Are simplified hadoop interfaces the next web cash cow? - <AUTHOR> http://brianbreslin.com/are-simplified-hadoop-interfaces-the-next-web-cash-cow/

<comment><USER2> He's right that Hadoop needs to be simpler, easier and faster to use than it is right now. And I don't doubt there is value in being someone who puts a friendlier layer on top of it.

However, I don't think doing so would be as huge or game-changing as he argues. Any company that has somehow aggregated petabytes of data probably has some reasonably competent developers and admins. Dealing with the inevitable scale-related issues will either burn someone out or make them competent. For these developers, getting Hadoop running now is probably _easier_ than doing whatever else they've been doing to keep aggregating these petabytes of data. I went from knowing little about Hadoop to running relatively complex queries in a matter of hours through Amazon EMR and Hive (a SQL-ish layer on top of Hadoop). Basically, I gzipped and uploaded the data to an S3 bucket, downloaded a client to easily use the EMR API, wrote a simple Hive query derived from examples, and it just worked. All this was much easier than what I've had to do to keep a MySQL cluster or web application running.

<comment><USER3> well my thesis was based upon the premise that those who would need a UI for hadoop scale queries wouldn't be those doing the data collection. i.e. the marketers or research scientists who want to run queries against existing data sets, or data sets in use by others in their companies.

imagine someone in say the sports division at aol wanting to know patterns for users across aol who have viewed auto related info or something.

the idea is not having to bother the sophisticated db admins, and let end users figure out the data themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazon's Elastic MapReduce does a decent job of this, and there's a GUI for it in the form of the Console (<http://console.aws.amazon.com>): <http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/>

<comment><USER5> EMR merely abstracts away the problem of configuring and hosting hadoop; the actual business of crunching data is still very much in the build-it-yourself realm.

There is a huge, huge market for a value-added service on top of EMR to help people understand their data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> from my perspective, a single user interface paradigm is unlikely to cover the variety of use cases that the full suite of hadoop platform services (flume, sqoop, hdfs, mapreduce, hive, pig, oozie, hbase) provides.

at cloudera, we've built and released into open source a user interface construction kit and an environment to house these various "applications". that way we can incorporate any metaphor you'd like: file browser, spreadsheet, yahoo pipes, etc.

see <http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/whats-new-in-cdh3b2-hue> and [http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/developing- applications...](http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/developing-applications- for-hue) for details.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea. How do you solve the problem of marshaling tera/petabytes of customer data into a system like this?

<comment><USER3> I honestly don't know. beyond physical hardware transfers (shipping a disk) I don't think the average person has a connection that could upload terabytes of data.

you'd have to assume much of the data is already in the cloud. i'm no expert on the matter, but I'm sure someone on HN could figure out the solution. I was merely proposing the idea.

<comment><USER8> Tanenbaums stationwagon always seems to be one step ahead of fixed line capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Those interested might want to check out Cascading (<http://www.cascading.org/>), and open-source project tackling this very problem.

<comment><USER10> Cascading is nice, don't get me wrong, but you still know you're writing MR. And you're still far more involved in the details of getting data to and from than I would like.</comment></comment>


USCIS Announces Further Measures to Detect H-1B Visa Fraud and Abuse - <AUTHOR> https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/putting-american-workers-first-uscis-announces-further-measures-detect-h-1b-visa-fraud-and-abuse <comment><USER2> > Employers who abuse the H-1B visa program negatively affect U.S. workers, > decreasing wages and job opportunities as they import more foreign workers. > To further deter and detect abuse, USCIS has established an email address > which will allow individuals (including both American workers and H-1B > workers who suspect they or others may be the victim of H-1B fraud or abuse) > to submit tips, alleged violations and other relevant information about > potential H-1B fraud or abuse. Information submitted to the email address > will be used for investigations and referrals to law enforcement agencies > for potential prosecution.

I wouldn't want to be responsible for managing this inbox:

firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Many in G.O.P. Offer Theory: Default Wouldn't Be That Bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/us/politics/many-in-gop-offer-theory-default-wouldnt-be-that-bad.html

<comment><USER2> I am generally loathe to think about govt default, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be bad to shed some debt-ability since people seem to abuse it. We overspend so much with so little accountability, it might be good to reign that in.

Then again, I am a little afraid of change in this respect...

</comment><comment><USER3> The government has a credit card that is almost maxed out and it has been making its minimum payment every month. They spend more than they take in, so in order to make their minimum payment they have to get cash advances from the credit card, which brings it closer to maxing out. They are about to be maxed out, so there are three options if they don't want to default: 1) they get a raise in their credit limit and continue doing what they were doing 2) they figure out how to get more revenue 3) they figure out how to spend less. Democrats are saying that the only option is 1) or default. Republicans are saying that 3) is also an option that they are not considering.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to write a program to scan the blue seas for MH370? - <AUTHOR>

Just heard in the news that the search for the missing MH370 has now shifted 3000kms to the south west of Perth. I wonder if somebody can write a script that can scan the blue seas across the Indian ocean and adjoining seas to come up with all locations that are not blue in color. Yes, there will be a lot of false positives like ships and other debris, but if we can use this script to reduce the workload to a few thousand datapoints, we should once for all know if the plane crashed or is now elsewhere. <comment><USER2> And clouds, and wave caps, and noise in the input data, and natural variations in ocean color... I think your estimate of the number of false positives is off by several orders of magnitude.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. In that case, would scanning the sea for hues of red work? The MH370 has a pretty prominent red strip along its body. If we can scan for this color, then it could be a more practical search.</comment></comment>


Why are universities teaching this stuff? Stata, Java, no SQL - <AUTHOR> http://seamusabshere.github.io/2020/06/12/why-are-universities-teaching-this-stuff <comment><USER2> I took an RDBMS class to complete a comp sci minor back in the dark ages.. 1984ish. Agree at some level it should be taught.

Disagree on the Java thing - its use is very wide spread outside of academia. Rust? Not so much, maybe one day. It would be appropriate to have electives in things such as Lisp or C and perhaps one or the other should be part of what is necessary for a major.

Not sure I would hold Middlebury up quite so high, especially in comp. sci where they certainly do not have a long track record. Poster is located in Burlington so perhaps local bias and of course name rep.</comment>


The UDP Firewall Punching Technique Explored - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/08/05/the-udp-firewall-punching-technique-explored/ <comment><USER2> This technique won't work on a Symmetric NAT firewall.</comment>


IBM's Watson is starting to be tested in the real world - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21669609-watson-ibms-attempt-crack-market-artificial-intelligence-starting <comment><USER2> > Transcribing a minute of speech costs 2 cents

It's a shame that the public API (Bluemix) isn't nearly as effective as what I presume the private one is for their business clients. I tried the speech-to- text services and it made too many errors to be any sort of useful.</comment>


Large Scale Payments Systems and Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://nerds.airbnb.com/large-scale-payments-systems-ruby-rails/

<comment><USER2> Very nice, especially the ProtectedAccess layer. Are you guys still using flight.js on your front end?

<comment><USER3> At the moment flight is still used on the Search page, but we're moving towards React. Have a look at Spike's slide deck on the evolution of Airbnb's frontend here: [http://www.slideshare.net/spikebrehm/the-evolution-of- airbnb...](http://www.slideshare.net/spikebrehm/the-evolution-of-airbnbs- frontend)</comment></comment>


Amgen publishes failures to replicate high-profile science - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/biotech-giant-publishes-failures-to-confirm-high-profile-science-1.19269?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1601_NEWSBIOTECHFAILDATA_PORTFOLIO <comment><USER2> Publishing failures to replicate without blame seems like a good way forward, similar to the practice of publishing postmortems in the computer industry.

<comment><USER3> I would say that this is more important than postmortems. This is new science that's being published. It's overturning knowledge assumed to be true.

<comment><USER4> Well, casting doubt on knowledge assumed to be true, which may lead to overturning, but is still provisional when you're at the point where you have one published experiment claiming a result, and one published failure to replicate that result. Even correct results are not always successfully replicated on the first replication attempt, including in "hard" areas like physics/chemistry. Lots of possible reasons. One frequent case is that the original results were, even if broadly correct, underspecified, i.e. there was some key component of the original experimental apparatus or method that wasn't sufficiently described in the paper, either due to an oversight or because the original authors didn't know it actually mattered to the outcome. Sometimes figuring out what that was makes it possible to replicate the result, although other times it turns out to undermine the original results (e.g. the entire result turns out to be due to some specific impurity in a specific supplier's equipment). But in any case still very useful.

<comment><USER5> Yes! Been there, done that. So much of lab technique is hard to explain in words. People do postdocs and sabbaticals in order to learn technique. And then there are uncontrolled variables. Classic example:

> When a student had difficulty in crystallizing a compound [professors] would > simply shake their beards over the flask containing the offending substance. > Then, lo and behold, after nucleation had done its job, crystallization set > in. Gerhard believed that the beard of an Adolf von Baeyer or an Otto > Wallach could indeed be a source of crystals of every conceivable space > group.

[http://www.improbable.com/2011/02/09/legend-of- chrystallogra...](http://www.improbable.com/2011/02/09/legend-of- chrystallographers-beards/)

[https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/are-bearded- chemists-b...](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/are-bearded-chemists- better-at-crystallization-6397626)

[http://tdl.libra.titech.ac.jp/hkshi/xc/contents/pdf/11709748...](http://tdl.libra.titech.ac.jp/hkshi/xc/contents/pdf/11709748X/5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >'"I believe the main risk of a publication venue like the F1000 channel is that it becomes a place for "bashing" good science, because biological experiments are complex and beset by many variables that are hard to control.'

Funny how rare it is to see mention of this in original papers and press releases. When is the last time you read a biomed article where the authors said something along the lines of "we excitedly await the independent verification of our findings".

</comment><comment><USER7> While I applaud this effort, it does concern me that they have chosen to publish only three of the claimed 47 failures to replicate.

The Begley that spawned in part this debate was seriously flawed for two reasons: the first is that the experiments they performed were not described in _any_ detail, and the second is that the experiments they choose to repeat were clearly not selected at random.

Indeed, the limitations of their initial study may underlie the skepticism that greeted their claim that 89% of studies were not reproducible. Most scientists expected a certain proportion of studies to be difficult to reproduce, but nothing approaching 89%.

So, perhaps publishing details of ~6% of their study is an improvement, but again, ironically, it is not a statistically relevant sample.

<comment><USER8> According to the article, these three articles were not part of the original set:

> In 2012, Amgen researchers made headlines when they declared that they had > been unable to reproduce the findings in 47 of 53 'landmark' cancer papers. > Those papers were never identified — partly because of confidentiality > concerns — and there are no plans to release details now either, says Kamb, > who was not involved with that publication. He says that he prefers to focus > on more-recent publications.

<comment><USER7> The Begley paper and the whole debate over reproducibility spawned a worthwhile introspection on behalf of the journals, several of which have adapted the information required from authors in response.

However, I am distinctly unimpressed by Amgen's failure to live up to the standards it expects of others; not releasing the information required to assess their original claims being their worst offense. In this series, one of the studies, as mentioned in the article, is even a repetition of 4 [1,2,3,4] earlier failed attempts to reproduce the original claim that bexarotene caused a reduction of amyloid in mice [5]; while worthwhile, it is not an impressive contribution.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704555](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704555) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704554](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704554) [3] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704553](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23704553) [4] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086452/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086452/) [5] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3651582/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3651582/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If only we could prevent the news from making discoveries public before they've had a chance to be verified. Even if the news media publishes a retraction, it usually happens long after the initial results are already spread and reinforced as common knowledge.

I'm only just an armchair opinion but I get the impression that a some people are gaming the system for profit rather at the expense of intellectual honesty. The prospect of the field of science incentivizing 'junk science' is really unsettling.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was a Planet Money episode about this recently - [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episode-677-the- experiment-experiment)

I loved the part where one of the researchers who couldn't replicate other experimental results, had some of his experiments found to be not- reproducible.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a simpler version of this site for hosting the data: [https://osf.io/sqb2x/](https://osf.io/sqb2x/)</comment>


Journalism is treason in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/30/german-digital-rights-pioneers-investigated-for-treason/

<comment><USER2> It's a sad tradition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel_scandal)

(Interestingly, the Spiegel carefully tries to not have an opinion on the current scandal and just quotes both sides.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I know that. Its realy sad specialy according to our "Grundgesetz" §5

<comment><USER3> The Grundgesetz has no Paragrafen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Artikel. Sry. You are right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Germany's plans to expand domestic Internet surveillance earlier this year.

Sorry if this smells slightly of Godwin's law, but if the internet had been available from when the Berlin Wall went up until it came down, the Stasi would not have bothered with neighbors being informants; they would have done exactly this.</comment>


Show HN: Nokia Lumia ad recreated with CSS transforms - <AUTHOR> http://kuanyen.net/lumia/

<comment><USER2> It's ironic how the only modern browser that can't see that is Microsoft's.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't work too well in Firefox either, since some techniques like image masks aren't well supported yet. Chrome and Safari will display the full effect.

Still, given that this sort of design can work in 2D as well, one could conceivably position the background logos differently for browsers that don't support 3D transforms so that the ad degrades more gracefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://i.imgur.com/UitrT.png></comment>


Slack acquisition by IBM coming soon? - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-slack-partnership-customer-digital-transformation-2020-2 <comment><USER2> Hopefully, I would not be unhappy if Slack took the same road to hell as other IBM acquisitions.</comment>


Show HN: 70% of startup ideas suck. Yours doesn't have to. Alpha testers wanted - <AUTHOR> https://validator.phalox.be/?pk_campaign=launch&pk_source=hn_show <comment><USER2> _70% of startup ideas suck._

Is there anything to support that claim? ... why not 99%

<comment><AUTHOR> The failure of startup ideas is probably one of the toughest to quantify: Failed ideas probably didn't result into a registered business. Articles on the internet all seem to refer to a paper from 2011 ([http://gallery.mailchimp.com/8c534f3b5ad611c0ff8aeccd5/files...](http://gallery.mailchimp.com/8c534f3b5ad611c0ff8aeccd5/files/Startup_Genome_Report_Extra_Premature_Scaling_version_2.1.pdf)) that claims that 72% of intellectual property is not a competitive advantage.

This article ([https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of- star...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups- will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/)) claims that 42% of startups fail because there's no market demand. Which doesn't include startups that found market demand, but didn't offer what the market needed (e.g. market values the offer but doesn't (or too little) want to pay for it). For failed startups in general, this article mentions a failure rate of 90%, but the reasons are diverse.

As I'm focusing on the validation (and some ideation) phase, the first metric made the most sense. Thanks for being critical!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting. How does it work under the covers? Do you have an army of testers of various demographics?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm so happy you're asking! As a good entrepreneur/product manager, I start by validating the idea with the most minimum viable product possible.

For a service like this, I can simply use the 'concierge MVP' ([https://www.shortform.com/blog/concierge- mvp/](https://www.shortform.com/blog/concierge-mvp/)). So you're not far of: Rather than an army, it's me myself and I. Another common strategy is to do things that don't scale (and this most definitely won't scale). If it turns out to be a success I can define with the customers which features will be implemented first, and which will remain a 'concierge' service. The technical risk will need to be tackled next when there is market demand.

For early adopters, that pretty much means they're getting a personal coach for near to nothing.

If I'm lucky to have customers, I have some ideas around converting chat bots into virtual coaches, doing a bit of natural language processing (mainly to get the sentiment) and some simpler text matching to make sure the target customer, problem and solution match. Under the hood I'll need a process with different branches for different businesses. The alpha stage is also meant to further expand this process before implementing it in software.

(sidenote: Launching something is exciting, but also scary. I'm super happy you wrote!)

<comment><USER4> Love the transparency and boldness. My personal opinion is that your service sounds too good to be true so it makes me hesitate trying it out as there is a time and emotional cost to trying it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great feedback, and I believe the solution is to be even more transparent. I was thinking of adding some FAQ after the pricing to give people some insight and increase the trust level.

So far, no conversions yet. I can only conclude that the current format is indeed not the right one. Trust in the service can indeed be a problematic one.

I'm going to individual approach now: Reach out to people on IndieHackers who wrote about their idea, and browse around here (although, I think people will be in a later stage).

I'll be sure to get back when I have an update! :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The HP Way [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpalumni.org/HPWayBooklet1980.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> linked to from a summary at [http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm](http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm)</comment>


Fact checking George Dyson (where he taps me on the shoulder) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/fact-checking-george-dyson.html?

<comment><USER2> jgc, the 1953 report is in the public domain, but the site you linked to wants me to be a registered member from a "partner institution". (sigh, mumble, expletive, mumble) If you would be so kind as to put it up on your site, it would be really appreciated. I'd love to read it.

I feel the division between memory types is artificial, and touting "53KB in 1953" is blatantly misleading. The UNIVAC I had 20K on it's own, albeit mercury delay line memory.

Of course, the real fun begins when the size of a "byte" isn't 8 bits, and the size of a "word" isn't 16 bits. And let's not forget the added fun of decimal based systems (ENIAC). ;-)</comment>


GitHub Spotify Playlist - <AUTHOR> http://open.spotify.com/user/shutupandfish/playlist/5F6qlzi3Jau29g9Ay1G22H

<comment><AUTHOR> Tracks (Collaborative Playlist!):

\--- Please Read Me - Bee Gees

\--- Push It - Salt-N-Pepa

\--- I Can Change - John Legend, Snoop Dogg

\--- She's Got Issues - The Offspring

\--- Repo Man - Ray LaMontagne And The Pariah Dogs

\--- Stash - <USER2>

\--- Log Trucks - Brian Regan

\--- I Think I'm A Clone Now - "Weird Al" Yankovic

\--- Red Eyes - The War On Drugs

\--- Fork In The River - The Black Crowes

\--- Checkout Time In Vegas - Drive-By Truckers

Born out of a Saturday night team hack session with a growler of IPA close at hand</comment>


My Brain Can't Handle OOP Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/articles/my-brain-can%E2%80%99t-handle-oop <comment><USER2> My personal opinion on this OOP vs. FP debate is that this is a result of that fact that OOP has been taught as being the only way to write software, not as one of many. OOP has it's place. When you have a complex system that needs to keep track of state since the entities within thayt system behave differently dependng on the state, that's a good time to use it. Design patterns are like chess moves, they give us a good place to start working from. However, if the problem doesn't fit the pattern, most people try to make it fit rather than redesining it based on what they learned. Functional programming is better for time when you don't need state. You need an answer based on the current state, but that's it. I personally think both paradigms have a place in modern development..

</comment><comment><USER3> I would argue that in this case, the author is technically wrong with his argument.

You do not need to know the entire history of the foo object, only the intrinsic state and the arguments to the current method call to determine it's behaviour. This means that a method on an object can be modeled as add :: (foo, integer) -> integer.

That is not to say that this is necessarily easy, and yes, singletons do complicate this by making it difficult to know exactly what the intrinsic state of an object is as they essentially hold a reference to something which may be modified by something other than the foo object.

I fully agree that functional programming seems like a good idea right now, but I would also say that this particular problem is mainly due to the programmer failing to adequately control and rein in extra, unnecessary state.

</comment><comment><USER4> previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3938566></comment>


Ask HN: Best realtime mobile analytics with API - <AUTHOR>

I want to track in realtime some very simple, but accurate stats about the mobile users of our website. I want to know all the usual stuff like visitors, referrers etc but also things like hardware, screen resolutions of the mobile devices.
I know about the usual suspects like getclicky.com but wondered if there were any out there built from the ground up for mobile that addressed more efficiently the issues effecting analytics on mobile.
My last requirement is that they have an API so I can pull the stats I'm interested in into a dashboard. <comment><USER2> Hey there, our mobile analytics startup <http://percentmobile.com> can help you with your needs pretty quickly. It's not real-time though, but we are soon rolling out an API to plug into.

Give it a spin and let me know if it works for you!</comment>


GDB 7.12 – Debugging programs written in Rust is now supported - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/msg02192.html <comment><USER2> Discussion from 4 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832237)</comment>


Optogenetics Hardware Setup - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/hardware.html <comment><USER2> I saw one of the guys from this lab give a colloquium (namely about the virus vectors and mice) and it was the single most amazing thing/field I've learned about in the last 10 years.

<comment><USER3> Optogenetics represents a huge advancement in Neuroscience as they allow us to single out a specific population of neurons for stimulation while leaving their neighbors alone. Previous technologies for driving neural activity are barbaric by comparison. I seriously hope that karl deisseroth wins the nobel prize some day.

<comment><USER4> It's not just the improvement in spatial resolution, but in temporal resolution, too. The ability to stimulate specific subpopulations on millisecond timescales basically means the precision of our surgical techniques is now probably the main bottleneck to more sophisticated control (alongside our own understanding of the interactions of different neuronal circuits).

I'd say it's not so much a matter of "if" Deisseroth and his colleagues win so much as when.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing. A couple of years ago I asked if we were able to use Optogenetics to build a "bridge" over damaged neurons or nerve fibers. Is this technology a "yes" answer to that question?

<comment><USER6> Specifically in the peripheral nervous system, there's been some work along these lines, primarily in anesthetized experiments, using ChR2-expressing stem cells, which integrate into denervated nerves, and enable optogenetic control of the previously denervated muscles. See here: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24700859](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24700859)

We wrote a review recently about what's been happening in optogenetics in the peripheral nervous system/spinal cord. That's here: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27147590](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27147590)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel terrible for the mice used in experiments, and yet I'm grateful for the scientific advances such experiments have made possible. Makes me uncomfortable.

<comment><USER8> Lots of mice for neuroscience experiments end up with their heads sliced in half, anyway, so there are worse fates. I never got that job, but I heard it does strange things to the mind to cut rat heads for an hour straight.

<comment><USER9> > I heard it does strange things to the mind to cut rat heads for an hour > straight

I've spent a few years doing that. While I can see how the image might appear to folks who haven't been in that field, it's a bit hyperbolic to to think of it as a soul-bending meat grinder. Conducting an animal study in a reputable institution is regulated by an ethics committee with the purpose of scrutinizing scientific motivation and the care of animals. When you're clear on the purpose, methods, and minimum animal requirements, it isn't butchery. Furthermore, keeping the animals comfortable (through medication and other means) doesn't just serve to make the researcher feel good; it also eases stress on the animals, which otherwise can confound medical data. In short, it's a sophisticated professional endeavor, and the science gets more mindshare than the visceral unpleasantness of performing surgery on an animal. It has also been my experience that most people without experience in animal research can be quite surprised by the degree of similarity between animal care and use committees and human subject research review boards. Animal researchers can have a fairly high bar to clear to justify the use of vertebrate animals.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I've read enough about the beginnings of biological science to deeply appreciate your explaining the humane approach which seems to be as well considered as your research, on behalf of our invaluable rodent assistants, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> they're attaching that thing to the mouse's brain?

<comment><USER12> they're not just attaching it, they're shoving it in there with long pointy spikes!</comment></comment>


Optimizing Linux Memory Management for Low-latency, High-throughput Databases - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.linkedin.com/performance/optimizing-linux-memory-management-low-latency-high-throughput-databases <comment><USER2> You can also optimize memory and cpu management through linux control groups. Oracle published a pretty good description (see: example 1: NUMA Pinning) of how to assign dedicated cpus and memory to a process or group of processes [1], but you can also read about the supporting cpuset & memory cgroups subsystems too [2, 3].

p.s. I can recently created a screencast about control groups (cgroups) for anyone interested @ [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/14-introduction-to- linux-c...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/14-introduction-to-linux- control-groups-cgroups)

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers- storage-a...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage- admin/resource-controllers-linux-1506602.html)

[2] [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt)

[3] [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting note about the reclaiming. Yet another warning when transparently using a NUMA system.

NUMA can be a real pain. You can get a 40% hit on direct memory access, and far worse if you're modifying a cacheline in another processor. On one of our VoIP workloads, we noticed major (250%+) increase in performance and CPU stability after splitting a very thread-intensive process into multiple processes, each set with affinity to a particular core.

OSes try to help you, but it seems like they're primarily concerned with multiple processes, not huge processes like databases. Such processes should become NUMA aware and handle things themselves for best performance.

It might even make sense to ask if you can split the machine on NUMA boundaries and just act like they're separate systems. RAM's getting very cheap, and RAM/core is going up faster than CPU power is (it seems to me, anyways).

Also, is there a reason not to use large pages directly for the mmap'd sets if you know you're going to have them hot at all times? (I assume they read the entire file on start?)

<comment><USER4> Hi, post author here.

> Also, is there a reason not to use large pages directly for the mmap'd sets > if you know you're going to have them hot at all times? (I assume they read > the entire file on start?)

We could use large pages directly. But, as I mentioned in the article, the performance gains would be negligible compared to the gains that come from having things in memory in the first place. These are not very large memory systems and the page table / TLB miss overhead doesn't seem to be biting us. We are just following the mantra 'pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil' :)

<comment><USER5> In my experience, most people don't know they have TLB problems because, effectively, it's always bad.

It's only when you start getting to the metal to see what your hardware is actually capable of that the TLB stands out as a glaring source of inefficiency.

Put another way: yeah, the TLB is making your app slow, but it's doing so _always_ , so you don't notice. Instead, you mistakenly think your hardware is just slower than it really is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "after rolling out our optimizations, we saw our error rates (ie. the proportion of slow or timed out queries) drop by up to 400%"

There is some good shared knowledge in the post (unlike this comment, to be fair), but what does drop by 400% mean?

If a rate drops by 100% it becomes zero. I get that.

If it increases by 400%, the outcome is slightly ambiguous (do we add 400% for 500% total or do we multiply up to 400% of the original value).

But a rate decreasing by 400% - am I the only person who finds that (not uncommon) expression hard to conceptualize?

<comment><USER5> I understood it to mean that it had 1/4 the error rates they were previously seeing.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly right :)

<comment><USER7> Then it dropped by 75%.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It was a blunder. The post has been updated to reflect this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In regard to conclusion 2, there is another approach here - when you're finished with an old segment, posix_fadvise(..., POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) can be used to drop it from the page cache.

<comment><USER4> That would be true if we were using C++. Unfortunately, all our code is in Scala and we use Java NIO libraries to memory map our files. AFAIK, they don't give us the option on using these POSIX calls.

<comment><USER8> Cassandra binds to posix_fadvise to do exactly this when writing out new SSTables:

[https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/trunk/src/java/org/...](https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/trunk/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/utils/CLibrary.java#L145-L162)

<comment><USER4> Wow.. that's great to know. We will definitely investigate this approach. Thanks for sharing! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was hit by the transparent huge pages on RHEL 6.2 in my workload. If you find our ordinary processes randomly taking up huge amounts of CPU time -- system CPU time -- when doing apparently ordinary tasks, you might be affected too. That was a real pain to diagnose when you're used to trusting the kernel not doing anything that weird. Running "perf top" helped to narrow down what the system was REALLY doing.

I didn't have LI-size databases -- just a dozen Python processes allocating each perhaps 300MB and all restarting at the same time were enough to trigger it, taking 10 minutes rather than 2 seconds to start up.

</comment><comment><USER10> According to LWN, this is probably going to be automatic in the future:

[http://lwn.net/Articles/568870/](http://lwn.net/Articles/568870/) (subscriber-only now, will be free in a week)

</comment><comment><USER11> _" we saw our error rates (ie. the proportion of slow or timed out queries) drop by up to 400%."_

Should that be 80%?

Edited to add: Apparently it should be 75%, per comments elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, the 400% number is wrong. It was a last minute edit.. I should learn not to do that. I have updated the post to say that the error rates have dropped by 1/4th.

<comment><USER4> Yikes. I meant that they dropped TO 1/4th the original.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does the information in this article apply to VMs (specifically AWS) or is it only relevant when you're running directly on hardware?

<comment><USER4> We did our experiments directly on hardware. I don't think that AWS VMs simulate multiple physical sockets. If they don't then this article will not apply to them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > On small setting for Linux, one dramatic performance improvement for > LinkedIn!

should be...

you know what it should be ;)</comment>


In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html <comment><USER2> What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science.

For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y in the paper by providing the paper with a fully pre- digested story to perhaps rewrite, or perhaps not.

The words "narrative science" appear 14 times in that story, including such clunkers as "To generate story "angles," explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story. It even includes pricing: hey readers, this is not only cool and will win the Pulitzer Prize, but it's cheap too! No mention of competitors... It reads like an ad because it is an ad.

This story was provided, probably almost word for word, by a PR person to the NYT reporter.

I'm not sure if computer-generated text will be better or worse than the media system we have now.

<comment><USER3> This is true. I've been told by PR people that 80% of the content in a newspaper or a magazine is written by PR agencies.

I have a question, though. Why don't they also create an expert system that writes PR pieces? I imagine it would be really nice tool for people in the business. You write down the variables (who, what, when)from an interview with a client in a form and you get to show him an instant first draft, you correct it together and you publish it after leaving the room.

Or even better yet, take that data and use advanced algorithms to embed mentions of clients, products and initiatives in bigger articles.

This is how a PR piece usually goes:

1\. Case, problem, solution. Short story here.

2\. Introduction of company

3\. A Question and an Answer

4\. Another look of the company, credentials.

5\. This is really cool think about it. There may be a sound (text) bite here.

Do you see the patterns?

<comment><USER4> _Why don't they also create an expert system that writes PR pieces?_

It's cheaper and easier to just use the endless supply of interns.

<comment><USER3> Unpaid interns? Ouch. I didn't think of that.

Although there are hidden costs even behind unpaid labor. Office space, HR costs (hiring isn't easy), training, etc, etc.

<comment><USER4> It's not hard to hire people to write PR stuff. It's just unemployed english majors of which there are legions. There are no associated costs as the positions have no benefits and everyone works from home.

<comment><USER5> ...and the interns get to say "I've written for New York Times" the next time they interview for a job. Everybody wins, as The Economist argued: <http://www.economist.com/node/21528449>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love seeing these examples of product development: begin with a very specific niche at the edge (not tackling the mainstream head-on) and "target non-consumption" - that way, you have no competition; and it's not a zero-sum game where you beat someone, but creating value that never existed before. This is possible not because it's good, but because it's _cheap_ (and good enough):

> primarily a low-cost tool ... for local youth sports .... and financial > results of local public companies ... _"Mostly, we're doing things that are > not being done otherwise,"_

Then, once you have some customers - _any_ customers! - you improve it, bit by bit. It doesn't need to be perfect in the first place; it doesn't need to be perfect in the end. It just needs to be good enough to be useful.

> [customer] worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the > software

As for the technology itself, we're not told anything of its details, just what it can do. This is a marketing article, not a tech report. It would be interesting to see the models they use for stories, and whether they use grammars for the overall structure. These are very narrow domains, which are the easiest to start with: you could enumerate all the standard cliches, understand when they apply, and tweak the model. That's where the journalist expert domain knowledge of the two founders would come in handy. BTW: "easiest" is only relative - it would still be very difficult (almost impossible), and kudos to these guys for actually doing it - and even better, making an actual business out of it.

It reads like a 50's Asimov story - the future is finally arriving.

But a Pulitzer in 5 years is absurd, either cynical puff or visionary bravado. Theoretically possible, I think, maybe in 50 years - the figure I've long given for strong AI. ;-)

<comment><USER7> Curious, what do you mean by "target non-consumption"?

<comment><USER6> It means target people with needs that aren't being met. Those people are not consuming (i.e. buying and using) a product or service to address their problem.

It's clearest to see when a product exists to solve a problem, but it's too expensive for some people (or some situation). In the article, the problem of reporting on local sports/financials has a solution (reporters), but the value of that news isn't worth their time: their time is too expensive. So the newspaper doesn't "consume" a solution to the problem of reporting that particular news.

By targeting this non-consumption, the startup doesn't compete against reporters (yet...), so it provokes no desperate fight for survival.

It's an term from Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, though he doesn't use it til "The Innovator's Solution", and expands on it in "Seeing What's Next".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did they write an entire two page article while ignoring the real leader in this space, in my opinion: <http://statsheet.com/>

<comment><USER9> A computer never would have missed that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My worry here is computers will learn to write articles specific to every individual. The computer will know what other articles we liked and what we didn't like and just try to write to what we want to read. This will make it even less likely we'll hear an opposing view to our own, if the computers are giving us what we want to read.

<comment><USER11> We don't need computers to do this, people do it already. Most "news" channels spew out such a monotonous train of thought, that it makes me wonder if switching to a news channel these days is even worth it. For now, I am able to get my news and information online from a variety of sources that offer me interesting views on both sides. Even if one day all of this is content produced by machines, I think its the individual's responsibility to make sure that he/she gets information from both sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If a computer _had_ written this article, maybe it would have mentioned how useful this technology is for spammers.

<comment><USER13> I've said it before, sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. If this comes to pass, I'm not sure who will have won the spam wars, but I'm. Inclined to say that the low end content authors will have lost it.

<comment><USER14> Relevant: <http://xkcd.com/810/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm skeptical of the claim that a program could win a Pulitzer. How does it decide what to write about, who to interview, and what questions to ask?

Reporting a day at the races or the markets is easy because we know which kinds of data are relevant and we have them available.

<comment><USER16> It's not inconceivable that, as AI advances, at some point there with be algorithms that figure out the questions you have posed.

<comment><USER17> True, it's not inconceivable, but arguably having a system that is an effective investigative journalist is AI-Complete:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete>

<comment><USER18> This is true but like most things has to do with AI has limitations.

In some fields (eg, finance) one can conceive a computer based process that would do a _better_ job than most investigative journalists. It can't deal with missing data, but it can discover inaccuracies, unusual events and suspicious patterns and in some limited fields this is enough.

For example, an AI based process might have been just as good at finding the problems at Enron as conventional journalists were (since it the problems there were mostly uncovered by forensic accounting on their public balance sheets):

 _But hard information was scarce. "It's almost as if you have to use forensic accountants when you're doing a company story because many companies are using very aggressive accounting techniques that are perfectly legal," Shepard says._

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan17.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if these automatically generated articles will ever become good enough to be worth reading. Currently, they seem to be just good enough to fool Google, and convince people to click the link. Do any sports fans bookmark and come back to these sites?

No matter how good the algorithms get, they are still limited by their input, the statistics. If for example a player scores a very unusual goal, say a bicycle kick in soccer, then a real writer who actually saw the match would surely mention it. An algorithm could not if there is no field for unusual goal in the match statistics.

<comment><USER20> I think I'd rather see more innovative ways of representing the history of a sporting event graphically instead of trying to replicate the relatively inane blow-by-blow that you currently get from real sports journalists.

Maybe though if this kind of thing continues to improve the humans will have to start doing more serious analysis instead of fluff coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's a description of my venture into this territory, in which I generated formulaic lottery result briefs:

"I wrote this article with one mouse click"

[http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with- one-...](http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-mouse- click)

I can't imagine the sort of code base that would be needed to make these stories not seem formulaic.

</comment><comment><USER22> Single page:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer- generate...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated- articles-are-gaining-traction.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER23> Page One [1] is a browser extension that automatically redirects you to the single-page version of articles on popular news sites, including NYT. Works great for me.

[1] [http://globalmoxie.com/blog/page-one-safari-chrome- extension...](http://globalmoxie.com/blog/page-one-safari-chrome- extension.shtml)

<comment><USER22> But doesn't work with Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ObXKCD: <http://xkcd.com/904/>

There are certain topical areas which lend themselves to automated content generation. Sports, financial news, weather, astronomy (astrology isn't worth mentioning), earthquakes and other severe events, machine monitoring.

Domains in which a quantified or measured outcome tied to a specific point in time or event (final score, market close, daily forecast, etc.) occurs. The important data has already been highlighted, all you've got to do is sprinkle some syntactic sugar around it.

Oddly enough, these are areas in which you're already most likely to find existing "AI"-type content generators.

In areas in which you've got to do significant determination of what is salient, the approach isn't nearly as successful.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a recent email I got from Facebook Support team regarding a vanity url for my business. I could swear this guy is a robot or a script, and I wonder if Facebook is using the technology described in the article:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

We're sorry, but we're unable to process your request because another entity has made a previous request concerning this username. If you are still interested in claiming the username, you may contact us in 60 days for an update about its availability.

\---

You have reached the right channel for these requests. As mentioned earlier, we have no further information to share with you concerning the username "xxxx" (marked out). We will be unable to assist you further from this alias.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

What human being talks like that?

<comment><USER26> A human who had to write several dozen support answers?

Naming collisions have to be a common occurrence for Facebook. It's sufficient to write exactly one mail for such cases. There is no need to re-write or change things around, it's always the same answer to the same question.

Using a robot to write stuff like that seems wasteful – I don't even think it would currently be possible.

<comment><USER27> It's probably a template. Someone read it, and picked "template-name-conflict- XYZ" to respond with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suppose this may do for articles that just deliver some facts. However the kind of stuff I enjoy reading doesn't just barf up some facts in the form of sentences, it provides insight into what the implications of those facts may be and also draws from the past to better put things in context.

That's not to say their technology couldn't be improved to search the web and see what past events are relevant, but providing _good_ insights about the implications of the facts will be a whole lot tougher. I don't think journalists need to be shaking in their boots unless they only deliver the quality and depth of results that this algorithm delivers.

</comment><comment><USER29> These technological advances made me shudder about the potential job loss of the future even though the previous technological advances created new jobs.

Sure, there's no way that my profession and the great majority of jobs on the internet would be possible if we rely on human switchboard operators rather than relying on automation. That doesn't mean it will be true for the next advances in technology, does it?

<comment><USER30> If the cost of producing even the sort of dry, statistics-heavy content the program presently excels at was a primary factor then we'd have outsourced it to India or the Philippines by now. You'd certainly pay less than $10 for an article like this: [http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new- england/...](http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new- england/manchester-nashua-nh.aspx)

I'm willing to believe the underlying machine learning technology is very clever, but I'm also willing to believe a _specialised_ toy script could produce similar results, even if you had to hard code the minimum winning margin for a "rout".

As for the Freakonomics comparison, they seem to have missed the appeal of Levitt: that his ability to posit a _plausible causal relationship_ between two apparently unrelated variables. Any idiot can summarise "remarkable findings" based on spurious correlations.

<comment><USER5> Fun idea: produce similar autogenerated narratives on commit activity of various open source projects

 _Bergie had a strong start on the office day, closing four bugs in row. Then luck turned and he broke the build..._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is pretty fascinating stuff, despite the limitations and obvious bias of this article. Are there any Open Source libraries or papers which cover toy implementations of this sort of thing? (Assuming, of course, that it is not simply a bunch of if/else constructs applied to templates, which would be far less interesting.)

</comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of what MarketBrief is doing for financial documents. Definitely less color / variance in the stories though.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief- makes...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief-makes-obtuse- sec-documents-human-friendly/)

</comment><comment><USER18> For those interested, the best source of research in this field is the "Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation": <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/siggen.html>

</comment><comment><USER33> If this works as advertised, it would have important (bad) consequences for SEO, right?

</comment><comment><USER34> Making a note here: add some shiny around my Python template engine and I can land $6m investment.</comment>


Running TensorFlow with GPU Support on AWS - <AUTHOR> http://mortada.net/tips-for-running-tensorflow-with-gpu-support-on-aws.html <comment><USER2> You could use the Deep Learning AMI and save lots of work :) [https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/ai/the-aws-deep-learning- ami...](https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/ai/the-aws-deep-learning-ami-now-with- ubuntu/)</comment>


Tell HN: Google uses a Chrome-specific feature to highlight text on any website - <AUTHOR> I searched for something and clicked on a Quora search result that highlighted the search result text. I was surprised because Quora can't know what the search result looked like and so doesn't know which part of the text to highlight.
I looked in the URL bar and saw this: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-I-see-numbers-and-not-contacts-names-In-WhatsApp#:~:text=If%20your%20contacts'%20numbers%20are,Go%20to%20Account%20%3E%20WhatsApp.
Note the #:~:text= part. If you use it with Chrome on any other website you can highlight any text:

     https://www.ycombinator.com/#:~:text=Y%20Combinator
     http://paulgraham.com/useful.html#:~:text=useful
 I can't find any documentation on this feature. Google appears to append it to the anchor when you click on a search result in Chrome. <comment><USER2> This is called ScrollToTextFragment. See [https://github.com/WICG/ScrollToTextFragment](https://github.com/WICG/ScrollToTextFragment)

I think they just started doing this a few hours ago. I only noticed it in the "Featured Snippet" box.

Edit:

> I was surprised because Quora can't know what the search result looked like > and so doesn't know which part of the text to highlight.

Did Google at some point stop sending referer headers that include the query? The last time I checked (~10 years ago, admittedly), they did, which was often collected for analytics. Regardless, it's the browser doing the highlighting in this case, not the site itself.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This appears to be part of a test: [https://9to5google.com/2019/08/26/google- search-highlight-we...](https://9to5google.com/2019/08/26/google-search- highlight-website-content/)</comment>


Will Coronavirus lead to fairer societies? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/12/will-coronavirus-lead-to-fairer-societies-thomas-piketty-explores-the-prospect <comment><AUTHOR> French economist Thomas Picketty discusses the effects of pandemic on economies, societies and globalisation.</comment>


Antares rocket explosion: The question of using decades-old Soviet engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/29/antares-rocket-explosion-the-question-of-using-decades-old-soviet-engines/ <comment><USER3> To answer the question of why even use them at all, it's because on paper they still compare very well to the other options.

Specific impulse is basically an efficiency measure, like mpg for cars. The higher it is, the more efficient the rocket engine is.

SpaceX's Merlin 1d has a thrust-to-weight ratio (twr) of 150, and a specific impulse (I_sp) at sea level of 2.73 km/s. I doubt this was an option for orbital sciences to use in their rockets.

The NK33, which is the soviet engine that was used, has a twr of 137 and an I_sp at sea level of 2.91 km/s.

The atlas V rockets by boeing and lockheed use an rd180, also russian built btw, which has a twr of 78.44 and an I_sp at sea level of 3.05 km/s.

The delta IV rockets by boeing us an rs68 or rs68a have a twr of 51.2 and an I_sp of 3.58 km/s. I'm not sure if these are available for commercial use, though, since boeing shut down the commercial delta IV launch program. The US military still uses them though, so they are still being produced. Also, these use liquid hydrogen instead of RP1 (rocket grade kerosine) like all the rest of the engines here.

The Saturn V used five F1 engines (also 1960s tech, but no longer available). Each of those have a twr of 82.27 and an I_sp of 2.58 km/s.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this much more a question of reliability and track record than 10% performance differences?

<comment><USER5> Both reliability and performance. And also reliability is something which you estimate, calculate basing on some models - it's probability, not a guarantee. How would you estimate the reliability of an engine which run over 3 hours on a test stand? Of course you might prefer a well known fuels, industry-proven range of pressures and other engineering solutions, and you test them on Earth first - but after that you have to fly.

Track records are tricky for rocket systems. Since the first Sputnik, over the 57 years the humanity had may be - roughly - 4000 launches of space rockets of all kinds, with many different fuels, engines, sizes etc. It's relatively rare when you have a good track record which is measured by many tens of flights - let alone hundreds. When a system flew 20 times it's already considered rather mature - double so if those were all successful flights. So it's quite usual to use a new engine in a new design of rocket - in fact it's rare when you have many different rockets with the same engine type or many different engines used on the same rocket. Rockets and engines are usually optimized to each other - particularly rockets are built around engines, since margins are quite thin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NK-33 may be old, but it offers equal or superior performance to anything made in the US. Another engine, the RD-180 is used in the Atlas. US industries have the rights to manufacture, but want $800M and 4 years to build it or create a new engine. That tells you the state of US tech.

[http://aviationweek.com/defense/aerojet-rocketdyne- targets-2...](http://aviationweek.com/defense/aerojet-rocketdyne- targets-25-million-pair-ar-1-engines)

Video on Russian/Ukranian engines: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure what proper HN etiquette on this is, but I made a comment on the launch news story on this exact subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525057)

TLDR- Those engines may be 50 years old, but they're a technological marvel. Using them is a little crazy, but I'm sure Orbital saw it as the "least crazy" of three options: building a new engine from scratch, buying prohibitively expensive engines from Rocketdyne, or buying risky but cheap engines from Russia.

<comment><USER8> The design is a technical marvel, but it won't keep the metal from corroding, and this isn't the first sign of trouble -- a few months ago, a different AJ-26 blew up on a test stand. It isn't yet clear that the engine was at fault in the Antares fire (trouble in the tankage or fuel lines could have cascaded down, among other fun possibilities) -- but if the engine does turn out to be at fault, the remaining stock will certainly get more attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well the CEO of a rocket company should have a better response than "I wish there were better engines to use." Maybe with that multi billion dollar contract you can, oh I don't know, build one?

<comment><USER10> SpaceX certainly built their own and they seem to be working quite well thusfar.

<comment><USER11> To be fair SpaceX's last launch (Aug 22) exploded too. It was a test, not a real mission, but to quote Elon: "Rockets are tricky."

<comment><USER12> For starters, that wasn't an actual launch to orbit, that's just the low altitude testing frames for landing/reusability.

It was deliberately destroyed as a safety measure because the rocket was moving out of the testing zone and the onboard system wasn't able to compensate fast enough.

Apparently Elon and a few others were a little annoyed that more (appropriate) risk wasn't being taken in those test flights, because they'd been 100% successful.

Secondly, their launches of the production Falcon 9's have been 100% successful (with one launch not achieving a secondary objective). Additionally, after the first three Falcon 1's, they were also 100% successful.

And finally, they launched two Falcon 9's since August 22nd: September 7th: Asiasat 6 launch (Geosync), and September 21st - Dragon CRS-4 (ISS).

<comment><USER5> Agree. And those Merlin-1D seem to be very efficient from economical point of view. Technically they are also good - record setting for open cycle engines.

However, NK-33 are closed cycle and have better Isp. Economically they also made a lot of sense for Orbital, since they were bought as already made for another project. It can be justified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The B-52 is just as old, and is expected to have served for almost a century once retired. It's not the same as rockets, but "oh it's old" isn't as compelling of an argument as failure rate, which - how many have there been using these engines?

Is that data available?

<comment><USER14> "We saw rust and crack, so we repaired them" seems like the culprit. Not the age.

<comment><USER15> Which begs the question... If they don't know enough about rockets to build them, how can they possibly know how to safely repair them?

<comment><USER5> I don't know enough about computers to make my own PC from scratch. I however can fix some problems with PC. So you can have one without another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My admittedly uninformed opinion is that it just doesn't make any sense. I don't care how good the Russians are/were at making rockets. First of all, surely there has been significant progress in all aspects of the design and manufacturing of such an item. And second, who knows how well the engines have been stored, cared for, maintained and transported over the past 40 years. I would think you'd want to have more visibility into such a thing for this type of component.

Elon: It "has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke," he said. "It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."

Orbital: "we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking,"

I could see Elon offering to supply Orbital with some US-made engines. But maybe that wouldn't satisfy NASA's desire for diversity.

<comment><USER5> Uninformed, yes :( .

There are theoretical limits for how high Isp - the specific impulse, defined as how much thrust, in, say, pounds of force, you can get from a unit of fuel flow, going into the engine, in, say, pounds of mass per second. The engines created in '60s are already rather close to that theoretical limit - so saying that you can do much better just because decades has passed is similar to saying "well, surely we had SR-71 flying back in '70s already - by today we ought to have all civil aviation routinely doing at least Mach 2".

So - no, it's pretty hard, including for fundamental reasons, to make engines much better that NK-33 by Isp. And that parameter is of paramount importance for a rocket engine.

Mind you, this is still not the only parameter. After all, you probably care a lot about economic efficiency. Elon Musk seems to understand that pretty well - and SpaceX engines, while lacking technically, could be in a much better position economically. Next, you're right that design and manufacturing aren't standing still. Both control of materials parameters and the ability to convert the raw material into an engineered device substantially rose - talking about, say, 3D printing engines or parts, which happens rather frequently now, but didn't in '70s.

So it's a complicated matter. However, NK-33 still have good technical parameters, and were bought inexpensively - in '90s, when Russia was severely starved for cash. Why not to use something which is already there, and not expensive? That's quite a rational decision Orbital - and Aerojet before them - took.

Regarding the second part, about storage. Surely this is unprecedented case. That's why the engines were tested - many times, both in Russia and in USA, and also analysed, trying to predict how several decades of storage could affect engines. The results were apparently positive - of course you and I don't have the original raw data which was used to make that decision. But don't think the engines just were, say, buried underground; their storage history is roughly known and isn't that different from other products of heavy machinery industry.

So I think Elon is habitually being overreacting in regard to Orbital usage of those engines. May be it has something to do with Elon's unsuccessful attempts to strike a deal with Russian space industry back when SpaceX was really young - or may be it's just a tradition for him, Elon sometimes says something out of proportions, even though SpaceX real - smaller - results are undeniable. Elon misses the point - it's only for uninformed the phrase "rocket engines made in USSR 40 years ago" would mean "unacceptable variant". George Sutton, author of "History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" mentions that USSR spent far more towards rocket engine research than all other countries combined, and NK-33 is one of the serious achievements of Soviet rocket school. Don't discount something off hand just because it's old and foreign.

<comment><USER16> The only thing I was not referring to were the technical parameters.

<comment><USER5> They are important to make a good decision. Efficiency, mass, reliability, price... You can't just ignore them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can highly recommend these two books for an engaging introduction to getting things right in the rocket business: Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_) and Space Systems Failures: Disasters and Rescues of Satellites, Rocket and Space Probes [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1015478.Space_Systems_Fai...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1015478.Space_Systems_Failures)

</comment><comment><USER18> Also note that we don't know yet if the NK-33/AJ-26 engine was the cause of failure. Sometimes the most visible possibility wasn't the original cause of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think it's so much about age as it is about design. From my understanding the original NK 33 rocket engines used a unique oxygen-rich fuel turbo-pump mechanism that the west considered too dangerous. Aerojet- Rocketdyne took these engines and refurbished them and therein lies the question. But I think it might be premature to ask this given they haven't told us what happened.

The thing is they are very powerful engines and the price was right.

<comment><USER5> It's not that unique - in Russian space school oxidizer-rich turbines are routine. Proton, for example, used to have - until latest years - a pretty solid track record, especially for first stage engines, and those engines use N2O4 for turbines. Considering that N2O4 is burned with some amount of (CH3)2N-NH2, making HNO3... the gas going to chamber from turbine is the nitric acid. Still engines work just fine.

One of big reasons for Russians to use oxydizer-reach gas generators is that on the rocket there usually much more oxidizer - by mass - than fuel, which makes the flow through the turbine much bigger - several times. So efficiency of turbopumps goes up. That justifies the complexity of having oxidizer-rich gas flow before the chamber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For someone who doesn't know much about aerospace engineering, can someone outline the actual challenge with getting something like this right?

What's the missing piece that'll effectively eliminate accidents like this? Or is this one of those things that will just happen from time to time because going to space takes a lot of math that we don't fully understand yet?

I was just under the impression that this was a very well known area of science.

<comment><USER21> With these particular engines, you also have the variable factor of them being stored for decades in a warehouse, and all the issues with metal corrosion, fatigue, degradation, etc. that come with that.

I'm not a materials engineer, but I could imagine things like seasonal temperature changes, humidity, rough handling, changes in the metallurgical properties of the alloys they used over time could all affect the ability of the engine components to withstand high temperatures and pressures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So these engines were built when Paul McCartney was 23 years old?

Apparently Orbital Sciences scoured the museums and antique shops in Russia and picked up enough of these engines to base a new rocket on them.

The reason they were surplus was that the rocket that they were built for was canceled, because the engines exploded on each of the four test launches conducted.

Orbital Sciences was once a scrappy startup. Books were written about it. However, this is just embarrassing.

<comment><USER5> Aerojet bought those engines from Russia - the original manufacturer - <USER2> 1990-s. No need for Orbital to scour museums.

No, engines didn't explode. Were actually never flown before the first Antares lifted off. But performed pretty well on stands.

<comment><USER22> Are you were claiming that there were no failures of the NK-33 engine on any of the four N1 flights that exploded during first stage burn?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

NK-33 never flew on N-1. They were intended to fly on N-1 in its fifth flight - which never happened, because Glushko closed the program after becoming the head of the Energiya company.

<comment><USER22> So before the engines were obtained by Orbital, the NK-33 had never even been flight tested?

<comment><USER5> Before the engines flew for the first time, yes they never flew before. And Antares is the first rocket where those engines have flied - though not the only one rocket already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When all else fails, blame Russia.

<comment><USER24> No one is blaming Russia.

We're blaming the age of rocket engines (that just happened to come from Russia).

<comment><USER25> And why not prominently state "Soviet" in the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's the thing: the rocket itself is not 'decades old'. The design is.

This is tantamount to saying "Oh, cars use a decades old design.. they must be terrible!"

The article also completely overlooks the fact that Russia launched a rocket with the supplies within 24 hours of the failure. [http://news.yahoo.com/cause-sought-space-supply- rocket-08252...](http://news.yahoo.com/cause-sought-space-supply- rocket-082528475.html)

<comment><USER27> Not exactly. The engines themselves _are_ decades old, Orbital Science is quoted as saying

 _" 'As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking,' Culbertson conceded at the time. 'That's what we [corrected] with weld repairs and other inspections.'"_

They got the engines that were decades old, and they've been fixing problems that they have found, and refurbishing them and installing them into rockets. It doesn't say they have built new engines on the old designs. That would have been better, because then you would have someone who had designed the engine on staff and could understand it in a deep way.

Presumably Orbital is designing their own engines now, or contracting with someone to do so, perhaps their go to market strategy was "Get some things into space with these old surplus engines, use the revenue/time to design/test/manufacture our own engines, and then continue on with our own bespoke design." I don't know of course if that was their intention or not.

<comment><USER5> Orbital now has ATK experience on board. Feels natural to switch to all-solid rockets - like other Orbital designs. However for now, the Antares is the biggest Orbital rocket, and it's designed with NK-33. Definitely need to investigate this event and make decisions.

It's better to use engines which were just created - or just manufactured - but sometimes there are reasons to prefer old engines to new ones. Age is not the only factor.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of Cloud Computing? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to keep this question open and span both technical and non-technical aspects/values/problems/doubts, gathering both direct users' and outsiders' thoughts. <comment><USER2> You should Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It really helped me out in situations like this.

<comment><USER3> how is the book relevant to cloud computing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use AWS, Heroku, DigitalOcean every day because they fulfill a need, for cheaper than I could do myself. What's to "think" about it? What do you "think" about car washes?

</comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately that term has been used in so many ways that it's practically meaningless at this point. Did you have a particular definition of 'Cloud Computing' in mind?

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you be a little more vague?

<comment><USER7> OP already did her/his best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think cloud computing is a great thing. Pretty soon computers will be totally small, and you won't ever need to worry about losing data. Plenty of ways to protect it. So long as there is competition between cloud companies, people would drop a provider in a hurry if they thought their data was being compromised.

</comment><comment><USER9> the "cloud" is a term used by uniformed non technical people. They don't know what they are saying when they use it. However, the "cloud" is simply access to data over a network. Emulating local data storage, but really accessed over a network.

<comment><USER10> I very strongly disagree. "The cloud" is generally understood, in my circles (and we're quite informed, though not uniformed, and just a teensy bit technical) to be elastically provisioned compute resources that allow us to avoid carrying inventory and turn CAPEX into OPEX.</comment></comment>


ExxonMobil Bungles Rewards Card Debut - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/exxonmobil-bungles-rewards-card-debut/ <comment><USER2> Should they have just used a subdomain in their regular domain? Seems like a series of mini problems. Is the '+' obsolete (you need it for international calls right?) or it the problem the phone using the same button for 0 as well. So people who don't pay attention press 0 instead of '+'.

It just seems like "similar looking domains" and stuff has been a problem for ever and it still is. Will this still be a problem in near and far future?

<comment><USER3> I wholeheartedly agree with the "similar looking domains" thing. They should just use a subdomain.

If I'm used to visiting "capitalone.com" \- and the site to activate a new card is something like "activatecapitalone.com" \- that seems sketchy. It should be capitalone.com/activate or activate.capitalone.com -- I tend to simply avoid sketchy sites even if they appear to be from official sources.

<comment><USER4> The worse case I've seen is Amazon's credit card site — Amazon.mycreditcard.mobi. I realize that it's run by a third party, but I am sure they could have given it a better domain name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Easier to go to the speedpass+ app, if you have set that up. They have your rewards card there already and you just assign a pin #.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't have exxon reward card I need one plzz

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait do they not own the domain? Or they own the domain and the registrar's parked page is full of scams?

</comment><comment><USER8> I have haad nothing but trouble trying to activate this card

</comment><comment><USER9> _It always amazes me when major companies with oodles of cash (ExxonMobil made $20 billion last year) roll out new marketing initiatives without consulting professionals who help mitigate security and privacy issues for a living. It seems likely that happened in this case because anyone who knows a thing or two about security would strongly advise against instructing customers to visit a parked domain or one that isn't yet fully under the company's control._

Why is it amazing? There are no negative consequences, so why bother?

<comment><USER10> Presumably they want people to participate in this program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like the marketing department did its job, and the web guys missed their deadline.

<comment><USER12> or in my experience...

marketing put some URL on new promotional material without ever bothering to check if it existed or was even available.

a whois on exxonmobilerewardsplus.com doesn't look very reassuring at all.

I think someone scooped them on the domain and now they're stuck with bad promotional material.</comment></comment>


Masks Don't Work: A Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.rcreader.com/commentary/masks-dont-work-covid-a-review-of-science-relevant-to-covide-19-social-policy <comment><USER2> This is a particularly insidious form of advocacy because it mimics the writing of a scientific article while presenting a political opinion.

I stopped checking after the 4th linked journal article. All 4 had their results were misrepresented in the article. Not one suggested that masks didn't work. 2 showed they did work, 1 showed there wasn't much difference between N95 respirators and surgical masks and 1 was a small sample size result that showed family spread amongst 2 families, 1 who wore masks outside and one who didn't.

Further they were a mix of respiratory illnesses mentioned. Colds, flues and SARS were all mixed and matched.

Thats before we get into the dubious claim that there was a 100% infection rate if any aerosolized droplets got through the mask.

<comment><USER3> _" This is a particularly insidious form of advocacy because it mimics the writing of a scientific article while presenting a political opinion."_

 _" Not one suggested that masks didn't work. 2 showed they did work."_

You're right, if I hadn't been reading the research papers on the matter over the past few weeks I reckon I'd likely be fooled (at least in some parts).

Dr Rancourt points out that: _" The main transmission path is long-residence- time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective dose is smaller than one aerosol particle."_

What he fails to mention is how N95/P2 masks actually work. From my reading, these masks are made by stretching the plastic sheet until they start to part and form into string-like strands/fibers with gaps between them. He's right, the gaps are wider than 2.5 μm (somewhere around 5 μm) but the hidden factor is that the stretching of the plastic causes electrostatic charges to permanently form on the plastic through deformation somewhat akin to the way the charge is formed on an electret microphone and it is these charges that attract the aerosol particles which then collect on the plastic strands.

It seems Dr Rancourt's search of the literature was insufficiently deep (seems it's another instance of a non-expert in the field stepping above his station).

The most disconcerting aspect of Rancourt's report is the statement that it only takes one virion particle to infect a human. It was my understanding that the figure was considerably higher than this. If his quoted figure is correct then N95 mask won't work as they're only about 95% effective.

Until we get more definitive information on this I'll continue to wear my N95 masks in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Applying this article's standards:

Seat belts don't work, because they don't prevent all fatalities.

Don't use a safety rope while climbing, because your anchors can break and you can still fall.

Safety glasses don't work, because foreign debris can still enter through the sides.

Don't wear a life jacket, because you can still die in cold water.

Don't get your teeth cleaned, because it doesn't prevent every instance of tooth decay.

This is ridiculous. If wearing masks reduces transmission rates by 10%, it's still easily worth it. The cost of masks is tiny compared to the enormous costs of reduced economic activity (not to mention infection-related healthcare).

</comment><comment><USER5> "This paper was originally published at Rancourt's account on ResearchGate.net. As of June 5, 2020, this paper was removed from his profile by its administrators"

[http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2020/06/covid- censorship...](http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2020/06/covid-censorship- at-researchgate-things.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> A few german cities could reduce the number of new infections to 0 early in the pandemic after making masks (including community masks) mandatory. The university town Jena in particular was frequently cited for its pro-mask campaign. I thought they had written a paper about their results, with statistically corrected comparisons to cities of similar size; but can't find it. Those studies indicating that masks might not work were known in the public and political discourse at that time (e.g. they were discussed in the coronavirus update podcast). The city governments went for the policy anyway.

Japan and South Korea are also still doing much better than nations where masks are not commonly seen...

</comment><comment><USER7> Neither the author nor the publication seem credible sources for information on this topic. The author is a Physics professor who was fired for giving all of his students A+ in a course after coming under fire for putting a course description in the catalog to get students to enroll, and then teaching something completely different in the course. (They called it academic squatting)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm writing this with the caveat that it takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute bull than to produce it.

The way I understand the current mask guidelines is that your mask isn't there to help you, but to help other people. I clicked through a few of the studies and they looked at the effectiveness of masks in preventing the wearer from getting infected in uncontrolled situations, not the effectiveness in preventing the wearer from spreading it to other people.

</comment><comment><USER9> But this doesn't hold up in the real world.

Particularly since viral load matters wrt severity of infection for COVID-19.

Do you want to get shot with 100 count bird shot or 70 count with a shorter effective distance? An individual pellet probably won't do much harm, but multiple pellets damaging the same organ will cause non-linear increases in damage and severity of outcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean viral load _after_ being infected, or viral load in a hypothetical asymptomatic person who is showing no symptoms, not quarantined, and the primary threat vector being mitigated by masks? Are there studies on viral load in pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic individuals with Covid-19 or other viruses?

<comment><USER9> The data for the reduction in viral load came from and Italian experiment with symptomatic patients. A simple surgical mask caught 30% of viral particles when they coughed vs no mask.

There might be some level of virus that your body can handle without even developing antibodies / becoming symptomatic, but beyond that threshold, you actually get sick.

Anecdotally, we have this for asymptomatic spreaders and potential casualties.

> 2 infected hairstylists

> Masks worn by everyone

> 0 of 140 clients infected

[https://www.livescience.com/hair-stylists-infected- covid19-f...](https://www.livescience.com/hair-stylists-infected-covid19-face- masks.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What do people think about the article suggesting that R0 is influenced by humidity? Is it time to add giant humidifiers everywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus- quickly...](https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-quickly-says- us-agency-231844605.html)

 _> ... experiment that was carried out at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center in Maryland. It showed that the virus's half-life -- the time taken for it to reduce to half its amount -- was 18 hours when the temperature was 70 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (21 to 24 degrees Celsius) with 20 percent humidity on a non-porous surface. This includes things like door handles and stainless steel. But the half-life dropped to six hours when humidity rose to 80 percent -- and to just two minutes when sunlight was added to the equation. When the virus was aerosolized -- meaning suspended in the air -- the half-life was one hour when the temperature was 70 to 75 degrees with 20 percent humidity. In the presence of sunlight, this dropped to just one and a half minutes. Bryan concluded that summer-like conditions "will create an environment (where) transmission can be decreased."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ridiculous. What does "not work" even mean?

If you block 90% of a surface, that area is blocked. Of course, not all of it.

I mean: photons are even smaller, and they happen to be blocked. Yes, this is not a good example but it is not totally wrong.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah yes, I too get my scientific news from sites called "River Cities Reader" that publicly solicit donations at the end of articles. Clearly, an institution we should trust when it comes to applying the scientific method.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fortunately, the hyperlink was invented to mitigate issues of transitive trust. The following institutions are cited by this article. Thanks to technology that is merely decades old, a single click is sufficient to consult these primary sources:

      American Journal of Infection Control
      Epidemiology and Infection
      Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses
      CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association)
      Clinical Infectious Diseases
      JAMA (published since 1883)
      JEBM (Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine)

<comment><USER8> I can also cite papers in various journals. However, it only matters if the citations are relevant. In this case the author is largely citing papers that show how wearing masks can prevent the wearer from becoming infected, not preventing other people from becoming infected.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of studies on the effectiveness of masks on prevention of other people from becoming infected?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Falken's Maze - <AUTHOR> https://wearethemutants.com/2016/12/15/falkens-maze-game-theory-computer-science-and-the-real-life-cold-war-inspirations-for-wargames/ <comment><USER2> This movie was a classic, but the way it wove tangential topics like Cold War tactics, and Game Theory in to make a substantial story blows my mind even today...

This movie was the first inkling that I can remember as a kid that I needed to put time into nonlinear games and their associated thought processes. Poker, Role-Playing Games, Wargames, etc... Anything and everything that "upped the ante" when it came to strategy, complexity, realism, and paradigm modeling became more interesting to me as time moved on, and it more or less started about the time I first saw this film.

It's amazing to me how well it stands up even after all these years.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just watched it again last night and it really did stand up well.</comment></comment>