How many seconds does your website have to capture user attention? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eyequant.com/2013/04/08/how-many-seconds-does-your-website-have-to-capture-user-attention/

<comment><USER2> The real question to ask's oneself is why even bother attempting to 'capture' users. The real users you should be pursuing are the ones that are seeking the solution your site/product/$gadget offers and those are the ones willing to put in the time to resolve it. I want a loyal clientbase, not those ready to abandon their attention & my service at the next corner.

I'm not entirely against capturing as many users as feasible, but having 'been around the block', I'm of the understanding that they're the sort that'll inevitably abandon your service either way leaving you with a vapid userbase that's a distraction from your core users/clients. Quality > quantity applies. I too admit that if I can net 100x the amount of users inevitably a larger % might stick around, vs. netting 1/10th the userbase and still losing roughly the same amount to attrition.

Note: I didn't actually read the article as the site didn't capture my attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason, I only read the first few sentences.

<comment><USER4> Its because of the way they phrased the title. It made you look for a quick answer, which they didn't give up front, and the article seemed texty. So...

<comment><USER5> It's quite ironic actually if you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something they didn't touch one (surprisingly!) is the F-pattern of eye movement: [http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading- web...](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/)

In summary, research shows that the eye follows an F-shape on your website, and that's the sort of thing you should optimize for if you want to grab eyeballs quickly.

</comment><comment><USER7> One. If you don't deliver some valuable content in one second. it's faster for the user to click back and click the next search result.</comment>


Blocking Compromised Passwords on PyPI - <AUTHOR> https://caremad.io/posts/2018/08/pypi-compromised-passwords/ <comment><USER2> Integrating HIBP checks in online platforms is nice, but what about the public (and admins) at large? Has HIBP been integrated in upstream for registration/login forms in "usual" software? I'm thinking about Nextcloud[0], Wordpress, GitLab, etc.

There should be no harm in doing it, and the admin would get a new switch "check the password with HIBP at login time (Y/n)". This could have a good impact - and it could be done from either client or server-side.

EDIT: after checking, it's already in Nextcloud: [0] [https://github.com/nextcloud/password_policy/commit/fed9c37f...](https://github.com/nextcloud/password_policy/commit/fed9c37ff620cb74dc027a5a40b27313e26c5ba3)

<comment><USER3> There are libraries for doing this, but it's ultimately up to each site/service to implement.

I maintain an add-on for Django that does this, for example, but I can't force people to go and use it, though I also maintain one of the more popular user- registration apps and I probably _will_ find a way to enable it by default in there.

<comment><USER4> Could I have a link to your Django add-on?

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/ubernostrum/pwned-passwords- django](https://github.com/ubernostrum/pwned-passwords-django)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't it be sensible to use a bloom filter instead of iterating over all passwords?

<comment><USER6> See footnote 4 on the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fig leaf. Implement package signatures.

>ESLint

Glass houses. SSH Decorator was much worse, it stole SSH keys.</comment>


Heroku is down - <AUTHOR> https://devcenter.heroku.com

<comment><USER3> I know it's popular to be a "developer-centric" organization these days, but please, please, don't schedule risky maintenance operations for 10 AM on a Monday, when your tools are in heavy usage.

Every SaaS product I've built has analyzed traffic, and performed migrations/deployments at off-hours (generally, after midnight in our dominant time zone). In this case, the outage may have resulted in hundreds (thousands?) of paged administrators across the world, but at least fewer end- users would have been affected.

Also, at scale, it's a good idea to deploy to a single cluster/zone first, and check error rates before deploying to the larger environment.

It's pretty scary that the 'professionals' to whom I've trusted my business aren't more savvy when it comes to high availability...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well the dev center just came back up, but now Heroku.com won't load.

They are in the middle of a maintenance period, but they assured everyone there would be no downtime.

[https://status.heroku.com/incidents/641](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/641)

EDIT: The have issued an incident report: [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/642](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/642)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's kind of interesting how long it takes status.heroku.com to update - <USER2> on our experience and response on twitter, it was about 10 minutes.

<comment><USER5> same here, between 10 and 15 minutes before the incident report

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are they doing maintenance right smack in the middle of a Monday afternoon!? Losing a crap ton of money right now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Update on Heroku's status page:

"Update

Due to our scheduled maintenance this morning, dynos are currently unable to start or be restarted. We are working to address the issue. Posted 2 minutes ago, Jun 23, 2014 18:14 UTC"

</comment><comment><USER8> PX dynos seem to be fine (at least mine are). Our staging environment on 2X dynos however are having the same errors as others.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like I'm back...</comment>


Ask HN: Who do you use for DNS management and why? (2020) - <AUTHOR> It's finally and unexpectedly time for me to move DNS management away from IBM Cloud (formerly SoftLayer). Who do you all use and why?
Backstory: After managing my DNS with IBM Cloud's "Classic Infrastructure" for a while now (and with SoftLayer for many years before that), I logged in to discover that I have to enter a credit card and upgrade from the free plan in order to access my DNS records.
There wasn't any notice that this change was coming, so imagine my surprise :)
On the plus side, IBM / SoftLayer DNS doesn't support reverse DNS or CAA records, which I've been wanting for several of my domains. <comment><USER2> I like DNS Made Easy. I've used them for probably more than a decade now. Never had any issues. Insanely cheap compared to the competitors I've looked at from time to time.</comment>


Ask HN: GDPR Boilerplate Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> We would really like to be ready for GDPR as opposed to just trying to block access to our site for EU customers but are finding the quagmire of rules and regulations hard to navigate.
Does anybody know of boilerplate terms of service for standard SaaS businesses? For those of us that don't sell or track our users in weird ways but are just trying to provide a useful service?
It seems most SaaS sites probably fall into this broad category:
  1. You use Google analytics to get high level usage data for inbound visitors
  2. You use a help desk like UserVoice or the like to deal with customer tickets
  3. You use something like Intercom for drip emails, notifications or the like.
  4. Apart from that you aren't selling or sharing customer data with anyone and aren't keeping more data than you need to provide your service.
You also keep some web logs for debugging, though with a fairly limited retention period.
For people like us why isn't there a boilerplate terms of service we can tweak as well as a checklist of what we need to do to satisfy GDPR. Does this exist and I just missing that?
If this doesn't exist, any lawyers out there want to team up to create it? I'd happily pay for this if it was available. <comment><USER2> Just to clarify, there's a difference between a Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy [1]:

\- A Privacy Policy describes the types of data you collect, how you collect it, and what you do with it.

\- A Terms of Service acts as a contract between you and the user that indicates the requirements, limitations, and standards involved in using your website / app.

GDPR impacts Privacy Policies more than it does Terms of Service agreements. Over at TermsFeed, we're looking to see if GDPR impacts other agreements such as the Terms of Service or EULA or a Disclaimer, but so far GDPR is really about privacy practices and Privacy Policies.

[1] [https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/differences-between- com...](https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/differences-between-common-legal- agreements)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shopify has some free templates:

[https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator/terms-and- con...](https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions) [https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy- generator](https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator)

(It's a marketing tool, just skip the account signup bit and you can still get it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's a good start, though seems slightly Shopify specific. Also is this GDPR compliant?

<comment><USER3> I believe it's GDPR compliant (though you have to do some work to be GDPR compliant too). It's possible to edit it down to be more generic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have the same issue...

Found this [https://www.iubenda.com/en/](https://www.iubenda.com/en/)

27$/year sounds like a reasonable amount instead of hiring a lawyer for 300$/h to generate a piece of document that no one ever reads...</comment>


24 Sleepless Hours of Work = 1 Prelaunch Page - <AUTHOR>

http://loudly.com
Was it worth it?
--
BTW, we aren't publicly revealing what we're up to yet, but if you email me asking for details, I'll likely spill the beans confidentially. <comment><USER2> It makes me dizzy but its def intriguing and inviting otherwise. I signed up. I'm working on a similar landing for the website promoting my mobile app. NYC based, trying to decide between cityscape and zooming in on a particular experience within the city

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we also had the same debate on whether we should go with cityscape or first-person street views. I don't think we ever made a final decision, but leaned street view when picking photos.

Our landing page photo changes based on the visitor's IP and host, so most of our effort went into getting the right photos.

On a friendly note, the guy who signed up as email@example.com (seemingly in response to the question "was it worth it?"), probably didn't "no" that.

<comment><USER2> Nice, all great pictures! Where's your about/contact? Would love to learn more abt loudly, confidentially of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _click, click, click_

<http://loudly.com></comment>


Follow the Path of Least Resistance: An Oral History of 'Office Space' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/2/19/18228673/office-space-oral-history <comment><USER2> _Judge: I'm doing a show [Silicon Valley] about the tech world. Now, they've gotten rid of cubicles. They all brag about their open work space: "It's all open." I think a lot of people want cubicles back. People want some privacy. I think people try to keep dressing up work as something that's not work. I think that's almost more annoying than just the work itself. That's carried on since Office Space came out. In general, no matter how workplaces change, human beings will find a way to be annoyed by other human beings._</comment>


If you sit by the river long enough, you'll see the body of your enemy float by. - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/28/justSittinByTheRiver.html <comment><USER3> It's _"something [Dave Winer] gave up on long ago"_ because he has one of the lowest reputations of anyone in our field.

Here's a pretty good introduction: [http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number) (read the comments)

He has a long history of fucking over business partners and customers, developing mediocre ball-of-mud software, writing terrible specifications and being the worst spec-maintainer of all time. Thankfully most of his technical efforts have been unsuccessful, despite the effect his self-aggrandizement had on the media for much of the last decade.

Unfortunately a few of his clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, and his epic mismanagement of RSS (which only ended with a headshot from Atom). The man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for him, the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft and IBM would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have pretended it had anything to do with the web.

<comment><USER4> But he invented blogging!!!11!!

... several years after everyone else did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In 2002 we had a bunch of people we fired and they were saying really untrue stuff about us in [Utah's] valley. It's a small valley.

We were just a $4M business - who cares about a $4M business - <USER2> don't. We were saying 'you know we would never do it - you guys know us but you know it was he says, she says. But you know what, the day of reckoning must come. You just build the business. The credibility comes with the quality of business. Then they realize that the stuff you were saying was true...Revenue forgives all sins"

Josh James, founder of Omniture, sold to Adobe for $1.8B

[http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december...](http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december-8-2009.html)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164815>

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes. Sometimes, your enemy is on a boat, with many women and beers.

</comment><comment><USER7> The title is only true if you sit downstream :(

</comment><comment><USER8> What does this mean? This sentence especially is quite confusing:

"It works! As your competitors rise, eventually they have done to them what they did to you, and if you sit there a while, you don't have to do a thing -- nature takes care of it. "

whaaa???

<comment><USER4> Eventually people that make fun of you die.

Of course, so do you.

<comment><USER9> Basically hope you're young when you get screwed over, if you're old the chances are you'll die before you get the karmic justice you desperately want . . . at least that's what the authors point seems to be.

<comment><USER10> Judging by this thread so far, it seems as if everyone's almost just as confused as I am by this article... :-(

What does the "river" represent? The flow of activity/competition/life? Why would you sit still and watch it all pass by you?

If A = the point where you and your competitor started in this "river" journey, B = the point at which you got out of the river and sat by it, and C = some distant point where your competitor is still "moving" with the river, then you have a situation where A < B < C.

How an earth can your enemy pass you by? Unless there's a tide that makes the river flow in again at some point?

My logical brain can't handle this ...

<comment><USER4> You are way overthinking it. The image you are supposed to see is your competitor's corpse floating down the river. That's it.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be so sure — after all, Winer 'invented' the "river of news" UI

Instead of having an inbox of his enemies' obituaries with an unread count, he sees a continuous stream of corpses float by.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-legendary-scientist-sounds/246257 <comment><USER2> 10 days ago, 60 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19856874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19856874)

</comment><comment><USER3> The way I approach STEM with my own child is not preaenting him with a series of challenges but as a set of tools and opportunities.

I do expect to encourage him to engage in competitions like science fairs and Math Olympics, but my experience with those is that they are fun, yield good discipline, and the team activities are just as good at developing team skills as any sport.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Interview with E. O. Wilson" might be a better title here.

<comment><USER5> If your goal was for 1% as many people to click on it. STEM is a cultural marker and people want to know if it will go up or down in status. Both for their own status and to know if it will help their kids. "Interview with E.O. Wilson" only attracts people who are interested in raising or lowering the status of evolutionary biology, which is much smaller because most people know they will get in trouble if they pick the wrong side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always felt STEM as yet another compartmentalization of people that create from the business side that manages to own all of the profits from said object/process the STEMs create. A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions, so why is an MBA level education not a critical component of a STEM education? Seem like a critical oversight, or intentional for some odd valued reason.

<comment><USER7> > A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions

Funny how many billionaires are out-there without an MBA.

> _Of the top 100 people listed by Forbes as the world's richest, a grand > total of 16 have MBAs. The highest-ranking MBA is Michael Bloomberg at > number 11_

[https://www.businessbecause.com/news/making-the- headlines/52...](https://www.businessbecause.com/news/making-the- headlines/5260/how-many-forbes-billionaires-have-mbas)

<comment><USER8> > _Funny how many billionaires are out-there without an MBA._

The OP said "business education", not MBA. That article points out that a number of the top 100 richest who do not have a MBA do have a bachelor's degree in business administration (e.g. Warren Buffet) or dropped out of business school (e.g. Steve Ballmer). So it's not as cut and dried as that.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: YouTube Timed Comments - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-timed-comments/mfmjnhncafdcdegeiamnjpnjgmmkkaal <comment><USER2> This is a really cool idea. Any chance of us getting a Firefox version?</comment>


Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03423 <comment><USER2> this paper reads well, and shows publicly some parts of "Function as a Service" on the Microsoft Azure FaaS platform, measured during two weeks of summer and subsequently analyzed. The stated purpose of the paper is to understand and discuss the actual use and performance of the platform, with the intention of optimizing power-vs-responsiveness tradeoffs. The paper carefully does not disclose some raw aggregate numbers, for competitive reasons.

The authors show a complex environment in a disciplined way, and take the time to work out a few tricky statistical measures to support the discussion. Efficiency is always a concern, so it is useful and productive to make studies like this to further the art. It appears Microsoft continues to renew their relationship with academic-like research on business implementations, and this is to be applauded IMHO.

No breath-taking revelations here, but rather a complete treatment of a somewhat tedious collection of stats that can refine the implementation of the FaaS platform.</comment>


Introduction to face match system in Hulu - <AUTHOR> http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/03/face-match-system-overview/

<comment><AUTHOR> A series of introduction to the face match system. More details about each component in the system: [http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/03/face-match- system-face-...](http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/03/face-match-system-face- detection/) [http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/03/face-match-system- shot-...](http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/03/face-match-system-shot- boundary-detection-and-face-tracking/) [http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/04/face-match-system- clust...](http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2014/05/04/face-match-system-clustering- recognition-and-summary/)</comment>


Why I don't like Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://akshar.co.in/blog/archives/290 Twitter though popular cant not kill blogging as many claim it to be. Here are the reasons <comment><USER2> Like most critics of Twitter (Twitics? No. Definitely no), he's completely missed the point.

He seems to be expecting Twitter to be a drop-in replacement for his blog, but it serves an entirely different need -- at least, I suppose, when you have real-world friends on Twitter. Being able to broadcast messages to your friends is pretty powerful. My standard example use-case is "I'm going for lunch at X in 10 minutes. Anyone nearby?". Try that with a blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes thats the point being made there. Twitter is not really a medium to express any "knowledge" as such. It is basically used to convey short lived information.

The author does not say that twitter aims to be a replacement for blogs, not really. It is a common concern that is expressed at many places that people who blog often might find twitter more attractive.</comment></comment>


I don't need a bigger iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6399321/i-dont-need-a-bigger-iphone

<comment><USER2> As a happy Galaxy Note user, the big screen makes a huge difference; that extra inch is the difference between taking a separate tablet for watching videos and just happily using my phone for everything.

</comment><comment><USER3> > A larger screen... but no apps that take advantage of that yet.

I've had 30+ updates in the last couple of days that specifically mention being enhanced for the iPhone 6 screens.

<comment><USER3> There's also a specific AppStore call out on the "Featured" tab which has ~55 apps listed.</comment></comment>


Ultimate Hacking Keyboard – Why you need to buy one, Ultimate configurability - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdsupply.com/ugl/ultimate-hacking-keyboard/updates/1911 <comment><USER2> I don't get it. This problem can be solved in software, no special hardware required.

Ergonomic aspect is also misguided since touch typing correctly on a standard qwerty keyboard will not bend wrists, so no need to split the keyboard in half. Your hands _need_ to be at an angle to type (look at the keys, columns are offset to create an angle), if they are perpendicular you need to learn touch typing correctly.

<comment><USER3> Even though you can use Autohotkey and similar software to remap your layout but it's limited in various aspects so as it turns out hardware-level remapping has no substitute. It's also nice to create keymaps, save it to the onboard EEPROM and be able to move your UHK across different computers without ever dealing with (OS-specific) remapping again.

The staggered columns are indeed offset to create an angle but it's more comfortable to be able to adjust the angle and the distance between the keyboard halves.

<comment><USER2> It is still almost always worse. Storing the mapping on a large device doesn't make sense, when you can store a script online or in a small storage device if internet access is a problem somehow, and it works with _every_ computer that has a standard keyboard. Just like the drivers, script has to be written only once, but has the benefit of sharing with any other user for free without requiring special hardware.

The benefit seems to be low level systems where it is hard to script the key mappings (assuming drivers work). But do you really write your code, i.e. spend a significant percentage of time in them, or in moderns OSs?

As for comfort, buy a ergonomic keyboard that is cheaper and static and will force you to adapt the correct posture. Especially if the problem is the small additional angle required to touch type, those keyboard solve it.

<comment><USER3> "Storing the mapping on a large device doesn't make sense" \- I agree about this, the large device being a bulky host computer. Various OSes have various (sometimes quite severe) limitations regarding remapping and the "script" that you mention is also OS-specific which is a pain if you use multiple OSes.

<comment><USER2> >"Storing the mapping on a large device doesn't make sense" \- I agree about this, the large device being a bulky host computer.

Strawman. The large device is the keyboard you need to lug around. Tell me, is your keyboard designed for use with a computer?

>Various OSes have various (sometimes quite severe) limitations regarding remapping and the "script" that you mention is also OS-specific which is a pain if you use multiple OSes.

No. It isn't a pain, it called hacking and you only need to do it once and it is free and shareable. So in this sense only one person has to do it once and it just works for everyone else from then on.

<comment><USER3> > Tell me, is your keyboard designed for use with a computer?

Of course it is.

> No. It isn't a pain, it called hacking and you only need to do it once and > it is free and shareable.

It's not a pain _for some_ who have the skills and are willing to spend enough time. The big difference is that we enable users to make this work in an intiutive, platform-independent way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also take a look at the ergo dox. [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ergodox- ez-an-incredible-...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ergodox-ez-an- incredible-mechanical-keyboard#/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a shill.

I really just want to see this succeed, so that I can get mine :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I played with one of the prototypes. It's quite nice.</comment>


Goodbye, Object Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cscalfani/goodbye-object-oriented-programming-a59cda4c0e53#.qexzwqsuh <comment><USER2> Even as a huge, huge proponent of FP over OOP, I want to provide the following caveat: some of the problems here are not a necessity of OOP. This is a reaction to OOP as _commonly practiced_ , which is still interesting and useful. Just something to keep in mind as you read.</comment>


This Cat Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com/ <comment><USER2> I think this might be a well-done satire showcasing the pitfalls of having insufficient training data. It's magnificent. Half the cats are adorable and half are, I believe, creatures from "The Thing".

<comment><USER3> They look like Star Trek transporter accidents.

<comment><USER4> That could mean a lot of things. Are you saying that they look dead, fused with another cat, drastically younger, attacked by an interdimensional monster, cloned or are the evil alternate reality version of themselves?

<comment><USER5> Fused with a human in some cases, so very much like "The Fly" sometimes: [https://imgur.com/a/usixtLS](https://imgur.com/a/usixtLS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ... and thank God it doesn't. Just look at this poor fella!

[https://imgur.com/a/IBudXk6](https://imgur.com/a/IBudXk6)

<comment><USER7> Did it automatically generate that "caption" because it learns from lolcats/cat memes? Fascinating!

<comment><USER8> This reminds me of the movie Annihilation, it's like it's blindly mimicking something without knowing what it's doing.

So weird!

<comment><USER9> > it's like it's blindly mimicking something without knowing what it's doing

If it's not, that should be the definition for machine learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cute idea, but about half of these have given me very weird/unrealistic results. For instance this[1] one which, while amusing as hell, isn't exactly convincing.

[https://i.imgur.com/g5bHmH6.png](https://i.imgur.com/g5bHmH6.png)

<comment><USER11> Fun fact, the toroidal cat is actually a stable gravitational configuration along with a spheroid. There are upper and lower bounds on angular momentum and mass of course, but within those bounds you can have a toroidal cat orbiting its primary!

Wait, what's a cat again?

<comment><USER12> Complete tangent, but I've always wanted to ask someone else who thinks about toroidal gravitational physics: in the center of a toroidal cat (planet) of sufficient mass, does gravity "cancel out", or are you instead being "pulled apart" in every direction at once, as if on a medieval rack?

<comment><USER13> Cancels out. To pull something apart, there would have to be a gravitational gradient, meaning the object would have to be pretty huge relative to the toroid.

<comment><USER14> AKA Spaghettification

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone download a bunch of corporate ppt slides from slideshare and train a model suitable for thisslidedoesnotexist.com.

I think we've seen what these latest gen GANs can do with natural images, so why not try a novel application ?

They can do something to imitate text in images, so there's reason to think ppt slides should work.

<comment><USER16> I was about to comment that this sort of thing would be a great source of "stock" pictures for powerpoint presentations; pick a theme (subject) and hand-pick the good ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also this airbnb doesnt exist [https://thisairbnbdoesnotexist.com/](https://thisairbnbdoesnotexist.com/)

and these recordings dont really exist [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llG- jQf8IBk&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llG- jQf8IBk&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER18> And these Stack Overflow/Exchange questions don't exist:

[https://se-simulator.lw1.at/](https://se-simulator.lw1.at/)

Disclaimer: Fun useless side project by me (And contains no machine learning, but just plain Markov chains)

<comment><USER19> you have no idea how similar this is to SO's moderation queue content

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Personally, I'm excited for [https://thisjavascriptframeworkdoesnotexist.com](https://thisjavascriptframeworkdoesnotexist.com)

<comment><USER21> I'm really exited for [https://thiswebsitedoesnotexist.com](https://thiswebsitedoesnotexist.com)

<comment><USER22> You don't need to wait. That site does not exist until someone books thiswebsitedoesnotexist.com domain.

<comment><USER23>
      Domain Name: THISWEBSITEDOESNOTEXIST.COM
      Creation Date: 2005-08-26-T19:04:47Z
      Updated Date: 2018-08-23-T01:12:14Z
      Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2019-08-26

And I'm pleased to say that (as I write this, at least) the registrant has done exactly what I had intended to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like there were some memes with watermarks in the training data [https://i.imgur.com/iMOSUog.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/iMOSUog.jpg)

<comment><USER25> That's a caption, not a watermark. This one has a watermark, and was clearly taken from that popular vendor of stock images, shuttersrstsck:

[https://i.imgur.com/Nytlb16.png](https://i.imgur.com/Nytlb16.png)

Raises some questions about what is able to be copyrighted vs. derived works if the generated image was produced by this algorithm and doesn't actually exist in Shutterstock's (excuse me, Shuttersrstsck's) database.

<comment><USER24> I was referring to the gray bar with text on the bottom. Its supposed to have the URL for the website rehosting image, like the bottom white bar in the image you linked to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Half, if not more, are nightmare fuel.

<comment><USER27> I didn't take me long to get this abomination [https://imgur.com/a/gI8Vlla](https://imgur.com/a/gI8Vlla)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's another one too: [http://thesecatsdonotexist.com/](http://thesecatsdonotexist.com/)

<comment><USER29> You're absolutely sure none of these exist? This look way too real: [https://imgur.com/a/aQYjeL6](https://imgur.com/a/aQYjeL6)

<comment><USER30> Or this one! [https://d2ph5fj80uercy.cloudfront.net/01/cat1971.jpg](https://d2ph5fj80uercy.cloudfront.net/01/cat1971.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> funny take on This Person Does Not Exist and StyleGAN generation (related post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280))

</comment><comment><USER31> I still can't shake the feeling that most of these StyleGAN images are cleverly overfitting and just showing the face of an already existing cat in its training data. (But would love to be proven wrong!)

<comment><USER16> Back when I used to experiment with Markov chat simulators, this was a big problem. Besides the disappointment of finding out a particularly clever generated sentence was actually verbatim from the training set, there's also "accidental sharing" and/or "plagarism" issues. Of course with text it's pretty simple to code a check that output doesn't exactly match any known inputs. Not sure how you'd do that with images; maybe some kind of image hashing. (I wonder if you could use the neural network itself to assist in that - i.e. hash the measured values at a lower-dimensioned layer of the network rather than the raw image.)

<comment><USER28> Yes. For hysterical raisins, VGG-16 is usually used as the hash/space for the nearest-neighbor lookups. Recent example of this is in the BigGAN appendix, where you can see that despite the dog samples looking perfect, they are nevertheless totally different from their closest neighbors in the ImageNet training data and so can't be memorization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The website owner could use the time between two refresh by a given user to assert the "weirdness" of a picture.

</comment><comment><USER33> Curious, is cat more complex object than human's face for ML to be trained and produced?

<comment><USER34> Might be that humans are not very good at recognizing differences between cats.

<comment><USER35> It would be interesting to see how realistic a cat thinks these are, maybe by measuring brain activity or reactions. It's possible that a cat may not be fooled by cats we think look real, or perhaps more interestingly, that a cat is fooled by a not particularly good image.

Common cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests. The chicks don't necessarily look much like the host species to the human eye, but they can fool their hosts along the correct dimensions to get food from them. It's an interesting question to what degree ML algorithms trained on human dimensions could be foiled by an animal whose brain has been wired for different perceptions, or how feasible it is to train an ML algorithm on animal perception, or if it's possible to make an algorithm that successfully fools, say, both man and dog.

On the last point, for example: to make fake sounds that fool animals with different hearing ranges, presumably you have to be able to output sounds across the union of the ranges and train on sound data over the union of the ranges.

(Note: I'm not a biologist, if someone more informed wants to correct me on anything here you are welcome to do so.)

<comment><USER36> Starting a lab soon to investigate this. Brb, I'm going to gather feral cats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Two creatures in this picture: [http://imgur.com/TDeLYwF](http://imgur.com/TDeLYwF)

One looks like a cat, the other...?

</comment><comment><USER38> Select the pistol, and then, select your cat.

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26/the-unhorse](https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26/the-unhorse)

</comment><comment><USER39> Can someone explain to me what I am looking at? :)

<comment><USER40> Someone recently posted [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) \-- which shows a random AI-generated human face.

This is a cat version, but it works out a lot worse. Some are fine, some are terrible.

<comment><USER41> I think that's on purpose - the training data appears to be all results from search for "cat pics"... captions and meme text and all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> kinda funny how this GAN picked up the strong presence of cats within early 2010's memes, some of the resulting photos have remnants of the distinctive white-on-black text from some of the training data

</comment><comment><USER43> Being reincarnated in a cat isn't always great. [https://imgur.com/rHm8Nwv](https://imgur.com/rHm8Nwv)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm glad this doesn't exist. [https://i.imgur.com/xrhRpAe.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/xrhRpAe.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER45> Don't they? I feel like half the pictures are probably nearly identical to some picture in the training data and the other half are distorted mess...

</comment><comment><USER46> You bet it doesn't...

[http://imgur.com/gallery/1SkEEho](http://imgur.com/gallery/1SkEEho)

<comment><USER47> Hey! It's my little Tiddles the cat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Human-cat hybrids: [https://imgur.com/a/mqBA8IM](https://imgur.com/a/mqBA8IM)

</comment><comment><USER49> This generates nightmare fuel: [https://imgur.com/jw9OmFi](https://imgur.com/jw9OmFi)

</comment><comment><USER50> Please do not change the training data for this....or at least keep this version. These are the most amazing failure cases ever.

</comment><comment><USER51> If you want to see this more often, I made this Chrome Extension for fun: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/this-cat-does- not-...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/this-cat-does-not- exist-n/pkbeecgdgbomcpbcdmmlkmaipbjhcjgb)

</comment><comment><USER52> A while back I started to think about something like gan.tv (it's an owned domain I see) for computer generated entertainment. This cat one and the person one would be example channels. I assume we're going to get pretty creative with how we use automated creativity in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER53> Looks like taxidermy'd cats, lol.

</comment><comment><USER54> [https://imgur.com/a/1plpnyg](https://imgur.com/a/1plpnyg)

for some reason shutterstock showed up on the bottom of the preview image when i posted it to my discord channel

</comment><comment><USER55> For the sake of some of these cats I am happy that they don't exist.

</comment><comment><USER54> [https://imgur.com/a/1plpnyg](https://imgur.com/a/1plpnyg)

for some reason shutterstock showed up at the bottom of the discord image preview XD

</comment><comment><USER56> On one reload, I got Grumpy Cat. The background was different from any image I can find in a quick image search, but the cat was definitely Grumpy Cat. Does that make the domain name a lie?

<comment><USER57> I also had Grump Cat. Looks like their dataset was not large enough to avoid overfitting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> meanwhile: This Pidgeon DOES exist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigmy_Pouter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigmy_Pouter)

</comment><comment><USER59> Yikes I hope not. What is this eldritch abomination?

[https://i.imgur.com/xXZuQ5K.png](https://i.imgur.com/xXZuQ5K.png)

</comment><comment><USER60> Well, at least after the human race is wiped out by AI, the fascination with cats will still live on in the new sentient creatures dominating the planet.

</comment><comment><USER61> First person to create "thisdoesnotexistdoesnotexist.com" with some appropriate functionality wins one Internet. And apparently several HNs.

</comment><comment><USER62> Dear god what have we done [https://i.imgur.com/OanNO7W.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/OanNO7W.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER63> I.. don't get it. I imagine it's embarrassingly straightforward once I do, but until then I'm lost. Could someone help me out?

<comment><USER64> The missing piece for your brain algorithm must be: [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Jesus christ I sure hope it doesn't

[http://i.imgur.com/CuGMzhw.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/CuGMzhw.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm so sad I didn't screenshot the first image with "Shutterstock" written all over it - this never happened again.

<comment><USER51> If it makes you feel any better, I've seen with with a watermark too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> [http://notarealhuman.com/](http://notarealhuman.com/) has cats as well :)

</comment><comment><USER68> I love this, but it's a lot less uncanny than thispersondoesnotexist.com due to the number of vaguely cat-like blobs it generates.

</comment><comment><USER69> There are frequent bugs where the cat face is at a weird place, so I'm glad nature doesn't let such animals actually live.

</comment><comment><USER70> [https://imgur.com/a/xJDDsYi](https://imgur.com/a/xJDDsYi)

</comment><comment><USER71> [https://ibb.co/x55vHwv](https://ibb.co/x55vHwv) Another failure sample

</comment><comment><USER72> The domain can as well be petsematary.com

<comment><USER73> I'm really tempted to register [http://petsematary.ai](http://petsematary.ai) and link it to this, but it's a bit pricey for a prank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Saw a cat with a bunch of garbled motivational poster text. Drove me over the wall with laughter at work.

</comment><comment><USER71> [https://ibb.co/x55vHwv](https://ibb.co/x55vHwv)

Failure sample

</comment><comment><USER75> at least not on this plane of reality it doesn't, maybe one of the inner circles of hell tho (yikes!)

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm curious now what would happen if you trained a model on 50% cat pics and 50% human pics

</comment><comment><USER77> I clicked on the post expecting an article or a Github repo, but I was surprised to find a cat.

</comment><comment><USER78> This site made my morning. Wow such incredible technology! Machines are learning too much

</comment><comment><USER79> So are these from real cat photos.. or they are entirely made by AI? I am confused...

</comment><comment><USER80> Im curious what is generating the pictures? I want to play around with this toolset.

</comment><comment><USER81> It's only a matter of time before thisporndoesnotexist.com happens.

</comment><comment><USER82> Holy Shit! I hope those DEFORMED cats don't exist lest we put them down!

</comment><comment><USER83> Great idea, poorly executed

</comment><comment><USER84> Should be called "this cat was in transporter accident"

</comment><comment> crooked-v I wonder how well this'd work on screenshots of websites.

</comment><comment><USER85> This technology would be pretty cool for placeholder images.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm waiting for "this alien does not exist".

</comment><comment><USER87> This actually looks a lot like failed taxidermy

</comment><comment><USER88> The first five I reloaded were all cross-eyed.

</comment><comment><USER89> Thank god! some of those were monsteras.

</comment><comment><USER90> I have nightmares about these cats.

</comment><comment><USER91> A reload page button would be nice..

</comment><comment><USER92> Now this is getting out of hand!

</comment><comment><USER93> I found some horrific misses...

</comment><comment><USER94> And if, it's on lsd.

</comment><comment><USER95> Well I should hope not!

</comment><comment><USER96> Schrödinger's cat?

</comment><comment><USER97> _Looks at cat_

 _Sees title_

«Obviously»

</comment><comment><USER98> ceci n'est pas une cat

</comment><comment><USER99> Coming next thispoodoesnotexist.com

<comment><USER100> Do you really want to gather the training data for this one?

<comment><USER101> That'd be a bit of a poop job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Quick, someone make a slack plugin for this!

</comment><comment><USER103> I certainly hope not, the first "cat" I was shown had a human face.

</comment><comment><USER104> ThisCarDoesNotExist or ThisDressDoesNotExist would be fun. Can see them monetized nicely.

</comment><comment><USER105> Ack. Almost every other made me say "I should hope not!". A lot of deformed kitties there, algorithm needs work.</comment>


Tough Choices - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/1/26/tough-choices

<comment><USER2> I don't know how Daniel manages to do it, but every week he seems to post something that relates directly to what's been weighing heavily on my mind.

Over the past year and a half, I've really let both my health and social life slip from under me because I put my startup above all else. And lately it's really been catching up to me. For the past month or two, I haven't been able to get much done. I can't focus anymore and it takes me a week to get something done because I'm tired of looking at my screen at the same few hundreds (thousands?) of lines of code. I've known for a while that this is a result of eating poorly, lack of daily exercise, and lack of social life; but I kept telling myself to just get the startup done first and everything will turn around.

Now I'm finally realizing that I'm going to have to shift my priorities and make every decision the best one, which includes the simplest things like what I eat or what time I go to sleep and wake up... or the startup won't succeed. At some point, I seemed to reach a breaking point where my level of happiness began to directly reflect on the quality of my work on my startup. I won't stop until I succeed though. It's now just a matter of making all the right decisions, I think, which includes prioritizing my health and happiness over my work.

<comment><USER3> One of the greatest insights I've taken out of the last few years is to discard this idea of sacrificing today for tomorrow.

Sure, there's always a bit of give and take, but my conclusion is that successful businesses come out of successful people. That may seem like a flat statement at first, but what it means is that if you really want your business to be successful, you also need to take up the daily habits, behaviours, modes of thinking, etc, that will make you a successful person. The success of your business will then emerge out of that, rather than the other way around.

In your case, if you do what you need to make sure that you're a happy, healthy, pleasant individual, your business will do better as a result.

To put it in simpler terms, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, etc - were exceptional people before they started their businesses. They didn't become exceptional because of their businesses - their businesses were exceptional because of them.

<comment><USER4> > One of the greatest insights I've taken out of the last few years is to > discard this idea of sacrificing today for tomorrow

Exactly. Interestingly, this is completely in contrast to common wisdom, where people are encouraged to university so they can get a PhD so they can then get a "good job". After which you work your way up the corporate ladder over the next couple of decades. And then when you're 55 you're totally going to sail the world and do all the cool things you never got around to doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is almost a 4th, higher order tool here, one which is implied through each of the three, and that is: determine (and articulate) your values.</comment>


The Fabulous Forgotten Life of Vita Sackville-West - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/31/the-fabulous-forgotten-life-of-vita-sackville-west/ <comment><USER2> Ah, the Sackville's. The name is very well known around East Grinstead (Sussex, UK) because of the almshouse that is there to this day [0] (along with many other historical connections).

Thanks for posting this, as I also spotted a link to an article about sheltering-in-place with Montaigne [1] whose 'Essays' would definitely be the book I'd grab if I could only take one into lockdown.

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

[1] [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/07/sheltering- in...](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/07/sheltering-in-place- with-montaigne/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder whether Tolkien took his inspiration for the Sackville-Bagginses from that family.

<comment><USER2> According to this link [0], yes. It even says that Tolkein had the '..."sack"/"bag" connection in mind...'.

[0] [https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Sackville- Baggins](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Sackville-Baggins)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forgotten? Sorry.. I totally don't get this. She's immortalized in gardening.

She is anything but forgotten or only a sidekick to the Woolfs.

<comment><USER5> Upvoted. Her book on Sissinghurst seems to be easy to get. Her other writings I know nothing of.</comment></comment>


An Open Letter to Sec. Ashton Carter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.erratasec.com/2016/03/an-open-letter-to-sec-ashton-carter.html <comment><USER2> I'm Chinese. I feel this part very offensive.

"...but without stopping the Chinese or Russians from knowing this detail..."</comment>


I Failed to Install Firefox Accounts Server - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mirabellette.eu/index.php?article33/i-failed-to-install-firefox-accounts-server <comment><USER2> Yeah these are not the simplest of services to install.

The author probably should have gone the Docker route though. I think that is how Mozilla deploys, and it really hides much of the complexity.

You can even find all current images on the DOcker Hub like for example [https://hub.docker.com/r/mozilla/fxa-content- server/tags/](https://hub.docker.com/r/mozilla/fxa-content-server/tags/)</comment>


The Future of Search Has Arrived… And Its Name is Swingly - <AUTHOR> http://launchdfw.com/news/the-future-of-search-has-arrived-and-its-name-is-swingly/ <comment><USER2> From the article: _In Swingly…. I just ask it the question. "Who was the first manager of the Texas Rangers?" And then I'm given an answer (Mickey Vernon)._

When I google "Who was the first manager of the Texas Rangers?", the first result is the Wikipedia article "List of Texas Rangers managers" which has the answer in its description. The same thing happens when I use Bing, DuckDuckGo, and even AltaVista.

<comment><USER3> Right. The point is that you don't have to search for the answer, it just gives it to you. That's a simple example of the possibilities of semantic search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Answering # of your questions, Are you sure the number is correct ? It's kind of unbelievable for a startup in beta.

<comment><USER3> That's what they claim. And what Brad said is correct. According to the CEO (who is also CEO of LCC) their software is much more granular than other search engines. For example, when they scour NYT, Twitter, Blogs, etc. they are able to create about 100 semantic tags for every 1 that most of their competition does. This is how they're able to create so many Q&A pairs. They also incorporate real time keyword search along with the Q&A pairs that they have, which is something that (AFAIK) isn't done by any other company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> hi - we just moved the site to a new server today and the DNS is still propagating in some regions, so if you get a 404 that is why!</comment>


Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-unintentionally-killing-irc/ <comment><USER3> As a counterpoint: I am in 78 IRC channels. I've never seen slack mentioned anywhere aside from here on hackernews. I suspect it's not actually converting any long-time users, but only being an effective draw on people who like the new and shiny.

<comment><USER4> Right, but this is kind of the point. Because Slack is more approachable for the masses, it wins in these scenarios. It doesn't need to convince the longtime IRC users to move across, just the ones that see barrier to entry on IRC as enough of an issue to make the switch. Exactly what happened in Wordpress' situation, it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't quite understand the huge level of hype around Slack. We use hipchat, which has it's own foibles, and recently tried out Slack at the insistence of one dev who wanted the IRC integration. It was a failure, and the only dev who liked it was the IRC fan, and they were connecting with IRSSI, not the Slack client. I had to set up Slack, and it's true that it's very smooth and easy to set up. Everything around the core feature is beautiful and frictionless.

But the core feature is not good. The chat window is awful, with huge amounts of whitespace between comments and overlarge profile icons. Low information density, one of the lowest I've seen for a chat program. Switching to a compact view improved things, but only a little - but now all the comments start at different points depending on the length of a user's name, making it irritating to follow a conversation as each chat line is not locked to a given position. We found that despite its other shortcomings, we had better quality communication on Hipchat than Slack.

I did notice on their site that they're not marketing to existing chat users. They have video testimonials from people who've never used chat before - <USER2> they're lionising in those videos is actually "having chat functionality", not "having Slack in particular". If you're not used to chat, I can see that the above problems wouldn't stand out.

Certainly they above criticisms aren't fundamental flaws, and they can be fixed with some layout design. I did try a couple of user layouts that fixed the craziness, but they had their own problems.

</comment><comment><USER6> _What_ is killing IRC?

Oh, OK, never heard of you. Get in the line behind ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Gtalk, Lync, Facebook/What's App and of course Skype. Get your HipChat bro with you.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't be sad to see IRC die if it were for a superior alternative, but seeing it die to get replaced by a propietary alternative simply saddens me.

</comment><comment><USER8> > That shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's gone through the experience of > using IRC for the first time; the barrier to entry was a formidable > challenge for the first time user.

I consider this a feature.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it really "killing" IRC or just replacing it in a few cases aimed at non- technical people?

There are no real statistics offered up in this article to back up the author's claim, just a handful of anecdotes of people switching to Slack.

<comment><USER10> our dev group moved to Slack and chat increased noticeably (plenty of our devs would either ignore IRC and not connect to it, or connect to it and forget about it)

it's not just non-technical people that care about polish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a long-time IRC fan/user/developer-of-chatbots, I wouldn't _entirely_ mind if things transitioned to a proper successor. (The advantage of IRC is that it's extremely easy to work with/implement on a basic level. The disadvantage is edge cases and things like NickServ which, while not official, might as well be.)

Slack seems well-positioned for this, but I'm still somewhat rooting for something more like Matrix ( [http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/) ), because that's an open protocol.

<comment><USER12> It's a shame there wasn't widespread support for XMPP's XEP-0045 ([http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html)). It was the closest thing to IRC that I believe could've made it the new communication powerhouse in its place with its adoption by Google and Facebook, among others. IRC is great but there's no denying it's dying. It's shed to 60% of its userbase since 2003. It's not gaining new users.

Matrix ([http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)) looks pretty good, but I feel that it's trying to fill a niche that isn't there. A simple, open (in terms of channels / rooms), chat protocol that doesn't have a complex barrier to entry would work wonders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I doubt that the majority of people who use IRC are ever gonna switch to Slack. I personally cannot stand Slack - so noisy, so distracting - if I have to use something other than IRC, it will be HipChat, Gitter [0], or Kato [1], but I guess there's a demographic that just loves wasting time with animated gifs...

[0] [https://gitter.im/](https://gitter.im/)

[1] [https://kato.im/](https://kato.im/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ubuntu and its derivatives have hardly killed off less user-friendly distributions like Gentoo, Slackware, Arch or even Debian. On a broader scale, Chromebooks may be gaining popularity but they will not be replacing the ultrabook or even the netbook so easily. No single method of messaging has ever come close to replacing email. No matter how FOSS it becomes, Windows is not going to displace Linux or BSD distros when it comes to servers. Bitnami is not going to stop people rolling their own web applications and solution stacks.

Slack has its use-cases. Collaborative chat for non-tech people who either do not want customisation, or cannot be trusted with it, to communicate rapidly from any device and easily integrate with popular filesharing/social media applications in private channels. Sounds great but it's bloody specific when you think about it.

In a way, if you were to slap Microsoft Office apps into it, Slack would be what Office365 should have been. And it may yet prove to be an Office365 killer. but it is not going to displace IRC. As another comment has said, IRC filters users by their ability to actually learn about it, rather like cryptocurrencies--they're not very complicated at entry level but there is an entry hurdle that precludes any old numpty from joining in. IRC has long been a haven for people who want to avoid at least a percentage of the web's numpties.

Slack won't even replace forums because fundamentally a Slack team has no identity, no creative control. I can't see SomethingAwful or Hacker News being replaced by Slack. It's not even just about style/design: HN's arc implementation, and basically any community's solution stack, is part of what makes it a separate entity. Slack is too impersonal, too clinical to make for much of a walled garden as many forums seem to be.

</comment><comment><USER15> To say Slack is killing IRC may be going a bit far, but if I were to setup an open chat system today for a project or group, I would certainly use Slack in instances where IRC would have made more sense in the past.

The cited example of WordPress is a good one. For contributors or newcomers, IRC has issues -- especially when it comes to engaging with a channel on mobile devices (lack of push for IRC without a separate relay for that exact purpose is definitely a problem).

My only problem is that I use Slack for work/a few personal groups and HipChat for a few other things. I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface. But hey, I'd rather have 2 apps than deal with IRC all the damn time.

<comment><USER5> _I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface._

Both Hipchat and Slack support the Jabber protocol, so you could potentially work out something there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The process of joining IRC (which comes naturally to us today), is actually really complicated for the non-techie. This is a good thing, because we value IRC for like-minded folk. It feels like we're part of a cult. I don't think many of us want the masses to come to IRC. IRC is a filter, so keep the Facebook/WhatsApp/Snapchat/etc. away.

Oh, and if Slack is making IRC redundant, KiwIRC, Mibbit, IRCloud and the rest are making it easily accessible.

 _grabs pitchfork_

</comment><comment><USER17> I doubt Slack will take some IRC channels. For many, there's an unique nostalgic charm that ties up a lot of communities. There's a lot more than just frontend design and PR.

</comment><comment><USER18> No surprise here. Speaking personally, I usually present Slack as IRC with search and a slew of integrations with all sorts of useful services. HipChat is quite neat as well.

There's arguably a case for IRC regardless, e.g. for when you want to be interacting with arbitrary users. Though even there, one might point to WordPress and highlight that they're using Slack for this too.

</comment><comment><USER19> Come back when slack works over i2p, then I'll dump IRC.</comment>


Show HN: Twitter bot that tweets bad ball and strike calls in MLB baseball games - <AUTHOR>

@MajorLeagueUmp or @[TeamNickname]Ump
You're watching a baseball game. The pitcher throws a pitch right down the middle of the plate, but the umpire calls it a ball. Was it really a bad call or did you just have a bad angle.
@MajorLeagueUmp or @[TeamNickname]Ump tweets bad ball and strike calls in realtime and includes:

  - A picture of the pitch location
  - Percentage of the time a pitch in that location is called a strike
  - How far the pitch was from the edge of the *real life* strike zone
 On TV, FoxTrax will show you where the pitch went relative to the rulebook strike zone, but it won't tell you if pitches in that location are typically called strikes. I found this frustrating because any baseball fan knows that the real strike zone is different than the rule book zone.
To find the actual zone I:

  1. Downloaded Pitch F/X data from the last four years.
  2. Built a fine-grain heat-map of called-strike percentages.
  3. Applied some gaussian filters.
  4. Converted the heat-map into perimeters
    (inside this line it is a strike 78% of the time, etc).
    Polar coordinates finally turned out to be good for something.
 The tweets are updated by:

  1. Nodejs server on heroku that monitors Pitch F/X data in real-time.
  2. Each pitch is stored in Firebase.
  3. Compare the pitches to the actual zone from above.
  4. If the call was really bad, generate an SVG and tweet.
 I've been researching the strike zone on and off for the last 5 years. At first, I wanted to answer two questions.

  1. Where are balls and strikes actually called?
  2. How consistent are umpires in making those calls?
 Some quick answers:

  1. They widen the plate a tad.
  2. They really round off the corners.
     The strike zone is closer to a circle than a square.
  3. Left handed hitters face a much larger strike zone
     that extends well off the outside of the plate.
  4. They are actually pretty consistent, but not perfect.
 <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

[https://twitter.com/MajorLeagueUmp](https://twitter.com/MajorLeagueUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RedSoxUmp](https://twitter.com/RedSoxUmp)

[https://twitter.com/YankeesUmp](https://twitter.com/YankeesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/DiamondbacksUmp](https://twitter.com/DiamondbacksUmp)

[https://twitter.com/BravesUmp](https://twitter.com/BravesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/OriolesUmp](https://twitter.com/OriolesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/CubsUmp](https://twitter.com/CubsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/WhiteSoxUmp](https://twitter.com/WhiteSoxUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RedsUmp](https://twitter.com/RedsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/IndiansUmp](https://twitter.com/IndiansUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RockiesUmp](https://twitter.com/RockiesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/TigersUmp](https://twitter.com/TigersUmp)

[https://twitter.com/MarlinsUmp](https://twitter.com/MarlinsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/AstrosUmp](https://twitter.com/AstrosUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RoyalsUmp](https://twitter.com/RoyalsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/AngelsUmp](https://twitter.com/AngelsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/DodgersUmp](https://twitter.com/DodgersUmp)

[https://twitter.com/BrewersUmp](https://twitter.com/BrewersUmp)

[https://twitter.com/TwinsUmp](https://twitter.com/TwinsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/MetsUmp](https://twitter.com/MetsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/AthleticsUmp](https://twitter.com/AthleticsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/PhilliesUmp](https://twitter.com/PhilliesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/PiratesUmp](https://twitter.com/PiratesUmp)

[https://twitter.com/PadresUmp](https://twitter.com/PadresUmp)

[https://twitter.com/GiantsUmp](https://twitter.com/GiantsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/MarinersUmp](https://twitter.com/MarinersUmp)

[https://twitter.com/CardinalsUmp](https://twitter.com/CardinalsUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RaysUmp](https://twitter.com/RaysUmp)

[https://twitter.com/RangersUmp](https://twitter.com/RangersUmp)

[https://twitter.com/BlueJaysUmp](https://twitter.com/BlueJaysUmp)

[https://twitter.com/NationalsUmp](https://twitter.com/NationalsUmp)

</comment><comment><USER2> Do you have a github repo for these?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I'll have to consider that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> is the 3-d strike zone incorporated into these calculations? i know the strike zone has width, in addition to length,height. so when you say the strike zone is more of a circle, i would contend it's a horizontal cylinder.</comment>


There's more than a few ways for small-business owners to make meetings more productive.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/business/smallbusiness/05toolkit.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=smallbusiness&adxnnlx=1219881668-2cwYqpQ+kb+t5YtrKfW9dg <comment><USER2> Don't have meetings

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php></comment>


Basecoin, aka the Basis Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/10/13/basecoin-bitshares-2-electric-boogaloo/ <comment><USER2> I've worked with these founders over at Google. They were normal, middle-of- the-road SWEs working on some (fairly boring) DoubleClick teams, one of which eventually shut down. In a matter of a year, with no revenue, code, product, or customers, I can't believe they've raised over $100m.

Are investors just betting on pedigree at this point? In which case, is a Princeton undergrad degree really worth that much?

Moreover, their stint in Google Search lasted maybe 2 months, but is still prominently displayed in their bios. Is that worth another few million?

I can't think of a better example of the SV echo chamber when an investment like this is announced. Even color.com and Juicero had more experienced founders/prototypes.

The future looks bleak when you see fashionable SV outfits leading the blind. It's no wonder why diverse founders with great ideas have trouble getting funded when so much money is going to companies like this.

<comment><USER3> They must be good at selling if they can convince people to get 100+ million with no "revenue, code, product, or customers." You can't hate on someone for making it.

<comment><USER4> In other words, "you gotta respect the hustle"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MakerDAO's DAI coin (currently collateralized by ETH) has already proven quite stable in the face of several black swan events and the price of Ethereum crashing nearly 70% over the past couple of months. They're in the process of adding more assets to back the currency to improve stability. The supply is capped by a debt ceiling. There are sound principles behind the currency, and it being an ERC20 token, it's got all the advantages of being pluggable into the ETH ecosystem.

It's not a bad idea, it's actually a great idea and if DAI or BaseCoin turns out to be stable-ish over the long term, then it will be incredibly useful for the crypto ecosystem. Honestly, even if DAI fluctuates a few pennies here and there, if it's stable-ish it will be useful for a wide variety of services and applications.

<comment><USER6> DAI coin is just diversifying risk by using multiple underlying assets- So instead of a 10% chance of the value dropping 90% due to a failure of an asset guarantor, it will just have a 90% chance of dropping 10% in value. The MakerDAO organization can likely cover this 10% loss in asset value by using their enormous capital, but this is not a sustainable strategy for creating a stable synthetic asset.

I think sustainable synthetic blockchain assets are possible, but they will always have complicated risk/reward profiles that won't fully mirror the underlying asset they are designed to model: The dream of a truly "synthetic dollar" will always remain a dream.

EDIT: I should clarify that I think DAI coin may still be a useful construct for some situations, but it's going to be an asset with very different properties compared to any target real-world asset.

<comment><USER7> >this is not a sustainable strategy for creating a stable synthetic asset

Could you give some pointers for further reading on the subject please?

<comment><USER6> There's not really much reading on this- You simply can't take 10 assets that are worth less than $1 individually (because of guarantor risk) and mix them together to create an asset that's pegged at exactly $1- This is not a problem that can be solved by "diversification".

For other history on synthetic assets, read Preston's posts and also Vitalik's posts such as [https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a- minimal...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal- trust-universal-data-feed/)

<comment><USER5> MakerDAO's system over-collateralizes on DAI. Currently, it takes at least $1.50 of ETH to create $1 of DAI. This is based on the volatility and risk profile of ETH. These parameters are adjustable by MakerDAO token holders. Suppose they added gold to the asset basket where 50% of DAI was backed by gold and 50% was backed by ETH. They could require 125% position on gold and 150% position on ETH. In this case, 50% of the supply of DAI would be subject to the whims of ETH price while 50% would depend on gold. If gold or ETH were both to drop to near zero at nearly the same time so rapidly that the CDPs could not be liquidated in time, then the system would be at risk. Seeing as how Gold and ETH are not correlated, this is an unlikely event. Adding 8 more uncorrelated assets to the protocol would only further improve the stability of the system.

<comment><USER6> The inherent problem is that even if you are heavily diversified, in order to back by 50% gold you'd need to have 50% gold PLUS 50% MULTIPLIED BY THE PROBABILITY THE GUARANTOR FAILS.

For ether, such overcollateralization isn't a problem, because you can package it as an ether derivative and have no counterparty risk... But for a gold collateral you would have a risk that cannot be mitigated in this way and the risk will need to increase the slippage of the asset.

<comment><USER5> As time progresses, other guarantors will place their assets on the blockchain similarly to Digix. And when other guarantors come online, Maker will be free to add those to the pool. As it stands, Digix provides Assay certificates and undergoes third party auditing. MakerDAO is off to a great start. They're doing all the right things to build a sustainable stable coin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stablecoins are fundamentally broken and unsound. Ignoring the tech-stack that achieves price stability, and looking at them purely economically, the math simply breaks down.

This is a great writeup on Basecoin, but there's another player in town called Carbon ([https://www.carbon.money/](https://www.carbon.money/)). Directly from their whitepaper:

"Carbon utilizes a decentralized schelling point scheme to achieve distributed con- sensus on Carbon's exchange rate. Every 24 hours, also known as the rebasement period, a schelling point scheme is initiated where nodes submit bids for what they believe the true exchange rate of Carbon to be. Each bid is weighted by a collateral, denominated in Carbon. At the end of the 24 hours, bids are to- taled and the protocol takes a weighted average of the bids. Anyone who bids outside the 25th and 75th percentiles will have their balances slashed. Anyone within the 25th and 75th percentiles receive a normal distribution of the loser's balances, with the highest reward distribution at 50% and normally diminishing on the right and left respectively"

This has security issues. Unless they own all the participating nodes, then -- as written -- this protocol has several ways that it can be gamed with enough Byzantine players so that the Byzantine parties are w.h.p. in between the 25-75 range and correct nodes are at the edges, which then get their funds slashed. They use several (also broken) mechanisms for contraction and expansion depending on the agreed-upon exchange rate, but supposing they are not broken, the true value of the coin can be gamed which then invalidates these mechanisms. We are truly so deep in mania.

EDIT: Also to add a bit more to Carbon: Hashgraph is also simply a BFT protocol that requires a permissioned setup. If we are going to deploy a smart-contract-enabled stable cryptocurrency on a permissioned network, then it is unclear why this complicated and unproven stack is even needed.

<comment><USER9> > Stablecoins are fundamentally broken and unsound. Ignoring the tech-stack > that achieves price stability, and looking at them purely economically, the > math simply breaks down.

You seem to be making a claim about the space of all possible stablecoin designs, and then then proceeding to demonstrate weaknesses in one particular stablecoin design.

<comment><USER10> Stable coins are unstable because they're inherently leveraged. This is a problem that traces back to the original "stable coin," bank deposits.

<comment><USER11> > Stable coins are unstable because they're inherently leveraged.

No they're not. Asset-backed Stable coins are not leveraged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before you read this 2000-word treatise, know that the author, Preston Byrne, has a history of misunderstanding fundamental concepts about money and markets.

Example 1: He believes Bitcoin is a fractional reserve system.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15792314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15792314)

Example 2: He doesn't understand that market participants bring liquidity to exchanges, so he thinks exchanges themselves go bankrupt if market prices decline.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15792065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15792065)

I don't have a horse in the Basis Protocol race, but I have little confidence that this author understands the basics.

<comment><USER8> Attacks on the author aren't the best thing in general ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Graham%2...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement- en.svg))

<comment><USER12> I agree that ad hominem attacks are generally counterproductive when your goal is to evaluate an argument.

However, when deciding whether to invest hours reading and discussing his latest arguments, the author's credibility is a factor.

<comment><USER8> Preston has some beliefs that don't make a lot of sense, I agree. But his ability to reason about technical facts is not impeded.

There is no fundamental argument he makes that can be refuted soundly, besides just disagreements in opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cryptocurrencies have reached the 1980s, with "stable coins" attempting to achieve the "impossible trinity" [1] of a fixed foreign exchange rate ( _i.e._ "stable"), free capital movement ( _i.e._ liquidity) and an independent monetary policy ( _i.e._ reasonable collateral rates).

Prediction: to prevent a breakdown of stability, the marketing point for these schemes, we'll see, for coins without a centralized bottleneck, stupid collateral rates, and for coins with one, redemption restrictions.

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

<comment><USER11> > The formal model underlying the hypothesis is the uncovered Interest Rate > Parity condition which states that in absence of a risk premium, arbitrage > will ensure that the depreciation or appreciation of a country's currency > vis-à-vis another will be equal to the nominal interest rate differential > between them. Since under a peg, i.e. a fixed exchange rate, short of > devaluation or abandonment of the fixed rate, the model implies that the two > countries' nominal interest rates will be equalized. An example of which was > the consequential devaluation of the Peso, that was pegged to the US dollar > at 0.08, eventually depreciating by 46%.

Stablecoins don't set their own monetary policy. The interest rate on a stablecoin will be set by the market, not a central bank. The interest rate here is the escape valve that allows the exchange rate to be fixed. The interest rate floats, the exchange rate remains constant.

<comment><USER10> > _The interest rate floats, the exchange rate remains constant_

Collateral rates have a practical cap, particularly in a time of broader financial crisis. This structure is identical to the "always redeemable" structured products from a few decades ago. There is zero innovation in the financial engineering, just the presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> After being shilled on /r/cryptocurrency, I dont trust any alt coin now.

While this is probably going to be an economic disaster based on the redistribution, its merely another alt coin solving a non-existent problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> The last bondholders will be left holding worthless obligations when no new buyers are there to create demand.

The institutional investors seem to recognize the ponzi nature of this; first money in, first money out at several X. The veil of "crypto-economics" around this gives them plausible deniability in engaging in this wealth transfer mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER15> Something is unstable because market wants it to be unstable. There are no mathematically underpinnings which can stop them from a long time. This is a fallacy which cryptocurrency groups need to wake up from. Sure it looks like math can solve this problem and many have over the years relied on solid math only to fail. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long- Term_Capital_Management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long- Term_Capital_Management)

But, what about controlling supply like Basecoin? See SNB peg of 1.2:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_franc#2011%E2%80%932014:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_franc#2011%E2%80%932014:_Big_movements_and_capping)

Their peg was broken many times before they removed it completely in 2015.

</comment><comment><USER16> > The money to keep the machine going must come from somewhere, and in this > case that somewhere is a new investor willing to subsidize profit-taking by > earlier participants in the scheme by committing risk capital of his own.

This exact thing could be said about bitcoin and other cryptos and any other scarcity based investment vessel. It sounds like a horrible flaw but it didn't stop anyone thus far.

The only thing this indicates is that at some point in time baecoin will loose its peg. But it might be decades in the future.

Although I think author is spot on with overall assesment. And failure after loosinh the peg will probably be anything but graceful.

</comment><comment><USER17> Regarding Tether, you can be rightly suspicious but it's not just the exchange run by its corporate parent that you can trade it for a dollar on.

</comment><comment><USER18> The crazy thing about stable-coins is that they're really trying to replace/disrupt fiat money, more so than normal cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

"Normal" cryptocurrencies are way too volatile to actually be a store of value, as of yet, so stable coins really do fill a void and have one of the features of a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar, that of relative stability.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is good but the author makes a common mistake referencing fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking really isn't a thing. Most central banks in the world don't have reserve requirements. Even in the USA, only a small subset of debt requires reserves. And even then the reserves can be met in 30 days.

</comment><comment><USER20> >In English:

...(proceeds to use latin)...

</comment><comment><USER21> This guy doesn't give Bitshares enough credit.

His review from 2014 may hold water in a low liquid scenario, but even for a mildly strong market, it's always been a better alternative than, say, the magically backed world of Tether.

<comment><USER22> Damning with faint praise.

<comment><USER21> Not really.

He basically says the Bitshares approach is unsound because it requires market forces to be > 0\. I agree that you can't have a stable pegged asset when nobody wants to participate in that market. However, if nobody wants to participate, then why do we care about stable pegged assets in the first place.

<comment><USER22> Oh I just meant that when you said "it's always been a better alternative than, say, the magically backed world of Tether," it was pretty faint praise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why can't you simply make a stable coin where you bet long and short at the same time?

Bitcoins goes up 5x, you gain from your long and lose from your short. Then, you find an algorithm that balances it out properly, done.

<comment><USER6> This scheme will always have one of these problems: (1) people will be required to lock a large amount of collateral to cover their bet that is uneconomical or (2) the peg will break during extreme fluctuations.

<comment><USER23> Why is that? If BTC goes 20x, then the long position liquidates, but so does the 20x short position.

<comment><USER24> If you are interested in this, people tried the long/short strategy in currencies (forex) and called it a grid trade.

The system would be both long and short the same contract and take profit at a given interval on both sides. When they took a profit, they would reopen a trade on the same side.

Ultimately it was just a mean reversion strategy where one would not close out their losses. So the profit was linear while the losses often became geometric until the time the market came back to where they started the grid.

If you just want to buy both sides and never close either trade, there is no profit just a loss of spread/commission on both legs.

Most of the people who did it looked at their account balance rather than NAV, so they were mostly just abusing leverage until a margin call.

Edit: To be fair, some grids were smarter in their allocation and weighted to be positive to the carry, so at least they would collect interest everyday when the contracts swapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing that jumped out at me was that the article compares modern cryptocurrency to the dot com situation in 1997-1999, and is using it to criticize cryptocurrency.

27 billion dollars were raised in 1997-1999. Perhaps most of that was wasted. But just one company started in that time period, Google, is now worth 700 billion dollars. From an overall point of view, the dot com investment era was _good investment_. People just weren't sure which companies were going to be the winners.

<comment><USER26> Public investors lost much more than $27B. (Private investors made money.)

There were thousands of IPOs during the 1996-1999 period. Hundreds of billion of dollars were raised.

The impact of the dot-com bubble in terms of actual losses was hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

<comment><USER27> Net losses are different from nominal losses. If someone buys at 10, the stock hits 15$ then drops to 5$, they lost 5$ a share not 10$ a share. We are easily talking about 100's of billions in losses, but 1.7 trillion is an over estimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Preston takes an insulting tone towards the basis team. Fine to critique, but assumes the visionaries of this project are uneducated, or haven't given things proper thought. I assure you they are thoughtful...

<comment><USER29> >I assure you they are thoughtful...

I thought you were arguing from a position of authority but looking at your comment history all I can find is "I'm a blockchain investor at [redacted]" which leads me to a placeholder website. You'll have to come up with something a little more convincing if you want us to trust your judgment.

<comment><USER28> If you glance at their whitepaper, stability analysis, or old FAQs they had up, it's clear they're thoughtful. Therefore, comments like these underestimate the founders:

 _"Please. Figure out what a government bond is, first. Then we can have a little chat about scalability."_

 _" electric boogalo"_

 _" But you need to study politics, economics and history to learn things like this, which I understand are not computer science and are therefore unpopular"_</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone still use gmail HTML view? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Exclusively.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get the feeling its being let by the way side. It's harder and harder to switch back to HTML, after using features like calling.

It's much faster, no?

<comment><USER3> I use it for the speed, despite its lack of features & ugliness. A lot of my devices are getting old chug when loading up new Gmail. Speed is why I use the HTML version.</comment></comment></comment>


Android Wallpaper Template for Photoshop - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2010/10/27/android-wallpaper-template-photoshop

<comment><USER2> A bit more than a simple template. It actually lets you visualize how the UI and icons will appear on your device, in each of the positions for the screen.

I like it.</comment>


NoSQL databases benchmark: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/tech/2012/102212-nosql-263595.html

<comment><USER2> I was part of a large migration that moved a significant amount of data from MongoDB to HBase recently. Along the way, I also spent significant time digging into Cassandra and Riak.

I appreciate the effort and intention behind this article, but for all practical purposes, such numbers are really not helpful. From experience, if you really want performance from HBase, you need to spend significant amount of time coming up with the right way to structure your data in HBase. To name a few:

* choosing the right row key that optimizes bulk scans

* setting optimum client and server caching based on the size of each row

* pre-splitting regions, and setting custom region sizes

You will also run into various cluster-related issues. Things don't really scale linearly as you add more nodes. You need to also consider maintenance, upgrades, backups, replication and so on.

If you want to choose a NoSQL (or for that matter any database), spend some time thinking about whether it fits your data model and your own understanding of the technology. Performance is rarely gained by simply switching a few knobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that the HBase numbers are so good because the client wasn't actually hitting the database: [http://brianoneill.blogspot.com/2012/10/solid-nosql- benchmar...](http://brianoneill.blogspot.com/2012/10/solid-nosql-benchmarks- from-ycsb-w-side.html)

<comment><USER4> Just came here to post this.

It's frustrating, because a configuration like that makes the numbers completely irrelevant, unless you don't care whether your data gets persisted or not. I'd much rather see a more like-for-like comparison, and perhaps an unsafe configuration included for interest's sake.

<comment><USER5> Nobody in their right mind hits a key value store for each single key value (an RPC for each key value). You'd be limited by the network latency.

You batch your changes in the client and then you commit them to the server. When that commit succeeds your data is persisted; until such time any client application must consider the data uncommitted. This is not unlike a client application would deal with transactions to a relational database. So the benchmark is completely valid here.

(Well, only that here we also have deferred log flush, which means the changes will take a second or two to actually make it to the file system, but that still demands the same aggregate throughput from the HBase. That is where this test is not fair).

Edit: Spelling

<comment><USER4> > (Well, only that here we also have deferred log flush, which means the > changes will take a second or two to actually make it to the file system, > but that still demands the same aggregate throughput from the HBase. That is > where this test is not fair).

That was actually the bit that I was concerned about - I failed to read the parent comment properly and assumed it had the exact same concern I did. If you don't have to do a disk write because you're not guaranteeing durability, you have a completely unfair comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure I buy the paper's analysis. They don't seem to know much about load testing -- they speak as though throughput is 'load' (rather than the multiprogramming level) and don't computer Bandwidth - Delay products.

Also, rather than using M/M/1 or some reasonable analytic model, they deliberately trottled their request rates to hold throughput constant (thereby guaranteeing different loadings for different 'benchmarks')

Just reading the first graph, for example, and applying Little's Law, it's pretty evident that Cassandra was loaded more heavily than than the two MySQL systems, with HBASE and Riak trailing.

Looks like HBASE and Cassandra lead the pack to me, with different characterists for different purposes.

Advice to authors: buy a book by Neil Gunther.

</comment><comment><USER3> A more rigorous set of tests (including datasets that don't fit in memory, for instance) was presented at VLDB this year: <http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf>

<comment><USER7> Note that this paper was discussed at the time on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453500>

Some people were skeptical of the tuning for HBase, and an HBase developer criticized their methodology, given the especially poor performance shown for HBase. The paper authors themselves indicated that they had considerable trouble setting up the HBase system. Which in a way validates the comments of some here that HBase is fickle and can be difficult to tune, though it still means that the results in this paper for HBase are not valid, when compared to the other systems.

In the interest of disclosure, it should be mentioned here that jbellis is a principle corporate backer of Cassandra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why they picked MyISAM for MySQL, since basically no one sane is using that anymore. It isn't even the default anymore, so that can't be the excuse.

"MyISAM caches index blocks but not data blocks."

<comment><USER9> MyISAM is fast at reads. You can use innodb for the transactional, writeable master, and replicate to MyISAM for read-only slaves. This also gives you full-text search.

<comment><USER8> Then your slaves will lag really badly while the replication thread keeps stalling on table level locks.

InnoDB is faster at reads for most workloads on modern hardware. MyISAM has horrible scalability across multiple CPUs. MariaDB recently improved in MyISAM with the segmented key cache, but I haven't seen any results of head-to-head benchmarks since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Running benchmarks dependent on I/O speed on AWS, where I/O speed fluctuates wildly depending on who you're sharing the hardware with?

Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER11> What I find most interesting is how bad mongo performance is.

<comment><USER12> Actually, looks like it does pretty well on reads. It's the writes that mongo can't handle. But we all knew that already...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article tries not to draw a conclusion but Cassandra's numbers look pretty good to me...

</comment><comment><USER14> A note for people doing benchmarks - please post your configurations for the services with your post as well - it would be even better if your tests were posted on github or something similar so others can reproduce your tests and validate/update them.

Also, unless you're running all of the tests concurrently, we really need to see your IOPs records during the tests, since a single lagging EBS volume in a Raid-0 array will still negatively affect disk performance (either that or spring for dedicated iops), and thus skew your benchmarks.

Making sure you're not getting a spike CPU steal time would be great as well; same reason.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, the data never leave JVM, that is why it is so "fast" - it never fsyncs.

What if JVM instance crash under load? Data lose, but, see, it is not our fault - our code is OK.

<comment><USER16> Not exactly. Cassandra writes commit log, and if JVM will crash, cassandra will repair data from that log.

<comment><USER15> how often it fsyncs that log?

<comment><USER16> It can be configured: <http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/Durability> One option is to fsync changes before telling client that operation is succeeded.

<comment><USER15> And get what benchmarks?)

<comment><USER16> Benchmark will be not so good, but do you have better choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How would you compare SQL benchmarks? Oracle, mySQL, SQL Server, Postgresql? You can find any specific use case where one will out-perform the others. A lot of DBAs assume the Oracle is the most powerful, but it is also harder to manage and VERY expensive to run. I know that most NoSQL databases are free, except for support or multiple datacenter usage- but what about the cost for DevOps? Or backup?

<comment><USER18> Almost all NoSQL databases are open source and free for multiple datacenter usage.

And they are all just as easy to manage and backup as everything else. They all have their problems and issues.

<comment><USER19> How do I back up a 20-node Riak cluster as easily as a Postgres cluster of any size?

Disclosure: I work for Basho, makers of Riak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I guess the conclusion pretty much sums it up. Every db solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. I find many people jump on latest bandwagon and later regret the choice followed by a "Why we moved away from xyz database" post on their blog. Please make sure to analyze your application and future strategy fully before choosing one.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for this post. It was really good comparison.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thank you for posting this. I actually spent a considerable amount of time searching for similar benchmarks a few weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER23> "After some of the results had been presented to the public, some observers said MongoDB should not be compared to other NoSQL databases because it is more targeted at working with memory directly. We certainly understand this, but the aim of this investigation is to determine the best use cases for different NoSQL products. Therefore, the databases were tested under the same conditions, regardless of their specifics."

Oh, great.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a shame they didn't test CouchBase 2.0 (or at least 1.8)... and really kinda silly, given that it is pretty widely used commercially. I think CouchBase may be the most successful NoSQL database, when it comes to commercial installations (for large customers, maybe mongodb has more total customers.)

Plus, I think it would have scored very well here.

<comment><USER25> I was curious about CouchBase myself. I know it's hard to run tests on every variation of the NoSQL fad, but CouchBase (IMHO) is a pretty sizable player.</comment></comment>


FTC Urged To Crack Down On Social Sites by Senator - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20003415-36.html

<comment><USER2> I agree with the intent, but I can't see how this would be run through the FTC. Sounds like a nightmare to me. Can you imagine the FTC as web usability mentor/monitor?

I suppose it is lucky for the Senator that Facebook is a US company.

<comment><USER3> In the startup world, we always talk about the difference between ideas and execution. I can like the idea, but I shudder at the execution.

This won't end well.</comment></comment>


Lessons from Sixteen Months of Bootstrapping - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cmuir/lessons-from-sixteen-months-of-bootstrapping-at-underdog-io-6deb98344d31 <comment><USER2> Loved this.</comment>