What Can Hitters Actually See Out of a Pitcher's Hand? - how-about-this http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/what-can-hitters-actually-see-out-of-a-pitchers-hand/ <comment><AUTHOR> The statistical and scientific nature of baseball is incredibly deep, far deeper than any other sport I can think of. You not only have the one-on-one of pitching that many other sports can rival (think cricket for example which is mostly about this match up), but once you start including men on base and positional state, it becomes absolutely beautiful to analyze.

This isn't to say other sports don't have action (basketball, soccer, etc) or chess like transitional strategy (football), but the scientific wealth of information in baseball is fairly unrivaled because of discrete nature and very calculable states. These qualities make it assaultable mathematically and scientifically in ways other sports that have more flowing nature cannot have done to them.

It's good to see the article give a nod to a cricket bowling study though. Cross-pollination is good. But for mathematics geeks, baseball is the Beautiful Game.

<comment><USER2> It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring. Baseball is unique in that play is limited to brief bursts of activity rarely lasting more than a few seconds. Then the actors return to fixed positions. During these extensive and predictable downtimes everyone has time to calculate and plan. It's like a group of bits all sitting at known energy states waiting for that one random bit to set everything in motion, that being the batter-pitcher outcome. In no other sport are so many of the players physically locked into place every few seconds. In no other sport can observers see and measure them all so regularly. It's the thinking mans game because there is so much downtime in which to ponder so many known values.

Give me the fluidity of soccer, hockey or basketball. That's a very different type of thinking. The great players in those sports are the ones able to keep track of all the motions without the downtime between plays.

<comment><USER3> > It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring

A very obviously subjective view. What you mean is, it's boring to you. Major League Baseball managed 74 million in total attendance in 2015. Given the 162 games, it manages a remarkable attendance figure per game average (30k).

<comment><USER2> Something can be boring and popular. In fact, I'd say that the regularity and slow pace of the game allows for a host of activities to occur around it. Chatting, eating, _drinking_ can all be done without missing anything. And it is very suited to broadcast. In the days of radio the downtime allowed the commentator to keep everyone up to speed with everything on the field. Today, television broadcasts display all the stats and the role of color commentator fills the silence. But take all that away and the core game is very slow in comparison to other sports.

<comment><USER4> I agree - for me, baseball is great as background for other activities. For example, say that you're at a party with your friends. You have conversations that are happening, maybe some beer pong or cornhole or similar party games, and you have the Red Sox in the background. If you hit a lull where your conversation partner goes off to the bathroom or you just lost at beer pong, you can walk over to the TV and relax for a few minutes.

Similarly, bars often have baseball games on for the same purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Immediately reminded me of this NYT interactive about Mariano Rivera's cutter, back from 2010: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/29/magazine/river...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/29/magazine/rivera- pitches.html)

If the NYT did that interactive today, they'd probably try it as VR, and I would definitely re-download the app to look at it.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of my favorite moments from Michael Lewis' Moneyball is how Billy Beane's introduces Lenny Dykstra:

> Physically, Lenny didn't belong in the same league with him. He was half > Billy's size, and had a fraction of Billy's promise—which is why the Mets > hadn't drafted him until the thirteenth round. Mentally, Lenny was superior, > which was odd considering Lenny wasn't what you'd call a student of the > game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the > opposing pitcher warm up. "Lenny says, 'So who's that big dumb ass out there > on the hill?' And I say, 'Lenny, you're kidding me, right? That's Steve > Carlton. He's maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.' > Lenny says, 'Oh yeah! I knew that!' He sits there for a minute and says, > "So, what's he got?' And I say, 'Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He's got > heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.' And in. Finally he just says, > 'Shit, I'll stick him.' I'm sitting there thinking, that's a magazine cover > out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he'll stick him.

\---

A little backstory. Billy Beane was a phenomenal baseball prospect that only ever flirted with the major league. As opposed to Lenny Dykstra -- who had very little in expectations as a prospect -- became a 3x All-Star Outfielder, won a Silver Slugger (1993, OF), MVP Runner-up (1993) and a World Series Champion with the 1986 Mets during a 14 year career.

Of course the, Beane\Lewis caricature of Dykstra is merely anecdotal, but it falls in line with the anecdotes at the end of this article. I won't further perpetuate the characterization, but it does seem like there's a _je ne sais quoi?_ ability that allows someone to focus on a task by eliminating all distractions and situational qualifications. Maybe ignorance helps out, but I get the feeling that it has very little to due with long term success.

</comment><comment><USER7> I played baseball at the collegiate level and definitely agree that color was the biggest indicator of pitch type for me. Curveballs were very red, fastballs were a mix of red and white, and splitters were almost completely white. Before a pitch, I would visualize what color and location I was looking for and if the pitch looked like it matched, I swung and hoped for the best.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you like the idea of working on this kind of research project, you might check out a local Baseball Hack Day (held annually at the beginning of the season in March or April).

[http://www.baseballhackday.com/](http://www.baseballhackday.com/)

I keep thinking it'd be nice to do one the weekend before the World Series as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was told growing up that Ted Williams, the last 400 hitter in baseball, had vision so great he could see the seams on the baseball as it approached him.

While that turned out to be false it is a fact that when he became a fighter pilot during the Korean War and was tested he had vision only one person in 100,000 possessed.

[http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23050/ted-williams- seams...](http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23050/ted-williams-seams/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Really interesting documentary on this: [https://www.netflix.com/search/fastball](https://www.netflix.com/search/fastball)

</comment><comment><USER11> I cannot find the article right now but there is an article about Greg Maddux discussing how he practiced making his motion the same for all his pitches. This cut down on the hitter's ability to judge what to do.

<comment><USER12> Greg Maddux was one of my baseball heroes growing up!! I'm not sure if this is the article you're talking about, but it has a few paragraphs about what you're talking about:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg- maddux-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg-maddux-a- hall-of-fame-approach-that-carried-an-average-arm-to- cooperstown/2014/01/07/fdd7ae82-77d3-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html)

(If you don't want to click, here are the relevant passages.)

 _First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

"You just can't do it," he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher's hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

"Except," Maddux said, "for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn."

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux's main goal was to "make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate." Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part of that "column of milk." He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed — like fastball 92 mph, slider 84, change-up 76.

One day I sat a dozen feet behind Maddux's catcher as three Braves pitchers, all in a row, did their throwing sessions side-by-side. Lefty Steve Avery made his catcher's glove explode with noise from his 95-mph fastball. His curve looked like it broke a foot-and-a-half. He was terrifying. Yet I could barely tell the difference between Greg's pitches. Was that a slider, a changeup, a two-seam or four-seam fastball? Maddux certainly looked better than most college pitchers, but not much. Nothing was scary._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "This experience of "blacking out" probably speaks to the lack of frontal- cortex activity during the moment — hitters aren't using the part of the brain that's best for mapping out complicated, deliberate decisions, so maybe it's not surprising they bypass the frontal cortex and use deeper, darker parts of the brain."

That sounds a lot like descriptions of the "flow state" from other domains.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can somebody explain what is going on in the video? I understand that swinging at this kind of ball is some kind of a loss, but what if he saw it is going to hit the ground and did not swing? Would it be a lost round for the pitching team?

<comment><USER15> It depends what you mean by 'round.' The batter has a 'strike zone', that is, if the ball is pitched there, it's considered a strike. Generally, this zone is from the knees to the mid-chest.

A batter has two numbers: balls and strikes. When the batter gets 3 strikes, they're out. If they get 4 balls (pitches that aren't in the strike zone), they walk (advance towards first base).

If a batter swings and misses at a pitch that would normally be a ball, it's considered a strike. If he hadn't swung, it would have been considered a ball.

The point of the video is that at the professional level, batters should be able to tell quickly when a pitch will be as 'off' as the one in the video - so why wasn't the batter able to?

<comment><USER14> I see, thank you! So, not immediate loss probably, but wrong decision that added to the tally of strikes instead of tally of balls. A follow up question: do pitchers intentionally throw this kind of ball, or was it most likely unintentional and the swing was a saving grace?

<comment><USER15> Sometimes they do - it ultimately depends on the current pitch count (balls and strikes), the batter, and the pitcher. There are certain situations when "off-speed" (non-fastball pitches, like the one in the video) are usually better.

In this case, the pitch was probably further off than the pitcher wanted, but the pitch thrown is generally less accurate and moves a lot, making it difficult to hit.

For example, when a better has 2 strikes they need to "protect the plate" \- swing at any pitch that could -possibly- be a strike (while if they had 0 or 1 strikes, they may let a pitch go hoping it's a ball).

If you're interested in the amount of strategy that goes into a pitchers strategy, I recommend watching this[1] 30 second video of an MLB announcer predicting a pitchers pitches. (Notice the pitch count in the bottom right - "1-2" reads as "1 ball, 2 strikes"

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Do1l8itr6E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Do1l8itr6E)

<comment><USER16> That's a fun video and it definitely hints at the strategy involved, but it's worth noting that in-game announcers routinely get these sorts of guesses wrong. Which is just to say it's not quite as predictable as this video implies in isolation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon Is the ball thrown in the first video "valid" even though it bounces on the floor? If so, how is the hitter supposed to hit that? If not, does his attempt to hit it result in a penalty for him? Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER16> Reading the other responses here it occurs to me how remarkable it is that so much needs to be defined to fully understand this one pitch. Minimally, you need to know what an "out," a "run," an "at bat," a "ball," a "strike," a "base," a "base hit," and a "walk" are.

First of all, let's understand what the objective is. The offense, that is to say, the batter, is attempting to advance around each of the four "bases" in counter-clockwise order (i.e. score a "run") without being eliminated from play (i.e. make an "out"). The offense is trying to score as many runs as possible before making three outs. Teams alternate turns attempting this.

The batter most typically advances by striking a pitched ball within play such that they are able to safely reach base without making an out. This is called a "base hit." An out is made on balls in play when the ball is caught cleanly off the bat in the air, when the runner is tagged by the ball while not on a base, or when the ball reaches a base ahead of the runner in a situation where that runner is not allowed to retreat to the previous base. This happens when another runner from the same team occupies the base behind the runner (and always on any play between home plate and first base). This last case is called a "force out." (Existing runners also must not attempt to advance on balls hit in the air until they have been caught by a fielder. This rule prevents a runner from setting off on a sprint while a high fly ball lazily floats through the air and into a fielder's glove.) [0]

A given play ends when all runners are accounted for -- that is, when each runner is either safely on a base or has been eliminated.

A batter has limited opportunity to put the ball in play each time he goes to bat (an "at bat"). A zone is defined -- the "strike zone" \-- through which any pitched ball not swung at results in a penalty for the batter -- a "strike". This area stretches from left to right over home plate and vertically from roughly the batter's knees to the letters on his chest. However, any swing that misses the ball also results in a strike, no matter where that ball was pitched. Finally, a batted ball that lands out of play -- a "foul ball" \-- can also result in a strike. However, such a batted ball can never result in an out (unless, as with balls in play, it is fielded cleanly in the air). It can never be the final strike in an at bat. [1]

Any pitched ball that does not result in a strike is counted as a "ball". A hitter receiving three strikes is called out (i.e. he "strikes out"). A hitter receiving four balls is rewarded first base -- a "walk." In either case, his time at bat is complete.

The batter may also be rewarded first base when a pitched ball strikes his body. However, provided he does not hit the batter, the pitcher is free to throw the ball anywhere he pleases, with the obvious incentive to either make the batter swing and miss or to place the pitch within the strike zone without him swinging (thus (hopefully) generating a "called strike" from the umpire).

So, this pitch is legal and the batter in this case is indeed penalized. He swung and missed, which is always a strike, no matter where the pitch was located. However, it is a minor penalty. This was the first pitch in this at bat and therefore his first strike. He remains at bat with two more strikes remaining to attempt to reach base safely in one of the ways described above.

[0] The runner is actually free to start toward the next base on balls hit in the air, but he must return to his starting base if the ball is caught. He is out if the defense can tag his starting base with the hit ball in hand before he is able to return.

[1] A ball fouled directly back into the catcher's mitt is indeed a third strike (and, thus, an out). It is treated the same as a swing and a miss.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Thanks to everybody for the replies. Yours in particular feels like a whole introduction to the sport! There are multiple rules in this game! Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would hitters benefit from more practice against "game situation"-level pitching?

It occurs me that they get a lot of practice against decent batting-practice pitching and pitching machines, but how often do they get reps against high- caliber pitching outside of actual games?

<comment><USER15> Probably not.

MLB teams play 162 games a season, you can probably consider pre-season games to be practice for game-sitation pitching.

The players get plenty of out-of-game practice from spring training and experience (minors, college, etc).

<comment><USER18> I don't see how they could not benefit. How many pitches a game are they seeing? Like 15? If you had the pitches for it (I don't think they do), it seems like you could do a few hundred a day if you were deliberately practicing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Assuming situational pitch prediction being one of the biggest batter advantages, one wonders how well a pitcher would perform if they threw a truly random progression of pitches.

<comment><USER20> Would be funny if they tried that - give the catcher some form of RNG, don't let the pitcher disagree with catcher's first signal. Probably hard to test properly though, since pitchers would be used to not doing it that way for so long.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is some batters are much better at certain locations and some pitchers are much better at certain pitches and locations. The batter could probably lay off until he gets what he's looking for.

But you might be able to get a club like the A's to try it in spring ball or something for a few games a year and gather some stats on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> fangraphs has good, data driven baseball articles.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone else read the title as "What can Hitler actually..." ?

<comment><USER23> More than once: even after knowing the full title from a previous read but glancing and reading it as "Hitler" anyway multiple times. I think it's a result from the uppercase first letter on each word: it's common to read Hitler with uppercase h but not Hitters with uppercase h. And as word recognition is a function of the peripheral letters of the word it gives a cognitive mishap.

Edit: This could very well be a textbook example on why not use uppercase first letters when not needed on UIs.</comment></comment>


Berlin anti-TTIP trade deal protest attracts hundreds of thousands - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/berlin-anti-ttip-trade-deal-rally-hundreds-thousands-protesters <comment><USER2> Nice Article. Unlike what Der Spiegel wrote... They quickly associated the protestors with: Pegida, NPD, Front National, Bulgarian Ultranationalists, American Tea-Party and Donald Trump.

"Wer nichts Schlimmes daran findet, sich gedanklich bei Pegida-Bachmann, Marine Le Pen und Donald Trump unterzuhaken, darf bei der Demo heute gerne hinter dem Plakat mit dem Chlorhühnchen herrennen."

Unbelievable.

Source: [http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ttip-bei-der- demo-...](http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ttip-bei-der-demo- marschieren-rechte-mit-kommentar-a-1057131.html)

<comment><USER3> The article on Der Spiegel is an opinion piece (Kommentar) and not thought to be neutral coverage.

<comment><USER4> It's even not only an opinion piece but explicitly labelled as "polemic" and has a reply linked at the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, so it turns out that there are 2 deals:

TTP TTIP

In essence, it is hoping to standardize trade and other shit into 1 "free" system.

It also looks to be centred around NATO countries (or mostly them). So similar capitalist-agenda I guess?

This also sounds very dangerous on political grounds, as it will outcast many countries with alternate ideologies compared to the corporate-governed (or would "controlled" be a better word?) countries.

As hackers, many on HN wouldn't care too much for political banter like this, but as startup founders, this type of deal will entrench the VWs of the world and the "much-loved" Teslas will be squeezed out by entrenched corporate- sponsors with deep pockets.

<comment><USER6> There are more than two trade deals being negotiated right now, there are at least five: TTIP, TPP, TISA, CETA and a Chinese-led deal I forget the name of.

EDIT: The Chinese-led trade deal I was referring to is called RCEP.</comment></comment>


Fixing Homebrew for OS X 10.10 Yosemite - <AUTHOR> http://jcvangent.com/fixing-homebrew-os-x-10-10-yosemite/

<comment><USER2> Homebrew already fixed that, you can just do a git pull in /usr/local.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah that might work too indeed, tried doing a homebrew update and that did not work, so fixed it like this and that worked too :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's really nice to see this in the very first paragraph:

"Homebrew, for those who don't know it is "the missing package manager for OS X" and really saves a lot of time and trouble trying to install software on your mac system."

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems to be down. Google Cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TfWANJ...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TfWANJ3rWYMJ:jcvangent.com/fixing- homebrew-os-x-10-10-yosemite/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

<comment><USER5> Even this takes ages to load, quick summary from article:

      Open the file brew.rb using the following command: vi /usr/local/Library/brew.rb
      Change the first line from: #!/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -W0 to #!/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby -W0
      Save and exit brew.rb

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, this comes hours after I resorted to reinstalling brew from scratch (which works, too).

Does anyone know why they hardcoded the location of the interpreter like that?

</comment><comment><USER7> I just set it to /usr/bin/env ruby and it worked without having to do a git commit.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, I'm seeing issues with gcc failing to compile for x86_64 as well, for various packages. Whether this is 10.10 or Xcode 6 beta I have no idea yet (fwiw, I have both Xcode 5 and 6 installed).

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else having issues with gcc though? Whenever I try to install new rubies w/ RVM, gcc46 is attempted to dl and brew freaks out.</comment>


Local SIM – find the nearest store of local mobile provider while travelling - <AUTHOR>

I would like to introduce an iOS application that can be useful for every traveler - Local SIM. Before making a trip, or if you are already traveling, you can find on the map nearest store where you can connect to the local network carrier (provider) and get the local sim card. The application will be useful for those who do not want to pay for roaming, and for the provider companies. There's currently available in Appstore second version of application, which already includes 27 countries and more than 50 providers around the whole Europe! In the future it is planned to increase the list of countries and providers, also the ability to select the best voice/data rates and plans for even greater savings.
Going abroad and don't want to pay for roaming? Act like the locals - get the Local SIM app, find the nearest store to you, and get connected to local data & network provider.
While travelling, we often use wifi in hotel, cafe, or somewhere else, but if you want to stay connected all the time, if you need to check the bus departure time, if you need to build route, use navigator in car or make a call - you have to use 3g/LTE connection. The cheapest way- is to use local providers data plans, so the only one problem is to get know which providers are available and where you can get connected to. Local SIM helps you to get all this the information you need.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/local-sim/id906088582 <comment><USER2> can you please provide promos?

<comment><USER3> yes please

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> great</comment>


Ask HN: Should founder / CEO be the Chairman of the board? - <AUTHOR> Basically the subj. We are setting up the board for the startup and are wondering if we should work to get the founder-CEO to be the chairman. Investors want to have outside director to be the chairman and we, frankly, are not sure if this is worth negotiating over or is that just some kind of formality. <comment><USER2> The dynamic changes as soon as founders give up control of the board. It goes from investors having to convince founders of major decisions to founders having to convince investors. It also makes the founders fireable. The founders become effectively employees of the investors. This results in them becoming become averse to "rocking the boat". It's a very powerful negative incentive.

Investors have more than enough control over a company using money, minority board seats, and the potential of follow-on funding. Founders should control the board as long as as they're running the company.

A famous example of how bad boards can be is Facebook's board wanting to sell to Yahoo for $1 billion. Zuckerberg controlled the board and vetoed the idea outright against them. Facebook is only worth $600+ billion today because he maintained control.

<comment><USER3> According to most bylaws CEOs sit at the pleasure of the board, not the pleasure of the chairman. So a ceo can be fired any time the board votes for it regardless of who the chairman is.

Perhaps a better question to ask is what is really the role of the chairman vs the CEO in the company.

<comment><USER2> The board generally controls everything, including who the chairperson is. Founders should maintain board control as long as possible, hopefully until they leave voluntarily. They're the least likely people to destroy the company. They're the most qualified to run it (having created it) and the most incentivized not to destroy it (owning a large part of it).

<comment><USER3> I'm not convinced that they are always the most qualified to run it. I've seen plenty of good technologies founded by people who are terrible at executing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It may be worth thinking about hypothetical future scenarios where the interests of the chairman of the board and the founder-CEO and the company are not all aligned.

There's a quora post by Dale Strickler that gives one perspective: [https://www.quora.com/Does-a-Chairman-of-the-Board-have- more...](https://www.quora.com/Does-a-Chairman-of-the-Board-have-more-power- than-a-CEO)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're Carlos Ghosn its a no brainer.</comment>


Flies see the world in slow motion, say scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10311821/Flies-see-the-world-in-slow-motion-say-scientists.html <comment><USER2> My mother told me this when I was a kid.</comment>


Ask HN: What code analyzers do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to know what code analyzers (static/dynamic) you use. Do you run them locally, before pushing your code or remotely against pull requests? Thanks! <comment><USER2> You mean code analysis like in terms of continuous QA on your source code? Try Sonar ([http://www.sonarqube.org/](http://www.sonarqube.org/))

</comment><comment><USER3> ReSharper mostly, sometimes Visual Studio's code analysis functions.</comment>


Peter Thiel Says Immigration Order Does Not Constitute a 'Religious Test' - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/28/peter-thiel-says-immigration-order-does-not-constitute-a-religious-test <comment><USER2> Peter Thiel is right. If there was a religious test then Saudi and Pakistan should have been top. This is move like "hit someone who cant hit back" test.

The retrospective nature of the order is what is very very concerning here. Why do people who have already gone through green card/visa process cant enter USA overnight but those who have already in can stay ? So the people outside are more of a threat than those inside ?

This has lowered my faith in DHS and US Gov. This is more of a witch hunt than systematic policy changes to keep Islamic radicals out.

<comment><USER3> Why DHS and US gov? Why not Trump in particular? This was all done in keeping with the Exexutive Order.

<comment><USER2> > Why DHS and US gov?

Because for immigrant like me that is the interface. I do not care what is under the hood.

Imagine I go to court, win a case and go home safely only to find cops arresting me again because the judge has changed and new judge has changed previous judge's decision.

As much as I might blame the new judges it lowers the respect and reliability of the court as an institution itself. This damage is far more serious than short term effects.

<comment><USER3> I see what you're saying, but in this case it's hard for me to see how Trump is "under the hood". DHS is doing what they've been told to do. There are reports that in response to questions to why they're doing what they're doing, border security have been explained it's because of the Executive Order. Using your analogy, you might as well blame all US citizens. I don't think that'd be fair, either.

<comment><USER2> > Using your analogy, you might as well blame all US citizens

Of course US citizens are responsible for all the actions of their President. You cant brush off your responsibility by claiming you did not vote for him.

<comment><USER3> May I ask where you're from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the time has come for anybody doing business with Peter Thiel, having him on boards etc. to either fire him or render an explanation for why they continue to associate with him. The explanation might well be that they're OK with Trump policies and Thiel's support of them. If that's the case, then be it. But you can't be showing up at protests against the policy on one hand...

( [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/29/y-combinators...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/29/y-combinators- sam-altman-this-may-be-a-defining-moment-when-people-oppose- trump/#1511e3771e47) ) and harboring Trump's chief apologist in the Valley on the other.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there something like s3 but with append? - <AUTHOR> We have a small stream of data -- perhaps 100 or so messages per second.  It would be awesome to be able to divide that data up between a few s3 objects and append to them bit by bit.  But of course s3 doesn't allow appending.<p>Does anyone have suggestions for a service we can use in its place? <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I just realized that I asked this same question 76 days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17903036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17903036)

Suggestions include batching first with AWS Firehose and using multipart upload.

</comment><comment><USER2> Maybe use SQS and then batch every X messages?</comment>


BitTorrent reveals Sync, a new file synchronization tool - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2013/01/25/bittorrent-launches-sync-in-pre-alpha-a-new-app-to-compete-with-dropbox-and-icloud/

<comment><USER2> This is what I've been waiting for. A dropbox-like service that uses BitTorrent. Seriously, with the way BitTorrent is integrated into all kinds of services and devices, it would be like instant Dropbox integration, with everything. You could start using the cool Torrent scheduling stuff to, for example, automatically transfer large files to a partner, quickly, as they're produced on the other end. Or to your TV, whatever.

<comment><USER3> I use git-annex assistant for that. When a new file appears in a certain directory in my VPS, the Assistant will automatically sync it to my Desktop machine (which has a 2TB disk). When the VPS disk space gets low, a script will run "git annex drop --in=here --in=desktop", which deletes files that have already been copied to the Desktop (but not without first checking if they're there).

Then, on my laptop, I can just do "git annex get [file]" and it'll fetch it from the best source automatically.

Seriously, it's a great piece of software.

<comment><USER4> Does it work on windows yet?

<comment><USER5> Not yet. See: <http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/windows_support/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And where are the files stored? If I create a 'Sync'ed file, switch off the computer and start the laptop, the file needs to be stored somewhere. And if this somewhere is the torrent swarm, then I would expect an interesting discussion on cryptography and (perhaps) fountain codes etc. ( Unfortunately the blog post [1] is even less detailed than OP's submission.)

[1] [http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/01/24/test-bittorrent- sync-p...](http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/01/24/test-bittorrent-sync-pre- alpha/)

<comment><USER7> I suppose it can be seen as twofold:

1\. an AeroFS-like part, i.e your files reside only on your machines and are synced via a P2P protocol, so not-yet-synced files are unavailable when your source is offline (unless like AeroFS, they are opt-in stored in the cloud).

2\. a content-hashing part, which means files on your machines that happen to have an identical file elsewhere can be obtained from that elsewhere, even if your machines are offline.

Still, no source => no data, but that's a given.

Technically, 1. is of course a special case of 2. It's just that AeroFS restricts peer requesting to your machines (and — optionally — their cloud storage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Several companies have been using BitTorrent this way to move data in between machines (backups, builds, etc.). This may be inspired by such anecdotes.

<comment><USER9> Probably. I've been looking for easy ways to share large files between 2 computers, and I've noticed some people were recommending to just create a torrent with utorrent (apparently you can do it just by dragging and dropping the file on utorrent), and then send that person the torrent to download the file.

So I think this has a lot of potential, as a much more secure alternative to "cloud storage" as this is being more like "personal cloud storage".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess a big difference is that your data isn't stored at a 3rd party somewhere. That's one of the things that are good about Dropbox - if you delete your stuff, you can go back and fetch it.

<comment><USER8> It is also one of the things that are bad about Dropbox: even if you delete your files, someone else still has a copy. Worse, it's almost never encrypted client-side.

That is often not an issue of course, Dropbox is great.

<comment><USER11> Dropbox has its demons, however, and it's probably not something you should rely on for its security.

I used to use it as a means of keeping an encrypted file synced across machines, but when you re-lock up the file it... well, encrypts it, which means re-arranging ALL the bits, so a diff (how dropbox syncs) is just the whole damn file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've tried to hack together something like this but had trouble getting the initial torrent to seed from behind a NAT. After reading up on the BT protocol, my conclusion was that it really works best when you have a large swarm of peers. For sharing a file between my 2-3 devices or with 2-5 friends/coworkers, I want a protocol that works to establish the fastest connection between me and 1-2 other peers (taking advantage of local networks), not one that's designed to peer me with 15 other people. I'd encourage anyone interested in this to check out AeroFS.

Also, I think I had seen an earlier iteration of this that was using some kind of technique where they sucked the data you wanted to share into their seedbox. I wonder how they got around that.

<comment><USER13> One thing dropbox and other cloud-based sync providers have going for them is that they've solved peer-to-peer NAT fairly well.

I've always thought that the simplest way of solving the problem of "I want to sync an arbitrary amount of content between two computers, and I don't care that it's not available 'in the cloud' when all my machines are off" is to build a communication channel on top of dropbox (or something else). Although it's likely that Bad Things could start happening once your usage profile starts getting attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It wasn't "launched", only "revealed".

</comment><comment><USER15> This would actually be tremendously handy for my geographically-distributed extended family.

For example:

* My mother could see all the pictures we've taken of her grandchild.

* My sister would know that all her PhD research is backup on a computer half-way across the country.

* I don't have to email my wife documents she asks me to scan, because she has everything I scan in her folder, even if she's out of town.

I love Dropbox, but being able to roll my own solution with my own family is great.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems similar to AeroFS.

<comment><USER17> And git-annex assistant (<http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have been using AeroFS ( <https://www.aerofs.com/> ) for a couple months now and it works similarly.

The files sync between all your AeroFS computers (and supports selecting syncing too) instead of to a single server so I basically have literally 100s of GBs of 'cloud'/Dropbox-like storage available. And as a bonus, its completely free for all this 'unlimited' storage.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just want to know if it does client-side encryption.

<comment><USER20> AES256 client side

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Logmein's Cubby does pretty much the same thing, in same p2p fashion and has an option to get a server-side storage. Doesn't have the cool kid factor associated with BitTorrent, but the point is that the tehnology has long been there and it has been wrapped into the products.

Sync success hinges largely on whether BT can market it well, not on what it does or how it does it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. Questions come to mind:

Encryption? (or would that require another layer a-la BozCryptor?)

Error/collision management - when Dropbox syncs files, there is a master repository (Dropbox.com) and a file isn't synched unless it exists there.

</comment><comment><USER23> How do you think it compares to Crashplan multi backup feature [http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/feature/multi_destinat...](http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/feature/multi_destination_backup) ?

<comment><USER24> As a Crashplan user, I see it as only slightly related. Crashplan is a backup solution, with multiple versions available for restoration. These are stored in a compressed and optionally encrypted blob of folders and files with restoration controlled by Crashplan's GUI.

BitTorrent's Sync application appears to be a way to keep the current version of files syncronized on multiple computers without a cloud (server) intermediary and without a history of previous versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am I missing something? Other people have my files? Peer-to-peer sounds horrifying for my personal files.

I'll take SSL between me and one server, thankyouverymuch, and I'd prefer if 100 different seeders didn't have my personal files!

Or am I only seeding between my own personal machines? I sync to my four devices and I can leech off of any of my own devices connected? But that doesn't seem very "cloud".

Does anyone honestly feel comfortable syncing their files to peers?

Why not just hop on and peer everyone for the sole purpose of harvesting people's files?

<comment><USER20> Files are stored only on your computers, there is no cloud part. Sync uses p2p to create a cloud from your computers. You will need to care about your setup, to have 24x7 availability of the files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We do this in Tonido as well. Using your primary computer as a sync server and sync clients in all your other devices.

Your data is completely private and secure. Since it is a sync and have the same files on all your connected devices you really don't need 3rd party cloud storage systems like dropbox. Because often the argument is made for public clouds that it provides offline backup not only sync.

Many small businesses use the product especially who have sales personnel in the field.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems like Tonido Sync (<http://www.tonido.com/app_sync_home.html>)</comment>


Apple fires shots at all mobile competitors today, and Microsoft too - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/apple-fires-shots-at-all-mobile-competitors-today-and-microsoft-too/2752 <comment><USER2> >> _Content lock-in is what every company wants to get, as it makes it difficult or prohibitively expensive for customers to take their business elsewhere. The new apps and document revamp in OS X and iOS 5 takes this lock- in to a new level, by doing away with a traditional filesystem and replacing it with documents that just exist on every Apple system. This is the ultimate lock-in, and it crosses laptops, phones and tablets. It is a brilliant move by Apple for the long term._

Interesting, so it's like a private filesystem on the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the arguments against Windows 8 and quoting the price of OSX Lion, miss the point that you can't run it unless you are on Apple hardware.</comment>


Show HN: New type of job board for teams and projects gt $50,000 - <AUTHOR> http://22.214.171.124 <comment><AUTHOR> What if the new model for software development is you join a "band" with a lead singer, a drummer, etc. Five guys in the band. The band answers to no one. They are never employees of any of the companies they work for. Some bands can headline and charge $1,000,000 for a project that will only take them two weeks cuz they are that fucking good. And that same million often goes to mediocre programmers and takes TWO years vs two weeks. And the final product something isn't even as good as the rock star programmer band.

I.e. Let's hollywoodize the programming industry with crews that work gigs. There are major gigs that pay big league dollars and agents and managers negotiate these deals.

<comment><USER2> I was under the impression this is what vendors and contractors did; or even outsourcing companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> well they often have more than 5 and their teams are often terrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm talking about paying a premium for a team that works well together and has been doing so for years. That's worth gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea, and I definitely see a need for this sort of focused site.

But.

You seem to assume that teams have exactly 5 members.

The site seems to effectively be static HTML, the sidebar links all go to the homepage, the same teams are displayed on every page view, and search is a no- op.

Is this actually a working web app, or just a static HTML MVP to gauge interest?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think 5 is the perfect number. Maybe I'll allow teams of 4 with a silhouette pic for the last member?

But definitely no more than 5.

It's 1/2 way in between working web app and static HTML MVP to gauge interest. The three example teams "xray coders", "Always On", "Get It Done" are made up from pics from uifaces.com. The 0x7a69 team is my real team.

<comment><USER3> Sure, no larger than 5 is a good limit. But how about 3 (backend dev, frontend dev, designer)? Or 2 (dev and designer)?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah I see it like a band. The best bands in the world usually have 5. But Green Day had 3. Interesting note: after Green Day was super successful they added 2 more "sub" members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does everyone on the page know that you've put them on there? Some of the photos are of friends and I'd be surprised if they were willingly listed.

<comment><AUTHOR> They agreed to uifaces.com terms and conditions no?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any startups hiring developers based overseas? - <AUTHOR>

Story: I am currently tied down to something in my hometown and can't leave to find a job elsewhere. Unfortunately, the startups in my region are rather stifling and I prefer the experience gained from startups based in the US.<p>I've worked in one before, but it seems so hard to find jobs like these. Or am I looking in the wrong place? <comment><USER2> There definitely are tons of startups, but yeah you'll probably need to look around a bit. We're looking to hire a developer in South Africa (Cape Town): <http://www.snapbill.com/jobs/developer>

If you're moving away from the US you'll see a significant drop in salary though. The market salary down here (even for top developers) is significantly lower at around $60k/year; but so are the costs of living. I live comfortably off $8500/year.

<comment><USER3> "If you're moving away from the US you'll see a significant drop in salary though"

Depends on whether you're moving from popular dev centers such as Silicon Valley or New York City, and of course it also depends on where you're moving to. My guess is wages here in Denmark should be able to match or beat US wages outside of Silicon Valley and New York City.

<comment><USER4> I'm foreigner studying in Denmark, and I'm curious, how are the dev/programmer salaries in Denmark? And if you have any knowledge, how is the marked for game development?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want the positions in Japan, there are a lot of candidates because we need english speaking developer/geek. For example, these would be the famous examples including GREE and DeNA: <http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-tech- startups-in-Tokyo>

The average salary probably is 4m-6m yen/year (about $7000).

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, I'm hiring expert-level Ruby On Rails developers anywhere in the world.

My team has excellent tools for distributed programming, including video pairing within Assembla, continuous delivery with rolling code reviews using Gerrit, and of course git.

If you code Rails, message me for details.

<comment><USER7> Care to add email to your profile? Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe better to post a "Who's Hiring Remote" thread, like these: [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=who%27s+hir...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=who%27s+hiring+remote)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm just starting out and am looking for Ruby on Rails developers in India.

My email is in my profile so send me an email if your interested.

I'll be in bangalore for about 2 more weeks.

</comment><comment><USER10> We're hiring in Tokyo.

<http://beastcrm.com/about/jobs/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes. speaking from both ends

</comment><comment><USER12> What are your capabilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do mainly iOS development, and have worked for a few startups before. Check out my portfolio at <http://portfolio.sidwyn.com>

<comment><USER4> Direct link: <http://blog.sidwyn.com/portfolio></comment></comment></comment>


One Small, Arbitrary Change and It's a Whole New World - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/147.html <comment><USER2> Only tangentially related but the ZIP file format is designed with floppy disks in mind. A ZIP file puts its table of contents at the end of the file. The point of this design was that if you had a slow floppy and wanted to add some files to zip file you could read the old table of contents, append some new files and write a new table of contents. Therefore you didn't have to re- write the entire file. Of course you might have some wasted space because you've got 2 tables of contents and might even have some older versions of files earlier in the zip file. That was a trade off though. Re-writing an entire floppy (or 10) was prohibitively slow.

Unfortunately that makes zip files whole unsuited to streaming because according to the official standard you MUST read the table of contents at the end of the file to know which parts of the file correspond to the correct contents. Steaming the file and looking for headers is an invalid way to parse a zip file.

A large number of engineers are unaware of this fact and sadly keep choosing zip for standards that would be better off with a format that can be streamed. (tar/gz can be streamed). Examples: Chrome's extension format. The W3Cs Widget format. I'm sure there are several others.

<comment><USER3> (edit: I just noticed that rarrrrrr made the same argument in his comment, which I totally believe I did not have locally before leaving my response. Regardless, I went into more depth and provided a few related issues, so I don't feel my comment is sufficiently repetitive to delete.)

While tar.gz can be streamed, if you happen to have the entire zip file already and want to extract a single item from it, you are screwed: you actually _must_ scan through the entire file; this is _both_ because gzip is not random access _and_ because tar files have no index at all, they just concatenate files.

This reason is actually insidious, because it also means that zip files are much more efficient containers if you need to be able to "browse into them", such as with a GUI. This means that they tend to be much better supported ("better" assuming .tar.gz files are supported at all) by graphical file managers.

In comparison, the fact that you can't stream download and decompress the tar.gz on the fly is actually largely irrelevant: you aren't going to be using the Chrome extension until you've downloaded the entire package anyway; and for some file formats (Java jar files, for example) you don't intend to decompress the entire contents anyway.

Ironically, the reason tar files are designed this way, is actually due to yet another ancient piece of storage technology: the tape drive. The name "tar" stands for "tape archive", and is a modified version of the file format used for "ar" that is better suited to tape drives, which were much slower than floppies if you needed to rewrite earlier content (if rewriting was possible at all, which I don't think it was on all tapes).

<comment><USER2> Streaming is not unimportant for the examples I gave. Both are 1 step away from being replacements for flash apps. They are basically a webpage with all assets bundled together making them easy to distribute. Except, because a non- streamable format was chosen they can't make the leap to full flash replacements.

Even as an extensions or widget, the fact that I can't stream them means I have to wait for them to download entirely before they can be used. I can certainly imagine a Chrome app (game) > 500meg that would be awesome if I could start interacting with as soon as 1-20 meg had been downloaded. That use case though was made harder because a non streamable format was chosen. Instead the app has to download some small boot loader and the manually stream the rest of its assets. With a little more foresight that could have been solved directly by the format chosen.

As for tar/gz not being random access. There's nothing preventing implementations from caching locations as the file is downloaded or inserting a file as part of the tar that lists the locations.

<comment><USER3> The problem you are talking about is so much more complex than just "use tgz", though... like, a Chrome extension includes a metadata file... are you intending that the tgz is also constructed to make certain that that metadata file must be near the beginning of the archive? Again, one of the main reasons that zip files are used is because they are better supported by simple GUI tools, as they are intended to be constructed by reasonably "end" developers.

As for having an implementation caching locations as the file is being downloaded, if you are going to that much trouble to layer browser intelligence over the file format, you may as well just download the index first; we do this quite often in iPhone-jailbreak-land, as Apple uses zip files for firmware updates: we download the index, and use that to download just the parts we need (all using Range headers).

<https://github.com/rpetrich/partialzip>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Casual disk writes like the ones mentioned in the article rarely effect overall performance, because the operating system doesn't actually do them right now. They're buffered by the OS and happen behind the scenes whenever the disk is free. If you profile a complex program that uses much disk IO, rarely will you find that write calls are hot.

Rather, it's usually reads (and consequently seeks) that matter.

The exception to this is when you're wanting to fsync or fdatasync on every write.

Similarly, the situation of writing an entire new file when you only need to append a few lines to the end may sometimes be desirable, depending on how often that file is read. If it's a fairly short file that's read more frequently than written, it's often better to just write out the whole new file without fragmentation, rather that appending to the end.

<comment><USER5> > They're buffered by the OS and happen behind the scenes whenever the disk is > free.

I don't think you're cooperating with the thought experiment here. Yes, buffering will help a lot, but buffering doesn't conjure up capacity that doesn't exist. If you need to write a megabyte and your throughput is just 5kb/sec, then buffering isn't going to make a whole lot of difference: you'll need to use up a full 2000 seconds of throughput at _some_ point. If your written logs and files over a day average out to be more than 5kb/sec, you're still in for a world of pain no matter how nicely your buffering smooths out the load.

<comment><USER6> Rarrrrrr may not be cooperative, but I think he's right.

Sure, if you actually need to write a giant file, beyond a certain point buffering isn't going to help you. But two of the three examples in the text are rapidly rewriting short history files and avoiding intermediate files that will immediately be deleted. In both of these cases, the VM system of a modern operating system completely solves the problem.

The third example is logging, which feels more like a question of defaults. He's probably right, and a lot of logged messages are never used, but this is a matter of configuring syslog rather than changing the way we think about disk IO. Removing the ability to turn on debug messages doesn't feel like a good optimization.

The overall thought exercise is good, but I think it's misguided. I think the real frontier is optimizing access to RAM: RAM is the new disk. Assume every TLB miss costs a second: how would you lay out your data differently? If (as is approximately the case) access to main memory is 100x as expensive as fetching from L1, do you really want to be using a linked list?

Or one that I'd love to have a good solution to: given the flexibility of the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory, why is there no good way to insert a 4K page at the head or in the middle of a multi-megabyte (virtually) contiguous array?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11621606/faster-way-to- mo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11621606/faster-way-to-move-memory- page-than-mremap)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the article he asks why does less need a history file. Who says it does? It's an option. It can be disabled turned off. The question of why it's on by default is another matter.

Manpage extract:

LESSHISTFILE

Name of the history file used to remember search commands and shell commands between invocations of less. If set to "-" or "/dev/null", a history file is not used. The default is "$HOME/.lesshst" on Unix systems, "$HOME/_lesshst" on DOS and Windows systems, or "$HOME/lesshst.ini" or "$INIT/lesshst.ini" on OS/2 systems.

Then the author complains about applications that write too much to disk. He has my sympathies.

Has he ever heard of a ramdisk? mfs? tmpfs?

This is the easy solution to the problem of braindead applications writing needlessly to disk.

The simple rule is: If you don't want disk writes then don't use the disk. Mount your directories in RAM. Is this perfect solution with zero overhead? No. Is the cost very small? Is is exponentially faster than using the HDD? Try it and answer these questions for yourself.

There are also the countless bloggers who write about installing an OS to a USB stick or SD card. They usually mention the issue of disk writes and how this impacts flash memory, but they almost always proceed to instruct their readers to "untar" several thousand files in the course of an install anyway. This is not very helpful.

Did it ever occur to them that they could make an image of a filesystem and transfer that to the media - requiring only a single write? Can you mount root read-only and other dirs like /var and /etc read-write? Yes, of course.

How do tech support people in corporations deploy countless Windows installations? They use imaging. It is not rocket science.

One commenter says you can't extract a single member from a tarball without reading the entire file. What version of tar is he using?

Manpage extract:

-q, --fast-read

Select the first archive member that matches each pattern operand. No more than one archive member is matched for each pattern. When members of type directory are matched, the file hierarchy rooted at that directory is also matched.

This means the entire archive is not read, unless the member to be extracted is at the very end. Similar to sed /pattern/q or grep -m1 pattern.

Anyway pax is better than tar.

Another commenter claims you cannot "stream download and decompress" tar.gz files "on-the-fly". What exactly does that mean?

What if you do this: (BSD/OSX only; Linux ftp is not the same)

ftp -o"|gzip -dc" <http://host.tld/file.tar.gz>

Or this

{ echo GET /file.tar.gz HTTP/1.0 ;echo ;} |nc -vv <http://host.tld> 80 | gzip -dc

Then try the same with a .zip file and using unzip -c instead of gzip -d -c</comment>


Fastsocket – A highly scalable socket for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fastos/fastsocket <comment><USER2> The performance data looks interesting, but this is work based on a pretty old kernel (originally released in 2010 or so). There have been many changes and improvements added to the 3.x kernel that may overlap with this work. Publishing the code and details on github is great, but working with the kernel community and merging into the mainstream kernel is the only way for work like this to have a long-term meaningful existence - Google in particular have been doing a great job getting networking improvements in.

That said, it's interesting to have this kind of thing come out of large-scale production web environments in China.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible that by using an old kernel like this one, you'd expose yourself to security vulnerabilities?

I'm new to kernel programming. Is this submission suggesting that you downgrade your kernel to a 2010-era release in order to take advantage of the performance improvements, or is the submission showing some kind of modular component which you can integrate into your current kernel?

If it's the former, then wouldn't you be pinning yourself to the old version of the kernel, so you'll have to integrate all updates by hand rather than receive them automatically during the normal update process?

<comment><USER4> This kernel is what Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is currently using. Red Hat maintains it, and writes patches for security vulnerabilities. It's no surprise that Sina developed, tested, and deployed this patch against what they were running in production.

<comment><USER3> By using this kernel, will you be able to automatically receive security upgrades in the future? Or will you have to apply them manually and then recompile and install the kernel yourself?

Is "developers have to apply security patches manually, then recompile and reinstall the kernel themselves rather than automatically" not a big deal in practice?

<comment><USER5> All distro vendors backport critical fixes for the lifetime of the operating system. RHEL6 is supported at least until 2020.

2.6.32 is also supported by kernel.org still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like its based on 2.6.32 series. I would hope they start working with the upstream Kernel otherwise this project will stay stuck in Limbo as previous initiatives to improve TCP handling at kernel level (e.g: Megapipe).

This version do not support TCP_FASTOPEN, SO_REUSEPORT, TCP_AUTOCORKING, etc.

<comment><USER7> It's RedHat's 2.6.32 kernel, which is not the vanilla Linux 2.6.32 kernel. It's been getting backported fixes since the tree began. RedHat does not release what patches they include in their kernels, but luckily for us, Oracle maintains a project called RedPatch which publicly documents the patches going into the RHEL kernels.

As an example of how this kernel is not the 2.6 tree: On April 14, 2014, in RedHat's 2.6.32-431.23.3.el6 kernel tree [1] , there was recently a patch included [2] that affects the ipv4 subsystem. You can find that same patch [3] was originally applied to the Linux kernel on April 14, 2014. This is common practice, and so RedHat kernels more closely resemble modern kernels like 3.12 than anything else.

[1] [https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git;a=shortlog;h=rhel...](https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git;a=shortlog;h=rhel-2.6.32-431.23.3.el6) [2] [https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git;a=commitdiff;h=c0...](https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git;a=commitdiff;h=c01663823d746852b7632199c57ad77a84907540) [3] [http://www.serverphorums.com/read.php?12,912195](http://www.serverphorums.com/read.php?12,912195)

<comment><USER8>
        RedHat does not release what patches they include in their kernels

Stupid question here: aren't kernel patches considered derivative works? If so, then isn't RedHat legally obligated to released them under GPL?

<comment><USER9> They provide the complete source, as required by the GPL. However, they do not provide patch sets neatly broken out like they used to; that's what the parent is referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would the evaluation charts look the way they do?

[https://github.com/fastos/fastsocket#online- evaluation](https://github.com/fastos/fastsocket#online-evaluation)

The "before and after" CPU series have nearly the same exact fit. If the data was from separate 24 hour periods, wouldn't you expect the graphs to look different? I recognize that with a large service, you'd get repetitive load patterns, but the similarity here look a little extreme.

<comment><USER11> I find the first graph peculiar on its own. Supposedly, each line is the load on one of 8 cores on the same machine. Why would some cores experience heavier load than others, very consistently, over the course of a day? I've never seen a workload exhibit that kind of long-term, core-level affinity on Linux.

<comment><USER12> Well, the obvious reason for such a graph is that the network load balancing between several waiting worker processes isn't symmetrical.

<comment><USER11> Even if that was the case, there isn't normally a stable mapping between processes and physical cores. There would have to be something within the kernel itself that gives higher priority to some cores than others.

Not saying that's impossible, but I've worked on machines with more than 8 cores and never seen it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this being considered for merging upstream? What's the tech behind it, what makes it faster?

<comment><USER14> The developers have not posted it to the relevant mailing lists or asked that it be merged, so, no, it is not being considered.

<comment><USER15> Maybe it's up to the more sensible in the kernel "community", to reach out to the developers of code known to be interesting to discuss what's in it for them to do the work required to get it merged, the probability of doing a ton of work, and then being ignored etc etc.

There's a sense in the above of "They haven't submitted us so we don't care." It might not be the best way to make the kernel as good as it can be, if that is the goal of anyone active in the kernel "community." (And maybe it is).

I have a lot of sympathy for someone publishing their code and their results and then saying "I won't play stupid kernel politics, your move." I don't know if that's what is happening here or it's cultural differences or something I haven't thought of. Nor do I know if this particular development is worthwhile merging, but hey, neither does the kernel "community" right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> does this occupy the same functional space as zeromq or nanomsg ? are there any comparisons?

<comment><USER17> This is much lower level than those. This is all about the TCP stack.

This is the OSI model, from the top down:

7) Application 6) Presentation 5) Session 4) Transport 3) Network 2) Data link 1) Physical

ZeroMQ fits in neatly at the top, layer 7 (arguably it is the presentation layer too because it uses its own protocol).

What this is talking about relates to network sockets which is around layers 4 and 5 (you can find lots of debate around the subject). Any speed improvements at lower levels in the stack would be seen by stuff on layers above it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Better yet - avoid the kernel altogether!

Onload + Solarflare is a wonderful thing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great job!</comment>


US Senator says games are a bigger problem than guns - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/01/yes-a-us-senator-just-said-games-are-a-bigger-problem-than-guns/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting that "violent games" and "violent music" often get blamed (often by the same people), but "violent films" or "violent novels" less often. I would guess demographics are a big part of it: lots of people who don't think of themselves as potential killers like horror films, but they think of video games, or black metal, as something only weird obsessives are into, because people in their circles aren't into them.

I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films, than I am by people playing Call of Duty or buying Dimmu Borgir albums, but ymmv.

edit: That isn't to say that I think violent films should be banned, either. But I'm more weirded out by the fact that some really gory stuff is really popular, than I am by anything that comes out of the game or music industries.

<comment><USER3> I said it before (and other people made useful rebuttals) but I find it interesting that people are quick to condemn pro-anna and thinsperation type imagery, but they'll also defend violent video games.

If someone _really_ wanted to get a law on the books they'd take an existing game, re-skin it to be full of children, "Jews" and "blacks", and build some levels in schools and shopping malls, release it anonymously, and then tip-off the most vocal press.

And I find it a bit confusing that people spend _billions_ on influencing others, but that we never refer to the research when discussing this.

<comment><USER2> I think people _could_ make some pretty hateful games, yes, and some people probably do (but they aren't that popular, as far as I know). But isn't that true of any uncensored medium? People publish white-power books, and books about how Hitler was great, and we're not (at least in the U.S.) pushing for laws about those. Heck, Stormfront is on the net with no age-related access controls. It's just sort of a fact of uncensored media that you'll have to live with some pretty unpleasant stuff. What I don't see is games being uniquely dangerous, or having the unpleasant stuff in unusually high concentrations.

<comment><USER4> Really? Its pretty well understood that women come off badly in video games. Either super-sexualized, or just props to be beaten and killed.

And now somebody will point to 1 or two games that don't. That's called 'the exception that proves the rule'.

<comment><USER2> I agree there's a ton of sexism in games, yes. I don't see them as so outrageously different from our general culture as to be the source of a unique problem, though. Certainly not as the explanation for why the U.S. has such unusually high levels of violence for a developed country.

I mean, American culture and media are full of sexism, some of it pretty absurd. Beer ads are super-sexist, for example, and those are allowed to be shown at prime-time to children, despite peddling both sexism _and_ alcohol. And the treatment of women in Hollywood is extremely problematic as well. I'm willing to believe that games are even more sexist than the already pretty low bar for media in general, and that's something worth criticizing game developers for, but it seems strange for a Senator to single them out. I would be _really_ surprised if Lamar Alexander is the one to lead a general charge against sexism in the American media.

<comment><USER4> Other media is temporary entertainment of an escapist sort. Viewed/read and forgotton.

Video games are immersive environments. Roleplaying continues for scores of hours. You might spend longer in one game than watching all of Star Wars put together.

And you are the protagonist in a video game! You are PERSONALLY doing all that misogynistic violence. Its fun! You get points!

I think video games are fundamentally different than all other 'media', to the point that video games aren't media at all. They are closer to a club, or a school, or a gang experience than they are to a book.

And I've played hundreds of games. I have a room at home dedicated to the playing of games, with machines arrayed around a large round table with power strips mounted below, built for the purpose. So no I'm not here to slam games through ignorance.

But we do our cause a huge disservice when we pretend not to 'get it', when we paper over the real differences between our hobby and other entertainments.

<comment><USER2> I guess that part I just don't agree with. I feel _much_ more immersed in novels than in games, myself. Games are just escapist entertainment, whereas novels have changed my worldview, stuck with me for years, and made me feel I was _there_. I can't think of a game that has been more than entertainment for me, and I've played quite a few also. Heck, even in sci-fi situations, Ender's Game felt much more immersive than Doom. All that stuff about "demons from hell" and "being on Mars" in Doom I just saw as sort of silly skin on top of what's fundamentally some abstract gameplay. And it's hard to take the skins of Counterstrike or CoD any more seriously than that.

More to the point, though, the scientific evidence that games change behavior more than other media just isn't very compelling, despite lots of money spent trying to prove it (some of it in the positive direction, as people with "serious games" grants try to prove that games are uniquely positioned to enact positive behavior change).

<comment><USER4> You say novels have deeply impressed you - at a conscious level, with moving themes and new ideas. Despite violence, evil characters and events, maybe even genocide. They all happen in novels.

Compare a video game - you kill an NPC, scoop up some loot, scrounge around breaking all their crates and pots, then move on. Not thinking about it, not caring what it is you're doing or what it means to loot a body or take the pathetic remains of some poor wretch's miserable existance. Ha! This gun is way worse than the one I'm wielding! Throw it in the trash, or keep it to sell for coin.

Clearly they are very different experiences. You can't tell me killing innocent bystanders, looting strangers' homes, fencing stolen goods not once but 10,000 times to get to the final level - none of this penetrates, not even a little? You mention Doom which is disengenious - that was riveting when it came out because of the tension, the surprises. But we're way past that now. Now we hear the screams of carefully simulated civilians, see their blood, then loot their wallets and cars.

Why? What moron thinks this is entertainment? It substitutes shock for any scrap of intelligent gameplay, until it becomes meaningless. Until its just abstract gameplay.

Anyway maybe I'm off the mark here. But until we admit that something is going on here that's different from a book or movie, we've not begun to figure out whether it matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem with this type of issue is that the topic is complex, it is hard to get anything like clean evidence, people start with strong opinions, and attempts at careful analysis immediately get derailed. We could try to reduce it to its component parts. But that fails, as Calvin points out at [http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/04/im...](http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/04/image_ed7vv0.gif?9d7bd4).

But that said, here are my personal beliefs:

\- Exposure to violence in mass media (including games) is probably correlated with overall violence in life across all of society.

\- The individual correlation is very, very small.

\- There are widespread confusions about cause and correlation that come up over and over again.

\- Long term comparisons have trouble dealing with the confounding influence of a long-term decrease in violence in our society, with possible causes from changing mores to reduced lead to parents not resorting to corporal violence to who knows what.

\- No simple correlation exists between levels of gun ownership and violence in a society.

\- The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

\- There is no way that, given how polarized our politics are, that anything resembling an assault weapon ban is getting through this Congress.

\- The Supreme Court in _Heller_ made it clear that governments have limited power to regulate the kinds of arms that are available, but has not ruled on what those limits are. There is a real possibility that assault weapons bans, like the one that just passed in New York, are going to be struck down on constitutional grounds.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled argument...

<comment><USER6> It's when stories and comments like this come out that I realize just how alien America is sometimes.

Most of this comment is nonsense. But many of you can't see that because you're American. It's quite obviously nonsense when you're outside America. On THIS issue, your politicians are absolutely nuts, your citizens are absolutely nuts.

We can all tell it is utter nonsense because you can look at all the other countries in the world that don't have these weird mass murders at anywhere near the frequency _per capita_. All of them have violent video games. Few of them have massive gun cultures.

Yet Americans are seriously debating this. It's like some crazy countrywide delusion.

But it's not just your gun culture, it's something else. Who knows what part of the American psyche causes it. Perhaps it's the dark-side of the American dream. You have massive homicide rates compared to the rest of the stable developed world. When it comes to murder you're a backwards country. You're down there with Belarus and Georgia.

That's really, really weird. And it's not video games. Or we'd all be joining you.

So it's not really very complex at all. It's got nothing to do with video games.

<comment><USER5> For your information I grew up in Canada. A long time ago I would have immediately agreed with you.

But then I made the mistake of posting my views on Usenet. Unlike most people on either side of these arguments, I actually followed up on the deluge of references I got in return from both sides. And did my best to create an informed opinion for myself. Here are some basic points off of the top of my head from what I have learned over the following two decades.

\- Gun ownership and gun violence are nothing like linearly correlated. For example Canada has a third the guns/capita that the USA does, and a fifth the gun violence.

\- The USA's violence problems are tied closely to racial problems. Over half of homicides are committed by blacks, and over half of the remainder by hispanics, despite the fact that there are more whites than either of those other racial groups. I just ran across a reference that I'm not sure is trustworthy indicating the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries.

\- When two areas have easy transport between them, the one with more restrictive gun rules tends to experience worse gun problems tied to crime.

\- There is some evidence that removing guns increases levels of violent crime, but reduces odds of death during that crime. Whether you consider this an improvement is likely to depend on your politics.

\- I've seen and found believable (but have not researched) the claim that in the short term after a major gun ban, the use of guns in crime actually goes up. (It is believable because criminals still have their guns, and have less fear about using them.)

\- No matter what the truth is, there is no way in the US system that we actually could ban guns. It would require changing the Constitution in a way that most Americans do not like.

<comment><USER7> >"the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries."

you're forgetting that the vast majority of those other countries might also find a large part of their violence being committed by "minority groups"

<comment><USER8> In an ethnically homogeneous country (and not all are), the minority is likely not one readily distinguishable by skin color alone. There are the Yakuza, Kkangpae, and Ah Kong (the latter mostly Chinese Singaporeans). European nations often have issues with right-wing groups (and in some cases ethnic Muslim minorities). But the distinct racial and cultural division (and history) present in the US is fairly distinctive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been reading about bayesian stats and likelihood ratios lately.

So, a likelihood ratio is P(X|A) / P(X|~A) .

If you define X as "likely to commit gun violence", then A would be the way to identify X.

Here, he's saying that A="plays violent video games". The problem is that not only is there a poorly correlated relationship between gun violence and video games, there's also plenty of gun violence by people who don't play violent video games. So the likelihood ratio isn't great.

It's the same with "is mentally ill". Even if you screen for mental illness, you're going to get a lot of false positives _and_ false negatives.

The problem is that people keep trying to identify "A", and I suspect there isn't even a root cause. To me it seems like it's more a matter of multiple contributory causes that reach tipping points. System dynamics, if you will. For instance, if you reduce the allure of "preparing for the end of the world", that could have a system-level impact. Or, if guns looked feminine, that would probably do it too.

<comment><USER10> _Is mentally ill_ doesn't have binary outcomes. Mental issues are set on spectrums (spectra?), usually from _normal to extreme_ or _extremely low to extremely high, normal in middle_ , and each human has an analog value on each spectrum for each disorder. With the latter, we expect a Poisson distribution.

<comment><USER2> A particularly tricky aspect for the purposes of this discussion is that the positions on those spectra are somewhat circularly defined when looking at outcomes, at least as defined in the DSM, the most common U.S. diagnostic manual. Many of the conditions have outcome-related diagnostic factors right in the definitions: whether the person is experiencing significant distress in their life, conflict with others or their surroundings, inability to work a job, etc. The pragmatic goal is to avoid over-diagnosing things that aren't actually causing people problems, but as a result it's tricky to isolate causal factors. Even worse if you're diagnosing people in retrospect: of course someone who went on a shooting rampage is going to meet all those criteria, after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually wrote a paper in university about whether violence in games and tv causes violent behavior in real life. It turns out that the US has spent tens of millions of dollars since the 1950s on studies trying to prove that violent media does in fact cause real-world violence. After the decades of studies, and the gobs of money that's been spent, still not one shred of conclusive evidence has supported the notion that games cause violent behavior.

Here's a link to a draft of the paper if anyone's interested: <http://goo.gl/TJQaU>

</comment><comment><USER12> Didn't James Holmes dress up like the riddler/joker, record an insane voicemail greeting in joker character, cover his apartment in batman posters, and shoot up a theatre playing batman? Clearly it was call of duty and gaia that made him do it

At least this senator could've found some sort of phony empirical evidence before scapegoating. Guess the violent movies are the root of all evil card is played out

</comment><comment><USER13> Parenting is the real issue here. If you can't teach your kids the difference between reality and fantasy, you have failed.

I had caring parents who love video games. I have been playing violent games since my dad got Doom for our N64. I am a well-adjusted individual with a good job, a happy relationship, a stable living condition, and plenty of friends.

Why didn't video games turn me violent? It's probably because while my parents love games, they didn't let me sit in front of them 24/7. They made sure I did my work, had an after-school job, was involved in clubs, etc. The same applies for any other medium, like TV. Everything in moderation.It's not the job of the video game industry to make sure kids are only playing x-hours per day, it is the parents'.

<comment><USER14> There is no evidence that sufficient experience playing (say) Doom deathmatch will turn anyone into a mass killer. 'Moderation' is probably a red herring.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. I think the best correlation may be that if someone is already inclined to commit mass violence, they may be able to improve their technique for practicing murder with a violent video game by studying various reactions by human and computer players.

This, of course, is equally true for watching any violent movie, and even just the news these days. But don't let that get in the way of some good sensationalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is Lamar Alexander, one of the top senate recipients of NRA contributions ([http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/12/18/nra-and- congre...](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/12/18/nra-and-congress/)), so this sort of misdirection is rather unsurprising.

<comment><USER17> Oh, _that_ guy? Co-sponsor of PIPA and COICA, and therefore by definition one of the baddest of the bad guys? Yeah, this is exactly the sort of inane blather you'd expect from him.

<comment><USER18> I think you might be thinking of Lamar Smith.

<comment><USER17> I think you are right, since Lamar Smith has been a prominent baddie, but it is still true that Lamar Alexander co-signed PIPA and COICA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Let's see.

USA - strict laws against violence in games (PEGI ratings etc), liberal gun control, 4.8 intentional homicides per 100 000 citizens

Poland - liberal law regarding violence in games, strict gun control, 1.1 intentional homicides per 100 000 citizens

Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

<comment><USER20> "The plural of anecdote is not data."

<comment><USER21> "Using a quote out of context just makes you look like an idiot"

<comment><USER20> Is it out of context? Two datapoints with a multitude of confounding factors do not actually tell us anything of value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people. But the First Amendment limits what we can do about video games and the Second Amendment to the Constitution limits what we can do about guns._

Wow. He's managed to combine "they say the darndedst things" with "that pesky constitution, always in the way of the best ideas".

I'm sympathetic to the cause of limiting the power of weapons available to average citizens, but with this guy on my side, I'm not sure the opposition has much work to do. By dragging _another_ amendment that people are passionate about into it, he effectively makes his case impossible to argue.

</comment><comment><USER23> US: Huge number of guns, access to violent games Rest of world: access to violent games

US: lots of gun deaths Rest of world: not lots of gun deaths

So either 1- lots of guns = more gun deaths, or 2- lots of guns combined with violent games = more gun deaths

No way to tease out the two variables, unless there are places with lots of guns and no violent games that we can look at.

<comment><USER21> YES. Seriously why isn't anyone recognising this ?

The exact same violent video games and movies available in the US exist in many Western countries (New Zealand, Australia, UK, Singapore, Ireland, Scotland, France). But there is no where near the same issues.

In Australia I could get lost and end up at any house and be guaranteed I am not going to be killed for no reason.

<comment><USER24> Do you honestly think if you get lost and knock on a strangers door you'll just be indiscriminately killed in the USA?

Remember that the statistics are all talking about relatively small numbers. Take USA's 0.00004 vs Australia's 0.00001 it's technically correct to say '300% more likely', but it's still a very small chance.

tl;dr Your more likely to commit suicide than be murdered in either country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have heard speculation that violent video games are _inversely_ correlated with actual violence, in light of the fact that violent crime is way _down_ over the past thirty years or so.

The reasoning is, people who are predisposed to violence can get their kicks from violent video games, in their own homes, rather than going out and shooting people.

It is just a theory, but it is no less plausible than the opposite theory.

<comment><USER26> And I remember reading that the drop in crime was correlated with the disuse or ban of leaded gasoline when the cohort was in infancy or young childhood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> US Senators are a bigger problem than guns _and_ video games.

</comment><comment><USER28> Statists are always looking to point to people's freedoms as being the problem. The vast majority of gun violence is actually State-driven: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9bRDNgd6E4>

<comment><USER29> That guy in the video is a crank. I watched the first eight minute (until he brings out a poverty graph). He a)leaves out the massive reduction of poverty in the US in the first half of the twentieth century and b) brushes off Social Security's massive success in reducing the elderly's poverty rate.

<comment><USER28> You stopped watching when he brought out a poverty graph? Did you think the data was wrong?

He wasn't arguing about the elderly's poverty rate. It's not relevant to the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "

Voilent games can also be seen as a punching bag to vent out your anger, without hurting somebody in actual. It is not always the case that kids turn voilent in real life because of them. Parental guidance is needed at every step of life, blame poor parenting if you have to :?

<comment><USER31> _There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "_

Bad example: I wouldn't but a lot of kids are easily influenced.

And no, I don't support a ban or censorship of games. I see this and guns as part of life, bad stuff happens some times, like when you cross the street and a car or a lightning might hit you.

<comment><USER30> True, the games should be in moderation as well, but I have seen numerous instances of negligence on part of parents. Your kid is 12, why let him play PG-13 games? A lot of people, need to be strict in this case.

this is indeed a very complex situation, like a algorithm, for which we know one of the 'possible answers' but not the answer as of yet.

On a second thought, I do think thats not the best possible example :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well I think the senator should be more worried about those amalgamated automatons roaming around our steppes, breaking our penny-farthing bikes and soiling our women's petticoats.

These godless contraptions are invulnerable even to the senator's modern blunderbuss, and are fueled by the pills he needs to live.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is only through the responsible use of freedom that people can continue to remain free. Freedom used for selfish ends leads to bondage. History has proven over and over again that in cases when self-serving attitudes spread throughout the culture that they are ripe for picking by their enemies with freedom soon lost. Freedom used responsibly always is to the benefit and welfare of others.

George Washington: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indespensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars."

To those of you who out there who are consumers of this type of material... buyer beware.

</comment><comment><USER34> How about an experiment. Subject a group of people to violent video games and knives. Give another group of people automatic assault weapons. Create tension in the group over the course of a year, and see how many people get killed.

</comment><comment><USER35> The article ignores the real issue-- the impact of violent video games and movie content on children. There's no First Amendment right for kids to access violent content.

<comment><USER36> I disagree with your assertion. Some violent depictions can trivially be political speech, and "think of what the children will do" is simply not a compelling reason for the government to limit any political speech, especially when there is such a tenuous scientific link between viewing that content and long term health impact.

Consider The Bully Project film from 2 years ago; the MPAA rated it R because they consider it to be too violent, even though it is literally actual footage of bullying in schools. I find it difficult to accept that 15 and 16 year olds should be _legally_ forbidden from watching something that has direct and important relevancy on their lives and could, from a reasonably objective view, actually improve the lives of bullied kids. Just because you are 16 shouldn't mean you have no rights.

<comment><USER4> Yeah pretty much just because you aren't 21 you have few rights. Its strange - by legislating a number (legal age) we can disenfranchise, economically marginalize, and socially stigmatize whole groups of people. And no constitutional protection helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In my research I came across what I think is the best explanation for the cause for violence in our society. I believe video games are just another symptom but not the cause and effect.

"Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality." \- <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/the- spirit-level>

<comment><USER35> That doesn't explain the mass rampage murders, which have been all committed by wealthy or upper-middle class perpetrators. Plus, violent crime in America is decreasing even while poverty is increasing.

<comment><USER14> Violent crime is decreasing, period. It is spurious (if not intentionally misleading) to suggest that this correlates in a meaningful way with changes in poverty.

<comment><USER4> Yes, recently an article was posted here (WSJ) that correlated unleaded gasoline with violent crime. That's actually believable.

<comment><USER38> IIRC, Freakanomics had a section correlating legalized abortion with a drop in crime ~18 years later. Also plausible. But, of course, not necessarily causal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> On the other hand, violent games may actually reduce violence, because people with violent tendencies may be using the games to get their "fix" in a way that doesn't actually hurt anyone.

</comment><comment><USER40> Good luck, Senator: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchant...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchants_Association)

</comment><comment><USER41> Yet another excuse to not get tough on gun control, all thanks to a badly worded Second Amendment.

The reality is without serious gun control the massacres in the US will continue.

</comment><comment><USER42> If games are a bigger problem than guns, war is a bigger problem than games.

</comment><comment><USER39> Don't forget to blame the comic books!</comment>


Information about Primary key and Foreign key - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmingeeks.com/difference-primary-key-foreign-key/ <comment><AUTHOR> SQL server has seven types of keys. primary key and foreign key are important keys to them. Each table has only one primary key in a database table. Because of its unique, not accept the null value and duplicate value. We can create more than one foreign key in tables.</comment>


IBooks embedded HTML boilerplate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TrevorBurnham/iBooks-HTML-Widget-Boilerplate

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple provides very little documentation when it comes to embedding HTML in an iBook, so I hit a lot of walls when trying to get the examples running for CoffeeScript: An Interactive Reference ([http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/coffeescript/id498532763?mt=...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/coffeescript/id498532763?mt=11)). Hopefully this project will save other developers time and effort as they use iBooks Author to create interactive book-apps.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good examples of entrepreneurs being resourceful? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Brian Chesky from AirBnB offers up a bunch of great examples in this talk from Startup School.

<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383>

</comment><comment><USER3> Many entrepreneurs who spend time here on HN have written extensively about being resourceful. #1 in my book, currently, would be patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) -- read everything he has ever posted and blogged. Seriously.

Other people worth reading in earnest: Peldi from Balsamiq (excellent), Rob Walling from softwarebyrob.com, Bob Walsh of 47hats, Max Klein (some may disagree), Joel Spolsky (obviously), David Rusenko from Weebly, and Marshall Kilpatrick. I've seriously spent hours and days studying what these guys have written and am always on the hunt for more gurus.

Every single one of these guys has advice and experience about how to be resourceful while creating, launching, and running your startup. In some cases, they've come up with approaches and techniques that I think are ingenious (patio11 ranks high here).

<comment><USER4> Thanks -- both the praise and being put in that company is humbling.</comment></comment>


Original Command and Conquer devs will remaster series' first games - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/original-command-conquer-devs-will-remaster-series-first-games-in-one-package/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic news and I'm very excited for Frank Klepacki to return. Those original themes and tunes were stellar.

</comment><comment><USER3> In a way I hope they update the control schemes more than the graphics -- they're kludgy by modern standards, and I think it would be hard to enjoy the nicer-looking game if it controls the same as before.

<comment><USER4> I think the developers who 'remastered' AOE2 struck a very nice balance between improving usability (high resolution displays, etc), minor graphics changes that still keep the nostalgia alive, and adding new content (new civs, units).</comment></comment>