Google Calendar Unexpectedly Leaks Private Information - <AUTHOR> http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/01/another-google-privacy-flaw/ <comment><USER2> This article has pretty much the same content as my article from March, 2010: [http://lee-phillips.org/gcaldisaster/](http://lee-phillips.org/gcaldisaster/)

Even the titles are similar: this one's called "Another Google Privacy Flaw"; mine was called "Another Google Privacy Disaster Brewing". So people have been complaining about this since at least 2010, and Google by now has pretty firmly established that they don't care.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Lee,

Although I did search for information about this issue, I didn't come across your blog.

I'll update mine with a link to yours.

T

<comment><USER2> No worries - I didn't mean to imply that you copied me, but just to point out persistent this problem has been, and to underline the fact that Google doesn't consider it an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So the way to solve this is to create a note on my calendar with "Remind to complain about this to firstname.lastname@example.com firstname.lastname@example.com" ?

<comment> master-ruse-man What about we flood their calendar about this? ;)

<comment><USER4> [http://i3.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/012/132/tha...](http://i3.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/012/132/thatsthejoke.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Privacy, where it exists, creates impedance in Google's cash flow because it requires designing for some _n sigma_ tail where _n_ does not entail statistical significance and the case analysis must be very fine grained.

Google doesn't have a category labeled "private" information". It never has and creating one is not planned. Privacy is not amenable to computer science. It is a social concept not a technical one. The closest technical concern is security. It scales and so that is where Google devotes resources.

As far as Google is concerned: _All your bit are belong to us._

<comment><USER6> Do you have a source for this? I've worked on user data and privacy-related stuff (I work on Maps, not Calendar) and everyone involved took it extremely seriously. We sent PMs back to the drawing board more than once when we found edge cases with potential privacy issues.

<comment><USER5> Google's single identity policy is an obvious example.

Sharing that Google identity with other websites when that identity is logged into Google is a less obvious one.

Analytics, cookies, personalized search results, etc. take it to Google's very core.

Driving around collecting WiFi data, storing WiFi passwords, reading documents via Docs and email via Gmail, and just plain crawling the web don't embody any common language notion of privacy.

Instead security stands in for it. Two factor authentication for a Google account is an example. It keeps a person's account secure but does not enhance privacy because Google will still share and slice and analyze everything that can possibly be associated with that account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is one of the problems I see more and more often the last days:

Applications try to be extra-clever (more clever than their users) and think 2 steps further ... thus doing more than the users said.

So in my opinion, it is not only a privacy problem, but a problem of our "computing-" era. Applications get more and more clever, but in the effect they become extra-stupid, not doing what the user really wants, but doing what the programmer thought (or worse, some weird AI thought) could be right to do now.

I think, the reason is, that somehow applications must more and more show that they are "better" than just simple eMail, or just simple groupware or just a simple (you name it), as it existed before and as thousands exists as open source apps. The way it goes, is adding some "extra benefit" (same as in the food area) to the applications. But sometimes the extra benefit plainly backfires.

That's also the reason, I shiver when I think that the car industry wants cars that more and more take over control. That will become a big mess!

I also will reduce my usage of Google products, because it becomes more and more "you have to do it the Google-way" products and I must say, that e.g. Gmail has worsen it's user experience over time ...

<comment><USER8> > That's also the reason, I shiver when I think that the car industry wants > cars that more and more take over control. That will become a big mess!

It's only a matter of time before any traffic infraction anywhere results in an automatic debit from your bank account, and then Google lets everyone know, with a sad-face icon next to your name.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and people that insist steering their car themselves will be punished by public opinion. They will be treated nearly the same way as Muslim looking people in US airports directly after 9/11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Btw. ownCloud 6.0.1 was released yesterday: [http://owncloud.org/releases/Changelog](http://owncloud.org/releases/Changelog)

<comment><USER10> God I love the idea of ownCloud so much but secretly hope it's not written in PHP.

I run a wordpress site for 3 years, and one day a hacker took my site over with a bug from a plugin.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, that's proof that PHP is bad. And that all other frameworks in other languages don't have bugs that can be exploited.

<comment><USER12> (cough _yaml parser_ cough) ... indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The worst thing about things like this happening is the feeling of helplessness when you can't reach anyone in the company or when they just say "it's not a problem".

<comment><USER14> Or the company shill shows up and burns through four HN accounts trying to spread FUD.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk2](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk2)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk3](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk4](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ritikk4)

(Should I add the 5th link or wait for him to create that ID as well?)

<comment><USER15> What does "FUD" mean and how is it relevant here?

<comment><USER16> Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> this is a feature. it's actually pretty awesome for setting up quick meetings. It's a function of the "Quick add" feature that carries over into the title of the event: [https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/36604?hl=en](https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/36604?hl=en)

Edit: I am very familiar with Google's products, having helped many businesses move to Google Apps through the years. "Features" like this often surprise users and it is not unusual to get negative reactions. Normally, once you show someone how it works and explain that it isn't likely to change, they adapt.

<comment><USER18> Ugh, I understand that it can be useful for some people, but I find natural language parsing of calendar events intrusive and annoying.

99% of the time it ends up parsing a field incorrectly, and if I wanted to set a field it's on the form anyway, so why bother? In this case, why parse out an email address and send them an invite when there's an "invite" text box on the same page?

If the _only way_ to set the time, date and invite list was to have the subject line get parsed, it would be obvious that this sort of thing will occur.

Honestly, to me this is a solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER17> but you can create an event from the calendar interface prior to going into the event interface. from the calendar interface, it only gives you the option of creating a title. so i can put meet with firstname.lastname@example.com and create the event. that's it.

Google Calendar should TOTALLY notify you you are adding someone to the event and ask if you want to send an invite. Also, if you are in the events interface and add someone's email to the title, it should add that person to the guest list on the fly. It should do these things, but it doesn't. I think that is the root of the complaint, not the feature itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should the word "unexpectedly" in the title be changed to "predictably"?

<comment><USER20> I was thinking 'naturally'.

<comment><USER21> Makes perfect sense!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is not a "private information leak." It's expected behaviour. Entering information in that field to create a new event results in Google Calendar parsing your information as best as it can, to automatically set things like the date, time, event description and of course, the participants (the apparent privacy leak here.)

<comment><USER23> If you're aware of the feature, it's not a privacy leak. If you aren't, it could be very damaging.

It would have been nice if the first time the Calendar parsed and sent emails on behalf of a user, it would ask if this is what they wanted. It doesn't have to bug them ever again, but that's a single instance of training that would minimize confusion.

<comment><USER22> [https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/36604](https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/36604)

<comment><USER24> Except that says: 'Who: This should begin with 'with' followed by a list of email addresses; these are added to the guest list.'

'Email firstname.lastname@example.com' does _not_ match this spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm gradually stopping using all of google's services. One by one they either turn out to have "features" like this, or they "improve" them into being horrible. There isn't much left I use any more. And I used to like google a lot... Times change

</comment><comment><USER26> One annoying thing about this is that it allows spammers to automatically add events to your calendar.

<comment><USER27> So THAT'S how they've been doing it. For the past week I've been inundated with spam events on my Google Calendar, it's been winding me right up.

<comment><USER28> Theres an option in your settings for google calendar that is something along the lines of "Automatically add invitations to Calendar" that you can turn off, and I think it will fix that problem for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm going to take a stab here and say that "Automatically add invitations to my calendar" being set to yes is what allows you to be on the receiving end of this. Can someone try turning that setting off in the gear menu and repeating this?

It would at least stop spammers (and people on HN from inviting execs to reminders about this).

</comment><comment><USER30> >Google really needs to work harder at protecting the privacy of its users.

They would need to start protecting it first.

<comment><USER31> Google does work extremely hard trying to protect the privacy of its users. Yes, we might miss the boat sometimes but let's not make blanket statements like yours.

D: I work for Google.

<comment><USER32> Would you be so kind and provide your definition of "privacy"?

The first thing that comes to mind is how much information about users Google itself stores and processes. This happened earlier and faster than people learned and understood the consequences of.

The next thing would be how the real name policy can make it difficult to keep someones Youtube-habits separated from a gmail/g+ account.

For you, do these two concerns fall under the term "privacy", or how do you reconcile all of that with your claim "protect the privacy of the users"?

<comment><USER31> I am not looking for a debate here but your points are related to Google's algorithms analyzing user data. Google developers do not have access to that data and Google does not reveal data to anyone. Yes, I consider our handling of this data a success of our privacy engineers.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the answer. I understand that times have changed and that revealing that you're from Google is not as fun as it used to be.

The distinction you seem to be making between data that Google has and data that is "revealed to anyone" is misleading in my opinion. No matter who has the data, "privacy" is concerned.

Also I need to call you out on your blanket statements that Google developers have no access to that data (clearly, some would, as part of their jobs, also [1]), and that data is not revealed to anyone (seriously?). As of January 2014, this position is not defensible and you might have to face a more nuanced, and possibly inconvenient reality.

[http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats)

<comment><USER31> Thanks for understanding.

The reference you point out was a one-off event from 2010 though, and a lot of our systems and checks have developed in the subsequent years to prevent a recurrence.

I'll concede the point about my blanket statement especially when talking about NSA and Government espionage though. All I can say is Google does fight in courts against that. I wish I had a good way to stop spying completely. All we can do is continue to make our encryption stronger.

<comment><USER32> Additionally, when the dust settles and people figure out what's really going on in all those data-collection companies, we need clear regulations what kind of data may be collected, how it is used and when it must be deleted.

The data, properly analyzed, represents an immense power and has to be transparent and under democratic control. In the EU the first steps go into this direction already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This reminds me of the interesting security implementation in Netscape Calendar. Among the interesting security practices:

\- the server sends the (obscured) password to the client, so the client can check it

\- if you want to look at another person's calendar, the server will send you the person's entire calendar, with the 'public/private' flag of each entry. It's up to the client to decide whether to show the user each entry.

\- If you click on another person's private entry, the calendar data was copied to the clipboard. Paste it somewhere to view the details.

</comment><comment><USER34> I discovered this by accident some time ago as well but I've always appreciated the convenience - when I add an event using the Quick Add dialog, it's very useful for me to be able to say "Movie Night with firstname.lastname@example.com" and have it show up on Alice's calendar automatically. I use it all the time at work and at home and it saves me time from having to go to the dedicated event creation page to add people.

<comment><USER35> I don't think anyone is arguing the potential usefulness of the feature. It'd just be nice to know when its going to happen and have an alert box verifying that you actually wanted to add the user to the event. The alert box could even have an "Always do this" option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A good friend told me once: " the moment you enter info in an electronic device, you can assume it's public ".

It was in response to me getting a pic of him wearing red thongs (dont' ask), but the point stands in regards to Google, any email account, your PC, your phone, and everything else.

<comment><USER37> I worry about an overly defeatist point of view here. Just because the security situation is so bad right now does not mean that it is unavoidably so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Spammers gonna spam. Those around in the 90s should remember the usual email address obfuscation techniques.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've had bad experiences with this "feature" lately too - scammers can pop notifications into my phone simply by "inviting" me to events. I have no idea that anything is afoot until my phone pings me the notification.

</comment><comment><USER40> In a big-picture sense, it's only unexpected if one doesn't realize that privacy is inherently in conflict with their business model.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes, It actually adds an invite in my other calender (other email account) without confirming. Surely a privacy issue.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A quick note to say I've received an email from Google - the calendar team are treating this as a bug and are implementing a fix.

Hopefully it should make it a lot more obvious to users when a meeting invitation is about to be sent.

</comment><comment><USER42> My golden rule, never ever put any personal information on the web especially on google. If possible, don't even use your real name.

<comment><USER43> Is your last name Turhan, by any chance? ;)

(If you were being sarcastic, I rescind my comment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If this was any other company like Microsoft, Every one will enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER45> does it really count as unexpected at this point?

</comment><comment><USER46> when will it end?

</comment><comment><USER47> A couple of things:

That is expected behaviour, email address in reminders applies coordination. It's basically parsing your command correctly 'email this address'.

Second, the zdnet post you link to towards the end is full of inaccuracies:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107554)

<comment><USER48> It's evidently _not_ 'expected' behaviour from the point of view of the user. Just because you happen to put an email address in the title of a _calendar_ event doesn't imply that I expect the software to go and send messages on my behalf.

<comment><USER49> Then we disagree. Especially if it's in the title it indicates you want to coordinate with the email you just entered.

A proper way to do it is, Title: "Email Alice", Description: "email@example.com".

<comment><USER50> A good UI would make it explicitly clear by highlighting the email address and/or by auto adding an explicit entry to the guest list.

At present there's no way to predict the behavior until after the fact. Something with that much consequence (sending an email to an unintended recipient) should never be done silently. By all means take the initiative with autofill etc, but the user should have the final say.

If the supposed design revolution within Google ([http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the- redesign](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign)) isn't just for show, the Calendar team (assuming there even is an ongoing team) clearly hasn't been touched by it and that ought to be corrected.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Editing functions within JavaScript closure, e.g. Agar.io - <AUTHOR>

I've seen Chrome extensions which remove the site's <script> tag and replace it with a modified version, which isn't ideal because any minor JS change can break it. I've seen using debugger tools to place a breakpoint in the closure's init script, in order to create a global variable to reference it, which works great but requires user intervention each load. And yes, I understand that the point of the closure is to limit / restrict public access. Are there other alternatives to access / modify the contents of a closure, within the context of a malicious user? <comment><USER2>
      function createQueue(){
        var queue = [];
        return {
          enqueue: function(item){
            queue.push(item);
          },
          dequeue: function(){
            return queue.unshift();
          }
        };
      }

      var queue = createQueue();

Now you might think `queue` is inaccessible because it's in a closure, right? Wrong. Because I can do this:

      var queue = createQueue();
      var originalPush = Array.prototype.push;

      Array.prototype.push = function(){

        // turn all enqueued to foo
        arguments[0] = 'foo';
        originalPush.apply(this, arguments);

        // Also know that "this" in here is the queue
      }

You can easily monkeypatch things in JS. There are more creative and invasive ways to do this. You do have to know how the code runs in order to execute the right patches.</comment>


Ask HN: Does Dark Knight Rises represents Plato's allegory of cave? - <AUTHOR>

In Batman begins it was "The Trolley Problem" in Dark Knight it was "Prisoner's dilemma" and do you think in the third and last installment Nolan has represented Plato's allegory of cave ? <comment><USER2> I can see similarities between the allegory and film in terms of the populace being blind to the so-called "truth" of the world until Bane forces it upon them; even that though is like an inversion of the cave situation, I would suggest. Apart from that though, I'm not sure that I see the correlation, unless you're suggesting that Batman himself is the guy in the cave (not literally the Batcave). Was there anything specific that made you think that's what Nolan was going for?

<comment><AUTHOR> As per the plato's allegory of cave, one wise man managed to escape the cave with lot of hardship. He climbs up towards the light and once he realizes that there is a reality beyond the cave Plato argues that it is his moral responsibility to go back and save the those who are trapped.

I think batman so far believed that his lie about Dent's death had done good to the City and his city did not need him any more. All was well with the Gotham city. This is the imagined truth aka the shadows on the walls of the cave.

Batman's rise from lazaris pit is symbolic in the sense that with lot of hardship and pain batman realizes that there is truth beyond his knowledge. Gotham needs hope in the form of the same symbol that he had created 8 years ago.

Just like the free man in the Plato's allegory Batman could have just escaped because he did not owe anything to Gothamites. (Catwoman did suggest that). But he considers his moral responsibility to go back to Gotham with hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I believe Jonathan Nolan stated that he specifically looked to Charles Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" for inspiration.

Admittedly, I haven't read "A Tale Of Two Cities", and it's been years since I read "The Allegory of the Cave", so I'm not in the best position to comment on any similarities or comparisons.</comment>


From Twitter to Automattic, Boston VCs Grokking Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/05/12/boston-vcs-grok-social-media-so-can-we-please-not-tell-that-facebook-story-anymore/

<comment><USER2> If only they could properly conjugate 'Grok'... it should be grokking! ;)

<comment><USER3> Actually, I don't think they used either in the original article or title.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Interceptor – mock AJAX requests at the browser level - <AUTHOR> https://crypt.codemancers.com/posts/2018-04-24-intro-to-interceptor/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty cool tool. I'm currently working on a tool that addresses this problem in a different way, by standing up an API server that returns mock data based on the incoming request. It's targeted at an enterprise audience where dozens of APIs need to be mocked. This looks like a great solution for smaller teams or projects.

<comment><USER3> I built one of these myself recently, you might be interested: [https://github.com/pimterry/mockttp](https://github.com/pimterry/mockttp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Might be a silly question, but is this any different to the Postman interceptor?

Edit: yes it's very different! Didn't see that you could return different responses dynamically.

</comment><comment><USER5> Having finished reading Neuromancer, the domain "codemancers.com" paired with a technique for hacking the browser into thinking it's receiving communications from the outside, this submission seems a little tongue-in- cheek.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good stuff. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER7> How usable is this in for example webdriverio tests?

<comment><USER8> webdriverio tests are basically automation tests similar to selenium tests. Looking at FIREFOX PROFILE SERVICE([http://webdriver.io/guide/services/firefox- profile.html](http://webdriver.io/guide/services/firefox-profile.html)), it looks like you can only fire up the extensions, but not define actions like click or type. If that would have been the case, One could have intercepted the requests, defined their own response and have automated tests defined for an app/website. Have a look at the blog post to understand the proper use case.

<comment><USER9> Idk about FF, but I've zuccessfully loaded extensions into chrome selenium in the past. It doesn't work with chrome headless AFAIK

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> wow, I needed that 3 years ago.</comment>


Big Data Debate: HBase - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/big-data-debate-will-hbase-dominate-nosq/240159475

<comment><USER2> Oh please.

On the one side we have a commercially competing entity arguing against HBase and on the other side we have an individual "defending" HBase who never contributed a single line of code to open source HBase promoting their own closed source solution.

HBase is a "Sparse, Consistent, Distributed, Multidimensional, Sorted map" and at that it is pretty good.

Other stores are either not consistent or not sorted by default (which means you cannot do range scans). Some can be configured to do that, but then suddenly all those nice claims made by the commercial entities backing them just vanish.

If you do not need consistency and range scans, then do not use HBase. If you do need those HBase will be a excellent fit.

Some of the most heavyweight entities on this planet have committers to HBase (Facebook, Intel, Salesforce, to some extend Twitter, etc) as well as commercial backers such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Disclaimer: HBase committer here.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Out of the box none of the other storage systems actually allow you to not worry about range scans at all. While HBase will repartition your data to balance the used disk space automatically, in most other systems you'll end up having to manually partition your data in different ways and then aggregate the queries across partitions.

This is pretty literally the main reason why many companies use HBase. Then in the same companies you can also find a good usage for Cassandra but it'd be a different use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Linkbait aside there are some reasonable points being made here, specifically "Failover means downtime" about HBase. We run into this pretty much every day in one of our customer facing applications or APIs and it's quite frustrating to have to explain that there's very little you can do to prevent it.

I haven't looked too closely at MapR yet, but "instant recovery, seamless sharding and high availability" are impressive claims. It's still decidedly differently than HBase in my mind given the cost.

<comment><USER5> Which version of HBase are you running? If we have a node or two go down in our cluster, HBase is completely unaffected. Recoveries can take up to a few minutes, in the old ages it took hours.

I know that MTTR (mean time to recovery) is being worked on together by several large companies to get down to seconds.

<comment><USER6> "Minutes" is not "unaffected" if your site is now down.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I should have clarified. When a node goes down, there isn't any sort of "minute" interruption...When there's a full scale outage and you need to perform an actual recovery, that can take minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We use HBase pretty extensively and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it's very clunky. Though the documentation is pretty good these days, setting up and managing a HBase cluster on production and in scale involves tackling many moving parts. Setting up Cassandra is almost a joke in comparison.

HBase-Hadoop integration is great, but Cassandra has caught up significantly on that front. If you want strong consistency, apart from HBase there is no other (non-sql) solution that's really battle tested. If you're okay with eventual consistency, you should take a hard look at Cassandra.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why people keep thinking that Cassandra is only eventually consistent.

It can be set to any consistency level you like for both reads and writes: [http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.1/dml/data_consistency](http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.1/dml/data_consistency)

<comment><USER9> It doesn't even have transactions, I'm not sure how 'consistency' is even in the conversation.

EDIT: Just saying, failures and partitions are extremely difficult to deal with without atomic operations.

<comment><USER10> Here we're discussing the Consistency in CAP, not the one in ACID. Here's a good introduction to the concepts involved: [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/eventually_consi...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/eventually_consistent.html)

<comment><USER9> It's no less applicable. During a partition (you know, the 'P' in CAP) it's a nightmare to identify data that's been dropped AND recover from it without strong transaction guarantees. Transactions are the heart of consistency and I wouldn't consider a piece of software to be CAP consistent as opposed to available without transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heavy HBase user here. My two cents, FWIW.

I totally identify with both sides of this article, but if we had to do this again, we would probably go for HBase again. Its quite a pain to manage unless you have someone on your team with a PhD in HBase, but:

1\. The main HBase committers are also the ones who contribute to the Hadoop project, so its in a forward trajectory with good velocity, since its fairly coupled to the Hadoop ecosystem. Cloudera is a big contributor, as are Facebook and Salesforce.

2\. Facebook, Adobe and other BigTM companies use it in production and at scale. (Granted they have armies of smart people to maintain HBase.)

3\. For all the pain it is, its reasonably documented and has a growing community that fills in the gap. I could be totally totally wrong about this, but Cassandra doesn't have that same level of community as HBase does.

<comment><USER10> /author of the "con" position here

I can see why you might come to those conclusions -- a lot of people with their heads down in Hadoop just don't realize that there's a world outside HDFS. Not saying that in a mean way; that's just the way it is. If you're involved in that ecosystem, there's enough to keep up with without researching what others are doing.

1\. True enough, but HBase tends to be an afterthought for the datawarehouse- focused Hadoop players. You see this manifest in a bunch of ways, but as just one example: when I evaluated HBase at Rackspace 4 years ago, they were exploring options for secondary indexes. They're still exploring.

2\. Yes, you really do have to have expert-level knowledge of the internals to deploy it successfully. And there's a LOT of those internals, by design (hmaster, ZK, regionserver, and close ties to the HDFS infrastructure). Cassandra is much simpler, much easier to deploy and troubleshoot. When Cassandra gets evaluated vs HBase, it tends to win [1], but often HBase is the "default" choice because of "Hey, we already have HDFS" thinking. This is changing as awareness grows of alternatives.

3\. I think that's the tunnel vision I mentioned. By any metric I can think of -- conference attendance (over 1100 at the Cassandra Summit in June), IRC activity, StackOverflow participation, jobs advertised -- the Cassandra community is larger and more active than HBase's. Here's a list of some of the users: [2].

Give it a look, I'll be happy to answer questions!

[1] [http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf](http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf) [2] [http://planetcassandra.com/Company/ViewCompany?IndustryId=-1](http://planetcassandra.com/Company/ViewCompany?IndustryId=-1)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the reply!

1\. True, the fact that we were deploying Hadoop was a big reason to go with HBase. Despite the challenges, it was a case of "better the devil we know than the one we don't."

2\. Agreed, I played with Cassandra, but again, point #1 carried the day.

3\. That's great! I was at HBaseCon 2013 and that only had 750-850 people. I concede this point. ;) Sorry I didn't explore this further, that was my bad.

[EDIT] One thing we like is that HBase re-partitions data really fast since data is in HDFS. Not sure how well Cassandra holds up there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At the risk of hijacking what seems like a linkbait article, I'll ask folks here a question:

Does anyone have good experiences/recommendations for storing a "reasonable" amount of unstructured logs/pcap files. By "reasonable", I mean, not petabytes (maybe a couple terabytes, over time).

I ask, because I keep thinking something like HBase is overkill (although one of my alternate solutions is to run an internal Openstack Swift cluster, which seems like pretty much the same amount of hardware/engineering).

If I could, I'd just send it to the cloud (to the cloud!), but I need it to be local and internally controlled (however, the developer niceness of S3 or Azure blob storage is what got me thinking about just making my own Swift object store).

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I work at Cloudera as a Tools Developer

What do you mean by unstructured? Do you mean the data has yet to be parsed into a format which could be logically grouped into columns? Or do you mean that it's deeply nested?

Since log data doesn't really change, it might be overkill to use something like HBase (or any database for that matter). On the tools team at Cloudera, we've found that writing the data into HDFS and using Impala to analyze it works pretty well.

We typically analyze chunks of log data and then ingest it into HDFS (due to the use case), but if you're looking to ingest data in "real-time", you'll want to use something like Apache Flume.

With the data separated into partitions, we're able to run queries that analyze GBs of data in under a second (15 nodes). This is log data (LOG4J) that has been extrapolated into columns, and then loaded into a columnar storage format (RCFile, soon to be Parquet).

Let me know if you have any questions, glad to help.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I've been testing out a bunch of hare-brained schemes and it didn't even occur to me to just use HDFS directly (and seeing you and karterk both suggest it helps).

Basically, at a high level, the system I'm working on aggregates and processes security information (It's a SIEM, if that product category means anything to you). At the point the logs get ingested, the server determines if they're "actionable" (which is determined by rules I load into Redis), in which case it parses them and stores them in a Postgres event table; or "not individually actionable, but may cause an action in conjunction with some other log" that I want to just store somewhere for batch processing.

I don't really need to tokenize those logs, as at the point I care about them I'm just going to be searching through them. So, they're "unstructured" in the sense that there's about 15 different collection points, each with it's own format (many just an ugly facsimile of syslog with some JSON in the middle).

So, I think your suggestion will work out very well.

Thanks again.

<comment><USER5> No problem, glad I could help. Your use case sounds pretty interesting, HDFS should fit the bill for sure.

You should take a look at Parquet ([http://parquet.io/](http://parquet.io/)) for storing your data. It's an open source columnar format that was designed for Hadoop, it even supports nesting ([https://github.com/Parquet/parquet- mr/wiki/The-striping-and-...](https://github.com/Parquet/parquet-mr/wiki/The- striping-and-assembly-algorithms-from-the-Dremel-paper) <\-- really interesting). Also, it already works with a lot of the Hadoop ecosystem components (MR, Hive, Pig, Cascading, Impala, ..), so your data doesn't have to move once it's in HDFS.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> NoSQL is my least favorite buzzword of the decade. It means absolutely nothing but being counter cultural to... SQL culture. Many NoSQL "databases"—and I use that in the lightest term possible—even have SQL engines.

<comment><USER13> How to make a simple NoSQL database:

(1) Install MySQL.

(2) Create a database called "nosql".

(3) In the "nosql" database, create a single InnoDB table called "data" with 2 columns: a BLOB primary key "mykey" and a BLOB column called "myval".

(4) Write a thin wrapper over your favorite mysql client library implementing "get" and "set" operations (which are translated to SELECT and UPDATE statements).

(5) Enjoy your ludicrous speed.

<comment><USER5> If you're comparing this to your riak, redis, tokyo cabinet, ... database than most likely.

With HBase, one of it's bread and butter operations is the start and stop row scan (otherwise known as a range scan). The only thing equivalent I know of in MySQL is using windowing functions, and even then I don't think that's an appropriate comparison.

I hear you though, most people equate NoSQL to some sort of KeyValue store and that's it.

<comment><USER9> How are multi-row transactions these days? That was the largest problem when I looked last... A data store does not a database make.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about HBase but for Cassandra it should be available in the next minor update.

Single row transactions have just recently been added: [http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions- in...](http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in- cassandra-2-0)

<comment> mh- FWIW, Cassandra 1.2 is the latest production/stable version.

<comment><USER10> You are correct, for about another week. :)

<comment> mh- so, 1.2 will become unstable? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I laugh at mongodb, but every time I've seen a shootout between Hbase and Cassandra, Cassandra has won.

<comment><USER5> Could you please elaborate? It totally depends on use case...

<comment><USER14> (1) I've seen more than one project failure involving mongodb,

(2) Every time I've done a performance/features shootout of mongodb vs. other projects, mongodb doesn't just lose, it comes back with two black eyes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that neither person has anything to do with Apache HBase. Both are in a position to belittle it.

</comment><comment><USER16> some people even describe hbase as nosql, because its not sql right? unless you use cloudera impala, which is sql, but impala is supposed to kill sql too. in the end no one wins.

<comment><USER5> > impala is supposed to kill sql too

I'm not sure what you mean by this, Impala is in no no way trying to replace "SQL". Impala is a general purpose distributed query engine that currently translates SQL to a query plan.

<comment><USER16> I was commenting in the theme of tc-style enterprise tech journalism but thank you for clarifying.

<comment><USER5> :) sometimes I don't know what to believe on the internet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blatant link bait

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER18> NoSQL, what's that, is that like Big Data ?

<comment><USER19> NoSQL is only a stepping stone to NoQuery, it's going to be awesome

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does it matter?</comment>


Ask HN: New interesting games for programmers suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

I mean like RoboWar, Ants from aichallenge etc. I can use google, but it's just interesting to know someone personal experience. Right now I'm reading the screeps.com documentation, looks interesting (and not, this is not a plug :)) <comment><USER2> codingame.com is pretty rad</comment>


Ask HN: Books You Read in 2019? - <AUTHOR> I would love to know which books you've read in 2019 and which you would recommend.
Some of my favourite reads were:
Fascism: a warning (Albright)
Sapiens (Harari)
Normal People (Rooney)
I will comment with a full list of my recommendations. <comment><USER4> Recently, I am unsatisfied about spending a lot of time on consuming knowledge, rather then producing. As soon as I get to some level of expertise in some area, the benefit of passive reading approaches zero. So I plan to write more and code more (mastering Julia for mathematics and CS) in 2020.

A few titles I enjoyed this year:

"An Invitation to Applied Category Theory" by Brendan Fong, David I. Spivak. It was fun to dig deeper into categories and read how you can apply thinking in them to different domains: databases, signal processing, circuits. Some mathematical background is probably required. It is available for free as a PDF: [http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/](http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/) or if you are, like me, love collecting good titles in paper, a hardcover copy is nice with good paper and colour pictures: [https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory- Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory- Compositionality-dp-1108482295/dp/1108482295)

"Can't Hurt Me" by David Goggins. [https://davidgoggins.com/book/](https://davidgoggins.com/book/) It helped me to start running, and I keep doing it. It improved my mindset about overcoming physical discomfort, inspired to cultivate a savage mindset within. I lost a few kgs as well. There is an audio version of it.

"Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet [http://davidmarquet- com.3dcartstores.com/Autographed-Book-Ha...](http://davidmarquet- com.3dcartstores.com/Autographed-Book-Hardcover-Turn-the-Ship-Around- _p_13.html) A book on leadership, told as a story of transforming the team on the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe. Not that boring like usual leadership titles.

</comment><comment><USER5> Data Intensive Applications

This and Object Prototypes (You Don't Know JS Series)

Fall: Or Dodge in Hell

Fortress Marin

Count Zero

Become What You Are (Alan Watts)

Swords and Circuitry

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The High Sierra of California

Trees of Power

I highly recommend Data Intensive Applications, as have many others on HN.

If you live around San Francisco, and don't know the history of the shore batteries across the Bay, Fortress Marin is a nice, short, illustrated history of California's coastal defenses. There are good places to go hiking / camping in that area around the old fortifications.

I'm into planting trees and gardening, so I thoroughly enjoyed Trees of Power by Akiva Silver.

</comment><comment><USER6> In no particular order the best ones I've read this year(so far) are:

Children of the Nameless by Brandon Sanderson - Probably one of the few very good magic the gathering books.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt - <USER2> overview of the emperor

King Rat by James Clavell - fictional depiction of being a prisoner in a Japanese camp during WW2.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann - <USER3> about the natives in the Americas after first contact. Follow up to 1491.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin - Good book for people looking to write clearer, more understandable code

The Elric Saga Part 1 by Michael Moorcock - Interesting protagonist.

Currently enjoying and will finish by end of year:

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern - It's about stories so far. If you liked the Night Circus, then you will like this. Great atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER7> Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable - One of best industry related books I have read, and I think I need to read it couple more times. I highly recommend it.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle - Explains and gives you action plan for your weight loss/muscle gaining yourney. It cleary explains macronutrients, how much to eat and in what proportions. Since there is so much misinformation on internet about nutrition, this book exlpains "real truth" and makes it simple as it is.

Child 44 - Amazing novel that took place in Staljinistic Russia. Except great plot it gives you great insight in what was to live in Communist system under Staljin regime.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some highlights of the year:

Children of Time - (Tchaikovsky)

Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - as an aside, I've started reading his daughters (Lisa) book Small Fry

The Colour out of Space - (Lovecraft)

iWoz (Wozniak)

The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)

</comment><comment><USER9> Just some of the top of my head...

1\. Permanent Record (Snowden)

2\. Maude (Mabry)</comment>


Solar storm heads Earth's way after double sun blasts - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solar-storm-earth-sun-blasts.html

<comment><USER2> > "We don't expect any unmanageable impacts to national infrastructure from > these solar events at this time but we are watching these events closely," > said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center at the > National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is so reassuring..

Space weather forecast : Armageddon delayed to next major eruption.</comment>


Identifying facial phenotypes of genetic disorders using deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0279-0 <comment><AUTHOR> I find the ethical questions raised more interesting than the work itself.</comment>


Golang's Real-Time GC in Theory and Practice - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pusher.com/golangs-real-time-gc-in-theory-and-practice/ <comment><USER2> The weak generational hypothesis states that most objects are short-lived. Therefore concentrating on collecting the youngest objects yields the most garbage/cpu cycle spent.

In the benchmark, all objects survive the same amount of time and it is the oldest objects that become garbage first. It is the opposite of the behavior the weak generational hypothesis presumes. So collectors optimized for that scenario is at a disadvantage. :)

For example, I ported the benchmark to Python 3 and got a max pause time of 0.05 ms. That's 40 times faster than OCaml but it doesn't mean Python is faster in general. It just "got lucky" because ref counting is an almost optimal fit for the benchmark. There is no strategy that fits all when it comes to memory management. :)

<comment><USER3> Reference counting is great. I used to be skeptical but I'm a complete convert after using Objective-C.

The old myth about GC was that it was slow. Nowadays that's usually false, but what _is_ true that it wastes a lot of memory, or has long pauses, or both.

The old myth about reference counting, on the other hand, is that uncollected cycles are a problem, but in practice they're usually not that hard to find and fix.

Reference counting _is_ a bit slower, but it doesn't waste memory and doesn't pause. So it's great for throughput. And throughput is very often more important than overall performance!

For anything with a UI, you want maximum throughput. For anything on the server side that's realtime, or even indirectly user-facing, you want maximum throughput. The only time you want performance over throughput is batch jobs, which I reckon crop up less often than you expect.

(Edit to add: on memory-constrained devices, you might not want the memory overhead of GC even for batch jobs.)

<comment><USER4> Reference counting does not scale to multi-threaded programs well. Keeping reference counts up to date across multiple threads is maddeningly and frightenly hard to do efficiently. By the time you correctly solve the concurrent update problem for essentially every access the program does, you have a very complicated memory management system that incurs overhead on every single operation. Compare that with a GC that imposes overhead (usually) only on writes to objects, not "writes" to the stack or local variables going out of scope. Reference counting also incurs overhead for reading from objects. Empirical studies have shown that reads outnumber writes 10x to 1 usually. Why would you consider it to be just a _bit_ slower?

And of course reference counting pauses. Killing one object (its count dropping to zero) may cause a chain reaction of objects whose reference counts to drop to zero and need to be cleaned up. The difference is that you now suffer work proportional to the _dead_ data of the program. In comparison, a tracing GC does work proportional to the _live_ objects.

<comment><USER5> > Reference counting does not scale to multi-threaded programs well. Keeping > reference counts up to date across multiple threads is maddeningly and > frightenly hard to do efficiently.

Is this not just a matter of using an atomic reference count?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but atomics are pretty slow.

<comment><USER5> I guess, but that doesn't seem that bad.

> maddeningly and frightenly hard to do efficiently.

It definitely doesn't seem maddening or frightening. I'm not saying a GC isn't stricly better (because I'm unsure either way) but arc doesn't seem like some awful thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good writeup, with a surprise about OCaml. The authors welcome PRs for other languages. I look forward to seeing the results, and wonder if they will end up in a Techempower-style global brouhaha (which the Techempower folks have, I hasten to say, apparently handled with grace and integrity).

<comment><USER7> There are already versions in:

* C - [https://gitlab.com/gasche/gc-latency-experiment/merge_reques...](https://gitlab.com/gasche/gc-latency-experiment/merge_requests/5)

* C# - [https://gitlab.com/gasche/gc-latency-experiment/merge_reques...](https://gitlab.com/gasche/gc-latency-experiment/merge_requests/4)

* Nim - [http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/2646](http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/2646)

</comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong If you have a long-lived functionality in your Go program that needs buffers, it may just be best to allocate a pool of buffers and reuse them. Go does offer a basic primitive for this with sync.Pool

I once wrote a high throughput UDP listener that maxed out all the cores to deal with receiving some bursty UDP traffic. I realized that interacting with the memory allocater was my bottleneck, so I just moved to a pool of UDP buffers. My ability to deal with load spikes improved substantially. There's no reason not to use Pools in general if you're building a service with a predictable and repeatable object lifetime

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a little surprised it didn't seem that they considered a GC-less language like Rust. If your latency requirements are that strict & you're already considering a total rewrite, I would personally have been looking into a solution that would avoid GC entirely.

<comment><USER9> Rust has a semantic overhead and isn't quite as mature as Go. Their requirements don't necessitate a lack of GC pause.

<comment><USER10> I disagree with your first point, at least from a personal perspective. I find Rust more expressive than Go, and slightly more productive.

You're right about maturity though. Hopefully the Rust library ecosystem continues to make strides.

<comment><USER8> I agree: I personally find Rust more expressive than Go. I don't think it has any more "semantic overhead" than any other language with a highly featured type system.

To tie it back to the article a bit, Rust also seems like a relatively natural choice for a team considering switching from Haskell if their reason for switching is performance. The niche Rust fills for me personally is that it has a very robust type system (putting it in a similar camp as Haskell) with an explicit focus on fast, performant code (which Haskell does not have).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A great writeup and I feel it's a welcome reminder of some important points:

\- your programming language and runtime aren't equally good at everything and never will be \- you have to choose your environment based on your anticipated workload \- you have to understand what your anticipated workload actually is \- you can't just treat the garbage collector as a magic box that does the memory thing for you

Unless, of course, you're writing software which is nowhere near the performance boundaries of the system and never will be.

Can't say I share the author's surprise about the JVM's performance, but I never did like Java anyway.

<comment><USER12> We were surprised by Java's poor performance because the HotSpot JVM also uses a concurrent mark-and-sweep collector, and is famed for the amount of engineering effort that has gone into it. We suspect our benchmark could be improved by someone with more high-performance JVM experience.

[Edit] jcipar on Reddit made some promising progress by tuning the JVM GC parameters for our benchmark: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5fyhjb/golangs...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5fyhjb/golangs_realtime_gc_in_theory_and_practice_pusher/daof47v/)

<comment><USER13> This was a super insightful comment

 _The Java GC does not optimise for low latency exclusively, it tries to strike a balance between many different factors which your analysis entirely ignores! In particular it is compacting (Go 's GC is not), which is very useful for long term stability as you can't get deaths due to heap fragmentation, and it tries to collect large amounts of garbage quickly, which Go's GC doesn't try to do (it's pure mark/sweep, not generational), and it tries to be configurable, which Go's GC doesn't care about. For many apps you do tend to want these things, they aren't pointless. _

_This is especially true because for most servers a 100msec pause time is just fine. 8msec is the kind of thing you need if you 're doing a 60fps video game but for most servers it's overkill and they'd prefer to bank the performance._

 _To put this in perspective Google is having problems migrating to G1 because even though it gives lower and more predictable pause latencies, it slows their servers down by 10%. A 10% throughput loss is unacceptable at their scale (translates to a 10% increase in java server costs) and they want G1 to become even more configurable to let them pick faster execution at the cost of longer pauses_

<comment><USER14> > This is especially true because for most servers a 100msec pause time is > just fine.

I disagree (a bit). A 100 msec pause is perceptible by a human, and can lead a user to leave your website or you app, especially is the pauses are compounded among several serialized remote procedure calls.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our interviews are what we can get away with - <AUTHOR> https://somehowmanage.com/2020/07/11/our-hiring-process-is-what-we-can-get-away-with/ <comment><USER2> Yes, hiring is almost universally an exercise in selection bias. If the candidate selection process does not closely result from the performance review process something is broken and things are selectively open to manipulation.</comment>


The Racial Dot Map: One Dot per Person for the Entire U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/

<comment><USER2> When looking at data like this, I'm always reminded of Schelling's model of residential segregation, which suggests that even a small preference for living near like people leads to high segregation in the global system.

Example: in this simulation, agents are willing to live in environments where only 30% of neighbors are like them: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnffIS2EJ30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnffIS2EJ30)

Another good explanation of it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFl3Cfw12bo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFl3Cfw12bo)

I wonder if anyone has done a "reverse" model, taking in census data and trying to estimate a rough "Schelling threshold" \-- like if all the dots started out randomly placed on the US, what percentage of "tolerance" would lead to the clustering we have in reality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. Unfortunately, color-perception-deficient visitors will have trouble with the map. I personally can't tell the difference between the "Black" and "Hispanic" dots unless two relatively big blobs of them are right next to each other. The "Asian" and "Other" colors are similarly indistinct, but not as bad.

<comment><USER4> Agreed even for normal color perception :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are interested in why racial segregation persists to such a high level (especially in the de-industrialized midwestern and rust belt cities) and the persistence of intractable racial disparities, I highly recommend Massey and Denton's American Apartheid. A bit old now, but still a very clear and deep understanding of segregation and its effects

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674018214/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=4161...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674018214/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=4161356325&ref=pd_sl_7szqbh44o9_b)

\--

I spent about a decade working for racial justice think tanks doing research and policy work around racial segregation and its connection to racial disparities, and it was always my go to book to explain to people why the work I was doing was important for racial justice.

</comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6276296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6276296) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302548)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great map!

I go to school in St. Louis and think that it really shows what the situation is like. Here is a map I just created: [http://i.imgur.com/uz9Pbhx.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/uz9Pbhx.jpg)

Red box - Forest Park (the big park in the middle of the city)

Green shape - Lambert International Airport (Ferguson is about a mile to the east)

Purple line - City limits -- you can clearly see that St. Louis County and St. Louis city have very different demographics.

Blue line - Imaginary line of segregation. Its a few block north of Forest Park, its not as clear on Google maps, but its very distinct on the dot map.

</comment><comment><USER8> Also shows the correlation to slavery in the US as well [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/maps-reveal-slavery- ex...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/maps-reveal-slavery-expanded- across-united-states-180951452/?no-ist)

</comment><comment><USER9> I would be very interested to see this overlayed with the boundaries of some of the more oddly-shaped, gerrymandered districts.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this would be more intuitively understandable if they just took the skin color to represent the different races.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does everyone take part in the US Census? If so, why, is there an incentive?

<comment><USER12> Answering US Census surveys is legally required, though nobody's been prosecuted for failing to do so in decades. If you don't respond to a survey, the bureau will send someone to the house to ask the survey questions in person. If nobody there will respond, then the agent/representative will record their own estimates for that household.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really interesting…and well done.</comment>


3D printing pen lets you draw sculptures in thin air - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23183-3dprinting-pen-turns-doodles-into-sculptures.html

<comment><USER2> Their video says "patent pending technology". I already emailed the EFF's patentbusters with a link to prior art.

It would be such an awesome thing if they weren't trying to take it away from the rest of the world.

<comment><USER3> Are you completely against patents, or just against some?

The people who produced this have obviously spent a significant amount of time working out how to make this possible. I haven't seen their patents, but I doubt they're as generic as "A device which extrudes plastic in 3D space". Have you read the patents they've submitted and actually found prior art for the exact aspects of the design they've patented?

Patents are designed for this kind of thing. They allow these guys to sell the results of their work without getting ripped off straight away by someone who spent none of the money doing R&D and so just has to cover their costs.

<comment><USER4> Clearly this 3D printing pen is innovative, but that does not necessarily imply that it includes patentable inventions. The technology used looks like FDM (fused deposition modeling) 3D printing extended to free hand, without support material.

The key technology here that makes this 3D/air printing possible is the gooey material that the pen releases. If this material has properties that other existing materials do not have, then it may be patentable. Also if the pen releases material in a manner that is new and novel, then it too may be patentable.

<comment><USER5> I more or less did this 2 weeks ago while testing the extruder for my 3d printer (and I'm no pioneer here). I used Kliment's (parent of thread) software to cause filament to extrude from my 3d printer's nozzle (the hot end) while I tried to write letters to test it was working ok.

Now someone is trying to claim this "new technology" is patentable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haha - it's a fast/durable glue gun!*

I love when automated tools go manual. Here's a free-hand laser cutter:

[http://inventables.blogspot.com/2012/11/free-hand-laser- cutt...](http://inventables.blogspot.com/2012/11/free-hand-laser-cutting.html)

*As was pointed out!

<comment><USER7> I was just going to say this was another glue gun. I remember in middle school using glue guns to make shapes and "art" in art class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kickstarter page:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1351910088/3doodler- the-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1351910088/3doodler-the-worlds- first-3d-printing-pen)

</comment><comment><USER9> The spatial integrity of the structure could be enhanced, perhaps, by using a ferromagnetic "ink" inside a structure that moves and varies the strengths of magnets to keep the material at the tip of the pen at its centre.

<comment><USER10> I never thought I'd say this seriously, but, those magnets, how do they work?

<comment><USER9> It's trivial to create a "magnetic well" with three to four strong magnets balancing against each other at a fixed point, with gravity holding a ferromagnetic object against it. Altering their directions and strengths would allow that single-point "well" to move just behind the pen. If the hardened material could withstand the force one would be able to prevent the drooping witnessed in the video. I'm not sure how one would maintain multiple wells simultaneously from a single plane. That or move the pen slower. Clearly, magnets win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great example of being original by taking something existing and changing one aspect of it.

<comment><USER12> I want to see someone use this to print out a 3d structure in the same way a 3d printer does. Not that it would be efficient or sane, but it would look really cool to see the infill and what not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a bit of working with hot glue guns, only quicker drying. I still remember the first time I got hot glue on my hand while making a project in elementary school.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow this is awesome! I've never seen something like this, and it seems to work quite well!

I first thought this was going to be about some type of 3D mouse or kinect thingie, but it's the actual physical real deal! :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Good! But that's not "3D printing" or even printing at all! ;) Maybe you could have a 3D model and a robot could draw the "sculpture". Anyway, we want MORE !

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hDdYClgoV8>

<comment><USER17> Just came to say this. I'm glad that there are some people who know the Chinese sugar art. The video you linked is not very clear. Some suggestions YouTube gives have a better perspective, for example this one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQlQQDP6hNY>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd probably buy one if I could think of a practical application for one.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm very impressed by this.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's very prototype-ish but it looks real good!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is freakin' awesome!</comment>


Wirth's Law - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law <comment><USER2> The law was based on Wirth's article, A Plea for Lean software, [1], which was discussed at [2]

[1] [https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf](https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf)

[2]. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301511)</comment>


Munchery Shuts Down - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts-down/ Got this via email:
Since 2010, we have been committed to bringing fresh, local, and delicious meals into your homes along with all our customers across the country. We've been delighted to work with world renowned chefs, experiment with diverse and unique ingredients and recipes, and be a part of of your holiday feasts and traditions. We have also enjoyed giving back to our community through meal donations, volunteer service, and so much more.
Today, with a heavy heart, we're reaching out to announce that Munchery is closing its doors and ending operations effective immediately. Any outstanding orders with Munchery will be canceled and refunded. Please allow 2-3 business days for these refunds to process.
More than anything, we want to say thank you. Thank you for all of the love and support you have shown us over the years, for sharing us with your friends and family, and for including us in your special life moments.
We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to share our dream with you-- it has been truly wonderful. Happy Eating!
Team Munchery <comment><USER2> On demand food delivery has several major problems that were all very predictable

1) you can't predict how much food to make. On demand food companies were throwing away 30% of the food they made every night

drivers cost ~$25 an hour, and only do ~6 drop offs.

2) lots of idle driver time

3) routes can't be optimized (or only minor optimizations in real-time)

4) on average they are only dropping off 1.3 meals per delivery, making each meal very expensive to deliver

I helped start [http://Thistle.co](http://Thistle.co) (only in California) to fix these problems; people order their meals for the week (doesn't work for everyone obviously) and we drop off 3x/week, with optimal routes and many more meals per dropoff. The company has been really capital efficient in doing so, hardly raising any money but doing 10s of millions in revenues.

<comment><USER3> Wait, why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this and have been for ages if it is so difficult?

<comment><USER4> At least around here:

1) Pizza is made on demand, quickly, from a small number of relatively non- perishable, cheap ingredients. You won't throw away a significant dollar value of raw materials. Also, pizza is popular, and your delivery drivers can stay busy. Pizza is _so_ suitable for delivery that it's the ur-example.

2) Indian does have long lead times (the sauce cannot be made on demand), but the core food item is rice (which can be made in advance in bulk, and is also very cheap), and sauce, but the way the restaurant works is they make up a small number of sauce bases, cook up some meat, and then combine when the order is made. You don't necessarily know how much butter chicken will be ordered in a night, but you can cook batches during the night to adjust to demand.

3) Thai, around here, is always run out of an existing successful Thai restaurant, so they can piggy-back off the volume of the restaurant. It also tends to be a bit pricier, probably to reflect the higher margins. It also tends to centre around stir-fry, which again is cooked mostly on demand from a small-ish number of prepared ingredients.

4) Sushi...not popular around here (sushi is, but there is ZERO delivery options), but sandwiches, mexican, and turkish kebabs are. Again, you can get a bunch of cheap bread, tortillas, or pitas, a small number of mostly cheap, mostly non-perishable, mostly interchangable ingredients, and churn out chicken quesadillas, beef burritos, etc. Leftover bread is a small cost, and if you're careful you can minimise loss of meat, as you prepare more batches over the night.

5) Fish and chips (very popular around here), made from frozen ingredients and a VERY small selection of fresh ones, deep friend on demand.

See a pattern? A lot of "combine cheap starch with some fresh vegetables and/or meat that can be prepared quickly, ideally from frozen", where in many cases on-demand labour (putting the sandwich together, putting toppings on the pizza) will be a major chunk of your inputs, and ingredients will be minimal. In all cases you're looking at cuisines where it's relatively popular, the ingredients are relatively cheap, and _critically_ you have a lot of interchangeability, a small number of ingredients, and low preparation times, etc. The fish and chip shop doesn't care if they sell 80 scoops of chips or 40, they've got tons spare in the deep freezer, and they're being cooked on demand; no wastage. Their main concern is just selling enough of _anything_ to cover the cost of the oil in the deep fryer.

What will NOT work is something like a steak, roasts, ribs, fancy fish; stuff that has expensive ingredients and (especially) long lead times. You can't just cook up 40 plates of ribs on spec to see if you'll sell any tonight. (Well, not and stay in business for long.)

And if we look at the screenshot of Munchery's menu, item 1 is Corn Husk Roasted Salmon, item 2 is Honey Glazed Pork, item 3 is a side, item 4 is Roasted Chicken. These are the exact sorts of thing that will wreck your economics. No doubt they were popular; people are sick of pizza, indian, thai, mexican, etc as delivery options, especially at $11 a plate! But as the joke goes, if you lose money on every sale, you can't really make it up in volume. :)

Edit: Munchery tried to work around this by closing orders early, I think at 2pm, but 1) that's going to lose you some volume and 2) that's still not enough lead time.

> why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this

They're doing something _very_ different.

<comment><USER5> > They're doing something very different.

I don't buy this explanation. I can easily get roasted chicken, honey glazed pork, salmon, bbq ribs and a ton of other 'complex' dishes delivered with no fuss and for similar prices. Pizza, thai etc are popular because, well, people enjoy the food. There is nothing radically different about doing other cuisines, except messing up logistics or not meeting consumer demand...

<comment><USER6> These VC subsidized delivery businesses are all built to artificially scale rather than built to necessity, with almost comically predictable results. Webvan showed us how that works in practice 20 years ago and most of these latest companies are still repeating its mistakes. Then whoops the cash is gone and it turns out they never actually had a real business at all (they were merely net delivering money to customers, a truly extraordinary business model).

The winners are going to be giants like Amazon that can absorb zero or negative real margins and can play a very long game until vehicle improvements (automation + electric) cuts into the delivery cost (and or they'll just find a way to bundle in other products/services to produce a broader profit).

<comment><USER7> Exactly. There isn't a billion dollar market to tagging $5-10 on each Five Guys order for a 30-75 minute delivery. I order food delivery from these places about twice a month, and almost never pay anything, due to competitive pressure. End of the day, I'm never, ever paying $10 to get $20 of burger delivered.

Even Amazon gave up on paying me to deliver groceries to my home. They would have a guy in a deli in New Jersey (~200 miles away) slice ham and turkey cold cuts in the middle of the night, and deliver via USPS by 7:30AM. Truly a marvel of modern logistics, except they couldn't figure out how to not put big cans of olive oil on top of eggs or bread.

We probably got an average of $50/week in refunds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who grew up in a restaurant, this seems crazy to me.

This appears to be a restaurant that tries to make every kind of meal, and deliver it.

"Restauranteur" might well be the second oldest profession. There should be dozens of people in everyone's network who could tell you how the business works. The Everything Delivery is also a business model that most people in the business could critique.

A friend of mine runs a very popular sushi chain in central London. It works, but only because everything is highly controlled. They know exactly how much fish people are going to want, and they know when. They know where to deliver to as well. Having all this knowledge means they are able to cut that fine line between the minimum cost and the revenue.

</comment><comment><USER9> TechCrunch on the shutdown: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts- down/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts-down/)

The meal delivery companies all seemed to expand too fast. There were no economies of scale to be had by geographical expansion. These companies needed to absolutely nail one or two big metros before even thinking about expansion.

<comment><USER10> I didn't realize that the name recognition was so regional in this space. I remember traveling internationally years ago and looking at Yelp for recommendations. After reading a few reviews and seeing what restaurants had the highest ratings I could tell that it was mostly used by tourists, not by locals.

I know for restaurants the real money is made by expanding and sharing the suppliers, management, advertising, but for something like a delivery app I'm not sure what the benefit of growing quickly is if you have competition outside of being first to (that local) market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With more actual restaurants delivering through Postmates/Door Dash/Uber Eats there are just a lot more options available from _known_ restaurants. At a similar price point, I would rather order from a restaurant that I either have already ordered from or that has good reviews vs a non-restaurant food delivery service that I don't know anything about.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that on the SAME day I received an email from the Dept of Public Health re: my complaint re: Munchery's food handling standards, Munchery announces that they're closing--immediately. It's a shame that, what once was a really good food delivery service, Munchery lost its 'successful charm'. The DPH stepped in because I complained that our meals were delivered way after scheduled time and they were NOT under refrigeration. Unfortunately, my meal contained raw tune which eventually led to serious food poisoning. After that incident, I didn't trust Munchery and never ordered from them again. Munchery began to overload their drivers with far too many orders which made deliveries late. This indicates a lack of sound infrastructure, greed, and a lack of concern for their hard-working drivers, as well as the customers who are receiving meals that are going to make them sick.

<comment><USER13> I've used Munchery a handful of times back when they were prominently featuring local chefs. The sushi was always done by these two guys and it was always mediocre. The only other problems I've had came up later and were: they've shifted the menu to exclusively bland recipes by the Munchery kitchen and the delivery became unpredictable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like they just did too much. GrubHub, UberEats, DoorDash are all significantly difficult without the cost of making food at scale. I'm impressed that they raised the amount of money they did.

The most interesting work in the food delivery space, IMO, are companies that want to bring the Deliveroo model to the US:

\- [https://www.cloudkitchens.com/](https://www.cloudkitchens.com/) (aka City Storage Systems)

\- [https://2ndkitchen.com/](https://2ndkitchen.com/)

It'll be really interesting to watch this space evolve. I wonder if prices will drop in the long run without sacrificing quality (I'm hopeful, but my rational side says otherwise)

<comment><USER15> Isn't Deliveroo's model exactly the same as that of GrubHub/Seamless, DoorDash, Postmates, Caviar, etc.? In Europe, there's also Just Eat and Foodora in the same space.

Deliveroo has started expanding to use local kitchens (that have no physical restaurant where diners can go), though you'll also find examples of those on GrubHub/Seamless.

<comment><USER14> > Deliveroo has started expanding to use local kitchens (that have no physical > restaurant where diners can go), though you'll also find examples of those > on GrubHub/Seamless.

Not nearly to the same scale as GrubHub. Deliveroo's prep kitchens (called RooBox or Deliveroo Editions) are a lot more ubiquitous. Additionally, Deliveroo actually provides & helps prep kitchens, whereas GrubHub is fairly hands-off when it comes to whether a restaurant has a retail location or is delivery-only.

Their ability to provide prep kitchens works twofold: 1) Help drive down cost, and, more importantly, 2) Gets more restaurants on Deliveroo to drive sales. This is also a perfect touchpoint to sell all sorts of things a restaurant would want: packaging, point of sale, marketing materials:

[https://restaurants.deliveroo.com/en- gb/](https://restaurants.deliveroo.com/en-gb/)

The fundamental difference is that GrubHub & UberEats are (mostly) just delivery. Deliveroo is full vertical integration. I would not be surprised if they start impacting & controlling supply chains soon.

<comment><USER16> Delvieroo here in Australia doesn't prepare their own food, they just deliver food in the same light as Ubereats and Menulog. Interesting they have a different business model internationally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My office has been using them for years for dinner orders, sad to see them go. We used to use Sprig and Munchery (anyone staying for dinner gets to pick), but then Sprig shut down, so we moved to a choice between Munchery and a group Caviar order. Realistically, Munchery hasn't been as popular: we've had maybe 1-5 people order Munchery and 5-15 people order Caviar each day, but it was nice to have the extra options. One notable downside to Munchery compared with others was that the food is cold and you need to heat it up yourself. Now with Muchery gone, I guess we'll try to find some alternative. Definitely sounds like a tough market.

<comment><USER18> Can we take a step back and talk about the management, scheduling, and boundary issues that are resulting in your needing to order _dinner_ at your workplace, seemingly _every single night_?

Sounds like something must have gone seriously off the rails over there.

<comment><USER19> how else are you going to feed a group of people in a big city? e,having people make their own food is irritating(and can't be included in "perks"), having a staff kitchen/canteen is a cost center.

how would you do it better?

<comment><USER20> > how would you do it better?

I was lucky enough to have bosses who would come around at 5:30 and say 'Oi, what are you still doing here, go home'

<comment><USER21> Quite. We sat down as a team and spoke about sustainability to the one guy who was working late regularly. And pointed out when he wasn't quite grasping it that we weren't going to allow code he had written on his own into the codebase.

You might think it's a sprint. You're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a driver and biker myself, Munchery had a great culture. We worked really well together as a team to complete challenging routes in heavy traffic, and 3 months of the year are rainy, which complicates everything.

I think 30% is low. I've seen 100+ lobsters, 100+ steaks, 200+ salmon, and more in a single night. It was very frequent, no one who worked there paid much for food since you could live on the Munchery diet as we called it. Every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (and Sunday at one point too) were big giveaway days. At least 2000 meals per week were given away.

Best side job ever. But I said this years ago when I started, "how can they keep giving away this much food?". I was told it was never a profitiable buisness and it was kept alive by investors. They did pad the tip pool, especially around the holidays. But typical pay was between $20-$25 an hour with tip, $15 without tip. It was less but it's always been minuniun wage for SF.

The one thing the food did do was keep everyone very happy and loyal to the company. Most have been there for 5+ years, a few since near the beginning.

I never understood why they missed the mark so much in predicting the amount of food. The last few weeks, they have been making less food, letting items sell out.

My biggest complaint is I didn't even get notification ahead of time. In the middle of the shift, they shutdown and told us we're being laid off. Everyone is scrambling to find new jobs as no one is getting paid anymore and no one knew it was coming this quickly, we all thought at least another 6-8 months. Even a 2 week notice would have been nice. I found it very disrespectful to just close one day with no notice to your employees that this is coming.

<comment><USER23> Wow that's a lot of food waste! Was upper management really disconnected with the kitchen staff and delivery drivers? They must have known burning through that much cash and wasting food is incredibly wasteful and unsustainable right? I'm really having a hard time getting my head around why management simply didn't just tighten the belt buckle...

Also assume you were paid by the hour? How many deliveries would you typically do since traffic is so terrible around the times they deliver?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's time that companies who put food in a box and mail it to peoples' houses stop claiming to be tech companies.

They are just food delivery companies who happen to have websites. Like all other food delivery companies and restaurants, they are in a cutthroat low- margin business and a few bad months can kill their company. They have no moat because anyone else can also deliver food.

<comment><USER25> Technically, there is no such thing as a tech company. They are all selling something, usually software directly or better software-powered versions of existing industries.

Amazon is retail, AWS is IT, Google/Facebook are ad networks, Microsoft/Apple is hardware and software, etc.

<comment><USER24> Let me put it this way:

Could people have put food in a box and mailed it to your house before the invention of computers? Yes.

Could people have offered computer hardware and software before the invention of computers? Of course not, that's silly.

Of course Microsoft and Google and Apple and Facebook are tech companies. It requires ridiculous reductionist contortions to argue otherwise.

On the other hand, Munchery could have existed at any time the USPS and Visa/Mastercard were operational. Restaurants have been delivering food for far longer than computers have existed.

<comment><USER26> The point is that the boundaries are being blurred. Is Amazon a tech company? Is Netflix? Is Netflix a tech company if they mailed you CDs instead of streaming the material?

Doing anything at scale pretty much turns you into a tech company these days.

<comment><USER24> No, doing things that you could not do without the benefit of technology is what makes you a tech company. Obviously you can stretch the definition of technology to mean pretty much anything if you are not arguing in good faith.

I think all of us in 2019 have a fairly standard consensus understanding of what technology means in the context of this conversation and it would not be good to hijack that to mean anything you want it to mean.

<comment><USER25> _> > stretch the definition of technology to mean pretty much anything_

The actual definition[1][2][3] of technology is applied science and knowledge for practical means. Narrowing the scope to fit arbitrary companies seems like the real stretch to me.

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

2\. [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/technology](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/technology)

3\. [https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths- technology/engi...](https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths- technology/engineering-and-technology/technology/what-technology)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Founded in 2010, the San Francisco-based business had raised a total of $125 > million in venture capital funding, reaching a valuation of $300 million > with an $87 million round in 2015, according to PitchBook. Munchery was > backed by Greycroft, ACME Ventures (formerly known as Sherpa Capital), Menlo > Ventures, e.Ventures, Cota Capital, M13 and more.

I would absolutely love to hear some of these VCs rationales for investing.

<comment><USER25> Portfolio theory. VC is not about in-depth rational understanding, it's about getting into as many deals as possible. Due diligence costs too much.

<comment><USER28> They do due diligence to ensure what the founders are pitching is based in reality - i.e., current sales and growth figures, unit economics, industry data, general trends.

But they know they can't accurately predict the future so they don't spend much time trying to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd really, really like to see a breakdown of expenses for the company's operating lifetime. In my mind this amount of funding should let you build functional nationwide delivery infrastructure, not only three cities, maybe open 100+ locations; but I'm likely wrong and would love to see how. My first guess would be most of it is burned on marketing and software development (?).

<comment><USER29> They overpaid for:

salaries

No one in the restaurant business makes the salaries that restaurant logistics companies pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For people who might be like me and not know what Munchery is: [https://munchery.com/](https://munchery.com/)

Curiously, no mention of shutting down on their site that I could see.

<comment><USER31> I read their website and I'm still concerned i don't get it. (or maybe that's why they're shutting down).

So they deliver you the food from their menu? So its just a professional food business with delivery but without the restaurant/dine-in option? So presumably their competition is actual professional restaurants and they're just in the professional food business?

I'm still struggling to understand how this is different from just ordering food delivered from any other food business? The fact that they say...presumably with a straight face...that you reheat their meals suggests to me that they must be pitching to sacrifice quality for convenience, but they seem to want to believe they're upmarket...

Forgive me, it just doesn't compute?

<comment><USER32> I've ordered over 200 times.

Munchery is pretty good food, with better variety than sf peninsula restaurants, and definitely much healthier, delivered cold to your house. The value is it's waiting when you get home. You reheat it and have a good (sometimes great!) meal in 5 minutes.

As for local restaurants, there's not great delivery options here, particularly if you don't want pizza or sandwiches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I could've sworn that they closed down a year or two ago. Are you sure you just got this?

Edit: yeah, looks like this happened 8 months ago ([https://munchery.com/blog/a-letter-to-the-munchery- community...](https://munchery.com/blog/a-letter-to-the-munchery-community/))

Edit 2: oops, that was only NYC and Seattle - looks like I remembered incorrectly!

<comment><USER34> Maybe they are shutting down by geography?

<comment><USER35> Looks like 3 cities, [https://www.fastcompany.com/40571483/munchery-is- shutting-do...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40571483/munchery-is-shutting- down-in-three-cities-and-cutting-staff)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is unfortunate. I would hope we see a postmortem to get a better understanding of what went wrong. This information could be incredibly valuable to other founders working on similar challenges.

<comment><USER37> The business model of losing money on every sale, but making up for it with volume, turned out to be unsustainable, who knew?

It was nice to get VC-subsidized dinners while it lasted.

<comment><USER38> It's amazing to me how few companies get this, and even more amazing that they ever find funding, much less multiple rounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> $125 million raised, and they only cover the Bay Area, the most competitive market for this kind of service?

Is there even $126m of value in delivering food in an area with a population of 7 million?

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a sad announcement for a service I didn't even know existed.

Over the last few months my schedule has gotten extremely busy and I haven't had time to do any of my normal cooking. I've been just grabbing fast food and putting on more weight than I would like. Toying with the idea of hiring a personal chef along with a nutritionist to plan/prepare meals, I was hoping to have a high quality meal served within seconds of walking in the door. Basically eliminate the stress of dinner and poor diet. I seriously wish I would have heard of this service as it solves my problem in a vastly less expensive way.

So yeah, sorry to hear of the closure and I wish everyone over there the best of luck on future projects.

<comment><USER41> I don't know where you live, but most places there are healthier options for takeout (like salad). A personal chef is much more expensive than you think.

<comment><USER42> I've hired a chef to do meal prep, it's not that expensive and the food was fantastic.

<comment><USER27> This conversation is pretty meaningless without numbers on "not that expensive" and "more expensive than you think".

<comment><USER42> You're right. I paid $300 plus food costs for a week of meals.

<comment><USER43> 15,000 a year. That's a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does anyone have a rough idea what proportion of expenses Munchery spent on?

* marketing and promotional costs

* management overhead and office expenses

Perhaps I'm naive, but looking at their fundraising history, $125M in investment should have been more than adequate to cover launch and build-out costs, considering their core food supply costs would have been covered by actual customers' order fees.

Is this another example of scaling prematurely and hoping you can recoup all of the massive promotional expenses you've employed once you have major regional markets under your thumb?

Generally expensive corporate office space rates in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York don't often help, either.

Edit: Added clarification of questions.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm waiting for a "book the cook" food delivery service where I can ask a chef to cook whatever, get a quote, pay for it and have it delivered.

</comment><comment><USER46> Word is that all the 'employees'(1099ers) found out this morning. In somewhat understandable angst, they've cleaned the place over, bringing in trucks to take all the now un-used heaters, ovens, and all the soon to be spoiled food. Rent is due in 10 days afterall.

So, if you are in the market for some industrial grade kitchen supplies, now is the time to act on that impulse!

</comment><comment><USER47> There goes my $500 gift certificate... Any suggestions on how I can recover that, or have it returned to the initial buyer?!

<comment><USER48> Ask the initial buyer to file a chargeback if it was purchased via credit card. At least in the US, there's good protections that way for preventing folks from owing money for goods and services they didn't receive.

<comment><USER49> But they did receive the gift card. Why should the payment processor assume the risk that, possibly years later, someone doesn't honor the gift card?

<comment><USER48> They're not assuming the risk, the merchant bank is. And the merchant bank should be mitigating that via holding back a portion of credit card receipts from companies for the specific purpose of honoring chargeback demands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Edit: I read a stale link. My bad.

\---

I live in the bay area, have ordered over 200 times with Munchery, and haven't gotten any shutdown email.

All meals are shown as sold-out through Friday. Normally you can order up until 2pm the day of.

</comment><comment><USER50> One thing that I don't understand is why the Social Team are still posting food porn even after this message. Have they not been informed yet?

<comment><USER51> They're probably using this: [https://hootsuite.com/platform/scheduling](https://hootsuite.com/platform/scheduling)

<comment><USER52> They're using Twitter Media Studio according to the app tag in TweetDeck.

[https://media.twitter.com/en_us/articles/products/2018/media...](https://media.twitter.com/en_us/articles/products/2018/media- studio.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> youve released some great talent into the world. munchery developers are some of the best ive worked with :)

</comment><comment><USER54> (deleted)

<comment><USER55> That article is from May of last year.

(I also just got the email that OP quoted.)

<comment><USER54> I did check their own site first. The lack of indication of problems misdirected me. They even have job postings still up.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing HTTP Middleware in Go - <AUTHOR> http://justinas.org/writing-http-middleware-in-go/

<comment><USER2> As the author said, this is middleware in the Django or Rails sense rather than the traditional sense.

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/middleware...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/middleware/)

[http://guides.rubyonrails.org/rails_on_rack.html](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/rails_on_rack.html)

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool use of httptest.</comment>


Certain Types Of Carbon Nanbotubes May Lead To Cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.crn.com/hardware/207801650 <comment><USER2> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195514>

</comment><comment><USER3> Nanotechnology is bad. Let the hysterics commence.</comment>


The Web does not need flash.   - <AUTHOR> http://www.stimuli.com.br/trane/2010/feb/01/the-web-doe-not-need-flash/ <comment><USER2> It bothers me that people seem so _angry_ at flash. It's been the only way to do so many things for more than a decade--and the technology to replace it isn't even really ready yet.

It's now more than a decade old. Of course it's going to be replaced at some point. But let's keep in mind that the open source/standards complaint alternative is _fourteen years late_ to this market, and give credit where it's due.

<comment><USER3> (Author here)

I am sorry I sounded angry. Besides the sensationalist title, I surely didn't intend to.

I've done more Actionscript programming than any other language, keep OSS projects with it, I am not angry at all.

I do think, however, that specially inside the agency niche (to where I belong), there is a very strong blindfold, people really believe that flash is the only tech that matters on the web. Really.

I was aiming more at agency flash devs, to try to stir up some of the signs one can pick up.

I do have a lot of frustration to vent, however, with the toolset, community (certain parts of it) and Adobe. But ironically, all 3 of these have improved greatly in the last couple of years.

<comment><USER2> Honestly, this is more about the general attitude than your post. You were pretty reasonable and acknowledged more of what's going on than most others. Sorry I chose to vent on your post.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Isn't Labor Day Celebrated on May 1st in the United States? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day#United_States

<comment><USER2> Because Communism and Anarchism: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day>

Socialism is not enshrined in American government, and labor unions are only barely tolerated.</comment>


Create a community around your startup to show social proof for investors. - <AUTHOR> http://startupli.st/about

<comment><USER2> Great idea!</comment>


10M former California students' SSNs/medical records/etc. being disclosed [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/ws/documents/form2016jan26.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Mods, please change the link to this: [http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/ws/documents/order2016jan26.pdf](http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/ws/documents/order2016jan26.pdf)

I wasn't able to submit this link unfortunately, so I submitted the form.

</comment><comment><USER2> Odd. Seems like the concerns could be taken care of by a) not just giving them a straight copy of the database and therefore b) just giving them controlled access via user credentials (i.e., that particular user only gets access to certain sanitized views or certain tables).

Seems like the privacy concerns could be fairly straightforward to address by a competent DBA or two.

</comment><comment><USER3> IEP students in some cases have documented medical conditions that would be in those records.

Is this not in any way a problem in regards to HIPPA? Are IEP students (current and former) exempt from the protections of law? Am I off base here?

Shouldn't a superior judge or DA be filing an injunction or something of the sort?

</comment><comment><USER4> Background?

<comment><USER5> [http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Calif-Student- Informat...](http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Calif-Student-Information- Released-to-Non-Profit-368556881.html)

<comment><USER6> Auto play video with sound</comment></comment></comment>