The Raspberry Pi: One year since launch, one million sold - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/the-raspberry-pi-one-year-since-launch-one-million-sold/ <comment><USER2> What a bunch of naysayers...

The Pi isn't the most modern board out there. It isn't the most powerful one or the smallest. It isn't the most open one... But, who cares?

The Pi is readily available from a number of distributors in a number of countries. It is cheap enough. It runs a plain linux distribution that can be easily installed on a plain SD card by anyone with half a brain. It has (documented) GPIO pins.

It serves its purpose just fine. People are curious about it (even if they are attracted by the media-center red herring), they buy it and they learn something.

Many of these people never used Linux, some never programmed anything. Maybe they just mess with it for a while and then put it away.

In the end, it's a net gain.

BTW, for those of you touting supposedly "better" alternatives. Why haven't these alternatives taken off?

And also, why hasn't Beta totally killed VHS... it was so much better...

<comment><USER3> The thing is, it was months between the Foundation launching the Pi and its basic, advertised functionality becoming even close to reliable. Originally, your SD card had to be carefully picked due to firmware bugs that made it incompatible with most of the newer cards on the market, ditto for your USB keyboard and mouse because it was incompatible with many of those too, and the network fell over all the time as well.

In fact, despite the Pi Foundation trying to blame the problems on power- hungry keyboards and people using the wrong power supplies and everything except the Pi itself, an outsider eventually figured out that the USB hardware and driver couldn't reliably talk to any low-speed USB devices like keyboards and mice. Communicating with anything the Pi Foundation didn't explicitly advertise, like webcams or Arduinos, was even more broken.

<comment><USER2> Regardless of that (which I haven't experienced, at the very least because I only got a Pi when they started selling the Rev 2), any platform has its issues at first. The important part is that they recognize them and fix them. People can choose not to buy if the outstanding issues are important to them, but they seem to have chosen to buy en-masse instead...

Unless you are referring to those issues being, in part, from the non-open nature of some parts of the Pi. If that's so, I only have to point to every other platform where there's a ROM with non-open firmware. Being that on the Pi all firmware is loaded on startup, and on other platforms the firmware is there and all that the OS can do is work around it's bugs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Endless marketing for an obsolete surplus item (your last phone is likely to be more capable). Just to clarify:

\- doesn't work without proprietary blobs, ie. you are NOT allowed to learn how it works.

\- doesn't make use of the hardware w/o additional license crippleware

for the fans to clear the fog:

[http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is- un...](http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable- for-education/)

<http://boingboing.net/2010/09/19/intel-drm-a-crippled.html>

The VideoCore graphics processor on the Raspberry Pi in particular needs drivers that do not comply with Fedora's licensing guidelines. Let alone DFSG.

Go with an openwrt friendly router instead (the audio noise and desktop experience is substandard on the pi anyway)

<comment><USER5> Your critique is unfair and one-sided. As an example, I use the PI as an ethernet/web bridge for my microcontroller projects. Your "openwrt friendly router" won't necessarily have (documented!) GPIO pins I can access, a 3.3V-level UART, SPI or I2C.

With the Pi, it took me all of 5 minutes to hook up an MSP430-based device via UART, and another 10 minutes to get a perl script that talks to it via the (included) driver for the UART.

Anyone that tries to compare the Pi to the "android sticks out there" forgets that there are people for whom time is important. I'd much rather start with a popular, documented and well-supported (as in: downloadable distro image that supports all of the hardware) device than hack my way through an undocumented jungle of hardware/software. And I do know what I'm doing, I've written Linux drivers before. I t's just not something I want to do every time I start a new project.

I also think that in spite of the critique of the lack of openness, this is a breakthrough project. Broadcom has been famously secretive and closed. Getting anything from them without being a multi-million device maker and having an NDA has been a nightmare. Now I hope Broadcom will notice that lifting the veil a little brought in some money.

I found the Pi to be an excellent tool, I am thankful to its creators and I wish them all the best.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention the "openwrt friendly router" replaces a "substandard" desktop experience with a _non-existent_ desktop experience...

That's like saying _"the back of a Prius is a bit cramped for my kids as they are growing up, so I replaced it with a motorcycle"_.

<comment><USER5> Well, perhaps, but I really don't understand why people buy Raspberry Pis and try to use them as desktop machine. I mean, this thing doesn't even come with a case, it is clearly not a desktop. It's a hacker's tool.

There is the second crowd that wants to use them as poor-man's video devices, hooked up to TVs. That's fine, and I actually tried running Raspbmc on it. It works. Kind of. Until it breaks. But it isn't your optimal, finely polished and tuned media machine. And I really don't think there is much point in doing it.

The Pi is a hacker's tool. It's great for learning, hobby electronics, various interfacing needs, and lots of other things. But it isn't a notebook, it isn't a desktop, and it isn't a media device.

<comment><USER6> As I see it, the value in a pi is that it is balanced. You can get cheaper devices, you can get devices with more GPIO, you can get devices with lower power consumption, and more powerful devices. The Pi sits in a sweet spot with all of those factors though, things like usb-dongle computers and openwrt friendly routers push all of those nobs one way or the other.

Also, maybe I'm weird but I have never liked xbmc regardless of the device; it is just plain shitty. The pi that I'm using as my home server/media player right now I just use with omxplayer. After years of just using mplayer that is much more comfortable to me. Of course I also use my Roku primarily with curl...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con I kind of get the impression that a lot of their sales went to the uber-geek crowd that already spends lots of money on gadgetry (such as myself). I'm sure it was still a learning tool for them, but whenever I see phrases like

> The Pi has been used as a tool to teach and learn programming

I can't help but think that the vast majority of buyers already knew a lot of what they were doing. But... I could be wrong.

Regardless, it was a good product and had wild success. I'm glad they made it.

<comment><USER7> It's an incredibly fun plaything for geeky people like me, but also educational. I'm learning Python, and I have mine always running and set up so I can ssh to it anywhere from my cellphone. I fire up emacs through ssh and work on my Python programs when I'm commuting by bus or train. I also have it set up with CLISP and Scheme for when I want to mess around with those.

But the funnest thing is that I used samba to mount the music directory on my desktop, so that I can ssh in and play music from my cellphone from anywhere (it's connected to the speakers and TV in my living room). I also use it to play videos from the video library on my desktop.

<comment><USER8> In addition to the NFS mounts (instead of Samba -- no Windows at home!), I took a slightly different route [1] and set up a DLNA server on it, so I can play my media using the various phones and tablets around the house.

It works brilliantly well -- if you have a DLNA-compliant TV, you could use that as well to stream media from what is basically a wireless media centre.

[1] [http://shr1k.github.com/post/2013/02/16/setting-up-a- raspber...](http://shr1k.github.com/post/2013/02/16/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi- powered-headless-media-server-and-nas/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not at all an expert in electronics but I'm still curious what makes a Raspberry PI better than the $40 android USB sticks? Linux? Inputs? Is it just a matter of positioning? Just curious.

<comment><USER10> I've seen very mixed reviews of the Android USB sticks, especially at the low end (~$40 as you say, many are more like $70)... they seem unreliable. They also don't have quite the large community hacking on them that the RPi has.

Not an expert opinion, just the reason I went with the Pi personally.

Also, they run Linux by default, so you don't have to worry about installing it and whether it's going to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting negativity here, mostly disappointment at wanting something that doesn't exist (an actual open source 3D subsystem), but some in performance issues.

The 'all up' RPi is about $100 (less monitor) which is not a bad price for a compact, self contained, programmable computer that is "mostly" open. Lest people forget the original IBM PC and APPLE II were also 'closed' in many ways.

So as a teaching tool, its pretty freakin' awesome. While I might have had someone bring up a cast off PC before, now you can have them using their own machine which is easy to carry in a back pack and transportable. Many folks, even of limited means, have access to a TV set that has a spare HDMI or composite video input. So basically it hits that target pretty well.

Given the sales volume there is some value to someone :-)

That said there are lots of things a simple, non-3D Linux box can do which are really useful. So while its not a 'game console' (although I suspect it could run MAME pretty nicely) its quite useful. And from a 'learn to program' / 'experiment with algorithms' point of view its pretty much lowest entry cost out there (caveat the 'free' discarded PC) so what's not to like?

</comment><comment><USER12> I bought a RP last Christmas to use as a xbmc station with my new TV. I've been quite disappointed, the experience is sluggish, even when overclocked to eleven. Since I bought so much crap with it (power adapter, wireless adapter, power usb hub...), I'll try to recycle it into something else eventually but really all I needed was a 10 feet hdmi cable to plug my computer in.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Raspberry Pi sounds great, but like many others I've been waiting for weeks since my order with no feedback at all on when it might ship.

There's certainly a bias in the shipping thread, but you can find plenty of folks having issues!

<http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=23>

<comment><USER14> Out of curiosity where are you ordering from / having them shipped to?

This is probably the 5th time I've seen someone post something similar but all of mine have arrived within a few days or weeks.

So far I've ordered from Newark/Element14 and MCM Electronics and I'm in the US.

<comment><USER13> I ordered from Allied, and I'm also in the US.

I'm tempted to cancel and place the order elsewhere...

<comment><USER15> I placed my order, heard nothing for 4 months, then all of the sudden got a shipping notice and it showed up two days later. All I know is they're shipping them as fast as they get them.

If it's been a while, why not drop their customer service a note and ask for an update? If you're polite I doubt they'll begrudge you that.

EDIT: Also ordered from Allied in the US (California)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a rasberryPi, its in my closet, doing nothing. Am I the only one on those 1 million sold doing nothing with it?

<comment><USER13> It's something I'd like to tinker with.. I plan on using it as a frontend for my media center with the raspBMC software.

<http://www.raspbmc.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking forward to an ARMv8 chip next year (based on Cortex A53 most likely, and hopefully dual-core).

<comment><USER18> Isn't RPi based on ~2008 technology? If they keep to that philosophy they won't have ARMv8 for a while. I'm sure ~$200 ARMv8 boards will be available but they won't benefit from RPi hype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If they made more, they can sell more.

</comment><comment><USER20> Want to sell another million in half the time?

Get netflix working on it.

(it's not a cpu problem, it's a linux problem)

<comment><USER21> >it's a linux problem

Linux can play videos just fine. It's a coryright / DRM problem.

<comment><USER22> Specifically, it's a Microsoft problem, since Microsoft refuses to license Silverlight's DRM to Linux.

Also, Netflix CAN now run on Linux, as of ~4 months ago: [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-get- netfl...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-get-netflix- streaming-on-ubuntu-1210/40191)

<comment><USER6> I'd call it more a Netflix problem for either choosing silverlight in the first place (or failing to obtain licenses for their media that permitted them to use anything else). I don't know of anybody, _regardless_ of OS, that finds the silverlight requirement pleasant.

<comment><USER22> FWIW, Reed Hastings (the CEO of Netflix) was on the board of Microsoft until November.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Guy makes tech videos for 5 years now. Gets about 50 views each. Keeps at it - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/user/selmateacher7/videos <comment><USER2> IT lessons for your grandma, cool. Just my grandma does not care much, maybe that's why he does not get much views. Also posting 5 videos in a single day does not help. It's better to take some time and produce one good-quality video, even if it takes couple of days.</comment>


Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://copetti.org/projects/consoles/nintendo-64/ <comment><USER2> Since [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134) is a big thread and still on the front page, now is not the best time for a follow-up. If you wait a week or two and then email email@example.com, I can send you a repost invite, which has magic powers a la [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> nitpick time. The "Bomberman Hero (1998)" is not a house sound, it's an amen break structure, also called "jungle" or "dnb". "house" is a specific "4 on the floor" beat.

<comment><USER4> More about the Amen Break: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac)</comment></comment>


Super-Fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/07/20/numeric-input-html-ranges-part-1/#.V49ym7utlR4.hackernews <comment><USER2> From the first screenshot, it looks like their final version has a vertical range slider under each numeric position. Why use a slider vs. simply having the individual number options? E.g. something like:

      1 . 4 6
      -   - -
      2   9 9
      1   8 8
      0   7 7
          6 6
          5 5
          4 4
          3 3
          2 2
          1 1
          0 0

That way you just need to touch the number you want, and not need to manipulate a slider, possibly overshooting the value, etc.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine dividing the column in to ten segments would leave them rather small and difficult to hit accurately, on screen keyboards for instance require a certain amount of prediction to guide missed clicks; a fader lets you dial it in. If you've ever played a stringed instrument (fretless that is), you will know that it's easier to miss your note by a little and then roll your finger to adjust than it is to simply get the note first try without some kind of tactile feedback like a fret, or in the app's case, a physical button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Genuinely curious about the rationals for using non-standard CSS, e.g. webkit- slider-thumb.

<comment><USER5> Sadly, the slider-thumb/slider-track pseudo-element selectors haven't been standardized yet. There are prefixed selectors available for all the major rendering engines, but we were only targeting webkit-based browsers (more specifically, we were building for a webkit-based web view in a Xamarin app for iOS and Android). CSS-Tricks has a good writeup if you're interested: [https://css-tricks.com/styling-cross-browser-compatible-rang...](https://css- tricks.com/styling-cross-browser-compatible-range-inputs-css/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As long as nobody sees/considers it as input validation/restriction :)</comment>


Node-libcurl – libcurl bindings for Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JCMais/node-libcurl <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I just released the latest version of the node-libcurl Node.js addon, which is the only up-to-date libcurl binding for Node.js.

The prebuilt binaries are now using libcurl 7.69.1. Let me know if you have any questions about the module or usage.

It's probably the fastest URL transfer library for Node.js, per some benchmarks I did, but benchmarks generally test scenarios that are far from real-world usage, so there is that.</comment>


The End of Social - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting article, terrible title - add something significant, like "the effects of frictionless sharing"...</comment>


Ikea wants you to stop throwing away your Ikea furniture - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3055971/most-creative-people/ikea-wants-you-to-stop-throwing-away-your-ikea-furniture <comment><USER2> Well, perhaps they should sell spare parts then. I wrote to them a while ago to ask about buying a couple of replacement shelves for a bathroom cupboard, and was told they only sold complete units.</comment>


In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012) - vezzy-fnord http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ <comment><AUTHOR> Speaking of that I recommend watching Pandora's Box documentary. It is fun and pretty well made (although the quality on youtube is rather low).

Here is where they start talking about Gosplan -- the central economic planning department:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h3...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h3gwyHNo7MI#t=1493)

It is funny to hear how they tried to control things. At some point during Stalin's time they planned how many people to arrest and where. No matter if they were guilty or not. The it talks how they tried to modulate various controls -- they measured success by amount of raw material consumed, so all of the sudden they ended up with oversized couches, and trains were being run for thousands of miles empty just to burn the fuel so everyone can get a bonus during the years' end. Then they started to fix prices for everything. That ended in disaster of course and so on.

Then have to like the taxi driver driving past Gosplan and saying "how they hell do they come with such ridiculous plans".

EDIT: They also mention Victor Glushkov, the father of Soviet Cybernetics. Here is a documentary about him as well. It is putting it in good light as if Soviet Cybernetics used in planning would be successful. It is a propaganda film. But it is fun to watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMS1hBhV2-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMS1hBhV2-4)

He talked about paper-less office and economy back in the 60s.

<comment><USER2> So yet another case of Goodhart's Law, this time perhaps before Goodhart formulated it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cosma Shalizi's article is correct, as far as it goes (as far as I know). But some of the commenters here did not read the whole thing. He adds, capitalist free markets can't optimize either: 'If it's any consolation, allowing non- convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo- classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz's contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich- style socialism would have been perfectly viable.) Markets with non-convex production are apt to see things like monopolies, or at least monopolistic competition, path dependence, and, actual profits and power. (My university owes its existence to Mr. Carnegie's luck, skill, and ruthlessness in exploiting the non-convexities of making steel.) Somehow, I do not think that this will be much consolation). [...] 'Both neo-classical and Austrian economists make a fetish (in several senses) of markets and market prices. That this is crazy is reflected in the fact that even under capitalism, immense areas of the economy are not coordinated through the market. [...] ' The conditions under which equilibrium prices really are all a decision-maker needsto know, and really are sufficient for coordination, are so extreme as to be absurd.(Stiglitz is good on some of the failure modes.) Even if they hold, the market only lets people "serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength" up to a limit set by how much money they have. This is why careful economists talk about balancing supply and "effective" demand, demand backed by money.

'This is just as much an implicit choice of values as handing the planners an objective function and letting them fire up their optimization algorithm. Those values are not pretty. They are that the whims of the rich matter more than the needs of the poor; that it is more important to keep bond traders in strippers and cocaine than feed hungry children. At the extreme, the market literally starves people to death, because feeding them is a less"efficient" use of food than helping rich people eat more.'

The article has another weakness, which is that Shalizi does not seem to understand how capitalist corporate planning works in real life. Increasingly, whole supply chains are balanced to point of sale events and other signals of incipient demands. And those whole supply chains do not do open market exchanges, the members are contractually bound. It's not optimal, but it's good enough. And all of that could be done without prices or money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Red Plenty (the book mentioned at the top of this) is truly great and well worth tracking down.

<comment><USER5> Seconded, and Backroom Boys [1] by the same author, is very enjoyable, too, even if Red Plenty is really in a league of its own.

1: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Backroom-Boys-Secret- British/dp/05...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Backroom-Boys-Secret- British/dp/0571214975)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one suspicious of his claim "It will not do to say that it's enough for the planners to approximate the optimal plan...This route is blocked."? It seems to me that in all my experience, computational complexity even for approximations rarely matches up with practical computation required. Computational complexity is worst case, doesn't understand the concept of "good enough for our application" when it's not mathematically defined.

For example, what's the computational complexity of training a deep neural network? Probably something pretty horrendous, even if you say it only has to be approximate within a factor of the optimal weights, and you allow it to fail some percent of the time, etc, etc. You could probably write an article about how training neural networks in the lifetime of the universe is impossible even in theory, if you defined "training a neural network" by starting out with the problem of finding the optimal weights, and then relaxing the requirements. But that entirely misses the point that training a neural network is not fundamentally about finding the optimal weights, but finding some weights which are good enough, which is measured in terms of real world performance in comparison to the alternatives.

Likewise, it seems like the discovery of the mathematics of linear optimization was mixed too strongly with the real-world problem it was trying to solve. The question is whether it is computationally feasible to outperform market based economies using this technique, and that's the only question that's really make-or-break it for the math side of things.

(Of course I may have misunderstood something, feel free to correct me)

<comment><USER7> Approximation of integer programming problems (what the author is talking about more precisely) is actually pretty well studied. From Wikipedia:

> NP-hard problems vary greatly in their approximability; some, such as the > bin packing problem, can be approximated within any factor greater than 1 > (such a family of approximation algorithms is often called a polynomial time > approximation scheme or PTAS). Others are impossible to approximate within > any constant, or even polynomial factor unless P = NP, such as the maximum > clique problem.

> NP-hard problems can often be expressed as integer programs (IP) and solved > exactly in exponential time. Many approximation algorithms emerge from the > linear programming relaxation of the integer program.

It turns out that shortest paths finding (via Bellman-Ford), dynamic programming and linear programming are all interrelated. Figuring out how your linear program can be represented as some other problem, like shortest paths finding, directly yields to generic approximation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I haven't read the book, but I believe one of the largest problems that centrally-planned institutions (like large corporations) face is that the planners tend to remove redundancy too much (in the pursuit of minimal cost).

For example, let say you have chain of 50 products that need to be made into a product. If each of these is produced by one factory and supplied into another, and each factory is late for a week, your new thing is one year late!

This was a frequent problem, that the planners tended to designate one producer of some product, in order to save costs. But the product wasn't good enough or late, and then you had a cascade of failure ending up in shortages of goods.

So there seems to be a tradeoff between redundancy and cost. What is optimal? Would you think it's optimal to say, send the cheapest possible rocket to the orbit, with no backup systems?

However, in the free market, you cannot control redundancy. It just happens through freedom. That pushes it out of the cost optimum but makes it lot more robust, and winning in the real world. A good example of "worse is better" indeed.

I also don't think the actual planning problem is very difficult. There are multinationals that are larger than some state economies and still can do that. So I think traditional economic textbook explanations of central planning failures are wrong, because they ignore the tradeoff.

<comment><USER2> One example of this is the Toyota Just-in-time system, where i believe they have a number of suppliers, some of them mom and pop producers in a basement or loft somewhere, that are gathered up and delivered to the factory as needed.

And i think you find a structure somewhat similar on Germany as well, where quite a bit of the parts manufacturing is done by smaller companies dotted around the nation.

As for traditional economic textbooks being wrong by ignorance, no surprises there. Check out Steve Keen's book on the topic, Debunking Economics.

Also, as best i can tell the soviet system was pretty much a perversion of what Marx was musing about back in the day. I think he even told Lenin that the latter was barking up the wrong tree.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I agree with you, I am sure some places and configurations deal with the problem better.

And I am fan of Steve Keen too.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to charge hostgator hosting to a client? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I have a question for you. I made a website for client and I'm hosting it on hostgator.I have account which costs me about 10$ a month. Now that I sold website to my client, how can I charge them that 10$ for hosting?I have my credit card number typed on hostgator.I can't tell them give your credit card so I can type it in my hostgator control panel and then hostgator will take 10$ from your credit card every month.
This is my first sale and I don't know how to solve this hosting question. Sorry for sounding like a newbie :) <comment><USER2> I wouldn't bother. Have them handle their own hosting. There are multiple possible traps with offering any sort of hosting services.

1\. Look at the business model. Web hosting providers make a seriously small margin on their sales and their profits come from high volumes. It's difficult to add any value there.

2\. You can't offer the support that the hosting company can offer. The hosting company may or may not have good support, but they can provide it 24 / 7. You have your own life and it's not worth having to respond to emergencies when you are normally unavailable. Sure, you may be able to charge for that time, but the host can probably offer that same support for no extra charge.

3\. Problems with hosting can pop up at the worst times. Imagine that you have overbooked yourself, you have multiple deadlines that are just around the corner and then all of a sudden you have to deal with a hosting problem. It's bad that you have to take time away from urgent and probably better paying work to deal with that issue, but it's even worse to have to do a mental switch away from one project, deal with the hosting issue and then have to do another mental switch to get back into the project you were distracted from.

4\. You could be a world class developer but a hosting issue can reflect negatively on you from the perspective of the client. A bad hosting issue can sour the overall experience that the client has with your services. Again, it's just not worth it.

5\. Many developers don't have the expertise to deal with hosting issues, which means you will probably provide a worse service than the hosting company can provide.

6\. Hosting is a commitment that you may not want to make. If you decide to get out of client work, then you will have to deal with migrating your clients into different hosting situations. I have seen this turn out bad for the client.

As the application developer, offer to setup the application on their hosting and offer some sort of maintenance plan for the application, not the hosting. Set the expectation for the client that the hosting provider should be the point of contact for hosting issues and that maintenance issues with the application may have a 24 - 48 hour turn-around (or whatever you feel comfortable with.) Don't even recommend a provider, or if you do, then compile a short list of good providers and have the client make the decision on which one to choose.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why can't you add their credit card to the account? Can you also change the account details so that they own the account?

Barring that, simply charge them $10+n/month, where n represents the value they receive from you handling all aspects of their hosting account. You can charge their credit card on a recurring basis using e.g. Paypal, Stripe (best), another credit card gateway, or simply have them pay you up front for a year. A few hundred dollars as a lump sum is a trivial amount for a reasonable business to pay to have you manage all aspects of hosting their website for a year.

</comment><comment><USER4> Two answers:

a) you can tell them it will be $10 a month for hosting, and offer to set it up for them with their credit card, or the client can make their own hosting account and host it themselves.

b) You can chage up front for a year of hosting, then let them know you'll be contacting them in a year for another year of hosting.

I would suggest a) is the better one. I tried to do b), but then got lazy/too many clients/hosting costs were negligible anyway, and now a bunch of my clients just get free hosting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for answers guys. She just called me to tell me she don't want to type card numbers on internet (afraid :) ), so she will just give me money on hand.</comment>


A Cancer 'Moonshot' Needs Big Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-cancer-moonshot-needs-big-data-1452813330 <comment><USER2> More importantly, we need FDA regulatory reform. There is absolutely no reason that approved anti-cancer drugs in one cancer type and stage should be limited to just those cases. You should be able to spin up a direct Phase II study without going through Phase I. And more importantly you should be able to get these drugs when all other options are exhausted.

People need to read the book "The Death of Cancer" by the former NCI chief Vincent DeVita. I agree that we need a cancer czar and that the NCI needs to run the show including drug approvals. In addition, academia needs to get with the program.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry that you think academia isn't "with the program". There's lots of great basic and translational research going on in the academic sphere. Can you at least elaborate, if you're going to paint us all with a broad brush?

<comment><USER2> Academic cancer centers need to focus on improving clinical outcomes, not just basic research. That cancer centers are associated with primary research institutions universities is largely a compromise between with the NIH and the NCI when the national cancer act was implemented. Tenure is based on basic research publications and on not clinical trials. So therapies are not optimized.

<comment><USER4> How are we supposed to cure diseases we don't fully understand? How can radical new solutions be tested if we don't even know if they're feasible? Basic research answers these questions.

<comment><USER2> If you would have waited until you fully understood a disease in order to treat it then kids would still be dying of leukemia today instead of having a 90% remission rate today. People should read about Emil Freireich and the development of chemotherapy.

<comment><USER5> >"kids would still be dying of leukemia today instead of having a 90% remission rate today"

Do you know a good source for the historical data? I am wondering how they rule out that in the 1950s/60s they saw only much sicker patients, while today a bigger population gets diagnosed and treated. Related, there may be lead time bias: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias)

Any source with discussion of these methodological issues would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Cancer" isn't a single disease or problem domain, but what could be categorized as a syndrome that shares some basic commonalities.

The governmental "War on Cancer" began under Nixon and was pitched as a "moonshot" type of program, which promptly ran aground on the realities of cancers.

If only there were some sort of documentation for this kind of effort... perhaps they could call it "The Emperor of All Maladies" or something.

<comment><USER5> >'"Cancer" isn't a single disease or problem domain, but what could be categorized as a syndrome that shares some basic commonalities.'

Cancer is characterized by having cells with an abnormal number of chromosomes and genetic instability. It is one disease. I don't know the origins of it, but this "many disease" claim sounds like an excuse for lack of progress in targeting aneuploid cells.

"In contrast to normal cells, aneuploidy--alterations in the number of chromosomes--is consistently observed in virtually all cancers." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15549096](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15549096)

<comment><USER6> Of course cancer is a result of genetics gone amok, but that's about as useful as saying that death is caused by hypoxia... of course it is, all death is the result of lack of oxygen to the brain.

Cancer as a disease, in its expression, effects, and treatment, is not a monolith and has been utterly resistant to attempts to treat it as such.

<comment><USER5> If you could count the chromosomes in every cell of a patient's body and specifically kill cells with/without certain numbers, you could cure the cancer. For practical purposes it is one disease with a single identifying characteristic and molecular target. Only technical limitations are preventing a cure.

No disease manifests exactly the same way in every person, so I don't get the point of calling cancer multiple diseases.

<comment><USER7> > you could cure the cancer

Or you could vaccinate against a virus and prevent the cancer. Not all cancers need to be attacked the same way.

<comment><USER5> >"Not all cancers need to be attacked the same way."

Ok, but what does that have to do with the (apparently new) idea of calling cancer "multiple diseases"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't agree with much that Tom Coburn says, but he's right that 'data silos' are a big problem in cancer research. To elaborate on a few points:

\- While enrolling 500 people with breast cancer in a study might be easy enough at one academic hospital, there are lots of rare cancer types. It's fiendishly hard to gather enough cases to do real research on these, and samples are like gold, so people are resistant to sharing.

\- There's lots of duplication of effort. While studies funded by the NIH are required to deposit their data, what's being deposited is raw sequence data, which requires lots of computation, disk, and skill to turn back into useful information about the mutations in cancer.

\- The clinical data (phenotype) that is released with studies is often incomplete or vague enough to be useless

\- Getting data into and out of these access-controlled repositories is, to put it mildly, a pain in the ass.

We do need to protect people's privacy, but removing some of these hurdles would go a long way towards accelerating the field.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, better / more uniform access to patient records would be nice, but more money into basic research is probably the best bet (as it has always been). It makes me think of this Gregory Petsko commentary (open access):

[http://www.genomebiology.com/2001/3/1/comment/1001](http://www.genomebiology.com/2001/3/1/comment/1001)

With the great quote:

"...If a hundred years of cancer research has taught us anything, it is that if you must get cancer, you want to be a mouse, because we can cure cancer in mice."

<comment><USER9> >"...because we can cure cancer in mice."

Actually as far as I know we can't cure mice of cancer - by cancer I mean natural cancers that mice get as they age just like human cancers. I have looked through the literature in great detail and I can't find a single recent paper where anyone has even tried curing mice of cancer. If anyone know of one I would love to read it.

The way we go about trying to cure cancer is insane. We basically take inbred mice, inject them with a cancer cell line to give them cancer, and then treat them with experimental drug X. This process is nothing like how real human cancers arise. On top of this we only test new drugs in people that have failed all other treatments and have very high tumour burdens. We then demand that the new drug have a significant effect in these patients despite us needing drugs that work in newly diagnosed patients. If we get a drug that works it is more by chance than design.

<comment><USER5> >"I have looked through the literature in great detail and I can't find a single recent paper where anyone has even tried curing mice of cancer."

It's interesting how your perspective will change after reading the literature. It is the same thing with the various mutations claimed to cause cancer. For example, in this thread someone claims mutations to BRAF cause cancer. I am nearly certain that inspecting the literature will not result in any studies where that gene in a normal cell was mutated, and then it took on the properties of a cancer cell.

Maybe we will see some data on many cell generations later and in conjunction with various other treatments, but not the direct experiment of "non-cancer cell + BRAF mutation = cancer cell" while "non-cancer ell + control treatment = non-cancer cell".

<comment><USER9> Cancer in humans is never driven by one mutation - if it were there is no way we could reach adulthood. Cancer is the slow process of accumulating mutations in cell lineages - the time between the first mutation in say BRAF and a metastatic cancer is 20 to 40 years. Lots of other mutations have to happen before you get clinical cancer.

<comment><USER5> >"the time between the first mutation in say BRAF and a metastatic cancer is 20 to 40 years"

Actually do you have a ref for this? I can't easily think of how they would date the mutation.

<comment><USER9> I haven't got one off the top of my head, but it is pretty well known. An really good example was the atomic bombs in Japan. They tracked all the survivors and when they got cancer and the delay was in decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we should be talking about 'uranushots' rather than moonshot because 1. the moon is close and now relatively ho-hum while uranus is in another category altogether; 2. For these things to happen a little good luck is required.</comment>


How stupid are banner ads? - <AUTHOR> http://attentionforsale.posterous.com/find-me-in-my-tribe

<comment><USER2> Advertising on the Internet is going the way of social. The new Facebook timeline changes for brands that have a very influential affect on how companies can promote themselves on Facebook is one example. New expectations for advertisers by Facebook & social media will shape the online advertising of the future. Much of what many of us don't like about advertising now may not even be allowed in many places. If you don't believe me then ask some marketers how they feel about not being able to use landing tabs for their Facebook page.</comment>


I Have a Startup – What is the difference between a side-project and a startup? - <AUTHOR> https://mattkremer.com/i-have-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> I think there are several distinctions. You can have a side-project, a lifestyle business, a small business, a startup, etc...

I think a startup is by definition a company hoping to scale fast. By this definition, what the author is doing probably isn't a startup. But then again, everyone define startup in their own definition so maybe it is by his definition.</comment>


Spotify has 320,000 paying subscribers – and is making money - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/mar/17/spotify-subscribers-making-money

<comment><USER2> I have been using Spotify for a while now, and generally think it's a great idea, and provides a great service. I was considering subscribing for the access to their mobile service, though one factor recently put me off.

I don't know how widespread this is within their library, but Spotify interests me in the niche music they serve. When I first got the beta, I loved that I could find a few of the more obscure albums of Irish music on there (don't laugh!) However, a few weeks ago, a large selection of these disappeared. I signed in one day, and many of my playlists were next to empty.

I presume that they encountered a rights issue which forced them to withdraw the music. But from an end users point of view, my quality of service was diminished, without prior warning.

Shame really, but the experience was enough to put me off subscribing.

<comment><USER3> I had that experience of songs disappearing a couple of times too. But it's actually the rights holders who are doing us (and themselves) the disservice here, not Spotify. So I don't think that you'd be rewarding bad service by subscribing; those rights holders who withdrew their music will miss out on the subscription revenue.

I've been using the S60 client for a couple of days now, and it's quite enjoyable. There's a lot that could be improved about the UI, but right now I'm happy for the company to focus on expanding the catalogue (at least judging from their blog, that seems to have been the focus for a while now). (Actually, they should just release a libspotify for ARM dev-package!)

It would be good to have a cheaper option for light users though - I'm considering canceling the subscription just because it's too much money.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone think the smart watch will ever actually take off? - <AUTHOR>

Serious question. <comment><USER2> Apple has a horde of people waiting to buy its devices, it will take off thanks to Apple's marketing and then 2-3years from now, they'll start claiming that they invented smart watches.

</comment><comment><USER3> It all depends on the application. The ones I've seen that act as an extension of some other computing device (typically a phone) are pretty handy (har har).

When used as an additional input device, or for notifications, etc. they are much better for basic interaction than the alternative of accessing the device itself.

<comment><USER4> I dunno...I think smart watches are a wristy venture(hardy har har).I created an account just for that joke.I'll go jump into a fire now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i find it really curious. the phone is already a device for consuming notifications. now everyone is trying to sell a smartwatch to consume phone notifications.. its so meta...

<comment><USER6> The trick is that the phone is a lousy device for consuming notifications. You're either tying up your hand holding it or it's sitting in your pocket and not actually helping. Comparatively, the watch can pass notifications while leaving your hands free, allowing you to get things done.

In the sordid tradition of technology prognosticators, I'm going to make a prediction: there will never be a strong game market for the smartwatch like there was for the smartphone. Games work on the phone because the phone is what you stare at when you're bored. The smartwatch isn't for when you're bored, but rather for when you're busy, so there's no point in gaming on it.

<comment><USER7> I'll second this, but I think there is possibly a huge market for the watch/healthkit integration. As a runner, I'm really excited about the possibilities of a customizable tracker that I don't have to carry in my hand while I run. Particularly pacing my runs. I'd love to have the adaptive touch let me know when I'm falling out of a set pace.

<comment><USER5> i feel like the smart watch is like the pager all over again. it can only display limited notifications, and cannot respond..well not really...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns <comment><USER2> So close... It's the money driving demand for continued overproduction that is the main problem.

Think about a Lime Scooter in the river. Someone paid for the energy to have that scooter produced and shipped across the ocean, but yet didn't actually care enough to keep it from being vandalized. Because the scooter was not bought by someone investing in a cheaper/quicker way to get around that may pay off over a year or two, but rather a startup _hoping_ to saturate the market to eventually control it. Wild preemptive bets look financially reasonable because there is so much investment capital with nowhere else to go, as interest rates are being held low to stimulate the economy so that there are "enough" jobs!

<comment><USER3> Lets overproduce some low cost education, and free health care. Let's overproduce free lunch for school kids. Let's overpay public school teachers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> McKibben's essay is an obvious counterpoint to Bill Gates' assertion that financial divestments are impotent as a greenhouse-gas containment measure.

</comment><comment><USER4> > in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was > designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks' lending > to the industry has increased every year

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess the idea is that if you could somehow get passive investors not to default to investing in the S&P 500 (or similar) then it could be pretty powerful?

What are some other indexes that could use more publicity?

</comment><comment><USER6> Title should be changed to global heating.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is painfully ignorant. Yeah those companies also rely on gravity for there day to day operations. So is gravity responsible for global warming? Should we outlaw both of them?

<comment><AUTHOR> What is more subject to human control, gravity, or access to financial markets?

<comment><USER8> We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using fossil fuels. It's a hypothesis we're currently testing and hoping it will hold.

<comment><USER4> "We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using horses."

\-- Somebody from the beginning of the 20th century.

<comment><USER9> Argubly, there are still economies that rely on horses. Havasupai still gets all their mail by mule, in the USA. Its a matter of scale. There will always be use cases for electric, ICE, and even beasts of burden.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Baling Machine - Jumbo Turnout Auto With Hopper - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJu_JZcMEWE&feature=plcp&context=C48e8237VDvjVQa1PpcFM6NiNYldDVCkOwXalvMf77RdZtvJDqmvo%3D Baling Machine Jumbo Turnout Auto comes with Hopper is highly used to compact waste materials for ease of handling and can utilised it for other recycled purpose.<p>Contact us for more info : firstname.lastname@example.com / email@example.com Tel : 91-11-47571100-99 Mob. : +919958596018 Website : www.advancehydrautech.com , www.advancehydrautech.in <comment><USER2> Looks like the poster is a promoter for 'advancehydrautech'. Verified from posting history.</comment>


60% of all NBA players end up poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/42766400/?slide=1 <comment><USER2> Not surprising. Many of these players come from a lower class background where financial literacy is not taught to them. They likely got through school with the minimum of effort, protected by coaches, teachers, and administrators because they "were good ball players". If they went to college, it was on a basketball scholarship where their preferential treatment would continue.

In short, they've never had to think about anything besides basketball. They go from rags to riches without anyone telling them the obvious: it won't last. Their heroes spend big money on flashy cars and houses, and when you're staring at a seven figure cheque that might seem like a good idea.

They likely grew up in a household where their parents lived paycheque to paycheque, and simply being able to provide for yourself and afford luxuries was considered being smart with your money. They probably thought of their houses and cars as investments, because thinking of them as million dollar wasteful extravagances is depressing. They wouldn't have made the connection that an investment is not something that's expensive, it's something that makes you money.

The average NBA player is raised to play basketball, and that's it. They end up being very good at basketball, and little else. If they are amongst the small cadre who think about life after basketball, then they likely won't be broke. It doesn't even take any special knowledge to be able to live well off $100M in career earnings. They just need to go to a financial adviser and have someone else look after their money. But they don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a surprise at all. I have read many stories like this and the problem is that many of them come from poverty. They get money and they feel very guilty, so they give money to any friends or family that asks. This is why many have such huge entourages.

One player was paying rent for 15 of his friends. It wasn't some cheap place either, but at high rises in a big city.

He also paid for 20 cell phone bills, on top of buying house for his parents, brothers and sisters. Paying all the bills eating out with his close friends, paying for rides and flights.

</comment><comment><USER4> What I don't understand is why the players association doesn't do something about it.

In theory, they could do something like this: All monies paid to players go into a common fund, which is managed by the player's association. Each player gets a small stipend from this fund for entertainment and housing. The rest remains in the fund, and the player gets a statement every year showing how much they earned from playing and how much from investing. Hopefully, after a few years, the investing is making more than the playing, showing the player that investing is good.

Then upon retirement, the following happens. 2 million is set aside and put into a fund. From that fund 5% is paid every year to the player, with the rest being reinvested. Then the rest they can choose to either remove from the fund, or keep in the fund and get earnings payments, or maybe take some out and leave the rest. The hope being that they saw their statements and know that investing is good.

But even if they don't, they still get that 5%, which starts at $100K/yr and in theory goes up with inflation, which should be more than sufficient to keep them from being totally broke.

They could do the same for football players, who tend to have the same issue.

<comment><USER5> Most NBA players are scouted from very early on (AAU), then to college for 1 year, then to NBA. They do not get a chance to learn about how to manage money (compared to a regular joe: summer job, internship, etc..).

Most of the inner city kids have a distrust of "the system" or "the man". Therefore, they would never trust their income to a players assoc.

Whats should be done is to establish a class on How to Manage Your Money 101 by the league/PA.

Here is a article from SI on 'How Athletes go Broke' [http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1...](http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1153364)

<comment><USER6> "Most NBA players are scouted from very early on (AAU), then to college for 1 year, then to NBA." This is completely untrue. Players that go to the NBA one year out of college are the exception and not the rule.

<comment><USER5> >This is completely untrue. Players that go to the NBA one year out of college are the exception and not the rule.

This years first top 10 picks:

4 Freshman 3 Internation players (ages 18, 19, 21) 1 Sophmore 1 Junior 1 Senior

If you are any good or hyped, you are draft in the first year..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's also worth remembering that a pro athlete if he's lucky has a career that lasts 15 years, tops. Most play significantly less. Contrast that with the average person's working life, which usually lasts 40-50 years. So sure they make a lot per year but once they're done, they're done, since they tend not have much by way of marketable skills. Saving and investment is the smart thing to do, but it's also a difficult thing to tell a 21-year-old who suddenly has more money than he's ever seen in his life.

<comment><USER8> Also, earning $10 million over 15 years is far less tax efficient than earning that same amount over 50 years: you keep less of your income by a few marginal tax brackets.

<comment><USER9> > _$10 million over 15 years is far less tax efficient than earning that same > amount over 50 years_

// Presumably you're ignoring investment even at bank base rates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just like the studies of lottery winners.

"Nearly one-third of lottery winners become bankrupt.

"The CFP Board made an offer to the National Association of State and Provincial Lotteries to provide the organization's members with information to distribute to winners. The Investment News article highlighted the lack of financial guidance many winners receive from state lottery agencies; estimates show that nearly one-third of lottery winners become bankrupt." Source: Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc <http://www.cfp- board.org/bulletin.html>

more studies on lottery winners: [http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id...](http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=141224)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article quotes a statement by the NBA Player's Association to that effect, but does not substantiate it. As far as can be determined by a Google search, no one ever corroborated the claim and since the Player's Association has a vested interest, I wouldn't trust the assertion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool. Not a big surprise. Take a person who is focused on playing sports, sports, sports, training, sports, and oh yea, training who also is poor, and shove money in their face the thing they will do is buy everything they could.

The problem is that most people didn't get the necessary financial education.

The bigger problem is that I doubt these people are very good at math and financial management so they probably ignored the warnings of "I need x dollars per year to sustain this life style, if I get fired tomorrow due to uncontrollable circumstances I am fucked". In the end lots of money needs investing. This is a problem for the middle class and even bigger for the upper.

<comment><USER13> Another large factor is that, often when athletes realize they need to save/invest money, they get scammed in bad investment deals. A shady businessman will hire a former athlete as a representative to sell risky investments to current athletes, who then lose tons of money even though they were just trying to invest their money for the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have seen this literally - it's low down but it does happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good content, unbelievable inept slideshow implementation. Takes 5-10 seconds to load every time you click "Next". CNBC has a really shitty web development team.

Also, completely busted on android/iphone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm missing it, but where is the article? All I see is a slide show about 15 athletes that have gone broke. Google didn't return anything recent. Can somebody reply with the link?

</comment><comment><USER15> [http://retardzone.com/2008/09/23/abandoned-mike-tyson- mansio...](http://retardzone.com/2008/09/23/abandoned-mike-tyson-mansion-in- ohio/)

For an idea of where the money goes.

<comment><USER16> One can only imagine the amount of fornicating that went on in that pool room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that anyone who comes from lower to middle class backgrounds and makes a substantial amount of money quickly faces the risk of losing it. Lottery winners, people who receive large court judgments, and pro athletes have consistently shown that as with most things, large amounts of money can be easy come, easy go.BTW: The NBA player turning down a $30Million contract and then going broke is quite funny to me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does this phenomenon replicate itself in the start-up world? Curious how many first time start-ups fail due to too much cash, to fast with no idea how to spend it appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER19> nice article on the MLB pension plan with mentions of various other leagues: [http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-nhl-nba-mlb-retirement- pe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-nhl-nba-mlb-retirement-pension- plans-lockout-2011-1)

[add link] [http://www.thestreet.com/story/10983698/1/even-pro- athletes-...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/10983698/1/even-pro-athletes- worry-about-retirement.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> What exactly is the definition of "broke"? Declaring bankruptcy and having your house foreclosed doesn't mean you're broke like a homeless person is broke.

</comment><comment><USER21> A family friend of mine is Mark Madsen. After 9 NBA seasons (with 2 championships) and an average of 11 minutes per game, he entered Stanford's MBA program. That's a pretty smart way to play. Even if he wasn't a star, he's doing well for himself, with the future all the more promising.

</comment><comment><USER22> The fault doesn't fall 100% on the athlete. Bad loans, high risk loans, were given to these people just like the rest of America but on a much larger scale. Yes I agree they spend lavishly, but all of them have over financed themselves!

</comment><comment><USER23> you can give a poor person money but you can't make them wealthy.</comment>


Tesla to settle class action lawsuit over Autopilot 2.0 with partial refunds - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/05/01/tesla-autopilot-reimburse-delayed-features-settlement-class-action-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> Tesla blatantly duped thousands of people into buying their Beta/still some Vaporware Enhanced Autopilot features years before it was publicly safe on the road. Anyone who got an AP2 in Q3'16 and Q1'17 knows this. There needs to be another lawsuit for those who paid for their self-driving vaporware.</comment>


C++ implementation of the Jupyter kernel protocol - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus <comment><USER2> See the post on the Jupyter blog for more context which has a section on xeus : [https://blog.jupyter.org/interactive-workflows-for-c-with- ju...](https://blog.jupyter.org/interactive-workflows-for-c-with-jupyter- fe9b54227d92)

<comment><USER3> I had heard of interactive C++ before, but to see it, and see it in a Jupyter notebook, was eye-opening.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you also would like to see the Energize C++ environment created by Lucid, after they pivoted away from Lisp Machines.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk)

[http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf](http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I did, but while it looked like a nice IDE (as an aside, I was a Lucid Emacs user), what amazed me about the Jupyter example was the interactive C++ interface with GUI display of objects.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that is pretty neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Are there any examples of this library being used so far? Can anybody familiar with the topic elaborate on how much can it actually simplify things and what's left to figure out?

<comment><USER6> This is an initiative backed by Bloomberg. It was pretty trivial to make a C++ ([https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus- cling](https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling)) and R ([https://github.com/JuniperKernel/JuniperKernel](https://github.com/JuniperKernel/JuniperKernel)) kernel around it.

It's pretty easy to use, the biggest work pending is in the widgets system for charting.

<comment><USER7> We're working on it: widgets ([https://github.com/QuantStack/xwidgets](https://github.com/QuantStack/xwidgets)) and bqplot ([https://github.com/QuantStack/xplot](https://github.com/QuantStack/xplot))

Also in the roadmap, a C+ backend for threejs and ipyvolume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what was the reason this was written in C++, not in Python or other interpreted languages? Is speed a concern here?

<comment><USER9> Embed-ability, distribution. Using Jupyter from R, Julia, etc generally has an awkward dependency on python for the notebook server.

<comment><USER8> thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists confirm there is an inherited element to creativity - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/want-to-be-a-writer-have-a-literary-parent-8200777.html

<comment><USER2> Another crap press release on another crap preliminary correlational study. The method of operatinalizing "creativity" in this small-n study is highly debatable, and hardly likely to be generalizable to, say, creativity in software engineering.

See Peter Norvig's online article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

for a checklist of signs of faulty procedure or reasoning to look for in any report about a research study, and see the writings of Eric Turkheimer

<http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm>

or Lars Penke

<http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications.html>

for thoughtful discussions of genetically sensitive designs in the study of human behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Another crap press release on another crap preliminary correlational study._

\-- This should have made the mock-HN humor thread =]

Original is behind a paywall, though. [1,2,3,4]

_______

Notes

_______

[1] HN humor > <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731>

[2] Original | (paywall) > [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608012...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608012001276) (paywall)

[3] This can't be as bad the Organic food one, though?

[4] _Abstract: The etiology of creative writing has been overlooked thus far in studies of skill acquisition. Here we attempt to make a start by examining the familiality and heritability of indicators of creative writing in a sample of 511 Russian-speaking children, and their 489 mothers and 326 fathers. The contributions of cognitive ability (fluid and crystallized intelligence) and family environment were also taken into account. Results show modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability of creative writing in this sample, even when other cognitive and environmental factors are added to the model._

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Journalist's list of latest articles confirms link between correlation and causation.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSec...](http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=search&publicationName=ind&pageLength=5&startDay=1&startMonth=1&startYear=2010&useSectionFilter=true&useHideArticle=true&searchString=byline_text:\(%22Roger%20Dobson%22\)&displaySearchString=Roger%20Dobson)

</comment><comment><USER4> So the new question is, why? Is it genetic? Epigenetic? Memetic? This really doesn't tell us all that much: many things run in families, including things that cannot possibly be genetic in nature.</comment>


Apple Fined as Customers Win a Right-To-Repair Fight - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-fined-as-customers-win-a-right-to-repair-fight-1529399713 <comment><USER2> This is a huge clickbait. Does not mention that fine is in Australia and fine is just $7 mil.</comment>


Review: How to live on 24 hours a day - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/09/how-to-live-on-24-hours-a-day/ <comment><USER2> Available on Project Gutenberg: <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link, this was a great read!</comment></comment>


A Major Coinbase Milestone: 1 Million Consumer Wallets - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coinbase.com/post/78016535692/a-major-coinbase-milestone-1-million-consumer-wallets <comment><USER2> Quick question: What's preventing Coinbase from shutting down operations tomorrow and walking away with everyone's money, as MtGox walked away with mine?

Or, what if the founders orchestrated some sort of disaster wherein all of the coins are claimed to be lost, but in reality they're simply transferred to the founders?

I know they wouldn't actually do that. My question is, what's stopping them? Why _wouldn 't_ someone try to do that, other than their morals?

<comment><USER3> Nothing, so most people should use Coinbase the same way they use a grocery store: buy what they need and take it somewhere else. Unfortunately most people do not know enough to do that. I wrote a blog post about it if you're interested.

[http://diegobasch.com/do-you-know-enough-to-securely-own- bit...](http://diegobasch.com/do-you-know-enough-to-securely-own-bitcoins)

<comment><USER4> > Nothing

False. Theft is against the law. Bitcoins don't magically avoid being subject to existing law. The owners are known and subject to US jurisdiction, you have legal recourse through the courts should they try and steal your funds.

<comment><USER3> The law doesn't prevent you from committing crimes. It certainly did not prevent Mt. Gox from making bitcoins disappear.

If that happens and you need to go to court, good luck proving that an exchange stole your coins. We haven't even seen Mt. Gox play out yet. Suppose they actually stole everyone's coins. Can someone prove it wasn't a hacker or a software bug? Time will tell.

<comment><USER4> > The law doesn't prevent you from committing crimes.

That wasn't the question, the question was what's to stop them and the answer I objected to was "Nothing"; that's false, the law is not nothing. What's to stop most bad behavior... the law.

<comment><USER5> The law is fairly obviously not an answer though, given the context. The original question specifically asked what stops Coinbase from shutting down and taking everyone's money like MtGox did. It was just as illegal when MtGox did it, yet it happened anyway. (Actually, most of the other answers have the exact same problem.)

<comment><USER4> > The law is fairly obviously not an answer though, given the context.

You're free to think that, I'm free to think you're wrong. MtGox is in Japan, Coinbase isn't; the contexts are different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Considering any positive comment will be buried deep under in HN, I think it's important to celebrate this success. Price of Bitcoin is meaningless, all other metrics seem to point to higher and higher adoption of this new technology. Great news!

</comment><comment><USER7> The main reason I chose to buy BTC through Coinbase is because they're funded by A16Z and USV. Very prominent and influential investors that would also come under scrutiny if anything nefarious happened internally.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's one million consumer accounts with no FDIC insurance, no surety bonds, and no other backstop in the event of a problem.

I'd love to see a Coinbase blog post about why Coinbase doesn't need to be licensed like every other MSB registered with FinCEN.

<comment><USER9> FDIC insurance is aimed at banks that make loans, which Coinbase does not.

<comment><USER10> This is the correct answer. FDIC insurance is needed because when you give your money to a bank, they turn around and lend it out to other people, so when you want to withdraw they may not be able to collect enough to pay you out.

I suspect when you deposit 10 BTC in Coinbase, they actually just hold it for you. Honestly, given how volatile Bitcoin is, and the general upward trend, it would basically be insane for them to try to invest it in any other assets.

<comment><USER11> Maybe FDIC insurance specifically doesn't make sense for Bitcoin, but it can still be lost or stolen in a full-reserve model and thus should be insured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> how are they able to guarantee an exchange rate? aren't they exposing themselves to the huge fluctuations in bitcoin price (though the price seems to have stabilized recently)? for instance, there were some days this month where the price fluctuated by more than 40%. somehow the price and volume must work out where this is a calculated risk to cultivate the broader bitcoin ecosystem. would love to see some numbers if anyone has any ...

<comment><USER10> I suspect they don't need to expose themselves because they are holding large amounts of both Bitcoins and cash, so they can simply sell them to people at whatever price they want to. It's not like they take your USD and then have to run out and buy Bitcoins to cover them. They do have to worry about the value of their Bitcoin and USD holdings becoming worthless, but that's something all Bitcoin and USD investors have to worry about.

If they are taking some risk, by making commitments that they don't have backed with currency, it's trivially easy to calculate their exposure and figure out how high their fees need to be to cover it. That's a problem actuaries solved decades ago. Currency exchange is not a new business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a few empty (never used) wallets

</comment><comment><USER14> I realize it's all startup-y to pat yourself on the back about growth, but aren't you painting a target on your back for those that want to perform the next heist?

<comment><USER6> No security is perfect of course, but Coinbase has over 98% of the funds in cold-storage. See: [http://antonopoulos.com/2014/02/25/coinbase- review/](http://antonopoulos.com/2014/02/25/coinbase-review/)

<comment><USER15> Gox claimed 95% of their coins were in cold storage.

Unproven claims aren't worth much.

<comment><USER16> Technically that still appears accurate. The inaccurate portion was that they didn't have anywhere near the correct number of coins (cold or hot).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Erlang, C And Lisp To Fight The Tsunami Of Mobile Data - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/11/26/bigdata-using-erlang-c-and-lisp-to-fight-the-tsunami-of-mobi.html

<comment><USER2> Why using a self-made lisp here ? Why not using an existing one ? Is it because regular lisps use a VM ? But then what's the tradeoff ?

On a side note, i really don't know if the savings will be worth it once the company starts growing and hiring. They'll spend a lot of time maintaining very custom code, running on a custom implementation of a language, alongside erlang codebase... Unless they open source everything to get a community to grow the user base for their tool.

<comment><USER3> Probably has something to do with this statement, repeated many times on the page:

      We are able to do this, because starting our LISP-VM and doing all these processes on every
      request, is still many times faster that having a VM (with a garbage collector) online all the time.

Self-made LISPs usually aren't that complicated to write, and if you're taking shortcuts like preallocating chunks of memory rather than writing a full-blown VM GC system, then things become even easier. My guess is that most of the LISP code doing the data analysis is composed of calls into primitives written in C that do all the heavy lifting so the performance hit of an interpreted or bytecode-interpreted language is minimal.

Having to maintain a small LISP interpreter in C is definitely an extra thing to keep up with, but you have to balance that with the work that would normally go into avoiding long GC pauses once you start tracking a nontrivial amount of objects/data in a VM with garbage collection. Java, for instance, doesn't support separate heaps, which means that a background piggy processing thread that is haphazardly allocating objects can cause "core" threads doing I/O to pause for several seconds for full GCs. Even with Java's fairly sophisticated heap management schemes it is still _very_ difficult to design a system to completely avoid full GC pauses. Erlang is somewhat better in this respect but introduces its own sets of problems to the mix.

In any case, I agree with your sentiment (probably would not be the angle I would have taken), but I can kind of see why the authors might have decided to go this route.

edit: formatting fixes

<comment><USER2> Since garbage collecting seems such a great issue, does anyone knows of an effort to have an objective-C-like language with automatic reference counting and memory retain/release (like with clang) on the server side ?

PS : i'm speaking objective-c here because it's the only language i know that does it that way, not because of its features as a language.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure CPython reference counts objects. Also Objective-C -- as in GNUStep, if you aren't using a Mac server.

EDIT: There's a downside to reference counting in that either you or the runtime does the retain/release calls _very_ often, whereas a mark-and-sweep collector would just touch each object once per collection. So reference counting might not be faster overall, but typically avoids long pauses. What you probably really want is something like Azul's JVM, which has a kernel extension so they can collect memory concurrently, resulting in shorter pauses than sweeping and faster overall time than reference counting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As it turns out, they previously were using Clojure + Python. [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/02/bugsense- hybrid-...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/02/bugsense-hybrid-app- experiences-using.html)

<comment><USER6> We are still using it for some other parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice to know how many man-hours it took them to get this system from 0/idea to production and how many people were in the team...

<comment><USER6> Two people, prototype in 2 months (CTO of BugSense here)

<comment><USER8> Is there a specific process you follow? Lean/agile whatever buzzword that is closest to describe how you go from idea to delivery.

How close do you work with your clients and how much is your system changing in response to feedback?

What drawbacks (if any) the current tech stack choices had so far on your?

<comment><USER6> Having a small (but very strong) R&D team helps you eliminate most of these "processes". The buzzword here is "iterations". Lot's of them.

Our clients were involved since day 0 (which I think is the key of our success btw). The first prototype (built in two days) was in Erlang using Mnesia.

The drawbacks are: \+ not having lots of engineers knowing C and Erlang \+ Outsiders having problem with LISP (that's why we implemented PIG)

<comment><USER9> This is a great write-up. Off-topic, but I'm wondering what bottlenecks you encountered with the straight Erlang + Mnesia prototype?

<comment><USER6> Mnesia is by far the fastest (and easiest to use) thing we've ever tried. The only problem was that it was more expensive to keep data in memory and that pointer arithmetic is so damn fast. And (the most important thing) is the 2GB limit Dets has :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why they didn't just use Lua or some other embeddable language rather than writing their own Lisp? Is Lua's GC too invasive?

</comment><comment><USER11> I am interest in the missing part: what data structures/layouts are used inside LDB? Cause for In-Memory DB, CPU cache miss plays a key role in executing query. And how much data are touched to execute a single query in common case?

<comment><USER12> Cache misses are not compared to initializing the lisp engine. So, we don't worry so much about them. Also, since the data organization is up to us, we touch only what is necessary (well, almost! We are talking about fine-grained locking here, but we modify (mutate) only the datum that needs to be changed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why the data is unstructured, and thus SQL is not an option. Isn't the data coming in from calls to the company's own API?

<comment><USER12> It has to do with semantics and the way you view your data. SQL is not a Turing-complete language (without abusing it!) and represents a subset of Relational Algebra. For us, relations might seem to resemble these of an RDBMS at first sight, but we work with them in a different way.

Also, the data format for input is not tightly-coupled with the LDB system. One can have different processing scripts (lisp) that may organize the data in a different way. Or you can write a C module that extends the underlying db engine to work with your implementation or even your database infrastructure (whether it includes SQL, NoSQL, etc).

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure if I understand your answer. To quote from the article again:

 _During our tests, we saw that SQL databases weren't a good fit due to the fact that our data where unstructured and we needed a lot of complex "joins" (and many indexes)._

I guess that you say it's unstructured because the most important parts of bug reports are stack traces and debug messages? My naive assumption is that stack traces can be stored in a relational way, and it seems that you do:

 _For us, relations might seem to resemble these of an RDBMS at first sight, but we work with them in a different way._

From 'unstructured', 'complex "joins"' and 'work in a different way' I infer that you do a lot of string processing on the fly, and the real problem was about precomputing everything vs. staying flexible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Self-made Lisp, in-memory database and hacking the Linux kernel: what's not to like about it ; )

I'm wondering: how does one decide to change the TCP_TIMEWAIT_LEN from 60 seconds to 20 seconds? 20 seems an arbitrary picked value: I understand that by doing so they can drastically cut down on the number of open connections after the last FIN is received, but why 20 instead of, say, 17 or, say, 9?

<comment><USER16> On linux echo 20 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout

<comment><USER17> The question was not "how do you do it once you decide" but "how do you decide on such an arbitrary replacement".

Also: "Do not be confused by the /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout config item. The FIN TIMEOUT is not the same as the TIMEWAIT length." -- <http://www.stolk.org/debian/timewait.html>

<comment><USER18> The value was picked heuristically after measuring through Ganglia and a set of CLI tools the average TCP dialog duration between a set of mobile devices and our database and then performing a set of tests with varying TIMEWAIT lengths. The 20 second period is a sweet (and round :)) spot with < 0.01% of packets / day arriving after FIN. It's a good approach all in all, since our expected payload packet set is extremely small (just 1 on broadband connections with large MTUs).

\- Panagiotis Papadomitsos, Head of Infrastructure @ BugSense

<comment><USER4> I was hoping it got chosen empirically. It's awesome that they were wise enough to not pick some theoretical best and calling it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should we call this example code a Spaghetti Scheme?)</comment>


If JavaScript is getting popular why does Google Trends show decline? - <AUTHOR> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascript <comment><AUTHOR> You read how Javascript is getting popular year after year yet Google trends search reveals a declining search volume for Javascript. What explains this?</comment>


Amazon's NoIE6 - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/BCt31.png <comment><USER2> Baby steps. They are forcing the sellers to upgrade because the sellers have a financial incentive and because those admin pages aren't used by a large volume of people.

It's much harder to justify removing IE6 support from the product pages, especially on the scale of someone like Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER3> It makes me tingle inside every time I see a company drop support for IE6. It's the only way that we'll ever be able to put it to rest.</comment>


How to determine if your A/B test is statistically significant - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/easy-statistics-for-adwords-ab-testing-and-hamsters.html

<comment><USER2> I like this rule of thumb a lot. It's very straight-forward and easy to remember so you can apply it quickly to see significance and then use a more rigorous method if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are tons of tools that can test statistical significance for you:

For example, <http://www.splittestcalculator.com/> or <http://www.usereffect.com/split-test-calculator>

</comment><comment><USER4> _But what about the vast majority of people who don't click either ad? That's the "ad impressions" that didn't lead to a click. Shouldn't those count somehow in the statistics?

No, they shouldn't; those are "mistrials."_

I don't think those are mistrials. Clicks vs impressions is a separate test and should be treated as such.

<comment><USER5> The test only counts if an even amount of impressions is given. The viewers aren't given a choice between ad A and B, they have a choice between A (or B) and nothing. I don't think the author explained this well enough. Obviously (to everyone here) the test is inconclusive if one ad is shown much more than the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We can do this for you at the click of a button at 360voltage: [http://360voltage.com/blog/2009/09/ab-split-testing-out- of-d...](http://360voltage.com/blog/2009/09/ab-split-testing-out-of-dark- ages/) (For Free)

</self promotion>

</comment><comment><USER7> The statistics are a little bit off - the Chi-squared isn't appropriate for the example he gives (sample size too small), although it would be fine in practice. What you really want in that situation is the exact binomial test.

<comment><USER8> Good point! Although with around N > 25 you're OK. See: <http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/garson/PA765/binomial.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And besides that, she's clearly leading the witness (Hammy). See the outtakes: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmZ7p3ExIc8>

</comment><comment><USER10> So, he's just explained Standard Deviation?

<comment><USER11> You'd be amazed how many smart people don't have a decent grounding in statistics, so any easy reference to explain this is nice.

<comment><USER10> Fair point, and yes it's quite informative from that point of view. I didn't like his approach however, he seemed to be beating around the bush a lot with phrases like

      I'm here to rescue you with a statistically sound yet incredibly simple formula

than giving a more honest 'hey, what you need is Standard Deviation, and here's how it works!'

<comment><USER8> No Torn, you're still not using the correct statistic.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STANDARD DEVIATION.

Also, how can you say that the article isn't "honest," especially given the complete, precise explanation for the stats at the end.

<comment><USER10> Seems I'm haemorrhaging karma over this. I misjudged the method used (Pearson's Chi Square, as pointed out by hn user pibefision). Fine, that'll teach me to skim read and comment.

My point above was that the author could have come out and labelled it as such in the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>