Philippines Wins South China Sea Case Against China - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china <comment><USER2> This was a long anticipated but still powerful ruling. The only surprise was maybe Itu Aba (太平島) being ruled to not be an island.

The court was particularly clear on rejecting the nine-dash line and China's claims of historic waters.

As much as China will say it ignores this ruling, it absolutely puts pressure on China and constricts the language it will be able to use when discussing disputes in the South China Sea. China has particularly relied on claims of historic waters, which will diplomatically make for some extremely awkward press statements for China now.

This may force China into some face-saving agreements, so that it continues to appear strong at home where it has made this into an issue of nationalism, but internationally may try to consolidate what it does hold.

Another likely option is China may try to create a ADIZ over the South China Sea like it did in the East China Sea (and use its somewhat perverted interpretation of when an ADIZ applies), with the idea that if its interests in the sea have been denied, it can try to control the air.

I expect freedom of navigation transits may increase now and with greater certainty, both from the US and from other countries including Japan and Australia, now that we know what features are entitled to a 12-mile territorial sea and which ones are not (due to being submerged at high tide).

I'm optimistic after some initial saber rattling that this may actually lead to a reduction in tensions in the South China Sea, but that is mostly up to China now at this point.

<comment><USER3> "Itu Aba is not an island" was indeed a surprise, and I think it is a mistake. In particular, it was not part of the case.

The court brought the issue in because it was necessary to rule on Philippines' claim that Mischief Reef is within its EEZ, because if Itu Aba is an island EEZ generated by it needs to be considered. I think this was a bad idea and an underhanded tactic.

<comment><USER2> I believe the Philippines did actually ask the Tribunal to rule on the status of Itu Aba, for exactly the reason you mention. The Philippines also argued that it was not.

I'm reading the ruling now and it appears the Tribunal based its decision on Itu Aba lacking a "stable community of people." I think most observers expected the opposite decision based on the fresh water on Itu Aba and its _capacity_ to support human habitation.

I do agree though that this is probably the one point in the ruling I disagree with.

<comment><USER4> > and its capacity to support human habitation

Well, that "island" created via an act of human intervention that must be utilized on a regular basis, I'm not sure the habitation angle is completely supportable.

<comment><USER2> The land reclamation on Itu Aba was almost non-existant compared to the land reclamation China was doing. Itu Aba is the largest naturally occurring feature in the Spratly's and does have fresh ground water.

You can see some of the before/after picutres of Itu Aba and some of the other features here: [http://amti.csis.org/before-and-after-the-south-china-sea- tr...](http://amti.csis.org/before-and-after-the-south-china-sea-transformed/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, there is a precedent Nicaragua v. United States where the United States just blatantly ignores the international court's ruling against it, and vetoes any attempt of enforcement by the Security Council. China is also a permanent member, so they will do just the same.

<comment><USER6> Yep, the one council in the UN that really matters and China can veto any resolution regarding this issue anytime they want. Possession is as they say 9/10 of the law and I doubt any country can wrestle away the islands that China has already developed.

Filipino here - I still applaud our government's efforts in pushing this issue through. This was raised by my country in the ASEAN summits and China through various political and diplomatic channels were able to stop those resolutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> An interesting bit: China created a half-mile square terrain model of a disputed region with India that was discovered in 2006[1].

1\. [http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/07/huge_scale_m...](http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/07/huge_scale_mode.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> There is a nice multimedia article in NY times about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078612)

</comment><comment><USER9> This resolution really only has teeth so far as the US Navy is ready and able to enforce it.

<comment><USER10> The huge benefit to this ruling is precedent and credibility. Laying down a trail of rulings against China around the globe, that will facilitate cohesive economic sanctions against them if they attempt to enforce their bogus claims to the waters. One country attempting to sanction China would fail, and China would and could easily retaliate. If most of the developed world signs on to sanctions for their attempts to annex territory ala Russia with Ukraine (except this is dramatically larger), then it will stick. An easy example would be to throw China back out of the WTO, dump their currency / refuse to promote it any higher as a reserve, actually enforce consequences on their dumping practices and other economic misdeeds, and so on.

<comment><USER11> They are already enforcing their bogus claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am no geopolitical expert, but the Chinese seemed to be playing with fire. At which point a war will erupt in the South China Sea, especially when those nations won't take it anymore?

<comment><USER13> Which nations? Vietnam, who lost two conflicts with China already, when China was even poorer and weaker than it is now? Or the Philippines, who can barely keep their own state together as it is? Maybe Malaysia, a country constantly rocked by internal dissent because of huge economic inequality? Singapore?

The only nation who might decide they "won't take it anymore" is the United States; but post-Iraq, the US will struggle to justify any significant intervention abroad for another generation, let alone against a nuclear superpower. No, on the military side China is laughing all the way to the naval base on artificial reef.

The question is, what exactly do they think to gain from this aggressive expansionist activity? Hopefully it's just strategic military positioning for the long run. If it's anything they think they can directly leverage (like imposing controls or tariffs on ships going through the area), then they risk a backlash on their commercial interests.

There are probably competing forces inside PRC hierarchies competing over this particular policy. It might well be that sanity will eventually prevail. Launching WW3 over a bunch of rocks just to stick it to your boss, seems a bit too much even for the average military nutcase.

<comment><USER14> Why downvoting this guy? He is somewhat right.

And it is "just" strategic military positioning - to protect the new silk road naval routes. The bases are going to be there so China's naval trade routes cannot be potentially blocked by a hostile naval power.

<comment><USER15> Exactly.

To exaggerate things a bit: This is proxy conflict with USA.

The South China sea today is under US Navy dominance. Within a decade or so that will no longer be the case.

Simply because USA cannot afford an arms race with China.

<comment><USER16> The U.S. is so far ahead of China in the arms race already that that will not be an issue for decades, if ever. The issue is political will, because ultimately arms only change minds if they are willing to be used.

China's government would have a much easier time justifying violence in the South China Sea to the Chinese population, than the U.S. government would have with U.S. citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ...China, which has displayed a willingness to negotiate in many such situations. In just over 60 years, China has gone from 23 land disputes down to just six. In the majority of its settlements, China accepted less than one- half of the territory it originally claimed. [1]

1\. [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/10/territorial_disputes_how_much_of_the_earth_is_claimed_by_multiple_countries_.html)

<comment><USER18> "In the majority of its settlements, China accepted less than one-half of the territory it originally claimed. [1]"

If those original claims are as overgrown as the nine-dash line, that looks like a huge success for China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The multimedia article shared by stefap2 is a good one.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078612)

What's concerning about this is on the end of the slide, there is a text which says:

"The Tribunal in the Hague ruled on Tuesday, July 12, that China's claim was illegal. But it has no power to enforce the decision."

Some questions: 1\. If that's the case, then what good would the Hague ruling be if it is not going to be enforced? 2\. Who should be enforcing the said ruling in this case?

<comment><USER16> No one enforces international law except the individual nations themselves.

This is different from a national or (in the U.S.) state government, which is typically embued with police and military powers to enforce the national laws.

The state of Virginia has state police and a state court system that will arrest and put people into state prison if they violate a state law. The U.S. has federal police and a federal court system that will put people into federal prison for breaking federal law.

The U.N. does not have a global police or military force. It can be thought of more as a venue for developing a shared understanding of the world, than a government that creates and enforces its own laws.

In this case, this ruling essentially says that most of the world does not agree with China about its territorial claims. This will lend moral authority to the actions of other nations like the Philippines, U.S., Australia, Japan, when they transit and operate in the South China Sea.

<comment><USER20> Most of the world or the few countries which have outsized influences on Hague? The US (Philippines' close ally) and the EU basically control Hague.

<comment><USER16> Well that's a good point. It's the difference between the ideal of the UN, vs. the reality of the UN. It's supposed to a fair global venue, but because it lacks any self-sufficient authority, it's dominated by the most powerful nations. That said, China is one of those most powerful nations, so I'd argue that this ruling still has significance.

Maybe someday there will be an actual global government, but right now I don't think that anyone believes we (i.e. human beings) know how to create a well- functioning government that large.

The EU suffers from many of the same problems of the UN, like crazy bureaucracy and dominance by the largest/richest member nations. The U.S. federal government was carefully designed to balance small states and big states, and seems to do a good job of that--but maybe not a lot of other things. And big U.S. states still dominate other areas of national governance, like environmental regs by California, or school textbook standards by Texas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It will not change anything. China is already a superpower and what do all the superpowers do? They make rules.

<comment><USER19> Not just make rules, but bend rules that are already in place to lean in towards their favor.

<comment><USER22> ...and away from US's favor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hardly any surprise.

A tiny piece in the massive chess game that is China's rising military dominance and the west's declining ditto.

This will play out over decades and is at its heart driven by a Chinese economy that expands faster the west's.

<comment><USER10> China's economy isn't expanding faster than the West's. It was.

China's economy is hardly growing at all, and is no longer growing organically. They require extremely vast amounts of new debt to continue growing at just a few percent per year. That's a scenario they can't maintain going forward.

The US economy by itself is expanding as much as China in dollar GDP terms, and is doing so without taking on the kind of debt that China is. Per dollar of debt taken on, the US is getting two to three times as much GDP growth as what China is. China's economy is growing at 2% to 3% currently; with the US economy ~65% larger it can grow quite a bit slower and still outpace China.

$18 trillion * 2% = $360 billion

$11 trillion * 3% = $330 billion

China is unlikely to ever be the extremely fast growth economy it previously was. All the easy economic growth is long since over. And this is without discussing the inevitability that China will run into regular recessions like all other economies do once their growth slows down to normal levels (and ignoring that China is also likely to face far harsher consequences with economic slowdowns given their system of government; which keeps the Chinese leaders up at night). For example they've been in an industrial recession for at least a year now, and their service sector has barely shown any growth. There's no reason to believe their manufacturing will kick back into boom mode ever again, especially with other Asian competitors eroding that base. Their service economy was supposed to take over, and so far it's doing nothing but flailing.

<comment><USER15> "China's economy is growing at 2% to 3% currently"

Where is that number from? The latest I can find is a real growth rate around 7% pa.

<comment><USER23> That's the thing. No one who knows what they're talking about trusts the "real growth" numbers. They're all massively inflated by the CCP in order to maintain their growth driven political narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Did they really win though? It also nullifies their claims to many islands.

The whole thing about the Spratley islands began with Vietname and the Philippines occupying islands there: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands#Geographic_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands#Geographic_and_economic_overview)

<comment><USER2> The Tribunal agreed with the Philippines position on almost every question with the exception of 2 features: Gaven Reef (North) and McKennan Reef. Both of those features were found to be high-tide elevations.

The Tribunal also ruled Chinese activity in the region was illegal, found China to be violating its obligations under UNCLOS and failing to protect the natural habitats (including willful destruction of the coral and endangered species). China's harassment of Philippine ships was also ruled illegal. The nine-dash line was ruled invalid. China's claims of "historic waters" was found to be groundless. Mischief Reef, Second Thomas Shoal, and Reed Bank were found to "form part of the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf of the Philippines."

Really, this was about as complete a victory for the Philippines (and refutation of everything China claims and is doing) as possible.

<comment><USER24> I guess I have some problems understanding the situation.

Here's my understanding: Before the court ruling several countries claimed the Spratleys to be part of their country. This includes the Phillipines which have included the Spraytleys as the municipality Kalayaan: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalayaan,_Palawan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalayaan,_Palawan) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ph_Territorial_Map.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ph_Territorial_Map.png)

Now the court has ruled all those claims void ("None of the fiercely disputed Spratly Islands, the UN body found, were "capable of generating extended maritime zones" in the article). However still large parts of the Spratleys lie in the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines.</comment></comment></comment>


Homeowner in search of an IoT installation expert - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/12/homeowner-in-search-of-an-iot-installation-expert/ <comment><USER2> Do you really want your house to be as hassle free as your computer? The nightmarish accounts of these houses gone wrong is painful to read.</comment>


Teaching "The Smell" - <AUTHOR> https://www.learningfromincidents.io/blog/teaching-the-smell <comment><USER2> I love the bio at the end:

> Silvia Botros is a Sr Principal Engineer at Twilio. She focuses on ways to > break databases but is also talented at finding bugs in all your software. > Whether she helped build it or not. When she is not helping Twilio Sendgrid > send billions of emails a day, she is busy training her little replicas on > also breaking computers and trolling her friends on Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Small replicas are generally quite adept at breaking computers. Often they're so innately good at it that you have to teach them to stop ;)</comment></comment>


A huge stretch of the Arctic Ocean is rapidly turning into the Atlantic - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/06/26/a-huge-stretch-of-the-arctic-ocean-is-turning-into-the-atlantic-right-before-our-eyes/ <comment><USER2> This article is gated behind a paywall/coercive consent "choice".</comment>


The Alt-Right and Global Information Warfare - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02712 <comment><USER2> This is well researched and compellingly shows a distinction of sources and metrics between alt-right and typical conservatism.</comment>


The oldest copper mines in Timna National Park date back to 4500BC - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180419-the-israeli-park-with-a-valuable-secret <comment><USER2> I'll need a lot of convincing that this is "Writing and other marks left behind by ancient miners" and not "random vandalism".

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/624_351/images/li...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/624_351/images/live/p0/64/7l/p0647lb8.jpg)

<comment><USER3> I had the exact thought. Also what writing is that? Historically you would assume it's Roman Latin. If that's one of their evidence, it does not point to King Solomon temple. As you would assume some Hebrew text.

This article is a cross between tourism PR and faulty reasoning by an Indiana Jones wannabe

<comment><USER4> Greek would also be possible, which would put the writing no earlier than 500BC. To my eye it couldn't pass for the earlier Phoenician alphabet.

When you're talking about a mine that was likely operated for centuries, it's also hard to say "everyone who worked here was a slave" or "everyone who worked here was a well-paid highly educated craftsman".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huh. I was just reading yesterday that the Negev is the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface in the world (1.8My). [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are- we-e...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths- only-civilization/557180/)

</comment><comment><USER6> If anyone is interested in the history of this area, there is an interesting theory about the location of Mount Sinai.

[https://www.i24news.tv/en/tv/replay/holyland- uncovered/x6h81...](https://www.i24news.tv/en/tv/replay/holyland- uncovered/x6h816t)

</comment><comment><USER7> Copper is used for electrical traces, I take it. If technology allows for light (laser) based switching, could less metals be used in the construction?

<comment><USER8> Copper allows creating a movement of electrons, which is what you usually call electricity. Any kind of light, while it allows transferring a signal, does need to have the signal transformed from electricity to light on one end, and from light to electricity on the other.

Replacing a very long cable with a fiber that allows transferring the same signal using light is a way to save on copper. But in appliances themselves, having signals transformed to and from light is too expensive. So you won't find lots of light fibers inside of appliances.

<comment><USER9> I think the person you're replying to meant having the computing be done optically (switching by some optical rather than transistor means), so in theory if you could do that you wouldn't need any copper except to provide power to your optical computer. I doubt we'll ever get to the point where optical computing is more cost effective than what we currently have though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR: Ancient underground copper mines

<comment><USER11> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can we change the clickbait title?

<comment><USER13> Sure thing, we've gone with a representative image caption from the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting article hampered by a tenuously related clickbait title. Please change it.</comment>


Ask HN: Have a favourite Web Programing website? - <AUTHOR>

hi,
I'm trying to find a better source of interesting thoughts on programming, my interests lean towards Native Web Apps: Javascript Server/Client etc, language design, tool development, and interaction design.
Anyone have any interesting sites they recommend. I don't read much more than whatever shows up on HN, Ajaxian, and Lambda-the-ultimate.org.
Thanks in advance, Francois <comment><USER2> Here's a site I'm working on that is meant just for your situation:

<http://www.moreofit.com>

Enter in a URL you already like and it will show you similar URLs. You can then sort by popularity, and filter with tags.

<comment><USER3> Neither the "About" nor the "Contact" links seem to work, and I'm having a hard time understand exactly what it does. Certainly the site's idea of "similar" doesn't seem to match mine.

<comment><USER2> It's a work in progress. It looks up the URL you enter on delicious to see what it's been tagged as, and how much. Then it finds the most similarly tagged pages.

Which URLs did you enter which brought up unsatisfactory results?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> www.smashingmagazine.com www.9lessons.info good sites to learn and enhance your knowledge</comment>


Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming/ <comment><USER2> I hate to say it but this SSD story has been plastered all over the news by the PR machine, mainly because the new consoles have no other inovations whatsoever....

No, it is not going to usher a new area of gaming, just make game have less 'loading' screens, and perhaps larger open worlds.... but it is no near the innovation and changes we experiences in the 90s and early 2000's....

Let me say in a more popular language: History has demonstrated that gamers don't give a f@ck on how fast is the SSD.... PS1 won over N64 even though it had huge loading times, compared to near instantaneous N64's loading screens....

I meant, personally, i think it is great, as PS4 loading time are bad, but just fast loading time it is not going to make me buy a game.

Anyway, just a sad PR piece trying to get people exited for something that looks a small (but good) evolutionary improvement over the current PS4 Pro/Xbox X.

Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology, than it would have been exiting. But it looks like if enabled, a game will either have to drop resolutions and cap frame-rates to barely playable 30fps.

But, hey your SSD will be fast.....

<comment><USER3> The N64 looked way better, loaded faster, had a better controller, and to me had a better game library as a whole. The PS1 had comparatively horrible architectural choices like no built-in z-buffer, texture filtering, or floating point processing. Apparently N64 sold less per year available though. What did everyone see in the PS1?

<comment><USER4> Maybe N64 had a better library of games to you, but for others PS1 had Silent Hill, MGS, FFVII, Gran Turismo, Tomb Raider, Tekken, all games that define their genre even 20 years later.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I still remember playing Tekken for the first time at my friends house, which was over 25 years ago. It was truly jaw dropping for the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One really good example of an Xbox One game that has grown to truly bloated proportions is Destiny 2. The loading times are multiple minutes per map section now. Total game is about 105GB on disk.

People have even resorted to using external 256GB SATA3 SSDs in USB3.0 enclosures, which are faster than the internal 5400 rpm HDD in an Xbox One S.

I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles. 1TB of SSD space is enough for maybe 12 or 14 games, maximum. "Serious" console gaming people buy many more games than that...

<comment><USER7> Ahhh, remember those days when you would get back from the shop with a cartridge, rip off the shrink rap, drop it in the slot, hit the on button and you were playing straight away in seconds. Good times.

Fallout 76 was something like a 45gb install and then a 50gb day 1 "patch"...

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a lot more effort and time than just downloading 95gb.

<comment><USER9> Depends where you live. For me, 95gb takes a couple hours. For my friend in Kentucky, it takes at least a week

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's about time. SSDs have been around a very long time, and without a supported way of swapping out the internal hard drive, console gamers are penalized with long waits vs PCs where SSDs have become fairly standard.

<comment><USER11> PS4s have been able to swap out their hard drive and it's fully supported. However, base model PS4s run it at SATA2 speeds no matter what's attached, with SATA3 only being supported on the Pro.

<comment><USER12> Swapping the 5400 RPM drive with a SSD still makes sense even on SATA2. You'll go from 80ish M/s reads to 300.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article of course focuses primarily on the consoles with an interesting gathering of some of the lower level details behind "fast SSD". But while it compares it to servers what it really brought to mind to me was mainframes, which often had not particularly impressive CPU specs at first glance but were kings of IO and offloading. It made me wonder if over the next decade we'll see yet another example of the cyclical nature of the tech industry in PCs. I haven't been following storage super closely for a bit, but it hasn't been _that_ long yet the numbers the author tosses out in terms of "by the end of the year everyone will be doing 6-7+ GB/s" felt pretty staggering. Combined with the sudden leap forward in system bandwidth thanks to AMD, and after a fairly long period of stagnation around HDDs and the limits of SATA it feels like a huge amount of progress in storage is happening at an enormous clip. And that is leading to the discovery of bottlenecks elsewhere, like with ZFS Issue #8381 [1] where the ARC meant to improve performance actually becomes troublesome. AMD has really pushed available PCIe bandwidth up dramatically with EPYC 2 doing up to 128 GB/s, yet with drive numbers like those arrays could actually be made to get towards it already!

As the article says that kind of IO becomes a real strain on valuable general purpose CPU time. So I wonder if we'll actually start to see regular PCs begin offloading again, reversing the generalize everything a bit with more support specialized silicon so that they can actually feed the beast. I could see that having real implications for a lot of future software and OS development too, particularly for OSS. If things go that way I hope some good open standards can get out ahead of it.

\----

1: [https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381)

</comment><comment><USER13> This article didn't talk deep enough about PS5 custom storage chip controller or I missed it.

Reference:

1\. [https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480](https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480)

2\. [https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve- di...](https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-disappointed- and-embarrassed-myself/)

<comment><USER14> I think you may have failed to notice that there's more than one page to this article. Page 1 covers the SSD hardware itself, and page 2 covers the other storage-related hardware that's not actually on the SSD itself.

<comment><USER13> I really failed to notice that, yea they did talk about it in other pages

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The PS5's SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB/s. The RAM runs at 448 GB/s, _81 > times faster_. [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox- > ps...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new- > era-of-gaming/3)

SSD is compressed (by "Kraken"), giving 8-9GB/s typical.

You could compress RAM too, but not worth the latency penalty.

<comment><USER16> Textures are kept compressed in ram

<comment><USER17> Yes, but they have special formats (ETC, PVRTC, ASTC etc.) so GPU can use them directly, and the compression is lossy. e.g. PNG would not work in this situation because GPU cannot decode PNG textures fast enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long since been eclipsed by PCs in terms of performance.

Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years?

<comment><USER14> For starters, the compression hardware isn't part of the SSD.

But more importantly, transparent decompression has been implemented many times on many systems; it's not a pipe dream. Developers don't have to do much of anything special to use the decompression hardware. They just have to use the platform's standard APIs for reading data from disk, and the OS or standard library takes care of routing it through the hardware offloads. From the application programmer's perspective, the decompression just shifts the performance characteristics of the storage a bit—higher latency, higher throughput, stronger preference for certain block sizes.

The bigger question is whether developers will be able to make good use of high bandwidth storage, regardless of how that storage is provided. Replacing everything in RAM on a ~2 second timescale is pretty wild. Lots of game engines have systems to coordinate loading assets on the fly, and the scalability limits of those existing solutions are going to be tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are any of these magical load times and such going to actually happen?

I feel like gaming companies really don't emphasize load times unless they have to and their energy goes into pretty graphics or other things.

In theory couldn't they have ultra fast load times now if they just lowered the amount they needed to load to start? / Manage the amount of content they need to load to start?

I wonder if they'll just focus on pushing any speed benefits into....load times for even more assets, pretty graphics or whatever they choose.

In the meantime console announcement promises/ hype have a terrible history as far as accuracy goes...

<comment><USER20> The great thing about having these ultra fast SSDs and the associated software stacks is that you can get both faster load times and also more assets. One of the greatest benefits of these SSDs imo is that it tightens up how big your streaming pool has to be, freeing up a large amount of ram and allowing for on demand loading of assets just before they are needed.

Additionally the huge bandwidth means that the consoles can fill their entire ram in between 3ish and 6ish seconds, which should reduce max loading times by a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A lot of people here don't quite seem to get what this is all about.

Previously, a PC or a console might have 4-8 cores (or hyperthreads, or cell processors, or whatever). Typically, you'd want to be doing sequential I/O from just one of those processor cores, because more than likely be a mechanical disk. At _most_ you could do asynchronous or threaded I/O so that the CPU core could also do other computation while waiting for textures to stream in (or whatever), but that's about it.

More than one concurrent I/O at a time (even from other programs!) would cause the disk head to seek, killing your performance. You'd get stuttering in the game or texture popping as the I/O fell behind. You could budget on _maybe_ 20-30 MB/s if you're lucky, or less than 5 MB/s random I/O if unlucky.

 _It made no difference if you had a PC with an SSD, as zero games were written for it._

So now, with SSDs in consoles as standard you would automatically assume, that we can finally utilise all the CPU threads and throw 8 cores worth of I/O at the SSD. Maybe increase the queue depth a bit more, have some asynchronous and overlapped I/Os or something.

But that's _crazy difficult_. The models and textures being streamed in are actually _used_ on the GPU, not the CPU. Each texture is typically mip-mapped, building up a "pyramid" of lower and lower resolution versions to prevent moire when viewed at a distance. The "currently used set" of each texture is a complicated angled 'slice' through this sort-of-3D texture 'volume'! This is used asynchronously by the GPU, and ideally you'd somehow want to track this, figuring out which parts are used by the GPU, which aren't, from which mip-map layer, etc.. and then _predict ahead_ the next set of 32x32 tiles or whatever you'd want to load. In parallel. Across 8 CPU cores. While the GPU is doing its own thing.

Just no. That's not happening. The synchronisation alone would be a nightmare. It's crazy talk. No human can write code like this, and certainly not optimally _and_ efficiently.

So the brilliant thing about the GPU on the PS5 is that the GPU can make direct I/O calls. No CPU involvement. Whatever it "needs", as and when it decides, it can simply directly fetch.

It's not going to do this with 8 cores, or 16 threads. No, it's going to do it with _thousands_ of cores. The I/O queue depths that used to be "exactly 1" for literally 100% of all previous games are not going to be 8. They're going to be tens of thousands! This is massive. This isn't "a couple of random I/Os done a little bit better", it's _four or five orders of magnitude_.

</comment><comment><USER22> "all games and game engines are still designed to be playable off hard drives because current consoles and many low-end PCs lack SSDs"

Saved you some time

<comment><USER23> that is not a fair characterization at all

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Game programmers cannot take full advantage of NVMe SSD performance without > making their games unplayably slow on hard drives.

Well, yet. As history shows, many big game shops care very little whether their game is unplayable on current systems and push for a more expensive setup instead. On the other hand, this is partly the reason I can now do ML at home doing things that were far out of my range a few years ago.

<comment><USER25> Game developers might treat PC players like that, but never console players. If an optimization boosted performance on PCs but was detrimental to consoles they would never implement it.

<comment><USER24> I was specifically referring to PC games. They can't do that on consoles as the game for model X is for model X, whereas the one for PC has minimal and recommended requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every generation has seen the various console makers hyping some magic technical aspect of their machines. We had Blast Processing, Mode 7, polygons, MORE polygons, the Emotion Engine, RAMBUS, hyper futuristic Cell technology, and none of it solves the central problem for game designers - how to make a FUN game.

I'd give up this ultra fast SSD in a heartbeat if it meant there wouldn't be any pay to win or DLC to buy for a half completed but shipped anyway game.</comment>


Being more efficient on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.christmas/2019/7 <comment><USER2> Here's a 4th step:

Be quite liberal with your cross-referencing of issues, pull requests, commits, comments in Github's UI.

GitHub will prominently display these reference breadcrumb whenever you're navigating around. When I found myself in an obscure Github issue tracking down a problem, it was _awesome_ to see a reference made 6 months ago by a colleague in a different team.

Now that I've left plenty of references in my own little corner of Github, I've made my own life easier too.

<comment><USER3> This has been very helpful when working on my own projects. I find issue to be a great way to add context to commits.

If a commit solves part of an ongoing problem, referencing it helps clue yourself in on why you made the change you did when you git blame yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GitHub is still quite annoying to use compared to something like Phabricator.

\- The diff viewer is bad at showing intraline diffs and whitespace changes. I often check out branches just to be able to view the diff in IntelliJ, which is much less noisy.

\- Stacking PRs is unintuitive and requires lots of rebasing and messing with branches. With Phabricator, you can just have a stack of commits on a branch and submit them one-by-one using "arc diff HEAD^". This makes it much easier to have small self-contained diffs that depend on each other, while the PR workflow encourages large PRs that do many things.

\- Phabricator's CLI can create new revisions non-interactively, so I can just do a commit in my IDE, then press a shortcut and a new revision is created without leaving the IDE. The hub CLI for GitHub requires multiple steps and wants me to fill out a PR template in an editor.

\- The bug tracker misses critical features for managing large projects like task dependencies.

None of this matters for drive-by contributions or small projects, but for a company repository that I contribute to all day, the workflow is nowhere near as good as Phabricator or Gerrit.

There's a reason why even some large open source projects like AOSP or Blender use a patch-based code review tool despite the learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some more practical tips:

Install the `hub` CLI[1]. Being able to fork, open and checkout pull-requests directly from the command-line reduced a lot of friction that I had.

Install the `h` tool[2] to automatically checkout repos in a fixed layout compatible with Go. `h org/repo` automatically clones and changes directory in one command. Instead of browsing a repo in the browser, use `h` and directly jump into the code.

Install the `vim-rhubarb` plugin[3]. This allows to select a few lines in the code and then type `:Gbrowse` to open the browser, with the same lines selected on GitHub. And then share the location to a colleague.

[1]: [https://hub.github.com/](https://hub.github.com/)

[2]: [https://github.com/zimbatm/h](https://github.com/zimbatm/h)

[3]: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-rhubarb](https://github.com/tpope/vim- rhubarb)

</comment><comment><USER6> > 2\. Writing good issues

I've made a small MVP of a utility that syncs issues to/from local folder as a git repo, so that you can use your favorite editor (like Emacs) to keep extensively good issue descriptions

[https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent](https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent)

<comment><USER7> Nice! Another option is to use a plugin that lets you edit textfields in an external editor: [https://github.com/jlebon/textern](https://github.com/jlebon/textern)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I honestly don't see how any of this is specific to github.

<comment><USER9> Is anybody claiming that?

<comment><USER10> Well.. the title here is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was not aware of saved replies. Will make my life easier.

</comment><comment><USER12> Saved replies have saved (no pun intended) me so much time. Great advice</comment>


Linus Torvalds starts blogging - <AUTHOR> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ <comment><USER2> _"... Linus Torvalds starts blogging ..."_

He's been blogging for years in the kernel change logs. Sample ~ <http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.20> for instance. Worth a read though as you can gauge what hardware is coming up that runs superior on linux. And there's more software to take a peek at ~ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/tracker

</comment><comment><USER3> Wake me when he signs up for Twitter.

<comment><USER4> Linus is exactly the type of person I'd expect to never Tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> may be he just needs to share more "just for fun" stories....just like his book "Just for fun"

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually found the entry on the Intel SSD rather exciting. I found it on Amazon but it seems like it's either not shipping yet or just started...couldn't find it on Newegg.

</comment><comment><USER7> how can you be sure it's him? from the tone of the writing, I am skeptical!

<comment><USER8> 30 seconds in Google finds him mention it in <http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/6/300>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> talk about late adoption...

<comment><USER10> Better late than never?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is either very good or very bad..

<comment><USER11> Why did I get downvoted? It was probably too short to be meaningful.

What I meant that this can be good because it can show to people the "human side" if you like to open source. I see many people think Linux is only for slightly crazy fanatics and I believe that LT can do a much better job at representing the diverse movement than RMS and ESR (don't get me wrong I kinda like both of them).

On the other hand LT can be a bit insensitive and turn people off (do you remember that GNOME controversy?)

<comment><USER12> I didn't vote for this post or your original post. But I can tell you if you hadn't already been downvoted to 0, I would have downvoted you because your comment added absolutely nothing to the conversation.

It was no different than saying "It might rain tomorrow, or it might not."

<comment><USER9> how do I downvote you, then?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MySQL v PostgreSQL: Which have you used and why? - <AUTHOR> MySQL v PostgreSQL: Which have you used and why? <comment><USER3> We started with MySQL and switched to PostgreSQL when some unit tests started to fail after doing a minor MySQL upgrade. Something like going from 5.0.1 to 5.0.2. We tracked this down to MySQL giving completely different result sets for the same (not very complex) query after the small upgrade.

We never looked back. PostgreSQL is really powerful and we use it in a clustered and soon sharded setup. Works well for us.

<comment><USER4> How is PostgreSQL clustering going? I heard that was a pain, whats your setup?

<comment><USER3> Slony. It is far from perfect though. But at least it is a good and stable way to have a backup database ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We use postgresql at <http://massify.com>

I don't have enough experience with MySQL to be objective. I chose PostgreSQL because it had a feature set relatively on parity with Oracle and the other big boys. So far I haven't been disappointed.

Well, except for tool support. I'm still looking for a good schema diff tool for it (something as brilliant as SQL Compare by red gate) and a good ER tool (something as simple but functional as Enterprise Manager for SQL Server).

Otherwise, I really haven't considered looking at anything else.

<comment><USER6> Have you tried DbVisualizer? I don't think it does schema diff, but it covers quite a few other features in Enterprise Manager and can extract ERDs from your schema. It's relatively cheap too (or free with limitations) and works with any database with a JDBC driver.

There's also Aqua Data Studio. I've never used it, but it looks pretty awesome. A little pricey, though.

<http://dbvis.com/products/dbvis/> <http://www.aquafold.com/>

<comment><USER5> Haven't tried dbvisualizer.

Huge fan of Aqua Data Studio though, great tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've recently been through this decision process. I had v1.0 of <http://shellshadow.com> using mysql. I ran into one bug in my assumption about how mysql was handling unique constraints and from there started to look at postgres again. It turned out my decision to move to postgres, which I put in production last month, was more about timing of pfg 8.3 coming to maturity than absolutes against mysql.

Here are a few points that tipped things to postgres. 1 - constraints and complex queries. MySql handles simple selects fast but has somewhat unpredictable behavior on complex queries. Including counts. Postgres generally scales in proportion to complexity of the query well. 2 - <USER2> 8.3 came out. This was a big deal as it cleans up lots of things that want into 8.x. 3 - BSD-style engineering. Everything from docs to source code to make files is more rigorous with old school BSD projects. FreeBSD and Postgres are clean!!! I don't want to hammer on linux, GNU, GPL stuff too much, but to be honest, this camp is stable because of massive user base and companies put in effort to make it stable. Its a sledgehammer approach. In general I find projects like FreeBSD and Postgres to follow more rigid engineering processes. I like this in my DB ;) 4 - Full Text Search built into postgres 8.3. MySQL has FTS, sort of. Postgres prior to 8.3 had it as an add-on. You can run external Full Text Search engines like lucene or ferret or maybe even better, sphinx. But this adds one more "engine" to manage. Most real world FTS use cases needs to have its results filtered in context of user prefs and have results filtered and sorted by other DB criteria. This means that for many FTS use cases, it is very desirable to just give the DB one big complex query and have it return things all sorted out. Using an external FTS system, you usually end up taking your FTS results and going back to the DB for further queries to filter and sort the FTS results. This adds to app code complexity. With postgres 8.3, you can do this in ways that MySQL cannot begin to compete with.

Hope these rational help. I am very happy with my decision to switch from MySQL to postgres and the process was not painful.

good luck, Jon www.shellshadow.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about that too and the timing of the new relaease is a big factor in the decision making.

A year ago is would have been MySQL, just because everyone else who is big is them (e.g. paypal, google, amazon etc.) but now I really think PostgreSQL is the better choice and will be going ahead with it until I can think of a reason not to.

It is now just as fast, but much more robust

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While Postgres seems nice, mySQL is still the choice of the majority of high- traffic sites that absolutely need to scale. I'm not saying Postgres is bad, but their only huge-volume user is Skype. They simply don't have as many of the huge, high-traffic users such as craigslist, eBay, Ticketmaster, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.

Those sites need to scale an order of magnitude (or several) greater than sites like CD Baby or Macworld.

Just look at: <http://www.postgresql.org/about/users>

Other than Skype, there aren't as high-use sites as the ones I mentioned that go for mySQL. Postgres isn't bad, but it just hasn't been tested at the same level. Could it do better at that level? It IS possible. I prefer to go for a sure thing.

<comment><USER9> Reddit is also Postgres, if you consider that high-volume.

<comment><USER10> Did not know this -- very cool.

One of the only reasons I still use MySQL is that PostgreSQL would break some Drupal sites I deployed. I miss the ease of obtaining relational integrity under Postgres (although pgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's).

Have scaled up to saturating an OC12 with Postgres (17 web servers) and doing 30 million hits/month with MySQL, so it's not like I care that much, but MySQL has a nasty tendency to piss me off in corner cases, and I'm getting tired of it.

Definite pros and cons to both. I've seen people stick with (and patch) a particular point release ofMySQL (eg. 3.23 for AdWords at one point) just because the errors were consistent and they were no longer doing much to the schema. Never seen that happen with PostgreSQL.

Jeremy Zawodny's tools (mytop, etc.) are invaluable if you have to get a MySQL shop to scale up (eg. without migrating a metric fuckload of existing SQL), btw.

<comment><USER11>
      pgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's

Really? I'm curious if you could explain what you found unintuitive about PG's EXPLAIN.

BTW, there's a "ptop" (pg_top) project for PostgreSQL as well.

<comment><USER10> psql's EXPLAIN basically shows you the execution plan, IIRC. MySQL's EXPLAIN provides the information about what keys will be hit for which joins in a more compact fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Didn't you just basically ask the same question 6 hours ago?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184099>

Also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861>

<comment><AUTHOR> I had some problem intially getting the question posted here. The second post asks a similar question but slight variation. I am really intersted in this at the moment so sorry if this seems to be a double posting. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I initially wanted to settle on MySQL for the sake of simplicity. But got bitten twice by it and have since changed my mind.

a) Once I had to store a large chunk of time series data in MySQL 'TEXT' field. Got errors in the application, could not figure out where they are coming from.

Turned out, MySQL has 1 to 65535 characters limit for TEXT field, and I should have used LONGTEXT type. MySQL has simply bitten the tail off my data and happily stored the rest without any errors or warnings. OK, I should have RTFM but still, the idea of a database corrupting my data without any warning makes me very uncomfortable...

b) Second issue that I've discovered is simply the ability to make 'hot backups' to SQL text files. pg_dump will produce consistent backup from working db server, mysqldump requires you to stop the server or to lock its tables etc. 'Hot backup' of mysql databases can be achieved through other methods/tools but at the cost of greater complexity.

<comment><USER14> "MySQL has simply bitten the tail off my data and happily stored the rest without any errors or warnings. OK, I should have RTFM but still, the idea of a database corrupting my data without any warning makes me very uncomfortable..."

That is just insane. I heard about it a couple months ago and wondered what were those folks smoking when they wrote it like that.

The hot backups thing never crossed my mind, but is very interesting. Of course, it relies on transaction consistency and MySQL has the option (shivers) of not having it, thus the locking demands.

From what I know (I am a PostgreSQL guy too), when you use a transaction-aware data store in MySQL, these behaviours are gone (along with any performance edge it may have over PostgreSQL, but that's another story), so, you may want to give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Started with MySQL, switched to PostGres for latest project, but latest project doesn't have any significant traffic yet, so I can't give you a field report yet.

MySQL can have fairly unpredictable performance characteristics if you're not an expert in it. It certainly can scale, but it's very easy to kill your performance if you're indexed wrong or have the wrong table type or wrong cache settings or run into table locking issues. (And these aren't theoretical issues; we've run into some of them at past MySQL-based websites.)

I don't have the time to spend debugging cache settings and EXPLAIN SELECTs and locking issues, so I went with Postgres, which supposedly has many fewer pitfalls "out of the box". Been happy with it so far, for development, but haven't needed to scale it yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Postgresql here, for all the reasons states by over commenters, with an additional proviso: we were a Postgres shop when I arrived and nobody has ever seen a reason to change.

Sometimes we'll think wistfully of more OTS solutions for Oracle and MySQL, in a grass-is-greener sorta way, then we see stuff like this: <http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=11472>

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using PostgreSQL since 2004 on <http://ourdoings.com/>

I've been watching free-software databases since 1997, when people at MIT were using msql and I thought mysql would be a better choice. PostgreSQL looked like it had the potential to be better than mysql, but it wasn't fast or stable yet.

A few years later I tried PostgreSQL 7 and it was great.

</comment><comment><USER17> Our main product uses MySQL 3. We are unable to upgrade it to version 5 because a key violation problem. Only next versions will use MySQL 5, so we are not able to use UDF nor stored procedures. When developing another strategical product, Ricardo Banffy used PostgreSQL with a very good performance and nice UDF and stored procedures.

</comment><comment><USER18> PostgreSQL for many reasons. If you use MySQL check out <http://sql- info.de/mysql/gotchas.html> to stay on top of potential problems.

</comment><comment><USER19> We switched from MySQL to Postgres because MySQL does not scale. MySQL rebuilds all indexes for InnoDB tables (and all other storage engines) on any trivial "alter table" even though InnoDB indexes refer to records using the primary key. So just adding a column to a big table means taking down your database for hours, even though the rebuilt indexes will be exactly the same as before the rebuild. So dumb... We are happy with Postgres.

</comment><comment><USER20> Postgresql

1\. license less confusing 2\. great mailing list support

<comment><USER3> There is also enough commercial support for when you have to bring the marines in to fix stuff.

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill I have used both, MySQL has the edge on friendliness but Postgres is overall the better database. A dual or quad Opteron system with a decent amount of RAM and well-tuned Postgres should be able to handle queries sufficient to drive a web site at 50 to 100Mbps continuous bandwidth, assuming no ridiculous queries.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tried MySQL like 2 years ago and out of the box it preferred to insert a known-invalid "000000" date than aborting loudly.

The last thing I want my DB to do is corrupt my data silently. There were other braindead "philosophy" problems but I don't remember what they are.

Been a happy user of Postgres ever since.

</comment><comment><USER22> Both. We use Ruby on Rails both on Windows and Linux. MySQL and PostgreSQL sometimes work on one, sometimes on the other. If one does not work we just switch to he other. Often small revision changes in the DB or in Rails will break one or the other.

</comment><comment><USER23> MySQL. Simple to setup for non-complex websites. And I wonder if MySQL's rise to billion-dollar acquisition was fueled by the growth of PHP (read: non-CGI) websites.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just ran into a case where I needed a FULL OUTER JOIN and MySQL let me down. It looks like PostgreSQL would have saved me from UNIONing two queries.

</comment><comment><USER25> we are building our product on postgres, because we like the sql features that mysql doesn't have, such as constraints and checks, or really much of anything relational.

</comment><comment><USER26> MySQL. Easy to setup replication and good tool support.</comment>


Five Startup Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://noahlitvin.posterous.com/five-startup-ideas

<comment><USER2> On Culinary Education Site, a related concept perhaps could be a three column recipe format whereby each row has:

      Column 1: Ingredients involved in that step.
      Column 2: Instructions.
      Column 3: Reasoning, extra info. Things like why you're blanching and not boiling beans. Or potential substitutes. Or pain points to avoid.

Optionally a fourth column with the best user/tester annotations.

Some recipe sites end up looking like an eHow/similar article with just the most basic of info. I cooked a couple of tandoori lamb racks on Feb 14 as one course. The recipe I used was brief and didn't mention whether the tandoori paste should be left on the meat when roasting it, or wiped off or what. I was torn between imparting maximum flavour and going for the best roasted appearance - ended up sacrificing some of the finished look to go somewhere in the middle.

(Very simple and easy recipe if anyone wants the URL.)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the spirit of sharing, I did have something similar to the Culinary Education Site mocked up for a while. The idea was to combine techniques/instruction with a recipe site in a simple multi-column layout.

Imagine the ingredients and steps on one panel. Clicking on any ingredient or any step would pull in dynamic content onto the right "content panel". This requires that the recipes use standardized naming conventions + measurement units and we would handle this by making a guided recipe builder. The author of the recipe would be able to add in notes that would show up when you click on an ingredient/step.

Why is this any different than every recipe site out there? Right now, recipe sites, especially the most visited ones, mainly reproduce plain text and try to build some interactivity by finding words to trigger links against like "carrot". Even when you have more information, the sites are designed to open up new windows so you end up having 20 windows open by the time you finish the recipe. In a "twitter-like" layout, you will NEVER leave the recipe page. The ingredients and steps are always visible and all content loads into the content pane.

The types of content would include vetted UGC videos, photos/illustrations, or helpful tips like "shortcuts" or "substitutions". Of course, this is also where users comments would show up. This is where I really had the idea to try and do this.. I was on a recipe site and a popular recipe had over 200 comments.. MOST of the comments related to specific ingredients or steps but they were organized chronologically which is absolutely NOT logical at all. I asked myself why the comments weren't attached to specific ingredients/instructions and thus this idea.

I'm sure someone here will tell me it's been done, so please share any links if it has because I couldn't fine any that did it well enough to satisfy what I had in mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> It'd be nice if someone would bother to set up a site or a wiki to collect these ideas in one place. Call it "Please somebody make this" and bootstrap it by annoncing on HN :)

<comment><USER5> You mean something like this (from a HN thread a while ago)?

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag- R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWR...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag- R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRkbjNyUGRxS2JIV3NxYVdiaXc&hl=en#gid=2)

Also related: <http://www.builditwith.me/>

The problem with idea sheets seems to be that most ideas are terrible...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _College Recommendation Engine_

I know the guys over at <http://www.Zinch.com> are sort of addressing this problem. Its more of a social approach to finding a University.

</comment><comment><USER7> For Culinary Education Site, I recently learned of Rouxbe <http://rouxbe.com/>

I was rather impressed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Five Ideas with Microscopic Target Markets</comment>


Alex Payne — One Year In Portland - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2011/05/26/one-year-in-portland.html <comment><USER2> I first met Portland when attending JSConf this year. The city is simply amazing.

It's relatively cheap, its residents seem very pleasant, its street are well laid out, it's biker friendly, it's in a beautiful area, it has great food ( loved all the food trucks ), it's youthful, it's walkable, it has great public transportation, it has a grassroots feel to it, it has a great tech vibe to it, it has great neighborhoods, it has great shopping, it seems unpretentious, etc, etc...

Ever since I left, I've seriously thought about moving there.

<comment><USER3> ... and so many spoiled white kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, all those words and yet nothing really was said. I think all the microbrew and coffee shop amateur poetry nights in Portland have finally settled in.

</comment><comment><USER5> +1 for Portland</comment>


Jupiter loses a stripe. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18889-jupiter-loses-a-stripe.html

<comment><USER3> Interesting article. Normally when I read an article in the form of "some natural phenomenon has stopped occurring", I get worried and think of how the human race is fucking over the planet and we're all going to die, unless we figure out what we did wrong. That was the initial thought that went through my mind when I clicked through to this article.

Then I realized, hey... that's another planet. We didn't cause the problem! We can just watch and not care one way or the other. If we figure out why, great. If we never do... also fine.

Quite relaxing.

<comment><USER4> Actually, we probably do want to care about that. We know Earth's environment is changing but be don't really know why. Our planet is a single data point in the solar system, which makes analysis a little difficult.

Is Mars getting warmer or colder? Is Jupiter? Why is Jupiter's atmosphere visibly changing? If all other planets in the solar system are getting warmer/colder, shouldn't we expect Earth's temperature to change as well?

It's like a bright neon sign flashing "Clearly Explained Reason for Increased Solar System Exploration", but the space agency budget folks will likely ignore it and attempt to gain public support through some asinine vision quest thing instead.

<comment><USER5> I agree that sending probes thought the solar system is interesting, but other planets are not worming.

PS: This is the second time the band has disappeared discovering why that happens may be interesting like the North pole hexagon cloud pattern over Saturn but it's probably not a temperature effect: [http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060519/full/news060515-17.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060519/full/news060515-17.html)

<comment><USER4> Do we have sufficient data to conclude that other planets are not warming? How far back does our accurate, consistent measurement go? Years? A decade or two?

I'm not sure we have sufficient data to conclude anything right now. We know astoundingly little about the neighbourhood we live in.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to sound like too much of a jackass here, but do you have any reason to think that other planets _are_ warming? The rhetorical technique of "pose a question without any real backing, then demand proof when someone answers" drives me nuts.

<comment><USER4> Yes. For one, there's that big ol' fusion furnace in the middle of the place that's tossing out a variable amount of energy as time goes on.

Examining the weather of other planets would help explain if solar activity or other factors are affecting planetary temperatures more than recent human actions.

<comment><USER7> The sun isn't responsible for global warming. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7327393.stm>

<comment><USER4> Please don't bring that politicized stuff into the discussion. That's a different flame war entirely.

If Jupiter is warming/cooling or Mars is warming/cooling, then something has to be responsible for it, and it sure isn't human activity.

If not the sun, then what? Something about planetary environments we're likely interested in learning more about, right?

<comment><USER7> You don't get to just label contrary scientific findings as 'political', and dismiss it out of hand. Here's the published paper that the article refers to: <http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/3/2/024001/> The correlations don't hold up under analysis, and that's really all there is to be said on the subject. But if you feel that you can refute that paper with evidence, then go for it. I for one would love for you to be right, It's no doubt save me (and everyone else on the planet) a whole load of economic pain. Sadly, reality does't seem to be going along with my desires.

<comment><USER4> I didn't dismiss/refute/claim anything or intend to start yet another global warming flame war. I'm probably as familiar with that research as you are and I'm not refuting it.

If other planets are warming/cooling then something is responsible for it. If it's not the sun, then it's something else related to planetary environments with which we are not familiar. Studying that would be A Good Idea, regardless of where people stand on global warming, because examining Earth alone just gives us a single data point.

What's happening on Mars? Does it parallel the changes we're seeing on Earth to some degree? What's happening in Jupiter's atmosphere to bring about such a dramatic change in a short period of time?

Could we see a similar dramatic change on this planet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's quite a difference: <http://i.imgur.com/ISCI3.png>

Note that the Great Red Spot is in the same location where the stripe used to be. I'm surprised they didn't mean that in the article.

If you look at how the Great Red Spot spins against the southern stripe, you can imagine it gobbling up the stripe: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/790106-02...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/790106-0203_Voyager_58M_to_31M_reduced.gif)

</comment><comment><USER9> On closer inspection, astronomers detected what appears to be a large and rapidly-growing collection of black rectangles on the surface.

<comment><USER10> ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE USE THEM TOGETHER USE THEM IN PEACE

*Edit Ack! pavlov beat me to it

<comment><USER9> Pedantic note: the last part - "USE THEM TOGETHER USE THEM IN PEACE" - <USER2> added to the movie version, in which the story was overlaid with a now- anachronistic Cold War tension between the American and Soviet members of the mission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure it will turn up in the last place you look for it

</comment><comment><USER12> same could happen to... eg. the gulf stream! europe would be frozen like sibiria...

look around, in fact there are people anticipating a shutdown: <http://www.gulfstreamshutdown.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> "All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there."

(A. C. Clarke, "2010")

<comment><USER14> why? or would that be considered a spoiler to the book?

<comment><USER15> It would be pretty hard to explain why without explaining 90% of the plot. Fortunately, there is wikipedia, which will do the spoiling for me - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> conspiracy theories, anyone?

<comment><USER16> BP was mining for some toxic gas on the surface of the planet when something went horribly wrong. Now they're pumping out 5000 Bcfe's of it per day into the southern hemisphere and its destroyed the red stripe we'd become so accustomed to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?

<comment><USER18> Don't forget the other important question:

WHERE ARE THEY?</comment></comment>


Banks Sprint to Meet $493 Trillion Swaps Market Margin Rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-22/banks-sprint-to-meet-margin-rules-for-493-trillion-swaps-market <comment><USER2> Financial firms dislike the idea of letting money sit idle, unless they are getting negative rates. What happens to that $300+ billion ~ $3.6 trillion collateral? I'm sure it will find its way into an investment as well.

<comment><USER3> The collateral isn't limited to cash.

 _Eligible collateral for initial margin includes cash, debt securities that are issued or guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Treasury or by another U.S. government agency, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, multilateral development banks, certain U.S. Government-sponsored enterprises' (''GSEs'') debt securities, certain foreign government debt securities, certain corporate debt securities, certain listed equities, shares in certain pooled investment vehicles, and gold._

From here: [https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-11-30/pdf/2015-28671.p...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-11-30/pdf/2015-28671.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Wow, tbh invest in our (or our allies) bonds is an interesting way to structure this for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> et-al This is news to me. What happens if the banks don't meet their collateral requirements? A fine?

Secondly, I assume this will cause interest rates to go up as a way for banks to incentivise people to save money?

<comment><USER5> I was wondering if they would approach companies like Apple with a lot of off shore cash.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't at all surprise me if Apple's treasury department already lend out to banks.

<comment><USER7> Apple have their own hedge fund to help manage their assets [1].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> considering that mortgage CDS-es total was on the scale of only $1T and it was enough to sink the economy...

<comment><USER9> Notional values can not be usefully compared between asset classes. That's why it's so dumb that people keep reporting them in the media. Comparing $1T of CDS to $493T of derivatives is like comparing Fahrenheit numbers to Celsius numbers. Comparing either of those to GDP is like comparing Fahrenheit and Calories.

<comment><USER10> What about comparing it to the world's total debt? that figure is more than double the current debt of the entire world (230T).

Does the act of re-packaging that 230T really create an additional 263T in value? And even if so, is that not a hopeless feedback loop?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what comparison you're trying to make. These derivatives are typically used modify the cashflows of those instruments for different issuer/investor preferences.

The vast majority (>90%) of that OTC derivative figure is interest rate andFX swaps and the gross market _value_ of those swaps are less than $15 trillion. The aggregate notional principal has also been declining for the last several years.

Here's an example trade:

I'm a European company and I've determined there's demand for my USD fixed rate bonds in America, but I need EUR to invest in my business and my profits are linked to interest rates so it's less risky for me to pay a floating interest rate.

So to _reduce_ my risk, I need to swap the bond cashflows into EUR and the fixed rate payments into floating rate payments.

I issue $100 of bonds to US investors, and then I execute a $100 notional fixed-floating FX swap with a bank. That bank then executes a $100 notional fixed-fixed FX swap with another counterparty and a $100 notional (EUR equiv) rate swap with a different counterparty.

So we have $300 notional value of OTC swaps and a $100 bond. And if we take out the central counterparty, the three swaps actually net into a single $100 swap.

<comment><USER12> What happens if any part of the chain breaks?

<comment><USER11> Parts of the chain break regularly. Individuals, companies, and even banks go bankrupt.

These outcomes are expected and swap agreements are protected by collateral under an ISMA agreement to mitigate the potential losses to counterparties should the other counterparty default.

Now it's reasonable to argue about the amount and type of collateral required (which is broadly the topic of the article), but aggregating all of the notional doesn't produce a meaningful number, because it doesn't reflect the underlying risk.

Even without the sort of hedging I described, it's impossible to draw any meaningful understanding of the risk from the notional number. Consider the following two contracts:

Party A sells $100 protection on a corporate to party B (i.e. CDS)

Party A enters a $100 1Y USD interest rate swap with party B, paying floating.

If the underlying corporate defaults with no recovery in the first case, it's quite possible party A will owe $100 to party B

In the second case, there is a realistic ceiling on what can happen to USD interest rates within the next year. Let's imagine the impossibly unlikely scenario where the fed decided to raise rates to 5% overnight one day after the contract was signed. Even in this situation, the value of the swap (i.e. loss to party A) is still likely only around 5%.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's train wreck  - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chinas-train-wreck/2011/04/21/AFqjRWRE_story.html

<comment><USER2> I don't know how well more trains would work in America, but I was not impressed at all by his arguments. No countries make a direct profit on their transportation systems. He also throws in corruption which seems like a separate issue.

I can likewise give some anecdotal evidence that whenever I rode trains in China they were fast, convenient, cheaper than buses for longer distances, and most importantly, completely packed with people who weren't burdening the roads.

</comment><comment><USER3> The hidden premise in arguments similar to the one the author seems to be getting at is that transporation infrastructure should be financially self- sustaining.

We don't expect that our roads pay for themselves, so why should our trains?

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Transportation infrastructure produces benefits far beyond the direct benefit for those who choose to use the system. There are environmental benefits, congestion benefits (reduced road usage), convenience benefits, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, comparing poor young chinese workers who can barely afford a bus ticket to the average US citizen makes a whole lot of sense. That last paragraph really did not fit with the rest of the article.

Besides, Europe provides plenty of examples of pretty healthy railway systems.

<comment><USER6> Not only that, but his comparison of bus tickets to high-speed rail tickets is absurd. In the UK it can cost me anything from £20-70 return London to Edinburgh by bus for example. By regular-speed train without a railcard, it's gonna be about £120, so at least twice as expensive. And you can guarantee if we ever get around to high-speed, it wont be as 'cheap' as £120.

$5.40 => $9 is a pretty good deal then I'd say for bus to high-speed rail. OF COURSE it's gonna be more expensive, and I'm amazed that the price differential isn't even higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Profitability in private railways is everywhere - it just isn't with large "public service" passenger railways.

Freight railroading is where the money is at and that is why every single majorly successful railway company focuses on just that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Next year China will have more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined. The US really needs to built at least one route(200mph). It's really embarrassing that we could fall so far behind. D.C. to NYC in 1hr, with a 5 minute stop in Philly?

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

<comment><USER9> The high-speed trains in China wait for about 60 seconds at each stop.

How many times a station gets stopped at varies, the busy stations by most trains, other stations maybe only twice a day. There's often a handful of direct routes every day. All this means the scheduling of stops must be precise, especially on longer route, e.g the 4-hr Wuhan-Guangzhou line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is silly. There will always be things that should be built not because they make financial sense but because they serve the greater good.

Roads, railway, transporters, you name it.

</comment><comment><USER11> A side question on rail: Has any municipality in the US given property tax waivers / discounts to get businesses to cluster around rail stops or are almost all stops after the fact?

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is he looking at China? I thought Japan's trains were the exemplary high- speed rail model for the world. I had thought Japan's railways were what inspired the high-speed rail project in CA.

<comment><USER13> _Why is he looking at China?_

Well, China's system is a failure, and he doesn't want the US to build trains, so ... it makes sense.

But something you have to keep in mind is the size of Japan versus the size of China and the US. The most popular Shinkansen route, Tokyo<->Osaka, is about the same distance between Chicago and St. Louis: a 6 hour conventional train ride, a 5 hour drive, or ... a 30 minute flight. So high-speed rail is kind of a hard sell: a 5 hour drive is not that long, and a 30 minute flight is worth the cost if you really need to be there fast. The middle ground, a 2 hour train ride, is not really that compelling, and a ticket would probably cost as much as flying. (The first time I took the Shinkansen, I had a little sticker shock. $200 to ride a train!?)

Rail does make sense for Tokyo to Osaka, though, because the airport in Tokyo is so far away from the city center. It's at least an hour and a half between Tokyo Station and Narita, and then you need to be there in time to navigate the terminal and board 30 minutes before departure. Then you have to do the same thing on the other end. So flying is a net loss between Tokyo and Osaka, which is why the Shinkansen is so successful. Lots of demand, and it's the quickest way to go.

But in the US, the places where high-speed rail will work already have high- speed rail. The other popular city pairs are too far apart -- New York to LA is popular, but that's going to be an awfully long train ride.

<comment><USER6> But can you turn up 5 minutes before your flight and just hop on?

<comment><USER13> Mainline flights? Nope. But there are various airlines that let you do this.

One time, I was in Seattle and needed to be in Portland. I could have taken the train, but the schedule was very inconvenient. I then discovered SeaPort airlines, which operates single-engine aircraft out of Boeing field and flies to PDX. It was $80. I showed up 20 minutes before the flight. The check-in agent greeted me by name (since I was the only person on that flight), and we walked out onto the tarmac and into the plane. No baggage X-ray. No TSA. No metal detectors. I don't think I even showed anyone ID!

I believe US Airways operates a similar service out of LGA, although they probably have more security since their planes are more expensive and seat more than 12 people. But it can definitely be done, and it's a lot cheaper than a high-speed rail line that nobody is going to ride.

Look, I'm the biggest railfan there is. But in a country where the most of the major cities are very far apart, and where everyone owns a car and pays for the interstate system, high speed rail is a hard sell. I'm completely in favor of it, but I expect it to be a gift from the government: it will never pay for itself, and most people won't even think to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That was utterly pointless. As China becomes the largest economy in the world, and its standard of living continues to rise, more Chinese will be able to afford to take high speed trains.

Meanwhile, the standard of living in the US continues to drop. And there are no high speed trains for Americans to take.

Another quality propaganda piece from TWP.</comment>


Analysis of the Comodo hacker's manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/03/comodo-hacker-releases-his-manifesto.html

<comment><USER2> My analysis: This Comodo RA got hacked by a script kiddie, and it probably happens all the time.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. He got lucky.

<comment><USER4> Have you ever thought why no one else wasn't such lucky? It's not luck, stop taking it so easy.

<comment><USER3> Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there were other people exploiting the same weakness, and this arrogant prick was the only one caught?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > People believe that once you compile human readable "source" code,

> that humans can no longer read the resulting binary "object"

> code. That is in incorrect. Code can easily be decompiled

> back to (nearly) the original source. In our (Errata

> Security) pentests, we regularly find embedded usernames and

> passwords that nobody believe hackers can read. It usually

> takes us less than 5 minutes.

Really now? When you are talking about .NET assemblies this is close to true (in some cases). Not so much for C. So much for a "high-end cyber security consulting company".

<comment><USER6> Decompilation of native code for x86 and ARM has gotten pretty damn good these days. I still prefer to read straight disassembly, but Hex-Rays has raised the bar in recent years. For all intents and purposes, you can decompile non- obfuscated functions back to effectively original source, barring type propagation issues (which still plague Hex-Rays, sadly).

<comment><USER7> I'll add for the un-initiated that the ability to read and reverse engineer assembly dumps doesn't require witch craft or use of the force; it's pretty easy. At CMU, it's taught to sophomore Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering Majors [1]

[1] <http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/bomblab.pdf>

<comment><USER6> Agreed. My standard recommendation to those interested is to read the book Reversing by Eldad Eilam (Amazon referral link warning: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764574817/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764574817/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=iha0a-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0764574817) )

I'm also always willing to help people out here -- if anyone is interested in reversing, feel free to email me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why anyone should care what 'errata' thinks.

This is some of their past research. <http://www.erratasec.com/research.html>

Really.

</comment><comment><USER4> errata's analysis is good, no reason to not accept it. About hacker, we should accept he did something which seemed impossible to most of us, so stop taking is job easy, instead of it suggest solutions for prevention of such attacks in future</comment>