Why investors don't fund dating - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/ <comment><USER2> The thing about dating services is that they work a lot better when they're not explicitly marketed as dating services. Facebook started out as a thinly veiled dating service, where the primary activities were looking up people you might want to date and communicating with them. But the product was marketed as a more general tool, even keeping the meaning of the "Poke" button rather cryptic. Instagram is in the same vein - a large use case is showing your friends and acquaintances how cool and attractive you are, with the goal of raising one's dating status. And Instagram is marketed towards making sunsets and pictures of flowers look better, allowing users to realize for themselves that a Gaussian blur might make their selfies look better too.

Huge numbers of products are marketed towards increasing one's attractiveness in some way, whether shampoo or automobiles or clothing, and outside of Axe body spray, very few of them are explicit about it. There's no reason that websites wouldn't follow the same script.

<comment><USER3> Dating services probably have difficulty getting traction unless they can attract women, and it might be harder to attract women to a dating service if you are purely and overtly offering a dating service.

<comment><USER4> That depends on the age group, on sites targeting 30+ / more serious dating there is usually balance or more women

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 5% churn = 79% annual churn is incorrect. Churn doesn't compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number.

It is actually 0.95^12=0.54 (5% churn/month = 46% annual churn).

<comment> one-more-minute That formula is more correct, but only assuming you don't replace any churned customers – or at least, replace them all at once at the end of the year, which seems like a pretty unreasonable assumption to me.

If you replace customers every month then the number leaving per month is constant, so you end up churning 0.05×12 = 60% of your userbase per year.

 _Edit:_ The 12x model is also pretty coarse, but you can take the limit of _continuous_ replacement, and you end up churning

        -12log(1-x) = 0.616

× your customer base per year.

<comment><USER6> ya'll are total nerds. Have some upvotes!

edit: subtle sexism

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem is, founders tend to try to solve problems they've experienced and understand. For the twenty-somethings that are the public face of "startup founders", they may not understand international trade or enterprise health care or other big problems, but they understand dating. So they write dating apps.

And then, by the time they've acquired enough real-world professional experience to actually understand some interesting and high-value problems, they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.

<comment><USER8> Despite the echo-chamber of SV and tech media, most successful founders are older, with real world industry experience.[0]

This data probably doesn't reflect the insane number of 20 somethings chasing ideas in markets like the dating space right now. Most of them fail.

I work in the senior care market and I'm shocked there aren't more businesses being started around that market. It's absolutely huge with endless opportunity. But I guess that kind of proves your point...

[0][https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top- foun...](https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-founders- heres-the-data/)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you're right. But if you look at the _really big_ companies, nearly all were started by young founders (Facebook, Google, etc.) And that's what kids (and the media) focus in on.

IMO experienced founders are great for building a cash cow business worth $1 billion or so. That takes hard work and a billion dollars is a fucking lot of money, so it's nothing to scoff at. But it's not primarily what VCs are interested in: the VC model is built off of small equity stakes in $10 billion+ IPOs.

To have a $10 billion+ IPO, you need to invent a market, and young kids are great at that because they don't see the limitations the market has placed on us. Most don't have the fucking slightest about finance or money, which can be an impediment if you're trying to create a product in an existing market, but if you're building a new market or category, short-term viability matters less.

That said, there are a lot more ideas that can turn into successful $1 billion companies than ideas that can become $100 billion companies. So your odds are a lot better at starting a successful business if you learn how first.

And to your point about senior care... most VCs who don't focus on health care avoid it entirely for similar reasons they avoid dating apps. You can either go the medical device/biotech route and spend hundreds of millions on lawyers and regulatory approvals, or you can go after the provider side of things. The healthcare IT space is pretty saturated and very fragmented, so it ends up scaling like a consulting business (which VCs are also not fond of).

<comment><USER10> Where are these 10 billion dollar ipos and these billion dollar businesses that investors don't want to touch?

What are these magical markets invented by oh-so-spry out-of-box-thinking unburdened-by-reality type of kids?

<comment><USER11> I think they're talking about things like WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat.

If you had asked me about each of them before I'd heard of them, I would have told you that they are all solved problems. That SMS, email, and the existing photo-sharing apps are "good enough".

However, these companies are apparently solving people's problems (hence the large userbase for each), even if I personally don't use them and don't quite understand the value proposition that each provides.

<comment><USER12> Except that WhatsApp was started by a 30something experienced founder pair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are also many free alternatives which are very good. I'm not suggesting something like Tinder or OkCupid are perfect, but both of them are fully usable for your whole dating lifecycle without ever having to pay a cent (both of them have premium options, but they are entirely optional). Maybe IAC will change that at some point, but they haven't thus far.

Dating is also always going to require work that can't be replaced with money. I can throw money at my laundry, my meals, my house cleaning and completely outsource them. But with dating, regardless of how good the site or matching is, I'm still going to have to meet the other person and have to do most of the "dirty work" involved with dating myself. So I'd think that fact limits the upper bound of money they can charge and upper bound of money a dating company can make.

<comment><USER14> another problem with dating is simply throwing money at the problem actually decreases the quality of the results!

it's easy to go out on tons of dates with gold-diggers, or the male equivalent, moocher deadbeats. unfortunately people get tired of both very quickly even though on paper it sounds like a lot of fun (dating exciting, interesting losers).

<comment><USER15> Is there any reason the term gold digger can't apply to both men and women? I do agree they are to be avoided as I have yet to meet one even slightly interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There seems to be a lot of explanation from a business-y POV as to why dating startup is hard, but I'm curious from a different POV: does dating company/apps actually solve any problem that people are having? To be more precise, dating is _hard_ , but the difficulty is multi-facet, and I can't see an app potentially solving any of them for me. I'm a single 20s-something, so firmly in the target audience for most dating app. And I fail see the benefits of using almost any dating service from a startup out there.

<comment><USER17> I've tried various dating apps and websites throughout the years. Result: I haven't even made a friend from any of them. Every experience with one of these apps I had was kind of depressing and humiliating. (I also have a very small potential dating pool anyway, so that certainly doesn't help.)

Here's an idea for a dating app: Successfully identify what people _want_ in a relationship, match based on that. Alice might be looking for a monogamous relationship, Bob might be looking for a one-night stand. The system should not match the two together unless one of them changes their minds.

<comment> shock-value OKC does just that -- if you take the time to answer the match questions they offer.

For example, regarding a relationship vs. one night stand, there are the questions "About how long do you want your next relationship to last?" and "Say you've started seeing someone you really like. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?". Assuming both parties have answered those questions (and done so honestly) it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what each side's intentions are.

Also, I believe that if you pay for their A-list feature, you can actually filter out profiles based on answers to these questions, rather than needing to compare answers manually.

<comment><USER17> I answered over 1000 questions honestly on OKC and the matches were all pretty terrible. That could be simply that there is nobody I'm compatible with.

<comment><USER18> A lot of the questions are pretty terrible, it forces one to cram their opinions into 2/3/4 choices. The moral quandries with "this is wrong / this is right" are the worst

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My takeaway from this article is that Ashley Madison is a great investment. No churn, comprehensible to investor class, generally high disposable income customers. Hmm.

<comment><USER20> There's talk of an Ashley Madison IPO in the near future:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Dating belongs to a category of industries that also includes jobsearch/careers, education, fitness, and socializing. The characteristics of these industries are:

1\. They are broad, holistic consumer problems where a success metric might be clearly defined (find a spouse, get a job, earn a degree), but the steps to get there aren't.

2\. There is a social status component: people (rightly or wrongly) make status judgments about your life outcomes.

3\. Success means you don't need a product.

There's a big mistake that many rookie founders make with these industries (and I'm speaking from bitter experience founding a career-guidance startup): You can solve people's problems, but you can't rob people of their problems.

I met my fiancee on OKCupid. I _met_ her on OKCupid. But I did the hard work of living an interesting life and adjusting my expectations to reality on my own. We did the hard work of earning each others' trust and respect, building a relationship, and overcoming our differences together. We deleted our OKCupid accounts about a month after meeting.

Similarly, someone who gets a job through LinkedIn _gets the job themselves_ , LinkedIn doesn't get the job for them. They have to do the hard work of building the skills and meeting the qualifications themselves. They need to build their network themselves. They impress the hiring manager and interviewers themselves. LinkedIn is a tool for managing this, but it is not and cannot be the reason for their success.

A lot of founders look at hard problems like dating or unemployment thinking "This sucks. It shouldn't suck. I'm not going to rest until everyone has the perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect skills, etc." They don't realize that _this is not a problem they can fix_. If they could fix it, it would rob their customers of their humanity, of a lot of what makes them real. The _reason_ we choose people as employees, as spouses, and as friends is because of things they do and challenges they overcome, not because of products they use.

Successful companies in these spaces realize this and focus on one individual sub-problem they can solve to make people's lives easier. Tinder won't get you into a relationship, but it shows you people of your preferred sex. Indeed also shows you options, but getting the job is your responsibility. Google has done wonderful things for self-education by making the whole web available with a few keywords. LinkedIn and Facebook started out as great rolodexes, but then (IMHO) have been steadily ruining their products by trying to creep into more and more of my life.

<comment><USER22> True, there is currently no app or web service that can do all the work of getting you a job, or getting you a girlfriend, or whatever, from start to finish, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It only means that particular app doesn't exist yet. Whoever cracks a nut like that can name their own price.

<comment><USER21> What would it mean if such an app existed? Would you be employing the app? Dating the app? Where's the person when the machine does all the work?

(This assumes that we don't have a dystopian future like in Terminator or The Matrix where the machines take over, which is not a given. But then, if we did, whoever wrote that app would likely be too busy saving the world from their creation to name their own price.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _It's super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley > investors_

Huh? I've seen quite the opposite. Anecdote: The League [0]. $2mil in funding without the existence of a product or a team (when it was funded). There's some _very_ mainstream investors on that list too.

Investors who don't invest in dating apps don't do it because they know the problem never gets fixed. Investors who do invest in them, know they can sell to IAC. As I've heard from a prominent VC who is friendly with the Match.com board (paraphrased) "The whole dating app market knows that at scale finding someone on a dating app is statistically no different than finding one at a bar. We simply making going to the bar easier".

[0] - [https://angel.co/the-league-date-intelligently](https://angel.co/the- league-date-intelligently)

<comment><AUTHOR> that's one data point. Not saying it never happens, and in fact, Dating Ring raised $500k or so. But here's a lot more commentary on the topic: [https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture- capit...](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture-capital- funding/)

<comment><USER23> So Shasta, IDG, Cowboy, XSeed, Khosla, Lowercase, etc are not mainstream?

Here's some more data points. According to AngelList

[https://angel.co/online-dating](https://angel.co/online-dating) ~38,000 investors

[https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2](https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2) ~989 investors

[https://angel.co/travel-tourism](https://angel.co/travel-tourism) ~1,082 investors

Yet the market for Travel is $300b (online) and the dating one is $2b (online).

How does that constitute as investors not wanting to invest into dating startups when there's 38x as many investors (by absolute numbers) as travel and yet the market is 150th the size? Seems like it's quite the opposite, no?

If anything the talking point here should be "why are so many people investing in dating apps when their returns aren't great?"

It'd be also helpful to define what you consider "mainstream" before drawing a conclusion...

<comment><USER24> Travel is a misleading outlier as it has historically terrible margins and a large portion of the market volume is in airlines which historically generally lose money. On the other hand the market cap from online dating is pretty much entirely captured in online dating and isn't dominated by companies that own airplanes or hotels. "Revenue" that includes directly passed on fees is highly misleading as an indicator of relative market size. I'd rather own a company that made 1/4 as much than a company that passed 90% of revenue to other companies.

<comment><USER23> Expedia's 1.1B EBITDA alone last year [0] was nearly half of all of the _revenues_ for online dating services...

[0] - [http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Expedia_%28EXPE%29/Data/EBITD...](http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Expedia_%28EXPE%29/Data/EBITDA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He botches the math. 20% monthly churn means you have to replace your customer base 2.4 times over a year, not 8 times. But the conclusion is the same: CAC > LTV.

<comment><USER26> I assume his formula (1+monthly_churn)^12 – 1 was based on a misremembering or misunderstanding of annual churn = 1 - (1-monthly_churn)^12.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The criticisms made against dating startups could be levied for many other market segments as well. I imagine that if investors are shying away from dating startups, it's for no other reason than Dating Startups are no longer in vogue (because dating is complex), and the heard tends to stick together. Dating is a common problem, and investors have gotten "dating app" fatigue.

Here are some counter points.

> I've heard [Churn] numbers as high as 20-30% monthly

Making an argument based on hear-say.

> Dating is niche and has a shelf-life

So is the market segment for weddings, and newborns. Underserved niche markets are ripe for "disruption" which follows with it--investment.

> Dating products have historically depended on paid acquisition channels to > build their customer base,

Source?

> City-by-city expansion sucks

It's an extra challenge, but ubers, and airbnb's and many other marketplace as a service have figured it out.

> Demographic mismatch with older, married investors

While there are investors whose methodology precludes them from investing in markets that have not bearing on them, it's probably safe to assume at one point in their life, they had to date.

</comment><comment><USER28> A more obvious reason that dating sites don't get funded is that they're uniformly terrible. No one understands dating well enough to create a service that works reliably, and according to Pew Research fewer than 1 in 4 online daters actually find a long-term relationship online. So the sites become an exercise in hand-waving, and I can understand why investors are reluctant to invest in what boils down to pure marketing, the service equivalent of a Pet Rock.

</comment><comment><USER29> Curious to point out that Tinder & clones found a solution to the dating churn problem:

\- Don't target people for whom success in the app will make them want to churn = people looking for a public committed relationship.

\- Target people for whom success will make them want to use the app more = people looking for secret private hookups!

</comment><comment><USER30> The churn argument overlooks the fact that there's a _lot_ of repeat business. I know plenty of people who have been using one or more of these services literally for years. IAC seems to have figured out something the other investors have not, which is how to capture that segment of the market and keep them coming back. It seems to have something in common with slot machines and other casino and freemium games: you have to give people enough wins to keep them playing but not enough that they actually get what they want.

<comment><USER31> Really interesting analysis. I always wondered if the general quality of online relationships is less than those formed elsewhere. I mean, if you found your partner on a dating site I wonder if you are more likely to break up because you know there is a whole pool of singles just waiting to message. If you don't have a buffet of potential partners to choose from you may be happier?? I am reminded of Dan Gilbert's research - seems it may apply.

I know that online dating was a horrible experience for me. I felt I was becoming way too picky and judgemental trying to pick people to go on dates with. I also knew I couldn't judge chemistry and compatibility through someone's profile so the whole thing was pretty frustrating. I ended up meeting the person I married totally randomly one day when I wasn't looking.

Obviously I am not saying all relationships that were formed online are terrible or anything - I'm talking generally.

<comment><USER32> Are you a man or a woman?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a great analysis although the Silicon Valley jargon is heavy at times. Even as a fairly-regular HN reader, I didn't recognize some of these, like IAC and ARPU, and they aren't defined or linked in the piece.

<comment><USER34> ARPU is "average revenue per user", but I can't for the life of me figure out IAC. Maybe someone else can help???

<comment><USER35> IAC is a company who owns a lot of dating sites. Source: the article.

<comment><USER34> Thanks so much! I have absolutely no idea how I missed that...:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Dating apps should have a bright future here in the US thanks to the sterilization of the American work force. We have women like Ellen Pao to thank for that. Men are rightfully too afraid of the legal consequences of hitting on female co-workers with HR policies like "no unwanted sexual advances." How do you know an advance is unwanted until you try?

</comment><comment><USER37> Too bad this write up showed up after this episode: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431)

<comment><USER38> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100)

I offered similar thoughts when Dating Ring first launched:

 _YC 's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large" companies[1]. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that.

There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite high because there's so much competition. That makes it very difficult for new services to gain traction without significant investment in advertising. Second, there's an additional level of churn built in to this market because when a dating service works, it loses customers. That produces a constant need for investment in the aforementioned user acquisition which is so costly.

More specifically, Dating Ring seems to be positioned in no man's land (no pun intended). It can't compete with the quantity and immediate gratification of online services that cost nothing or roughly the same, and it can't compete with the quality and exclusivity of matchmaking services which generally have costs signaling much higher value.

If the OP's comment is true, Dating Ring would ironically appear to be offering the worst of both worlds by trying to package users from the former as part of a service masquerading as the latter. Even with adjustments to its model, the odds that this company ever achieves "hyper-growth" or becomes a very large business are next to nil.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI) _

None of this means that the founder hasn't experienced sexism, but she seems far too eager to ignore the inconvenient fact that _some_ early traction and an impressive team don't necessarily mean you have an investable business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> i think part of the problem is the bad taste anyone would have in their mouth after using any of the obviously fake dating sites that have existed to date. as the majority of dating sites are littered with vast amounts of fake or ancient profiles, after a person has been through a few, they usually write them all off as fake or poor quality. its just an industry, much like adult, that collectively has not done itself many favors in the eyes of the general public and past customers.

the other issue with growing a date network is the fact that it is a hyper local focused market, so unless you have a good regional marketing and roll out plan, traction will be hard to gain.

these two problems coupled make it a pretty tough nut to crack. reeducating, recreating trust and moving market by market is going to a cost a bit. the good news is, members tend to stay around a while, in fact often times for a few months after they have found a new person to date. If you want MRR, dating is even better then porn.

one thing that was good for the market was the disappearance of myspace and aol, both of which allowed for searching via zip, dating status and age... making them free places to find possible dates.

source: used to work in the web based dating industry.

</comment><comment><USER40> Isn't considering churning in dating bad kind of like saying that a supermarket or restaurant shouldn't give much food to their customers otherwise they'll be sated and won't eat anymore?

It seems to me that it's the opposite, mating for humans is such a basic instinct that there will never be a shortage in the market, considering also that new humans that want to date pop up at a pretty much constant rate.

<comment><USER41> The problem is not at all like restaurants. If a restaurant gives someone good food, they'll stop eating and buying _today_ , but will probably be back tomorrow or later in the week.

With a dating site, if you're successful, you probably won't be seeing that customer again for at least several months, possibly forever. Sure, new people are entering the dating pool all the time, but the marketing effort required to constantly replenish your userbase at those levels of churn is incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if there's a market for angel investing (w/o followon) in dating startups SPECIFICALLY to become friends/familiar with great early-in-career founders, to try to invest in their second, presumably non-dating startup.

i.e. throw down $25k on whatever valuation purely to build a relationship with 10 teams/year, with the hope one might survive as a business, and one or two might be stellar teams who fail for reasons specific to dating, but will come to you first when they do their next startup. $250k/yr isn't that expensive, and you could pre-screen by just investing in 100% of the YC dating-or- adjacent companies.

Extra points for going out of your way to be helpful vs. maximizing your return, and being super helpful during inevitable wind-down.

</comment><comment><USER43> While these are all reasonable and valid points it's missing a key one: margin.

If you look at successful SaaS businesses users who pay <$50/month are pretty much always loss leaders. Almost all the money in SaaS is in enterprise and large customers.

It's very hard to make subscription work for consumer SaaS businesses simply because the margin between CAC and LTV is so small. Gaming (ala World of Warcraft) has shifted away from subs to IAP because it's easier to lower CAC through making a product freemium than to increase LTV.

Commercially successful dating sites have become so through increasing LTV by locking customers into long term contract and reducing CAC via shady tactics to increase conversion. Neither of which many investors want to be associated with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually specifically talk about CAC and LTV and why enterprise/SaaS can drive higher revenues over time. There's a whole section for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Dating has always been a game of breadth first search and sampling with rapid feedback. The "promenade" (a town or two would meet up, single boys circled clockwise around a circle of anti-clockwise girls) was commonplace in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

In the end though, most business and consumer interactions at least begin with something very similar to dating. So solutions found in "proper" dating sites _ought_ to be translatable to sales and marketing apps

Even advertising is a weird form of one sided dating, with the most promiscuous and least picky self selecting for paid exposure to man y many potential new partners.

</comment><comment><USER45> I doubt that. As soon as your product has momentum investors will shit you with money. The problem is the hen egg problem. Same with ebay clones.

You don't have users and new users are turned off by the fact that you don't have users.

</comment><comment><USER10> Uber is dating for drivers and riders.

AirBNB is dating for owners and renters.

Facebook is dating for content and readers.

Amazon is dating for supply chains and consumers.

Tinder is for hookups.

</comment><comment><USER46> Dating is a massive business. A major part of our economy thrives around dating. People who don't believe you can charge for it are not creative. It's true that we don't like to pay for membership, but the service can charge for activity tickets such as events, movies, dinners etc.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wrote about this last month.. with dating sites, losing is losing while winning is losing bigger:

[http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating- website](http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website)

<comment><USER48> Outside of deliberately "tainting" matches, I don't really see a big problem with what you said on your blog.

Back when I was in the dating pool, it would have been nice to get matches on all checkboxes, but life doesn't really work like that. Nobody's perfect and if you go onto a site expecting a perfect match (yeah, I'm sure many, many do so!), you're going to be sorely disappointed.

e.g., I hate cigarettes, but I married a smoker. In this case love made me see past something that would have been a dealbreaker. I'm an atheist, but I've dated religious people.

But to the point about losing customers, that's an interesting one. One the one hand, the successful matches will probably send business your way, but will they make up for the ones you lose due to "success?" I don't have data, but my gut tells me that even with great matching software, it will take people so long to meet someone who causes them to stop using the site, that you're better off giving them great matches to keep them coming back until that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> To me the main points seem to come down to market size. My impression is that the points made are valid, but that the market is still big and unsaturated enough for there to be a ton of opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny thing is that dating as a primary use case led to the creation of social networks in the first place: Friendster -> Facebook (poking, checking out classmates) -> $223 billion market cap.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't get the 'shelf life' argument. Most people are constantly on dating sites to keep meeting other people (maybe under fake names if they are already married).

<comment><USER52> Your experience doesn't line up with my own. The majority of my friends who use dating websites and start a relationship stop using the dating sites early in the relationship.

<comment><USER51> That must be another plus of living in an atheist post-Soviet world :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > Most investors who can write checks (as opposed to associates) are older, > married, and kids.

Amusing word omission.

</comment><comment><USER54> But dating services can go viral. Network effect.

<comment><USER7> And what are the odds of that, in a field already saturated with both successful, established competitors (OKCupid, Tinder, EHarmony, etc) and a thousand other would-be viral newcomers?

And even if you could overcome the competition, you still have all the other problems Andrew Chen wrote about... how do you make money? How do you grow without spending a fortune? How do you exit?

<comment><USER20> Keep in mind that Tinder is only 2.5 years old and entered what was already a crowded market.

But they had a new take on mobile dating and managed to find room in the market.

There's always room for one more!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Once thought about doing a match making business:

(1) There are lots of singles, and the number is not going down. Sure, each year some get married, but others _come of age_.

(2) Potentially there is a _lot_ of money in the match making business at least in the sense that most young people, especially the women, are highly motivated to get a _match_.

Let's support this claim: The women are motivated by ballpark $10,000 to $60,000 a year and are spending that now. How? Sure: College.

It's still the case (blame Mother Nature) that heavily women go to college to get their Mrs. degree and otherwise their teaching certificate or RN. Feminists, aside, that situation won't change soon. Maybe some people like this situation and maybe some don't, but, still, blame Mother Nature.

But college is a poor place for young women to get their Mrs. degree: Why? The male students are nearly all too young, too poor, and unemployed.

Other main competition: Bars. Bummer. What Mr. Right wants to meet his Angel in, what, what the heck, a, what, a bar!

Look, guys, neither the bars nor the colleges are on the way out of the match making business from customers getting married. So, why conclude so soon that a match making service has to be on the way out of business from losing customers from making matches?

Match making better than college and bars: The woman can be pretty and the man, older, ready to be good as a husband and father, that is, someone the woman will have a super tough time meeting otherwise. This is a very old story, not going away soon.

I remember: In college, the girls wanted nothing to do with me. But nine years later I drove my new, high end Camaro back to my college to look up some stuff in their library, and walking from my car to the library, for the first time, from 60 feet away, I got a really good look from an undergrad woman. That's the truth, guys: The car and my age, and that was enough -- I passed the first two filter questions on her list for Mr. Right. Blame Mother Nature.

Fathers? They would be better off saving on college tuition and getting some really good match making for their daughters.

Big, untapped, totally _natural_ market, very poorly served otherwise: Start with the women younger. Example: Lady Di. When she was 15, she decided that she would marry Prince Charles. About five years later, she did. Mother Nature says: Girls 12+ are thinking about husbands. So, by age 15-16 they might be ready for a Sunday dinner at home with a candidate Mr. Right, late model car paid for, house bought, cash in the bank, good job. Then 2-4 years later, she gets married.

In human history, this is not nearly a new idea, but a good match making service -- and it would have to be really good -- can be one of the best ways to make this work for the girls/women, their fathers, and the men.

(3) How to get new singles to replace the ones that get married? Sure: Go to singles groups; the standard is church youth groups. Churches are smart enough to invest in the future -- have married members who make more members.

Another way? Sure, hold singles parties, eventually invitation only. So, meet "the _best_ people". So, much cheaper than a high end country club or yacht club but with potentially even better results.

(4) Barrier to entry. Sure, match making is necessarily nearly a local business. So there is a geographical barrier to entry. So, get the best collection of singles in one area and have close to a natural monopoly.

Of course, the software doesn't have to be local.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't care how good your article is, if you pop up a subscribe box over the content I'm not going to read it.

[http://tabcloseddidntread.com/](http://tabcloseddidntread.com/)</comment>


US Violates International Law in Failed Plot to Capture Snowden (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/07/03/us-violates-intl-law-grounding-bolivian-presidents-plane-in-pursuit-of-snowden/ <comment><USER2> I'm at a loss ... what's the legal framework for this? I'm sure that some lawyer somewhere has justified why this was a legally valid maneuver. What's the narrative that clears this of legal issues?

Is it this? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milita...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists) and if so, what does international law have to say about events such as this?

To what authority are the actors here accountable to? Only their own domestic authorizations?

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember seeing this back when the event occurred. It still baffles me how the USA government has managed to wrangle their way out of this political mess all while trampling on core freedoms.

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember seeing it and then not hearing the shitstorm I was expecting to follow. It's impressive how they managed to distract the media at the time.

<comment><USER4> I wonder what would happen if the situation had been reversed, and the USA President was sitting in the 'hijacked' plane.

<comment><AUTHOR> CNN: "$country has kidnapped the President and declared war on the United States"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did this not get much coverage in the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> It got practically zero coverage in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And who does the wrist slapping when countries violate international law?</comment>


Cache-Efficient Functional Algorithms (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/iolambda-cacm/cacm.pdf <comment><USER3> I'm getting the impression that our problems with caching are related to the way we abstract computer memory. If languages are built with the assumption that you can jump around your RAM with no cost, I guess that can result in code that could have been made more efficient. This makes me wonder - <USER2> kind of abstraction would help alleviate this problem?

<comment><USER4> More abstractions! Higher level languages!

<comment><USER5> Don't you need a lower level language (than even assembly and maybe even some sort of hardware support)? Virtual memory abstracts away whether the address is in RAM or disk. Going a step further, you need to undo even one more layer of abstraction so you know whether you're accessing L1, L2, or main memory.

But to be honest I think just malloc is a decent abstraction. You control memory layout and the rest is having algorithms with good access patterns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really interesting article and I'm glad this is getting attention. It's especially refreshing to see a theoretical treatment bridging algorithms with more "modern" hardware implementations.

One opportunity I do find in this article is real-world performance tests and determining the importance of constants in performance tuning. Prakop et al. did some really interesting work in 1999 on cache-oblivious algorithms, with applications to kernels such as the FFT and matrix multiplication. The work is theoretically extremely interesting, but in practice, hand-written or machine- generated algorithms continue to dominate. The most famous example of this is probably Kazushige Goto, whose hand-optimized GotoBLAS (now under open source license as OpenBLAS) still provides some of the fastest linear algebra kernels in the world.

If you're interested in learning more about how the differences between the two approaches shake out in linear algebra, I recommend "Is Cache-Oblivious DGEMM Viable?" by Gunnels et al.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is about algorithms over immutable or persistent data structures, not about algorithms operating on functions, a common and unfortunate misnaming.

Ocaml is functional but allows arbitrary state mutations. On the other hand it is typically very straightforward to implement persistent data structures in a non-functional language with GC support.

<comment><USER8> I would be very hesitant to accuse Robert Harper of misusing the term 'functional'. I'm not an expert in their field, but I interpret 'functional algorithm' to mean an algorithm whose inputs are transformed by successive applications of functions (in the mathematical sense.)

<comment><USER7> I guess I formulated not precisely enough. I have not tried to accuse anybody of misusing. From books that I read I got a strong impression that the term "functional programming" as a term is about treating functions as the first- class entities (or even the only entities). The persistent data structures is orthogonal to this. But I guess I just have to accept that in the field it is a common speak to use "functional algorithms" to mean "algorithms for persistent data structures".

Personally I see this as unfortunate as the persistence as a term IMO is much more precise. It also remains that one also needs GC and properly accounts its cost which this paper discuss a lot.

<comment><USER9> The confusion is that you are thinking of function in the programming language sense (i.e. A subroutine ) rather than in the mathematical sense (i.e. A function called with the same arguments always returns the same value). The mathematic definition of function necessitates persistent data structures (i.e. You do not modify the dataset but return a new dataset with the modifications).

<comment><USER7> Yet persistent data do not imply functional programming. For example, one can work with persistent data structures in Java using global variables to pass references to data structures. One can also implement algorithms from the article using explicit stack to avoid recursion. Yet such atrocities will not change the conclusion of the article that the code will be cache-efficient as long as the runtime is sufficiently smart.

So my assumption (which could be wrong) is that by using the word "functional" that article unnecessary restricts its auditory. For example, a Java programmer would not even bother to open it assuming this is something relevant at best to Haskell or F#. I definitely had such expectation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DuckDuckGo Search Improvements - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-search-improvements/ <comment><USER2> I've been adopting and promoting DuckDuckGo for more than 2–3 years now. I can say that the transition period was quite long actually. I was invoking !g very frequently at the beginning but I force myself to at least probe a few first items first before trying Google. After these years I rarely use Google, and every time that I actually search something on Google, before even seeing the result, Google welcomes me by the whole TOS/Privacy stuff and I close the tab and try the DDG a few more times. I think the friction of accepting their privacy policy makes me think twice.

If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.

<comment><USER3> The biggest problem with DDG for me is how easy it is to game. Try doing research on new cars/trucks and you'll find most results at the top are trash sites like 2020-make-model.com and the like.

<comment><USER4> It's bing..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I keep trying DDG. Year after year I set all of my computers to use DDG. I last a week, a month, but in the end I always give up and set it back to Google.

I was really hoping the title meant like it read. Maybe my hopefulness was reading too much into 'Search Improvements.'

It is also possible that I don't need a search engine. I'm guessing that at least half of the questions/searches result in a post on SO or Wikipedia. There's probably a quarter of them that shoot me to some Medium entry. I guess I could always just bookmark those sites and skip the search engine..

<comment><USER6> Thats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG

<comment><USER7> I wish i could create a button that quickly reran the search with "!g" instead of typing it.

<comment><USER8> You can bookmark the bookmarklet that I just created at [https://codepen.io/durovo-the- typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX](https://codepen.io/durovo-the- typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> After 3 or so years using DDG full-time, it's a shock landing back on Google and realising how many ads there are.

Out of everything on the first page of a recent search, there were only 8 actual results - everything else was an ad.

DDG feels to me like Google did when it first launched - simple, fast and unobtrusive. A world away from the incumbents, like AltaVista and Yahoo, that were intent on becoming 'portals', owning every moment of a user's online activity.

Google has become a portal.

<comment><USER10> Do you not use an adblocker?

<comment><USER11> Curious. What adblocker are you using?

I use an AdBlock Plus & uBlock Origin, and when I Google something -- by default -- basically my entire search is ads. Do you need to add some configuration to uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus? Are you in the US?

I just use DuckDuckGo instead on Desktop. But since I have an Android phone, it's just easier to use Google.

<comment><USER12> Wait, do you use AdBlock Plus _AND_ uBlock Origin at the same time? That might be your problem - when I run uBlock Origin alone it blocks all those Google search ads.

AdBlock Plus has a program where they allow companies to buy spots on their ad whitelist, and I imagine that's interfering with uBlock Origin's more absolutist stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will be that guy and probably disliked for this but I use Bing. I get points for just doing what I always do and I almost always get what I need. I've got a few hundred Thousand points saved up and am waiting to get enough to buy something new. When Bing occasionally sucks like it does when searching for news, I go to Google.

I use DDG as part of TOR but the results are just not that good, and I really want them to be.

<comment><USER14> I tried to use DDG so hard. Changed my browser, changed my phone. I have pretty much gotten away from Google for everything except Youtube. I ended up using !G around 25% of the time and got tired of it.

So I ended up switching to Ecosia which is a cleaner front-end for Bing. I never really find myself using using google for search anymore. Bing is good enough.

<comment><USER15> DDG itself is a front-end for bing. It gets results from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It takes a lot to even replicate _some_ of the functionality of Google search. Huge credit to the DDG team for providing the second-best search results out there along with a much cleaner and privacy focused UI.

I do occasionally go back to Google but that's for less than <10% of my queries and when I do it's after a few attempts at finding something on DDG.

Definitely recommend to anyone for use.

<comment><USER17> Isn't Bing second best search engine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those of you using a single search engine: try DDG, but if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead.

Or use Firefox's smart keywords [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how- search-from-address...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from- address-bar?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Smart+keywords)

You could configure it to use:

      g something  # to search google
      d something  # to search DDG

<comment><USER19> I wonder, do the DDG people use the `!g` things as a way to further-refine their search algorithm?

For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted. Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.

There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking of.

<comment><USER20> ANECDATA:

on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle memory)

on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't find what I'm looking for

this is either down to:

(a) Google's results getting worse over time

(b) my searches getting more obscure over time

(c) selection bias due to DDG solving for my less obscure searches

I suspect (c)

<comment><USER21> As a frequent user of google, I think a is not to be underestimated. Google has gotten more aggressive with stemming and other forced "corrections" to your search. This (I assume) helps in general but can frequently result in undesirable search results if you are attempting to search for words like in spelling but unrelated to common words or uncommon senses of common words, both of which seem to occur somewhat frequently in technical jargon.

There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain (of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting harder and harder by the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem is google isn't just a search engine it's the information seeking megalith of our time. That little text input takes what you give it, determines what the hell you're trying to figure out, and delivers results on a level that just vastly supersedes anything else. I love the concept of DDG and would greatly prefer to use it, it's just a painfully inferior tool and shows no signs of coming close to what google offers.

<comment><USER23> That's great if it works for you, but doesn't match my experience. I've been using DDG for years now, and rarely bother with Google any more. If I can't find what I need with DDG I have better luck with Bing than with Google.

<comment><USER24> The simplest explanation is that you don't know how good Google is anymore.

I use DDG because I think it's important and have family members doing it too, but it costs us time when we search because the search completion is poor and the results aren't as intelligent as I expect. Perhaps maintaining those expectations is my problem to solve, but that does not make the product's deficiencies go away.

<comment><USER25> Is Google that effective if you're not logged in?

I try not to give them any more hooks into my privacy than I need to, so I never search while logged in.

<comment><USER26> The amount of user-specific customisation Google does is generally overrated. For the vast majority of searches, I see only minor shifts in ranking when comparing logged-in to anonymous. Case in Point: [crystal] currently gives me meth and stones before programming, even though I have done quite a few programming-related (and even crystal-lang specific) searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been using DDG for a half year now, and I'm digging it. A feature request: A quick language filter! I use three languages in my daily live. However, false friends (similar words with different meanings) and the fact that some topics are more relevant in some languages make searching sometimes an agony. Google suffers from this too; I can change languages from the settings, but what I really want is a quick language filter, similar to the date filter, since I tend to juggle with that many, many times per day. Or would, if it weren't painful.

<comment><USER28> Maybe a solution for you would be using Firefox containers, with one container per language?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use DDG daily and have been for nearly 2 years now. My biggest complaint UI wise is that there are no page numbers. Yes, you can keep pressing "More results" but you can't easily resume or share search result pages etc. It's an insanely useful feature that is missing and I have no idea why.

</comment><comment><USER30> I tried DDG for around a month. I really wanted to like it, but the results were just too inconsistent. I ended up using !g about 90% of the time after getting unsatisfactory results, which just doubled my time spent searching for what were sometimes quite simple things.

I know it's more, but DDG really just feels like bing with privacy.

I ended up using startpage.com which basically gives you Google results without all the stalky tracking nonsense. Now I only resort to Google for about 10% of searches.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search engine for a few years now, since 2014. It has improved significantly over that period of time and I am happy that it has come so far. I used to use g! flagrantly, but now I find myself using it less and less. Still, I wish there was some way to stop using yt!

I think it's time to switch to the dark theme. Thanks duckduckgo!

</comment><comment><USER32> Something that just strikes me as weird is how the tabs (for images, videos, news, etc.) aren't really tabs to different pages, but rather some sort of inline expansion thing. When I look at images, the regular results are still there if you scroll to the bottom. They're there for a second until infinite scroll triggers and loads the next batch of images, pushing the regular results to the bottom again.

It's not really an inconvenience. It's just weird. Why do it like that?

</comment><comment><USER33> Search is broken, almost all searches I do now, the first dozen links are all crap (no content, gamed the algorithm). This is for Google or DuckDuckGo. I hate the modern internet.

<comment><USER34> I rarely find this the case. Do you mind sharing some example queries?

<comment><USER33> I was looking for the etymology of a city name. Got buried in ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish Google introduced a dark theme too. Hopefully all sites on the internet become dark friendly one day without using external software to make it happen.

<comment><USER36> prefers-color-scheme is soon going to be a thing: [https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color- scheme](https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme)

The idea is to have one OS-wide dark theme switch and your browser to expose that preference to the websites. Latest iOS/Android/Windows already have that OS-wide preference, but, you know, it'll take quite a while before your favorite websites start supporting it.

<comment><USER15> As your link says, it already works for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, which to me makes it "a thing." The only big browser that (apparently) doesn't support it is Edge.

<comment><USER37> Sadly it doesn't work in Firefox after setting `privacy.resistFingerprinting` and Mozilla refuses to allow an override :(

<comment><USER15> Interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder if it would be possible to fix that with a userscript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Honest question: does anyone actually use DDG, other than the HN crowd? I don't know anyone in real life that has ever heard of it, let alone use it.

<comment><USER39> I think it's utilized more than we might think. DDG put up pretty big bill- boards around a lot of small and large cities. I believe those were mostly around "tech-forward cities" because it might be an easier crowd to get under the fold. They have a neat stats page where they track site traffic. [https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) It certainly looks promising. I've switched to ddg as my primary search, and I regularly do find queries that goog answers better. My partner often uses one of my devices and they have not complained about not being able to find what they were looking for.

There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.

Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I just need to stop doing !g in my ddg searches.

None of these improvements point to helping fix that. You've got my attention, but search results need to be better.

If you just focused on "coding related" search results that would make a world of difference. Maybe just put stack overflow on top.

<comment> WD-42 I actually emailed them (the have a specific address for suggestions) with this idea. It would be useful if there were topic specific search modes, coding would be an example, that weighted certain domains over others (like stackoverflow and readthedocs). You could imagine this being useful for other topics as well.

Of course I never got a response. I think it might be impossible due to their model. They aren't really a search engine, more like a search aggregator, they get results from Bing mostly if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER41> What is it? I've looked for a while and not been able to find an email address to contact them with for suggestions…

<comment> WD-42 [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/co...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/contact-us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It seems to only be UI improvements - the search itself is still terrible. I have DDG as my primary search engine, and I would say I have to repeat 50% of the queries in google, which has actual useful results after the first half page of ads.

<comment><USER43> In the past year or so I feel like I've had to resort to bangs like !g more and more. It's like Boolean searches don't work with DDG anymore. Quotation marks in particular seem meaningless to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> One thing that makes it impossible to switch to DDG for me is how bad the automatic correction is for simple typos and such. Google is incredibly good at offering to correct your search to what you meant if you completely botch the typing, eg. mashing "havlrt news" is fine to get here.

DDG often can't even correct single letter typos where the character is adjacent. On a phone there is usually no autocorrect or word suggestion in the search box as it doubles as the URL bar, so this means you have to manually fix typos to get the right results.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm a fan of ddg but have recently switched exclusively to ecosia. Sure, it's Bing. But the results I get are pretty decent. Only occasionally do I have to go to Google for better results.

<comment><USER46> DDG is also Bing.

<comment><USER45> I suppose I was aware of that at some point but had forgotten. It's interesting that I feel so much better about Ecosia. Maybe marketing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Last week I had a lot of issues with DDG where it barely returned a single page for some development-related queries it shined on before. I am wondering if something went wrong with their algorithms? I also periodically observed disappearance and reappearance of certain sites as a result of the same query (and not just different ranking, but them either completely vanishing from the results or you could get to them at some point).

</comment><comment><USER48> There are two annoying things that keep me from using ddg by default:

* the way they do scrolling by up and down arrow buttons.

* "load more" button instead of normal pagination.

But sometimes I have to use ddg when google forces me to solve recaptcha (this often happens when I connect via mobile network).

</comment><comment><USER49> I've now completely switched to DDG. I still occasionally use !g, but it's quite rare.

The results have been getting much better over time and I'd argue that the quality of Google's results is actually declining. Some queries return almost an entire 1st page full of ads.

</comment><comment><USER50> Please make search the focus of the mobile app. It's more like a browser and it's much too hard to tap the top of the phone for the search box. It should be more like the Google app. Make it easy to quickly search.

</comment><comment><USER51> If every search engine, and most websites, could stop displaying local results (which have nothing to do with what I search) that would be fantastic.

Why in the world would you show me local results in the local language when I'm searching in English? Google is the worst offender, they so "helpfully" run stuff through their own translate, resulting in a special kind of garbage SERPs.

Yes, I know there's settings, but I just can't be bothered to login every time on a different device or browser. And personalized search has its own problems.

</comment><comment><USER52> I use DDG everywhere. It really helps to use bangs to directly search in websites. It's like a supercharged web tool.

pro tip: Use !s for StartPage instead of Googling. It is a privacy preserving Google proxy.

</comment><comment><USER53> I noticed Past Year a few days ago. I had hit the drop down to use Past Month, saw Past Year and thought, whoops I'm on Google. This eliminates the top reason I fallback to !g.

<comment><USER54> Wow. Been waiting for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Solarized Dark Duck Go Theme:

[https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance](https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance)

      Background Color: #002b36
      Header Color: #073642
      Result Title Color: #fdf6e3
      Result Visited Title Color: #93a1a1
      Result Description Color: #839496
      Result URL Color: #268bd2
      Result Hover, Module, and Dropdown Background Color: #073642

<comment><USER55> Discovered I can share it as a link: [https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&k...](https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&kx=%23268bd2&k7=%23002B36&k8=%23839496&k9=%23fdf6e3&kaa=%2393a1a1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > If you've selected a different theme (or have customized your theme) you can > open the settings dropdown on the SERP and click the theme that matches your > OS theme, and DuckDuckGo will begin matching your OS theme automatically > moving forward.

Unfortunately this has the side effect of clearing all my three customizations and forcing me to use the default. Is there a way to keep the theme colors but use my own font?

</comment><comment><USER56> Daily users and lately I use !g three out of ten searches which is a decrease. Apple Map integration and its recent satellite view is great!

Things I still use Google for are...

\- getting Distance from one city to another

\- getting X business locations nearby with hours

\- movie times/listings

And unfortunately

\- email...would love to use a DDG email service .. wish DDG would somehow let me use my iCloud email through its interface. I and I think millions of others would move away from Gmail then.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been using DDG for the past three years and I'm impressed. The first few months of transition wasn't that easy as I' missing those Google results with dates. As of now, I would fall back to !g to get a quick overview of events(those tabs when you search e.g. champions league, whatever Google called it).

</comment><comment><USER58> I prefer DDG over other search-engines any day, the thing I love best is that the search results are impersonal to me, the problem with Google is that it learns your preferences and ends up being just an echo chamber for your own opinions

</comment><comment><USER59> I have recently switched to DDG as the main search engine on all my devices, home and work. My estimate that 80% of all my queries are done with DDG, turning to Google and local Yandex only rarely.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd use the DDG iOS app if only the search field wasn't at the very top, out of reach in one-hand phone typing... It's terrible UX on anything but the smallest phones out there.

</comment><comment><USER61> I love how it detects your OS settings and if you are in dark mode like I am, the page is in dark mode now too.

I wish more sites would do this, but I have an extension for that.

</comment><comment><USER62> Suggestion: make the favicon match the theme selected, since we see it a lot in the address bar when using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

</comment><comment><USER63> Remember to disable your adblock extensions on DDG. Let them earn some money for their privacy focused search engine.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've been really impressed with DuckDuckGo lately. Aside from directions I use it for almost everything</comment>


ANZ Bank's security incident response tool open sourced - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/15/aussie_bank_boffins_drop_slick_ir_tool_for_mandiant_mobs/ <comment><USER2> It took me a few times to see the GitHub link in the article. If anyone else has the same trouble it is here: [https://github.com/biggiesmallsAG/nightHawkResponse](https://github.com/biggiesmallsAG/nightHawkResponse)

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit OT but wanted to mention how impressed I was with ANZ and it's technology when I was in New Zealand. Not that they are completely responsible but NZ banking makes the US look like its still the 1970's.

ANZ has a lovely, clear website and apps where its possible to send a friend 25 cents for a candy bar on a whim for free. Every large entity is in a dropdrown and you can add a friends number and pay immediately or 10pm that night depending on bank.

<comment><USER4> _ANZ has a lovely, clear website and apps_

Every business should have this: it doesn't really count as 'technology'.

 _its possible to send a friend 25 cents for a candy bar on a whim for free_

This is more a function of the national interbank settlement system and market norms than the bank in question. In Europe, the numerous national interbank settlement systems and disparate norms were consolidated in to a new European norm: a regulation was passed that cross-border transactions could not be charged at more than national transactions, quickly resulting in (AFAIK) free transactions between any EU accounts/banks/countries.

 _pay immediately or 10pm that night depending on bank_

... the 'or 10pm' part is a disgrace. The way I see it, the twin phrases "close of business" and "next business day" are pathetic excuses for so much anachronism, whenever you hear it you should train yourself to wince and wonder who is shirking modernity.

On the plus side, I remember only 15 years ago ANZ was the first international bank with ATMs in Vietnam ... for years if you wanted to use an ATM in Hanoi, you absolutely had to find ANZ. Laos and Cambodia were pretty similar, though the former had BCEL too, if only in the capital, then a few years later Luang Prabang. However, today, ANZ's lead in these markets has apparently been squandered.

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's why I said they were not completely responsible.

Believe it or not I appreciated the 10pm part. It was fast enough, and at least once it allowed me to fix a mistake before it occurred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks cool, but I haven't really understood when I would use it... Is there a better explanation somewhere?</comment>


Association Between Traffic-Related Air Pollution and Cognitive Development - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001792 <comment><USER2> This is an under appreciated benefit of electrifying transport. Even if you aren't using clean energy it helps to not pump out neurotoxins next to schools.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those that are interested, Netflix's Dirty Money (S01E01) covers this topic from the point of view of the auto manufacturers emission scandal that happened recently.

It really puts a whole new spin on this very important conversation.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Quality of education was identical. However, children attending low-exposed schools had slightly better maternal education; had less behavioral problems, obesity, and foreign origin; had more siblings and residential greenness;"

<comment><USER5> Yes, but "Linear mixed effects models were adjusted for age, sex, maternal education, socioeconomic status, and air pollution exposure at home."

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full title wouldn't fit in submission:

Association between Traffic-Related Air Pollution in Schools and Cognitive Development in Primary School Children: A Prospective Cohort Study

</comment><comment><USER5> fwiw, study was conducted in Barcelona, which like the rest of Europe but notably unlike the USA, is dominated by diesel vehicles; accordingly, the study focuses on particulates resulting from diesel-based pollution which may or may not translate to gas/petrol cars.</comment>


"Easily had an IQ between 250 and 300" - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis

<comment><USER2> It's been speculated that Sidis's intelligence was due in part to having thin- walled blood vessels in the brain, making it easy for nutrients like oxygen to diffuse into brain cells. This theory explains his and his fathers' premature deaths due to stroke.

It also suggests that ordinary people today might increase their intelligence by trying to eliminate arterial plaque.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's ironic that there's a comment about intelligence tests being misleading, and that no scale is defined for the supposed IQ score of 250 to 300. 'IQ' means nothing by itself--you need to know which scale is being used (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabili...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability)). 110 on one can equal 150 on another--and that's the main reason IQ scores are chiefly given in 'percentile of population', i.e. "higher than 98% of the population", nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER4> And yet (leaving the debate about whether these IQ numbers are meaningful aside) he never produced anything of any real value.

His one published book apparently " _predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operated in reverse to the temporal direction that we experience in our local area. Everything outside of what we would today call a galaxy would be such a region. Sidis claimed that the matter in this region would not generate light._ ". This not only sounds wrong, it sounds like the kind of wrong that only somebody not particularly versed in thermodynamics (even as it existed in the 1920s) would write. His writings on other subjects seem to be equally wrong-headed.

It's a classic smart person disease, to think

(a) I have an idea

(b) I am smart, therefore

(c) My idea must be right!

See also: Einstein on politics.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool -- never heard of this guy. I have a theory that the vast majority of the greatest human ideas never come to fruition because the people who have them are too f __ked up to ever implement them, or to even articulate them in an appropriate environment (academic paper, novel/book , whatever).

<comment><AUTHOR> This would make sense, society tends to disfavor the different, as the tendency to "do what others do" is so deeply ingrained that anyone different in a less than obviously beneficial way is outcasted.

If you're talking about the "mad genius" types, who struggle to cope with internal conflict, I'd agree as well. Ultimately, the requirement in this context for an "idea coming to fruition" would simply require that the person cares about everyone hearing their theory, or the benefit to the world that might result.</comment></comment>


Show HN: LiveDo, live-updated personal task lists - <AUTHOR> http://sparklinlabs.com/2013/06/livedo-live-updated-personal-task-lists/

<comment><AUTHOR> I built LiveDo for my own needs over the last couple of days using Node.js / ExpressJS & server-sent events (EventSource). You can try it out directly here: <http://livedo.sparklinlabs.com/elisee>

I'll be happy to answer questions (technical or otherwise) you guys might have. Also would love some feedback!</comment>


The reigning absurdity in the digital news economy - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/the-reigning-absurdity-in-the-digital-news-economy-e560a4d3708c#.mu6uc1ftj <comment><USER2> > By contrast, a small fraction of the output can be labeled as Value Added > News; these items are supposed to be unique, more deeply reported than on > average —they also cost much more to produce.

The author's idea is quite interesting. I'm reminded of publications like The Information, though I don't consider this type of premium content mainstream.

I'm also not sure that I can believe this is the case, as much as it's what I would like to hear:

> That correlation between Engaged Time and propensity to return is the seed > of a foundational transformation taking place in the online publishing > industry, from a digital content economy based on clicks and indiscriminate > traffic to one that values quality and attention.</comment>


Grafana 4.0 with alerting is released - <AUTHOR> http://grafana.org/ <comment><USER2> This release has been long in the making. We started on Alerting way back in March this year and it's finally released! Read more about all the highlights in the release here: [http://grafana.org/blog/2016/11/09/grafana-4.0-beta- release/](http://grafana.org/blog/2016/11/09/grafana-4.0-beta-release/)

Oh, and if your in New York tomorrow, signup for GrafanaCon: [http://grafanacon.org](http://grafanacon.org)

<comment><USER3> Congrats on release! We've been using Grafana for a few years now, and personally built-in alerting is the only thing I would have added. Some may argue that this "violates" good concern separation practices, but honestly you are going to be alerting about the same data you feed to Grafana, so at the end of the day it makes a lot of sense. Call it a "two in one" if you will. Either way this will make monitoring with Grafana much more streamlined.

<comment><USER4> Note that keeping them separate has a benefit that when your 'Visualization' portal is down, your 'Alerting' systems are unaffected (and vice versa).

Collectd, telegraf. etc, can be configured to send the same metrics to your favorite TSDB and Alerting system (like riemann) in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Influx + Telegraf + Grafana is such a simple, sweet stack. No work to maintain, trivial to set up, I can ship just about anything I want into it, and reporting is fast.

With alerting in place now, I'm even happier than ever. A huge thank you to the Grafana team for solving a huge pain point!

<comment><USER6> What kind of volume are you sending into Influx? It crashed on me probably 5 times a day with only 100 requests per second.

<comment><USER5> Right now it looks like it's around 50/sec. A lot of data points get rolled up by Telegraf on individual machines, and then it's shipped in via the UDP line protocol. I've written much larger volumes, though, and never had an issue with stability.

<comment><USER7> If I may ask. How is UDP doing for you?

I checked my graphite setup once. We had 27% of metrics lost over UDP. That was bad.

pro-tip: "netstat -anus" and look at the error counters.

<comment><USER5> About 4% err-to-received ratio. That's probably due to untuned UDP buffer sizes though; despite dropped packets, we're getting enough information to provide the information we need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quick note for the ones who are tired of the giant clusterfuck of open-source tools for monitoring + alerting + storage + other, which is no less than:

\- statsd

\- collectd

\- graphite

\- whisper

\- carbon

\- prometheus

\- grafana

\- seyren

\- riemann

\- nagios

\- icinga

\- zabbix

There are multiple modern SaaS software that will do all of that in a single tool with better integrations, more polish, less work and no maintenance.

1) See [https://www.datadoghq.com](https://www.datadoghq.com) and last news [https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/investors-feed-datadog- a-h...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/investors-feed-datadog-a- hefty-94-5-million-round/)

2) [https://signalfx.com/](https://signalfx.com/) and last news [https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/12/signalfx-emerges-from- stea...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/12/signalfx-emerges-from-stealth-to- modernize-cloud-application-monitoring/)

3) [http://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it- solutions/truesight.html](http://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it- solutions/truesight.html) if you're not anti entreprisey (that was the "Boundary" startup, bought by BMC a few years ago and integrated in their offerings).

And don't think that they are "new" fancy tools. They've been around for many years.

<comment><USER8> For installations of a few hundred instances or more, some of the SaaS offerings cost more than the engineering salaries it would take to maintain the OSS tools.

<comment><USER9> Case in point: [http://blog.runnable.com/post/153498635761/how-we- saved-98-o...](http://blog.runnable.com/post/153498635761/how-we-saved-98-on- infrastructure-monitoring)

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, the post doesn't share things like: how much infra is needed and how much does it cost, how much time it took to set up, how much maintenance it needs, how long upgrades of the setup take, how much time future hacking of missing features will take, and so on. After that sort of stuff is truthfully taken into account I suspect most if not all savings would be lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's new in v4: [http://docs.grafana.org/guides/whats-new- in-v4/](http://docs.grafana.org/guides/whats-new-in-v4/)

</comment><comment><USER12> When you team Grafana up with a general purpose database like Crate.io some pretty amazing things can happen. Not only can crate just "roll with the punches" of auto-sharding whilst dynamically scaling performance over N number of database nodes, it also possesses powerful aggregation capabilities. If that weren't enough, crate also dynamically gzips data by default which is impressive given its zippy performance.

You get all of this for free with Crate.io without giving up the flexibility of a general purpose SQL database...

Wanna start storing log data in crate as well? No problem! Just design your table schema, and API ingest layer (My favorite is NodeJS) but you can use any language you like.

Or if security (facing the public) isn't an issue (if you're on a subnet safe from the public internet) then you can certainly just use the built-in REST API which crate exposes.

With Crate, I've been able to store hundreds of GB of systems log data without worrying about silly things like table-bloat (the autosharding of partitioned tables handles the spectre of bloated table shards for me for free).

Thanks to the amazing developers over at Crate.io for taking the best of Elasticsearch and making it sane, fast, and chock-ful of SQL goodness!

Also a big thank you to the Grafana team for recognizing the potential synergies that Crate.io & Grafana could catalyse for unifying time-series & log data streams.

</comment><comment><USER13> Grafana really looks interesting, and it is interesting that you can add all the different backends to it, for an example I didn't know you can use Elasticsearch as a timeseries backend.

Is it correct that Grafana works best with Graphite? At least that seems to be my impression, and it is a bit sad, since I think Graphite is cool, but it really has a lot of moving parts.

<comment><USER14> I've used it with Influxdb, Elasticsearch, and Prometheus.

They all worked great. I can't think of any reason to use Graphite.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. We reduced our write iops by 95% by moving from Graphite/Carbon to Influx. Try one of the newer databases!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently using Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager. I'm a big fan of the linux terminal, versioned config files, and separation of concerns but the rest of my team prefers web interfaces so I'm basically the only one maintaining Alertmanager. Grafana Altering looks appealing.

What have other people had success with?

<comment><USER7> I've had success with killing all the s __* free open source tools (Grafana, graphite, prometheus, whisper, icinga, nagios, carbon, ganglia, influxdb, zabbix...)

And using a single paid tool that does the job better AND doesn't kill me in maintenance work.

See [https://www.datadoghq.com/](https://www.datadoghq.com/) as leader or [https://signalfx.com/](https://signalfx.com/) as the second comer, or [http://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it- solutions/truesight.html](http://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it- solutions/truesight.html) if you're enterprisey.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how anyone can afford SaaS metrics/alert services at any sort of real scale.

$15/month/host gets expensive fast. Datadog doesn't start providing discounts till you are at 1000+ hosts.

<comment><USER7> All vendors provide discount if you negotiate. ;)

$15 * 500 hosts = $7500 per month.

If you think it's expensive, I can only advise you to check how much the hardware will costs on EC2 to run the free tools, plus how much work it will take to get the 8 different and independent OSS tools to work not only alone but integrate together, plus how much additional work and maintenance to keep it working without hiccups (war story: there is nothing worse than a monitoring tool that is less reliable than the thing it monitors).

<comment><USER14> Oh I agree. That's why we ditched ec2 for our own bare metal cloud based on joyent and saved over $200k/year

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> True story: Our monitoring stack now has three distinct components with alerting functionality.

<comment><USER18> We'll probably be in the same position. Grafana will make simple thresholds easy to visualize, Kapacitor can do more advanced anomaly detection, and we still need something like Sensu to do alerts that aren't really bound to metrics - and it provides a dashboard of alerts. Kinda annoying, but it works, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anybody got tips on how to start with implementing an alert system? Or what to read to get started?

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't be the only one who laughed out loud while reading the ad for GrafanaCon. It contains the word "democratization" and takes place on an aircraft carrier..

</comment><comment><USER21> Is anyone using a log management tool in conjunction with Grafana? I.e. if you see something anomalous or see an alert triggered, how do you investigate what's going on?

<comment><USER10> We've used Grafana with Sematext Logsene (which exposes Elasticsearch API, so it's like having Grafana talk to ES).

Here's a short howto + video: [https://sematext.com/blog/2015/12/14/using- grafana-with-elas...](https://sematext.com/blog/2015/12/14/using-grafana-with- elasticsearch-for-log-analytics-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It'd be nice if this meant being able to use Grafana as a frontend to alertmanager.

(Writing those "ALERT ..." requires a steep learning curve.)

<comment><USER23> This is exactly what I was thinking! I'd love to know what the dev of Prometheus think about alerting in Grafana...

<comment><USER24> [https://twitter.com/fabxc/status/803870900097523712](https://twitter.com/fabxc/status/803870900097523712)

> I repeat: Your alerts and dashboards belong into your SCM, not a random SQL > database!

(And I 100% agree, particularly for alerts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmm didn't know this was written in Go. Seems like Go is doing quite well in this space also with Bosun and Scollector.

<comment><USER26> Go code compiles to compact, statically linked binaries with relatively compact memory usage and reasonably good concurrency support, and an excellent standard library for handling networking - it's a natural fit for monitoring stacks. Even some monitoring systems that aren't Go on the back-end have Go- based collectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do users still have issues full access to data sources, regardless of what dashboards they have access to? This is what keeps me from using Grafana to expose some data to clients.

</comment><comment><USER28> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER29> I've had alerting via grafana built and deployed for the last 16 months. Not sure what took so long... but cool to see it native now. Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER30> Switch to Datadog and don't look back. Most valuable SAAS for my teams.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my new site? - <AUTHOR> http://foosurvey.com/iwzjfhla

<comment><USER2> It required me to enter a name and email so I didn't bother voting.

<comment><USER3> I can understand why you might want people to enter an email address (for validation/more authentic results etc...) and if you're going to take that approach you sell it to your audience - tell them what the benefits are.

Also say that the email address requires validation. I put in a fake address and of-course my vote didn't get counted. If I knew up-front it was to be validated I probably would have entered a correct one.

Having said all that I don't agree with email validation. It doesn't ensure unique votes. Can you explain why you choose it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that email validation is flawed in terms of ensuring uniqueness, so this is something I may drop and insist users create an account. One thing I have considered in the mean time is allowing registered users to hide non- signed in participants.

<comment><USER4> That'd be better. Make the default action when voting "vote as anonymous, unless logged in", and upgrade that anonymous vote to a registered one if the user decides to register after voting.

Also, having an account is not ensuring uniqueness either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't consider myself experienced enough to give anybody advice on startups, but it seems to me that programmers should pick up non-CS skill-sets. That way, two things may happen. \- Your startup won't be a clone of about 500 other startups. \- You will be solving real-world problems for sectors who don't receive the attention of most programmers.

In other words, follow Octopart's lead.

I know this wasn't a review of your startup, I just don't think this survey idea has any viability anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> I generally agree with you, however, from memory, I recall pg saying that entering a crowded market isn't necessarily a move that should be avoided. I think there's plenty of opportunities to beat established web sites by providing better solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cant help feel the name was created by a programmer. Outside of the computer world. Are there examples using "foo"?

The UI looks a little bit copied from elsewhere on the net.

I like the idea of being able to create a quick poll and let it loose. Not sure if there is away to let it loose on the twitterspehre.

Am I correct in thinking you mine ( to a degree ) the realtime statements on twitter to help populate your thoughts or to just sound cool.

A major positive, I like you are trying to make money from the get go. ( Even if it is a little hidden = faq )

As always and most unlikely, would be curious to know if anyone has bitten and has paid to use it. You could benefit from a demo, or a reasons why paying $1 is worth it for a poll. That kinda stuff.

<comment><USER7> foobar / fubar is military slang

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _What does the world think? Survey your friends, colleagues, customers and millions of Twitter users!_

Sounds like a sales pitch, not a slogan. It's also too long. Just a thought.

Simply 'What does the world think?' might be better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. The business model for this site is to help small businesses survey their customers and employees which needs to be the focus for promo material like tag lines, FAQ etc. The objective is to grow a paying user base who survey people with little insentive to spoof their responses (like voting multiple times), which negates some criticism like 'why would anyone provide an email for a frivolous poll'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a survey site... it seems to imply that I have to pay people to take my surveys/will get paid to take surveys... but the site gives absolutely no details on how this is supposed to work, or why I might want to do it (the FAQ answers _what_ , not _how_ or _why_ ).

The word _Twitter_ also appears a lot, and I can't tell what connection this has to it. Do you have permission to use Twitterific's logo like that? Or even Apple's Mail logo?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think we're using Twitterifics logo, but I'll check as that wouldn't be right. Thanks for mentioning that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looked pretty terrible to me. Um, congratulations on making a polling web site I guess??

</comment><comment><USER11> _We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly._

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking at the exception log, this appears to have happened was when you tried to vote without providing an email address? I can't reproduce the error but will investigate further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I filled in 'test' for name and got the message: "Name already used with a different email address!" and the results were shown.

Did I vote, or do I have to change the name and try again? What if it was my real name that is already used?

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone else remember a company called PollGround from one of the first YC rounds?

</comment><comment><USER14> I selected the option "boring" yet the results still show 0 votes.

</comment><comment><USER15> Joe Average might not be able to appreciate the "foo".

</comment><comment><USER16> Love your banner/logo</comment>


The Death of the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/2558/death-of-the-internet-net-neutrality-donald-trump-alt-right-gamergate-facebook-twitter <comment><USER2> I don't know about anyone else but I for one am not ready for the death of the Internet. I've barely seen the life of the Internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on the article?

I thought it raised some interesting ideas about net neutrality in the context of ownership of the Internet.

Edit: and also the difference between the experience of using an internet of independent websites vs a walled garden internet of Facebook pages (that is reminiscent of the AOL and Compuserve era).</comment></comment>


Practical advice for analysis of large, complex data sets - <AUTHOR> http://www.unofficialgoogledatascience.com/2016/10/practical-advice-for-analysis-of-large.html <comment><USER2> I hope some experienced data analytics people will read this thread so here is a slightly unrelated question: We have a data set of 1 TB growing at 1 TB/year we need to analyze. Our IT is pushing for Hadoop but this involves a lot of integration work because they have no plumbing ready. The whole thing just feels way too complex for our use case.

The data is reasonably structured so I think we can easily use a SQL database with possibly some XML or JSON columns. This would be much easier and quicker to set up.

Is 1TB a size that makes sense for Hadoop? Are there any alternatives like Google BigQuery, MongoDB or others? Sorry, I am not up to date with the latest cloud offerings. Also, we are in the medical field so this raises some security questions.

<comment><USER3> I only know Hadoop from reading about it on HN, and the blog post I remember the most is "Don't use Hadoop - your data isn't that big"

[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html)

TL;DR

> But my data is 100GB/500GB/1TB!

> A 2 terabyte hard drive costs $94.99, 4 terabytes is $169.99. Buy one and > stick it in a desktop computer or server. Then install Postgres on it.

<comment><USER4> There's also this [0] on how to outperform Hadoop with command line tools.

Obviously, you should look at the role I/O costs can play. A lot of RAM and some SSD drives might be a better idea than Hadoop at this scale.

[0] [http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster- tha...](http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your- hadoop-cluster.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this blog. They had a great post describing a privacy preserving query proxy: [http://www.unofficialgoogledatascience.com/2015/12/replacing...](http://www.unofficialgoogledatascience.com/2015/12/replacing- sawzall-case-study-in-domain.html)</comment>


HN, How did this happen? - <AUTHOR> https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bangladesh%20Bank%20exposed&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story <comment><USER2> I'll copy a comment of dang in a similar case: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273580)

> _HN doesn 't treat posts as dupes when a story hasn't had significant > attention yet. See > [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) > ._

> _This is because we want good stories to have multiple chances at making the > front page. The current story is a great example. In fact, we invited > tdurden to repost it, as we sometimes do when we notice an article that we > think the community might find interesting, but which fell through the > cracks._

> _We 're working on a better duplicate handling system that will reduce the > number of reposts in the story stream, but getting it right is surprisingly > subtle, and we'd rather take longer than get it wrong._

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's how I understand it, but some of this might be wrong.

Good stories sometimes get missed because there's so much posted to /newest.

The dupe detector is currently weak to allow reposts. A repost is better than missing a good story.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

</comment><comment><USER4> How did what happens? Not all times of the day are good for posting.

More people are active on HN at certain hours (mostly related to US work times, where the big majority of users come from).

And articles can both regularly either fails to catch up until some nth submission, or get on the homepage again and again every few months (even if it's the same article).</comment>


FBI Told Cops to Recreate Evidence from Secret Cell-Phone Trackers - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/05/fbi-told-cops-to-recreate-evidence-from-secret-cell-phone-trackers/ <comment><USER2> uh if it's so secret, then why allow outside agencies to use the equipment? FBI should only provide an interface 4 local LE

<comment><USER2> And i've known for some time that LE agencies in general collect "lead" information in this way, which would be otherwise inadmissible in court. However, doesn't this violate the 4th amendment? Depending on the degree to which it is used, of course.</comment></comment>


The ginsu knife of sales letters - <AUTHOR> http://saleskick.me/the-ginsu-knife-of-sales-letters

<comment><USER2> And yet there are long-form sales letters that we love to read ... I'd love to know what makes the difference!</comment>