close proximity to a magnetic field, it may be prudent for the designer to verify that a magnetic field does not exceed the magnetic immunity specifications of the MRAM." [1]

Also of interest [2].

Careful, they are PDFs, not sure if those servers can handle too much traffic!

[1] [https://www.everspin.com/file/206/download](https://www.everspin.com/file/206/download)

[2] [https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application- note/AN3525.pdf](https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN3525.pdf)

<comment><USER5> And that value is 25 Gauss (0.0025 Tesla), which isn't all that high. Run a neodymium magnet across it and it's going to affect it. 25 Gauss is only half of what a standard fridge magnet would even give you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty cool. TI has been using Ferrous mRam in their micro-controllers to achieve absurdly low levels of power consumption and it's worked great. Makes me excited to see others picking up the technology to put it into use in other mediums.

<comment><AUTHOR> TI uses ferroelectric, not ferromagnetic RAM - a very different tech that depends on physical movement of ions inside a fancy ceramic material.

<comment><USER6> You're right. I totally overlooked that.</comment></comment></comment>