MemSQL ships 2.0, scales across hundreds of nodes, thousands of cores - <AUTHOR> http://developers.memsql.com/blog/real-time-analytics-platform/

<comment><USER2> Is this one of those, "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it?" situations? Because "Try it now Free!" is the only thing I can see on their site related to a cost, and "First one's free!" rarely means it will always be free. :|

<comment><USER3> Their resource estimator starts off at 1640 cores [1] and even the bottom most tick on the scale represents 500 cores. For people who can dedicate that amount of hardware to their database the licensing cost is probably not a major component.

The numbers look impressive, though.

<http://www.memsql.com/why-memsql#scale-out>

<comment><USER4> Try again - I found the bottom ticks were 8 cores and 256GB.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough - I had considered that to be on the axis since it's the minimum value, and thus not a tick, but visually it certainly is represented as a tick.

At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that they clearly expect you to throw a lot of hardware at these systems.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but a lot of projects LIKE this have an open source project for those people NOT in the enterprise, and who probably won't be running more than 8-24 cores or so.

On a related note, changing the amount of RAM seems to only change the amount of RAM, not any of the other numbers. I guess that's their point, but I would rather they just SAY that than make me try a bunch of options to show that RAM doesn't matter. :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised these guys haven't been sued by Microsoft yet. I think the founder himself worked on a similar project at MSFT called Hekaton and moved out. Atleast that is what I heard from a couple of devs he tried to recruit out of sql. I'd advise startups to be weary of jumping ship.

</comment><comment><USER6> I blogged about this in some detail this morning.

<http://www.dbms2.com/2013/04/23/memsql-scales-out/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice product. I'll try this out.

It seems like the isolation level is Read Committed. Are there plans to support higher isolation levels (Serialisability)?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is in the books. It's tricky to do it on the cluster and has perf implications, but it is doable and we have a design for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks great!

Quick question: since data is uniformly spread across n leaf nodes, do queries that require checking a number of rows >> n hit nearly every leaf? If so, does this create latency problems when n is large? (since it'd only take one slow request out of n to cause high latency)

<comment><USER9> Yes, we will fan out queries when necessary. In a hard core oltp workload this will affect latency across the system by flooding the network (if you send too many of these queries at once) but we expose knobs that let you limit these queries' parallelism to keep the rest of the system really fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> the problem with scaling out to multi cores with a focus on ram is that in larger datasets you end up trading disk latency for network and protocol latency. I a not sure that is a great trade even if we are talking about fiber channel as a medium.

<comment><USER11> I have to disagree; disk is ancient - it's mechanical egads! - while 10GigE is pretty commonplace now and infiniband and fiber channel are even faster.

back from my CS 101 takeaways: there are only 3 bottlenecks in a computer system: CPU, network, and IO.

looks like MemSQL is fixing the CPU and IO bottlenecks, but physics is physics so network is pure hardware solution haha

<comment><USER12> The problem is that you can end up with larger latency over the network because it still takes a fixed amount of time for nodes to communicate. Even with a 1TB/s link between nodes you can still have a good 30ms between them all adding even more latency. That can be mitigated somewhat by a good protocol that can manage that latency properly (e.g. not blocking while waiting on ACKs and such), it can still end up with far more latency than a few large disks would be (even better now with SSDs). That said I do imagine that some datasets will benefit from this kind of topology (I can imagine that geospatial stuff will do well with that, since you can locate physically close things on a single machine and reduce the amount of talking needed).

<comment><USER13> 30ms? In anything resembling a modern datacenter? 0.3-0.5ms is more typical these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to kdb+? This seems like a much less arcane competitor.

<comment><USER15> kdb+ is compressed columnar in memory on a single box with a very exotic language called Q. memsql is row-based in memory across n-machines using SQL.

<comment><USER14> kdb+ is also very fast for real-time time series analysis and signal generation. Seeing Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse in the customer list made me wonder if memsql could become a competitor in the niche that kdb+ currently dominates?

<comment><USER6> Yes, if we note that there are core niches where nobody will replace kdb+ any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great design on the site! Congrats to the memsql team

</comment><comment><USER17> why is it that every company that has a blog either, a) doesn't have a link or b) buries the link to their main product site on their blog?

<comment><USER18> Often because the blog is run on a separate software platform from the main site.

<comment><USER6> Still no excuse.

I've educated multiple vendors on the subject. E.g., see the last point on [http://www.strategicmessaging.com/marketing- communications-t...](http://www.strategicmessaging.com/marketing- communications-tips/2012/12/09/) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Where is the source code?

<comment><USER20> It's commercial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> what are the major feature updates on this release compared to last one?

<comment><AUTHOR> there are a lot of new features! Beyond distributing data across multiple machines in a cluster, there's more SQL surface area, multiple levels of redundancy for HA, and a distributed query optimizer. Some cool stuff with bi- directional lock-free skiplists too w.r.t. indexes</comment></comment>


Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/karmic_koala_frustration/

<comment><USER2> The entire article mentions only one bug, which is caused by proprietary drivers. Seems more like FUD to me. And yes I had a smooth upgrade to Karmic- amd64 with proprietary ATI drivers.

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu 8.10 broke Intel drivers, which are OSS. Furthermore Ubuntu ships with restricted drivers manager, which pragmatically installs properietary drivers where needed.

Software vendors have the resposibility to their users to perform regression tests as part of their product. If Ubuntu doesn't want do do that, or do it better, then they shouln't bother to compete with other OSs that do.

I'm saying this after 10+ years of use of Linux on my desktop. The 8.10 issue (after deliberately picking low-powered OSS-driven hardware) made me move to OS X, which I hate, in order to have a continuously working desktop.

<comment><USER4> I moved my home desktop back to Windows XP after Ubuntu 8.10 was released. It's the most stable desktop Operating System I know of. I never lost a file on it. I've never been unable to boot. I've never had hardware that wouldn't work on it. I have experienced quite a bit of Apple drama and figured it's just not worth the money. If I need to do any unixy stuff I have a button on my desktop that instantly launches an EC2 instance I can ssh into. Costs me about $1/month.

<comment><USER5> You've never used it enough then :) all Operating systems have roughly equal "failure" rates in my experience (Fedora, W7 [this might change] and Server 2003 slightly lower / Ubuntu slightly higher than normal).

I work with a shed load of different operating systems working in a variety of capacities daily (though not so much in OSX). I haven't come across an operating system yet that recognises all hardware painlessly, doesn't come with a variety of random errors and doesn't ever crash :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never seen the register being positive about anything new.

<comment><USER7> I've never seen the Register being positive about anything.

<comment><USER8> Checking the authors back catalogue briefly - he does seem to be quite positive about Windows 7; I wonder if that's a coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's stuff like this which makes me think that the release cycle for Ubuntu is just too brisk. I've just recently managed to get two 8.10 installs to the point where they're comfortably configured and stable. I'm still working out a few issues with Jaunty on a netbook. There's no way I'm going to upgrade that thing to Karmic for maybe six months or so. Granted, this makes me an LTS guy and not an early adopter, but I don't think my situation is unique.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if this is truly a widespread issue. I've been using Karmic daily since the beta was released a few weeks ago, upgrading its packages to the official release, and I haven't encountered any issues yet. Has anyone here had any of the problems described in the article?

<comment><USER11> Widespread graphics driver and sound issues. GNOME-Do, System Monitor and some other programs. Launchpad is going berserk right now. <http://bit.ly/1IPSsm>

<comment><USER8> That bitly link is [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system- monit...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system- monitor/+bug/208570) . HNers prefer normal links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had two issues, one during the upgrade process, the second with proprietary wireless network drivers. I upgraded a 3-years old HP laptop from Windows XP. My initial plan was to make it boot both systems, but the install hang up during repartition, destroying Windows. Oh, well, isn't that what Linux is for, to destroy Windows? The second problem was just an annoying non-issue, solved by finding the right aptitude incantations.

Apart from that, Karmic has been a cute little boy all along.

</comment><comment><USER4> Never upgrade Ubuntu. Just reinstall. It's not that user-friendly.

<comment><USER9> Believe it or not, I've upgraded Ubuntu successfully several times through the GUI. Before Ubuntu 7.x this tended to fail spectacularly though. It's a very friendly process when it works, which admittedly seems contingent on the maturity of the release in question.

<comment><USER13> I've done the Ubuntu GUI-based in-place upgrade for the last three releases, if I count back correctly. Aside from the usual point issues in peripheral things that show up when you agree to use a beta (spotty sound in one old game, e.g.), the actual upgrade itself has worked correctly every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "fifth of people upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 have reported issues they can't fix, according to an Ubuntuforums.org poll here"

wow, statistics in action

I have an issue with fan control with my upgrade, apart from that it went well, so a little worse than jaunty, but still easier than osx and windows.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been told to wait with the Snow Leopard update, too. Update of Ubuntu on my second notebook really produced some errors, but after a clean install (often a good idea anyway), it looks great. For the first time I did not immediately switch off the desktop effects.

</comment><comment><USER16> Updated my Advent laptop from Jaunty a week ago, no significant issues. Can't say it's massively better than Jaunty in terms of features or performance though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just checked my Karmic Koala server. It does have Linux 2.6.31, but maybe that's because I've been aggressive about updating it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lots of issues for myself and friends too. Shouldn't have updated so soon, but 8.10 - 9.04 didn't feel this problematic.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google appengine does not work with 9.10, I have seen it yesterday. There is a bug as well in appengine buglist

<comment><USER15> Surely they'll make it work soon. I heard Snow Leopard broke a lot of stuff, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> First Linux version where everything worked perfectly OOB for me. No complaints here.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've had, and continue to have, sound issues.</comment>


When Will Mark Rebrand Facebook? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@carissalintao/when-will-mark-rebrand-facebook-d1ee6f15990d <comment><USER2> I think this will happen the moment he cashes out his shares, and goes somewhere else, probably never.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good idea. I suggest "Altria."

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL, that's a good one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN purchasing a new laptop. - <AUTHOR>

Around the 16th or so, my laptop quit booting, and while it's being looked at by my best friend, I'm looking for a new laptop. I have two problems that will make affording a new laptop hard;
1.	I take home around $670 a month. (SSI, because it's next to impossible to find private health insurance for my medical condition,  panhypopituitarism, so I'm on adult Medicaid.) 2.	I have no credit. (My credit's not bad, I really don't have credit.)
Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you for your consideration. <comment><USER2> If a desktop will do what you need, looking for your local freegeek.org or similar computer recycling program is a great strategy. They offer systems free or cheap to those who couldn't otherwise afford them.

</comment><comment><USER3> With your situation your best bet might be looking for a gently used laptop or trading services.</comment>


How to cope with the Gmail redesign - <AUTHOR> http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/ <comment><USER2> This article made me finally bite the bullet and convert. I've been using the new design for the last several hours. I happen to have a window open with the old design, so I know it's not merely my imagination that the new one is worse. Not enormously so, but definitely worse.

Read mails are more legible in the old version, because there is more contrast between black letters and the old light blue background than between black and the new gray.

It's also harder to parse the list of emails visually in the new design. In the old one, the 3D checkbox acted like a bullet point, and the name of the sender was closer to it. Now the heavy checkbox has been replaced by a faint square, and the sender's name is about 2x further away from it. So scanning my email is no longer like scanning a bulleted list. It's just rows of text.

That's a big deal functionally. There's a reason bulleted lists exist as a format, and removing the bullet points from the average bulleted list would make it significantly less legible.

It's a bummer to see Google making things work worse in order to make them look better (or worse still, more consistent). That's the sort of thing big companies do. Which I suppose Google now is. But they had at least been trying not to act like one before.

<comment><USER3> _or worse still, more consistent_

So you believe that consistency among UI screens should take a backseat to usefulness? I agree with this but I know there are a lot of people who believe the opposite - that consistency is more important to good design. And this isn't limited to big companies.

<comment><USER4> Consistency is only a means to an end. That end can be a net positive, but I think pg is alluding to _consistency for the sake of Google's convenience_ , rather than the convenience of its users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its a constant wonder how Google and other large companies can't actually realise that their design departments are not doing a great job. You'd think that Apple's successes might actually make them realise that great interfaces (especially if they can outdo the competition) are hugely valuable.

Some things about the new design are defensible, however others are definitely not. My particular pet hate is that all the things that are not mail services (but you can still access within gmail) are splattered around all corners of the screen. Chat is in one corner (along with 'gadgets' - whatever they are). G+ is in the opposite. And in a third (behind a button that is very unhelpfully named 'gmail') are contacts and tasks. Where is the sense in that???

<comment><USER6> Apple makes plenty of UI nightmares. Examples include Snow Leopard firewall configuration dialog, the leather versions of iCal/Contacts, the finder, etc.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget the apple.com online store - I can't even have multiple credit cards on my account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.

<comment><USER9> > I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this > level of customisation

That made me chuckle, using a desktop email app. Funny/curious/thought- provoking how different standards apply to web apps still.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure I understand. Most desktop email clients have _very_ limited customizability.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, they're usually far more customizable. Clients I've used include KMail on Linux, The Bat! on Windows and Mozilla's Thunderbird, all of which offer myriad options to customize the appearance and behavior of message list, message pane and folder lists, though the first two apps much more so than Thunderbird. You also get to modify things like toolbars much more freely, and OS/toolkit theming usually also beats the GMail theming system.

You could argue that GMail has a higher customization potential given the fact that you can muck around with the document client-side (though Thunderbird extensions are similar, and if you really go down that road: I can also change the source code of KMail and recompile it), but we're talking in-app options here.

And so I find the notion that "GMail has impressive configurability because it has the options described in the article" amusing. Somehow the world has forgotten just how sophisticated an experience a regular old desktop app running in the context of a regular old desktop environment can be.

I'd also argue that regular old desktop toolkits and libraries still require a lot less investment of effort to achieve such levels of sophistication than the web development environment does at the moment. Like I said, thought- provoking.

<comment><USER11> Also worth noting is that Thunderbird's layout can be thoroughly customized with a bit of JavaScript hacking via its extensions interface, just as Firefox can. While TB may not have tons of visual options by default, it can still get them via third-party extension.

<comment><USER9> Aye, that's what I was talking about with "Tb extensions are similar [in their capabilities] (to GreaseMonkey-style site hacks)".

<comment><USER11> Hmm, didn't see that part. Maybe you edited? Maybe I just skimmed it. Sorry. :)

<comment><USER9> I edited quite a bit (awful habit), but that part was in the original version :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I ended up leaving Gmail a few months ago (knowing this was coming). The new design works _really poorly_ with browser zoom. I need to view the page zoomed in to 300% or so most of the time (I don't have good vision). Zooming really worked pretty well on all of the past iterations, up until this one. There are a number of panes that stay visible when scrolling, so the content area on the web page becomes really really small. (I'm not usually one to complain just because things changed, I didn't like the mystery meat icons either, but I can get over something trivial like that.) It just doesn't work.

I couldn't really figure out where else to go, but OWA 2010 doesn't have these problems, so I went to Office 365 for my own domain (and forwarded Gmail). I never thought I'd pay for email but considering how vital mail is, having real support is a nice piece of mind.

I remember how awesome webmail seemed in 2003 (when I switched from Outlook to Gmail), but now that I've gone back to Outlook, I see all the awesome stuff that I was missing. This is really not to credit Outlook though, I'm sure Gmail (threading) influenced them greatly in the past 8 years. I know you can just use Outlook+Gmail, but sadly IMAP isn't nearly as good as Exchange.

<comment><USER13> Try <http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html>

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I know about the basic HTML site. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me, though. The basic site is literally worse than the 2003 version.

<comment><USER14> I have always used the basic version of gmail. It works very well for me. The site design has not changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I quite like the new design, and I've been using it since it was in "beta" a couple of months ago.

It certainly provided a couple of frustrating days before I got used to it, but I find it much more soft on the eyes - to me the old layout now looks pretty harsh; giving the impression of being just "functional".

A lot of non-technical folks I work (and live!) with find the new design much, much more pleasing. Bear in mind these are the folks that use hotmail, yahoo etc - so they really are after the "eye candy" more than the functionality; and with google's new social push I can assume this is now the target audience.

My only complaint would be about the icons; regardless of wether you've used Gmail before - you will get caught out; a few days ago it took me a good few minutes before I could find out how to get to my contacts.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am absolutely furious how my account was forced today to the new theme - it's hideous.

I've tried several stylish options to no avail, I miss the old dark layout with high contrast buttons.

Even the dark theme has a bright white message pane for no reason.

It also runs very sluggishly compared to the old UI, not sure why.

Well this should give me the kick in the pants to get off gmail anyway.

<comment><USER17> It's slow because all the UI elements in the new themes have alpha transparency and rounded corners. It increases the amount of work your browser has to do to paint it tremendously (though GPU acceleration will help).

<comment><USER18> Rounded corners? AFAICT the defining characteristic of the new UI is that every single visual element is a rectangle with a pale grey 1px border. It's all so _flat_ , ugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I designed the original Gmail UX and I have to admit I'd changed every pref in my accounts exactly as Jason did. Good call.

<comment><USER2> You did a great job. I didn't realize how quietly good the old design was till I looked at it side by side with the new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have never been so frustrated with a UI redesign as I have been with Gmail and Analytics. Unfortunately, I was already using all of the settings pointed out in this post, and I still can't get comfortable with the new design. I can't separate how much of that frustration comes from the large degree of change and how much comes from my long history of use, but the frustration is huge.

I know that many Google employees were similarly frustrated when they were eating their dog food last august. Yet the new look was rolled out anyway.

So I can only assume that the company had solid UI data showing that their target group of users prefer the new design. And I can therefore only assume that the target group of users does not include users like me.

Consequently, there is an opportunity here for somebody to do email right for the people frustrated by the new gmail redesign. I would happily pay for an email interface that makes sense and doesn't change against my wishes... especially if it doesn't require switching to microsoft.

Until then, I will be very grateful to the person who pointed out the 'slow- connection' interface is still available.

<comment><USER21> Hm, it seems strange though that they're not keeping the old interface, which is what many people were using Gmail in the first place (even if their _target group_ prefers the new interface.) Come to think of it, it's also kind of sad that HN users are obviously not their target group...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My biggest new-Gmail-design pet-peeve is that the Display Density setting is _only_ respected if your browser window is wide enough.

I prefer the "Comfortable" setting. I have a 22" monitor at 1680x1050, but I don't have my browser window maximized (it only takes up 65-75% of the screen width).

So, GMail has helpfully reduced my display density to "Cozy", ignoring my setting.

As far as I know, there's no way to "fix" this; it's a known issue but there's no workaround other than making my browser window wider.

<comment><USER23> It took my months of using the new design before I realized this. My impression before was simply that the design was "broken" on my desktop computer until one day I resized the window and discovered this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm obviously in minority here, but I don't stress too much about the design as long as unread messages are in bold text. But this might be due to me working mostly in terminals and text/code editors, where design never was a top priority.

The things I care about most in gmail are:

      1. reliability, speed and lots of space
      2. good spam filtering
      3. web view of various office documents (I used to cringe when someone sent me .doc or .xls, not anymore)
      4. fast search which also includes gtalk conversations (invaluable)

If one or two of these things goes away, then I'll probably switch.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was so busy using gmail I barely noticed the transition. Which for me says everything. Great design shouldn't be noticed, it should just work.

Obviously this is just one anecdote. But for me gmail is still the indispensable tool it always was. For all its shortcomings it is an amazing product.

<comment><USER26> I'm finding this hard to believe. You didn't notice when the Send button went from the bottom of the message to the top? Maybe you meant that you noticed but didn't find it jarring enough to cause a lot of confusion?

<comment><USER27> I confess I haven't really noticed any of the button changes. This is mainly because I am almost 100% keyboard in gmail, though. Send is a quaint tab- enter. :)

I can say every now and then I look for the buttons, but the only one I really ever find myself using is the refresh button, and that is simply if I wasn't already positioned on the keyboard.

<comment><USER28> /facepalm.

So you've got no qualification whatsoever talking about the new interface as you avoid it entirely.

What I love most is sometimes the important buttons are red and in the top left. But sometimes they are gray and in the bottom right.

Which will it be today? Flip a coin! Consistency is an alien word to the Google Design Team.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure I follow. I don't avoid it. They just happened to have not changed the way I interact with it. I confess I did find my old theme a little more pleasant to deal with, but I'm already at the point where I don't remember it anymore.

I'm curious what "important buttons" you are referring to.

I'm also curious how folks that get this worked up over their email client don't go into shock when they get a new car. Consistency is not the norm in life. Seems it is really only a norm when it was dictated by function.

Not that I feel you shouldn't get worked up over what ever you want to get worked up over. I just don't understand it.

<comment><USER29> When you get a new car, that's because of a choice you are making or a consequence of your actions (such as if the previous one was totaled.) When a website that a person frequents which "seems to work fine the way it is" changes, people get worked up because they see the change as unnecessary.

Similarly, if you are a developer, you might feel the same way if the company you work at randomly decides to switch bug trackers or wikis, when the new ones aren't really any better than before.

<comment><USER30> I wonder if the anger could be redirected by the realisation that if they were running their own client software, they would be in control of the interface. To realise the dream of free software. But I suspect most of the "rage" will blow over in fifteen minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I HATE HATE HATE the new design! I was dreading the day they took away the old look, but these tips go a long way to making gmail usable for me again. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> When I read this headline, I assumed Google had redesigned it again... didn't realise people were still using the old design.

Personally, the redesign pushed me back to Thunderbird and I ended up deleting thousands of emails. It was quite liberating.

</comment><comment><USER33> I loved the new design. Much less clutter. A service I use every waking moment need not label everything. I like the direction of Google's design efforts.

The Google+ design will continue to evolve, I'm sure (it is not quite there yet).

</comment><comment><USER34> Its not just GMAIL. Google analytics is painfully ugly. The first screen before showed a list of all the sites and traffic. Now it shows just the list of accounts. Its awful. There is no way anymore to use the classic design.

Also, once I am in google analytics it is just a UI mess. They cram every feature possible and make it unintelligible. They are ruining the UI for gmail,google search and google analytics.

<comment><USER35> I must be using wrong because I have to do so more clicks with the new Analytics design to see things I want, it's frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I also hate the new design, even after few hours I've spent trying to get used to it. With all the necessary settings (compact mode, text buttons etc.), the main flaw stays - theres no freaking border between message body and ads! C'mon Google, this is just too obvious. Wonder how users will switch to some other webmail or desktop clients, how many of them will install some ad- blockers, just because of this. You realise, Google, that this would mean actually less clicking on your ads? Speaking of intentional clicks here.

</comment><comment><USER37> besides the default theme and the high contrast theme, all others are useless and look like the work of a 5 year old. Design has a function, namely to make things clear and give the user a good experience.

<comment><USER38> I agree. Really makes me wonder if all their themes have been made by developers (like me). 'Work of a 5 year old', exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I know I was probably 1 of 10 people that actually used (and liked!) the Terminal theme with all green monospaced text... sadly that is now gone, and Terminal theme is now just a lame white on black with variable-width font. bummer :(

<comment><USER40> Yep. Only a blinking shell prompt remains, under "Google" (top left)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I use the following changes to the style sheet for some more colour contrast:

        /* Increase contrast on some arrows */
        .T-I-ax7.T-I-JE .T-I-J3 {
            opacity: 0.1 !important;
        }

        /* Make new chat highlight red instead of blue */
        .Hz .k, .Hz .n, .Hz .l {
            background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(192, 0, 0) !important;
        }

<comment><USER42> oh god, obfuscated CSS...

<comment><USER41> I doubt it was done on purpose. I think it's what minifying does to your CSS files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I stopped using it and moved to Mail.app. I cannot stand in-page scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't imagine using gmail for high-volume email; I've used it at various times due to being lazy about setting up something better, but ugh.

mutt is so much better, using maildirs synced with imap (with mbsync or something). Totally customizable, per-folder triggers, and works in a terminal.

<comment><USER45> Yes, I can't understand why highly computer-literate people use GMail. There must be something very compelling about it because it's so popular, but no one's ever explained to me what it is. If anyone here wants to explain, I'd appreciate it!

I use mutt too, which I find incredibly flexible. The only downside I experience compared to GMail is that searching is not as powerful. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER46> I've never used mutt, but I depend on Gmail's conversation view (a smoother experience than going through messages one by one) and easy searching of gigabytes of email; a proportional font, auto-linkification, and built-in video chat don't hurt either.

<comment><USER44> Searching is the one thing I still need to figure out for mutt (I cheat now by sending a copy of everything to gmail just for search). Linkification is handled by the terminal program.

<comment><USER46> To be fair, Gmail search takes several seconds for a basic query now, so I'm considering switching to Mail.app, which has the all-important conversation view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Using a web-service and raging when it gets redesigned or closed is pretty stupid. People who don't like when other people decide for them should use real email clients with a standard protocol such as IMAP.

<comment><USER48> bot sure if i follow you here, gmail uses IMAP, i never read my mails on the website, always in Mail (or sparrow, on osx)

<comment><USER47> Yes, of course, you can do that as well. As long as you don't depend on their server-side UI, you're not subject to unwanted UI changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> What concerns me more about the new design compared to the old original is the readability: now it is much worse. Why not offer the most popular old themes (adapted to the new layout) an option?

</comment><comment><USER50> You can actually still use the old interface for a little while longer, even if you've been forced over to the redesign.

<http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail>

<comment><USER51> Thanks for this. Having forced to use the new design for a few days, the old one feels and looks so much better.

My biggest annoyance in the new one apart from the horrible colors was how the buttons change position or disappear depending on the context. Much less intuitive than the old design.

Its a shame that Google decided to force the new design, I would just leave the old one as optional as it was during the past few months.

<comment><USER52> The old design will completely go away in the next few days. From a development perspective it's just not feasible to make everything work for two different designs (with many many themes). It's better to spend the time on cool new features.

<comment><USER51> Thanks for the answer. Based on the discussion here, one especially cool new feature would be a 'classic' mode that would mimic the look and feel of the old design :)

<comment><USER52> It's not possible to please everyone when you do a UI change and have 300+ million users, but we do try to fix some issues people have with the new design (e.g. setting for text buttons, high contrast theme). Of course it has to look consistent with other products so there are some limitations. Our community manager wrote a much more eloquent answer to that topic on reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/sk7i7/how_do_you_get...](http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/sk7i7/how_do_you_get_rid_of_the_new_look/c4eyaa8)

<comment><USER51> The link was an interesting read, and you make a valid point that some of the issues have been solved by features like the button texts.

Actually my point was exactly that everyone seems to have their own favorite thing they miss about the old design. So for me it would make more sense to build a mode (on top of the new codebase) that would mimic the old design instead of implementing fixes one-by-one. Then everyone who liked the old design better could just change one setting that is easy to find and be done instead of playing with bunch of individual settings in different menus to achieve the same thing. I think it would stop a lot of complaints even if it would not be perfect.

I understand that there might be very good reasons why it is not feasible, this is just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> My single largest complaint about the redesign?

When you search your messages, the buttons to go to the next page of search result are inexplicably only at the top of the results, not at the bottom.

Before I realized this design oversight, I spent a few minutes perplexedly scrolling to the bottom of search results, flabbergasted that those were all the results.

You can imagine my frustration at the design team when I finally realized: Oh, the pagination buttons are at the top...

</comment><comment><USER54> This could be of interest to some of the readers. I'm the developer of Gmelius, a poly-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox, <http://gmelius.com> . The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

NB: As you will surely notice I'm currently redesigning the homepage... Feel free to leave me your comments/suggestions both on the extension and the new website.

</comment><comment><USER55> Coincidentally, AskMetafilter has a good thread about fixing the redesign: [http://ask.metafilter.com/213264/You-dont-know-what-youve- go...](http://ask.metafilter.com/213264/You-dont-know-what-youve-got-til-its- gone-Gmail-Im-looking-at-you)

</comment><comment><USER48> I totally disagree, more blank space make it easier to read, the BIG problem of the redesign are icons that doesn't clearly mean what they do.

But hey, it's nice that you can revert a bit.

(but i must be satan, i also like FB timeline)

</comment><comment><USER56> A year or two ago I got tired of my email UI changing every week, so I switched to the "plain HTML" view. It's not as fast or smooth or javascript-y but I don't think it's changed a bit in years.

</comment><comment><USER57> There are 2 distinct threads woven through this discussion. One directly addressing Gmail's redesign which touches mainly on UX and implementation issues. The other being the more perennial debate between desktop vs. web mail clients. I wish HN allowed for comment collapsing at least which would make this and other conversations easier to follow just the threads that are of interest. (Reddit has this, not sure why HN doesn't)

</comment><comment><USER58> You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late.

This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run parts of it. Blah.

<comment><USER16> What UI do you use?

I probably going to use newest Thunderbird when I leave gmail.

<comment><USER59> Postbox (<http://www.postbox-inc.com>) is pretty solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Their spam/filtering has gone down hill. It does a great job with the spam. Unfortunately, several people I communicate with a few times a day, half of their stuff goes straight to the trash and I don't see it. If I login to webmail I can see they have both an Inbox and Trash label on them but my phone and mail client to register the new mail and it doesn't show in the Inbox. I just want it to pick one.

<comment><USER52> Can you rephrase that? How do these messages get the trash label?

<comment><USER60> Forgot to mention how they get them.

Either someone has my login and is messing with me by somehow adding the Trash and Inbox label or there is a glitch in the system putting both labels on it. My guess is the glitch.

<comment><USER52> There is no glitch that just adds trash labels. Did you check if you have any filters set up that might be responsible?

<comment><USER60> I did. I cleared out a few filters even though I am 95% sure they wouldn't match the emails. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong though.

The main thing I find irritating is that it contains the Inbox label as well.

Any filter to send something to the trash says "Skip Inbox, Delete It".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Another trick I found is to go into Labs and enable the one that moves the in- browser chat box to the right side of the inbox. It's not as nice as before where it just stacked on the left side, but with the new design it wanted to show me one of the chat box or utility at-a-glance views like my Calendar, but not both. Now I get both again, at the inexpensive cost of horizontal screen estate.

</comment><comment><USER61> I do not like the new redesign, and will have to implement these tips just to make it a little more usable. I wish Google wouldn't do sucky things like this. Also Googe seems to have the worst branding. Google+, really? You think that's more alluring than Facebook? Also, rebranding the android app marketplace as "Google Play"? That's just terrible.

</comment><comment><USER62> I find it hard google took away customizing the theme. The classic theme 'Tree' is the only one that I feel a little good about.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'd also add a tip to check out the Minimalist Suite <http://minimalistsuite.com> \- It's Chrome extension for Gmail as well as other Google properties that allows you to customize the UI and remove of things you don't use. There are many that do this but this is the best IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've always been using the Candy theme, and I like much better the way it looks with the new design. It's quite girly though, which unfortunately might exclude most of HN readers. But I agree that anything other than the compact display density option makes the experience much worse.

</comment><comment><USER65> The android theme is quite good, better than the old one imo. Otherwise, I love the text label.

</comment><comment><USER66> Just use thunderbird if you're on a desktop or laptop (ie. not an ios or android device, although I'm sure they have equivalents).

I recommend installing muttator, the equivalent of vimperator for thunderbird. It will make the time you spend with email much more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sadly for me I dislike the High contrast theme as much as the new default one.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm using Google Apps and the "high contrast" theme is missing from the list.

</comment><comment><USER68> Let me scroll the damn page and not just a viewport!!!

That's my only complain. Had to get it out of my chest. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER69> Wow, tremendously better. I wasn't even aware of some of these like text for the buttons!

</comment><comment><USER70> This reminds me of when people complained about the new facebook design.

</comment><comment><USER71> I "coped" with it by switching to sparrow as my gmail frontend.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't like change.

That said, any browser-based alternatives?

<comment><USER72> I like zoho personally. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of gmail, but it's at least decent and supports custom domains in free option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is more like a "how to revert to 2006 GMail" list.

I mean, he even goes out of his way to turn off Priority Inbox and important markers. That has nothing to do with the redesign - it's just turning off year+ old features, which is what a good portion of the post is. Luckily for the author, options exist to turn off all the features that have been released in the past many years.

Of course, there's some apportioning of valid and invalid frustration with any redesign, and I won't invalidate any of that here. But this post just comes off as "make all the scary new stuff go away!"

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried Priority Inbox for a while when it first came out. It's an interesting feature and maybe it works for some people, but I decided I didn't need it.

It didn't matter until the redesign, though. In the new design, the "importance markers" are very similar in appearance to the stars, and they are right next to each other. It's hard to tell them apart at a glance. That's why I finally had to turn them off.

<comment><USER74> Thanks for the tips, I'd done most of these when they changed to the new theme, but the the icon button/web clip tips escaped me. Thanks for those! I couldn't find the high contrast theme, unfortunately.

As a random anecdotal data point, my inbox would be completely unusable without priority inbox. My email volume is way too high without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> how can that theme be high contrast? it goes from black on white to black on gray!</comment>


Ask: Your Favorite Machine Learning Blog? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for good Machine Learning Blogs to follow. <comment><USER2> this focuses on NLP

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

this is also great

[http://colah.github.io](http://colah.github.io)</comment>


Mac DeMarco on Anxiety, Alcoholism and the Mitski controversy - <AUTHOR> https://www.huckmag.com/shorthand_story/mac-demarco-cowboy-mitski-interview-nobody/ <comment><USER2> I love Mac's music. The single/album name clash sounds like a huge waste of time, can't believe anyone even mentioned it.

<comment><USER3> We live in an age of outrage, people will always find ways to make something out of nothing.

<comment><USER4> Spot on. This controversy doesn't surprise me at all.

I am a little surprised Mac wasn't aware of her album, though. You would think the Mac world and Mitski world are relatively close circles in indie rock.

What I really wanna hear, is some of those Mac/Anderson Paak jams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't realize there was a Mitski controversy. I knew the songs had the same name, but it's just a single word that can represent a few different emotions. It's not like it was a super-specific title.

<comment><USER6> I only knew of the Mitski album until just this moment.

Clearly cowboys are now in.

I was all prepared to denounce the social-media hordes for yet again descending to defend the honor of someone who didn't ask for that... but all the mention I can find of the "controversy" is a few articles quoting the same handful of pretty tame (if wrongheaded) tweets. Maybe I should be denouncing the bloggers instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Leave Mac DeMarco alone, dude is chill and playing some tunes that aren't trying to fuck with anyone.

<comment><USER8> Yup. I think this dude has earthbound playing on the video screen at his shows. He aint lying about listening to video game music!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I missing something? Why is this here.

<comment><USER10> This was submitted by a user that only submits articles from the same site, almost none of which are really on topic for HN. Flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surprisingly, they don't mention his association with Freemasonry in his younger years. It may have helped him develop healthy coping mechanisms, being involved in a group larger than himself.</comment>


Redis on steroids: Autocomplete using Redis, Nginx and Lua - <AUTHOR> http://www.cucumbertown.com/craft/autocomplete-using-redis-nginx-lua/

<comment><USER2> This implementation is too naive. You can't just autocomplete queries, you have to accept typos and errors and suggest the correct query. That's the hard part.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great need to figure out a good way to do request verification maybe to ensure the request it properly signed.

Update: this looks like a good article describing a verification scheme [http://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx- authentication-...](http://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx- authentication-module-in-lua/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The usual implementation for autocomplete is to generate a trie data structure. A naive implementation will not have auto-correction or fix problems more established implementations have already addressed.

<comment><USER5> I'm currently implementing my own trie (for learning) for my own autocomplete module ... and I don't see how a trie (prefix tree) can solve the issues you just wrote.

<comment><USER6> When you traverse the prefix tree and you are blocked: meaning, the prefix does not match an entry in the structure, you perform edit operations: insert, delete, transpose, and substitute. If one of those garners a match, you keep going down the tree until you reach your edit distance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Redis, nginx, and Lua and wrote my own autocomplete implementation using Metaphone (e.g. [https://github.com/threedaymonk/text](https://github.com/threedaymonk/text)) but after a while it became clear that what I really wanted was an instance of Solr.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if replacing nginx+lua with [http://webd.is/](http://webd.is/) would be faster (and maybe easier to deploy)?

<comment><USER9> Could be.

We build something similar using node.js and it's working quite well. Perhaps we can open source that someday...</comment></comment>


Ask: Has Microsoft spent your trust - <AUTHOR> Microsoft has spent the little trust they had earned from me with this KB in particular: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3035583
No matter if I hide it from the Windows Update list,  it comes back as it just did.
I ruined one installation with this shady update and I've started checking every single update something I used not to do in the past. <comment><USER2> Microsoft has not spent my trust.

I was born in a Mac OS household. By the time I was born, my parents used Apple II clones and Macintoshes for over a decade. I have used Macintosh my whole life, except for the time before I was computer literate.

There was a time when I played Lord of the Realms on hand-me-down Windows 3.1 greyscale laptop I got for free in 2005, and a time when I played Age of Empires on another hand-me-down Pentium I desktop I bought for $99 in 1999. Those were the best times. I also used PowerPoint during primary school and high school.

Having no other experience with Microsoft software, I cannot emphatically say Microsoft has spent my trust.

On the other hand, I have a huge degree of trust in Apple software, which, I must say, has been slowly eroding in the years since the passing of Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> A long, long time ago:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

</comment><comment><USER4> Quite a while ago. There never was any alternative as comfortable as the GUI tools people make of Windows, so i kept putting it off for a while.

But somewhere around the start of the Win 10 malware i decided to bite the bullet and moved my work environment to Linux for good.

Looking at where MS was going it would have happened anyway, so better sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER5> Kb3035583: _Update installs Get Windows 10 app in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1_

Yes, they spent my trust. I switched my settings so updates aren't installed automatically because now I can't trust them not to perform some unwanted upgrade. Running "Never10" (disables Win10 update) seems to have fixed the immediate problem but not the lost trust.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually OK with Windows 10 (with Telemetry off), but still think the GWX overstepped the line. I'm sure they started the program out of good will (make people aware that you can upgrade), but the later practice is nothing but malice.

However, my little bit of trust in Microsoft was spent after I bought their hardware, in particular the still-running Surface Pro 3 Battery-gate[1] (I'm the person who started the thread in Microsoft Answer forums.) Microsoft lied about battery replacement cost, keep treating that the battery problem didn't existed, and insist it's a $560 replacement instead of the promised $200. I'm lucky that media outlet picked this up otherwise I probably won't even get the "we're aware of the issue" response.

That pretty much stop me from ever thinking about being their customer again, for anything ever.

[1]: [https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/73079/surface- pro-3s-simpl...](https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/73079/surface- pro-3s-simplo-batteries-responsible-microsofts-newest-surface-headache)

<comment><USER7> "Telemetry off"

Haha... Right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes. The GWX program, in my opinion, is malware (especially in its blatant disregard for lack of consent); the fact that it's the OS vendor pushing such stuff makes matters _worse_ , not "okay".

(I'm not going to recount the man-hours and lost revenue we got from "admit it, you know you want WinX, and we'll give it to you NOW; it's not like you actually _use_ the computers for anything")

</comment><comment><USER9> Not really, I also don't get what's the big deal about forcing you to upgrade to Win10. It seems that some people just cannot be satisfied no matter what they do. WinXP lockdown = bad, automatic (and free) upgrades = bad. Than what is good?

I use both Windows and Mac. I have no problem with both of them. Also, C# and VS rocks.

<comment><USER4> The big deal is that it does not ask whether you want to upgrade or not. It just did, whenever it damn pleases, regardless of whether you have work to do or whether your computer/work environment can handle it.

That's the trust-killing dick move, not the Win 10 itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried out Windows 10. I lasted 5 days, I think. I signed in to a Microsoft account, and the password on my PC was changed without my permission. That password was only saved in Lastpass. It's 16 digits of random characters. I eventually accessed my computer and immediately reverted to Windows 7.

I still haven't switched to Windows 10 on my home PC. I won't use Windows for anything work related but I need it for gaming. The day Linux is good enough for gaming, I'll say goodbye to Microsoft forever.

<comment><USER11> if that's all that's keeping you from linux, install Windows in KVM/Qemu and use GPU passthrough for graphics. full-speed gaming in a linux-owned sandbox will change your life.

<comment><USER10> I'll have to look into that setup. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I didn't have a smartphone, I suppose it's theoretically possible the Windows 10 upgrade could be my greatest privacy/anonymity concern. That theory however depends on a a universe in which I never browsed the web with cookies enabled, never played Flash content that I wouldn't want to watch with my mother, and never typed anything into the Mountain View company's search box.

In this universe, I actually have less concern about Microsoft doing something creepy with my keystrokes than I do about Canonical doing so. I run Ubuntu and it wants to send my keystrokes to Amazon and whichever search engine has the current paid placement in Unity. At least with Microsoft it's not continuous direct monetization.

If Windows 10 was a big concern, I wouldn't install it or run it on any of my computers. But that's just me. I run Ubuntu for other reasons. The machines I've upgraded to Windows 10 have had most of the crap turned up except for the peer to peer upgrades. It's right there in the install.

<comment><USER8> "But everyone and their dog is doing the same" is just a sophisticated synonym for "meh." If everyone jumped off a bridge, would that make it okay for each of the participants?

Plus, the "privacy and anonymity" angle is just one of the facets; "unconsented install of whatever" goes beyond privacy (availability, anyone?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A while back. It was fairly clear to me that they thought they were going to herd everyone into a walled garden with their surface/ windows 8 RT strategy which obviously did not work. They had planned to muddle the market so customers would accidently buy an RT table instead of a full PC tablet. RT tablets could only install from an app store. That didn't really work and about that time is when Ballmer said fuck it and handed the company over to people who have no comprehension of western ideals about what is culturally acceptable when it comes to privacy. Original Microsoft was built from an environment that grew up with the fourth amendment, a valid functioning legal system, etc. Current Microsoft culture is wholly international and reflects the lack of privacy culture, civil rights, and government restraint in many countries represented in large numbers at Microsoft.

<comment><USER14> The RT tablets were created because ARM processors were the only ones at the time hitting the benchmarks for tablet power consumption and form factor. It was entirely a play to get Intel to spend more money on x86-compatible tablet and mobile processors and it worked. The lockdown on the RT tablets was the simple basics of different processor architecture and very few Windows applications with working ARM builds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me their new privacy policy was already enough. A company, which actively worked with the NSA in the past, asking me to sign a document which would allow them to access any of my personal data whenever they have a "good faith belief" that doing so is necessary. What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER16> Well, glad you asked.

The part that goes wrong is that you don't have to view a Privacy Policy behind a tiny poorly colored hyperlink before clicking "I Agree".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Few years ago I bought Windows 8.1 from some online store. Used the activation key, worked fine, after few months needed to format the system and reinstall windows. Activation key won't work anymore, called the MS support, told them the key, found out that the key was from some "student/education program" and is no longer valid... WTF.

For last 2 years I have been using macOS (osx) and no crap of activation there and most importantly once you understand the abstractions of UNIX you wouldn't want to use any other architecture :)

I guess some major problem with Windows is the business model of OEM around the OS.

<comment><USER18> Maybe your issue should be with the online store who sold you a bad key? I don't see what microsoft has to do with this.

The police coming to take away a stolen macbook after you buy it from a dodgy site is going to make you mad at apple?

<comment><USER17> My point is that they MS business model is responsible for these problems. Yes the store is selling keys that are not meant for selling but the whole key thing is in the place because of the business model. There are ways to figure out that the a macbook is stolen and you can avoid it but how are you going to figure out if the key will give you problems later before using the key?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My trust in Microsoft was always limited because they have been behaving like crooks for as long as I remember. They have stooped to new lows though with the "Get Windows X" program and even more with Windows 10 itself. I do not trust them at all anymore. I actively avoid handling my personal data on devices running Microsofts software.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes it did. I start using a lot (as a student) Visual Studio and Windows 7 after a year with Linux. By this time products were good. I got a Windows Phone 7 and developed some app on it.

After that Microsoft release Win8 with its insane UI that make me loose time compared to previous versions and it was mandatory to develop for WP8. Then it release WP8 with no upgrade for existing phones. It purposely "uglify" VS 2012 removing all color and using CAPS menu which I found more difficult to use.

Things got even worst with Win10 where they actually didn't listen to feedack and release an OS with start menu not really usage. And forced people to migrate by changing their whole system! Also bugs, bugs and bugs with both the system, new version of Visual Studio. And on the phone side they kill the entire Nokia line-up and still no manage to release a usable version of Win10 for phone in on year. The insider builds each broke more stuff than they fix even to the point you cannot even deploy an app.

I franckly tired of this cr*p. Promises not kept. And the fact Microsoft had cards to do great stuff but self destroy them. Many times. I'm still using VS and C# because that's awesome but I will not change my system for Win10. That's why the .net core stuff is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER21> What litle trust they had from me was obliterated by their practices over the last year.

Never buying anything Microsoft again.

I will begrudgingly continue to use W10 as I am a heavy-duty PC gamer but I've locked that shit down as tight as is humanly possible.

All my personal computing and development will be done solely on Arch from now on.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been happy with Windows 10 on all my devices. I didn't have any issues with GWX, because I switched over early on, at my convenience. What I hear about it since doesn't sound all that different from what I remember of iOS upgrade nags.

<comment><USER8> iOS nags. GWX oversteps the line and installs regardless of consent. _That_ was the breaking point for me. (Win10 clean install is reasonably usable, although the mix of not-Metro-nooo and old Windows GUI style is weird)

<comment><USER14> The buttons are "Update Now" and "Update Later"; "Update Later" is a sort of consent. I do think there was an issue with it using the window close button as an implicit "Update Later" and that is a bad UX they should have tried to avoid.

I don't mind the mix of app styles these days. I realize it will take a lot of effort for developers to modernize some old applications and there are many old applications that will never be modernized due to disinterest from developers or no active development or too big of a code base.

(I also like that modern apps can run on all my devices, including my phone, as I'm one of the few weird Windows 10 phone owners.)

<comment><USER8> And if you are not present at the screen, it ass-u-mes "where do you want to go today? Wait, that's not up to you: Windows X it is!" Very useful when employees turn up for morning shift to find a Brand New Os. Which doesn't play well with hardware (because the HW vendor is still working on a WinX driver). Which was the reason the upgrade from Win7 had not been greenlighted _yet_. But hey presto, all great and good; never mind that a company can't do its business; that's not a problem for MS, here's your bunch of broken boxes, and _that 's your problem now_. We got what we wanted, screw everything else: [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hkAhasCtTg8/Tny1nldYIFI/A...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hkAhasCtTg8/Tny1nldYIFI/AAAAAAAAAGc/KcSFrDNv2xs/w506-h419/computer%252Cdesign%252Cimages%252Cphilosophy%252Ccomputers%252Ccartoon-c020938493360a30c06cc73132112e7d_h%255B1%255D.jpg)

And yes, this is exactly what "spent trust" is: orders came from On High to take off, nuke the site from orbit, repave with Win7 images, and never ever let Windows Update touch the boxes again (!): MS is now, by executive fiat, considered rogue ("we literally cannot afford another Windows X infection, WU is now an attack vector"). Everybody loses (except for that guy at MS whose bonus hinges on number of finished WinX installs; btw if he's reading this: you are, personally, a reason why we can't have nice things): security is undermined by no more patches, man-months are wasted on getting stuff to work again, there's plenty of MS-directed anger, customers are angry at company, not to mention we won't get WinX anytime soon, if at all. Whether anyone is willing to convince the mgmt that they've overreacted over MS's overeager installer is left as an exercise to the reader.

(The "close-as-yes" is also not "an issue", it is not mere "bad UI" \- that is black-hat UX (and oh, very much against MS's own UX guidelines, hello hypocrisy!); deception, plain and simple.)

((The mix of app styles is but a minor quirk; and for really oooold apps, there's Virtual PC anyway.))

<comment><USER14> «The "close-as-yes" is also not "an issue", it is not mere "bad UI" \- that is black-hat UX (and oh, very much against MS's own UX guidelines, hello hypocrisy!); deception, plain and simple.»

I don't attribute that to malice but an honest mistake. I think there was a combination of engineering pride involved ("Why wouldn't people want to upgrade as soon as they could?") and engineering obstinacy ("We don't want another XP!"), perhaps even more than that marketing metric everyone thinks they were focused on.

As for the anecdote of the business outage. My condolences. It sounds like the HW vendor should have done a better job at messaging to Microsoft that their existing hardware driver was not testing compatible with Windows 10 (and maybe a better job at their driver in general). Also, companies had the options to use System Center and Group Policy to drive GWX away, and admittedly that's not an easy admin task, but generally something companies should do for mission critical PCs anyway. (Not to mention that GWX is/was different on Enterprise SKUs and possibly a sign your anecdotal company was using not properly licensed Home or Pro SKUs on mission critical machines.)

<comment><USER8> See? "Blah blah blah not MS problem (plus a poorly veiled accusation of piracy, to add insult to injury)"

Anyway, doesn't matter now if the GWX fiasco was malicious or not. Damage is done.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, was not accusing of piracy, only possible ignorance. I've worked with companies that didn't know the difference between Home and Pro and Enterprise SKUs and I don't think everyone realizes how many small and medium sized business run on Windows Home editions.

Windows is a huge ecosystem and there is a lot of blame to pass around in every direction. I admitted that it was an MS problem, but I was also trying to point out that it was an ecosystem problem too. (There hasn't been a major driver architecture change between Vista and 10 and it blows my mind how many drivers needed new releases every Windows version between Vista and 10 and weren't just magically compatible.) Apologies if that point did not come across well.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for the clarification; my apologies for venting at you as if you were MS. There were ways that the organization should have blocked the upgrade better; and I agree that the need for new drivers where old ones ought to be fine is definitely not MS's fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Microsoft spent my trust with the Palladium incident, but I left beforehand for greener pastures/uptimes.

\- Linux-only since 1999.</comment>


A look at the 2014 Mac mini - <AUTHOR> http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/100240431773/a-look-at-the-2014-mac-mini <comment><USER2> In the various laptops, soldered-on RAM is a trade-off for the increasing thinness of the machines. Whether it's worth it will depend on the individual's needs.

In this case, the Mac mini is the same size as the previous generation, which had had user-replaceable RAM. Soldering it on the RAM in this new generation is just a dick move on Apple's part. It's hard to think of a legitimate reason for them to do this except to make more money from you.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I was really looking forward to what apple would do with the Mac Mini as I wanted it to be my first apple purchase. To be fair,the update seems like a _downgrade_. Even on the keynote, the product seemed neglected.

It looks like I am going look for small form factor cases and stick Linux on them and probably get a Mac book Pro when I save up enough money.

<comment><USER4> Intel NUCs are really interesting small form factor PC kits - a nice medium between completely from scratch (which can be a real pain in SFF) and completely prebuilt. i3/i5 Broadwell NUCs are announced for early 2015.

<comment><USER5> NUC sucks however. Its way too small.

I think I prefer the slightly larger mini-PCs from Zotec. If I build from scratch, the AMD-based AM1 platforms are superb. $30 socketed miniITX motherboards and $20 chips are great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't help but think this offering is designed to make people not miss the Mini when it's discontinued in a year or two.

This article read really positive despite basically saying the Mini is a terrible purchase. If you want a toy Mac with no concern for performance, most models from the past few years will suit you if you can find a good deal on Craigslist.

I was on the fence because I really wanted a Mini and the new $700 version didn't seem terrible, but now with the knowledge that they put tamper-proof screws on it and bundled it with a 5400rpm HDD ($200 minimum to get an upgrade), I feel like they're not interested in customers like me.

I found an Asus form factor prefab ([http://www.amazon.com/Asus-VivoPC- VM40B-02-ASUS-Desktop/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Asus-VivoPC- VM40B-02-ASUS-Desktop/dp/B00KU54KPQ)) that should handle the HTPC/Plex/quiet/price/value minimum requirements I have in case anyone else was looking for alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER7> The news about the non-upgradable RAM is tough to swallow.

About the only remotely positive spin I can put on it is that, relative to the 2012 Mac Mini, the "Apple tax" you pay for 16GB of RAM on the 2014 Mac Mini is somewhat offset by the reduction in the price of the base hardware.

The Mac Mini matters to me, because they make nice servers - companies like MacMiniColo and MacMiniVault will host your Mac Mini for $50 a month or less.

From a pure "computing horsepower per dollar" perspective, it's superior to virtual hosting - try hosting a 200GB database on a virtual host with 16GB of RAM and virtual CPUs anywhere near the performance of those in the Mac Mini. It gets real expensive real fast.

Obviously, virtual hosting has a boatload of other advantages, and it's the right solution for most situations. But Mac Mini hosting fills a niche for small companies with data < 1TB.

<comment><USER8> For $50/month you can get a Xeon E3 1225v2 with 32GB ram and 3-120GB ssds and 300mbps pipe nowadays.

<comment><USER9> I doubt that in the US you could get 1U, 300mbps unmetered, and 2amps for $50/mo. Forget about it if you throw in the hardware as well.

Now if you said 1U, 1amp, and 10TB of metered bandwidth, then $50/mo sounds more like it.

[1] - [http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131)

<comment><USER10> [http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential- servers/](http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/)

OVH pricing gets you pretty close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No sale. This has to stop somewhere. They're not smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER12> For a home server, consider the Dell T20 instead. $299 for low-power version, $499 for quad-core Xeon & 4GB ECC, officially supports Linux, no OS bundled.

[http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/pc- mac/peripherals/serve...](http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/pc- mac/peripherals/servers/dell-poweredge-t20-mini-tower-server-1257381/review)

As for size, unless you're living in an RV, put it under a desk. Just Say No to being hypnotized by shiny rectangles.

Consumers and small businesses can have an affordable server with incremental upgrade to many TBs of storage and 32GB RAM, plus OSS software to take low- latency, surveillance-free advantage of all that computing power and local storage/cache. HP and Lenovo sell similar models. With virtualization, it can run more than one operating system, replacing several boxes.

Why settle for a neutered and overpriced shiny rectangle?

<comment><USER7> Those Dells would be better than Mac Minis for a lot of things, but not others.

Clearly the Dell is more expandable and potentially more powerful depending on config. 32GB RAM ceiling is fantastic too, especially for virtualization.

Physical size is an issue for some applications but not others. Either one of these would be fine as a workstation, but I know which one of these boxes I'd want in my living room. Size also matters if you're racking these things up, or having one colo'd somewhere.

The Mac Mini kills the Dell in terms of performance/watt, especially when you move past the base CPU models of either the Mini or the T20. That _alone_ can erase the price advantage of the Dell (over several years of ownership) if you're using them as always-on servers and you factor in the cost of providing cooling for them as well. Again, this is an issue in some scenarios but not others.

<comment><USER12> If the priority is performance-per-watt, then an Intel NUC offers user- upgradeable disk and RAM, plus a range of processors from low-power Bay Trail Atoms to i7 vPro, at a smaller size than the Mac Mini.

The next version of the NUc will support Broadwell (Core) and Braswell (Atom) with a much-reduced power envelope that beats the Haswell processors in this "new" Mac Mini. And it will support 4K graphics with integrated GPU.

[http://www.extremetech.com/computing/188533-intels- nuc-2-0-l...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/188533-intels- nuc-2-0-leaks-the-next-unit-of-steam-machines-and-home-theater-pcs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Non-flame question here: what does running Mac OS as a server buy you?

I love my apple hardware and depend on my mbp as my primary computing device, but don't see the appeal of mac os X as a server environment. The things that make the mac great (for me) don't add value -- and in fact get in the way. I'm much much happier using Linux on my servers and much much happier NOT using it on my day-to-day machine.

I can imagine there could be some specialized cases in which running services on the mac make sense but I am astonished there are enough that macminicolo can make a business of it (and congrats to them for this by the way!). I assume this is a failure of imagination on my part, thus my question

<comment><USER14> My assumption was that these Macs were primarily used for automated headless testing of iOS applications; as a (relatively) cheap Mac that is able to run the simulator and whatnot, this could make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In comparing the low and medium end minis, I'm reminded of the below Arstechica article about the then-new low end iMac. It seems as if it's primary purpose was to meet a price point and make the next jump up look good. It'll be interesting to see how the various benchmarks turn out.

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/07/1099-imac-review- lose-5...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/07/1099-imac-review-lose-50-of- your-performance-to-save-18-of-the-money/)

<comment><USER7> Anecdotal, but the original $499 G4 Mac Mini -- along with iPods -- was my "gateway drug" when it came to switching from Windows to Macs.

<comment><USER16> Same for me. Bought the entry-level g4 mac mini, and it led to another mini, two macbooks, and ipod, iphone, and 3 ipads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always considered using Mac only software a risk, because I have to depend on a single company. That's why I've mainly used software that is either free or available on cross platforms (Except of course software like XCode). What if my Mac suddenly stops working? I need to get another Mac to continue working. With non-Mac Computers, I can at least get a cheap temporary replacement to continue working. This move makes me even more dependend not only on their software, but now also much more on their price policy. For instance, say I need at least 16 gig of RAM for serious web development with VMs. Now I can't simply replace my broken MBP with an Mac Mini and upgrade with cheap RAM but I have to completely buy in. What if they suddenly hard solder HDDs as well? I can't even replace my broken hard drive quickly. As a freelancer, this dependency is too dangerous and I really hope that this move leads other customers to consider their dependency on a single vendor.

<comment><USER3> _What if they suddenly hard solder HDDs as well?_

I have a somewhat weird feeling that this is going to happen in a couple of years.

<comment><USER18> It already has, in a way. The Air's SSD already fits that description.

<comment><USER19> All versions of the MacBook Air appear to have upgradable storage, even though none of them have upgradable RAM.

I base that on MacSales.com offering storage upgrades for all 5 generations of MBA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a 2012 mini with 16GB RAM (I play some games on it). I won't be buying one of the new ones because of this.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like Apple a lot, but I find it more and more tiresome the fact that, if I want an OS X desktop that doesn't try to squeeze underpowered, overpriced laptop components into a tiny chassis, I would have to buy a Mac Pro. The fact that you can't even replace the RAM on these newest models is pretty grotesque.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can live with soldered-on RAM - there is a bit of an Apple premium to the RAM they sell, but at least you can get the configuration you want. I'm much more disappointed by the lack of a quad-core option. I was planning on picking up a high-end quad-core Mac mini when they updated the line, but after the announcement on Thursday I ran down to the nearest Apple Store and bought a 2012 quad-core Mac mini instead.

I wish I could have bought the 2.6GHz quad-core as opposed to the 2.3GHz, but that was a build-to-order option only. Still, the 2.3GHz is much faster than the top end 2014 Mac mini when it comes to multithreaded performance:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/19/mac- mini-2014-benchmark/](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/19/mac- mini-2014-benchmark/)

<comment><USER23> The problem with the current Apple approach is that it forces you to make the decision about how much RAM you may need beforehand, and charges you extra for the privilege. Making the RAM on a desktop machine non configurable is a greedy move, and allows them to announce that their machines are affordable, while disguising the fact that most people have to buy the more expensive options.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly my problem with it. Every machine I've ever bought, I've upgraded the RAM later in life when I genuinely needed the upgrade and benefitted from much lower pricing. Now, that cost is needlessly frontloaded; either I pay much more for the RAM I won't need for at least a year or two, or I live without it and potentially have to upgrade sooner. It's definitely a greedy move on Apple's part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What kinds of workloads are out there that people are willing to run on machines without ECC?

<comment><USER25> You mean RAM with error correction? If so, I don't think many home users have such memory, it is mostly used on servers.

<comment><USER11> * and workstations.

It's one of the reasons I do a lot of my work on a proper machine with ECC and SAS disks.

Due to some duff RAM a few years ago I lost a week of work. It silently corrupted filesystem buffers.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Open source remote job aggregator - <AUTHOR> https://goremote.io

<comment><USER2> I have already shared this with a few people. Looks like it will be really useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> looks incredibly useful, ive been looking for a remote job, has some sources ive never seen before, definitely worth checking out

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll also be adding a JSON API shortly

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

</comment><comment><USER5> nice +1</comment>


Ask HN: Bitcoins, where to begin? - <AUTHOR>

What is the best tutorial for a beginner to start BitCoins? I am new to this and so far all I have got is a Bitcoin ID. I need more insight, Please help!!!! <comment><USER2> Is your intention to learn more about the protocol, try to invest, mine bit coins, use it to buy stuff, work on using the programmability of the protocol to create new types of stuff?

If you're on HN, you're probably a technical person. There's a lot of great resources about the protocol itself that are interesting, but this is one of my favorite introductory resources that kind of made it all click for me.

[http://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core- fin...](http://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core- finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it)

</comment><comment><USER3> The best way to get into Bitcoin is reading Satoshi Nakamoto's paper that started everything: [http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

Generally [http://bitcoin.org](http://bitcoin.org) is the de-facto resource to bootstrap your cryptocurrency know-how.

If you like podcasts, the folks at [http://letstalkbitcoin.com](http://letstalkbitcoin.com) are fun to listen to and informative as well.

Have fun and good luck!</comment>


Is 20$/hr enough for frontender in LA? - <AUTHOR> Hey, working in a broad types of front-end development jobs, I am hearing a much words like starting rate is 25$/hr netto, less is for newbies who don't know what is OOP is and can only make GOTO spagetti code. Others are saying that 20$/hr is normal rate worldwide for any developer. Calculating wage with 20$/hr it is 3200 USD per month on hands which is good for most cities, maybe not for SF / LA due to rent costs. So which rate is fair for you %username%? <comment><USER2> Median LA developer salaries on full time basis ([https://teleport.org/cities/los- angeles/salaries/](https://teleport.org/cities/los-angeles/salaries/)) seem to be 66k for web developer (for the lack of FE in taxonomy) and 78.7k for software engineers in general.

Without knowing your personal tax situation it is hard to deduct your net hourly income from this - so probably more useful to discuss and compare gross (pre-personal-tax) billing rates when trying to understand the market?

Two more LA cost & quality of life, as well as salary comparison research links for you: * [https://teleport.org/cities/los- angeles/](https://teleport.org/cities/los-angeles/) * [https://teleport.org/salaries](https://teleport.org/salaries)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can find lots of resources on typical salaries online. [1]

A better question to ask: What value do I bring to a company when I do work for them? I refer you to the comments of HN's resident expert on value: patio11. [2] Patrick has written about this very topic on his blog. [3]

[1] salary.com, for example.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11)

[3] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and- patrick-...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick- mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/)

[Also, it's good form to prefix this subject with "Ask HN:"]

</comment><comment><USER4> As a full stack developer in NYC, I wont entertain a job for less than $130k/yr + bonus. I have bills and a family to support. Before I left Houston (3 years ago), the going rate was $35-40/hr for contract work. My first job out of Highschool was $18/hr in a mom and pop consultancy, but that was 11 years ago now. I can't imagine working for hourly for $20/hr and having bills that I have to pay.

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely too low for US or anywhere in the western world. It depends how much experience do you have, and if you're talking about full time or consulting positions.

I'm based in London, so prices here are a little different (and lower), but I wouldn't consider anything less than $40/h.

For reference, I have 10 years experience and the lowest I can go, as a freelancer, is $60/h -- full stack engineer.

</comment><comment><USER6> no.

not sure about contractor rates, but in major centres (NYC and SF), a starting salary for top tech firms is very approximately $100k/yr (within a standard deviation). now, even a front-end dev would be expected to know algorithms, big-o notation, (maybe OOP as well), etc, etc, to get through the interview process at a top firm and secure such as a salary, but it gives us a reference point.

so, just using that, extrapolate from there depending on:

1) firm you work for (not everyone works at Google [or wants to] ...) -- if you go work for a non-profit, maybe that's more like 70k or 80k, or whatever.

2) where you live -- but salary does not go up/down linearly with cost-of- living, so don't shave off too much just because the cost of living is lower somewhere else.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your comments guys, it is really awesome information. I hope you are talking about amount after tax aka clear money?</comment>


Assembly Line Nuclear Reactors Are Quietly Building Steam in the Northwest - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/assembly-line-nuclear-reactors-are-quietly-building-steam-in-the-northwest <comment><USER2> This is great. I've always thought that the reaction to Fukushima should not have been "get rid of nuclear power generation because it's too dangerous", but rather: "using a handful of giant reactors is too dangerous, scale them down and spread them out so that a local disaster has limited ability to cause catastrophic harm".

<comment><USER3> I agree with your larger sentiment, but disagree that current reactors are too dangerous.

Let's look at what happened at Fukushima:

1) Massive earthquake 2) Massive tsunami 3) Devastating fire 4) Complete loss of power to all control circuitry

An extreme worst-case scenario if there ever was one, and yet no one died.

<comment><USER4> _...and yet no one died._

Yet.

EDIT: Don't mistake; I'm (conditionally) very pro-nuclear power. But the fallout (pun not intended) from Fukushima is far from over, so to be all, "Welp, dodged _that_ one" is a little disingenuous.

<comment><USER5> To visit the area surrounding Fukushima you need a rad-protected hazmat suit, because apparently the contamination is so bad as to be deemed unsafe for unprotected humans.

Yet if you pulled out a Geiger counter outside of the plant itself, the reading you'd get is less than what you'd see in a typical hot springs bath, the national leisure in Japan.

To be sure there is a difference between relaxing in a high-rad bath for an hour or two, now and then, and living in one 24/7\. The latter probably wouldn't be very healthy, either. But our knee-jerk response to anything involving the word "radiation" some times does more damage (economic, etc.) than the radiation itself.

<comment><USER4> Sure, the _air_ may not be tremendously hot (though I'm still seeing reports of 10-20 µSv/h as far out from the plant as 5km, when the US CFR's recommended annual aggregate dose limit for individuals is 1 mSv), but what about the groundwater? What about the soil?

<comment><USER6> Not an expert on these things, but as I understand it the groundwater can't actually _become_ radioactive, it picks up trace radioactive material. So the next question is, how hard is that to filter, and how many people in Japan drink unfiltered groundwater.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that is correct. Water can not become environmentally radioactive except as tritiated water which has a short lifetime both radioactively, and biologically.

The longest half life for radioactive oxygen is 2 minutes.

Tritium (from hydrogen) has a half life of 12 years, and is harmless externally. Internally it's dangerous but has a half life of only 1 to 2 weeks, so the danger is very limited.

Mitigating the risk even more, tritium is rarely made by reactors (i.e. made in very small quantities), they prefer to make deuterium, which is not radioactive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it clear which design these smaller generators are using? I am a pro- nuclear power guy, but I'd be slightly concerned with the idea of having more of the conventional ones being used as if they're no big deal, even if they're smaller.

<comment><USER9> Depends on which small modular reactor. NuScale mentioned in the article is an Integral Pressurized Water Reactor[0]. A PWR is conventional, but I am not sure where your concern stems from since PWRs and BWRs are the most common reactors in the USA and are some of the most thoroughly studied, especially when it comes to passive safety system design and maintenance.

[0] [http://www.nuscalepower.com/ourtechnology.aspx](http://www.nuscalepower.com/ourtechnology.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Scares" aside, is this really a good idea? Nuclear waste is an essentially unsolved problem of already epic proportions. Incidents too unlikely to ever happen have happened. Any nuclear material running around on trucks is in danger of being involved in catastrophic accidents or just stolen and used for dirty bombs or worse.

Some of these concerns may be alleviated by the reactor design....

<comment><USER3> " Nuclear waste is an essentially unsolved problem of already epic proportions."

No, it isn't.

After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the rock from which it came.

The people who told you it was going to be lethal for umpteen billion years?

They were lying to you.

<comment><USER11> We haven't solved the problem of storing the waste for hundreds of years, either.</comment></comment></comment>