SSD Prices in a Free Fall - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-freefall/a/d-id/1320958 <comment><USER2> Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350

Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40

Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity.

In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

<comment><USER3> Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted.

I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies.

When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).

Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...

It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1]

[1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB... [https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard- drive/#sort=a7&...](https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard- drive/#sort=a7&page=1&X=0,25540&S=8000,100000)

<comment><USER4> I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.

<comment><USER5> IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself.

If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.

<comment><USER6> I just got a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD. Filled it up in a matter of weeks by installing some of my favorite games from Steam. I'm looking to add a 500GB to my build, but I should have STARTED with a 500GB.

<comment><USER7> This seems like a big waste. Why would you put games on a SSD?

<comment><USER8> You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.

Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper HDD is fast enough for that. And that is what the people responding to your comment here miss completely.

Using a SSD is for many games a waste.

<comment><USER9> Why is it a waste?

If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.

<comment><USER8> Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming. Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD.

> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame.

> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

See [http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_wo...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance/3) if you want another source.

<comment><USER10> I have a 500gb SSD which cost ~200$. Sure 5 years ago I would agreed with you, but now days it's really not that expencive and in game load times feel much longer. IMO, Skyrim is load happy, sure the open world is fine, but go to town, get into your house, get out of your house get out of ton is 4 load screens in ~1Min of gameplay.

<comment><USER8> You see, that reasoning is perfectly valid, and when putting it like that I agree :) Well, kind of, 200$ still feels to expensive for me for that.

I just won't let me be told that the texture streaming outside in the open world needs that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend. I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.

<comment><USER12> That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline".

Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

<comment><USER14> Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories.

Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?

<comment><USER15> The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the _peak_ retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs.

As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

<comment><USER16> You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad:

1\. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win.

2\. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster recovery then paying a one time cost to retrieve a bunch of data pales in in comparison to the potential costs of not being able to recover your data.

3\. Is nearline actually superior for the case of "oh shit I need to retrieve everything right now"?

4\. AWS already has this cloud storage thingy called S3 and it has reduced redundancy storage if you're looking for something slightly cheaper.

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier- engineering...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering- for-cold-data-storage-in-the-cloud/)

<comment><USER15> I guess you've got a good point as far as #3 goes; the analysis is actually more interesting than I thought it was. Both Google's nearline storage and Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you have stored with them. You can express it as a tradeoff between cost/GB and the time taken to retrieve your entire dataset

Google throttles your downloads to a fixed rate, so they're effectively forcing you to one point in that space: (3 days, $0.01/GB). With Glacier, you get a curve depending on how fast you want it. It's much more expensive at the same speed (3 days, $0.10/GB) but you can go to one extreme of getting all your data for free over the course of 20 months, or getting it all within 4 hours for about $1.80/GB.

So I guess it's fair to say that Glacier gives you more flexibility, but Google's offering is a much better value at the particular point that it optimizes for.

<comment><USER17> Honestly it's hard for me to imagine a total emergency restore-EVERYTHING situation that needs the data in under a day.

If it's not that much data you should have a local copy anyway. If it's massive amounts of data is your connection even that fast? And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

<comment><USER18> > And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

Fire does that quite easily...

<comment><USER17> That's destruction, not wiping. If you are buying new servers as part of rebuilding you don't exactly need all the data downloaded in a 10 hour window.

<comment><USER18> That's an absolutely irrelevant distinction: The data is gone.

And why, in this day of rapid provisioning via cloud providers, do you expect a company to suffer the extended loss of waiting for new servers to want to bring the data back?

<comment><USER17> So you're talking about a company using entirely physical servers and switching to an entirely virtual infrastructure, while also dealing with the other effects of the disaster that hit them.

They're doing this in less than half a week, or assuming not all the backups are live data they're doing this in less than a day.

I submit that this is an extremely atypical company, and that in practice a company that just had a devastating fire is not going to be impacted more than marginally by the download speed limit.

There are a good few scenarios where there's total data loss. There are much fewer where you need to restore all the data in under a working day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore."

Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?

<comment><USER20> At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self- destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.

<comment><USER21> Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits constantly.

<comment><USER22> What do you do? mirror every drive?

<comment><USER21> OBR10

<comment><USER22> Thanks, it was an honest question. I'll look into OBR10.

Currently I'm at a small-ish startup and I have ~150 TB of data on a synology nas. It's in 2 raid groups, both raid 6. Seemed safe enough.

 _edit_ Ah, right. From some reason I didn't make the connection that raid 10 was raid 0+1, it doesn't work for us simple because of the sheer amount of data we need to store. Also, although it would be a real bitch if we lost everything(like set us back a week+), most of the data is derived data, and we have all the raw data in cold storage, so we could eventually rebuild the array from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will.

And then I'll never buy spinning rust again.

I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days.

This will allow lots of interesting things.

Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely.

Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".

</comment><comment><USER24> The article predicts that SSD prices will fall from 30c/GB to under 5c/GB in 18 months. This seems like a case of citation needed.

<comment><USER25> Can you cite predictions?

<comment><USER26> You can cite industry improvements in the manufacturing process that companies say will effect the price at a certain point along with scientific developments and in general claims made by actual corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of transistors [http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine- dreams/).

<comment><USER28> I believe they killed that off

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the- machi...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine- repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies)

<comment><USER29> Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me?

Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)

<comment><USER31> Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?

<comment><USER33> _So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?_

Not to mention the iPad.

The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level iPads still have 16 GB of storage.

Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger, entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably.

Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5 years.

I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.

<comment><USER34> Complaining about overpriced/limited storage options in the iPad/iPhone is like complaining about overpriced/limited food options at a sporting event, airport or any other venue where you've got no other option than to buy from an approved vendor.

With lock-in comes higher prices.

<comment><USER35> There's no lock-in what's at play here for most people. You can get a tablet/smartphone from several vendors, including Samsung, Google and Microsoft and people switch from iOs to Android and back all the time. It's not like apps are a huge investment or that it's hard to move your data across.

These people WANT to buy the iPad/iPhone, instead of something else. So a more accurate response would be "with desirability come higher prices".

<comment><USER21> We have students who WANT to buy Apple products like crazy at the school I work at. The majority of responses for why they want them is, "They look pretty."

<comment><USER35> Well, they do. But as a seasoned IT pro who cut his teeth on Sun OS and HP-UX back in the day, having a high end machine, with a great screen, great battery life and quite light to carry around that also has a friendly UI and runs a full blown UNIX underneath but also gets all major proprietary programs is nothing to sneer at either, pretty or not.

There's a reason even Linus Torvalds carried a MacBook Air (though I think he found something even lighter now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8 or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either. When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years.

P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.

</comment><comment><USER37> I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks!

Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.

<comment><USER38> At least you were told it was "gentrifying", not that it was "gentrified". You probably got a discount for moving into a neighborhood that was gentrifying. Once gentrified, the discount probably largely disappears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with 10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's.

[http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_headed_in_2015/)

</comment><comment><USER40> This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is this accurate? What is the source?

<comment><USER41> It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1]

[1]: [http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret- bdx...](http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will continue.

The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive- writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)

</comment><comment><USER43> What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common OEM systems.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is keeping a SSD powered on enough to prevent bit rot?

<comment><USER23> It should have no impact. It really is about write capacity. The little cells can only handle being changed so many times before they wear out. The wearing is a chemical/semi-conductor type problem.

It's not like DRAM where keeping power applied keeps the cells "fresh" (and in DRAM it's done literally be refreshing each cell at a certain frequency.)

The simple equation is the more times a cell is erased the sooner it fails. Write leveling and other software efforts work to spread around or eliminate unnecessary writes.

But over the practical life of a drive (5-10 years?) being powered off will not cause them to lose data.

Edit: I've been following FLASH technology since before the terms "FLASH" was coined, back when it was called EEPROM -- Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, an evolution of PROMs (write once) and ERPOMS (erasable with UV light). If there's a myth out there that flash drives just forget things, I'd like to point out that I've had flash drives (low quality at that) from the 1990s that were left for 20 years and then read successfully! Show some citations of real evidence before you down vote me.

<comment><USER45> That's incorrect. Charge leaks very slowly out of cells. It's not a big issue, but it does happen. Powered-on SSD firmware knows about the problem and will maintain the cells.

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd- data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data- retention)

<comment><USER46> And AnandTech quotes Intel materials who often boasts to have the most durable drives. Imagine what happens to other ones.

<comment><USER47> Samsung back up the 850 Pro with a 10 year/150TB host writes warranty.

The trick is moving back 2 processes, which alleviates some of the issues they've faced with the 840 series.

<comment><USER46> The warranty is certainly not "it will keep the data 10 years without being powered on." We discuss the topic of how long SSDs retain the data when powered off. Intel says, powered off but stored on just 35 degrees C, only 14 weeks, as published by AnandTech:

[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9248/3.PNG](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9248/3.PNG)

And Intel is proud to be more reliable than others. In one of their presentations I've seen they show that they use some very high tech setups (like accelerators!) to measure the degradations fast, and that the other producers fare worse on their tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer system.

</comment><comment><USER49> Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also died after 30 months.

<comment><USER50> Uh, what kind of SSDs are you buying that you're having that kind of failure rate (god please don't say OCZ). I've been using Samsung and Intel SSDs for years now with failure rates below the failure rates of WD drives (and well below Seagate failure rates).

<comment><USER49> SanDisk . They have always been quick to replace them. The last one they even upgraded to a much more expensive model which makes me think the issue was being widely experienced. If I were to buy today I would buy Samsung as I have heard they are much more durable. Incidentally it was a Samsung phone that died though I don't know who made the memory for that.

<comment><USER51> There was a review of SSD lifespan a while back, they found the samsung 840 pro was able to survive something to the effect of 2 petabytes of wear before failing. The worst of them all started to fail at 100TB, and failed at 900TB. Unless you're running something with crazy IO, I can't imagine ever practically running into that limit.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, but the problem is that SSD failures usually have nothing to do with flash wearing out, and more to do with catastrophic, sudden failures somewhere else (mostly the controller AFAIK) causing the drive to stop doing anything at all. I had a 840 Pro fail on me, hadn't had many writes but just stopped showing up in the BIOS one day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation.

If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.

<comment><USER54> Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly unheard of.

<comment><USER53> >Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures.[2] While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity.

Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.

<comment><USER56> False.

[http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance- experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment- theyre-all-dead)

<comment><USER45> True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month.

In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose _any_ data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully- fail.

Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.

<comment><USER57> Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something like 72TB of writes.

Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the drive.

<comment><USER45> Continuous record of 8 streams of 220Mb/s video. There were 10 SSDs for storage in a RAID-6 configuration.

So the effective endurance of the RAID was (10 - 2) * 72TB = 720TB.

8 Streams of 220Mb/s is 220/s, 13.2GB/minute, 792GB/hour, 19TB/day. So about 38 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> These estimates seem a bit exaggerated at this point. SSD is still lagging in terms of capacity, and in my household we only have a handful of devices using SSD. While it's become more widely-adopted for sure, HDD's are not "doomed" until SSD capacity goes up and prices plummet. Still too expensive for an SSD.

</comment><comment><USER59> Total cost of ownership is another issue:

> Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the > equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40 > to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good.

And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.

</comment><comment><USER59> Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.

</comment><comment><USER60> Also the noise of the HDDs is killing me. I have quite a silent rig (fiddling with music/audio in my spare time) and the most noisy thing was the HDD where my audio samples were. So I've moved everything to SSD and I'm looking for another 512GB to add.

</comment><comment><USER61> I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've gone up in price.

<comment><USER62> For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the same... repeat

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.

</comment><comment><USER64> I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends visually.

Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve parity that soon. Here's hoping though.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?

<comment><USER66> SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives-- which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems.

edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd- data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data- retention)

<comment><USER67> Do you have a source for this? Just curious.

<comment><USER68> [https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24](https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24)

<comment><USER69> The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This is the first time ever that GRE test-taking declined during an economic downturn. - <AUTHOR> http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/08/gre

<comment><USER2> Observations from the article:

\- Test-taking levels declined to below 2007 levels, but are still above 2006 levels

\- GMAT levels are still rising.

\- China's test-taking is still rising; India's fell to between 2006 and 2007 levels.

\- GRE test-taking has been sharply rising since 2004, when the credit bubble was in full swing.

So, was there also somewhat of a bubble for student loans, which is now deflating? Are GMAT-takers more ambitious in the face of an economic downturn, or just more likely to have already lost their jobs in 2008? Is immigration policy affecting China and India the same way, or is India's economy more vulnerable than China's?

<comment><USER3> Yea, I think most people are a little late to the game, we have been in a resesion for over a year and plenty of people noticed. What I found most intresting was:

"One of the largest changes in the GRE is the introduction of the Personal Potential Index, which ETS is adding to the GRE next year and that will allow students to have _people who know them_ rank their creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, organizational skills and ethics."

This does not seem like a good idea. It seems to test your ability to network and get people to lie vs any real skill set. Most companies and collages seem to have done away with personal references because of such issues and they want to add it to a standardized test?

<comment><USER2> Who says getting people to like you and lie for you isn't a real skill? ;)

ETS seems to be under pressure to do _something_ since they scrapped the latest revision of the GRE. Fortunately, colleges are still free to interpret an applicant's raw GRE results according to their own standards, including ignoring any new section that appears to be BS.</comment></comment></comment>


Hitting the High Notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html <comment><USER2> One thing seems to be missing from the data: where it always the same students who were faster on the assignments? Could be that student A good lucky with assignment 1 and student B got lucky with assignment 2, and they messed up the other assignment in turn.

Another possibility could be that the long hour students did all the actual hard work and the fast students simply got to copy their stuff. At least at my university, that is how most students dealt with the maths assignments.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite part here is the idea of using class projects as a controlled (if imperfect) measure of programmer productivity. However, am I missing something or is there a contradiction here:

"No points are deducted for bad style or lateness."

"...the penalties for being late are significant."

<comment><USER4> Perhaps non-point penalties?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An oldie but one of my top 10 favorite internet essays.

Whenever a prospect questions my rates, I give them a copy of this.

<comment><USER4> Does it work?

<comment><USER5> Does it get them to agree to my rate? Sometimes.

Does it end all negotiations of my rate? Always.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cyberspace - my new web browser for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://cyberspaceapp.com

<comment><USER2> This looks like an interesting app. However, the features that you have integrated are not unique or interesting enough for this app to gain a lot of attention.

If your intention is to create a niche app that solves a few problems, you've done a great job of that. The users who like your app will like it a lot.

If you are still in active development and would like to increase the number of people using your app, here are some things that might help:

1) Re-conceive both your self-hosted product page and the Apple App Store description. In short, you need to answer this question quickly and accurately: what makes your browser 100x better than any other browser out there? Currently, your "discover, read, share" sections are not compelling. Your App Store description is a little better with your quick point form feature list.

2) Your integration of Social Bookmarking is very interesting. I recently reviewed Delibar (<http://robisit.com/gl>). It is an app that saves bookmarks to Delicious or Pinboard. I concluded that the major flaw in this software was that it was limited to these two social bookmarking services. I think that you should integrate every single bookmarking and sharing service into your browser somehow. This is a powerful feature that is not currently being used in iOS apps properly.

3) I realize it's early - but listing real testimonials sells apps. Plain and simple, quotes such as, "I love this app, it changed my life" help people spend $2 on an App.

Without downloading your browser and testing it, it looks like you have an interesting product. The way that you have collected useful browsing add-ons and components into one iOS package might be useful. On the surface, your sales text isn't compelling and presents the biggest problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct - I intended to create a niche app and tried to integrate useful components into the users' workflow. Those who wish to use Cyberspace to replace his main browser might be disappointed by the lack of features compared to other alternate browsers.

1) It's interesting that you find the App Store description better, since the text are the same - on my product page, I just reorder them and put into different sections.

Cyberspace is a collection of tiny little features that add to the users' browsing experience, and indeed, I find it difficult to put them into words, trying to sell to the users.

2) I would love to hear about other social bookmarking services. I am only aware of Pinboard/Delicious and wish to add more to Cyberspace. Currently they're in the simple form of each site's mobile version, which I find suitable for a small screen/popover. In future version, I will add the ability to add your own service to Cyberspace.

3) That's a great idea.

I wonder if you want to give Cyberspace a spin. I'll send you a promo code right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Btw. this reminds me of an idea me and a friend had over lunch on how to take down Google, Facebook etc. An evil hacker could theoretically write a virus, that only does one thing: Block Ads. Or install an Ad-Blocker.

This could SERIOUSLY disrupt online business as we know it. Same thing would happen if the Cyberspace browser became the market leader. The creator would probably be bought out for whatever money he wants just so that ads get re- enabled for that browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I for one would be more than happy to be infected with that 'virus'.

I'm not totally against advertising though. I think it's the execution that fails — I really love those ads by The Deck and Fusion Ads. If only the web is without ugly ad banners, Flash ads and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just got it. I like the focus on working though a bunch of links. Currently for a site like hacker news I open a lot of tabs but I always have to switch back on opening the tab and it uses up a lot of memory loading them when I not actually going to read them yet.

iCab solves the first problem as it can auto background tab any links to a different domain. This is a actually smoother than the flow here: tap-hold- selecting is a slow operation I don't want to have to do it for every link on a page.

Instead I'd love a toggle that turns on add to queue as the default operation for the duration of that page. (This would be an improvement on the iCab option as the background loading is easy to forget about and then immediately becomes confusing.) The toggle should be a main button like the plus and would cease to apply if you navigate anywhere else or start going though your queue.

Another option would be certain pages always open in auto add to queue mode (eg set on the the bookmark). And some people might prefer add to instapaper as the default action etc.

EDIT: I actually really like this. Feels very smooth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. iCab Mobile is an amazing web browser, and I've learnt a lot from Alexander's blog (<http://icab.de/blog>)

I'll be sure to tweak the Reading queue feature to speed up the process. Stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ha, great. Ad-Blocking enabled by default and DuckDuckGo used for search. Good choices and good idea to differentiate your product from competition like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm not trying to compete with browsers like iCab (icab.de) in terms of feature sets - I just can't keep up with them. Cyberspace is my attempt to be an 'opinionated' web browser that integrates well with the user's work flow.

It may never replace your main web browser of choice, but it's really good at some frequent tasks - like checking out your Tumblr dashboard, Hacker News, etc.

<comment><USER5> > It may never replace your main web browser of choice, but it's really good > at some frequent tasks - like checking out your Tumblr dashboard, Hacker > News, etc.

That sounds like a niche that a lot of folks (including me) would like to see addressed. I like what I saw in the YT video and am planning on getting Cyberspace ASAP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good job on this one.

A few points. Some which have been hit already by prior posts, but I'd like to reiterate. Right now you're in marketing mode. So:

1\. The website really needs the focus right now. My first point of confusion was the image. Naturally, our eyes are going to navigate to that, but it doesn't tell me anything. I'm confused looking at it. What is this? Do I really have to read the blocks below it to figure out what it is? I've skimmed the titles, but I'm not interested in reading all that right now... (That's my train of thought)

I would throw in a simple script to cycle through some images. Include some text explaining some of the core features.

2\. What does this do that the other browsers don't? Some of this will be explained once point 1 is resolved. Past that, I would add more images + text below it.

Don't just tell me, show me. I might not have the time to read through a block of text. If you can describe epic in a picture, do it.

3\. The Icon. There are people who will simply refuse to buy an app because of the icon. Sad, but true. This is how people discover you. They will see a list of icons in their search and find the prettiest one to tap.

You need something simple, slick and polished. Right now I feel like it belongs on a childrens e-book.

4\. "You must be at least 17 years old" -- Really?

5\. Consistancy. Pet-peeve of mine, but why is your skin different between the iPhone/iPad version? The iPad skin is solid. I'd subclass those iPhone components and give it the same look-and-feel.

6\. I would definitely milk the social networking bit. I can't count how many times I've shared links and images from a page.

7\. 'firmware 3.2' should just probably be 'iOS 3.2 or later.'

All opinions of course. Take what you will. All in all, great work. I'm not sold primarily because the core browser does a good enough job, but I can be convinced.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) 2) 6) 7) Thanks. You're right on most points — the website, the copy, and the screenshots definitely need works. I'll have a screencast replace the current image asap.

3) The icon. Some people really like it, some hate it with a passion. I'll come up with a new (hopefully) better one.

4) That's Apple's requirements. All apps that pull data from the internet have to specify a 17-year-old age restriction. There's nothing I can do about that

5) I'm not sure about that. Both the iPad/iPhone version use default OS' skins (gray on iPad & blue on iPhone)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My new app Cyberspace has just been approved today - iTunes link: <http://bit.ly/getcyberspaceapp>. In one sentence, it is optimized specifically for the purpose of reading, discovering, and sharing. And it's pretty good at them.

Feature list: reading queue, access to Pinboard/Delicious bookmarks, DuckDuckGo as default search engine, ad blocking, Readability bookmarklet, text mode powered by Instapaper Mobilizer, share to different services, Pastebot & OmniFocus support, scratchpad with TextExpander support, etc.

<comment><USER7> Hope you don't mind -> just forwarded this to Mr Jobs. Will update as/when I hear back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I don't mind. Let me know if he gets back to you ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite tool for offline reading on the iPhone is actually another browser. Before I go on a flight, I load up HN, open up links to stories and comment pages I want in iCabMobile, which then saves them for offline reading. I've found it be more effective than Instapaper because I only need to load it once, and I end up reading a copy of the webpage itself, with all formatting, images, layout, etc.

If Cyberspace can support a similar feature, I would gladly purchase it, because iCabMobile's offline support isn't as well supported on the iPad.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I can't promise when to add offline support to Cyberspace, I can definitely say that it's on the roadmap I envisioned.

Edit: Have you tried Wikipanion? It's only for Wikipedia browsing, but its feature set is amazing. The offline support is very robust, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a nice app but please, please hire a real icon designer, it looks like a joke.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. Also, the screenshot on your homepage doesn't tell me much about your app (and the screen is out of date).

Granted most of the users that would find this app useful are power users, the teaser text on the site is probably more technical than it should be. Sentences like "There's no need to get out of your current context to check out a random link - just queue it to visit after you finish your current article" come to mind when I say that.

If you're interested I'd be more than happy to send you a couple other copyedit/text edits to that landing page. Just email me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, email's on the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple, pay attention. This thing rocks.

I love the integration with Readability and Instapaper.

<comment><USER7> Steve's now been informed. Will update if required.</comment></comment>


Boost your command line productivity with "fasd" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/clvv/fasd

<comment><USER2> This looks supremely useful. Anyone here using it?</comment>


Twitter Venn Diagram - <AUTHOR> http://www.neoformix.com/2008/TwitterVenn.html

<comment><USER2> Really neat stuff, thanks a lot for building this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wish I could take credit for it. The guy who runs the blog has a lot of cool data visualization work.</comment></comment>


Polyglot Notebook-style development environment for large and complex datasets - <AUTHOR> http://beakernotebook.com/?foo

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool. I am curious what the differences are between this and IPython Notebook... which has recently been renamed Jupyter and now supports kernels running different languages.

<comment><USER3> Beaker supports multiple languages at the same time in the same notebook, and the code can communicate. You can set a variable in one language, and read it in another language, and it just works, magically.</comment></comment>


Nokia buys Symbian, turns software over to Symbian Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/24/nokia-buys-symbian/ <comment><USER2> I love reading stuff like this.

"Okay we're going to acquire you then immediately release all the IP we just bought to a NP to turn it into OSS"

Of course it's a smart move for Nokia and they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but at least it shows they're not, well, _stupid_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, Nokia learns fast :D I said, in the tread about open source developers who need to be reeducated, that Nokia is the one which needs to be reeducated and they were smart enough to do it. Cool. Imagine apple doing that :D

<comment><USER4> imho top management at nokia still have the same position. for me, this is just PR, they're still control freaks

<comment><USER3> How many companies open source their products out of good will? Motives are not that important, results are. I'm curious about the results and don't care about the motives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Nokia getting cold feet from all this excitement about Android and other open source mobile phone platforms? RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market, which, as far as I know, is pretty much the only part of the mobile phone market that's expanding in the developed world.

This move kind of puts into perspective their recent comments about how the mobile phone industry works differently from the open source world. Doesn't look like they have much confidence that that will be true for much longer.

<comment><USER6> _"RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market"_

That's a bit silly. As of Q4 2007 Nokia has 52.9% of market share for smartphones, part of the 65% for Symbian. RIM has 11.4% and Apple has 6.5% (impressive for only a year after launch). See <http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm>

<comment><USER7> They have a 6,5% share in Q4 and not overall, basically all those numbers out there only mention quarters and not overall market shares and that's very misleading. I have seen this on Techcrunch and many other blogs, where they put out 20% market share for the iPhone but if you consider there to be some 300 Mio. smartphones out there you get the real numbers ;).

<comment><USER8> Could you clarify please?

<comment><USER7> Apple sold 6 Mio. iPhones till June and the whole smartphone market is about 300 mio. phones, that's 2%.

The percentages mentioned on Techcrunch and all the other blogs mention selling figures per quarter. e.g. 35,522,360 smartphones sold in Q4 and 2,320,840 iPhones that means only 6,5% in this quarter and not in the whole market. I think it was 26% in Q1 2008 and 19% in Q2 2008 but as you see their market share is still only approximately 2% of all smartphones.

<comment><USER6> Are those US or global figures?

<comment><USER7> 26% and 20% were US figures, that was a little mixed up I think - sorry. The rest was global.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, at this point, Nokia has invested time, money, and/or developers in the following platforms:

Mimeo (Linux, Gtk+ shell) Qtopia (Linux, Qt shell) Symbian (Symbian kernel and shell)

Tell me again how this looks like a reasonable strategy? If I'm a smartphone application developer, which platform(s) am I going to target? The _three_ incompatible APIs supported by Nokia, or the three APIs which will get me onto every other major device on the planet: Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Mobile Cocoa?

</comment><comment><USER10> It may be too little too late. Symbian is dead on the smartphone right now, but Nokia's iron grip on the mobile phone market is going nowhere. It will need a complete tear-down and rebuild, and quick, to be effective.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was shocked to see that DoCoMo (Japan's dominant mobile telephony provider) is contributing to this effort. They are infamously proprietary.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's good to see a British technology doing so well, when just about everything else has been Americanised.

<comment><USER10> Finnish?

<comment><USER12> Symbian is a spin-off off Psion, a British company founded by Brit Potter.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does it matter which deep learning framework I use? - <AUTHOR> On one hand I fully understand there are differences in language and specific features available depending on framework out there.
On the other hand, if a framework "correctly" implements the underlying statistical theory/principals of deep learning, shouldn't I get the same results regardless of whichever framework I use?
If not, how would I know which framework produces "more correct" interpretations of the underlying data? <comment><USER2> It all depends on what your goals are. If you just want to train a neural network on a dataset you have and you aren't all that interested in going into the details of how the NN works or is trained, Keras is fine. It has a nice high-level interface and the backend is either in Theano or Tensorflow (your choice).

If your problem is more complicated and you want to use some unique architecture, you'll have to use one of the more low-level frameworks. I would recommend Tensorflow just on the basis of its popularity (you're more likely to find people who have run into the some problems as you). But Theano, Torch, and MXNet are probably pretty much equivalent in terms of speed and ease of use. I hear Caffe has a steeper learning curve.

If you're really doing something fancy, then you'll have to look into more detail. Torch and MXNet have the advantage that you can adaptively change your computation graph based on the data, but you'd probably have to be pretty far into deep learning research before something like that is useful. Tensorflow Fold does something similar, but I'm not sure how well integrated it is with the rest of Tensorflow (I've never used it).

You might also take a look at this:

[https://github.com/zer0n/deepframeworks](https://github.com/zer0n/deepframeworks)

It's a little out of date now, but it'll get you started.

Some of these frameworks are more general than others (e.g., Tensorflow is more general than Keras), so you can specify architectures in some that you can't in others. But as long as you can specify the architecture in a particular framework, you'll be able to get a working model. Your choice of framework just comes down to whatever one is easiest to work with for the problem at hand.

<comment><USER3> For my particular case (OCR for limited set of strings) I found using caffe much easier than tensorflow (even when using tf-learn).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As with most programming questions, the answer is a combination of yes and no, and that depends on the level of abstraction provided by the framework.

I started off using Caffe/Torch and currently use mostly Keras for most of my deep learning related experiments. With a more base level framework, I actually could tinker with different moving components to understand why they are used as they are, while with a higher level abstraction, I can concentrate on the problem at hand, knowing that most basic abstractions (or building blocks) are well developed already and have more or less been battle tested by people far smarter than me.

And of course, when it comes to pure speed numbers and architecture for scaling/deployment, these frameworks do vary among themselves: [https://github.com/zer0n/deepframeworks/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/zer0n/deepframeworks/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER5> > On the other hand, if a framework "correctly" implements the underlying > statistical theory/principals of deep learning, shouldn't I get the same > results regardless of whichever framework I use?

That is about right provided that 1) you use the same initial values and hyper-parameters, and 2) you can implement the same network with all frameworks. Issue 2) is complicated. Some networks are easy to implement in one framework can be hard or even impossible in another framework. Here "hard" can mean two opposite things: lack of flexibility (which disallows you to construct a certain topology) or excessive flexibility in the framework (which takes too many steps and care to construct a topology). Which framework to use depends on your goal and skill level. For starters, keras is usually easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> Might want to look for video to Feb 22 lecture comparing caffe, theano, torch, TF: [http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). It was taken down from youtube because no closed captions but i'm sure it's archived multiple places

<comment><USER7> What? Youtube requires you to add captions manually, or the video is taken down? That's brutal! I thought YT had automatic captioning. Wow, lame.

<comment><USER8> No.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard- and-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued- over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html)

So they took the easy way out and removed the videos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's an in depth answer: [https://www.svds.com/getting-started-deep- learning/](https://www.svds.com/getting-started-deep-learning/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. While I am on Java, I know Python seems to rule the deep learning space.

<comment><USER10> Hi: VERY biased author of [http://deeplearning4j.org](http://deeplearning4j.org) here.

One path we recommend java developers take who are new to deep learning is to take the fast.ai class: [http://course.fast.ai](http://course.fast.ai)

From there, map what you learn to our model import in keras: [https://deeplearning4j.org/model-import- keras](https://deeplearning4j.org/model-import-keras)

That will more or less get you up and running.

We also have my oreilly book out for early release: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035343.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035343.do)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was using Keras pretty heavily, but I have switched over to fully using TensorFlow. Once you build a decent library of boiler plate, Tensorflow becomes very usable. Packages like prettytensor may even surpass Keras in terms of usability. Also I found the Keras documentation to be quite lacking, and ended up reading the source code much more often than I would like to.

I ended up bumping into the edges of the Keras API too much, and coming up with hacky type solutions to do things that are actually quite simple if you just do them in TensorFlow yourself.

Theano and Torch are also great options, but I think I will be sticking with TensorFlow, simply because I trust that Google will be putting solid effort behind it for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER12> It does not matter, and there's not a lot to get wrong in deep learning.

The math involved is pretty simple, in terms of the calculations that have to be performed.

Where frameworks differ is in things like speed and ease of use. Use the one that is the easiest for you. Tensorflow is certainly going to be the most popular for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am learning now TensorFlow and I have no knowledge of the other possible frameworks.

What surprise me the most is that, at least tf, is almost declarative as framework.

I needed to add some random noise to a point in a multidimensional space so to generate other n points, close to first one.

In python I would loop through n, each time I would add some noise to the initial point and then I would push it into a list or whatever structure, a list compression.

In tf I am "stacking" n times the original point so to obtain n times that same point, then I am generating n random noise and finally I am adding the two.

The second solution more elegant in my opinion but require an important mental shift.

If the other frameworks are somehow similar at tf your biggest hurdle will be this kind of mental shift, just pick one.

</comment><comment><USER14> In many frameworks the low level mathematics are delegated to the installed implementation of BLAS[1] anyway, so I'd expect most of the really popular frameworks to get the same answers from that perspective. Other than that, my feeling is that if you stick to the well known / popular frameworks, you should be fine. If any one of them had a glaring deficiency, I'm pretty sure it would have been noted and widely disseminated by now.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> there are few things you need to consider.

first is language. need to choose a familiar language.

second is feature set. they don't implement the same set of operators. but if you only want to use the common ones, most frameworks should have them.

the third is their ability to train in parallel. for example, does a framework support multiple machines? or just single machine, multiple gpus? Performance is also a factor. Do they support simd/gpu? do they generate intermittent code and compile it into cpp/cuda? or they just call into gpu libraries? Do you want to support mobile devices?

the fourth difference is the level of abstraction. if a framework is very low level, users need to understand many fundamentals of deep learning. but on the other hand, if you want to extend the framework to add new operators, a low level framework is easier to hack.

a high level framework lets you to write less code, but it hides details and makes it harder to hack.

the last thing that can be considered is the difference between dynamic/static framework. dynet and chainer and tensorflow with something called "fold" are dynamic frameworks. I was told they are more flexible. but I don't understand the details.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on your goal. Ultimately, the three tenets are flexibility, speed and speed of development. All frameworks make tradeoffs between them. Researchers use slower (in both senses) frameworks to implement weird new ideas that require the flexibility while engineers typically use faster (in both senses) frameworks that allow them to have a performant and reliable model for production deployment.

</comment><comment><USER17> A year ago it looked like Tensorflow might dominate, but most papers I read still publish their code in Caffe, so we've done a lot more with Caffe than Tensorflow.

Our own work calls cudnn/cublas directly because we're C++ programmers and its just more convenient for our use case.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's like any framework. You probably want to choose based on popularity (which equates to Stack Overflow articles explaining common pitfalls..) and a programming language you already know.

</comment><comment><USER19> Try using keras.io that way you can have an abstraction on top of tensorflow, theano, etc</comment>


Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success - <AUTHOR> http://hbr.org/2011/04/why-leaders-dont-learn-from-success/ar/1 <comment><AUTHOR> From the article, "The annals of business history are full of tales of companies that once dominated their industries but fell into decline. The usual reasons offered—staying too close to existing customers, a myopic focus on short-term financial performance, and an inability to adapt business models to disruptive innovation—don't fully explain how the leaders who had steered these firms to greatness lost their touch."</comment>


Strange "paint disease" is putting Georgia O'Keeffe paintings at risk - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/scientists-develop-new-tool-to-study-acne-in-georgia-okeefe-paintings/ <comment><USER2> Sateen Dura-Luxe - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabo_Karabekian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabo_Karabekian)</comment>


Bird is a new motion control system for all smart devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/bird-motion-control-gadget <comment><USER2> Not to detract from any technical achievement, but I don't think a solution that requires you to wear a device on your finger is ever going to reach mass- market acceptance.

Maybe niche (industrial?) use cases? (And even then I'm skeptical).

Also, to me, the demo looked simulated.

<comment><USER3> It worked for marriage in many cultures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Motion control" means something else.

<comment><USER5> Motion control: What a difference an 'er' makes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control) eg. [https://github.com/synthetos/TinyG](https://github.com/synthetos/TinyG)

Motion controller: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_controller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_controller) eg. [http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/](http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/)</comment></comment>


Does technology really empower us? Almost. - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sentienhq.com/does-technology-really-empower-us/ <comment><AUTHOR> Technology develops rapidly in a constant effort to meet our demands, but there has always been a gap between humans and technology.</comment>


Boeing Flies on 99% Ada (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.adaic.com/projects/atwork/boeing.html <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion in 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250646)

</comment><comment><USER2> I once spoke to a real oldtimer it consultant and he claimed(this was 20 years ago almost) all code related to aviation, including airports' systems are written in ada because of its resilience (he actually said it's impossible to write bugs in it)

</comment><comment><USER3> The first professional Easter egg I saw was 0xadabad sitting in unused memory in a Boeing device. So not everyone there is a fan.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ada was the language our University decided to teach for BSc Computer Science.

Once you learn to code in Ada - every other language looks like a death trap. To say it is unforgiving is and understatement. The huge benefit of this is that you learn to do things "The Right Way TM" (because that is literally the only way Ada would allow you to do something - by the book GoF style)

Anyway fast forward to graduation at a time when PHP was ruling the web - imagine going into a job and saying "Well I can do that with a CGI-Bin I will write in Ada", I literally got laughed out of the room.

TLDR - Great language for airplanes / real time systems - but maybe uni should have taught us something to help us get a real world job (not at Boeing) as our main language!

<comment><USER5> > because that is literally the only way Ada would allow you to do something - > by the book GoF style

Ada is a very flexible language and the first versions didn't even support OOP so I will hasard that there was more than one way to do what you wanted. It's actually often used like C but with a proper type system.

Going from Ada to early PHP seems like an easy step to me. Going from PHP to Ada on the other hand would require learning quite lot of new concepts so it doesn't sound like a terrible choice for a first language to me.

<comment><USER4> I think the last version we used was Ada95. I definitely wasn't saying it was a terrible first language to learn with - job prospects however - not so good!

And yes the transition from Ada to PHP was easy - agree that the other way around would be painful - it's very difficult to un-learn something!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Ada also used for self-driving cars? If not, why not, given the security implications?

<comment><USER7> NVIDIA is starting to use Ada and SPARK for their autonomous vehicle products: [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure- auto...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure-autonomous- driving/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Curious thought, does it still?

<comment><USER9> Definitely not in everything they build that flies, nor do all of their current subsystem vendors. Very sadly, one of the comments from the 2014 thread cited above is right - C is in heavy use with such usage growing.</comment></comment>


OpenSSH 8.3 was released on 2020-05-27 - <AUTHOR> https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-8.3 <comment><USER2> One interesting thing is that it announces that ssh-rsa will be disabled due to price drop of SHA-1 collision attacks (~50k$).</comment>


Ask HN: Single Facebook share button versus multiple share options? - <AUTHOR>

I remember reading a data based blog entry about how the AddThis widget isn't very usable design. I never use the AddThis widget and it seems obvious to me that being able to have so many different choices for sharing is just too much. Can anyone find me a blog post about someone that has A/B tested AddThis versus a single Facebook share/like or Reddit button?<p>Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Also I submitted this a few minutes ago and it was auto-dead'ed... AddThis is a banned keyword for titles?</comment>


Map Shows Where Sea Level Rise Will Drown American Cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/10/map-shows-sea-level-rise-will-drown-american-cities/ <comment><USER2> _For example, when the global atmospheric CO2 level reaches 930 gigatons, Boston will be due for about 9 feet of sea level rise. That's enough water to cover 25 percent of the city during high tide._

I know that is not insignificant, but these fears of sea level rise always sound to me like people expect entire states to go under water or something. This map actually suggests to me that a lot of this can be coped with.

But I mostly walk everywhere, so I don't have a guilty conscience. I gave up my car years ago.

<comment><USER3> Florida has the lowest highest point, at 345 feet. If all of the ice in Antarctica melts, the sea level will rise "only" 200 feet. So even in the most dire situation, entire US states will not go completely under water. That said, almost the entire rest of the state would be underwater should that happen.

However, ~1/5 of FL will be underwater, according to the 'unchecked pollution' map, which is nothing to sneeze at.

> a lot of this can be coped with

Well, yes. Humans will likely survive as a species. As the article says:

> Existential nihilists however, can relax: Nobody's doomed yet. Future > Americans are going to deal with the flooded basements and foregone > civilization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How hard would it be to stick a sufficient amount of dust in the atmosphere to give us a better handle on controlling the climate?

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Solar_radi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Solar_radiation_management)

A full nuclear exchange is predicted to lower the temperature by about 20 °C. That depends on 7 billion tons of dust.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. So although that particular mechanism is undesirable it seems like cancelling out a couple of degrees of warming is well within our capabilities.

<comment><USER3> Even if you are comfortable experimenting with the entire Earth's biosphere, global warming is only one aspect of increased carbon emissions. As that climate engineering page points out:

> These methods would not reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the > atmosphere, and thus would not seek to address problems such as the ocean > acidification caused by CO2.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Storage in DNA Becomes a Reality - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2013/01/24/data-storage-in-dna-becomes-a-reality

<comment><USER2> isn't this dangerous for the human species?

<comment><USER3> How so?</comment></comment>


Lucy McHugh murder suspect jailed for not revealing Facebook password - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/31/lucy-mchugh-suspect-jailed-not-revealing-facebook-password <comment><USER2> I don't entirely understand how these sort of cases pass the scrutiny of the 5th amendment. The founding fathers made it very clear that you cannot imprison people until they agree to admit their guilt, but that is precisely what we're doing now a days. You, as in the alleged offender, are not obligated to prove your innocence - it is the burden of the state to prove your guilt.

If we're so quick to ignore the spirit of laws previously passed then it undermines the value of the law itself. What relevance is there of decision made today, if they might simply be ignored tomorrow?</comment>


I've got something stuck in a hole and how I got it out. - <AUTHOR> http://www.surf-the-edge.com/2011/02/10/ive-got-something-stuck-in-a-hole-and-how-i-got-it-out/

<comment><USER2> How about a drinking straw, perhaps one off a child's drink carton (I used one to make a hinge part for a NDS recently), to pop the spring and then a small magnetic screwdriver poked through the straw (or gravity)?

Oh, must go and try this ...</comment>


TLDR: Submerged continent found in the Indian ocean - <AUTHOR> http://www.scilogs.com/allotrope/tldr-submerged-continent-found-in-the-indian-ocean/

<comment><USER2> Flagged as blog spam. Entire post is literally three sentences long and links to a _much_ better article from the journal Nature: [http://www.nature.com/news/long-lost-continent-found- under-t...](http://www.nature.com/news/long-lost-continent-found-under-the- indian-ocean-1.12487)

See also other "lost" "continents": Zealandia [0] in the Pacific (near New Zealand, obviously), Sundaland [1] near the Malay islands, and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian west of Australia [2]. Interesting how these three are all very close to one another.

0: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia_(continent)>

1: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland>

2: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Plateau>

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello from Mauritius ! Any questions welcome.

</comment><comment><USER4> Give the time frame (600 million to 2 billion years since it sank) are there likely to be interesting fossils on the sea bed? What about oil?

</comment><comment><USER5> We need more of these tl;dr, circa(<http://cir.ca/>) style news content</comment>


Ask HN: Should I stay on board? - <AUTHOR>

Recently, I was the lead developer on a project with a friend.
That friend has now taken the necessary steps to make it into a profitable company.
He's making great strides in his plan (which was the plan all along) and has come back to me with possibly good news. I'm beginning to get questions like what sort of hardware it will take to keep this thing going strong and what positions need to be filled and all that jazz.
I am very fast approaching territory that I have no clue about and tbh it's freaking me the hell out. Should I research the hell out what it would take to be someones boss or should I kind of step down and hope that I'm kept on board when someone who knows more than me steps up?
I know this is one of those Lead, Follow, or get out of the way situations and I'd like to lead but I have no idea what I'm doing.
And the only reason I'm asking HN instead of a psychiatrist or my parents is because I know this place has an extensive collection of people who have more than likely gone through the same thing hopefully. <comment><USER2> Keep on with it. If you're starting at a business you have to be learning and experimenting to succeed at it - regardless of whether the topic's code, infrastructure, employees, sales, etc. No founder is perfect at everything, and some failure is inevitable, but if you don't even try, you'll just be left wondering what might have been.

If you and your friend are serious, have a big discussion where you work out the explicit roles and specialties you're each covering. "I don't know" is not something to hide. Where something is unknown, schedule time to research it and determine if the best way to proceed is "book learning," buying advice, hiring the skillset, sheer trial and error, or something else. As long as you keep trying to tackle the unknowns, the business will progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> Scaling isn't necessarily that hard, especially depending on budget. Can you explain more?

Ideally nobody should be in a job that is completely comfortable.

<comment><USER4> > Ideally nobody should be in a job that is completely comfortable.

Because that means you've hired too many people?

<comment><USER5> I'd say, because you aren't stretching yourself and growing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in a similar-ish situation here.

I brought a friend onto an idea when it was in the very formative "barely an idea" stages. The initial idea was of the "good enough to try, but not enough to build an empire" variety.

He rapidly took the idea to a level where I think it might be an empire, but also a level where I can't really contribute. Its basically the idea done right, but more advanced than I can handle (he's a better mathematician and a better programmer than I) and I can't help but thing "well shit, maybe I should be just letting him do it on his own" (he can, and its not clear that having a second hand would be helpful (or worth it) in this venture).

I'm still sort of scared to have the conversation, but I've got to do it soon.

Anyone have any advice?

<comment><USER7> There is _always_ stuff to do. If he's doing hardcore stuff, then perhaps there's UI work or design work. What's going to happen when he's done? Is there a rollout plan?

If your gut's telling you to talk to him about it, don't let your lack of confidence get in the way of making it happen. He probably has been hesitant to ask for help on certain matters, afraid it would offend you. The real tragedy would be if you never talk about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What do you want to do/be for this company? If the company is heading in the direction of building a head count and there's an opportunity for being a leader, does that even interest you? If you want it, don't be afraid that you don't know how to do it yet, this could be the opportunity to grow as the company grows.

</comment><comment><USER9> what exactly is your official position with this project? co-founder? paid employee? etc..

<comment><AUTHOR> a friend came to me with an idea and i turned it into the first working prototype. unpaid but the work was definitely fun. i could be considered a co- founder but im just the guy who made it work.

<comment><USER9> i'd talk to your friend about this first, honestly. don't put the cart before the horse.

perhaps he considers it his business and considers you a friend who is doing him a favor before he hires someone serious. perhaps he's just tapping you for ideas/help and not planning on compensating you. etc..

define what your role is and what it will be as this project turns into a profitable company. THEN decide if you're ready/willing/able to fill that role.</comment></comment></comment>


Intemperate Planet: How Natural Systems Magnify the Effects of Global Warming - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/intemperate-planet-how-natural-systems-magnify-the-effects-of-global-warming

<comment><USER2> Oh boy, here we go again. Seriously, I even thought this had some potential. Obviously, as stated in the article, "Earth has natural processes that absorb and hold onto heat to counteract that cooling effect". However, the author slides to the wrong side. Without what has been called "greenhouse effect" (which should always be used inside quotation marks) to -387ºF at night. But the "blanket" that covers Earth is the atmosphere as a whole, regardless of its chemical composition.

Those "positive feedback loops" and "runaway greenhouse effect", such are "big words" they like to use, are speculation from (far from perfect) computer models (video-games). It is even admitted they know nothing about clouds.

What surprises me is that the author has the answer: "our carbon dioxide emissions wouldn't be anything to worry about".

One thing they are right, though, even though they interpret it wrong at some points, it's the water, stupid. (Please, bear in mind this is an expression, and I'm using it as such, not to offend anyone).

The temperature regulator power of water lies in its latent heat property, which, for water, is one of the highest there is for evaporation.

Honestly, I do not know how many times this has to be repeated, and this alone would put all this "global warming by CO2" nonsense off: the irradiative heat from "thermal (infrared) affected molecules" (I believe the term "greenhouse gases", apart from conceptually wrong, nowadays is misleading) cannot cause extra heating of the system. That would mean "doubling" the solar energy, thus suggesting "creation of energy", therefore implying in something like "infinite energy on a loop". It is like plugging those electric extension powers in itself, or saying that all energy necessary for anything is a candle. It is to say one can melt an iron structure with a candle. Besides, energy always flows from a warmer object towards a colder object.

It is that supply of water (almost 3/4 of the planet's surface) that allows for optimal life conditions on this planet. And it is water that "regulates" weather, almost like a thermostat.

The reflection/absorption argument is also lame. There ain't much solar power arriving at the poles anyway for its reflection/absorption to be of significance. Besides, it is only the visible light that is reflected.

When snow melts, it is because it is getting hotter anyway (winter to spring to summer). However, when snow is falling it actually gets warmer because of the release of energy in the process. It is water that is absorbing and holding most of the heating the Sun throws at us, thankfully. Without all that water and the atmosphere as well we would be frozen at -387ºF at night.

For those still insisting about the power of CO2, I invite them to spend a night in a dry desert. There ain't enough CO2 in the galaxy to make you warm, but be my guest.</comment>


Airpark - airbnb trying out parking - <AUTHOR> http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/165953

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool idea. Much less to worry about in terms of damages.</comment>


Warp, New VPN Service from CloudFlare - <AUTHOR> https://warp.plus/9XgWT <comment><USER2> Prior post - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070321)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. Somehow I've missed that.

<comment><USER3> Or, more likely, you just wanted to get some referral bonus.</comment></comment></comment>


Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow - <AUTHOR> https://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/ <comment><USER2> And, in general, it would be better if there were fewer dotfiles in $HOME.

Please application developers, follow the XDG Base Directory spec (or the equivalent in Windows and Mac OS X).

See [https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir- spec/basedir-...](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir- spec-latest.html) and [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_supp...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_support)

<comment><USER3> And the best is if programs don't need any config files.

<comment><USER4> How else would you save state between program runs? Config files don't preclude the application from having the ability to modify config from within the application. Not having config files (or some equivalent) does preclude saving state. Do you think it would be better to save state to a database or binary state file? I do not think it would be better. I prefer YAML config for most everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "dotfiles managers" are over-engineered waste of time. You only need git. Create ~/.gitignore with a single line:

        *

git tracks modifications to your dotfiles. And on the rare occasion that you need to add a new file, just force-add it:

        git add -f ~/.foorc

If you need a script to "install" your dotfiles, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER6> I tried this but git uses ~/.git for any subdirectory of $HOME. For example, if you type `git add .` while in ~/code/some-project, you will add it to your dotfiles repository. It's easy to undo but still kind of annoying.

<comment><USER5> > For example, if you type `git add .` while in ~/code/some-project, you will > add it to your dotfiles repository.

If your project has its own .git directory, no, it won't add to ~/.git.

<comment><USER6> You're right. I forgot to mention that this only happens if you haven't initiated a new git repository in the directory you're working in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've found Stow to be outstanding. When I initially started actually maintaining my _dotfiles_ properly I looked at what others were doing based on public repositories and most at the time were either not using any sort of management tool (manual symlinking as needed) or using something written in a interpreted language that couldn't be assumed to be on a diverse range of Unix-like systems in default installations (e.g. Ruby, Python, Node.js, etc...).

The problem was I wanted something I could easily install on effectively any system, including live servers, without needing to install dependencies or otherwise change the underlying global system state. Stow manages to solve this beautifully as pretty much all Unix-like systems do have a Perl interpreter and Stow has no unusual dependencies beyond the core runtime. That, and it can be included in your _dotfiles_ collection itself, so you can literally " _stow stow_ " to " _bootstrap_ " itself and then carry along!

If anyone's interested you can find my _dotfiles_ below which may be nice as reference material if you're wanting to "stow-ify" your _dotfiles_. I've also written some Bash scripts to automatically stow the available components on a given system ( _dot-manage_ ) and easily fetch updates from an upstream repository, re-run component detection and update Vim bundles via Vundle ( _dot-update_ ). There's also a metadata-esque system which augments detection of which components are available for where simply checking if a binary named after the relevant folder exists on the system is insufficient (e.g. for libraries like _readline_ ).

[https://github.com/ralish/dotfiles](https://github.com/ralish/dotfiles)

<comment><USER8> You may want go take a look at Gobolinux. Its a distro that applies a similar system to package management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like to use rcm[1] for this.

Works very well for keeping my configuration synced between multiple machines (via git).

[1] [https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm](https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been managing my dotfiles with `stow` for the past ~2 years. It's super easy, and keeps things clean. `stow` will also guard against non-symlinks getting stomped on.

My `update.sh` script does un-and-re-`stow`ing:

[https://github.com/peterhajas/dotfiles](https://github.com/peterhajas/dotfiles)

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh god, yes! Finally! I'm sick of hundreds of dotfiles forgotten in remote places of my filesystem, organized via a github repo and deployed with a handcrafted (by a friend) Rakefile.

The only change I'd make is to deploy by copying (and not by symlinking).

<comment><USER9> > The only change I'd make is to deploy by copying (and not by symlinking).

But then you lose any changes you make to those files...

<comment><USER12> I consider that a feature. When a change has proven to be good enough I copy it into my repository. I prefer to rsync the files though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen many people accidentally upload secret keys to external repos because of things like this.

I didn't see it in what I read (honestly I just breezed through it), does this prevent secret keys from being uploaded accidentally?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm quite fond of thoughtbot's rcm.

[https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm](https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm)

</comment><comment><USER15> The solution I eventually came to appreciate is to simply make your home directory a git repository.

<comment> Pirate-of-SV Do you remove all files from the directory before cloning or have you found some other way to get around "fatal: destination path '.' already exists and is not an empty directory."?

<comment><USER15>
        git init
        git remote add origin ...
        git fetch origin
        git checkout -t origin/master

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been using the "per-application" method (as the article calls it) for about 4 years now, and it's been working fantastically.

Now if I could only figure out an equally good method for managing my ssh keys...

A small tip for those working on locked-down systems: if you can't install GNU Stow, you can use XStow[1] instead. It is a C++ version of Stow (instead of Perl). It is very easy to build and has very few (if any) dependencies.

[1]: [http://xstow.sourceforge.net](http://xstow.sourceforge.net)

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess the automatic linking is nice, but I don't really see a need to switch vim configurations that often. What am I missing?

<comment><USER18> "The problem was always with setting them up on new machine and update it when I need to."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another happy stow user reporting in. Helps me a lot in managing my dotfiles across machines, and symlinking has been a huge improvement over rsync. Also, stow raises an error if it cannot symlink to the file (for eg, if a file/directory exists there with the same name somewhere in the path), so it is always non-destructive.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use yadm[1]. I don't have extensive experience with others, but I liked the idea of having my dotfiles in their original place, rather than inside a dedicated dotfiles folder.

[1] [https://github.com/TheLocehiliosan/yadm](https://github.com/TheLocehiliosan/yadm)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm using stow to manage my dotfiles since about a year, and it works pretty well. I tried things like homesick (or homeshick), but they were well overengineered and too complex for me.

It also works great when you create git submodules for your external dependencies and manage installing them via stow.

<comment> awinter-py homesick is such a good name though

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use a detached work tree approach to version my dotfiles without having to symlink or install them, see [http://enrico.spinielli.net/dotfiles/](http://enrico.spinielli.net/dotfiles/) for details.

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh](https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I use ansible to manage my dotfiles, configurations, cli and gui tools on OS X. [https://github.com/elnappo/dotfiles](https://github.com/elnappo/dotfiles)

</comment><comment><USER25> I was giving stow a try and was confused why it wasn't symlinking .gitignore.

Turns out .gitignore is on the default ignore list. But you if you add a .stow-local-ignore file to the directory where your .gitignore is then it works.

</comment><comment><USER26> I gave it a go but stow seems to be ignoring files that start with a dot.

Uninstalled and stuck with my 5 line shell script.

</comment><comment><USER27> this is a good find, i sorely need this!

</comment><comment><USER28> [2003]

<comment><USER29> [2013]... it mentions GitHub...</comment></comment>


So far #macOS Mojave ships with Python 2.7.10 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/llanga/status/1004049256053764097 <comment><USER2> Hey everyone, tweet author here. This was posted in June. In the 2.5 months since that tweet Apple apparently did update Python on Mojave to 2.7.15.

Could an admin take this submission down or flag it?

Why this blew up just today is very surprising to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I found your thread while looking for more information on (the lack of) Python 3 on Mojave.

As a developer I'm annoyed with having to install third party packages to get access to Python 3. The software Apple ships is also code-signed, which is important to some organizations which relies on binary whitelisting (e.g. github.com/google/santa). Software from Homebrew or Anaconda are typically not code-signed.

I was hoping that perhaps bringing the old Python 2 interpreter up here could lead to more radars for the inclusions of a recent Python 3.x release in the base system.

<comment><USER3> No major Linux distro besides arch ships with 3 as it's base either. For app development 3 is good but the base platform ecosystems are way harder to move.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if you would agree to call them major distros but at least Fedora 23 (Nov, 2015) and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Apr, 2018) ships with Python 3 in their base.

<comment><USER3> Ah,I guessthis ledme to believe that I wasn't. I suppose a better phrasing might be that everything stop ships python as python 2 still.

httpss://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FinalizingFedoraSwitchtoPython3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That "system python" will be py2 for a long while to come (except on Arch and RHEL) isn't terribly surprising.

That they aren't shipping 2.7.15 is kind of egregious.

I ignore system python entirely and roll my own, but cluttering up the system with old code from day 1 isn't great.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a serious question, who relies on system tools (besides the OS itself)?

The concept of default installations of tools has always been awkward. Invariably, to create a stable system around your software you want to control versions so that you can have predictable results.

I find Nix very appealing (though haven't used it yet) in this regard. Similary, it's why we've started using Docker to package up all the dependencies we need around the software.

A question I have is: should Apple just say, this is a tool for the OS only, and expect users to install the dependencies they need? Maybe even support that by adopting something like the Nix package manager for common dependencies across applications?

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds about right, Apple doesn't put much effort in to keeping their open source command line tools up to date.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of [http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl- purge/](http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/)

Usually, there are alternatives to these former GPLv2, now GPL3 tools and I wonder why Apple just does not replace them.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps Apple wants them to wither and die. After all, they don't provide them on iOS, tvOS, etc. Letting Python die out brings it closer to iOS unification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's pretty bad. I don't think there is any binary compatibility that would be broken with having Python 3 as the standard one.

It took a long time for Red Hat and Canonical because a lot of the OS was written in Python 2.x, but Apple doesn't have that excuse.

<comment><USER10> Well, almost every single user who has written a Python 2 program, or program which uses Python 2 internally, would find their code broken in /usr/bin/python moved to Python 3.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple just stays on Python 2 forever. Apple already does some patching to their copy of python when they upgrade OS, and it would require a fairly small amount of manpower to keep Python 2 running forever.

<comment><USER11> It's funny how when it comes to the actual hardware, Apple is among the first to adopt and customers are often forced to buy dongles and new peripherals, but when it comes to installing a major version of Python that was released a decade ago this December, Apple is happy to not push people.

<comment><USER10> Because I imagine Apple sees value in pushing new hardware, but not in pushing Python 3.

<comment><USER9> I hope they made a lot of money from the dongle division.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My bug report about inclusion of Python 3 was closed as duplicate, with original still open. Same for request to update to 2.7.13 (at time of High Sierra beta). Didn't bother to submit new bug this year.

<comment><USER8> My bug to 'update from python 2 to 3' was duped to rdar://21398921 (which, based on the chronology of the numbers, would be around June 2015). Were both yours duped to the same?

<comment><USER12> Yes, mine was duped to the same bug as yours.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Curated List of Awesome Products Made by Female Founders - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/softvar/awesome-products-by-women <comment><USER2> Call me an MCP if you want but this ain't something that gets me fired up. I am more interested in awesome products regardless of the gender of the founder or software developer.

<comment><AUTHOR> True that. I too wanted to show my love towards awesome products. Female filter was fast to curate first :)</comment></comment>


Dual monitor "bolt on" laptop screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0V108S5365

<comment><USER2> It doesn't list the weight of the screen on there...

</comment><comment><USER3> It's ugly.</comment>


Ask HN: Registered agent for domain registrations? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any way to register a domain such as .mr which requires a local contact in Mauritania (e.g. a registered agent type service)?<p>"Registrant must have a physical presence within Mauritania. Registration form must be signed by the Administrative contact and the owner must be a company (foreign or local)." <comment><USER2> Yeah, check out <http://www.101domain.com/> (I am not affiliated). I used them to get a .sk domain where an registered agent was needed.</comment>