Docker Says Absolutely Not to Collaboration on Standard Container Specification - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9538#issuecomment-65967102

<comment><USER2> They didn't say no, they just said they wouldn't spend effort conforming to a 3 day old standard that no one was using.

That just makes business sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Irrespective of the public back & forth between Docker and CoreOS, that's a completely reasonable stance to take. Standards need to be proven in the real world before being adopted. That's why the ANSI and ISO standardization process takes so much time (EDIT: or at least, _one_ of the reasons).

When you write "standards" without implementation, what you get is the Object Management Group, which published spec after spec that are impossible to actually implement.

</comment><comment><USER4> It might be worth pointing out that Alupis (OP), and Shykes (Docker creator), have had somewhat of a flame war on HN since Rocket was announced.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't really call it a flame war... more or less pointing out issues with Docker the company. I feel it's greatly important since container technology is poised to become a very big thing in the Unix ecosystem and we should take a moment to think about the motives of a commercial for-profit company such as Docker, before we embed it into everything. Shykes seems to take issue with me pointing these things out, as I would expect him to.

Anyway, that does not change the content of Shykes' message on Github, which makes it outstandingly clear he, and Docker, have absolutely zero intention of collaborating openly on a standardized container format. They had zero intention of creating a standard format prior to the Rocket announcement, and just last night have published their own proprietary and incompatible specification which they now call the standard.

That's not collaboration...

<comment><USER5> Is there anything technically wrong with the Docker format, or do you just have doses of Lovecraftian fear and uncertainty to offer?

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue with the Docker format is that there was no format, at least a standardized one. The image format has changed, and without a formal format specification, it's subject to future change. That makes it difficult to rely on when building 3rd party tools, or alternative runtimes.

I'd argue that a single, universal standardized container format specification is crucial for such a piece of technology that will soon be (is?) at the heart of all application deployments, both servers and desktops. We can look at the OVF specification[1] for a clear example of why this is necessary. Back in 2007 the top hypervisor vendors (VMware, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource) collaborated and created thhe OVF spec which would allow a virtual machine which conformed with the spec to be portable between any of their hypervisors. This enabled users to switch at-will, and provided great orchestration between clusters of heterogeneous hypervisors.

We've seen how successful a format is when a single for-profit company self- declares their format as the "standard" for all others to adhere to -- .RPM promoted by Red Hat. Even today, there are systems that do not use RPM's because there never was a consensus around what that format should look like -- It was just declared one day it was the standard because they had market share.[2]

A world where one becomes locked into any single vendor for any piece of technology is not good to say the very least.

An inter-operable, collaborated standard is what is necessary.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base#Choice_of_R...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base#Choice_of_RPM_package_format)

<comment><USER6> _we should take a moment to think about the motives of a commercial for-profit company such as Docker, before we embed it into everything. Shykes seems to take issue with me pointing these things out, as I would expect him to._

What about the motives of CoreOS, also a for profit company?

 _I 'd argue that a single, universal standardized container format specification is crucial for such a piece of technology that will soon be (is?) at the heart of all application deployments, both servers and desktops._

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the new container proposal do the exact opposite of this? Why not collaborate with Docker on a container format?

From the Github post: _But here 's a suggestion for you. If you were to complain that Docker's image format and runtime specification, as massively adopted as it is, is not appropriately documented, and it could be made easier to produce alternate implementations - then I would completely agree with you._

You state that Docker has _absolutely zero intention of collaborating openly on a standardized container format_ however they explicitly invite help into standardizing and documenting theirs, which is currently the most commonly used.

This is the last thing I'm going to leave here. [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/) It may not be the most credible of sources, however it makes the point I am trying to make quite well. Making an additional standard when there is already something well established does nothing but fragment the ecosystem.

You may be questioning the motives of Docker, Inc, however that leaves the rest of us to question the motives of CoreOS. I did not seen ANY efforts at collaboration by CoreOS before they released their own container format/runtime. Especially in the passive-agressive (mostly agressive) way in which they did it. If their motives were truely to create a "single, universal standardized container format specification", the first step would have been to at least attempt to work with Docker to create this. Instead of this happening, this whole argument has turned into a pissing match between the two companies. Seriously, both companies need to set aside their differences and have a real discussion about this, not just doing things on the internet to piss each other off.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I built a living memorial to George Floyd and others - <AUTHOR> https://stand-in-solidarity.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> My hope is that those of us who feel like spinning wheels can show solidarity through a simple gesture of clicking a button, and those of us who may need it can find tangible proof that there are other Americans out there who care, share your sadness, share your anger, and are thinking about this problem and ways to solve it.

Stay safe everyone.

(Stack is Vue + Elixir/Cowboy/Plug)</comment>


East Anglia's Climate Research Unit source code - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/crus_source_code_climategate_r.html

<comment><USER2> This is rather blatant:

      valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

The inevitable conclusion: "If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960, then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous, to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. If it's bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest man of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary. And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background info at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e- mail_h...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e- mail_hacking_incident). Basically, hackers stole a lot of internal e-mails from the research institute, and some of the e-mails contain dubious code and data from its climate research.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can fill the stench of paranoid conspiracy theory already in the first paragraph.

Global warming deniers are the new creationists.

<comment><USER4> Climate skeptics are not necessarily denying that there is global warming -- the climate has always changed.

The point is that the science is not done properly. The data and methods the IPCC based its reports on are not open to scrutiny and review. On this flawed data climate models are based, and on these models governments base their policies in turn.

The strawman fallacy comparing climate skeptics with creationists does not hold. Creationists take holy scripture as a start and try to shoehorn everthing to it; Climate skeptics have no such holy scripture.

<comment><USER3> Bzzt! Wrong. The IPCC based its reports in a lot of data open to scrutiny, not only East Anglia's. And even the problems with East Anglia data have been hugelly exagerated. The IPCC meetings were also open to a lot of dissent, particularly from Middle East oil producing countries (guess why)?

And GW deniers do have a basic belief: "you can regulate my energy from my cold dead hands".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who uses Oracle and why? - <AUTHOR>

With so many different databases to choose from, why would anyone choose to use a proprietary database like Oracle? <comment><USER2> Oracle Database is a typical enterprise product if there ever was one. The people buying it won't be the ones using it.

From a developer's or systems administrator's point of view PostgeSQL for instance certainly offers a similar - if not superior - feature set and better usability. That's not the main selling point for enterprise software, though. For enterprise customers aspects such as maintenance, service contracts and having a large company that can be held accountable if anything goes wrong are far more important.

Another reason is the way enterprise sales processes work. In general, they take far longer than sales decisions in SMEs and involve a variety of stakeholders. Oracle employs a large number of smart salespeople and Oracle can afford wooing prospective customers for months or even years before a deal is made.

That said, Oracle Database is a fine product that generally performs very well.

<comment><USER3> Another point for large companies is essentially vendor lock-in.

If you had Oracle 8 way back in the day (90's), then the upgrade and pay maintenance path is much easier than even the thought of switching to a different system. Think of how much testing and conversion you would have to do to switch to Postgres. ANSI SQL is a standard but there are little shortcuts and tuning and other things that are very vendor specific. An upper management viewpoint would ask the question of what is the ROI of switching?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used Oracle DB for >10 years. After using C/C++/Assembly in my degree course I was trained in Oracle development tools by an investment banking consultancy. Oracle was/is very strong in enterprise companies in Banking/Utilities/Government/Defence/Retail. The database was always really solid and scalable and Oracle was probably the first modern relational database server multiplatform from the 90s onwards with great SQL dialect and PL/SQL enabled very fast data manipulation for ETL and business logic.

Almost all Oracle products are free to download and play with and the tooling for building front end (client/server and web) were very easy to use and could provide useable (maybe not pretty) front end applications easily.

There is a lot more competition now from SQLServer and Postgres but for a while Oracle was miles ahead. I'd still choose to use it as I have a greater knowledge of it than other db servers. It doesn't need to be that expensive if you have a small server especially for internal use APEX is great and it's all freely downloadable to evaluate.

</comment><comment><USER5> In short Oracle is an Enterprise sales agency focusing on Enterprise clients, not the average implementations for companies less than $1B in revenue (my best guess). I know some companies smaller use it, but it isn't common to see it in smaller Enterprises.

In general through the 90's and even up until the last 5 years or so, telling your Enterprise C suite that you were installing Oracle was the equivalent of selecting IBM back in the day. There was a saying that *"no one ever got fired for going with IBM", when it comes to Databases, ERP/Financial software etc Oracle was in a similar boat. Oracle is also a sales agency that happens to make software, and they are damn good at sales. They typically lock companies in for long periods of time and get paid handsomely for it.

Oracle is also like an infestation, they get in and start spreading as much as possible. I honestly can't blame them, I'd do the same in their shoes trying to sell more product/services, but my issue with them is they have projects that drag on and on and so many fail to ever do 20% of what was promised. They aren't alone in that realm, and companies bare some of the blame too, but by far I see more Oracle solutions fail to get implemented than almost any other.

As for if their products are worth it, I will say their Database is really a solid product and has some really nice capabilities. I personally would never choose it or any product they push, but that isn't a judgement on its capabilities. In fact, I admire that they created the RAC cluster and how it is architected etc. Not that they are perfect, but at the time RAC was introduced it was truly a unique way to package and solve some common problems for Enterprises. For my money though, I'll bet on PostgreSQL or other solutions before I ever use/recommend Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER6> We picked it a long time ago. The licensing costs annoy me, but are small compared to our organizational budget. I'd be happy to see it gone, but there is a hell of a lot of PL/SQL code that would have to be rewritten.

</comment><comment><USER7> My enterprise web application uses Oracle heavily. It provides many features to ease DB development. It's a bulky monster, but it helps.

</comment><comment><USER8> Because it has the kind of support enterprises needs. Not your typical "I don't know how the fuck monetize so I'll pivot again" mindset.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would suspect that a lot of people who run the Oracle database engine use it because they want to run Oracle applications - finance, ERP etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> We have Oracle RAC clusters with GoldeGate for cross data center replication.

What's the alternative in the Postgres/MySQL world?</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for writing a design document? - <AUTHOR> I'm in the brainstorming phase for a personal project that I will likely open source at some point. I want to write a document to capture the guiding philosophy and high level design behind it. Any recommendations for resources that could help me do it right from the beginning? <comment><USER2> Let me tell you all the things I haven't written down yet, and really really should some time. Maybe I'll turn this into a blog post if anyone cares:

1\. "Design document" is ambiguous: some people use that to mean the specification, i.e. design as a noun. I tend to want to use the document to think through issues, so design as a verb. Just so you know my starting point.

2\. You want to write down goals. And non-goals. Non-goals are just as important, if not more so.

3\. You want to write down who the actors are and what their use case is. "As a monkey I want to use this app to acquire delicious delicious bananas." Give each use case a name, e.g. MONKEY-BANANA.

4\. You want to write down all your other requirements that aren't use cases. Give them names too, like ETHICAL-BANANA-ACQUISITION or whatever.

5\. Make a list of possible solutions. Write all the solutions down. The good ones and the bad ones, don't think about it just write write write write. Then add some more (what if you didn't write any code? What if you had to ship in 48 hours? what if you had 2 billion dollars to throw at the problem). Your goal is to maximize the solution space you're covering so you don't get stuck at a local maxima. You want global maxima.

6\. For each solution, write down how it does on use cases, requirements, goals.

7\. Go back and see if you can throw out any of your goal, use cases, requirements. Maybe a non-goal actually is a goal?

8\. Do step 6 again.

9\. Choose the best solution, document why you chose it.

Now all you have to do is implement the solution. Easy peasy!</comment>


Ways to bootstrap a startup: "working in waves" - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/2106915988/bootstrapping-waves <comment><USER2> Good post Joel ;-) I'm generally in agreement with working in "waves" (it's an approach I've used for past 10 years)

A couple of other thoughts that might be worth considering: 1\. Once you decide that the "start-up career" is your full-time career path - then you need to start thinking about "serious stuff like pensions and investing". I generally put 50% of the money that I make between "start-up waves" into investments (for me it's properties) that generate cash flow

2\. Find a business partner with complimentary skills to you (understand that they can - and probably will change as your business develops)

3\. Before your embark on a start-up wave try to make sure that the market is already there (ie spend the evenings and weekends of your "paying job time" doing Customer Development research (you don't need to cut very much code to do this)

;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Tim :)

Great to hear someone who's been maintaining the "working in waves" method for longer than me. Not sure I could do it for long though!

You raise some really good points - especially glad you mentioned investments, since I'm starting to think about that now as I am amidst a "work wave" and earning enough to put a portion into investments. Any advice on where to start with this?

#3 is one to remember before the next wave, thanks.

<comment><USER2> wow - #1 is a whole topic in itself Simple answers * I only invest in things I understand * I only invest in things which produce positive cashflow * I only take additional debt when someone else ;-) is paying it off

For me personally this means buying rental properties - I purchase 2by2 properties in North Manchester / the North West. Typically (at moment) properties at about £60k (where I'm putting down about £15k deposit). Get a good agent to manage them (around 10% of rentals). Ping me a message if you want to know more about this

(but pls not - this isn't the only option - there are plenty of other investment opportunities - but see point 1 above - understand them first)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I cant think of a single hacker I know that would be happy in doing a 'work wave'. There's that itching inside, you know you should be building something and its impossible not to work on it..

So I can't really see how 'wave' working would ever really work without hacking drifting into the little free time you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand exactly what you mean, and perhaps it was bad to make it seem like it's a binary paid work or startup distinction between the waves. I guess the reality is that it is more about which is the focus.

I agree that there is likely to be that itching inside to work to build your startup, but by the same token do you not think that whilst working a 9-5 job and doing a startup on the side, you will always be itching to know what it would be like to work full-time on your startup?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like the biggest danger with a system like this is that you might lose focus or passion while you're in between waves. Even if you're passionate about something while you're working on it, it seems like it would be very easy to become complacent working at your "in-between" job and difficult to get back working on your idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Working in Waves is quite an interesting approach. Although it is best suited for young founders with little responsibilities who can do contract jobs.

Another option is the "Nights and Weekends" option best suited for those who have full time jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, and another point is that once you start the "work to make money" wave it is often difficult to get out of it in order to do the "startup" wave. "Nights and Weekends" / "on the side" is another way to bootstrap, I'll likely blog about that sometime :)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, a post like that would be really great. I do that for my side projects and the slow down caused by having normal working hours and not all weekends "free" for work is just terrible.

A project which would normally be released in two months can take a year or so - I can't really imagine doing business this way.</comment></comment></comment>


15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/tools/faster_web_page/ <comment><USER2> I read the title wrong and thought it was 15 tools to help me develop web pages faster, not faster web pages :(

Oh well, yslow + firebug ftw!

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't forget getting a hosting provider with low latency.

Actual hostnames have been changed to protect the guilty and to avoid spamming on behalf of the innocent. If you really want to know, the IP address is there.

BAD:

$ ping suckyhosting.com

PING suckyhosting.com (184.108.40.206): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 126.96.36.199: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=85.547 ms

64 bytes from 22.214.171.124: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=85.164 ms

64 bytes from 18.104.22.168: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=84.244 ms

64 bytes from 220.127.116.11: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=89.111 ms

^C

\--- suckyhosting.com ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 84.244/86.017/89.111/1.848 ms

GOOD:

$ ping myprovider.net

PING myprovider.net (220.127.116.11): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 22.214.171.124: icmp_seq=0 ttl=57 time=12.773 ms

64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=11.947 ms

64 bytes from 184.108.40.206: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=12.747 ms

64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=15.037 ms

Geography matters too, but even for locale-specific sites, it may be better to have a US-based provider with super-great network connections (with good access to a MAE, for example), hopefully also redundant connections, than to have a poorly-connected provider closer to the geographic region you are serving.

<comment><USER4> Low latency is great, but I would take your concerns with a grain of salt. 80ms isn't bad.

        boucher$ ping google.com
        PING google.com (220.127.116.11): 56 data bytes
        64 bytes from 18.104.22.168: icmp_seq=0 ttl=241 time=83.783 ms
        64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=83.536 ms
        64 bytes from 126.96.36.199: icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=81.096 ms
        64 bytes from 220.127.116.11: icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=87.137 ms
        64 bytes from 184.108.40.206: icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=84.813 ms

<comment><USER5> not if your browser caches pages...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Charles (<http://www.charlesproxy.com/>) is also great for HTTP debugging and performance testing. It's got a cool "throttle" feature that lets you simulate slower connections.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for this. Theres some really useful ones I hadn't heard about before.

</comment><comment><USER8> Excellent, this is right up my alley. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank god, a posting that isn't by DHH (wink) or about some doomsaying economist! THIS kind of thing is why we hang out here. Thx for posting it. Useful!</comment>


React JavaScript Tutorial and Guide to the Gotchas - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/engineering/react-js-tutorial-guide-gotchas/

<comment><USER2> > Let's say that again. If anything, anywhere in your app has changed, throw > the whole thing away and re-render the whole thing.

I am not an expert in React, but I am fairly certain this is completely false. React will re-render the components where state has changed, as well as any children of that components whose props change as a result. This is one of the key advantages of unidirectional data flow, as it makes it easy to reason about which components need to re-render as a result of a state change.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe it depends on your definition of "re-render". When I say re-render, I mean getting React to run your render method, in which you're returning React elements.

By default, shouldComponentUpdate always returns true, so if a component re- renders, meaning you change state or props for that component, your render method is called again, and then all the child components (unless shouldComponentUpdate has been overridden) will also in turn have their render methods called. This will happen regardless of whether or not the props are the same. In fact, I often do this at the top, just calling setState with the same props (to a mutable object) to kick off another render.

This is all just JavaScript though and so is very fast. React is then mapping these elements to DOM nodes (which is slow). For that, it uses a very smart diffing algorithm to determine which DOM nodes need to be changed. (Maybe that's your definition of re-render.) So only the DOM elements that have actually changed get touched.

You can, if you want, use the PureRenderMixin to make React only re-render if the props or state actually change. The mixin just leverages shouldComponentUpdate to do this. This can be a bit of a can of worms though, so I kept this out of my beginnerish post.</comment></comment>


Invasion of the Tiny, Linux-Powered PCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/75259.html

<comment><USER2> _Post PC Era will begin in earnest when the functionality that we currently see in the home computer is replaced by numerous small appliance-type devices_

The truth is that large numbers of home PC owners don't really want a computer for everything a computer can do. They want to be able to do email, surf/shop, maybe play games and stream movies, without having to deal with a lot of "geeky" system stuff. This is why iPads are doing so well at replacing computers in homes.

 _Other devices we're already seeing include "the oven that you can turn on with a text message, the espresso machine that you can control with a text message, home security systems and cars that can be controlled from your smartphone_

Here I disagree. When I want to make a pizza, I want to walk up to the oven, turn a dial to 425, done. I do NOT want to send a text message to my oven telling it to turn on. This whole idea of "smart" appliances seems to me to be pushed by people who don't actually use appliances.

<comment><USER3> > This is why iPads are doing so well at replacing computers in homes.

Are they? Do you have any stats on this? I don't know anyone who has a tablet and no computer. I know a guy who briefly considered buying at tablet with no computer, but ended up buying a laptop instead.

<comment><USER4> They replace people's second computer, not their first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has always struck me as inevitable. People always joke about "the year of the Linux desktop", implying that there must at some point be some head to head battle with Microsoft that must be won.

In reality Linux is more like a treacle , slowly moving through the computing world filling in gaps and commoditizing everything it touches.

If you already have the guts of a system for free, it moves the value elsewhere which currently seems to be in providing user experience or "service" computing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it me, or is this article just segments of what basically amounts to the comments section of a Slashdot article? It seems like everyone who is quoted is referenced as a "Slashdot blogger".

</comment><comment><USER7> cotton candy: $199, 1.2GHz dual A9, quad Mali400 GPU, 1GB (comparable to iPad 3, I think) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Candy_%28single- board_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Candy_%28single- board_computer%29)

MK802: $74, 1.5GHz single A8, single Mali400, 512MB [http://www.aliexpress.com/product- fm/563764893-Freeshipping-...](http://www.aliexpress.com/product- fm/563764893-Freeshipping-MK802-Mini-PC-Mini-Android4-0-dongle-android-IPTV- google-tv-smart-android-box-allwinner-wholesalers.html) (NB: many websites give 1.5GHz/Mail400, but not listed on the device's own site...)

<comment><USER8> Not to dump on the ARM love, but you can get Intel Cedar Trail boards which compete really well on performance and price (especially if you need RAM) with those offerings. And of course have the advantage of being plain old PCs:

[http://www.amazon.com/Intel-BOXD2700MUD-Dual-Core-Mini- ITX-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Intel-BOXD2700MUD-Dual-Core-Mini-ITX- Motherboard/dp/B006ZN4S22/ref=pd_sim_sbs_pc_7)

<comment><USER9> The second one is a complete machine, not a motherboard...

<comment><USER8> True enough. Embedded devices are never 1:1 in feature sets. So you'd have to add a $10 DIMM and a $20 power supply. And then you'd have the choice between a $74 stick based on an unknown SoC ("Allwinner A10" apparently is a single 1GHz A8) with minimal software support and a $110 dual core 1.6GHz Atom with 8x the RAM. And it runs Ubuntu/Fedora/SuSE/Mint (hell, even windows if you're into that) out of the box.

I'm not dinging the ARM stuff really, just pointing out that for a lot of these "cheap computer" applications the best choice is often just a PC.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. The ARM stuff is hobbyist only, now. I wouldn't want to run production stuff on one.

People really think super tiny machines are very very amazing. I wonder if it's a discontinuity in value perception.

The Atom probably uses a bunch more power, though.

(Personally I am fond of x86 SBCs such as PCEngines Alix, since they run normal OSs, like you said.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not Linux but somewhat related: the Always Innovating HDMI dongle. They were talking about a price point of $80 for Android 4.0 on a dongle that plugs into your tv HDMI slot.

Any idea where these will be available?

Would it be possible to make a DIY version of this (it doesn't have to be as small or as attractively packaged, just that it would be great to have those functionality now). Would make a fantastic hardware/software hacker project.

Edit - link: [http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/always-innovating-hdmi- an...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/always-innovating-hdmi-android-ics- dongle-hands-on/)

</comment><comment><USER11> overview of different systems:

<http://elinux.org/Development_Platforms></comment>


Stalin's daughter on her life in Wisconsin (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/lana-about-svetlana-stalin-s-daughter-on-her-life-in/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-b181-001cc4c002e0.html <comment><USER2> Wayback Machine copy:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/lana- about-svetlana-stalin-s-daughter-on-her-life- in/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-b181-001cc4c002e0.html)

<comment><USER3> That doesn't work either. Paywall.

<comment><USER4> [https://outline.com/BNU45U](https://outline.com/BNU45U)

I wrapped that into outline. Last paragraph was missing though:

"Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone read Montefiore's Young Stalin and Court of the Red Tzar? Those books were an absolutely wild ride. Stalin really comes across as one of the more unusual characters of history. No one in his native Georgia liked him, so they were happy to dish dirt on his youth and give the full story free of obvious glorification.

I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him, then his father, who wanted him to be a shoe cobbler, then the czars by putting him in prison and exiling him, then his fellow party members by trying to out politic him, and absolutely nothing worked on him. The guy did not budge an inch from his mission or ever got discouraged no matter what happened. The guy, like a serial killer, was completely emotionally unmoved and undeterred by any obstacle or opinion of anyone.

They put him in prison, he started taking control of the prison. They sent him to Siberia he came back and dove right back into revolution after always seeming to father an illegitimate child while in exile. He remembered everyone who he ever met and punished them or rewarded them later accordingly. He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist revolution and he got rid of anyone, or group of people or thing that got in his way. He wasn't even vulnerable to flattery. He was just dead set and committed to his goal of global marxist revolution and brutal vengeance against all his enemies who tried to keep him from achieving that.

<comment><USER6> > I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone > tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him

Priests tried to control him ? He entered the school voluntarily. They did not lock him up. He left of his own accord and priests encouraged him to return. I don't think that was 'trying to control him'

> He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist > revolution

Stalin's policy was 'Socialism in one country'. Apart from some modest actions like supporting the Spanish communists in the Spanish Civil War etc, he did not work that hard to advance the Marxist revolution abroad.

<comment><USER7> > Stalin's policy was 'Socialism in one country'

He started a war with Finland, signed a treaty with Germany to split Poland, helped communists in China and North Korea and set communist regimes in all countries that soviet Army freed from Germany.

Also some historians think that Stalin had plans to start a war with Germany, but Germany started the war several days sooner (For instance Mark Solonin talks about this).

<comment><USER6> Ah, I am wrong about this. Thanks for the correction

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been reading recently books on the former Soviet Union. "Beria, my Father" by Sergo Beria, "Krushcev" by William Taubman, "Conversations with Molotov" by Feliks Ciuev...

Then tried "Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan but could't finish it. Compared with the 'bad guys' her biography is just dull.

<comment><USER9> She had an autobiography. "20 letters to a friend" or something like this, I liked reading it a lot just because of how short and personal it was.

<comment> master-lincoln Apparently this was read out in some radio program and is now available for listening at [https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend](https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend)

edit: nevermind, seems to be an excerpt only. Recorded by BBC in 2017 [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> His granddaughter: [https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an- all...](https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an-all-american- badass/)

<comment><USER11> How very NY Post of them to whittle Stalin down to "man of steel" who vaguely led a "brutal regime". Yes, Mao Zedong: man of books, who notably disrupted the production of food.

By any measure, she lives an ordinary life; why dig this up if they don't hold some secret admiration for the first contractor to the architect of the most devastating and heinous genocide in human history? I mean, maybe it's just a morbid fascination, but I find it kinda suspect.

<comment><USER12> I do think that history isn't nearly as hard on him as it should be. He is easily as bad as Pol Pot or Hitler.

But my college roommate got the symbol of Stalin's state tattooed on him because he said it was cool and ironic. This disgusted our friend who's parent's escaped communist Poland, but nobody really cared. Of course, if he had got a swastika tattoo he would have essentially written himself out of society, however you are permitted to express admiration of communism without really getting in trouble.

<comment><USER13> Yet this critique of ideological association never seems to come into play regarding the US's genocides in south America, or Britian's starvation of India.

<comment><USER10> Well, anti-communism had nothing to do with those. Just as it hadn't with the genocide of some Germanic tribes comitted by Caesar, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And for a little background, even though Svetlana is a relatively minor character in it, don't miss _The Death of Stalin_ \- surely one of the best black comedies of recent years.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/)

</comment><comment><USER15> EU citizens cannot access this site. So, use the Wayback Machine copy. Apparently, comments like this are buried down and repeated.

<comment><USER16> Why is that? GDPR reasons?

<comment><USER17> Yes, "451: Unavailable due to legal reasons" and then some details about the GDPR (but not saying why).

My guess is a local news outlet that's big enough to know about the legal requirements but doesn't actually see any value in doing the compliance work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact firstname.lastname@example.com or call 800-362-8333.

<comment><USER19> I don't get the sites who expend resources and effort to implement this, but not actually implement GDPR compliance. You're either under jurisdiction or not, but this half-implementation is extremely odd.

<comment><USER20> It's not a half implementation. They just don't want to comply so they restrict access from this geographic area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

"We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact email@example.com or call 800-362-8333."

<comment><USER22> I always read that "we really need your personal data for no good reason but the EU won't let us, god bless America!"

It really should be a 500 error, not a 400.

Edit: Listen, USA, it's not so difficult, and we all really need to stop siphoning off everyone's data like it's no big deal, laws or not. I wrote some stuff for the GDPR, just had to remove some emails from our database, and honestly, we shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place and neither should you. This surveillance capitalism we're all building is not a good thing and you should not be complicit in it.

<comment><USER23> It's somewhat tricky. I operate a discourse instance. I have absolutely no desire to collect any personal information on my users(it is a free website and I am an anarchist), but I also live in the US and haven't looked in to GDPR. The website is a hobby. I pay for the severs myself and do not display ads or use any tracking. I don't intend to violate GDPR but I don't know what it's impkications are. For now I continue to make the site available for all, but if I felt there were legal implications to including Europe, I'd have to decide whether to block that region or do my due diligence. I'd want to include Europe given the subject of my site, but it's something I haven't looked in to yet.

I do sometimes view sites that make a big deal out of it as whining, but I admit that I'm not familiar with what compliance requires.

<comment><USER24> GDPR only matters if your business is based in Europe, or targets European consumers in some substantial way. If you run a Madison, WI local newspaper, you don't need to choose between blocking EU users and following GDPR. You just ignore it and nothing will happen.

<comment><USER25> To me this seems like the reasonable answer. I guess I don't understand why this Madison website would even care about EU users or GDPR and why it would bother blocking visits it thinks are from the EU?

Because they don't want to get bogged down in EU law? I've had clients with real cross/inter/multi-jurisdictional issues. This would not be one of them.

<comment><USER24> Right - my point is that a lot of non-EU businesses over-reacted based on a poor understanding of the GDPR. Maybe their CIO read a blog post about American company X closing themselves to European customers, because they truly did attempt to market to Europeans and didn't think complying was worth it, and said 'Well, it ain't to hard to geo-block the EU' and went for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Overcome Existing Barriers to Nuclear - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/3-ways-small-modular-reactors-overcome-existing-barriers-to-nuclear/ <comment><USER2> This is not really about micro reactors, but about making the monolith power plant more like a microservice modular thing. So that you can potentially prevent decomissioning after 40 to 60 years and keep it operating much longer.

The downside of nuclear power still remains though: \- still high upfront costs (maybe lower that monolith plants, but still freaking high) \- poisonous and radioactive fission products that are hard to deal with \- perverse incentives between economic efficiency and safety (did I mention that a couple of those babies [1] here would have prevented the fukushima disaster)

[1]: [http://us.areva.com/EN/home-1495/new-challenges-proven- solut...](http://us.areva.com/EN/home-1495/new-challenges-proven-solutions- mitigation-passive-autocatalytic-recombiner-par.html)

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the byproducts are not something we're unaware of how to manage, we're just socially and politically unwilling to do it. Likewise, we know how to design and maintain much safer and more efficient reactors than anything we currently have running, but we lack the social and political will to make the change.

Besides, we like to pretend that burning coal isn't killing millions of us around the world, decade in, decade out. Focusing on the real human cost of when nuclear goes wrong, vs. when coal goes right makes it an easy choice.

<comment><USER4> Per kilowatt, nuclear energy is by far the safest. People fall off wind and solar installations all the time. Hydro fails _catastrophically_.

<comment><USER3> I don't know about Solar and wind being inherently less safe, in fact I'd disagree with that. The issue though, is that we still can't rely on them to power our entire grid. Hydro though, even without failure, seems to have a pretty undesirable environmental impact. Nuclear has to go catastrophically wrong for that to be the case.

<comment><USER5> For residential installs, solar systems go up on roofs, a few kilowatts at a time. The main risk is to the installers (they fall off). Little capacity per roof, every roof different, every fall a potential hazard = higher risk per kilowatt than you might think..

<comment><USER6> > The main risk is to the installers (they fall off).

Huge NO. The biggest risk is for firefighters if any part of the PV panel or the technology or the roof itself catch fire!

The DC side can easily pack in a couple hundred volts DC with double-digit amperages. And you can't turn it off unless the sun goes dark... not to mention that it's hard for firefighters to fight a fire if the whole roof is PV-panel-filled and something in the roof is burning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is strange. There is no "containment vessel". That's the reactor pressure vessel. Usually, there's an outer containment vessel as well. Chernobyl didn't have one at all, which is why that was such a disaster. Fukishima's reactors had ones that were too small and didn't have enough expansion volume to diffuse the pressure after loss of coolant. There's a design assumption here that there will never be a meltdown.

<comment><USER8> A containment vessel at Chernobyl would have been useless. The Chernobyl disaster was a combination of poor reactor design leading to dangerous reactor physics, poor safety systems, poorly-trained staff, and an dangerous and unnecessary "experiment" being performed on the reactor (i.e. operating it in a dangerous regime). No containment building could have been strong enough to contain the explosion. The RBMK is a particularly bad design of reactor.

<comment><USER9> > dangerous and unnecessary "experiment"

We always hear about how they were running the reactor in a dangerous mode to run the experiment, but the nature of that experiment is rarely mentioned. The experiment itself is the craziest part!

The experiment was a test of a new cooling system feature. The RBMK's _suicidally stupid_ design had a positive void coefficient of reactivity[1]. Coolant voids _increased_ reactor activity. The operators new this; they had backup diesel pumps that would take over from the electric pumps if power wasn't available. They also knew that it would take some time[2] for the backup pumps to reach full speed, which was not fast enough.

So someone had the "clever" idea to modify the electric pumps so they would continue to spin freely when they lost power, so their remaining kinetic energy could continue pumping coolant at a rapidly falling rate. The hope was that there would be sufficient kinetic energy to keep the reactors from voiding. The experiment was basically a bad hack to work around several serious design problems.

The experiment shouldn't have _existed_. Everything about the coolant situation should have been a reason to decommission the reactor. The experiment itself is evidence that _someone_ knew about the positive void coefficient problem, or they wouldn't have tried such a crazy workaround. Yes, a lot of the staff was poorly trained, but someone knowledgeable about reactors decided they couldn't afford even a few seconds[2] without coolant.

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

[2] like 50 seconds? if I remember correctly?

<comment><USER3> A positive void coefficient doesn't have to be suicidal or stupid, it just was in that design. See: CANDU

<comment><USER10> CANDU has a very small positive void coefficient.

<comment><USER3> I didn't say anything about a _large_ void coefficient, and I pointed to CANDU as an example of a reasonable beta, responsibly managed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> LFTR should be implemented like this: modules that can be decommissioned on a scheduled basis so that the transmuted parts of the container can be recycled/extracted.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article doesn't seem to mention what type of reactor this is. Are these still gen-III boiling water reactors, or is this a gen-IV type reactor?

<comment><USER2> Nobody designs new boiling water reactors these days. Reactors efficiency increase with temperature, that is why pressurized water is the name of the game - as it can have a much higher boiling point.

The higher temperature = better reasoning is also the reason why there is such a hype train going for reactor designs based on molten salts.

Needless to say a higher temperature also puts more strain on any material and makes safe operation generally harder.

<comment><USER13> One of the things that I don't get is that there a lot of cool fission designs that are arguably only hampered by the state of the art in molten-salt plumbing, but the only fusion design with mainstream support requires molten lithium plumbing for breeding tritium and heat exchange, along with a few other things that are still a touch experimental. Hash out the molten salt plumbing for the fission reactors since it appears strictly a subset of the fusion problems.

<comment><USER2> No, its not a subset of fusion problems. Very different problems:

Molten salt fission problem = dealing with vast quantities of a highly chemically active salt touching our plumbing directly over 40 to 60 years.

Fusion problem = containment of a small quantity by a magnetic field.

<comment><USER14> Fusion also has the "dealing with vast quantities of a highly chemically active salt touching our plumbing directly over 40 to 60 years." Nobody talks about it because the magnetic containment problem is harder.

<comment><USER15> You can't use water like most fission designs?

<comment><USER16> Some fusion designs in theory would burn deuterium-tritium. Typical way to produce tritium is from lithium. When lithium absorbs a neutron it fissions into tritium + helium. Potential designs for fusion reactors then have a way of exposing lithium to the neutron flux from the reactor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's great. You know how expensive it is to get rid of radiactive material. It this comes true the big power plants can just dump the waste into the river and say "It wasn't me".

I would not want to live next to such a thing.

<comment><USER18> Maybe someone here can inform me, howuch does the waste weigh? Would it be viable to launch it into space then send it on a course to the sun?

<comment><USER19> It's easier/less deltaV to send things out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun.

(Basically, to hit the sun, you have to scrub out all/most of the velocity from the Earth's orbit, or what you've done is put your waste in an orbit around the Sun that may intersect the Earth's at some point in the future)

<comment><USER20> Why not do an elliptical orbit that takes you close enough to the sun to burn up? That seems like less energy than dropping to zero no?

<comment><USER21> Bring it up does not change the fact that there is now radioactive material on an orbit which still potential overlaps the earth. Out of the solar system is a much better solution.

<comment><USER14> On the other hand it's not like the Sun isn't spewing out way more radioactive material continuously than we're talking about adding here.

EDIT: To give some orders of magnitude, the back of the envelope tells me that the sun inflicts about 700 TBq of carbon-14 on us every year. For comparison, countries like the USSR and UK have dumped 85,000 TBq of radioactive waste into the ocean (and Fukushima added another 15,000). I don't know how to judge how much of the vaporized waste would end up back on Earth so it's quite possible I'm wrong in the above.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


1975: The First Digital Camera - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iso50.com/2010/08/11/1975-the-first-digital-camera/

<comment><USER2> It's great to see how an idea and functional prototype evolves into a mass product. I like stories like this.</comment>


David Byrne: Don't Forget the Motor City - <AUTHOR> http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2010/09/092310-dont-forget-the-motor-city.html

<comment><USER2> Having lived in Michigan for almost all my life, I find Mr. Byrne's conclusion and observations about Detroit to be pretty accurate. I want to point out that not all parts of Detroit are ruinous; mid-town with Wayne State University, the DIA (Detroit Institute of Art), and other universities in the area make for an interesting and healthy part of town. As far as the tech scene, I'd say it's mainly concentrated in the Ann Arbor area.

<comment><USER3> I feel the same way. My wife and I work downtown and walked down to the Transformers filming at lunch. It's so odd to have outsiders look at Detroit. It's both embarrassing and cathartic.

I'm in AA too. Lived in MI most my life, but moved to AA last year. Any HN meetups? We are looking for another tech-cofounder, applying to YC this month.

<comment><USER4> There are not any HN meetups that I am aware of; based on the periodic "where are you" posts here I'm not sure HN density is high enoungh. But there is an active startup hub here, see <http://www.techbrewery.org/> . In the community section, I think a2geeks.org is probably the most active site. There's definitely enough startup activity to get you going. Either show up for the "beer thirty" mentioned on the techbrewery's sidebar, or just stroll in and start chatting. Make sure you meet Dug Song.

<comment><USER5> I live here in A2 as well (have for a few years now). My office is just across the hall (in the same building) as the Techbrewery, and we very much participate in Beer:30 every Friday.

I've actually met up with a few people here on HN, and I know many many more who are HN readers, but not really commenters. If anyone is interested in having a cozy HN meetup in A2, contact me via email and I'd be happy to set it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article about the history, but unfortunately, being outside of Detroit, the author has only barely scraped the surface of all of the amazing people that are still in and around Detroit doing real things to make a real difference.

Just take a look at the TEDx Detroit event [1] that I was fortunate enough to attend last week for evidence.

If you haven't seen the amazing difference that everyday people like Chazz Miller [2], or Claire Nelson [3], or Terry Bean [4], or many others are making, then you don't know what's possible for Detroit.

Also, if anyone is interested, I'm excited about a great movie being made about Detroit and what's possible, called Lemonade Detroit [5].

[1] <http://www.tedxdetroit.com/>

[2] <http://www.publicartworkz.org/>

[3] [http://www.thedindecor.com/2008/06/city-speak-and- interview-...](http://www.thedindecor.com/2008/06/city-speak-and-interview- with-claire-nelson-shop-owner-bureau-of-urban-living/)

[4] <http://twitter.com/motorcity>

[5] <http://lemonadedetroit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for submitting this. These are the kinds of non-startup stories I like to find on HN (I'm a fan of David Byrne's blog but I somehow missed this one).

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I just want to see the Naive Melody video that David produced.

Fantastic song by the star of the best concert movie of all time.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was born and raised in a suburb of Detroit. It's sad to see it die so much even over the course of my short life time.

I am watching the Requiem for Detroit documentary linked in the blog entry, it's well done.

<comment><USER9> I watched that yesterday (after reading the David Byrne article last week).

Good documentary (apart from all the "show and tell" cut and paste video and one or two of the soundtrack choices - Schools out for a burned out school! ugh)

Loved the optimism at the end and how a bunch of people living there see it as a really exciting place to live full of possibility.

(it also occurred to me that if anyone was going to film Samuel R. Delanys Dhalgren - Detroit would be the place to film it)

<http://www.sfsite.com/02b/dh122.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Detroit's story of a working-class town that failed to evolve is depressingly familiar throughout the US in many small towns whose main industries have moved on - for example, the old railway towns. I feel these towns die because they lack the critical mass of people with a culture that embraces technology and change.

Unfortunately, the pain that comes with this evolutionary process is probably unavoidable. To change it would require a wholesale change in culture - something that takes a generation, if not more.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a fifth generation Detroiter and have lived in MI my entire life. The people are like nowhere else. In my many travels, despite the state's troubles, I haven't met anyone who has left who doesn't want to come back if they could.

I think there is hope for converting large swaths of Detroit to farmland and reinventing the city. As I am fond of saying any idea that has among its supporters both Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh just has to happen ;<).

<comment><USER12> You've met one, now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Starting point for any SE Michigan startup folks: <http://a2newtech.org>

More about the Ann Arbor scene: [http://www.slideshare.net/dugsong/ann-arbor- startup-communit...](http://www.slideshare.net/dugsong/ann-arbor-startup- community-development-h109-1759718)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've always wondering if farming could be a solution for Detroit? It seems to have plenty of land and with growing shortages of basic commodities such as Wheat on the global market surely there's an opportunity to return large parts of the land back to farming use.

<comment><USER15> Many people have thought this (John Hantz), but there's a reason it hasn't begun. The cost of cleaning up the land is too great to start cost-competitive large scale farms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice to see the positive reference to Glasgow - I had forgotten that Byrne was born in Scotland.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's wrong with having a few cities like this? If you had clean, organized cities through the country, life would be boring and the visuals would be monotonous.

Broken down buildings are history. A country should not be made up of suburban sameness, just like a mole on a models face enhances her beauty, enclaves of disorganisation can make the country as a whole more interesting and prettier.

<comment><USER18> Because real actual people are suffering in the city. Think of the poor who _can't_ get out. Detroit schools are in serious trouble right now. Recently in the news they were taking donations for toilet paper. Apparently their EMS has trouble meeting demand because it's underfunded, and just about everything else about detroit is either underfunded or undermanned. Let's not forget about the crime and murders.

<comment><USER3> This. Detroit isn't a painting, it is an ongoing tragedy with many kids playing roles. When I was in my late teens, we used to go to parties and art shows in these abandoned buildings, even in that Packard plant.

Once Gil Hill (commissioner of Beverly Hills cop fame) and the police broke in our party with guns drawn. Before ticketing us (95% white kids from the suburbs) he berated us, and told us not to dance in his city. It was a very colorful tirade. He was in the wrong, but I now know where his anger was coming from. To us, Detroit was a cool industrial wasteland scene to party in. To him, it was a dysfunctional place where people struggle to live.</comment></comment></comment>


Symbolic Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://languagengine.co/blog/symbolic-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> _> Historically, symbolic techniques have been very desirable for representing richly structured domains of knowledge, but have had little impact on machine learning because of a lack of generally applicable techniques._

Is this generally true? I mean, "impact" can be measured in different ways, but this paragraph gives impression that symbolic logic was always orthogonal to ML. However, there was clearly much research in that area.

Here is just one example:

[http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/lbml.pdf](http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/lbml.pdf)

Frankly, I don't understand why the field of symbolic AI was so thoroughly abandoned. Contrary to popular belief, it did deliver results - a lot of them. It had a good theoretical foundation and years of practice. It could (with ease) do a lot of neat tricks, like systems explaining why it made certain decisions. Not just that, you could implement those tricks _after_ you implemented core functionality. And most importantly - it was scalable downwards. You could take some ideas from a complex system, put them into a much simpler system on vanilla hardware (i.e. normal application) and still get very interesting and useful results.

<comment><USER3> I think to some extent it disappeared, to some extent it rebranded. But mostly it disappeared, because commercial motivations pushed a lot of money towards machine learning research. But that's just a hunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a book titled Grammatical Inference [1]. If you are interested in the blog post, you might also be interested in the book as well. It's a different kind of "learning" though.

[1] [http://pagesperso.lina.univ- nantes.fr/~cdlh/book_webpage.htm...](http://pagesperso.lina.univ- nantes.fr/~cdlh/book_webpage.html)

<comment><USER3> Grammar inference is a very interesting (tho quite different) topic. We have absolutely no idea how humans do it, and we know that its really really hard (nearly impossible!) to do given just raw text. Super interesting topic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working in the lab that built Spaun [1] that might be of interest to you. We use the Vector Symbolic Architectures you talk about in combination with Deep Learning and other stuff to build brain models.

As far I know, my lab is one of the few places mixing symbolic learning with Deep Learning. Do you or anyone else know other modern attempts (Reinforcement Learning?) with this approach?

[1] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202)

<comment><USER6> It took a while to figure out which group you're talking about, but here is some recent work from another group: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05518](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05518)

<comment><USER3> Oh! Was Murray Shanahan's lab involved with this? Cool. I've chatted with Murray a very tiny bit on twitter about this all. That paper is part of what inspired me to write this blog post, because I was dissatisfied with the approach they propose.

It felt to me like they had found a way to restrict "symbolic" data to a very narrow domain where issues like hierarchical structure was totally absent, and vectorial representation was therefore quite straight forward, and I wanted to figure out an alternative. Instead of restricting the kinds of symbolic data involved, do the full spectrum. I had the symbolic vector idea in my head for about two years as an answer to the representation problem, but I hadn't seen what the right answer was to the other aspects, at least not clearly. But that paper motivated me to start thinking about it again, and this time I saw the answer. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post leads with:

> This post aims to provide a unifying approach to symbolic and non-symbolic > techniques of artificial intelligence.

This is the sort of thing people build academic careers on.

I'm extremely skeptical that a blog post will live up to this claim; I'd expect anything that even approaches to unify the techniques to be on the order of a Ph.D thesis or an extensive postgraduate research report.

<comment><USER3> It's a very small unification, and a big, eye-catching claim.

Besides, I said "aims", not "succeeds"! :)

I certainly don't think this is The Big Solution, tho. It's far more mundane. Unifying the techniques is nice, but all that means is that we don't have to think about GOFAI and ML as fundamentally distinct. It doesn't mean that any truly _deep_ problems have been solved, just that there's now a reasonably reliable way to use both that isn't just "simultaneous" but rather "fused".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there any examples of reading a graph _back_ from this representation? It doesn't seem straightforward, unless I'm missing something. How do you handle the nondeterminism caused by the lossy transform in to a vector?

<comment><USER3> Reading a graph back can't be done with any certainty, nor is it intended to be done. It's a representation that's intended to be used to build inputs to ML systems, not outputs. Building symbolic outputs should be done via the other techniques mentioned in the blog post (eg. structural editing), that way you can take advantage of notions of correctness inherent in the symbolic representation.

Regarding handling lossiness, it's not clear to what extent it _needs_ to be handled, but the `k` mentioned in the definition of symbolic vectors is a parameter, and the larger `k` is, the less lossy the representation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like [http://languagengine.co/blog/](http://languagengine.co/blog/) is missing this entry.

This is a great project, I can't wait until it's released for dev preview.

<comment><USER3> Oh! Thanks for pointing this out. The whole site is hand maintained, and I routinely forget to put stuff up there. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank you, very interesting to read and think about. This is why I read hacker news. This line of research/reasoning sounds very promising!!

</comment><comment><USER11> This representation assumes a fixed set of nodes. It would be much more interesting to allow for varying numbers of nodes.

<comment><USER3> Heyo. Author here.

It depends on what you mean by that. It assumes a fixed set of node _labels_ , but not node identities, since we're counting subgraphs. So for instance, multiple distinct nodes labeled `X` or edges labeled `Y` will contribute to the same count, despite having distinct nodes involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you deal with cycles in the graphs? (Apologies if I missed this in the blog post)

<comment><USER13> I don't think you need to do anything special for them. Your algorithm for counting subgraphs shouldn't go in an infinite loop when fed a cycle, but assuming you have such an algorithm already, getting the vector representation should be straightforward.

<comment><USER3> That's correct, yes. Cycles don't affect subgraph counts. There's still only finitely many.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your biggest pain points working with Kubernetes? - <AUTHOR> I've worked with Kubernetes at a small startup now and we've had some challenges with it. Wiring up a deployment pipeline and figuring out how to work effectively with Helm took us some time. We also had to invest a lot more than we expected in working with other developers to teach Kubernetes concepts. It really, in hindsight, was probably overkill for our use case.<p>What are some of the biggest challenges that you've had in working with Kubernetes? How did you solve some of them? <comment><USER2> Minor (but biggest for us) painpoint: CI pipeline tooling in a microservice environment. This breaks down into a few parts:

* CI tooling (ie for git push master to be automatically deployed to kubernetes) requires eg git + travis which is somewhat expensive for eg personal development, or manual devops work, which is somewhat expensive work-hours wise

* setup time for each microservice is just on the boundary where it happens infrequently enough to not get scripted, but each new one takes an hour to set up manually

* CI deployment time for eg docker builds on Travis can take 3-5 minutes, which is not great if prod breaks

<comment><USER3> * CI tooling (ie for git push master to be automatically deployed to kubernetes) requires eg git + travis which is somewhat expensive for eg personal development, or manual devops work, which is somewhat expensive work-hours wise

We're using gitlab which can integrate and manage with one kubernetes cluster with the free Gitlab CE licence. Now we did the minimal integration with it (as in we're still deploying our own tiller) to be able to use kubectl and helm from within gitlab-ci.yml scripts. It works quite nicely especially to test stuff in a personal capacity or in dev/staging.

* CI deployment time for eg docker builds on Travis can take 3-5 minutes, which is not great if prod breaks

We had the same issue that we somehow solved by building new images on top of existing ones to reduce build time and having sensible image tagging so we always have a rollback at hand without rebuilding inside gitlab's registry. This has been proved useful more than once when dealing with production systems.

* setup time for each microservice is just on the boundary where it happens infrequently enough to not get scripted, but each new one takes an hour to set up manually

That's also something we struggled with so we extended the time we were allocating to building the helm charts and so on but still no gold. Only semi- effective counter measure we found to this is to work on an internal helm scripts boilerplate of some sort to base all the projects on. But it helps since we are working on projects close one to another and with "preselected" technologies. But yeah i feel the pain on that one too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My recommendation is to avoid introducing Helm at the beginning, it adds another layer of complexity that feels too abstract, k8s yaml is confusing enough for new teams. Also Helm makes deployments depend on local configuration, which might result in confusing, non-reproducible situations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Probably that there is a lot to learn and it feels like a full time role, so looking after a small cluster say 2 hours/month I feel like I'm hacking to solve problems and not getting the deep understanding a full time sysadmin person would. Using a cloud provided solution and terraform and CI helps a lot though. I have a clone test cluster to play around with before I deploy to production.

I went from never have run docker build to maintaining docker k8s VMs running the modes, terraforms cloud load balancer so quite a learning curve. Took me ages to realise that to configure nginx ingress I needed to work with the docker image and not try to set it up via the terraform k8s config. That was a painful lesson. Not having those mental models! Doing a free online course on k8s helped a lot, after that I reached critical mass of knowledge and it got a bit easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found the same - I had to actually launch my own cluster and build my own terraform scripts from scratch to really understand how it works. Basically this:

[https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard- way](https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way)

Really helped me, especially going through it multiple times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Grumpy old sysadmin says that datacenters used to cause downtime, now it's dodgey deployments and kubernetes abusing dns as well as requiring more certificates than a small isp.

</comment><comment><USER7> Teaching developers who already knew linux and ssh that learning kubectl was worth the investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we had this issue as well. I kind of hoped turning over kubectl to the team would be a lightbulb moment and everyone would just get it. It really wasn't. Did a lot of training but I think that we mostly ended up writing our own tooling wrapping everything.</comment></comment>


Our Drinking Water is about to get more contaminated - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/23/trump-epa-curbs-water-protections-102779 <comment><USER2> "Our Drinking Water" should be changed to "Drinking Water in the USA".

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah but several people are going to get a lot richer. Isn't that the whole point?</comment>


Show HN: The tiny Instagram projector - <AUTHOR> http://www.getprojecteo.com

<comment><USER2> The original title makes me think this is not really a Show HN. Have you made this?

It's a cool product anyway.</comment>


A Missing Piece of Infrastructure for the dApp Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://thecontrol.co/understanding-decentralized-identity-433abb343279 <comment><USER2> this informative and well-researched article seems badly damaged by the opening two paragraphs ! Thoughtful rebuttal not needed -- just really ill- advised in the opening there.. still enjoying the rest of the post.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm kind of surprised that OpenNIC wasn't mentioned.</comment>


How to make onboarding engineers a launching pad for success - <AUTHOR> https://www.ericgong.com/blog/how-to-make-onboarding-engineers-a-launching-pad <comment><AUTHOR> I've worked at four startups and onboarding is one of the key elements that can easily be made better.

Hopefully this article can be helpful for your company. Feel free to share around and let me know what you think.</comment>


They call it Canaan: How 200K Haitians built a city on their own - <AUTHOR> http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2017/04/they-call-it-canaan <comment><USER2> Kushner describes it as a "city", but with no power, water grid, sewage system or stormwater management,[1] it's more of a squatter camp with roads than a city.

They want to build infrastructure, but since nobody owns the land they're squatting on, there's no way to raise money via land taxes. The technocrat answer to that would be individual septic tanks and solar panels, but because there's no land ownership and no law enforcement, you'd have to be nuts to invest any serious money in building a house, because a gang would just take it from you. Classic development trap.

Jonathan Katz talked about Corail/Cannan in The Big Truck That Went By, and he wasn't positive. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009OZN6GM/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009OZN6GM/) Published in 2013, but it doesn't sound like much has changed.

1: Port-au-Prince gets about twice as much rain as Seattle per year, and is routinely hit by hurricanes. If you don't manage the stormwater, it washes your house downhill. Sewage systems have also become important, since UN peacekeepers brought cholera with them after the earthquake.

<comment><USER3> 'technocrat' means something other than the way you're using it here, FYI - it's evidence-based institutional governance, not lifehacking.

<comment><USER2> I was using "technocrat" in the pejorative sense-- suggesting technological fixes to political problems. The political problem here is weak rule of law, which results in various physical problems. (No clean water, no electricity, etc) NGO technocrats frequently suggest ineffective technical solutions (water filters, solar panels) that don't address the root problem, which is either intractable or politically sensitive.

<comment> barry-cotter Given Haiti's history over the last 50 years the chances of fixing Haitian politics are ~0. What can people do when government does not work and has not worked in the living memory of a majority of the population?

The best way to improve the lives of Haitians is obviously to help them emigrate but they're quite, quite motivated to do that already.

<comment><USER4> The best way to help a nation is not to help the population flee their otherwise workable location. As others have stated, it's not politically correct to state the obvious: local rule has utterly failed. British or American occupation has always been the best option based on factual national statistics.

<comment> barry-cotter Fuck the nation, if we want to help the people of Haiti we absolutely should help them flee their location. It may be a workable nation for the Dominican Republic but it clearly isn't for Haiti.

America is politically incapable of a long term occupation, look at Iraq or Afghanistan. Real nation building would require running a country in a profoundly undemocratic way for at the very least a decade, more likely two or three. The US isn't even capable of winning a war of occupation given the political constraints it operates under. If they had the support of 60% of the population for a thirty year and 0.1% protested against it they wouldn't do it. Russia or China might, at a push Singapore, but a Western country? Give me a break.

And don't be a coward with your throwaway. dang may have bowed to pressure with the shut up or be banned to yummyfajitas Chris Stucchio but nothing will ever change if we're all cowards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading about how people cope after being displaced by a natural disaster felt so different than reading about people voluntarily abandoning their homes to form communes. The latter shuns authority, while the former actively seeks it.

Found Canaan on OpenStreetMap [1], as described in the article. It shows up on satelite images on Google Maps too [2].

[1] [https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/18.6540/-72.2634](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/18.6540/-72.2634)

[2] [https://goo.gl/maps/8w257Q5mC4y](https://goo.gl/maps/8w257Q5mC4y)

<comment><USER3> Don't confuse authority with organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Poorly constructed dwellings got lots of people killed during the 2010 earthquake. It might be bad news to see recovery take shape as structures built without paying attention to safety codes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake)

<comment><USER7> I'd rather take the risk of dying inside a poorly constructed dwelling in an earthquake than the countless risks of being homeless, and I'm sure most Haitians and people in general would too. Brings up the question of whether safety codes and other such nonsense even have a place when the alternative is homelessness. Clearly the US seems to think so, but I certainly wouldn't follow our lead on this issue considering how poorly we've dealt with our own homeless problem while keeping vast quantities of real estate empty or not even built.

<comment><USER8> Safety code nonsense? Surely you jest? You cite homelessness as an argument against safety codes? Sure, we all want to decimate the scourge of homelessness but do you have a sense of how small a percentage of the US is actually homeless? You would have us give up on safety codes for .... what? A shanty for everyone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This kind of looks like just another continuation of the man made ecological disaster in Haiti. But in lieu of real solutions, people are going to do what they need to.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would Haiti be a good source of cheap manufacturing labor?

<comment><USER11> Yes. There are a lot of textile operations there and they are starting to manufacture electronics as well. Significant investment into this infrastructure (industrial parks, etc) went in after the earthquake.

<comment><USER12> There was significant investment and most of that has lead to very little. There are efforts recently trying to do more complicated textile manufacturing but I have heard that factory owners aren't interested in doing more than simple things. Probably for a variety of reasons including lack of skilled workers, training, etc. The only electronics I have heard about (I live in Haiti) is Surtab ([http://surtab.com/](http://surtab.com/)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'Built a city on their own'

Aren't all cities built by people... on their own? Almost all cities formed spontaneously via market forces or geographical incentives, then eventually organize a more local government system - largely by the same families who founded the village/town.

What exactly are we praising them for?

<comment><USER14> Most cities are built in some sort of social and governmental framework.

<comment><USER13> That's how towns/cities are eventually organized upon reaching a certain scale, yes... but that is not how they are initially formed in the vast majority of cases. There is no central planning which brings a large group of people to an area. The rare attempts to start cities in that fashion in China failed spectacularly.

It's quite obvious which part is the egg and which the chicken.

People are drawn to areas for a variety of reasons. A more localized government is merely a rational reaction to the needs of a large community, a form of organization after the fact (or merely a result of following established standards and practices, rather than rational need).

What is distinct in this story seems to be the absence of government following the initial growth phase. Maybe due to a lack of stable functioning economic systems which incentivize the organization of municipal governments.

But the cities and infrastructure which we live in are very much the result of people who were initially just 'doing it on their own' before formalizing systems of organization. I know it's trendy to dismiss pioneers and frontiersmen who built western society but this seems like praising a step backwards.

<comment><USER8> You seem to be caught up on the idea that they are being "praised." Did you read the whole article. I think you went into with this preconceived notion that is something that it isn't. Also, it is true that cities started perhaps in a way that you describe but very rarely has something like on this on this scale occurred in recent history. There's also different reasons that Western frontiersmen. Anyway, I think it is an interesting update on rather unusual situation, I mean over 200,000 people, that's tremendous; also potential for opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So many NGOs, so few multi-story buildings.</comment>