TileDB: Storing massive dense and sparse multi-dimensional array data - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiledb.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> The underlying technology [1] for TileDB came up with MIT and Intel working together.

And TileDB, the company, formed out of it, has recently received funding [2] from Intel in Intel's latest tranche of investments.

[1] [https://people.csail.mit.edu/stavrosp/papers/vldb2017/VLDB17...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/stavrosp/papers/vldb2017/VLDB17_TileDB.pdf)

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/data-is-the-name-of-the- ga...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/data-is-the-name-of-the-game-as- intel-capital-puts-60m-in-15-startups-566m-in-2017-overall)

<comment><USER3> Good to know private shareholders are getting even richer off all that taxpayer research money that's pumped into MIT.

<comment><USER4> Given that this is an open-source project, Intel's involvement doesn't seem too sinister to me.

<comment><USER5> I think it was MITs involvement the above poster was concerned about... but the fact that it is open source is indeed relevant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For posterity sake, it reminds me of MUMPS persistent sparse arrays, but built to scale much larger. This comment is not meant in any way to take away from this achievement, but rather to muse on where we were and where we're going.

It seems like the days we were stuck in particular or limited ways of thinking about databases/persistent storage are finally well and truly behind us! Now we have many awesome tools to choose from, better to have more tools in the belt than less.

<comment><USER7> Haha, fully agree! It's good to separate MUMPS the language from MUMPS the storage layer / database which was innovative and pioneering in many ways. I don't think we need to re-hash MUMPS the language :)

<comment><USER6> Agreed! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting... Here's the publication that it appears to have formed from: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025117](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025117) (VLDB 2016).

<comment><USER9> Also available directly here: [PDF, VLDB 2017] [https://people.csail.mit.edu/stavrosp/papers/vldb2017/VLDB17...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/stavrosp/papers/vldb2017/VLDB17_TileDB.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would like to see some information on compression ratios. Compression can often significantly improve performance (less data to load/save, more in memory or cache) and esp dense arrays should compress easily. They mention that compression is supported but I'm not sure if that's done internally or just applied to the files they create.

<comment><USER11> Floating points compress poorly, though.

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. wenc and srean are right. techniques such as those used in zfp and fpzip wenc mentioned are also used to compress real world las file (point cloud) datasets. For the moment we are only focused on lossless compression (scientists are paranoid about losing data), but there is definitely room to explore integration with lossy compression as well. Machine learning applications often do not need full precision so intelligent forms of lossy compression are useful.

Another cool research application of TileDB that extends the storage library with the VP9 codec can be seen here: [https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/papers/haynes- sigmod1...](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/papers/haynes- sigmod17-demo.pdf)

<comment><USER10> You can get very good lossless compression with floating point numbers, Facebook's Gorilla paper comes to mind. I usually use it for delta-of-delta encoding which provides very high compression for time series. While that won't really help in your case, their floating point encoding could help compressing matrices quite efficiently.

[http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf) [page 5]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know how it compares with Apache Arrow (that pandas is moving to) ?

[http://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas- internals/](http://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/)

[http://arrow.apache.org/](http://arrow.apache.org/)

<comment><USER13> Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: Arrow employs a columnar format to store objects like data frames. TileDB is also columnar (so you can sub-select attributes and perform analytics with very similar optimizations to Arrow), but the first-class citizens are (the more general) dense and sparse multi- dimensional arrays. Moreover, TileDB focuses on optimizing for the persistent storage backend, so that it can handle out-of-core analytics on massive datasets that cannot fit in main memory (e.g., genomics), or offer the same performance using less RAM (leading to cost savings in the cloud). Nevertheless, we are quite fond of Arrow, so we hope to work together at some point and integrate as seamlessly as possible.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by out-of-core?

<comment><USER13> In-core algorithms require the entire array(s) in main memory to perform some computation. Out-of-core algorithms are typically block-based and stream the array blocks from persistent storage to main memory on demand, working on parts of the array(s) at a time, thus minimizing the memory requirements. If this is done asynchronously and carefully, for some CPU-bound algorithms you may be able to completely hide the storage-to-memory cost, thus saving memory without losing performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do I slice & dice TileDB with a query? Can TileDB compute aggregations or do I need to copy cells into main program memory out of TileDB and then perform all data manipulation?

<comment><USER13> Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: Currently, TileDB is a storage manager, so it offers only efficient slicing. Support for aggregation queries (e.g., similar to what you can do with Pandas) is in our roadmap. We plan to work on it as soon as we ship the Python bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Python, R, Matlab and Excel

Mentioning Matlab and Excel immediately puts the product in the category "they know what they are doing" as opposed to "another group of sophomores trying to reinvent data science".

I'm still waiting for a raw data dump with "avoid copies at all cost" access for very raw, very verbose vehicle and manufacturing data that is in 99.9 per cent never accessed, but must be analyzed when errors are detected late in the process. I.e. there's practically no transformation to apply during storage, but upon access, transformation must be done.

If TileDB is kind of like a more structured, more low-level struct oriented Redis, it is a very welcome addition.

<comment><USER16> Apart from a diminishing population of old farts and a clutch of national labs and universities that Mathworks keeps well greased, is MATLAB even relevant anymore ?

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. Engineering as a discipline is conservative (for good reason). The tools and the processes they use change slowly. Matlab is still entirely relevant both in the sciences and in industry. There are people with huge amounts of domain knowledge (who may only know Matlab or Excel) that are increasingly called upon to analyze and interpret larger amounts of data. These "old farts" are the people engineering, designing, and debugging our modern world. Empowering people with domain knowledge to answer data driven questions is what the democratization of data science is all about. There is tremendous value in building bridges across communities and across generations here.

I say this as someone who helped in small ways to develop open source alternatives to Matlab.

<comment><USER17> Stanislav, Seltser, Petacube agree with Jake. Matlab still has some unique features to it which many open source projects (eg python) don't have - <USER2> FPGA integration, System Modeling and Simulation. Combine that with decent language, nice debugger and many strong industry-specific solutions its good bet its will be around for a while. The reasons people dump matlab is not that its overpriced but due to the lack of integration with big data systems and the fact that matlab license cost at large scale becomes untenable.Plus number of industries using these unique matlab features is relatively small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> anyone have experience using one of these array data stores to handle large amounts of weather forecast data? At my job we've come up with our own clever postgres solution to handle the large amounts of gridded binary data. Essentially we are inserting large 3D arrays (a series of images where each pixel represents a geographic location and a value, like windspeed or temperature or rainfall) into our postgres. Our solution is solid but am always on the lookup for new novel approaches.

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. I think this would be an ideal workload for array data stores (NetCDF a standard in this area uses HDF5 under the hood). You have <N> number of attributes that you want per grid-point over time (and you want to append to the time dimension). If you are ingesting Grib2 files then you can take advantage of compression as well. An array data store like TileDB should offer advantages for fast access, as you can get a pointer directly to the stored array and do not have to access the (serialized) data over a socket, especially if you are only interested in a subarray of the dataset.

<comment><USER19> Hi both, this is exactly something that I'm looking at doing. We've got about 10TB of netcdf data coming in everyday and we're looking for a cost efficient data store to provide fast access to individual grid points. S3 has proven to be too slow.

Any chance I could pick your brains about using either Postgres or TileDB?

Thanks!

<comment><USER7> Absolutely! Drop us a line at firstname.lastname@example.com and tell us a little more about the problem you are trying to solve and we can go from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would it make sense to store a tilemap for a game in this? Normally I use NoSQL for that and just store the tilemap as a JSON array. I need to be able to update and retrieve single cells easily (this is for a backend in a multiplayer game).

<comment><USER21> I don't know, tiledb seems rather low-level and many databases have geospatial indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how it compares to SciDB[0] which is also used for storing multidimensional data.

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

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. In addition to the differences pointed out in the paper, I think SciDB and TileDB are very different philosophically. SciDB is architected very much like a traditional RDMS while TileDB is much more lightweight. SciDB encourages you to use their own query language (AQL), TileDB wants to integrate and extend the high level tools you already use (Python, R, etc.) with as little overhead as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Could I use this for deep learning research? It's common for my models to be anywhere from 100mb to a few gb. Although, I'd find it more useful for reading batched training data.

<comment><USER13> Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: TileDB could be useful for storing your training data (in some storage backend of your choice) as well as your intermediate data (as davedx pointed out). But this would make sense only if your data are truly large and cannot fit in main memory. In fact, we are looking forward to seamlessly integrating with systems like TensorFlow, but we would rather wait until we can bring some value to applications with very large storage requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds ideal for storing training/intermediate data for machine learning. Niche competitor for Cassandra in this space?

<comment><USER25> Most models I've seen have at most a few hundred MB of parameters, have complex connections that can only be modeled as a set of many different 1 or 2D arrays with different sizes. Further, this DB stresses that it handles sparse sparse data, any most ML data is not sparse.

It doesn't seem like the best application. On one of their pages it mentions they ingest BAM records, which is for biological sequences. I'm guessing some DNA storage applications.

<comment><USER26> > most ML data is not sparse.

This brings up a question: in what fields does one find heavy use of large, sparse matrices that need to be persisted and queryable?

In my mind, sparse matrices typically occur in the context of graphs/relationships, e.g. PageRank, logistic networks, adjacency matrices, etc. They also tend to be a property of Hessian matrices (2nd order derivative for a multivariate system). But typically these are intermediate quantities that are discarded after a computation completes.

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. Genomics is a big field where sparse matrix storage is needed. Human genomes are stored as a diff off of a reference, which as you indicated forms a graph which can be represented as a sparse matrix. In other fields of genomics, such as metagenomics, fragments of DNA when analyzed also have a graph like structure.

TileDB supports both dense and sparse arrays. It was designed around the concept of handling sparse arrays but dense arrays can be thought of a degenerate case of sparse array storage in TileDB. For dense arrays tile extents are contiguous and we don't materialize the coordinate values. This way all the concepts are the same and we can capture both use-cases. Sparse annotations to dense array values, such as NA or Null handling can also be captured as a sparse array fragment layered over a backing dense array.

I agree with you that for most use cases, storage will be dense. But it is useful to have one system that can handle both representations efficiently, with the sparse case not added on as an afterthought (it also makes the system simpler).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks very interesting. Currently we are storing our dense simulation (and experimental) data in NetCDF/HDF5. Given correct chunking, this seems to be pretty efficient both performance and compression wise. What would we gain using TileDB? How does performance compare with HDF5?

<comment><USER13> Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: HDF5 is a great software and TileDB was heavily inspired by it. HDF5 probably works great for your use case. TileDB matches the HDF5 performance in the dense case, but in addition it addresses some important limitations of HDF5, which may or may not be relevant to your use case. These include: sparse array support (not relevant to you), multiple readers multiple writers through thread- and process-safety (HDF5 does not have full thread-safety, whereas also it does not support parallel writes with compression - I am assuming you are using MPI and a single writer though, so still HDF5 should work well for you), efficient writes in a log-structured manner that enables multi-versioning and fault tolerance (HDF5 may suffer from file corruption upon error and file fragmentation - you are probably not updating, so still not very relevant to you). Having said that and echoing Jake's comment, we would love to hear from you how TileDB could be adapted to serve your case better.

A general comment: TileDB's vision goes beyond that of the HDF5 (or any scientific) format. Considering though the quantities of HDF5 data out there (and the fact that we like the software), we are thinking about building some integration with HDF5 (and NetCDF). For instance, you may be able to create a TileDB array by "pointing" to an HDF5 dataset, without unnecessarily ingesting the HDF5 files but still enjoying the TileDB API and extra features.

</comment></comment><comment> marco-lavag I wish they had python bindings.

<comment><USER28> Their Python, R, Matlab, and Excel bindings are in-progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks exciting. What's the easiest way to get started with this via Python/NumPy? Looks like this is a design goal, but not currently supported.

<comment><USER13> Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: We have elevated the Python/NumPy bindings as our top priority and have already started development. We will try to ship them asap. :)

<comment><USER29> Excellent! Good to hear :)

Also saw in your documentation that you're concentrating on lossless compression right now, which makes complete sense. However, as a scientist, I just want to put a vote in for lossy compression too: it's not uncommon to work with large datasets given in float64 (because float64 is used for any intermediate processing steps), but that actual final precision we need to store is much less than that, but we're stuck with these huge binary files.

<comment><USER13> The way the code is currently architected allows us to add support for pretty much any compressor (compatible with our MIT license) with minimal effort. So, please do send us suggestions about your preferred compressor and we will add it pretty quickly. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks nice, still have to read the whole paper. Seems like it's most useful for sparse arrays. Maybe we will get a golang port :P

</comment><comment><USER31> How long until we can have Julia wrappers?

<comment><USER32> Since jakebol is involved in both TileDB and Julia, this might be up and coming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am curious about how the query performance compares to working with JSON files in Spark for ~100GB data.

<comment><USER7> Jake from TileDB, Inc. here: Depending on the structure of the JSON files you are querying you maybe able to take advantage of columnar compression and massively reduce the dataset size (especially if the json files contain numeric data). Also, repeat queries will not have to re-parse the JSON files. This may speed up queries quite a lot, but it depends on the specifics of your problem.</comment></comment>


Higher Ed Bubble Dwarfs Housing Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/09/high-ed-bubble-.html

<comment><USER2> I can't sell someone my education like I could sell them my house. There will not be a flood of unsold diplomas hitting the market. There aren't secondary markets, CDOs, and all sorts of other investment instruments tied to the value of my education, like there is to the value of my mortgage.

I understand the rate of increase in education costs has outpaced housing costs, and there most certainly is a bubble in higher education, but I don't think it will have the same negative ramifications on our economy like what is happening with the real estate market collapse.</comment>


Instacart shells out $4.6M to settle workers class action lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/03/24/instacart-pays-4-6-million-to-settle-workers.html?ana=twt <comment><USER2> >> The company raised its fees for customers from $99 to $149 for an annual unlimited service, and delivery fees to $5.99 from $3.99.

Anyone familiar with the product know, what the annual fee is for, when the customer seems to be charged the delivery fee too, per delivery?</comment>


Comparison of Linux Software Update Technologies [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Comparison%20of%20Linux%20Software%20Update%20Technologies_0.pdf <comment><USER2> Unfortunate to see no mention of Nix or Guix :(</comment>


When Feces Is the Best Medicine - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/when-feces-is-the-best-medicine/379491/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "Someday, a commercial product may replace stool, making some of these issues less fraught..."

A synthetic product has been developed in Canada and tested successfully: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake- fecal...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake-fecal- transplants-for-gut-repo-13-01-10/)

Curiously, one of the barriers to commercialization cited is the easy, low- cost availability of the "natural" alternative:

"However, economic barriers to such a synthetic pill are significant. Elaine Petrof, an infectious-disease expert at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, has created RePOOPulate, a mix of 33 different types of bacteria grown in the lab to mimic the microbiome1. Her team spent two years getting the equipment to grow the bacteria up and running, but the process is still expensive and the bacteria finicky. 'Honestly, good luck to you,' she says to companies trying to commercialize the technology.

The high cost of producing bacteria in this way would be less of a barrier if the alternative were not so cheap. As Tom Moore, a physician and infectious- disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas, puts it: 'It'll be difficult to compete with the ready availability and very cheap costs of human poop.'" ([http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut- infe...](http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut- infection-1.13885))

</comment><comment><USER3> My startup, stool.io, provides on-demand stool for these types of transplants. We hope to become Instacart for fecal material.

A lot of investors initially told me that stool.io was a crappy idea, but thanks to growing acceptance of fecal transplants, we recently raised a small seed round.

<comment><USER4> Heh, stool input and output. Cool name for a fecal transplant company. Too bad poop.io is already taken. If you wait too long, your own startup's name might be taken, too:

        $ whois stool.io
        Domain stool.io is available for purchase
        Please visit http://www.nic.io/ for more information

<comment><USER3> Looks like my co-founder has failed me. Time for an Ask HN: My co-founder didn't register our domain!

<comment><USER5> You're in deep shit.

<comment><USER3> No shit!

<comment><USER4> "No shit" is literally the greatest danger that your startup will ever face :p

<comment><USER6> if it wasnt full of shit, they wouldnt be able to raise money in the first place!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is regrettable that such an effective and relatively safe treatment has received so much opposition due primarily to social stigma. Instead the healthcare system has chosen to trap patients into a cycle of using antibiotics to treat antibiotic associated infections and risk disease recurrence...

<comment><USER8> Social stigma? How so? I didn't see that referred to at all in the article.

<comment><USER9> It was talked about when it was said how it was embarrassing for patients to have to find their own donors.</comment></comment></comment>


Paperlinks Makes Takeout Menus More Interactive With QR Codes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/17/paperlinks-makes-takeout-menus-more-interactive-with-qr-codes/

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to use QR codes to track food in general. By putting QR codes on the menu in a sit-down restaurant, I could have a log of nutritional value, money spent by each person in the meal, expenses, etc.

<comment><USER3> I would prefer to see QR codes go away. They're inherently unsafe, especially as many readers scan them and instantly perform the action the QR code commands. It'd be nice to see a new implementation that had some form of built-in security.

<comment><USER2> That does seem like a problem, but there are more than enough bits in QR codes to handle some kind of authentication and permission system.

Maybe treat default QR codes as sandbox-browse only, but other QR codes could be "signed" as coming from a trusted source, and given greater permissions.

Seems like a good opportunity for a QR code app developer to come up with a security standard, make it open, and provide a simple toolchain to build trust on top of QR.</comment></comment></comment>


KeyTouch for Websites, Login to Websites on Your Mac with Touch ID - <AUTHOR> http://www.usekeytouch.com/kfw

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

I'm Tom de Ruiter, and I'm a 14 year old app developer from the Netherlands and I created together with my two friends Melvin (15 years old) and Erik (13 years old) KeyTouch.

We've just released an update that supports KeyTouch for Websites, which allows you to login to webpages on Safari on your Mac with Touch ID on your iOS device.

You can see more info about KeyTouch for Websites here:[http://www.usekeytouch.com/kfw](http://www.usekeytouch.com/kfw)

You can also see more about KeyTouch here: www.usekeytouch.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And you can directly download KeyTouch for Mac and iOS from here: www.usekeytouch.com/download</comment>


Boeing 747s still get critical updates via floppy disks - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363122/boeing-747s-floppy-disc-updates-critical-software <comment><USER2> Yesterday's discussion on this story >>> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109565)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops I missed that sorry</comment></comment>


How to prevent my site from getting crashed by HN? - <AUTHOR>

I am going to make a submission to HN next week with a website I have created.  I have a suspicion that it will be fairly popular (but I could be completely wrong here).  In the event that it is, what sort of traffic should I expect to be able to handle?
If someone on here has submitted something to HN before and it was top 5 on news page, how many visits did you get and in what time period?  Even an order of magnitude guess is helpful.
Also, I designed my site in NodeJS.  Does anyone know a good service I could put it on that could manage high traffic for 2-3 days?  I have a Nodester account but that site is always crashing (and it's slow).  I also have the free tier of Amazon EC2.  Thoughts?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> * Serve static content statically i.e. use Nginx or node-static or preferably a CDN.

* Cluster your processes to make the most of CPUs

* Try Joyent cloud or AWS.

* If what ereckers says (10K visits) it's really not a big deal. You can run stress tests to verify.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can find a lot of discussion on HN where people hitting frontpage for a few hours (or more) go into details on the number of visitors they had and other statistics.

Examples:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230885>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933016>

[http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on- hackerne...](http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on-hackernews- and-betalist-comparison-and)

Hope this helps

</comment><comment><USER4> I had an article sit on the frontpage over the weekend about two weeks ago. Total traffic was around 18k, peaking at 140 uniques/second.

This was a WordPress blog, so I had it configured to use W3 Total Cache, AWS Cloudfront as my CDN, nginx as my webserver, APC for php opcode caching.

My current box is a pretty beefy dedicated, but I used to run the exact same config on a 512mb Linode instance. It handled front-pageing just fine (similar traffic stats).

Basically, cache everything you can, look up performance tuning guides for your webserver, disable keep alive.

</comment><comment><USER5> You might want to search the site foe expected traffic levels. If memory serves me right I think front page is good for about 10k visits.

As for withstanding the hit, with your config, I can't help.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've had a front-paged node.js app behind nginx. It was running on the smallest Linode instance. There were no issues managing the traffic.</comment>


Google Offered To Buy Twitter For $2.5-$4 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Google-Offered-To-Buy-Twitter-siliconalley-2283206007.html

<comment><USER2> Is Twitter actually making any money?

I find these billion dollar valuations pretty crazy if the company in question is not actually making any money.

Sure, Microsoft and Google have their strategies and would spare no pains (money) to score each other off, but this overvaluation of companies is just not healthy for the tech industry. It just feeds the next big bubble.

<comment><USER3> During a conversation I had last week a colleague who's dealt with Twitter told me that they make $100M-$200M each year licensing the firehose.

<comment><USER4> How many customers do they have though.

If they're 'licensing' the firehose to Google and MS, that's pretty unreliable income.

<comment><USER3> Publicly their firehose customers include Google, MS, and ~10-12 startups whose names I don't know.

Soon they'll begin seeing revenue from the new half/10% hose plans announced last week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _Both sources speculate that Microsoft may have made an offer too. This makes sense to us. One reason Google would buy Twitter is to keep it out of Microsoft's hands.The logic goes the other way, too._

This M&A/portfolio game seems so silly. The companies bought up by the goliaths to use against each other seem to rarely have a successful life post- acquisition.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft in particular has a horrible record with acquisitions work.

There are exceptions of course. Hotmail worked out well, and back in 1999 they bought my startup for $60M, and it worked out great. But eight years later, when I left, we were still being used as the rare example of when it actually worked out. Almost all the other much bigger deals since then had foundered badly, killed by politics or the NIH syndrome or management incompetence.

Google's had some successes, most obviously YouTube, and they're probably a better cultural match for Twitter. I can see why Twitter turned down the $2.5B but it seems like a fair offer.

<comment><USER6> Why is google a better match for twitter than microsoft? Google appears to have tried to "become social" a few more times than redmond and failed regularly.

<comment><USER5> from the outside, Twitter seems to have more of the Valley-style engineering culture, and shares Google's API-oriented philosophy. Also there are some former Googlers in key roles there.

It's a good point about Google not getting social. Then again, Microsoft's also tried and failed to go social multiple times -- Windows Live Spaces, QnA, Groove, Hailstorm, and 3° are a few fairly-high-profile examples that leap to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is twitter really that unique? I know mindshare wise, it has front-of-the-bus valuation, but the technology behind it is quite simple (and should be written up as a RFC).

<comment><USER8> The technology behind twitter is trivial in the abstract. At scale it's decidedly non-trivial. See also: paypal.

<comment><USER7> Google has solved many of the hard problems that would render twitter a trivial. I am not declaring a 150 line python script would duplicate it, but that Google could easily build a similar service. Now mindshare is a different story.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but no. Google's systems are tuned to google's apps, twitter is similar but also different in some fundamental ways. The complexity of rendering every individual twitter feed is pretty significant compared to, say, gmail, and the same optimizations do not always make sense. Moreover, the complexity of the SMS back-end should not be dismissed. While google certainly has the chops to handle all of these problems, including SMS, it's still a bit much to say that google engineers could reinvent twitter better and faster with little effort.

The biggest piece of evidence that this is the case is the simple fact that they haven't yet. Despite trying (see: buzz).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I never thought I'd say it but Google paying up to $4 or 5b for Twitter kind of makes sense.

Google badly wants a "social media" win.

Twitter, for better or for worse, is the cheapest household brand name of social media.

I've personally found much value from searching archived Tweets via twitter & google which suggests that Google could monetize that asset, as they've done with YouTube, and turn this into a huge win since selling ads is such a core competency.

On the other hand, Google's biggest aquisition win - YouTube - they got for a relative "steal" at ~$1.65b in an ALL stock transaction, which you know isn't going to happen with Twitter.

<http://mashable.com/2010/07/09/google-social-media-attempts/> \- Google's history of social media attempts

<comment><USER10> I think twitter would fit with google because they can leap any privacy concerns. After the buzz fiasco and the reaction to the facebook privacy changes a public social network like twitter might be more valuable than it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember back in the day, 3 or 4 years ago now, when Yahoo tried to buy Twitter for $25 million, and twitter demanded $100 million. They couldn't come to an agreement, and the deal fell through. Funny how the longer they wait, the more pricey Twitter becomes.

<comment><USER12> Why is that funny? By definition, as a good business grows it will be worth more. It's not like Twitter has been standing still for 3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> totally not surprised. Twitter seemed like a great fit for Google.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think Twitter would be very bad fit for any tech company, but it would also be very surprising to me if they can achieve valuation of anything above $5bn post-IPO...

<comment><USER4> Agree. I think it's more likely someone like newscorp would buy it.

<comment><USER15> Don't even joke about that :( FoxTwitter _cringe_</comment></comment></comment>


The Tyranny of the Diff - <AUTHOR> http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2012/04/the-tyranny-of-the-diff.html <comment><USER2> Isn't this a fundamental difficulty with any flat text-file representation for code, though? Many programming languages don't lend themselves to easy semantic analysis based on even a single file, never mind a combination of files. We usually don't work with canonical textual representations of even quite simple programming ideas such as the example in the blog post of replacing a nested condition with a guard clause.

At our current level of expressiveness, the refactoring tools that make these semantic changes mostly aren't a huge step up from brute force text editing, and the mechanical changes we can automate are usually trivial compared to the way a developer might conceive a required change in the behaviour of his code. Trying to reverse the process to identify the semantic significance of changes after the fact is far beyond us today.

In fact, it's hard to see how we could ever move beyond that level without developing some new and much more semantically rich way to represent our programs. At that point, the idea of diffing raw text code side-by-side might seem like it comes from the dark ages anyway...

<comment><USER3> There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage.

What has succeeded for many is scriptable text editors, cscope-like tools, autocomplete-like features, and refactoring support in editors. But as you point out, these are better tools to work with program text.

I think text is safe for the forseeable future. Partly because we have thousands of years experience with it and partly because it's a winning combination of a extremely powerful representation format and a KISS solution.

<comment><USER4> _There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage._

Chunk format Smalltalk change logs are a text file, but they're combined with a mechanism for treating code changes like db transaction logs, in a language with very little syntax, with very fine grained codebase change (method level, with generally small methods) built into the language and environment. It's also as rock solid as traditional flat text files, and even more robust in some regards.

Code syntax which requires all information relevant in a class to be defined together interferes with a change log scheme. But such syntactic structures are helpful if dealing with code in traditional flat files. In a way, it's like an Evolutionary Stable Strategy. It's mostly a flat file world, so the languages are mostly implemented with that in mind. This general situation makes it almost impossible for anything else to develop its won ecosystem.

I think forward progress will be made by leveraging "code folding" schemes. Eventually, this will amount to the same functionality people are aiming for then they discuss non-text representations.

<comment><USER4> Arrgh: when, not then. Thanks again iPad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Diff works best when things are single idea per line, and when control structures don't get in the way.

One example - the use of the trinary (?:) operator as a replacement for if/else assignment statement can quick and easy when programming. The problem is that diffs with it can look like a total mess because a whole lot of things are happening in that one line.

Similarly, certain languages where program flow or control structures make it so that people are inclined to make many things happen in one line (inline regex, lisp or scheme syntax lanagues) can diff in a confusing manner.

Diff is great when everyone is using a coding/whitespace standard, and things tend to atomically happen on one line.

I'd encourage that when refactoring code that's not to the standard, you do two passes - one to clean up the code to the standard, then another to make the actual changes.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and commit on every smallest atomic refactorings.

<comment><USER4> I've used environments with quick and reliable Undo/Redo stacks. To be completely compatible, one would have to treat code as data in a "nondestructive" editing scheme and save off the actual refactoring steps, which can then be committed automatically.

Or maybe, a "quick snapshot" facility could be developed to make it easier to save off intermediate steps and commit the series of them automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The point is fair enough, but to call this a tyranny seems a bit much.

If one believes (as say that Literate Code movement does) that code alone isn't sufficient to convey an author's intent, why should diffs alone, which mark changes in a codebase, be any different?

Comprehensible commit messages and comments explaining the purpose of a method itself (and perhaps the mechanism around which a block of code functions if necessary) are no vice and go a long way to mitigate or counteract any such "tyranny".

</comment><comment><USER8> Split up your changes.

Seriously: in most cases it's possible to split up a 30-line patch into 5 separate patches that, applied in order, monotonically improve your code base and are easier to review, in total, than one larger patch. Changesets are cheap, and we should be optimizing them for easy review, so any eyeball we get can see what's going on.

<comment><USER9> When I'm ready to commit, I usually have solved the problem in code. In order to create five separate patches that illustrate the line of thinking, wouldn't I have to go back in time and re-create the intermediary steps?

I suppose I could create patches as I am actively solving the problem, but at that point my code may very well be a mess that I'd have to clean up each time.

Of course all of that is moot if your problem naturally segments into several patches, if nothing else than simply by the virtue of being larger than a 30-line patch or involving several mostly independent components.

<comment><USER10> If you've completed a big change and can't stage it in separate commits that build upon each other ("telling a story" of the feature development), I recommend at least splitting non-overlapping chunks that can stand (compile/test) independently into their own commits.

git-cola is a good GUI to visually stage chunks into separate commits. I haven't really used git-cola's other functionality, but I really like its visual staging features.

<http://git-cola.github.com/screenshots.html>

<comment><USER11> git-gui (part of the core git distribution) provides similar mousey-clicky staging -- you can stage hunks or individual lines at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of people have mentioned ugly diffs when lines are considered the basic unit of granularity, often giving examples that are much cleaner if words are considered fundamental (e.g. latex, or lists of files in makefiles). But there are many tools that can handle word-based diffs, and most have options to change what's considered a word.

git diff can use --word-diff(=color) and --word-diff-regex=...

There is also the venerable "wdiff" program.

I've only found one program that can do "word patches" though: "wiggle" <http://freecode.com/projects/wiggle> . It works well, though I've found the interface to be slightly confusing. But turning it into a git diff and merge driver isn't that hard.

<comment><USER13> I just want diffs at method scope. Show me the methods that have been added, changed, or deleted. Use line diffs for things external to methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you use vim, try the fugitive plugin[1]. You can do :Gdiff to see side-by- side diff between what is staged and the working tree. It provides some context, but if you need more you can unfold it.

[1] <https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive>

<comment><USER15> More generically, many diff viewers exist, and certainly help understand what is going on with a diff, in a side by side comparison. However, in a multi- file refactoring, sometimes this can still be a bit tricky. Say for instance you split one method into 3 smaller methods that are somewhat inter-dependent (you have x(), but now it is a(), b(), c(), and you sometimes call a(); c() and sometimes b(); c(), and sometimes just c()); in that case you have a complex diff that is hard to make sure everything is correct in. Even if you can turn it into a series of changes keeping x() as a wrapper around a(), b() and c(), you'll frequently end up with several multi-file diffs to look at as you migrate.

I somewhat agree with the author, that maybe there is some better change viewing paradigm we aren't seeing for these complex cases, that could benefit everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the most interesting things re diffing/VC I've seen in a while is "Towards Structural Version Control" <https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~yw21/slides/ydiff-slides.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER17> _I realized that I didn't want to look at the diff any more. I just wanted to see the full body of the affected method before and after my changes. Oh, and I also wanted to see whether I added new tests or changed existing ones._

Well there are multiple ways to do that. This doesn't really have anything to do with the diff but how you chose to view it.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely, I was just thinking that. Many version control systems support an arbitrary diff command, e.g. via environment variables. In that case, one might be able to try tkdiff, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I often stage changes with an eye toward making the diffs clearer -- not for myself at commit-time, but for myself and colleagues in the future.

</comment><comment><USER20> That would be an interesting feature to add to diffs - if there are huge structural changes in a block, just show before and after instead of trying to show differences.

No idea how you would define the criteria or implement it though.

<comment><USER21> I'd like an option to collapse additions or removals of entire functions into just one line saying "foo() added" or "foo() removed", instead of the 50 lines of the function's body scrolling past. However that does have to be language specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most languages and file formats don't _enforce_ an inherently "undiffable" layout, so it's really an issue of programming style. People tend to lazily do what's easiest to _write_ instead of thinking about what will be easiest to _read_ later (in "diff" or otherwise).

A common example I see is something like a one-line list of files to build in a makefile. It is certainly _possible_ to put every file on its own line and backslash-escape each line ending, and doing so produces a very readable "diff": if someone adds a file you see "+ xyz.c" (or whatever) _and that's it_ instead of a mangled mess of file lists repeated with one word that's different.

</comment><comment><USER23> Simple suggestion: Don't change the old code. Copy the old method and then rename the old method. Refactor the copied code. Diff will only mark your 'newly added' code which will check in without conflicts. Later remove the old method.

</comment><comment><USER24> For the reasons described in this post I tend to separate in different commits those changes that alter functionality from those that are refactorings.

Sometimes I refactor before making my changes, and sometimes I do it afterwards. In any case I try not to mix a change in the functionality and some refactoring in the same commit. That way, in retrospect, it's easier to me to understand each commit: the ones related to changes in functionality have simple, easy to understand diffs, and the ones related to refactorings have messy diffs but at least I know that they don't change any functionality.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have the same problem when maintaining Latex files in some RCS. After any "big" change (rewritten sentence, etc), I customarily reformat the text in emacs so that it looks nice on screen, which also totally messes up the diff.

emacs has a mode which allows one "logical" line to wrap and to be edited as many "physical" lines, but when I tested it few years ago, it was rather broken. Fortunately, for editing Latex and such, I don't really need the diffs, I'm just interested in archival.

<comment><USER26> Emacs virtual-line-mode has gotten much better; check it out again if you're interested.

What I do with my Latex files is have one sentence per (logical) line. I've found diffs at the sentence level much more helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like using a UI to do large diffs in a side-by-side fashion.

</comment><comment><USER28> Use meld, or any one of the many other excellent visual diff viewers.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem isn't that the diff has "tyranny". The problem is that what you are diffing is bytes instead of the program's AST.

</comment><comment><USER30> git add --patch can also help with this. You don't necessarily need to make all your changes simultaneously.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Gauge Interest While in Stealth-mode - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a site that I suspect would be useful to members of a niche online community.  I would like to float my idea around to gauge interest.  The problem is that the idea is somewhat easy to implement and the community is made up of technically-skilled people with free time.  Is it a good idea to announce the idea and create a sign-up site to collect emails and/or opinions?  Does anyone know of a better way to gauge interest? <comment><USER2> If it's that easy to implement, just build it yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to, if there is interest. It's easy in that the solution is straightforward and there are few difficult technical problems to solve. It will, however, require a substantial time commitment to build, which is why I'd like to gauge the market first.

<comment><USER2> If that's true, I don't think you need to worry about people "stealing" your idea. Most people don't have the drive to stop what they're doing follow through with someone else's idea just because it sounds nice.

My advice is to feel free to talk about it and gauge interest. If you're _that_ worried, just choose who you share with wisely (don't share it with people currently looking for an idea to work on), but I really doubt it will be an issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Apparent Theft at Mt. Gox Shakes Bitcoin World - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/business/apparent-theft-at-mt-gox-shakes-bitcoin-world.html <comment><USER2> This is a really sad moment but let's hope it teaches everybody lessons. One very nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that they can be kept safe in cold storage without too much trouble. Some people kept all their coins there. It's a shame, but too bad.

Otherwise, I really hope Gox dies, in a darwinian business sense. Forest fires destroy big trees but makes way for new shoots.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, lessons are what people need.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_story_thread_how_much_did_you_lose/cfo57gh)

"But too bad."

<comment><USER2>
      I stupidly had my life's savings in bitcoin, and when the
      price started to fall, I converted to dollars and watched
      the price plummet. I lost $357,000.

As I said, this is a sad moment for him. My point still stands: it was a _very_ naïve and borderline criminally stupid thing to do. I feel bad for the guy because _he_ didn't make Mt. Gox crash, but then he could win the equivalent of a Darwin Award in finance.

Harsh words, but you can't reason yourself out of such a bad decision as that he made. He _should_ have used cold storage, period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. Check out the people who lost serious money on MtGox: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_story_thread_how_much_did_you_lose/)

One person lost 1998 btc. That was anywhere from $500,000 to a million bucks.

<comment><USER5> On one hand I feel really bad for a lot of these people, but there were so many flashing lights and warning signs around MtGox that these people had to see putting money into this company was a bad idea right?

The exchange was a cobbled-together technical-mess that was originally supposed to be used for trading cards. They made a quick pivot and tried to wing it as a financial institution.

Hopefully the BTC and finance community learn from this disaster. There is going to be a huge market for a highly-regulated exchange run by banks and investment houses in the near future.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the only possible excuse is if you were new to Bitcoin and went with Gox because it is what was mentioned in the media most often. When I first got into it a year ago I used Gox for a couple weeks before I realized it was totally FUBAR and got out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Existing discussions about this news:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295190)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295084)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294762)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295331)

<comment><USER8> We know that. It's notable that the NYT has picked up on it, and is presenting it this way, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting to watch ordinary people attempt to dabble in currency. How many criminal organizations, governments, and financial institutions (redundant?) the world over have people who wake up everyday just to manipulate the value of currency? For example, a common criticism of China is that they purposely manipulate their currency to devalue the US dollar. In which ways could such organizations impact a new currency like bitcoin? Simple theft doesn't work very well unless immediately converted to cash, just like tangible goods being fenced, often below true value. Was it really just theft?

<comment><USER10> Not to be nitpicking but a common criticism of China is that they manipulate their currency to _increase_ the value of dollar not devalue it.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the Chinese are hard at work to give Americans ever more manufactured goods for ever fewer green pieces of paper.

(Or to be more accurately, entries in a data base.)

<comment><USER12> I'm just an armchair economist, but I have read real economist argue that a strong US dollar limits the US's ability to repatriate it's manufacturing base. Also, I don't think China so much increases the dollar as it limits the growth of the Yuan in measure with technological and capital improvements that allow it to keep its export market strong and keep manufacturing business in China.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's essentially what I said. And I question whether getting stuff for cheaper (or free) is a bad thing for those downtrodden Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a bit bigger than Silk Road in terms of the amount of money people will probably lose but it wouldn't surprise me if something similar to the rally that followed the Silk Road take down happens. It's going to put Bitcoin in the news, this is the best entry price in the past 4 months, and Mt.Gox going under means the unethical players continue to shake out which can only be good.

<comment><USER13> > Mt.Gox going under means the unethical players continue to shake out which > can only be good.

I'm not completely clear on the details (likely no one is), but it seems to me that the _unethical_ players stole a lot of money and got away scot free. Lots of innocent people lost money, and yes mtgox, an _incompetent_ player, will get shaken out. That doesn't exactly seem like a stellar outcome.

<comment><USER6> When I say unethical players I mean Mt.Gox who's master plan was apparently to hide their insolvency while at the same time creating enough uncertainty to tank the price so they could arbitrage their money problems away.

<comment><USER13> Well, I meant the people actually stealing money, who don't seem to get mentioned much in this whole discussion. What Empty Gox has done is not really good or right or anything, but deliberately stealing is worse in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How traceable are bitcoins. Suppose Gox released their logs, would it be possible to track when someone tried to offload the stolen bitcoins on one of the major exchanges?

given the alleged value of the stolen coins are in the range of 0.5B USD it's not unreasonable to suspect that some government capacity would investigate this.

If the stolen coins can indeed be detected - how would they go about extracting the value? Seems like a large scale, risky money laundry effort would be needed.

</comment><comment><USER15> hypothetical question for someone who is knowledgeable about bitcoin: since bitcoin is an experiment, what happens if it completely fails? what does a total failure scenario even look like, in terms of symptoms?

where does all the 'real' money go?

i don't understand how 6% of bitcoin can disappear when one of the supposed selling points is that you can verify all the transactions.

<comment><USER16> You don't need to be knowledgeable about bitcoin specifically to know what happens, at the last financial crisis we got the same lesson.

Value is perceived, and value can evaporate.

If bitcoin completely fails, the value evaporates.

It's a bit like buying a house in Detroit a decade ago for a hefty price, and trying to sell it today. Your money wasn't eaten by the house, no-one ran away with it, but it's now worth significantly less than it was and effectively the value just disappeared.

(PS: And I hope you bought the house with cash you could afford to lose rather than debt you now owe someone.)

<comment><USER17> No. Its a closed system. For every dollar that someone spent on a bitcoin, that dollar was received by someone else.

Now, you can certainly say that the money was _spent_ on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.

<comment><USER18> Oh you mean like how millions of Bitcoin market cap disappeared when people jumped off the hype train? Does that look like a closed system to you?

<comment><USER19> > Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value > that requires investigating an accusation of theft?

Market cap isn't money, its an estimate of value based on a premise that is not merely flawed but outright insane -- that _every_ unit of an asset that exists can be liquidated at the current market price of a single unit (that is, that market clearing price is not effected by supply.)

Its used because its easily calculated, and people are prone to want to believe that values that are easy to calculate are also meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Times like these I'm glad I didn't have a dime in gox--but I was never trustful of them, they didn't to seem to be as legit to me as Coinbase or Bitpay -- I'm not 100% sold on some of the other exchanges either - coins-e has left me with a bad taste in my mouth when they held onto my dogecoins for 2 weeks during a transfer request...

Luckily I have no money in BTC at all - other than 2k for mining equipment(scrypt) - and the coins earned from my small operation is only about 1 BTC so far -- which I'm planning on holding onto till it rallies, WHICH it will (too much investment money in too many companies) for it not to.

Lots of companies have spent a lot of money to integrate it, and there will be a vacuum for a few weeks, maybe even months, but trust will come back into the market and it'll grow...

One thing I'd like to see is some sort of P2P exchange service where exchanges don't happen on any network --ie all funds remain in wallet until time of exchange, -- of course this wouldn't work for usd necessarily, but for coin to coin exchanges it would, unless it was also tied into some sort of site like coinbase where they can store a fiat currency value like a bank for deposit at a later date.

<comment><USER21> > WHICH it will (too much investment money in too many companies) for it not > to.

That sounds like bubble talk to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most interesting part in that text for me was "Released in 2009 by an anonymous creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto"

It was news to me that the creator of the bitcoin technology is anonymous. Heard the name several times before, but never knew it was a pseudonym for an anonymous person or group of persons.

<comment><USER23> "He" used to post in various message boards at the beginning then abruptly stopped in 2011([http://www.coindesk.com/information/who-is-satoshi- nakamoto/](http://www.coindesk.com/information/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm just hoping I can get home after work and buy some coins at the price the are now before it goes up again. I feel that this is mostly already discounted in the price, everyone was expecting it. It may drop further but it's not going to last.

I should add that I only plan to spend perhaps 1% of my money available for saving/investing in bitcoin. I think it's a good investment but the risk is too high to risk more.

<comment><USER25> 1% doesn't seem like "good investment" money. Sounds more like a long shot investment...

<comment><USER26> I think we call this diversification of your investments, not 'long shot' investing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if law enforcement is already questioning him; I am sure FBI has eyes on him already. Yes. I want him to come out and explain to us. Any employees should come out and give us insider stories. Whoever took advantage of this (whether it's criminal or Mt itself) should be punished.

<comment><USER28> I'm pretty sure the FBI doesn't operate in Japan. (Not like that, anyway.)

<comment><USER29> Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value that requires investigating an accusation of theft?

<comment><USER19> > Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value > that requires investigating an accusation of theft?

ISTR that both the US Justice Department and at least one state government in the US has initiated prosecution based on the fact that Bitcoin is a thing with value, so probably.

<comment><USER29> I would think they were more interested in the products being sold as compared to the made-up currency that was being used to purchase said products.

But I haven't been following that case so I have to admit I have outdated info on that one.

<comment><USER19> > I would think they were more interested in the products being sold as > compared to the made-up currency that was being used to purchase said > products.

I'm not talking about the SR related prosecutions, I'm talking about, among others, the ponzi scheme prosecution against Bitcoin Savings & Trust, where bitcoins were invested for promised returns _in bitcoins_ in a ponzi scheme. (Though I misrecalled, and this prosecution was a civil prosecution by the SEC not the Justice Department; still, its a pretty strong indicator that the US federal government recognizes bitcoins as thing of value when it comes to the law regarding such things.)

<comment><USER29> That makes me wonder if, in that case, if the SEC would have to recognize some form of value to the bitcoins lost or is it enough that the victim feels there was value to the bitcoins lost.

Just because the Feds may not recognize any value of an object you possess doesn't mean that another can simple take it on a whim.

Things like bitcoin sure make for interesting legal debates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Saw this coming a mile off.

I hope the people who lost bitcoin learn not to keep them anywhere but in their own wallets.

<comment><USER31> I came late to the Bitcoin party, so when I started mining other coins mid- last year the first thing I did was download the wallet client and encrypt, and backed it up. And I _still_ didn't fully trust that my coins were safe, and that there wasn't some other bug in the protocol that could result in my coins getting stolen somehow (or at least confusion arising as to who owns them). I don't understand how people put so much trust in these exchanges as to have millions of dollars equivalent of coins there.

<comment><USER32> I think people (perhaps rationally) believe that the people running the exchanges know more about keeping bitcoins secure than they themselves do. The analogy would be that you're a lot safer putting your money in a bank than trying to keep it safe in your house. And certainly a company whose entire business is trading in bitcoin _should_ know how to keep them safe. Unfortunately the reality is obviously sometimes different.

Certainly you can keep your own coins essentially 100% safe relatively easily with encryption and backups, but most people wouldn't even think to try, let alone have the necessary knowledge to do so.

<comment><USER33> _> I think people (perhaps rationally) believe that the people running the exchanges know more about keeping bitcoins secure than they themselves do._

There was nothing rational about this assumption. Banks are bonded and insured with teams of very, very good security professionals auditing their stuff. Mt fricking Gox? Not so much.

<comment><USER29> I see this as more of how local banks were before government guarantees started being implemented. If someone robbed the bank it was your money they were taking and not the bank's. Heck, if the bank burned to the ground your money was gone. Made for a tighter community in some cases; you rob the bank the whole town hunts you down.

What was a bank? Any person off the street with a safe in a building who claimed they could keep your money safe for you until you needed it. Sound familiar?

Personally, I would have put about as much trust into these exchanges as I would have of those old banks.

<comment><USER33> _> Sound familiar?_

Yes, and equally stupid, which was my point in the first place. Why did you post?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> All those arguments about whether or not they ever traded Magic: the Gathering cards look kind of frivolous now, DON'T THEY. Sounds like Bitcoin is about to have its Enron moment...

</comment><comment><USER35> I really wish I had some BTC just to separate some fools from their money. Either through trading on the market or some sort of BTC based gambling. BTC isn't very liquid but I'd bet you could extract 50K in USD from it a year without too much trouble.

<comment><USER36> >> I really wish I had some BTC

So go and buy some

<comment><USER29> He'd be rich if only "something"...</comment></comment></comment>


US and China sign trade agreement - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39894119 <comment><USER2> The set of trade deals covers areas like electronic payment services, beef and poultry, compromising on some Obama administration stances but leaving untouched bigger issues that could still complicate relations between the two. The disclosure of the deals on Thursday evening suggests that the Trump administration is trying to smooth relations with Beijing despite President Trump's harsh anti-China language on the campaign trail. Under the newly announced deals, China set a deadline for fulfilling its promises to allow American beef and said it would speed up consideration of pending American applications to offer bioengineered seeds in China.</comment>


The farthest star - <AUTHOR> http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-farthest-star <comment><USER2> Amazing to me is the causal influence this star has on the Earth from 9 billion light years away. Physically the influence is zero, but the meaning humans are able to give it, makes it huge.

<comment><USER3> It caused you to physically move your fingers and type that comment.

<comment><USER4> That's a cool observation. You could then forget about this whole event and remember it again at the age of 90 and write another comment saying "I remember back when this was discovered"

Human bodies are very chaotic in their responses to stimuli due to the ability to react to old old memories...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This line from the article is wrong:

> Over nine billion light-years away.

With a redshift of z=1.49, the light from SN Refsdal was emitted 9.34 billion years ago, but the proper distance at the current time (a/k/a the co-moving distance) is 14.4 Gly due to the metric expansion of space:

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

Here's the paper announcing the discovery:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.10279.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.10279.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> An amazing discovery. If we can see things that far away, it's a wonder what we'll discover when we keep improving telescopes, introducing new telescopes (e.g. Webb space telescope), and even build devices on other celestial bodies! I'm looking forward to a permanent telescope on the far side of the moon where Earthly signals are no distraction.

As for the article, it was distracting by the poor writing style (emphasis mine). It's frustrating to hear people say "like" and "literally" all the time in speech, but far worse to see it in written pieces:

\- "...point source ( _literally_ , a dot of light)"

\- "...galaxy, a star, you, me — bends space, _literally_ warps it"

\- "...too faint to see. _Like_ , hundreds of times too faint"

<comment><USER7> It's a blog post rather than a proper article. And it's by Phil Plait (AKA "The Bad Astronomer") who has been writing with a similar tone for over a decade now.

<comment><USER8> I didn't notice the author, thanks for pointing out. I remember passing the time between college classes reading Bad Astonomy in the computer lab. In 1997. Over a decade for sure...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a nice size comparison of objects in the universe.[1] According to that video (and a Wikipedia article on it[2]), the observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter.

Yet the "farthest star" article says the farthest star is only 9 billion light years away, which is ten times closer than the diameter of the observable universe.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S69zZwYrx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S69zZwYrx0)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe)

<comment><USER10> > _Yet the "farthest star" article says the farthest star is only 9 billion > light years away_

I think you completely misread the article. This is the farthest star _we 've been able to observe directly at its normal luminescence_, as in, not a supernova. Granted, it is due to gravitational lensing.

The article never says this is the farthest star that exists, simply the farthest (by far) that we've been able to directly observe.

<comment><USER11> What are the farthest stars we've been able to detect?

<comment><USER10> The farthest directly observed objects are galaxies and quasars, to about 13 billion light years from us. We have indirect evidence of individual stars that far out, but prior to this discovery the farthest directly observed star[1] (SDSS J1229+1122) was 55 million light years away, so this is quite a leap.

[1] [http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/the-most- dista...](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/the-most-distant-star- everseen/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started to wonder how on earth it's possible we can see it if the amount of photons is still the same right? Well before I decided to blurt my unproductive comment here on HN I researched this article on Quora [https://www.quora.com/If-photons-have-no-mass-then-how- does-...](https://www.quora.com/If-photons-have-no-mass-then-how-does- gravitational-lensing-occur) which says that gravity increases the photons energy, frequency and speed(I thought they travel at the constant speed of light?) as they travel through space allowing those faint objects to be still visible here on near-Earth space.

Yet if the amount of photons that travel is the same with a gravitional lense or not I'd argue that the information to see a lot of other distant and faint objects exists as well. We just need better instruments to detect them. And probably there is a threshold after which the photon's energy become so small that it regresses into a background noise. Well kinda obvious now that I wrote it down.

<comment><USER13> I think lensing implies we're receiving more photons that would otherwise be scattered elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Once they found it in the 2016 images, the astronomers found it in other > data as well. The apparent brightness of the star changed over time in the > images. While a blue supergiant can change its brightness, it's more likely > LS1 is moving as it orbits the center of its own galaxy, and as it does so > the effects of the gravitational lens change.

Can gravitational lensing really affect the brightness of an star traveling around a galaxy within a few months timespan?

<comment><USER15> It doesn't affect the star, but it might influence the _image_ of a star through the very imperfect lens formed by the foreground mass distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "This is incredible: Due to a quirk of cosmic geometry, astronomers have detected the light from the farthest individual star ever seen."

That is perhaps the _least_ incredible thing I have ever heard. In fact, it's very nearly a tautology.

The overall writing style of this article is very poor and distracting.

<comment><USER17> Your quote is incomplete, the next two sentences are an important part of it:

" How far away is it?

Over nine billion light-years away."

To see the light of a star that far away is indeed "incredible" as in "so extraordinary as to seem impossible".

The following paragraphs then explain why it appears to be legit (" Then I read the paper, played with the math a little, and, sure enough, this appears legit.").</comment></comment>


Show HN: Free DynDNS alternative for cypherpunks - <AUTHOR> https://onetimedns.net/

<comment><USER2> I can't load the page from any browser, through a proxy, or over OVPN, but downforeveryone says it's up. Can someone summarize what it is (or what's done differently from DynDNS)?

Edit: Had to connect via Google DNS. Not ideal, but apparently none of the other DNS servers I use could access it.

Okay, so it's dynamic DNS that lasts as long as you curl the service with a name and secret random key after which it gets destroyed. The record you connect to goes [https://name.sha224-of-secret- sauce.onetimedns.net](https://name.sha224-of-secret-sauce.onetimedns.net). Neat.

</comment><comment><USER3> Man this is pretty DAMN cool! This definitely deserves more attention!

Thanks for making this!</comment>


The Feel of Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.parleys.com/#st=5&id=10

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the "next-gen e-learning platform" should load in less than twenty seconds and present a simple, non-interactive video and slideshow in such a way that I can use more than a sixth of my browser window looking at it, and without autoplaying. Then maybe I would acquire some learnings.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a warning that this autoplays with very loud audio so you might want to mute before clicking, adjust the volume control (bottom left) and then unmute.</comment>


WeWork Cleans House, Looks to Trim Staff Close to Ex-CEO, Sell Private Jet - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-cleans-house-looks-to-trim-staff-close-to-ex-ceo-sell-private-jet-11569531640?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I've worked for CEOs like Adam, tho with way less access to cash. Ambition is good only if you can pull it off, otherwise like like the greatest warrior poet of our generation Dominic Toretto would say: it don't matter if it's by an inch or a mile, losing's losing.

This dude had a plan, had big energy, earned trust, spent like a king, and came up short some miles and inches. He was building We to be a holdings company since the late-2010's-era, a la Zuck with late-2010's-era Facebook or a la Mayer with mid-2010-era Yahoo.

This is what a WeWork tech stack would have been:

For construction: * Case - property development management software * Fieldlens ($12.6MM raised) - construction site management software

For space management: * Euclid ($43.6MM raised) - space tracking software * Welkio - lobby digital sign-in software * Waltz - digital lock software * SpaceIQ - office management software * Teem ($100MM buyout) - room booking software * Manage by Q - office vendor solution management software * Spacious ($9MM raised) - restaurant downtime

For business management: * Conductor - digital ads spam software * Unomy - sales marketing spam software

For training management: * Meetup ($200MM buyout) - event and group management software * Flatiron School - coding school * MissionU - fake college

For expansion: * Naked Hub ($400MM buyout) - Chinese wework clone * Spacemob - Singapore wework clone * The Wing ($32MM investment) - Women wework clone

For fun: * Wavegarden ($12MM investment)

All of this prob has been a $2B spend. But Steve Jobs he ain't with the integration so it's all loosely organized and disjointed. But Adam's at least Steve Job's esque enough to convince Ashton Kutcher to call all this pile of parts a tech behemoth.

Divesting all this will be a mistake.

Find a better CEO, get it all done.

<comment><USER3> You make a compelling case that you could put together a company that owns a whole portfolio of products that essentially makes them dominant for office rental. But there's three issues with that:

Firstly, a successful office rental company is valued at no where near the multiple that WeWork claimed to be. So if this strategy is successful, what you're left with is likely a company that is significantly less valuable than the amount that's been invested.

Secondly, it's not entirely clear that all these things put together actually would be a significant competitive advantage in the office rental space, where the bread and butter issues are what dominates the running of the business.

Thirdly, let's assume this is a good strategy. Buying up these companies and integrating them into a single purpose business is a difficult task that most companies struggle with, it's much more common for these strategies to result in massive acquisitions followed by write-downs. Even a good CEO would struggle with it, but WeWork has _already_ bought these companies, so a new CEO doesn't just need to slowly fold each company into the core business, the new CEO has to handle the fact they already own these business and need to integrate all of them, all at once, as fast as possible, before they go bankrupt in a way that looks good for the IPO.

<comment><USER2> Your assumption is that the narrative is that WeWork is an office rental company when perhaps you can take the leap of faith and believe We was being truthful in their intentions of "elevating humanity" or whatever. Therefore their valuation is based on that.

The tell is amongst these post mortems being drummed up by the media they remark how Adam Neumann is unreasonable when he demands the tech team to "think bigger". I've heard that before when working for CEOs like Adam. He managed upwards, sold that to Softbank Vision Fund, and fails in managing downwards.

So on one hand it's an indictment on Masayoshi Son's tunnel vision when spending his fund's cash.

On the other hand, that's in the past. It's already happened.

So to your first assertion: WeWork isn't an office rental company, it's a real estate financial engineering holdings company with the intention of investing its funding into software research and development to further make their real estate financial engineering efficient. In simpler words, WeWork is in the occupancy game.

Like McDonald's using burgers to pay its mortgages, WeWork uses monthly rent and a splash of crossfit gym membership to pay its lease.

Therefore to your second point, it is indeed clear how these things would be a significant competitive advantage. If you think of a building as a living, breathing being, WeWork is the means in which it monitors all that goes in and out of that building. WeWork knows when someone shows up, wanders about, sips coffee, takes a poop, and leaves. WeWork knows when you are occupying a space.

There were some stuff tossed in to help you create and grow a business so that they can hedge against you running out of money and leaving.

Next step they want to help you be occupational, so they bought up stuff to make it so that you can go from idiot to trained. They also wanted to help you occupy your home.

Then he gave away the other silly stuff like raising children to his wife and brother in law.

Now for your third point, is this a good strategy? Yes. Masayoshi agreed. Will it work? Won't know till you try.

Except two things may have gotten in the way:

a. WeWork over-extended and needs more cash, Masayoshi Son was painted in the corner to not being to give more cash, they found themselves in a situation where they had to IPO in order to get more cash.

This is inevitable for the sake of chasing ambitious hypergrowth.

b. Adam Neumann is inherently greedy and shady, bad at operating a business, and bad at technology integration.

Will anyone else available now be able to manage the 12-18 mo process of integrating all that they've bought? Maybe. But it doesn't sound like they tried or figured it out.

When Microsoft swallows up businesses they work fast to rebrand, clean up the insides, then toss it to their sales force to recover costs. When Google swallows up businesses they leave it alone but then shut it down later. When Facebook swallows up businesses they leave it alone and their businesses grow.

So one might say Adam Neumann just isn't in the same leagues.

And Masayoshi Son is now seen as bad at picking which handful of people out of 8 billion on this world is going to be the next big thing.

Oh well, the world spins on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Incredibly hard hitting cuts, hopefully they yacht is spared at least

<comment><USER5> > Mr. Neumann's staff included at least one driver for the $100,000-plus > Maybach luxury car he often traveled in.

That poor driver is gonna be forced back on the job market I bet.

<comment><USER6> There's always Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know things have really hit rock bottom when the private jet has to go.

<comment><USER8> Maybe they can keep the staircar

<comment><USER9> Banana stand is a great name for a venture capital firm.

<comment><USER10> There's always money in the banana stand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a member at WeWork in Brooklyn - personally I think they could use more staff. Our community manager told me her inbox is flooded w/ "tickets" from petty things about chair noise to room temperature. Overall, I like it here though.

<comment><USER12> If I ran the place (I'm just the "primary member" for a 20-space private space in one of their LA locations), I would suggest that they prioritize handling all of these real problem tickets and stop spending time planning and coordinating massages, astrology readings, ice cream with unpronounceable names, etc.

<comment><USER13> But then they would just be a landlord and not a VC backed lifestyle brand super hip co.

My mental image of the old CEO is Ryan from The Office.

<comment><USER14> And the average investor in WeWork is a Michael Scott type that thinks he has the next big thing lined up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Feels like they need to clean house at whoever invested billions in a company run by a guy embezzling and his in-laws.

<comment><USER16> The thing I like about finance is how you can make things legal simply by writing the action in a contract and by sometimes disclosing the contract.

<comment><USER17> tell that to Dennis Kozlowski

> Kozlowski, prior to trial, asserted his innocence by stating, "I am > absolutely not guilty of the charges. There was no criminal intent here. > Nothing was hidden. There were no shredded documents. All the information > the prosecutors got was directly off the books and records of the company."

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

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

<comment><USER18> This was a really interesting case. I agree with the civil rights lawyers who fiercely criticized putting it in front of jurors.

<comment><USER19> Then why didn't he request a bench trial by a judge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >"Also out are some of the 10-plus staffers who worked directly with Mr. Neumann in a group that was referred to internally as the "oval office" and included some friends who worked on personal deals for him."

Wow so there were people on the We payroll that were being paid by We Co. to work on private deal's that only benefitted Adam and not We Co? The level of of greed and hubris involved in the We story is really incredible.

<comment><USER21> > _Wow so there were people on the We payroll that were being paid by We Co. > to work on private deal 's that only benefitted Adam and not We Co? The > level of of greed and hubris involved in the We story is really incredible._

Poke a little more at your own employer and you'll likely find just as much shenanigans.

<comment><USER20> There's no Chief Impact Officer whose married to the CEO, no private jet and no Maybachs chauffeuring the CEO where I work. You don't have to poke at all to to be aware of things like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wonder if they'll do tequila shots after the Jet leaves the building?

<comment><USER23> Maybe "You Be Illin'" this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's the utility of a private jet for an office space broker?

<comment><USER25> You don't have to deal with air travel wait times when visiting locations which are separated by great distances.

Not sure if that was the actual use.

Similar reason as to why Wal-Mart has a fleet of private jets.

<comment><USER26> Wal-Mart headquarters is in the middle of nowhere Arkansas. When my wife was there, they had a strict policy that you fly private only when it is cheaper than flying commercial. This mainly only happened when traveling with a team that can fill the jet.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for adding info on this. Everyone I've talked to who has worked at Wal- Mart HQ has talked about how cost-conscious the entire company is. I would be really surprised if things like private jets there weren't part of a strong cost-benefit analysis.

<comment><USER28> It also enables high level manager to visit stores and come back in the same day. Or visit 3 stores in two days.

So those same managers are more inclined to go actually visit the stores they are in charge of. Imagine having to visit 5 or 6 walmarts across different small cities, doing it commercially would take a week or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me Why did they need the jet? Was it to swiftly fly startup founders around the world conveniently when they needed to attend something?

And to think that this mess nearly got listed :(

<comment><USER29> >Why did they need the jet? Was it to swiftly fly startup founders around the world conveniently when they needed to attend something?

for the same reason Neumann's name appeared ~170 times in the IPO filing and the corporate structure looks like Losts Dharma iniative

it's the only way to get a company that subleases real estate to look like something that is worth 40 billion dollars

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amazing how quickly the WeWork brand has been demolished

<comment><USER31> WeFucked

<comment><USER32> WeWorked.

<comment><USER6> WeBork

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _He will remain nonexecutive chairman of the New York company_

Phew. At least they haven't lost him completely. /s

</comment><comment><USER34> I am not even sure who to blame for all these shenanigans. The CEO or the people financing him?

<comment><USER35> Cherry picking, of course, but, my gut tells me it might be the CEO:

> Also out are some of the 10-plus staffers who worked directly with Mr. > Neumann in a group that was referred to internally as the "oval office" and > included some friends who worked on personal deals for him.

Charitably, some high aspirations from Mr. Neumann and excellent synergy to have his personal deals team on-site at his We office.

> The plane was a favorite of Mr. Neumann's, who would use it frequently to > zip between his homes in the Bay Area and New York.

The main use of the plane was for personal reasons, not business ones.

> Attached to his office was a small spa an ice bath, according to people > familiar with the matter.

I wonder if this is a normal amenity offered to CEOs and if it is more prevalent in the Bay Area or New York City?

> The office is in the process of being cleaned up,

... which I take to mean they are removing the spa?

> and as a director, Mr. Neumann's access to the company's facilities will be > more restricted, the people said.

And here's where I hear a loud buzzer signaling that someone is not appreciated within their organization - no one wants to see them on-site after they leave.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but... who do we blame for it going on this long?

<comment><USER36> The board of directors. They have a fiduciary responsibility to the business and shareholders and obviously they were looking at high level financials and not digging in further. It is a bit surprising that Masayoshi Son of Softbank would fund so many rounds when it was quite obvious that it was a house of cards.

With Uber, at least there was a real business, with some real differentiation and not the tremendous Capex overhead of real estate to weigh down the business. Imagine if Uber had to employ all of the drivers full-time and also own the cars outright, that would be a dramatically different business.

But everyone is happy when things are moving up and to the right, but in this case, the losses outweighted revenue. It's one thing for a startup to be burning x% of revenue to grow market share, but to literally every year burn more capital than revenue at such a massive scale is completely bonkers.

The only logical conclusion is that Masayoshi Son was calculated in this. In that he had some belief that WeWork would work, but additionally if he was able to markup his shares through his own investments, he could then raise a second vision fund based on the supposed returns of the first one.

Obviously that plan is now shot with Uber trading below the value of his private investments, and with WeWork it is an even larger hole that he has dug for himself, because not only is it's value dramatically less than when he invested, but there is a real possibility that the company may not be able to get on to solid financial footing.

Softbank would literally be the only investor willing to put in more capital at this point, and they almost have to in order to save the business, but at that point, don't be surprised if the entire cap table is completely redone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> And they always told me you couldn't party your way to the top. I could have had a private jet if I kept it up!

</comment><comment><USER38> But what if I want to have a group, shared meeting in a private jet? Hardly forward thinking, WeWork!

</comment><comment><USER39> That guy had it all, he was a year too late, he could have cashed out and bounced.

</comment><comment><USER40> ...and the wework obsession at HC continues

<comment><USER41> I keep seeing "wework isn't a tech company", yet there is definitely an obsession here as if they were.

<comment><USER42> I think the fascination with WW on HN is because of how deftly they've used the "tech company" image to shield themselves from criticisms that their valuation is far removed from their reality of their gargantuan losses.</comment></comment></comment>


What Minimalist Really Means - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/philosophy/what-minimalist-really-means A completely minimalist design would have the highest possible SIGNAL-TO-NOISE ratio.  The SIGNAL is the information that's communicated, the NOISE is any extraneous information that dilutes the signal.  The goal in minimalist design is to have maximum signal and minimum noise. <comment><USER2> "If less is more, then too little can be too much."

<comment><AUTHOR> Touche...</comment></comment>


Kenny Shopsin has died - <AUTHOR> https://kottke.org/18/09/rip-kenny-shopsin <comment><AUTHOR> Well known for his eccentricity and the ultra-curmudgeonly manner in which he served over 950 distinct items, I found Kenny to be tremendously insightful when it came to understanding people, urbanism, and dealing with customers.

That is to say that if you broke one of the Store's dozen unwritten rules, you got yelled out for good.

"No allergies, no substitutes. If something I cook could hurt you, you need to go eat at a hospital."

Lunch at Shopsins was the only thing I refused to skip during any visit to Manhattan. I hope that Zach, Tamara and the other siblings find their strength and keep going.</comment>


The Rise of Mobile Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://www.shopify.com/blog/6704874-the-rise-of-mobile-commerce

<comment><USER2> Great infograph on this post! It's amazing how quickly eCommerce is transitioning to mobile devices, although I'm not sure who all the people are that are buying via mobile. I almost never buy anything via mobile as it's a hassle - much easier to do so on my primary machine.

Regardless, as an eCommerce shop owner I need to do some serious mobile optimization this year to stay ahead of the curve.</comment>


An amazing new way to browse through the world's newspapers (via Maps) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newspapermap.com

<comment><USER2> Cumbersome.</comment>


What is OOP? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/learn-how-to-program/chapter-3-what-is-object-oriented-programming-d0a6ec0a7615 <comment><USER2> A good quick overview of OOP.</comment>


Cfml: the context-free music language - <AUTHOR> http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/11/cfml-the-context-free-music-language/ <comment><USER2> First, this article is from 2009.

Second, while the description of the language seems correct, I wouldn't position it as "CFML", something that's been used at a large level commercially since 1995. (ColdFusion Markup Language) Granted, it's just a series of letters, but I wouldn't call my product VB or SOAP.</comment>


Why Auden Left: "September 1, 1939" and British Cultural Life - <AUTHOR> http://jhiblog.org/2015/12/09/why-auden-left-september-1-1939-and-british-cultural-life/ <comment><USER2> An Auden poem very relevant in today's world:

Refugee Blues –

[http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/refugee- blues/](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/refugee-blues/)</comment>


Why Employees Are Not as Aggressive for Earnings as Employers - user-on1 Since employers are aggressive they keep increasing the price of fuel, food, products, services, rent etc,.<p>Why employees tend to be less aggressive in terms of income? <comment><AUTHOR> Very broad and vague question I am having trouble beginning to answer.

1) Are you assuming all price increases are due to being "aggressive"?

2) What industries are you talking? Purely tech?

3) What groups / age range / etc. are you assuming that employees are less aggressive in terms of income?

4) Do you consider income only monetary? What about reduced hours, increased vacation time, more flexibility, etc? How do these fall on the spectrum?

I would say this question in its current state is impossible to answer, too vague.

<comment><USER2> Or why does the price of goods and services increases but the salaries don't increase in the same proportion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The story of the U.S. economy is that the cost of housing, healthcare, and higher ed have increased explosively, while the cost of other things have been stable or dropping.</comment>


Redbox Tells Warner Bros. to Shove It - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashfilm.com/red-box-bow-warner-bros-unreasonable-56day-rental-delay/

<comment><USER2> I was raised by the internet. I've been downloading movies, music, and games for as long as I can remember.

Other than the occasional trip to the theaters, in the past 5-7 years, the only time I've ever actually paid for a DVD was at a Redbox kiosk. They get it- it's cheap, instantaneous, and convenient.

It makes sense that WB would be against such a useful service.</comment>


How Java needs to become cleaner - <AUTHOR> http://codemonkeyism.com/java-cleaner/ <comment><USER2> A nice writeup, but I wonder why not just use Scala? It is true that Scala has a steep learning curve compared to Java but you get all of the efficiency with a concise notation. (Substitute Clojure for Scala - just about the same argument, except Clojure is easier to learn.) re: Groovy: too slow - I would rather just use JRuby if I want a slow but really nice programming language on the JVM.

</comment><comment><USER3> How the author needs to find a different language that runs on the JVM.

Seriously though, his suggestions boil down to "make breaking changes to the language so it looks nicer". Then it's a different language.</comment>


The Death Of The Deadline As We Know It - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragosroua.com/the-death-of-the-deadline-as-we-know-it/

<comment><USER2> If I've got any responsibility for the management of a project (and that includes putting tickets in an issue tracking system and resolving them), I ask the question of "What happens if we miss this deadline?"

I usually ask this question at least once a week, when the subject of the deadline comes up at the meeting.

There really are some things where, if you don't do something by a certain time, you might as well not do it at all (say, a grant application.) On the other hand, I was involved in a project that ran three months late, but somehow we managed to have meetings with the client where we always agreed we were a week behind schedule, but that everything was cool. The customer was very satisfied by that project, however, my continued involvement was expensive for my firm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, by asking "What happens if we miss this deadline?" you're transform it into a liveline, IMHO.

But what happens if you "miss a deadline" in your personal life? Do you have any personal life deadlines?

<comment><USER2> you'd better get your costume ready by Oct 31 if you want to have a halloween costume. You can slip your kid's birthday party to another day before you mail out the invitations, but after that you're committed. Christmas only comes on Dec 25, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> That I know. It's the "dead" part that bothers me, not the commitment. Who dies on a deadline? The "task"? Or you, little by little? That's my question...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Posterous is offline - <AUTHOR>

http://posterous.com/ <comment><USER2> Very related: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305073> A tech from Posterous got in contact with members of ArchiveTeam via Twitter <https://twitter.com/vincentchu/status/308467595416334336> and then joined IRC: <http://pastebin.com/YB0emvnY>

TL;DR Posterous and ArchiveTeam are working on a way to backup Posterous before the deadline without accidentally DDoS'ing it.</comment>