Why Google Does Not Own Skype - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/05/11/google.skype.wired/ <comment><USER2> I hate hate hate this kind of politicking and conspiring to team up during meetings. Not to mention the fact that he presented an entirely dishonest slide deck.

This is poison for any organization, and keep in mind that it can (and does) happen in even the smallest of startups. As a leader you need to be vigilant and stamp it out, if you want your company to be healthy.

Edit: And the way you stamp it out is to simply not promote the people who practice it, and promote those who don't. Once it has risen to the higher ranks I agree it is difficult to remove (although it can be done when, for example, Steve Jobs returns to Apple and cleans house).

<comment><USER3> It's exactly this sort of thing that's a big part of the big company atherosclerosis. Here, we are getting an account of how Google suffers from it.

<comment><USER4> Suffering? Buying Skype would've been a bad move for the company, and the forces of rationality won out.

<comment><USER5> I'd offer that the it would have gotten Google zillions of video conferencing clients and a leg up on implementing that into their VOIP style offering. Instead, we're looking at Microsoft struggling to fit into an online platform that has almost no users. Now, if they integrate more Skype functionality into their Office suite, that could be interesting.

<comment><USER6> Corporate clients wouldn't use skype just because google started using it. They sure as hell would if Microsoft started using it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If all this is true, I would have a problem with a co-worker who would stand up and lie. By starting the meeting by being "super supportive" while knowing along with co-conspirators that you were trying to kill it, a good deal of creditability has been destroyed.

Maybe I am naive, and this is how things really get done, but regardless of which side I might have been on during this meeting, he is no longer trusted.

<comment><USER8> I kind of agree here. I think it says more about Googles culture not being all that different from any other big company. This article insinuates to me that politics are more important than sound ideas that are good for the business. If the skype deal was bad because it would need a large overhaul, why not just lay out a convincing case to that effect?

<comment><USER4> I think you're confusing politics with persuasion. Technical people have a problem with persuasion; I did, before I joined a large company, decided I wanted to actually change things for the better, and realized there's nothing dishonest about convincing people that someone will improve their company/lives. I was just bad at it.

Technical people seem to lay out arguments that are sound, but just aren't convincing or appropriate for the audience at hand. This is why shitty technology can win out when the customer lacks the time to make an informed decision, and makes the perfectly rational decision to go with the more convincing pitch.

And that's just it: decision makers don't have time to go through a thorough, completely objective, scientific argument. So, you either do what you need to get things done in what you feel is the right way, or you don't. There's nothing wrong with hacking a meeting, so long as the hack benefits the company, or at least is done in the company's best interest. As with software, the only bad hacks are those that benefit the hacker at the expense of the organization.

<comment><USER9> People rationalize why what's good for them and their allies is the common good. (A person who believes they don't, well, that's evidence against them more than it's evidence in their favor.)

I agree with your first two paragraphs.

<comment><USER4> It's a problem if one puts their own interests first; it's not to convince oneself and one's allies to do what's in the common good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, thanks for that link.

If anyone ever wants to know why I don't work at Google any more and why I would decline their offer if they asked me to come back, I would point to this example.

If you thrive in that kind of environment where you "plant hand grenades so you can de-rail the deal" by all means go there. I don't. Every place in Google I looked at had this sort of culture.

</comment><comment><USER11> So ... If "cloud computing" is the new paradigm that Google works in, and that's why they should avoid the old "peer to peer" paradigm that Skype is using, where does that leave "client/server"?

I had serious problems making sense of that. I guess they mean that since Skype is peer to peer, that leaves too few places for Google's server-oriented infrastructure to inject advertisements?

<comment><USER12> "Cloud" is the new "client/server." The "cloud" is the server and an app (browser, specialized app, w/e) on your computer (desktop, smartphone, w/e) is the client.

It's just that the server part is now [theoretically] a bunch of servers in different locations [theoretically] to allow failover. Theoretically.

And yes, I'm almost certain that's Google's problem with the Skype model: no convenient place to stick ads. (OK, sure, the client app could just get ads from Google, but if the p2p voice protocol works w/o Google servers, you can write a client that avoids the ads.)

<comment><USER13> You can't create an alternative Skype client.

Protocol is closed and little progress has been made for reverse-engineering -- which I think would also be illegal, since the data is encrypted and then you're at odds with the DMCA (IANAL btw -- the DMCA grants a safe harbor for reverse engineering, but that hasn't worked out so well for DRM).

To my knowledge there is no alternative Skype client, not even for the IM part -- Pidgin has integration with the official Skype client and piggybacks on top of it. If you don't have the Skype client installed and running, Pidgin doesn't work.

P2P in this particular case is really not the freedom-giver technology that allows you to workaround Skype's servers. If Skype wishes to serve adds to you, or to track you, there's really not much you can do about it.

<comment><USER14> I hacked on Pidgin a while back and people talked about the Skype plugin a bit. From my understanding, the issue is that the Skype code is very obfuscated and reverse engineering the protocol would be very difficult - apparently, no one with the ability and time to do that has stepped up thus far.

<comment><USER15> This is a fascinating analysis of Skype from a few years back:

<http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part1.pdf>

<http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part2.pdf>

Looking at how complex it is, and considering that Skype probably have more obfuscation and crypto ready to roll out if anyone cracks it, I can see why nobody's implemented a compatible client:

<comment><USER3> Security by obscurity works, if you're willing to respond with resources, and the economics do not motivate an overwhelming horde of opponents. There are definite _economic_ reasons why Skype can make it work with just software and Sony can't even with help in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article makes me a bit worried about Google. It reminds me of emperors and sultans (e.g. Sergei and Page) manipulated by their courtiers (e.g. Chan).

<comment><USER17> My tinfoil hat theory is that Google is attempting to be the router for all of humanity's computation and communication.

<comment><USER18> That is basically Google's mission statement as laid out in their IPO docs : to organize all the world's information. We wrongly thought that was just a fancy phrase for webcrawling.

<comment><USER17> But the strategies they are using now are a lot more sinister than they initially seemed. They're not just organizing links to data, they actually want be a sort of universal turing machine. They don't want any two people to communicate with eachother without going through a Google server. Between language translation, Google Talk, Chrome laptops, Gmail... they're not even being coy about it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology."

This quote intrigues me the most. Is peer-to-peer really bad, and uses a lot of bandwidth, or is it just bad for Google?

<comment><USER12> That's just spin to make the architecture sound like a bad idea. Yes, p2p anything uses more of your _upload_ bandwidth than any other means of communicating on the 'net. IMO, that's not "bad" because it keeps the tubes all decentralized and more capable of routing around damage. Like it's _supposed_ to do.

<comment><USER20> Nope, it's not about that. Skype can, if you're not running behind a NAT, make you a supernode, and in that case you will be routing calls between NAT'ed hosts "on your dime". Basically, it may be that you contribute your bandwidth to calls that have nothing to do with you. Presumably this isn't the case in the "cloud based" service, where the some server would act as a gateway between NAT'ed hosts.

<comment><USER19> Does Skype actually route voice traffic through a supernode? I thought it was just routing TCP/UDP requests to open up ports behind a NAT'd router. As well, supernodes may also be handling some authentication traffic. But I'm not 100% familiar with Skype's protocol.

<comment><USER21> Yes, supernodes are used to negotiate the communication trough NATs, the method's called UDP hole punching: [http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=skype+n...](http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=skype+nat+udp+hole+punching)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think a side-lesson from this article is how difficult acquisitions/enterprise sales are in general. When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it. I think Chan was perhaps right for Google to not buy Skype, but it's a good lesson when you are trying to get Google to buy your startup. Or even if you are trying to get a big company to license your technology or be a customer. Find your benefactors and detractors and manage both to win deals you want.

<comment><USER23> _When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it._

More generally, this is known in economics as the agency problem of the firm. (I Googled for some handy references, but I'll let readers who are interested seek out the references that best fit their own background, as I wasn't completely satisfied with any of the links I found.) Employees of companies are naturally looking out for their own individual interests, as well as (the company's shareholders hope) the higher good of the company. Setting up company policies to provide incentives for shareholder-value-maximizing decisions is not easy, especially when many of those decisions involve predictions of an uncertain future, in which outcomes for individuals may differ from the outcome for the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Holy shit, Google may not Be Evil, but Wesley Chan surely is:

"As Chan helped with due diligence, even going to Europe to see Skype firsthand, he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets -- its peer-to-peer technology -- was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing.

"'The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn't work well with Google,' Chan told me during an amazing interview for 'In the Plex' in February 2010. 'Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology.'"

<comment><USER25> See, I don't get that. Perhaps his tactics were rather quiet, but he's just an employee who sees a possible acquisition as a dangerously expensive mismatch. All this shows is that he did his homework and worked hard to make sure it wouldn't happen. What's evil about that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I absolutely do not understand what he means by p2p using more bandwidth. I think he is lying. Google will not get the thing it most covets - data. So it cannot sell ads on skype as all data will be shuttled through peer systems instead of Google servers.

<comment><USER27> p2p uses more bandwidth in a multi-user scenario. Don't think that's an invalid point.

<comment><USER26> I doubt that actually. Done right the bandwidth used should be less than in a client-server model. The idea is that the peers talk to each other directly and the data does not have to go all the way to the server and back. But I guess I was trying to say that he is not stating the real reason behind the decision.

<comment><USER28> Also, in a corporate setting, if you make a call to a buddy in your building, chances are the data will be routed on your own private routers and never even hit the ISP. I'd say that was a big plus for P2P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Because a classy employee sabotaged the deal because Skype is P2P and therefore would require a complete rewrite.

What an odd article.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wesley Chan sounds like someone who needs to be fired immediately, if not sooner.

</comment><comment><USER31> I believe that very little of the MS/Skype deal is about the technology behind Skype. With 8.5 billions Microsoft could have developed the same technology or even a better technology, and it's very likely that they will completely change it in the future to better integrate Skype with their other products. The real value of Skype is in its user base and the significant number of companies that use Skype as a valuable business resource. That is potentially a much more profitable user base than that of Live Messenger and the two products together now represent a large majority in the entire instant messaging marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish Google bought Skype just so I could find and search archives of my conversations in my gmail. It is incredibly hard to believe how skype survives without online chat log archiving. I find it almost essential for business- related work.

</comment><comment><USER33> The poor Linux Skype UI is looking better now as it might not even exist in the future.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not convinced ... I still think Skype would have been the missing piece of the puzzle for google voice, that would have taken it from where it is now (nice-to-have) to a must-have/must-use like youtube is today.

But that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's a good read. The best way to prevent a wrong purchase is not to purchase it. I admire Chan's courage and slyness to sabotage that deal, he must have saved Google a few billions of dollars: Google has enormous data centers, and capable teams, lots of loyal Gmail users, there's nothing that would benefit Google by buying Skype. Those reasons also hold for Microsoft. I feel sorry for Microsoft as they just burnt a few billions for no gains --- that enormous amount of money should have been spent to hire talents and put into R&D.

<comment><USER36> It depends what immediate plans they have. If they want skype-like voice/video features for integration in some product(s) _soon_ it may make more sense to buy in the already working tech and just add what is needed for the integration. Designing, building and testing their own code and infrastructure could be cheaper in the long run but would take _far_ longer than just buying in the code, talent and infrastructure that Skype already has.

Also the MS brand does not command immediate trust in many, so convincing users to use an MS product over something else is not as easy as it once was. As well as the code, people and infrastructure they've got the brand, a name that a lot of the general public already "trust" as they already use a product carrying that brand.

<comment><USER13> According to Microsoft, Windows Live Messenger has ~ 300 million active users.

That may be less than Skype (I don't know), but Skype is mostly redundant tech for them.

This was definitely a brand purchase - and such purchases may be worth it, but I can't think of a single product that Microsoft bought and that doesn't scream "Microsoft" all over -- so whatever trust in Skype consumers have, those consumers that don't trust Microsoft will probably leave Skype at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "this is the dumbest piece of shit"... I've read in a long time! All the p2p FUD is just that. In TV like Skype the data path is still p2p. only call setup is server based.

<comment><USER20> That's the case only when the clients are not NAT'ed. When they are, Skype uses supernodes (other clients who are not NAT'ed and have good connections). Other technologies have different names for this, but basically need a 3rd party with public interfaces (e.g. in SIP applications, you often have media relay servers).

<comment><USER37> I meant "GV" not TV. The NAT case only applies when both the clients are behind NAT, otherwise you do not need a relay node. Also there seems to be a way to avoid a relay even if both are behind a NAT. Read the paper, "Autonomous NAT Traversal", joint work with Christian Grothoff, Nathan S. Evans, and Andreas Müller published by IEEE at the IEEE P2P'10 Conference (bib, pdf) <http://samy.pl/pwnat/>

<comment><USER20> I've actually read that paper some time ago, but I have not seen any implementation using that technique in the wild. In any case, double NATs are a very common situation, sadly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of how Humphrey would operate in "Yes Minister."

</comment><comment><USER3> Google has the Gizmo7 technology. If Microsoft starts making Skype really suck, Google is in a good position to jump in with the solution. The problem is, if Microsoft does things right.

<comment><USER39> Gizmo5: <http://www.google.com/gizmo5/>

<comment><USER3> Whoops, wrong single digit prime number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> how many people use Skype just for the IM? I find it vastly superior to all other chat clients....

</comment><comment><USER41> Does Chan have his own PR company? This article couldn't have done a better job promoting this "brilliant product manager" (articles words).

<comment><USER42> It's a classic 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' situation. Steve Levy wants to make his 'In The Plex' book worth buying, Wes Chan presumably wants some positive exposure - so Wes Chan gives Steve Levy interesting information for the book that also happens to make him look good.

I doubt this sort of trade-off even has to be voiced - it's just implicitly understood. Although in this case, I think the anecdote backfired - Chan seems really smart, but also somewhat manipulative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > "I even had a [PowerPoint] deck that was super supportive of it," he said.

I sincerely hope that it wasn't PowerPoint...</comment>


Most complete human brain model to date is a 'brain changer' - <AUTHOR> https://news.osu.edu/news/2015/08/18/human-brain-model/ <comment><USER2> Cool. Let's see the methods paper they used to produce this model, then let's see the independent validation papers which would show us that the model is accurate in compared to previously established information. Then let's see an independently authored paper on a unique speculative use of this model that has positive results.

This model is in its infancy. It still needs a lot of experimental work (5 years? 10 years?) and in general the more complex models take a longer amount of time to be validated and widely trusted. A great example is the humanized mouse model, which is super complex (though not as complex as a brain) and took somewhere between 3 and 10 years depending on who you ask to go from the point of the OP model to mainstream accepted usage for some purposes. Maybe 5 years down the line we'll see something come out of the new brain model.

Brain science isn't my expertise, but there's a couple of other tidbits that caught my attention about this model. First, its vascular structure is missing entirely. I'm guessing the level of oxygenation of the fetal brain is important, but there may be ways of controlling for this gap. Second, gene expression isn't 100% equivalent to an actual human fetal brain at this level of development. There are probably ways to control for this also, but it's still a flaw. We don't expect models to be 100% true to reality (after all, it's a model), so I expect that these holes aren't going to prevent this model from being successful and useful.

<comment><USER3> Brain science _is_ my expertise, and you're right that the lack of vasculature will limit the viability of this. It will never grow beyond a few mm, and will have a dead core most likely. Plus, at "5 weeks" there will be no astrocytes or oligodendrocytes. You need astrocytes to make proper synapses and oligos to get proper signalling speeds. Others have shown more advanced brain organoids, incl astrocytes, but this tech is still very far from a conscious piece of tissue in a dish.

<comment><USER4> > but this tech is still very far from a conscious piece of tissue in a dish.

I suspect that will help its adoption. Not so many ethical or para-ethical issues for the press to get upset about. It's just meat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Increasing probability that you are in fact a brain in a vat, part of an undergrad science experiment in the outerworld.

I mean, more seriously I am pro-choice, but do we draw a line somewhere? "The main thing missing in this model is a vascular system. What is there – a spinal cord, all major regions of the brain, multiple cell types, signaling circuitry and even a retina – has the potential to dramatically accelerate the pace of neuroscience research"

Of a 5 week old fetus? Is it ok to make 10,000 of these for random experiments? What about 10 weeks, or 15 or 19 or 40 weeks maturity?

I'm not saying I believe this in and of itself is unethical, but it seems extremely dangerous to do this research and publish and promote it without even beginning a discussion of, where would we draw a line? Does anyone really believe the line will be here, and not an inch farther?

<comment><USER2> Meh, better we use these models than entire living mice or rats, which would be the alternative. I highly doubt there is any kind of sensation or consciousness inside of the brain models, seeing as how they have no sensory inputs or organic energy inputs (especially oxygen) whatsoever. On top of that, even 5 week old fetuses (which these model brains are definitively not) aren't remotely viable or sensate anyway, and don't even have an associated behavior model AFAIK.

The ethical boundaries for experimenting on living mice are, in my opinion, a bit perverse at the extremes. There's a general consensus that mice are sensate and can experience in some form basic emotions and learning behaviors. Despite this, it's acceptable to do experiments which deplete or wildly manipulate various neurotransmitters or neural circuits inside of the mouse's brain far beyond normal physiology.

Imagine having 100% of the "feel good" chemicals removed from your brain and replaced with 10,000% the normal concentration of "feel bad" chemicals. Obviously this is a huge simplification, but it's pretty clear that it would be hellish-- and that experiment has actually been done using mice. Sure, it's not as bad as if it were done with a real person, but it'd be much better if we could spare the mice and use a model brain in a vat instead.

<comment><USER6> I gave an answer on Reddit a week or two ago to a what might be considered the current limiting case in clinical practice. In another comment in the same thread I tried to point out that there are a lot of edge cases, even where it seems to be a bright line.

It seems reasonable to me that we should monitor this train of research closely, and I'm pretty confident people will.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g31m0/are_fetu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g31m0/are_fetuses_considered_a_living_thing/ctuetts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The lab-grown brain...contains 99 percent of the genes present in the human fetal brain.

"We are thrilled to have finally created a living human brain in a vat. This is an exciting experiment and one that has absolutely no possible ethical ramifications of any kind whatsoever, now or wherever it may lead in the future," the not-evil scientist Anand added enthusiastically and without visibly fighting the urge to twirl his totally not-evil mustache.

"It's simply completely obvious that this is a great direction to go in and one that will never give anyone any pause. More biscuits?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Wait a sec, I thought five week old fetuses weren't human.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this being called a "model"?

<comment><USER10> Because the word "model" is very overloaded. In this context, it means something like [http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/modelsys.html](http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/modelsys.html)

So yeah, it sucks that when you read a headline, you don't know if it's talking about an animal model, an in vitro model, a computational model, or something in between. But that's how it is. They're all models.</comment></comment>


Texas medical masks manufacturer is caught in coronavirus's supply chain panic - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavirus-mask-shortage-texas-manufacturing/ <comment><USER3> Welcome to the end result of Just In Time inventory.

Nobody wants to hold inventory because that represents "wasted money". So, when you need inventory, everybody is screwed.

This is just like the banking crisis of 2008. There is no point in being the Cassandra. If you're right, _everybody_ is screwed. If your wrong, you personally lose.

Better to just bank your money and try to bail out as soon as possible.

<comment><USER4> Texas also charges ~2.5% annually on value of inventory.

<comment><USER5> Static value should never be taxed, which includes real property. The value should only become apparent at the time of sale.

<comment><USER3> On property I _totally_ don't agree. Prop 13 in California is the poster child for the damage that kind of thinking causes.

On parts inventory, I'm probably quite a bit more in agreement. Holding inventory is risky, but spectacularly useful when there are disruptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just like agriculture and heavy industry, USA must make sure that medical supplies are made here. In an emergency, no country will let a company export to USA, they need them back home first.

<comment><USER7> Central planning? That should go down well??

<comment><USER8> Import focused labor arbitrage schemes that US multinationals have been pushing for the last 40 years break down when the flow of goods stops.

Critical industries need to be domestic because otherwise the country is left vulnerable in a crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://archive.md/OHklY](https://archive.md/OHklY)

</comment><comment><USER10> Trusting profit-motivated organizations to make decisions that are aligned with the common good has been proven to be a mistake over and over again; Is actually in healthcare's industry best interest that even more people get cancer; in general everything health related should be highly controlled and supplied by the government itself to avoid such dangerous motivators, even the food industry must be highly regulated to make sure it doesn't make false health-related promises, and in general any product promising health benefits.

</comment><comment><USER11> There must be an investor out there willing to speculate on the probability of a health scare.

<comment><USER12> I forgot the name, but there's a whole site dedicated to listing what to long/short for various 'immoral' scenarios like major disasters, pandemics, housing crashes, etc.

<comment><USER13> How are any of those things immoral? Let's say you think there is a pandemic coming and you invest in mask manufacturers. They use your investment to build more mask factories. When the pandemic hits they sell more masks because their new factories can handle the demand spike. Your make more money, and the public gets better protection while being saved from a price spike - <USER2> because you offered your money and foresight. You could tell the same stories for the other events.

<comment><USER14> Basically you have unnecessary production capacity losing money the majority of the time, which can only pay off during infrequent emergencies.

Then if price-gouging laws prevent you from charging more during an emergency you won't make your money back.

<comment><USER6> Your kids will named and shamed in school cause daddy jacked up the prices when people are dying. The government needs to invest, and even keep a few essential factories on standby or buy, say linens from factories that if needed will make masks. WTH, we invest $700 BILLION in the military and if you don't have antibiotics, scrubs and other basics, what's the point?

The government bailed out car companies and other than jobs, it also means that in a WW scenario, the GM and Ford factories will make tanks instead of cars. Some things re essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No one in this thread mentioned the federal emergency stockpile of 100mio masks. It seems this is at least in principle the solution to this issue? If a 4 week stockpile turns out to be insufficient, make it a 8 week stockpile, problem solved.

<comment><USER16> Storage and rotation is your biggest issue.

<comment><USER17> For rotation, can the stockpile be made part of the normal supply chain, so that masks are sold halfway through their shelf life and new ones flow into the stockpile? Or does the size of such a stockpile mean that the masks would expire faster than the market would buy them?

<comment><USER13> I don't want all of the masks I buy to be through half their life already. Also, how can the government have the power to do that?

<comment><USER18> > Also, how can the government have the power to do that?

Through laws?

USA has a strategic reserve of oil. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_\(United_States\))

I really don't see how masks, or other emergency equipment, changes things. Stockpiling stuff for emergencies seems to be the thing that governments should do.

<comment><USER13> They buy the oil, they don't force everyone to give it to them for a time before being allowed to sell it.

<comment><USER19> How did you come up with the idea that anyone is advocating for some kind of force majeure?

The proposal is for USG to buy a bunch of masks and sell them halfway through their useful life. Absolutely no one, other than you, is interpreting this as a requirement that fresh masks cannot be sold under penalty of law.

That's a bizarre and tortured interpretation of what's being discussed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I never understood the obsession with masks and simultaneous complete lack of interest in simple reusable cotton gloves.

Is it because masks get more attention and there's a large overlap between narcissists and people scared of the zombie apocalypse?

I'm kidding about that, but it's really odd how easily people seem to flock without attempting any deeper analysis.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand why you'd use cotton gloves instead of nitrile or latex gloves. The latter seem like they'd be far more impervious to pathogens.

I'm also really skeptical of the effectiveness of flimsy surgical masks.

I'd expect respirators with filters of the P100 and N95 variety (which respectively filter out 100% and 95% of particles 3 microns or larger) to be far more effective.

<comment><USER22> AFAIK coronaviruses are around 0.1-0.3 microns.

<comment><USER23> Aerosol droplets are the primary airborne spreading mechanism as far as we know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is racism and irresponsible journalism "all but 3 deaths have been in China."

There is a time lag! The disease doesn't care if you are Chinese or white. No hospital system can handle the numbers that came first to China, and will soon come here.

Wapo downplaying the virus. Just like they've downplayed the threat of globalism. And those who have tried to sound the alarm or argued that we should, gasp, renegotiate trade and bring back some manufacturing, those people are slandered as xenophobic or economics dunces. "Any serious person knows we can't bring manufacturing back." "Protectionism is stupid, trade wars hurt us,etc..." And now they want to tell the American public, "no death outside China." Blood on their hands!

<comment><USER25> > This is racism and irresponsible journalism "all but 3 deaths have been in > China."

Why would you say that this is racism or irresponsible journalism? It seems like a simple statement of fact.

<comment><USER24> It's a fact that has no importance other than to mislead. There is no reason to think the virus is any less deadly outside of China or in non-Asian patients. The rest of the world is just a few weeks, give or take local variation in R0, behind and we should expect the same or similar outcomes. That's according to the experts who spoke at the senate hearing last week.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that only 3 deaths have occurred outside of China (and the vast majority in Wuhan is an important metric in assessing how the virus spreads and how effective or not containment policies have been. There are many, many Chinese people who live outside of China, and emphasizing that the virus is heavily contained in the country of its origin is pretty relevant to anyone who hasn't visited China recently.

<comment><USER24> The death rate has very little to do with containment. The rate of infection does. In this case both of these merely represent the time lag, and despite what you think all of the experts agree— we are buying time at this point. Argue with the experts, not with me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mara: A lightweight ETL framework, halfway between plain scripts and Airflow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mara/data-integration <comment><USER3> I really like this!

I bootstrapped the ETL and data pipeline infrastructure at my last company with a combination of Bash, Python, and Node scripts duct-taped together. Super fragile, but effective[3]. It wasn't until about 3 years in (and 5x the initial revenue and volume) that it started having growing pains. Every time I tried to evaluate solutions like Airflow[1] or Luigi[2], there was just so much involved with getting it going reliably and migrating things over that it just wasn't worth the effort[4].

This seems like a refreshingly opinionated solution that would have fit my use case perfectly.

[1] [https://airflow.apache.org/](https://airflow.apache.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/spotify/luigi](https://github.com/spotify/luigi)

[3] The operational complexity of real-time, distributed architectures is non- trivial. You'd be amazed how far some basic bash scripts running on cron jobs will take you.

[4] I was a one man data management/analytics/BI team for the first two years, not a dedicated ETL resource with time to spend weeks getting a PoC based on Airflow or Luigi running. When I finally got our engineering team to spend some time on making the data pipelines less fragile, instead of using one of these open source solutions they took it as an opportunity to create a fancy scalable, distributed, asynchronous data pipeline system built on ECS, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and NodeJS. That system was never able to be used in production, as my fragile duct-taped solution turned out to be more robust.

<comment><USER4> > When I finally got our engineering team to spend some time on making the > data pipelines less fragile, instead of using one of these open source > solutions they took it as an opportunity to create a fancy scalable, > distributed, asynchronous data pipeline system built on ECS, AWS Lambda, > DynamoDB, and NodeJS. That system was never able to be used in production, > as my fragile duct-taped solution turned out to be more robust.

"An engineer is one who, when asked to make a cup of tea, come up with a device to boil the ocean".

Source: unknown. I think it was in Grady Booch's OO book, or some such book.

Also: "architect astronaut" and "Better is the enemy of good" come to mind...

<comment><USER5> I think the reference to impossible things is far older than Grady Booch.

      To talk of many things:
          Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
      Of cabbages--and kings--
      And why the sea is boiling hot--
      And whether pigs have wings
      ~ Lewis Caroll, 1832-1898

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure this is right for someone, everyone has different requirements, but I don't really want a lighter-weight Airflow. I want an Airflow that runs and scales in the cloud, has extensive observability (monitoring, tracing), has a full API, and maybe some clear way to test workflows.

I was looking into how Google's Cloud Composer is run, which is a managed Airflow service. They use gcsfuse to mount a directory for logs, because Airflow insists on writing logs to local disk with no cleanup system, even if you configure logs to be sent to S3/GCS. To health check the scheduler they query Stackdriver Logging to see if has logged _anything_ in the last five minutes, because the scheduler has no /healthz or other way to check health. There is no built it way to monitor workflows, so you can't easily do something like graph failures by workflow, email on failure is about all you get. A GUI-first app that requires local storage is not what I expect these days.

<comment><USER7> > I want an Airflow that runs and scales in the cloud

I'd encourage you to look at Reflow [1] which takes a different approach: it's entirely self-managing: you run Reflow like you would a normal programming language interpreter ("reflow run myjob.rf") and Reflow creates ephemeral nodes that scale elastically and that tear themselves down, only for the purpose of running the program.

> has extensive observability (monitoring, tracing)

Reflow includes a good amount of observability tools out of the box; we're also working on integrating tracing facilities (e.g., reporting progress to Amazon x-ray).

> has a full API, and maybe some clear way to test workflows.

Reflow's approach to testing is exactly like any other programming language: you write modules that can either be used in a "main" program, or else be used in tests.

[1] [https://github.com/grailbio/reflow](https://github.com/grailbio/reflow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly IS an "ETL framework"? I looked at both this project and Apache Airflow, and I'm not quite sure I understand...

<comment><USER9> Basically software for batch processing a tonne of data.

eg. importing a SAP feed into a database, or loading a bunch of csv files, or like processing a bunch of images...

...anything where you have to convert data from some source through a series of steps (typically a DAG) into some useful output.

However, its often misused.

For example, if you have a trivial amount of data, or trivial process an ETL is over engineered cruft where a simple script would do.

So there are many (rubbish) 'simple ETL frameworks' which offer zero value and technical complexity for no benefit.

Unless you _need_ multiple servers processing data through multiple steps and you need the auditing and process control... you probably don't need an ETL, just a simple script.

<comment><USER3> > you probably don't need an ETL, just a simple script.

+1

> Unless you need multiple servers processing data through multiple steps and > you need the auditing and process control

I'll stress the "multiple servers" part. You can add in a substantial amount of multiple, sequential steps and auditing and process control in a simple script. The part that adds orders of magnitude worth of complexity and operational overhead and points of failure is being able to distribute it to multiple servers. Distributed architectures are operationally and architecturally expensive. And far more often than not, completely unnecessary for a given use case.

<comment><USER10> Some ETLs these days _are_ simple scripts - e.g. Spark, Dataflow - with their config files.

<comment><USER3> Being able to _define_ an ETL workload within a simple script is not the same as your ETL system itself _being_ a simple script.

While I love both Spark and Dataflow, both of them are incredibly complex distributed systems with very high operational costs. Someone, somewhere is paying a lot of money to have an operational resource maintain that complexity. Whether you have an internal devops resource doing so or you're using a managed service, you're paying for that complexity somehow. And, for a lot of workloads, you aren't actually getting any more value than you would from standing up a ~$50/month standard Debian/Ubuntu server and a set of simple scripts on it.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to have a cluster to run spark scripts, setting master to `local` (and running it on one machine) is often enough for small anounts of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is there in the ETL space with bi-directional sync?

I don't usually run into problems where "transfer data from X to Y" is it. Usually it's "there's data in CRM X and data in Event system Y, merge the two keeping X as the master source"

There's Mulesoft et al but they seem overkill for small deployments, as well as being stupidly expensive [1].

1\. I'm sure they're good value if you're an enterprise company. But if you don't need the UI builder and only 2-3 sources kept in sync, they are expensive. And with my reading of the documentation, conflict resolution isn't great either.

<comment><USER13> Kettle - the open source component of Hitachi Pentaho Data Integration is worth looking at, has some functionality for this (you can join sources and insert joined data back into master) and its pretty easy to extend to meet requirements. Its Apache licensed, with great commercial support if you need it, and can be found here:

[https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho- kettle](https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle)

We are small shop but it is a key part of our data workflows. We also found spoon the UI workflow builder to be very helpful for building workflows - since its allowed team members who were not strong in Java to build workflows that they need. Last but not least and a key decider in our adoption is the community is super friendly and very helpful. Something we thought would take months got implemented in a weekend thanks to quick feedback. Perhaps worth a look.

<comment><USER14> As a long time Kettle user (probably close to 10 years) I must warn potential users that the learning curve is steep and that (as any large body of code) it contains code that sometimes can run unpredictably. I got good at diagnosing user induced bugs in PDI transformation via reading the stacktrace but it is not to everyone liking.

To me, a very strong regression is the "new" UI which switched from meaningful icons to a blue & white scheme that makes reading/discovering new transformation a real pain: all is a blur of blue without the past color cues that you learned in the past ("ok, this is the icon for a merge from a source file & a database sent to an ES cluster" became "some stuff is read from blue sources and sent to some blue output")

I recently learned about the capability to run transformation into a spark cluster that replace the original engine by a new spark implementation, bring obvious compute optimization for large enough dataset but I don't have enough experience with it to speak of it positively or negatively.

<comment><USER13> @karmbahh - good to know. I've used Kettle for about 9 months in production and so far its been pretty solid - but we are not going that far off the beaten path for most things. Its a big app, but at least there is documentation and some great users who have been very helpful and the codebase is by and large very logically laid out.

We do use the Adaptive Execution Layer - but so far not with spark (we use it with our own processing engine) - its working well for us and its great we can switch engines as needed.

re: UI. I like a lot of new look and feel but I can see how it did lose some visual semantics and i can imagine any long term user would find the changes frustrating. I guess with coming to the tool much later, this has been less of an issue for me and we teak the presentation for our own workflows and plugins anyhow.

For us Kettle/Pentaho PDI is a great open source project but it will definitely be interesting to see how things evolve now Hitachi has acquired Pentaho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm interested in hearing thoughts from people who've used digdag ([https://www.digdag.io/](https://www.digdag.io/)) or pachyderm ([http://www.pachyderm.io/](http://www.pachyderm.io/)). Pachyderm is the most interesting to me. It seems to be focussing on the data as well as the data processing.

<comment><USER16> I'm the founder and a core developer of Pachyderm so I can weigh in on how it compares (there is, of course, some potential bias here). I also was at Airbnb around the time we released Airflow, so I got to see it being built up close and used the system it was replacing quite a bit as well.

I think it's fair to say that Mara and Airflow are both in the same category of DAG (directed acyclic graph) schedulers for Python; Python makes a ton of sense as the language to focus on as it's the de facto lingua franca for data science. I'd also put Luigi in that bucket, although I think Airflow has degraded its mind-share quite a bit. All of them are targeting the data pipeline use case, which is very well represented as a DAG, but the actual management of the data is left up to the user. They (Mara, Airflow, or Luigi) schedule tasks for you after all the tasks they depended on have completed, but you have to figure out where to store your data so that downstream tasks can find the data their upstream tasks outputted. At Airbnb we used HDFS as this storage layer, often with Hive or Presto on top. Storing in s3 is also a common pattern.

Pachyderm is also a DAG scheduler but we're a lot more prescriptive about where you store the data, and a lot less prescriptive about what languages and tools you use. Pachyderm ships with its own distributed filesystem (pfs) that we use for storage, it does a few things that other storage solutions can't do. In particular, it version controls your data and records "provenance" i.e. where data comes from. For example if you train a machine learning model then its provenance will be the data you used to train it. In terms of processing we're much less prescriptive, because we let users express their code as a Docker container rather than only having bindings for one language. So you can use anything that you can fit in a Docker container. Data is exposed to your code via the local filesystem, so regardless of language you have a very natural interface to your data: system calls on files.

Hope this helps understand the differences between the various systems and thanks for your interest in Pachyderm. Swing by our users slack channel [0] if you'd like some help getting started with it.

[0] [http://slack.pachyderm.io/](http://slack.pachyderm.io/)

<comment><USER17> Random question:

I want to automate some workflows on my local machine, and besides the obvious of just writing a script, I am interested in a system where I could describe my workflow as a DAG and then have an easy (web?) UI where I could specify which DAG nodes have changed (e.g. my data pre-processing code) and have it automatically run all of the nodes that (recursively) depend on it as an input, while not executing those whose inputs have not changed.

I am passing around very little actual data between these jobs; they are mostly writing data to a (distributed) file system, so at most I need to pass some paths around.

Some of the stages require launching a remote job and polling to find out if it has completed.

Is there a good system for doing this? Now that I've described it I could probably hack it together with a command-line UI without too much difficulty, but having a pretty UI for launching and monitoring jobs would be great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a conference talk presenting the framework and the ideas behind: [https://youtu.be/GdtFuOah-5c](https://youtu.be/GdtFuOah-5c)

</comment><comment><USER18> Send a pull request to add it to [https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome- pipeline/blob/master/R...](https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome- pipeline/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> done

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems interesting, but I'll have to dismiss it for now due the total lack of tests

</comment><comment><USER20> In my experience one of the places where every framework breaks down is when you must combine / reconcile multiple rows from multiple data sources to produce one row in a fact table.

Does there exist a "framework" that lets me do this simply?

<comment><USER21> (author here)

The mara example project [1] does exactly that. It combines PuPI download stats with Github repo activity data.

[1] [https://github.com/mara/mara-example- project](https://github.com/mara/mara-example-project)

<comment><USER20> Thanks! Just took a look.

The file directory structure is a bit confusing -- could you point me to the file that performs this transformation?

<comment><USER21> For example the PyPI download stats pipeline is here: [https://github.com/mara/mara-example- project/tree/master/app...](https://github.com/mara/mara-example- project/tree/master/app/data_integration/pipelines/pypi)

The __init__.py contains the pipeline, and the rest is the SQL files that do the transformations

<comment><USER20> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As the one who implemented Airflow at my company, I understand how overwhelming it can be, with the DAGs, Operators, Hooks and other terminologies.

This looks like a good enough mid-term alternative. However, I have a few questions (which I couldn't find easily in the homepage, sorry if I skipped something):

\- Do you have a way of persisting connection information? I saw an example of how to create a connection, but it isn't clear if the piece of code has to be loaded every time you execute the ETL

\- How easy it is to implement new computation engines?

\- Plans of creating a command line to make it easier to execute operations?

<comment><USER21> (author here)

Connection information is configured in code through [1], see [2] for an example.

It's very easy to run other workloads. Either by directly invoking Python functions from tasks or by writing own commands (operators)[3].

There is a command line. It's the interface for running from external schedulers (jenkins, cron)[4] & [5]

[1] [https://github.com/mara/mara-db](https://github.com/mara/mara-db)

[2] [https://github.com/mara/mara-example- project/blob/master/app...](https://github.com/mara/mara-example- project/blob/master/app/local_setup.py.example)

[3] [https://github.com/mara/data- integration/blob/master/data_in...](https://github.com/mara/data- integration/blob/master/data_integration/pipelines.py#L47)

[4] [https://github.com/mara/data- integration/raw/master/docs/exa...](https://github.com/mara/data- integration/raw/master/docs/example-run-cli-1.gif)

[5] [https://github.com/mara/data- integration/raw/master/docs/exa...](https://github.com/mara/data- integration/raw/master/docs/example-run-cli-2.gif)

<comment><USER23> Perhaps this is addressed elsewhere, but do you have any plans to support Common Workflow Language?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd love this, except for ruby. Anyone know of anything like this?

<comment><USER25> I wrote Kiba specifically for this.

I will share a good bunch of current use cases at Kaigi 2018 if you are interested!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ...but why?

Just use airflow.

Things I want in an ETL:

[x] works at scale.

[x] simple to use.

[x] not written in python (eg. in go or rust)

[x] easy to scale (eg. in docker)

[ ] this.

<comment><USER26> [https://github.com/thbar/kiba](https://github.com/thbar/kiba) This is still my workhorse and has never let me down. I do a ton of ETL.

[https://github.com/thbar/kiba-ex](https://github.com/thbar/kiba-ex) This looks interesting though.

<comment><USER25> Kiba author here - your comment made my day, so thanks!

<comment><USER26> :D Thank you!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reflow [1] is also well-suited for ETL workloads. It takes a different tack: it presents a DSL with data-flow semantics and first-class integration with Docker. The result is that you don't write graphs, instead you just write programs that, due to their semantics, can be automatically parallelized and distributed widely, all intermediate evaluations are memoized, and programs are evaluated in a fully incremental fashion:

[1] [https://github.com/grailbio/reflow](https://github.com/grailbio/reflow)

</comment><comment><USER27> That looks very interesting indeed, and love to see some more development in that space.

Would anyone care to explain how it differs from Airflow? I had dismissed Airflow some months ago for my use case (Windows, and large number of dependencies were an issue at the time), but would still like to eventually migrate my ETL scripts to a solid framework sometime in the future.

<comment><USER28> With a little bit of work you could probably trigger tasks on a Windows Machine, in particular if the work you need to do is mostly script and/or SQL based. The main limit is that Gunicorn for the Airflow webserver is not currently compatible with Windows, but the scheduler should work fine. I believe it might be able to run in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but I don't think anyone has tested it as of yet. (Source: I am an Apache Airflow committer)

<comment><USER27> Thanks! To be fair, I was looking at it from a single-user perspective, and was optimizing for:

        time it takes to setup and move my ETL to Airflow + time I will save in the future by using the framework

vs

        time I will spend fixing and maintaining my already-existing ETL scripts

so I dropped the notion after I hit the first major snag. But I should put a reminder to take a look back at it in a few months!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just thought I would add:

If you want something more serious that supports better scale, realtime/streaming, is written in a statically typed language check out [https://kylo.io/](https://kylo.io/) it's added on to Apache NiFi (which was developed by our friends at the NSA)

</comment><comment><USER30> Why PostgreSQL only? The mara-DB dependency [1] claims to support more.

[1] [https://github.com/mara/mara-db](https://github.com/mara/mara-db)

<comment><USER21> (author here)

Currently there is a hard dependency to Postgres for the bookkeeping tables of mara. I'm working on dockerizing the example project to make the setup easier.

For ETL, Mysql, Postgres & SQL Server are supported (and it's easy to add more).

<comment><USER31> I'm a bit confused about this. What if the target is HDFS? Why this dependency on SQL databases for ETL?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really like the interactive terminal-based menu, that's neat!

</comment><comment><USER32> This is slightly weird...but I named my dog Mara: [https://flic.kr/p/FtdRNX](https://flic.kr/p/FtdRNX)

<comment><USER21> Also weird: it's the name of a giant ugly guinea pig: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(mammal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_\(mammal\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's the least verbose/boilerplate-heavy tool in your experience?

We couldn't make it leaner than this (works well in production in scale). [https://github.com/wunderlist/night- shift](https://github.com/wunderlist/night-shift) If we could get rid of Ruby in there (super useful for scripting) and fly with only Python I'd be the happiest person on Earth.

Also we started to go cloud agnostic, it handles both AWS and Azure. Do you something that does AWS, Azure _and_ Google Cloud also?

<comment><USER21> GNU Make is indeed the least verbose/ boilerplate-heavy tool and I use it for a lot of things.

The problem with Make is lacking acceptance amongst younger programmers who always want to work with the latest technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How is this better than Singer [0]?

[0]: [https://www.singer.io/](https://www.singer.io/)

</comment><comment><USER35> the docs animations inline add to casual-browsing fun [https://github.com/mara/mara-example-project](https://github.com/mara/mara- example-project)

</comment><comment><USER36> Is anyone out there doing (or considering) streaming ETL as opposed to batch?

<comment><USER37> Apache nifi ([https://nifi.apache.org/](https://nifi.apache.org/)) is a software which handles streaming ETL processing.

From a previous post I made about it: "We have HTTP endpoints set up to receive data from our ERP's accounting system to send data to Concur and to update customers' Lawson punchout ordering systems with shipment information. The 'E' is an HTTP post with an XML payload. The 'T' consists of using the payload to query other databases to build the 'L' payload, and the 'L' is an HTTP post to the consumer's endpoints."

<comment><USER38> There's often a misconception about Nifi being batch or file based and not streaming. This probably originates as result of data in Nifi being represented as a FlowFile, which is kind of a misnomer. As woqe stated above, Nifi can certainly doing streaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does not seem lightweight. Maybe its light compared to the other solutions?

</comment><comment><USER40> if this had a scheduler and an alerting mechanism when SLAs are breached, that would be great! maybe future features?

<comment><USER21> (author here)

It intentionally doesn't have a scheduler, just definition and parallel execution of pipelines. For scheduling, use Jenkins, cron or Airflow.

Currently you can get notifications for failed runs in slack. Alerting itself is not really in the scope of this project, but it should be easy to implement in a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Composable is amazing at ETL - [https://composableanalytics.com](https://composableanalytics.com)

It blows things like Alteryx, NiFi, Airflow out of the water.

<comment><USER42> Please add a disclaimer if you work for these guys... I personally generally dislike enterprise solutions because I hate talking to sales people - <USER2> that's just me.

<comment><USER41> Yes - I'm the founder. And you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to :)</comment></comment></comment>


If you were awarded $20,000, how would you fight poverty? - <AUTHOR> http://www.d-prize.org/

<comment><USER2> I would take 5 impoverished middle-school kids, and put them to work on some public works projects, 8 hours a day for 4 weeks. If they can read or write, they'd work in an elementary school teaching first graders to read. If they can't read or write, they'd work on school facilities, painting, emptying trash cans, cleaning gymnasium floors. Each would be paid the $4000 share of the $20000, in the form of a trust fund for college. After the four weeks they'd return to school, hopefully knowing what work is, and able to connect it to their schooling.

Or I'd spend all 20k on one kid, to pay for a piano and lessons for as long as the cash held out. Might need to pay someone parent-like to enforce practice, that's the hardest part.

Both solutions require someone to teach self-discipline.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would address what many agree is the root of the poverty issue but no one is willing to talk about -- I would put the money toward a way to improve women's reproductive rights.

Planned Parenthood and other organizations do what they can to stay out of ideological disputes, focusing instead on assisting women toward reproductive self-determination.

In worldwide interviews, women who know their answers won't come back to haunt them, say they want more than anything to be able to control their fertility -- to choose when and whether to have children. But there are powerful political and social forces that stand in the way of this basic human right.

For me, this is a no-brainer. No human right is so fundamental as the right to control one's own fertility.</comment>


Facebook trapped in MySQL fate worse than death - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-trapped-in-mysql-fate-worse-than-death

<comment><USER2> Summary: The creator of VoltDB thinks MySQL is hopelessly slow. No other sources are cited.</comment>


Oumuamua Isn't from Our Solar System. Now We May Know Which Star It Came From - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/41928-where-did-oumuamua-come-from.html <comment><USER2> This thing remains just unfathomably weird.

An extra-solar object -- that's not actually the weird part; sure, we haven't seen any before, but their existence is to be expected and is totally reasonable. BUT...!

That shape? Asteroids don't come in that shape. They just don't. We've got literally thousands of data points which say that doesn't happen.

And the whole changing-trajectories business? Comets do that by outgassing a bunch of shit. But this has done it without outgassing anything detectable at all. That's also something for which there are thousands of data points in the "not a thing that happens" column.

Why aren't people more freaked out by this?

<comment><USER3> agreed! did someone at least try to signal it? I mean sure, it's probably an oddly shaped rock formed from some unusual event, but still, raidosignals aren't THAT expensive, are they?

<comment><USER4> [https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news/15](https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news/15)

No news since, so either nothing was found, or the aliens have already taken over the Breakthrough Board.</comment></comment></comment>


The Quantum Computer FAQ - <AUTHOR> https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2017/02/06/the-quantum-computer-faq/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't explain why working with qubits can make anything faster.</comment>


Eye Tracking vs. Mouse Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/eye-tracking-vs-mouse-tracking/ <comment><USER2> I would be really really interested how Gazehawk is doing the webcam eyetracking. Last year I decided to pivot my usabilitytest.com business to do exactly what they are doing now. I have been testing / researching / combining different eye-tracking and head-tracking algorithms/APIs etc. I must say for an engineer it was an ultimate challenge. However, after 3 months of working on it I realized this is too much for me and I called it quits. I managed to get eye-tracking working using 2 webcams (one front to monitor head-movement and one small near the eye to monitor eye movement). Unfortunately, because of the nature of eye reflection I had to work in complete darkness and use IR light to illuminate the eye - you can't call it non-intrusive method.

So I am very happy that guys at GazeHawk cracked this and launched the service that I really wanted to do and offer people low-cost eyetracking method.

<comment><USER3> I pointed at some of the general techniques we use on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision- tec...](http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision-techniques- does-GazeHawk-use-for-gaze-tracking)

> for an engineer it was an ultimate challenge

You won't find any argument from me; eye-tracking is extremely hard stuff to do correctly and reliably. There are many things that I still want to do to improve our implementation, but can't find the time to write.

(Insert a shameless request for interested readers to send me their resumes here!)

<comment><USER4> Just emailed you.

<comment><USER2> you emailed me? I didn't receive anything. I am not sure where you got my email but here it is: jezowicz at gmail

<comment><USER4> Not you - jgershen. But I can email you as well if you like. I've been working on some eyetracking stuff and find it fun and interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone tried fuzzing out content further from the mouse pointer -- perhaps with semi-transparent images or new CSS/canvas capabilities -- so that users have to move the mouse near what they're reading, thus making mouse position (for testing purposes) better model gaze?

<comment><USER6> You'll get bad data. If you put a piece of content to the side in a blurred- out box for testing, people may very well go investigate it -- unblur it and they ignore it entirely.

<comment><USER7> You can probably account for that by timing how long your mouse was near that area, no?

You'll have to re-blur the areas when you leave them of course so that the reader goes back to the other content.

<comment><USER6> Maybe - the only way to confirm that the timing is an effective proxy is to use eye tracking :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I don't have to, why should I choose only one or the other? Ideally, I'd love to have access to both sets of studies for my websites.

I would assume that eye tracking is mainly for looking at content and secondly for looking for next actions, while mouse movement would be primarily for locating next actions and secondarily for interacting with content.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can personally attest that my mouse and my eyes are only very loosely correlated, maybe 50% at best.

(Much of the time I am using hotkeys, and when I am actually using the mouse it is often flitting around in my peripheral vision where I can see it but don't focus on it)

<comment><USER10> I often move my mouse pointer out of the way so it's not distracting me. Surely that wouldn't be too uncommon?

<comment><USER11> When I'm reading Hacker News my eyes are on the comments, the mouse pointer is on the left or right side so it isn't causing any distraction. I do it all the time. Sometimes I also highlight what I'm reading, mainly if I'm multitasking and it's a long text, I want to know where I started last time I lost focus on the text.

<comment><USER10> Re: highlighting, I do the exact same thing. Has always made me wonder about an add-on or something that could handle that in a way that gave it advantages over the highlighting method?

Then again, highlighting is low-tech, easy enough and works fine. Maybe I'm looking for an idea that isn't there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Biggest flaw of eye tracking like this is that it's hard to get ppl in the 200k yr to participate.

With mouse tracking just need to bring them to my web site.

Of course, I understand how better eye tracking is. But I'm not talking about that here.

<comment><AUTHOR> A good point. Interestingly enough, around a quarter of our testers make > $90k/yr. We don't break it down more than that (and I don't know how active they are in actually testing), but I suspect it was because of interest in the new technology rather than actual desire to make money (even if we do pay well).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice for staying in the job market while homeless? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I've lived as a "hand to mouth" freelancer for a while and can no longer keep up with rent due to clients shutting down. I have over a dozen job applications under way, but obviously progress is slow and even if I do get an offer it won't pay off until I'm "on the streets".
I do have good friends who will let me stay on their couches for some time. Given the circumstances I'm afraid that I'll be stuck in this situation until my food budget is used up, at which point I don't know what to do.
Frankly I feel like throwing myself into the river right now, but obviously that is not helping anyone.
I have a fairly niche skill set that no one wants. My specialty is building and running complex on-prem infrastructure (in the petabytes and teraflops range), though in the recent years I've been doing DevOps in the cloud like everyone else. I'm also contributing to a wide range of free software projects, but no potential employers seem to care about that.
I don't even know what I'm asking here. A cry for help obviously, but with no room for actual advice! Probably I just want someone to say "it's going to be okay" because I can't see it myself.
Virtual hug, anyone?  :-( <comment><USER2> My name is Carson (carsonkahn.com/who) and I want to do whatever I possibly can to help you. Text me and let's see what we can make happen for you: +1 (303) 808-5874. It _is_ all going to be OK — not because of some mystical, arbitrary self-assurance, but because we're going to put our brains and hearts into it. Don't "throw yourself into a river", please; text me. It _will_ be okay.

<comment><USER2> Just realized you may not have access to texting. Email me instead if you need to. We're going to make this all work out for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what to say except that this post really moved me. We're living in a strange moment where everything is going to crap for a significant portion of the world. At the same time, we're seeing an outpouring of kindness and willingness to help from so many people. I think now more than ever there is reason to be hopeful.

I don't know you, but there was a time in my life where I made a similar type of post on a similar type of website, and I found some comfort in talking to and hearing from others. I was going to private message you, but I have just learned that HN doesn't have private messaging. Instead, I will put the onus on you: if you ever need an ear to vent to, I am open to alternate forms of communication.

Hang in there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, I only just saw this.

I run several websites pertinent to homelessness. I also run r/GigWorks. The Welcome message pinned at the top has a compendium of links to stuff that help you.

Given that this is on HN, probably the most pertinent thing is this list of remote work platforms:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview)

If you do actually end up homeless, this may be important info:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/prepping- to...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/prepping-to-be- homeless.html)

But also standard advice from r/homeless and r/almosthomeless is to just keep working at finding solutions and try to not end up homeless. It's much easier to avoid homelessness than to get back into housing from the streets and thus is a bad time to be homeless. They are closing soup kitchens and the like.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-an...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-and- impact-on-homeless.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> STAY WHERE YOU ARE and make arrangements to make staggered/partial payments at a later date.

STAY WHERE YOU ARE. I work at a homeless shelter and see first-hand how not having a safe place to work from and store your things complicates life and creates undo hardships.

STAY WHERE YOU ARE, especially now with the pandemic when shelters are trying to protect their clients from outside contamination. You may be turned away from even emergency homeless shelters.

STAY WHERE YOU ARE!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone for their replies. And apologies for the desperate and scary message, I was in a bad place yesterday.

Rest assured I'll do my best to stay afloat and keep a level head through this difficult time. I really just needed to vent about it.

Again, thanks for the feedback, it really means a lot! I will contact the landlord and try to defer payment, this possibility had not even crossed my distressed mind.

Love y'all HN. Take care! <3

</comment><comment><USER6> Evictions take a while so don't leave until you are forced. In this climate if your community is impacted by covid-19 situation (which is basically everyone) it will take _even_ longer. You might also ask your landlord to defer rent payments until you get a job etc... Clearly you are skilled and probably a good tenant. It seems unlikely they would find anyone to rent your dwelling. You might look for some grants / small business etc... a lot of those are spinning up now. You might ask your clients for a retainer as well. Keep applying for jobs. Take some shifts at Amazon or the grocery store too. See if you can stock shelves so you can stay away from others. Wear a mask, gloves etc... Best of luck.

<comment><USER7> Came here to say this.

Talk to your landlord.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> See if you live in one of these localities, you might be able to stay where you are for a while. Even if not, eviction proceedings usually take at least a month.

[https://www.fool.com/millionacres/real-estate- market/article...](https://www.fool.com/millionacres/real-estate- market/articles/cities-and-states-that-have-paused-evictions-due-to-covid-19/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Everything is going to be ok is too easy for human's life. Just keep in mind that our existance is a blink in the Universe's Eye. Be grateful to yourself and life, no matter what, until you're alive. Don't panic, don't stress yourself, just do your best and anyway everything Will be ok in this Life or another. I hope this could help. A big virtual hug.

</comment><comment><USER10> Where are you located, at present?</comment>


Sharing public keys between iOS and the rest of the world - <AUTHOR> https://digitalleaves.com/blog/2015/10/sharing-public-keys-between-ios-and-the-rest-of-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Ugggggh, yet another site that hijacks scrolling. Is there an extension to solve this stuff yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> I am really liking this article. One concern I've had for a while, with things like NaCl (and now, iOS), is that it's not always easy to get something in a portable, identifiable format. As annoying as the ASN.1-based PKCS objects are, they work really well for interchange!

</comment><comment><USER4> Use QR codes?</comment>


Bradley Manning acquitted of aiding the enemy - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bradley-manning-acquitted-aiding-enemy-171853159.html

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this something that should be on the HN front page?

Yes, politics is not full front and centre HN, but really, this started the whole privacy debate, Snowden almost certainly would not have released his data without Manning, and a US judge just told the US administration that no, it could not call a whistleblower a traitor.

It might not be much, but its a start.

</comment><comment><USER2> Aiding the enemy would have been the "show trial" result. Still hundreds of years in jail is still not an encouragement to the next Manning or Anowden</comment>


Did StumbleUpon just pass Facebook for social media traffic? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/03/did-stumbleupon-just-pass-facebook-for-social-media-traffic/ <comment><USER2> It's easy to understand both the reason this could be true, and the reason not to care. When someone visits your website from SU, they just clicked the stumble button. How many pages have they viewed in that session? How many of them bounce immediately? How many of them read a page and - while in their stumble mode - stumble along to the next page?

And when someone visits your website from FB, they probably just clicked on a link a friend shared with them (implicitly endorsing you), or came from your FB page, where they have been pre-qualified as interested.

As other commenters have pointed out, pageviews aren't the best way to measure the efficacy of your digital promotions. Try your best to find metrics that align with your actual business goals. Conversions to sales would be a good one, but something like time spent on site or pages viewed per session are fair indicators that you're doing something right.

I'm not trying to decry SU as worthless or this article as baseless; not by any means. I just want to encourage a healthy skepticism of metrics that don't necessarily mean anything. If "that which gets measured, gets managed", then optimizing for page views could mean you find yourself in the deadpool soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> While this is a pretty cool story, I share the author's reservations about what this actually means.

First, Stumbleupon could get more traffic, but less actual interaction. As an example, my personal blog posts recently got about the same number of page views from a post on HN and from a status on Facebook. But, the HN users were on my site for an average of 42 seconds, as opposed to 3.5 minutes for Facebook.

Second, the type of traffic could be different. I have no personal example of this- but it may be that Stumbleupon has more generalist viral content and Facebook could have more tailored content, possibly better for small businesses to monetize.

Either way, really cool for Stumbleupon, I totally did not realize how huge it was.

<comment><USER4> I have the same experience but then with pageviews and Twitter VS Facebook: Twitter users check an average of 1.2 pages on my website. Facebook users do 4.2. That means 1000 visitors from Facebook generate the same number of pageviews as 4000 from twitter.

<comment><USER5> The increased interest from facebook might be due to a kind of social obligation. Whereas when you use HN or Twitter to find links you have no obligation and less reward to stay on the page an actually read the content.

Someone who is reading a link that a friend has sent them is expected to read it, otherwise the friend may be unimpressed or you might not have anything to talk about. Plus, there is the added incentive of impressing or gaining a connect to the friend or appearing interested in your crush/gf's interests.

On HN and reddit, my only interest is whether I want to learn something or make myself laugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I posted the actual data last night: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062502>

</comment><comment><USER7> The headline misses the key point that this only covers social media traffic to websites that have the statcounter web tracker installed. Is this likely to be a representative sample of all social media traffic? I don't think so, and would love to sanity-check the underlying numbers against some other sources, but they only provide the percentages.</comment>


SSL Version Control Firefox Addon - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssl-version-control/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an add-on for Firefox by Mozilla that adds a preference to disable SSL v3 in the wake of the POODLE vulnerability[1][2]. This is intended for users of FF prior to version 34, when SSL v3 will be disabled by default.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456178) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456564)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you click on ads as a way to say thank you? - <AUTHOR>

I don't know if I am the only one but whenever I encounter an internet resource that I find very useful I usually click on couple of ads on their webpage.
Idea is they will get paid for those clicks.
Wonder if others do this as well. <comment><USER2> No. Not only do I run "Ghostery" and "AdBlock" in my browser, I also run DNSMasq as a DNS aggregator. I then use dnsmasq.conf to alias a lot of ad sites to 127.0.0.1.

Advertising is so close to lying, that I feel very comfortable in doing this.

<comment><USER3> Would you be ok if AdBlock sent an identifier to the website so the website could choose to block you if they wanted ?

<comment><USER2> Yes. But I don't think I'd run AdBlock at that point, not because I would be blocked from certain websites, but rather because that would be giving away too much information to a bunch of known liars, cheats and con men. Like I said, advertising is so close to lying, and advertisers cross the line from encouraging to lying so often, that I don't want to give that much real info away.

If I couldn't block the ads for some legal reason, I'd try to come up with a way to fake-click on ads, so as to spread disinformation about myself. The advertisers are almost certainly lying to me, so I'm going to lie to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never, because it's unfair to the advertisers. "Donating" other people's money and feeling good about it is a bit ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why should I care about being "unfair" to advertisers ?

<comment><USER5> Because we're your family, friends, neighbors, local shop owners and other people you share society with? Most AdWords advertisers are people running small businesses. "Advertisers" is not a separate class of entities that doesn't intersect with other people you care about being fair to. It's not morally OK to purposely spend our money as if it were yours just because nobody will stop you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do. I always wondered if others did this as well. I also wonder if that is OK to do... probably not.

<comment><USER5> It's not OK.

Advertisers don't want you to do this since you're spending their money for no possible gain. They only advertise with the expectation they'll earn more than it costs in new sales. Too many clicks for the purpose of donating to website owners and that won't happen, so they'd have to stop advertising.

Networks don't want you to do this because if advertisers can't make a positive return on investment, it doesn't make sense for them to advertise with that company, and they'll go elsewhere or go out of business. Either way, it's a threat to the network's existence.

Morally, it's very much not OK, for two reasons:

1) Small businesses have to market themselves to make people aware of what they're selling in order to survive. Simply opting out of advertising because some people are abusing it to give their money to website owners is not an option. Neither is advertising somewhere else for millions of businesses; Google controls too much of the ad space and traffic. There are no substitutes in many situations.

2) If you work a normal job, telling advertisers to accept this situation is the same as telling you that a condition of receiving your paycheck is that random people on the street have permission to reach into your pocket and take some money out whenever they want. That's what clicking on ads just to give money to website owners is. You may or may not have enough left over to pay your bills. Sound good?

<comment><USER7> It's just a click. For it to matter so much whether I am clicking this link or that link with the right intent, that all this supposed meaning and morality hangs in the balance, that it could make all this difference, it all seems so absurd. Almost makes me want to disable ABP, Allow Scripts Globally (dangerous), shut my eyes, and just start clicking. None of it really matters.

Eh, I think I'm done with the Internet for today. Might run afoul the click police.

<comment><USER4> > It's just a click [...] that it could make all this difference, it all seems > so absurd

It makes more of a difference to an advertiser than your vote makes in the presidential elections. Do you vote?

Also, keep in mind that the largest part of the money you just "donated" goes to Google and not the web publisher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Occasionally I will disable adblock on a website that I like, so that they atleast have a chance of making money off me. But having said that, I generally dont click on ads.

</comment><comment><USER9> I never do because I know people actually pay money for those clicks. Imagine paying 1.25 per click. You could waste someones entire ad budget for the day in a few minutes.

I block ad's because I don't want to see them no more than I would want to see them in a library. But I'm sure advertisers would rather me block their ad's than to click on ones I wasn't genuinely interested in.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never, but after reading some comments here I might start.

I block ads because of the obnoxious practices of some of the ad networks. I let some ads through from networks or individuals that are not obnoxious to me.

I also remember the early days when a slow ad server would keep a whole page from rendering (Hello ESPN)

</comment><comment><USER11> I do not click on ads, unless it's that 1 in 1 million chance I want to see their product.

I also don't block ads.

</comment><comment><USER12> No, that's click fraud, which could cause the very publisher you want to thank to have his/her ad account blocked.

</comment><comment><USER13> Never. If I find an Internet resource that is useful I tell my friends about it on Facebook. Whether or not they follow ads on the site is up to them. (I also tell my friends about AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and Social Fixer, so that they don't have to view ads if they don't want to.)

<comment><USER14> Well,it's good for the blogger but not for the advertisers. It also doesn't sound ethical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never thought anyone else would do something like this too, but yeah I do it all the time

</comment><comment><USER16> Ads are just a way of making money. I'm fine with them as long they don't disturb the user experience(video ads that run load in the background, click under, and those tricky ones )

</comment><comment><USER17> I've never done this and was unaware that other people did.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes, sometimes. Only if I'm at least 10% interested, though. I won't click an ad for thanks if I have 0% interest and will immediately bounce.

</comment><comment><USER19> not unless i'm genuinely interested in the ad.

</comment><comment><USER20> pretty sure this is click fraud

</comment><comment><USER21> Years ago, I belonged to a forum that added ads at some point. I indulged my curiosity about those ads in part out of genuine curiosity and in part to support the forum. I suspect I was not the only one. The forum owner initially made pretty good monthly money from the ads. As the forum went to hell, his ad money dropped off in a way that I think reflected lack of support more than it reflected declining traffic.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yup.</comment>


The Largest Map of Dark Matter Yet - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/scientists-have-created-the-largest-map-of-dark-matter-yet

<comment><USER2> Linkage to their paper:

[http://deswl.github.io/page1/vikram_paper/kappa_des.pdf](http://deswl.github.io/page1/vikram_paper/kappa_des.pdf)

via: [http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2015/Mappin...](http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2015/Mapping- The-Cosmos-20150413.html)</comment>


Interview with Jon Skeet - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogcreek.com/dev-life-interview-with-jon-skeet/ <comment><USER2> As a fellow Brit and as someone working in C# everyday, Jon Skeet is somewhat of a personal hero of mine. I can't count the number of times I've turned to StackOverflow and found the answer to have be written by him. Chappeau!

Interestingly we appear to have had similar paths to get to our careers. I too started off with BASIC and the BBC B Micro. I then went on to study Computer Science at GCSE, A-Level and then at university. Jon must be a similar age to me, so I'm guessing he also was one of the first to take GCSE's after the UK switched from the 'O-level' (1990-1991).

Great little interview. Thanks for sharing @eddie_31003.

<comment><USER3> Snap! Did my comp sci GCSE in 1990.

<comment><USER4> How was it? I didn't have an option to take CS either for GCSE or A-Level. There was IT but most university departments actually discouraged it and recommended just taking science and maths.

<comment><USER3> To be honest it was so long ago I can't really remember too much. I recall trying to learn SQL and relational theory but just not getting it and thinking I would never use it anyway - how naive I was! That might have been A-Level.

They taught us BASIC, I can't remember the computers we had, I don't think they were popular ones. I do remember one of my colleagues really struggled with his practical project because he named all his variables a, aa, aaa, aaaa and so on. There was a maximum variable length of 8 characters so things went all wrong when he needed to use 9 variables. I don't think we were taught anything about quality software development, using decent variable names, algorithms etc..

Overall I did find the courses incredibly easy and I aced both without even trying. It was university where things started to get a bit more challenging.

I did science and maths as well, I did get much more out of those courses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite apart from his obvious technical chops, I've always been impressed by Jon Skeet's unfailing politeness and helpfulness. He's a real role model to developers.

Whatta guy!

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy has always impressed me. He works on Java at Google and spends a large chunk of time being a C# and .NET expert. Obviously C# and Java are semantically close to the point of nearly interchangeable, but the devil is in the details and he seems to have them down.

<comment> V-2 Java is years behind C# in most aspects. Of course it doesn't mean it follows the same path, but there's less to learn if you switch from (modern) C# to Java than the other way round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I envy the way he manages to balance all commitments in his life. Pretty amazing.

<comment><USER8> Me too. I find myself frustrated with my inability to balance stuff every now and then. I would love to sit with Jon and just have him say "here.. here's where you are doing it wrong" and then find enlightenment. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would vote for him as the most decent & helpful guy on Stackoverflow. I've always found his tone humble, which isn't very common these days. Really glad to have people like him around.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm guessing this is what they mean by a 10x programmer? :-)

<comment><USER11> And the Chuck Norris of programming :)

[http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet- facts](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm vaguely aware of Jon Skeet from echoes from the Windows dev world, from which I've largely stayed detached.

Can someone explain the significance of Jon Skeet, preferebly in terms of "Facts" in the style of Bruce Schneier's [1] or Jeff Dean's [2]?

[1] [http://www.schneierfacts.com/](http://www.schneierfacts.com/) [2] [http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean- facts](http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts)

<comment><USER13> Jon Skeet is a frequent contributor to StackOverflow.com[0], where he is known for being able to answer highly obscure questions with equally obscure answers[1].

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon- skeet](http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet) [1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is- subtractin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting- these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result/6841479#6841479)

<comment><USER14> He's also, kind of, known for being the top user in terms of reputation points.

It's a little like there's Jon Skeet, then there's nothing for a while, then there's somebody else. His average reputation increase per day is often more than 300. Of course, 200 is the typical "cap" on daily increase, but somehow he Skeets around that. He'll probably reach a million points this year.

Not that I think reputation points on Stack Overflow is very interesting or meaningful, of course. :)

<comment><USER15> Has Jon Skeet reached one million yet: [http://www.hasjonskeetreachedonemillionyet.com](http://www.hasjonskeetreachedonemillionyet.com) Not quite this year, but soon.

(Ps, add your own id to see when you reach it: [http://www.hasjonskeetreachedonemillionyet.com/155689](http://www.hasjonskeetreachedonemillionyet.com/155689) Mine is in quite a few years)

<comment><USER16> Oh, yay, in 2046. I guess I should start answering a few questions again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-hernandez Nice interview, I always enjoy reading his contributions on StackOverflow. I don't always understand what even the problem at hand is, but it's just a fascinating exercise to read some of his responses and the obscure facts behind them.

Science Fact: Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions [0]

0: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/537093](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/537093)

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought that Google engineers weren't allowed to use Windows.

<comment><USER18> Google produces some software for Windows - e.g. Chrome. How did you think they did that if they weren't allowed to use the OS?

<comment><USER17> Sorry, I was just being sarcastic about how Google doesn't allow broad Windows usage, allegedly because they're afraid of Chinese hackers. I just always thought it was a bullshit reason that was trumped up to make Microsoft look bad.

(edited for clarity)</comment></comment></comment>


Space fountain - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain <comment><USER2> Sounds awesome, and there is nothing I want to see more than a space elevator.

But the safety challenges of an active structure like this seem insurmountable unless it is located in a remote area and used only for cargo. Although now that I am thinking about it, probably wouldn't be too hard to devise a safe ejection mechanism for the case of power loss.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anybody heard of this before? I almost have to believe it's a joke article based on the graphic and accompanying text about the pressure needed to keep the fountain erect.

<comment><USER4> A launch loop is a very similar concept, and is very serious. I think the graphic is just meant to convey the concept.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop>

It is being worked on in considerable detail:

<http://launchloop.com/slides/launchloop.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it doesn't have to be a permanent active structure. Have it inflate and deflate as needed.

Step 1: Start shooting iron bullets at escape velocity straight up.

Step 2: Something in orbit directs them back to earth.

Step 3: There will be incredible gas pressures around the bullets going to orbit, task that pressure to support a tube around the bullets going into space. This makes for less air resistance for the bullets lessening amount of energy needed for escape velocity.

Step 4: When tube reaches to top, send loads climbing up the tube.

Anything that could withstand such pressures would probably melt or be too heavy.</comment>