Show HN: Vector – A High-Performance Log and Metric Router Written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timberio/vector <comment><USER2> I was dragging my feet to build a log shipper solution. I was going to use Filebeat -> ElasticSearch -> Kibana.

This looks great. My primary attraction is possibly low memory footprint of this program over Filebeat. Secondary attraction is how easy it appears to enable transformations.

Now, if I can make a suggestion for your next/additional project..... A neat system metric collector in Rust that can export to Prometheus with same principles.

Low memory footprint,

Rust,

Single binary,

Customizable with a single config file without spending hours in manuals,

Stdin, Stderr -> transform -> Prometheus.

I'm learning Rust and eventually plan to build such a solution but I think a lot of this project can be repurposed for what I asked much faster than building a new one.

Cheers on this open source project. I will contribute whatever I can. Thanks!!

<comment><USER3> Thank you! Very glad it looks useful to you.

It's still slightly rough around the edges, but Vector can actually ingest metrics today in addition to deriving metrics from log events. We have a source component that speaks the statsd protocol which can then feed into our prometheus sink. We're planning to add more metrics-focused sources and sinks in the future (e.g. graphite, datadog, etc), so check back soon!

<comment><USER4> Just a question, are you familiar with work that's been done on the OpenCensus Collector and Agent [0]?

There was discussion earlier this year about creating a design doc for OpenCensus to handle logs. I'm not sure if that got finished, or it was sidelined while the OpenCensus & OpenTracing merger was worked on. Both projects will combine under the OpenTelemetry name.

I've been quite happy with the OpenCensus instrumentation SDKs.

I think the Logs & Metrics space is interesting, especially because there is so much overlap, both are just ways of representing data about an event that occurred in the software.

OpenCensus is fairly widely backed: Google, Microsoft, Etsy, Scalyr...[1]

[0] [https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus- service...](https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus- service/blob/master/DESIGN.md)

[1] [https://opencensus.io/community/users/](https://opencensus.io/community/users/)

<comment><USER3> I've looked into OpenCensus/OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry (and the apparently unaffiliated OpenMetrics?) a bit, but I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be. It does seem like they're focused primarily on application-level instrumentation and the ability to ship that metrics and tracing data to different backends.

Vector's perspective is that your applications and infrastructure are already emitting all kinds of interesting data via logs, metrics, etc, and the primary challenge is to collect, enrich, and manage the storage of that data. We have no plans to integrate Vector into your application or introduce some kind of Vector-specific method of exporting data.

We'll definitely be watching OpenTelemetry as it moves forward and would very much like to be a compatible part of that ecosystem. To the degree that they use common open standards for their communication protocols, that could just fall out naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems similar to Veneur (like many other projects mentioned in comments here; didn't realize this space was so crowded!) - down to the first two letters of the name: [https://github.com/stripe/veneur](https://github.com/stripe/veneur)

Veneur is more metrics-focused, but might offer inspiration as you work on metrics support in Vector - in particular the SSF source, internal aggregation, and Datadog and SignalFX sinks.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, Veneur is something we looked at quite a bit when it popped up. It's clear Stripe was feeling a lot of the same pain points we were when we started building Vector and they've come up with something really impressive.

As you mentioned, it seems they've focused more on metrics out of the gate, while we've spent more of our time on the logging side of things (for now). We're working to catch up on metrics functionality, but interoperability via SSF is an interesting idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use a rather bespoke syslog -> clickhouse log sink ([https://github.com/discordapp/punt/tree/clickhouse](https://github.com/discordapp/punt/tree/clickhouse)) we wrote in house because logstash (and then subsequently elastic starch) was too slow. Would love to switch off of it and to this! Hopefully a clickhouse sink comes soon! Maybe will contribute one upstream!

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, could you tell us a little more about your log analysis workflow? Once they are in Clickhouse, how do you visualise/search/analyse your logs? What is your equivalent of Kibana?

<comment><USER6> We do rollups into bigquery where we have a bunch of dashboards to look at stuff historically.

I did really like Kibana, ultimately, we had to ditch it (because of ditching ES). Of course, this was a good thing, as I more than once degraded ingest the ES cluster by just using Kibana to do some aggressive filtering. Clickhouse handles these without problem.

I think a more complete world view may be to pipe logs into kafka, and ingest them into Clickhouse/Druid for different types of analysis/rollups.

Our current logging volume exceeds ~10b log lines per day now. Clickhouse handles this ingest almost too well (we have 3 16 core nodes that sit at 5% CPU). This is down from a... 20ish node ES cluster that basically set pegged on CPU... and our log volume then was ~1b/day.

For more ad-hoc, we just use the clickhouse-cli to query the dataset directly. We are tangentially investigating using superset with it.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the response. Lot of tips to go research about for me.

I was mentally debating between trying to find a schema for our logs, and store them in a database where it can be queried efficiently from

Vs

Throwing logs into ELasticSearch in a lazy way and let it index the whole thing to enable us do full-text search on logs. But, with a limitation of only have a few days worth of data in ES indexes.

Kibana's visualisation is what is holding ES up for me. I will look into superset+Clickhouse to see if I can come up with a good analysis front for our log data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a heads up: There are several figures in your docs where the entirety of the useful information on the page is in the image and they don't have alt tags or any accessible way to get the information (that I can find anyway). e.g. [https://docs.vector.dev/use-cases/security-and- compliance](https://docs.vector.dev/use-cases/security-and-compliance)

</comment><comment><USER8> I really appreciate the comparison table. Very rarely are things totally new and novel so it's very nice to know what other things it's _like_

</comment><comment><USER9> Could this replace a simple fluentd setup right now or are there still major functionalities missing?

Specifically, I'm ingesting nginx logs in JSON format, cleaning up invalid UTF8 bytes (usually sent in the forwarded-for header to exploit security vulnerabilities), and sending to elasticsearch on an automated 90 day retention policy (daily indexes).

Seems like a fairly common use case for webservers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well logstash is now supporting good persistent queue. [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/persistent-...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/persistent- queues.html#durability-persistent-queues)

I don't know why author didn't put correctness tick mark on it.

<comment><USER11> It's very likely we're doing something wrong with this test, but after many hours of trying we couldn't get our simple test to pass for Logstash, even though it passed for others:

[https://github.com/timberio/vector-test- harness/tree/master/...](https://github.com/timberio/vector-test- harness/tree/master/cases/disk_buffer_persistence_correctness#results)

Definitely open to feedback on what we're doing wrong.

<comment><USER12> This is totally off topic, but holy crap, first message in 11 years. I would have lost my password about a dozen times by now.

<comment><USER13> That answer was definitely worth the wait.

(there's a "Forgot Password" link somewhere here).

[do you always look at poster's activity? sounds time consuming.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Freaking A... Rust performance is nuts when done right. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> How does this compare to telegraf?

[https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf)

Biggest thing that pops out to me is LUA engine (seems amazing :) )

<comment><USER11> Telegraf is nicely done. We spent a lot of time testing solutions in our test harness ([https://github.com/timberio/vector-test- harness](https://github.com/timberio/vector-test-harness)) and Telegraf was the most impressive of the tools we tested, so kudos to the Influx team on that.

But to answer your question, telegraf is very heavily metrics focused, and their logging support appears to be limited (reducing logs to metrics only). Vector is _currently_ focused on logging with an eye towards metrics, but still has work to do on the metrics front.

For example, we opened the door with the `log_to_metric` transform ([https://docs.vector.dev/usage/configuration/transforms/log_t...](https://docs.vector.dev/usage/configuration/transforms/log_to_metric)) to ensure our data model supports metrics, but we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to metrics as a whole. Our end goal is to eventually replace telegraf and be a single, open, vendor neutral solution for both logs and metrics.

Happy to clarify further :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Off Topic -

Does either of Filebeat or Logstash support config hot reload, as mentioned in the Vector's doc? [https://docs.vector.dev/usage/administration/reloading](https://docs.vector.dev/usage/administration/reloading)

Edit - Found It - [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/reloading-c...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/reloading- config.html)

<comment><USER11> They do, we actually put together a correctness test for this behavior:

[https://github.com/timberio/vector-test- harness/tree/master/...](https://github.com/timberio/vector-test- harness/tree/master/cases/sighup_correctness)

Logstash is not graceful. Our testing shows that they basically shut it down and start it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For clarification, does "mib/s" mean "Mbit/s" (since lowercase b usually stands for bits, and uppercase B usually for Bytes)?

If yes, how comes log processing runs at only so low throughput in general?

That is not to talk down your achievements (as per your benchmark page, you do better than similar projects in terms of throughput), but I'm genuinely curious why modern machines that have 40 Gbit/s memory bandwidth are capped at (in your case) 76.7Mbit/s. What's the bottleneck?

<comment><USER18> The capitalisation is confusing, but "Mi" means "mebi" \- either Mib for mebibits or MiB for mebibytes. The correct term for 1024 * 1024 bits is a Mib, and, 1024 x 1024 x8 bits is a MiB.

<comment><USER17> That is correct, but it doesn't answer the question whether it's Bytes or bits (which makes an 8x difference).

Given that the reported values don't care about the "m" (which means "milli" \-- clearly doesn't make sense for bytes), I don't think we can rely on the casing of the "b" to tell us the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats to the Timber Team on this one. Ben and Zach were a couple of former colleagues on mine.

</comment><comment><USER20> What is a high level example of why I'd use this?

<comment><USER3> Hi! I work on Vector. For a motivating example, let's say you have an application fronted by nginx. Using Vector would allow you to ingest your nginx logs off disk, parse them, expose status code and response time distributions to prometheus, and store the parsed logs as JSON on S3.

There are obviously plenty of ways to accomplish that same thing today, but we believe Vector is somewhat unique in allowing you to do it with one tool, without touching your application code or nginx config, and with enough performance to handle serious workloads. And Vector is far from done! There's a ton more we're working to add moving forward (thinking about observability data from an ETL and stream processing perspective should give you a rough idea).

<comment><USER21> Our company uses Splunk. I am not on admin/ops side so possibly missing details. The way I understand is that there is Splunk forwarder running on our app servers. And then there is Splunk server URL from there I get consolidated logs in browser where I can search and run many other statistical function.

So is Vector like Splunk forwarder or more than that?

<comment><USER3> Vector can act as a Splunk forwarder, but is designed to be much more flexible.

In addition to forwarding to more storage systems (S3, Elasticsearch, syslog, etc), Vector can do things like sampling logs, parsing them, and aggregating them into metrics. Depending on your needs, this makes it easier to reduce your Splunk volume and reduce costs, transition to something like an ELK stack, etc.

We're also working to build up the metrics side of Vector's capabilities. In a way, you can think of Vector as a stream processing system for observability data, capable of feeding into a variety of storage backends.

<comment><USER21> Thanks. This is all very interesting. I should try it on our app servers.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your interest! And please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or feel there are things we could do to better support your use case: [https://vector.dev/community/](https://vector.dev/community/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Heka, but in Rust instead of Golang?

<comment><USER23> There is also a Heka but in C.

[https://github.com/mozilla-services/hindsight](https://github.com/mozilla- services/hindsight)

Unfortunately deployment of Hindsight isn't as nice as Heka since you need to compile it yourself with all the Lua extensions you need, and the documentation is very disorganized.

Vector looks great on those counts, will be excited to try it if they get features like reliable Vector-Vector transport and more flexible file delimiters.

<comment><USER24> Hindsight isn't exactly heka in C; it's useful for data processing but not as a general-purpose log shipper. Currently we're using fluentd for the latter.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on the team that runs services used by firefox users and developers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is so exciting! An enterprise-grade solution to log workflow. To those unfamiliar with the Rust ecosystem, this project (Vector) addresses the 'L' within the ELK stack, and probably more.

</comment><comment><USER26> There already are a lot of projects in this space.

While better performance is always great, most are already plenty fast for the majority of use cases.

The main power comes from the multitude of inputs and outputs. Vector has a lot of catching up to do there. But if they manage to offer a noteworthy performance gain... one more is always a good thing.

PS: the Logstash numbers seem suspiciously low. I'd bet it's some JVM config issue. Logstash can come to a crawl if it does not have enough memory.

<comment><USER27> Yep, I push about 50-100MB/s through a single instance of Logstash (Redis (list) -> S3). That configuration is not in the benchmark table, but surely it's more demanding than TCP -> Blackhole, TCP -> TCP, etc.

Regardless, Vector looks very nice and I'll be testing it out :)

<comment><USER26> They are using the default config with 1GB memory. Sadly that's absolutely nothing for Logstash.

Reported an issue in their test harness.

<comment><USER28> IMO that's totally fair -- 1GB is more than adequate to run a log forwarder. The fact that Logstash can't perform well under such conditions is worthy of consideration when selecting a solution.

<comment><USER26> It's perfectly valid to mention the higher memory requirements as a considerable drawback.

But this is far from the possible performance that Logstash offers, so the comparison is at least misleading.

Also, there is no information about the memory usage of the other contestants, which probably don't have memory limits if they don't run on the JVM.

I say all this as someone who stopped using Logstash, in part due to the high requirements - but benchmarks should strive for a fair comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congratulations to the Timber team! I've had the pleasure of doing a small amount of contract work for them, have nothing but praise for them all.

</comment><comment><USER30> When people say "high performance" about these things, I wonder how they compare, for instance, with the Sandia tools.* One things that matters there is avoiding system noise (jitter) on the monitored systems with transport over RDMA.

* [http://ovis.ca.sandia.gov/](http://ovis.ca.sandia.gov/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Love Timber.io, so it's great to see some of your innovations coming back out as open source projects. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> Flume, but in Rust?

[https://flume.apache.org/](https://flume.apache.org/)

<comment><USER26> And about 50 other projects in all kinds of languages...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A pity it does not support at least once or exactly once delivery for the Vector sink.

Also, the documentation seems to miss information about which sinks support TLS?

We're currently looking for a distributed-over-the-internet logging setup and are interested in evaluating Rsyslog/RELP alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER10> How do you handle back pressure?

Do you have specific module for it?

</comment><comment><USER34> All this bombast and hubris is very unprofessional.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how popular posts on hackernews would be if people didn't mention "written in rust" in the title.

<comment><USER36> Probably significantly less, but I suspect "written in Rust" is part of what makes these posts interesting. People have an interest in what you can _do_ with this language they're constantly hearing about (and hearing people rave about). There are lots of incredible languages that few people are _using_ for real products. "Written in Rust" is therefore interesting on multiple axes.</comment></comment>


MIT Bitcoin Expo Livestream - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgjogLipvk

<comment><USER2> I typed some transcripts: [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/mit-bitcoin- expo-2015/](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/mit-bitcoin-expo-2015/)

videos are rude

<comment><USER3> I thought you were being "edgy," but after skimming the video, the quality's unbearable with background buzz, awkward angles, poor moderators, and more.

What's the point of throwing content on Youtube if you don't use its features?

<comment><USER2> > I thought you were being "edgy,"

Text can be more respectful of people's time. By all means, enjoy videos whenever you want, although I think text deserves a chance :-) especially for a bunch of busy HN people.

(I don't have any explanations to give you for the sound/moderators/stuff. Earlier today this was livestreamed so it was probably just some webcam?)

<comment><USER3> It sounds the school club needs to recruit your services ^^. You put more effort into curating information than they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I build secure IM, this was 15 years before telegram" He's a comedic genius.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Day 2:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96ULlHhia_Q&annotation_id=54...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96ULlHhia_Q&annotation_id=54f6493a-0000-295c-acbe-001a11c01e10&feature=iv&src_vid=lIgjogLipvk)</comment>


LPT: Add your email to your HN profile - <AUTHOR> This way fellow HN members can follow up with you on any of your comments. <comment><USER2> Technical note: The "email:" field in the profile is private and is used only by the HN system and the mods. To make it public, you must write it in the "about:" field.</comment>


MoviePass has changed people's moviegoing habits - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/5/7/17302706/moviepass-explained-subscription-survive-theater-make-money-unlimited-cancel-amc <comment><USER3> I'm bullish on HMNY and moviepass. A few things many people overlook, this article included -

1/ MoviePass does not reimburse 100% of the ticket price to all theaters. In at least 1,000 theaters they are getting $3 back or 25% of concessions. This number will continue to increase as moviepass proves they can drive demand.

2/ HMNY literally specializes in packaging and selling data. I think it's a mistake to treat them as if they don't know what they're doing.

3/ There are not a lot of options to deploy performance marketing dollars for movies. Instead, most of the spend goes towards broad-reach, hard to track, media. They can offer studios a way to spend marketing that is not only trackable, but measurably incremental. I cannot overstate how juicy that sounds to a person in charge of spending an $X0,00,000 marketing budget.

I feel confident they can get to $5-$10 per subscriber per month in revenue on the backend. If they can hit that, maintain solid churn numbers, and manage fraud, they will have a very healthy subscription business on their hands.

<comment><USER4> There is close to 0 percentage this company survives. The stock has fallen 40% each day for past few days. AMC head says they don't discount tickets and average moviepass holder watches 3 movies a month paying average $12 per ticket. They burn 21M a month and less than that in the bank. Plus they took money from many consumers for annual passes which will get them sued for fraud.

<comment><USER5> Now they can't watch more than 4 (select) movies per month and no repeat viewings. Moviepass hasn't changed anything because people generally are being termed out of the original breakneck deals.

<comment><USER6> Moviepass brought back the unlimited plan 2 weeks ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in New York, and the other day I was queuing at an AMC when I overheard a young lady talking to her friend in amazement: "Wait, you DON'T have a MoviePass??!!" And indeed it seems that two thirds of the customers in front of me used one to buy their ticket. Granted this is a very skewed sample - <USER2> theatre has reserved seating and those paying out of pocket probably bought online in advance. But still, in a market where a matinee ticket costs $15 - $17, if you watch movies it'd be silly NOT to get MoviePass. Surely, MoviePass has transformed how people go to the movies here.

I know the company will probably fold sooner or later, but I surely will miss it when it happens, and sincerely hope that the subscription model can live on.

<comment><USER8> It will be interesting to see an statics on how much it has changed movie viewership. I'm sure there are a couple of Data Scientists or Business Intelligence people at Regal tracking attendance of Moviepass-ers, and I bet they have a plan to introduce a subscription service the minute Moviepass folds.

If I had to bet, MoviePass is the reason my Regal Points expire now.

<comment><USER9> I worked for Regal for three years. Starting as a lowly usher and quickly becoming the projector tech for Oregon and Washington.

It is the worst run company I have ever worked for.

For example when "Something About Mary" came out we put it in theater 5. 150 seats. It was selling out every show. I was the projectionist at the time and said we should put it in #3 which had 534 seats. The box office was turning away hundreds of people every few hours.

I do not care about company profits. But I do care about my friends working concessions and door and usher. If we had the movie in the right theater we could have used more workers.

But lazy managers kept the print in #5 for weeks. Since it was a pain to swap prints in the computers. It wasn't.. It took two minutes.

That is just one example of many. It got even worse when I had to contact Nashville everyday to get basic supplies. It is never fun explaining why you need a new oscilloscope to a person that doesn't know what one is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's true. I used to have put movies into 3 categories.

1\. I'll see by myself 2\. I'll see if someone else wants to. 3\. Nope

With MoviePass, my friend group and I have been able to to add a 4th option to that list: I'll see it if it looks interesting enough and I have nothing better to do.

When I saw the movie Gringo, I got an email from Moviepass asking "Would you have seen this movie without MoviePass?"

<comment><USER10> I'm with you on option 4. I used to spot a movie I wanted to see, and then see it. Now I want to see a movie, and then pick the movie to see. I can't think of too many products I've experienced such a behavioral shift from.

I'd change the title too and drop "moviegoing habits" to simply "habits". I'm probably out on average 2 nights more a week than I used to be. I'll stop on the way home from standing appointments to grab dinner and a movie, just to wait out traffic. I don't think I'd ever done this before in my life.

If I owned a restaurant near a theater, I'd figure out how to be a Moviepass affiliate, in a heartbeat. Assuming they can survive, of course.

<comment><USER8> For me, it's something to do and a excuse to get together for a afternoon. None of us can feel like "shit, what a waste of money" with MoviePass. It's kinda like if a bowling alley offered all you can bowl for $14.99/month. Do we really want to go bowling every week? Not really, but it's an excuse to hang out outside of work/bars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another potential drawback is that if I were a teenager, I would get MoviePass and just treat the theater as my social club. If a movie was a boring drama that targeted older folks, I'd totally MST3K it with my pals[1]. Granted, I am formerly terrible teenager.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW4lHnLr- bE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW4lHnLr-bE)

</comment><comment><USER12> The issue with movie pass is it's too easy to do the math to see if the service is worth it.

Something like Netflix or Spotify is harder to fully quantify.

</comment><comment><USER13> The theory is that MoviePass can strong arm theater chains once they have a sizable audience, right? I don't see what's stopping another from stepping into the same space. Where's the moat?

<comment><USER14> The moat is network effects + revenue sharing with theaters.

If that happens, how is a second business going to overcome MoviePass (who would then have the additional revenue streams)?

If it's a risky play to do first, then it's even riskier to do second.

<comment><USER15> A theater chain could easily do it. Imagine if they come out with "AMC pass". They've got the network and prime locations.

I bet they're waiting for MoviePass to go belly up first. No point in having to compete with a company that's literally throwing money at them (paying full price x3-4 per person per month to AMC).

<comment><USER16> I guess they could, but they don't seem to want to. Cinemark's competitor gives you ONE movie (non-premium, non-3D, etc.) a month for $8.99.

Watching the ad for it preroll every time before a movie I've 'paid for' (with MoviePass) coming on has become a running joke between me and my partner that only people who are such luddites that they've never heard of MoviePass would remotely think it was a good deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And in other news... [https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/09/moviepass-parent- drops-ano...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/09/moviepass-parent-drops- another-46/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Moviepass or not, I would like to see a theater which sells concessions at reasonable prices.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sounds like AMC is afraid of being blackmailed because MoviePass is a victim of its own success. Sometimes capitalism has hilarious results.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmm...nope. I still don't set foot in a theater. Unless it's a new Star Wars or Avatar or LOTR, but they've made all those.

</comment><comment><USER21> I only watch about 1-2 new movies a year at best. Their service charges $10/mo. I'd rather just pay $15 one-time to watch a movie, like when I see it in a theater. It's a good idea, but I think they need to tweak their business model a bit if they want to bring in people like me that don't want to spend hundreds of dollars a year to watch garbage movies full of mutant CG gorillas punching each other.

<comment><USER22> Not every business needs to capture 100% of the populace in their target market. I too only see 2 or 3 movies a year (although I basically _only_ watch the mutant-CG-gorilla type), and I don't have a MoviePass because it's not worth it to me. But I don't think MoviePass execs are losing any sleep not capturing the kind of person who just doesn't want to see movies, in the same way Ford probably doesn't care much about people who don't drive.</comment></comment>


'Super Mario Bros.' has become a test bed for AI research - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-artificial-intelligence-researchers-love-super-mario-bros <comment><USER2> I suspect the reason is this: Super Mario Bros constitutes a discrete Markov decision making framework with a reasonably sized state space. I.e. one can iterate through many possible future scenarios, similar to chess, on a modern computer.

<comment><USER3> This actually makes a lot of sense. But I haven't seen a lot of high-impact Mario papers. I mean I've noticed work being done but I didn't realize it is quickly becoming a "thing".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funnily enough, I just got back into doing some AI stuff, and I had a vague recollection a few days ago, that I'd read something about researchers using games like Mario for this exact purpose. Guess that memory was real.

I'd like to work on some game playing AI, but since SMB isn't open source, I went looking for an OSS clone of SMB, or something similar. Luckily enough, there are quite a few:

[http://opensource.about.com/od/desktopapps/ss/5-Open- Source-...](http://opensource.about.com/od/desktopapps/ss/5-Open-Source-Side- scrolling-Games.htm)

This seem like something that could be a lot of fun. Or a massive time-sink. :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> I always thought it would make a fun game to build levels (Super Mario Maker style, with build constraints) to defend against an onslaught of A.I. Marios.

<comment><USER6> I'm honestly surprised that Super Mario Maker doesn't just run AI marios through your course in the background (like a linter) to automatically give an estimated difficulty delta for any change you might make—or even an initial difficulty estimate for Course World before people start playing the course for real. Nintendo does have a good few AI people (working on e.g. SSB4 doing the Amiibo learning stuff), but you never see that learning applied anywhere else.

<comment><USER7> You're honestly surprised by that?</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Mining Service NiceHash Says Hackers Emptied Its Wallet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/bitcoin-mining-service-nicehash-says-hackers-emptied-its-wallet <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion can be found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613)

</comment><comment><USER3> When I hear about something like this, I always think: "Insider's Job." Sorry, can't help it!

<comment><USER4> True. Founders risk tolerance may have been such that they looked at current $BTC price and decided this was it.

Can anyone guesstimate what they were profiting? Compare that to a $62m payday.

<comment><USER5> Reddit says they were making about $500K a day in mining fees.

<comment><USER3> What prevents them from keep mining?

<comment><USER6> Downtime, lack of trust from users, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure anything new in this story from the one discussed four hours earlier (70+ comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613)

The official press release was on reddit, submitted but with no comments: [https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_press_release_statement_by_nicehash/)

A handful (5) of comments on the earliest related submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863306)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know too much about bitcoin but am I reading this correctly that they had $60 million in ONE wallet?

Wouldn't it be wise to have part of this money in several "offline" wallets or something?

<comment><USER9> Apparently the reasoning is that this would cut fees on transferring money. Instead of transferring it from wallet to wallet, which would incur fees, they keep it all in one wallet, and change internal numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was just wondering, given the record prices - how soon will we hear about a hack? And here we are.

Though I wonder why the announcement says:

> We are working to verify the precise number of BTC taken.

While the article says:

> A wallet address circulated by NiceHash users shows that more than $60 > million of bitcoins might be affected, according to CoinDesk, the > cryptocurrency research and news website.

<comment><USER11> There is no official announcement on the BTC taken, but reddit users have been passing around a wallet that suddenly got $60m recently

<comment><USER12> It will be interesting to see if, when, and how they try to move all that crypto-loot. I'd be surprised if BTC/USD didn't start falling in anticipation of increased supply (and hopefully some healthy trepidation regarding the state of Bitcoin security), since Bitcoin is still the main source of liquidity between crypto and fiat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not very familiar with how crypto currencies work but when such an incident happens, how hopeful can the company be that they will get their BTC's back?

<comment><USER14> Transactions are irreversible. That's basically the entire point. They'll only get the coins back if the thieves are caught, haven't spent them, and give them up.</comment></comment>


How the Coronavirus Could Take over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It) - <AUTHOR> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html? <comment><USER2> Warning: this is really grim and doesn't end positively.

But reading it was informative, and did paint a vivid picture. I wish everyone in my life would read it and be more careful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Should have been titled:

 _How You Die From Coronavirus_

A horror.</comment>


KA Lite: Khan Academy for the 70% of the world without an Internet connection - <AUTHOR> http://dylanbarth.com/kalite

<comment><USER2> It would be great if the KA site could be optimized for tablet usage -- combined with this, one could have a very cost-effective beginnings of a "Diamond Age" like device.

<comment><USER3> Yes, mobile compatibility is a big issue, given the flourishing of cheap mobile devices in the developing world. We will definitely do more work to make this a smooth experience on tablets.

And awesome that you mention that -- when I arrived at Khan Academy for my internship on the first day, I was handed a copy of Diamond Age, and told that "Sal wants all the interns to read this". It was an inspiring read for me; especially the notion that part of the goal of real education is to inculcate subversiveness. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923821></comment>


First patch for Shellshock may not be a complete fix - <AUTHOR> http://www.itnews.com.au/News/396085,bug-in-bash-shell-could-be-worse-than-heartbleed.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

"It looks like the patch does not fix every case of environment variables being used to pass on executable code. We are still testing the patch, and hope to have more information on it soon," Boileau said.

A number of other security experts highlighted the incomplete nature of the fix on the Red Hat Bugzilla page. [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1141597#c23](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1141597#c23)</comment>


Newsletter with Remote Jobs for Devs - <AUTHOR> http://remotedigest.com/

<comment><USER2> What kind of "remote jobs"? Full time, contract, freelance?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Jeremy,

Mainly full time.

Cheers, Leo</comment></comment>


Exercise Makes Our Muscles Work Better with Age - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/exercise-makes-our-muscles-work-better-with-age/ <comment><USER2> > Of course, this type of single-snapshot-in-time study can't tell us whether > the athletes' training actually changed their muscle health over the years > or if the athletes were somehow blessed from birth with better muscles, > allowing them to become superb masters athletes.

I really appreciate this kind of honesty. It's rare that a popular article explicitly points out possible confounders.

</comment><comment><USER3> I sure hope so! I'm 42 now, and I just came back in from a bike ride - only my second since a 5 month layoff caused by a combination of weather, travel and shoulder surgery - and I'm beat. And gawd was I slllooooowwwww out there tonight. Uuuggghhh.

But hey, I know it will come back with time, and - more to the point - I know how important it is to stay active. After the whole heart-attack thing back in 2014, I'm pretty committed to staying active from here on out. Keeping my heart healthy is priority #1, anything else is just gravy at this point.

<comment><USER4> Holy cow, heart attack at 40? Can you elaborate on how that happened?

<comment><USER3> _Holy cow, heart attack at 40? Can you elaborate on how that happened?_

I mean, they never really know exactly what causes any particular heart attack. But there are definitely specific risk factors I can single out, and beyond that, I can speculate.

For starters, I was a bit overweight, and I am diabetic. Those are both risk factors. But on the flip side, my diabetes is well controlled, and while overweight, I wasn't exactly the stereotypical 400 lb slob that you look at and go "how is that guy still alive?" But while I was pretty active at times during my life (on an "on again, off again" basis), I was one of those people who eats a shitty diet and imagines that he can make up for it by working out more. So even though I wasn't huge outwardly, I'm pretty sure the crap diet, over a period of many years, played a role.

But beyond that, I was working crazy hard on this startup, and doing really nutty shit like working 100+ hours a week (between the day job and the startup), not getting enough sleep, and consuming simply ridiculous amounts of caffeine. I'd go to Barnes & Noble or Starbucks to work on the startup after getting off work at my other job, and sit there and drink a triple-shot latte, chase that with a Red Bull, and eat a box or two of chocolate covered espresso beans... 4 or 5 times a week.

I've also had some minor, but annoying, knee issues since I was a teenager and I've used a lot of ibuprofen over the years, including taking more than the recommended amount and definitely taking it longer than you're supposed to. Well, guess what? In the last couple of years they've found that sustained use of ibuprofen increases your risk of heart attack.

All in all, my personal hunch is that the main things that contributed to it where: 1. my diet, 2. stress, 3. weight, 4. excessive ibuprofen

<comment><USER5> Jesus. That sounds like the path I am headed down. Overweight, workaholic, ibuprofen taker.

<comment><USER6> It was me as well, 7 months ago I weighed 245, ate a shocking diet and subsisted on energy drinks and coffee.

Last year I got diagnosed with a serious spinal condition and resolved to fix as much as I could.

I now weigh 182lbs, lost 12 inches of my waist, don't drink any energy drinks and my coffee addiction is down to <4 a day.

I work out for 30-45 minutes everyday without fail mostly bodyweight and callisthenic exercises with swimming a couple of times a week.

Blood pressure is normal, resting heart rate dropped by 10 back to 70.

The pain from the spine condition has halfed as have the meds I take to stay functional.

It's been a hard journey 1500 cal a day for 6 months was brutal but I'm now at maintenance weight and the time would have passed anyway.

My advice: if it bothers you, fix it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's my understanding from my reading of pop-science books (specifically, Nick Lanes) that mitochondria can be selected for _within your own body_.

As you age, mutations naturally produce slightly broken mitochondria who do a slightly worse job at making energy. However, if you are exercising vigorously, those poorly functioning mitochondria will die off (apoptosis) and you will maintain a (relatively) "fitter" population of mitochondria inside your muscles, as those are the ones that are left to reproduce.

If you don't ever exercise, you'll probably feel fine (all else being equal) but secretly, you're cultivating a weak population of mitochondria within your own muscle cells. At some point the weakness of that population will become apparent.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Of course, this type of single-snapshot-in-time study can't tell us whether the athletes' training actually changed their muscle health over the years or if the athletes were somehow blessed from birth with better muscles, allowing them to become superb masters athletes."

I really wish they hadn't used world class athletes, who almost always have major genetic advantages.

<comment><USER9> yes, and maybe if they hadn't used world class athletes they could have had more than 29 of them.

I mean if they had 10000 exceptionally fit people for their age, that might start to mean something.

<comment><USER10> Given that they had to get them into a lab and use specialised equipment on them I'd guess the low number of participants was more due to budget than experiment design

<comment><USER9> probably, but the result is the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought this was taken for granted but I'm glad it's been confirmed and we understand the neural process behind it.

It's a good motivation for working out. I often think: "I'm squatting 180lbs now, so that I can sit down onto and stand up from a toilet when I'm 80."

<comment><USER12> I'm squatting 500 pounds now, so I can squat 350 when I'm 80 :P

<comment><USER13> Here's a 70 year old deadlifting 683:

[https://www.facebook.com/tommy.mason.9237/videos/10207393442...](https://www.facebook.com/tommy.mason.9237/videos/10207393442227388/)

<comment><USER12> Looking good for me then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the paper:

"World champion master athletes in their 9th decade of life had a greater number of surviving motor units, reduced collateral reinnervation, better neuromuscular transmission stability and a greater amount of excitable muscle mass as compared with age-matched controls."

and

"The Masters Athletes (MA) consisted of track and field athletes ranked in the top 4 of their respective events at the world masters championships..."

I'm not sure how surprised I'm supposed to be about people who were world- class athletes some time within the past ~40 years ago having above average strength.

Though, I understand that you can't easily pull off a randomized controlled trial (long-term) for exercise.

<comment><USER15> "World masters" championships are for older athletes. For example, in athletics, we have [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_athletics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_athletics):

 _" Masters athletics is a class of the sport of athletics for veteran athletes in the events of track and field, road running and cross country running. The competitions feature five-year age groups beginning at age 35. Men as old as 105 and women in their 100s have competed in running, jumping and throwing events."_

Winners of these events need not have been world class athletes when they were young, and often weren't, but they typically have been exercising regularly more than other people.

But yes, it is not that surprising that people who _are_ world-class athletes _in their age group_ score differently in some metrics than people who are not. Question is: in what metrics? This study researched that. It's not just that they have more muscles, the muscles they have work better, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who has recently quit smoking (6 months) and started a daily regimen of 1.5 hrs of serious cycling (including 45 min up a steep incline) at 2000m (6500ft) altitude at age 34 (2 weeks down; with a couple of breaks for alternatives like hikes or longer bike trips), this article makes me feel like I've made the right decision, despite daily aching muscles. I'm using the hope of joining a group cycle trip across Tibet to Nepal from southwest China[0] in September as a mental crutch.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20091026172350/http://www.geocit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20091026172350/http://www.geocities.com/graydonandjoanne/yunnan- tibet.html)

<comment><USER3> _As someone who has recently quit smoking (6 months) and started a daily regimen of 1.5 hrs of serious cycling (including 45 min up a steep incline) at 2000m (6500ft) altitude at age 34 (2 weeks down; with a couple of breaks for alternatives like hikes or longer bike trips), this article makes me feel like I 've made the right decision_

Definitely. Take it from me, the alternative(s) are no fun. I got lazy about biking and running and everything, let my weight creep up, and was over- stressing myself way to hard, and ultimately had a heart-attack. Luckily I lived and the doctors say I should be fine, but they all hammered me on the importance of staying active and fit from here on out.

Luckily I never smoked, so I have that going for me at least. But yeah, quitting smoking is definitely a Good Call if you care about your health.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the supportive words and I'm glad you're still around to cajole people in the right direction!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems fairly obvious but it's good to have it confirmed as I'm 60 now. I usually cycle about 100 miles a week and I'm glad I'm not wasting my time!

</comment><comment><USER18> People often ask me if I worry about tearing muscles/sore joints when I run, ride my bike or lift weights. In college, I kind of worried about those things, but now sitting in a chair from 8-10 hours a day makes me worry way more about heart health/blood pressure, etc.

I just kind of hope to offset all of that sedentary time in front of the monitor, and indeed do hope that all this activity benefits me down the line, be it muscle elasticity, heart health, lung function, whatever.

<comment><USER19> Try a standing desk if you can. I find that aside from tired feet I feel a lot more energetic throughout the day and no longer get and aches in my back that I used to experience when sitting

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Take hot water bath and go for one hour early morning walk;</comment>


From VC's to Super-Angels: The New Rules of Startup Investment - <AUTHOR> http://gem.glasgows.co.uk/gem3//ext/reg/register.php

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't normally post things that are behind registration walls, but this webcast is excellent for anyone looking to raise money. Covers topics such as when to look for Angels vs VC, what return VCs are looking for, etc.

I'm not normally an advocate of this sort of thing, but if someone was to rip it and post it up on youtube they'd be doing a great favour to the startup community :)

(It may actually be legal, given the video is produced by UKTI it's probably under crown copyright which allows reproduction as long as you don't modify it in misleading ways).</comment>


Yadig.com is valuable for general users and businesses alike. - <AUTHOR> http://www.yadig.com Yadig.com is a globally crowdsourced, opinion based website fused with social networking that helps you find the best (and worst) places near you and allows you to read and write real-time reviews on places, while staying connected to your friends like you do on a social network. <comment><USER2> Its looks like a nice idea, i like it.</comment>


How to write your own compiler - <AUTHOR> http://staff.polito.it/silvano.rivoira/HowToWriteYourOwnCompiler.htm

<comment><USER2> What is the name of that bookmarklet that makes any page readable? This site needs it badly.

<comment><USER3> <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Zillow and redfin estimates overtime, comparison? - <AUTHOR> Hi, Is anyone aware of a service/website which shows how zillow and redfin estimates vary overtime(for a given address or region). Ideally,  I want a report which alerts me when zillow modifies my home estimates. More generally, what are some services for tracking accuracy of automated valuation models? <comment><USER2> Zillow is not accurate at all. In my market, Redfin has been accurate to within 5% of the price, up or down. However, Redfin is a real estate agency, so they use their estimates and have access to data that Zillow doesn't, and they will adjust the algorithm at a neighborhood level.

Zillow is merely a real estate value estimator (they don't use sufficient data to earn the right to call themselves an appraiser nor do they provide sufficiently updated listings to justify calling them a listings service).

</comment><comment><USER3> With Zillow, you can just track a home (don't recall how - maybe just "Save" will work?). You can have it periodically email you reports on the home, which will include the value estimate.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Ideally, I want a report which alerts me when zillow modifies my home estimates._

So sign up with Zillow and "claim" your home, then subscribe to email updates. You'll get mailed weekly with your "estimate". Using quotes there because, like gamblor956 says, the values are complete bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not aware of any services but they have an API. I think it'd be skirting the tos to save it, but if this is just for personal use it might be ok.

[https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/HomeValuationAPIOverview.ht...](https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/HomeValuationAPIOverview.htm)

<comment><USER5> As far as general tracking of avms I don't know of any and the incentives are not properly aligned to have them set up (avm provider doesn't want to show inaccuracies).

Zillow used to show percentage error but it was a web page showing inaccuracies by zip.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the incentives part. But, apparently, some AVMs(not necessarily Zillow) are used by mortgage lenders to adjust their risk models. In such cases, I would assume lenders will first want to find out information about accuracy(through third parties).

You are right that zillow used to show accuracy by zip code. But I am looking for more granular info.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I bet the AVMs share their accuracy to people that pay them, but I bet not to folks who don't (consumers).

Anyway, hope this post turns up some useful info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zillow will give you monthly updates on their estimate of your house, and they show a history of their estimate when you drill into a house. When I listed my house for sale last month their estimate shot up immediately to closely match the offer price, so worth being skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER7> You could build a simple web crawling tool pointing to the URL of your house on zillow or redfin (trigger it just once a day).

Zillow estimate is way off by the way...

</comment><comment><USER8> How much are you willing to pay? Are you expecting this to be a free service? There is a company called Altos Research</comment>


Britain's Creaking National Health System Gears Up for Coronavirus Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-creaking-national-health-system-gears-up-for-coronavirus-crisis-11585479601 <comment><USER2> It's 'creaking' because it has been systematically been defunded by the Conservative Governments over the last 10 years or so. It is still doing a surprisingly good job considering it is quite overloaded due to low staff and funding numbers.

After Brexit, lookout for the US private industrial model being introduced by the Conservative Trade Deals which won't be anywhere near as effective.

</comment><comment><USER3> NHS was gutted by Torys. "Creaking" gives a false sense of inherent model failure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.is/wZDnJ#selection-2073.5-2073.78](https://archive.is/wZDnJ#selection-2073.5-2073.78)

</comment><comment><USER4> At least they have a public health service to worry about in the first place.</comment>


YCx San Diego - <AUTHOR>

If anyone wants to give this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3773787 a try in the San Diego, CA area this summer let me know or leave a comment. However, regarding the former post, I'm thinking of something more casual; whoever's interested could just show up at the May HN meetup (http://cses.ucsd.edu/wiki/index.php/San_Diego_Hacker_News_Meetup) with a YCx labeled name tag, a few ideas, and the best idea gets executed from June to August on our spare time. I see this as more of a hack opportunity than business one, for anyone itching to try a new technology or two. I'm sure all skill levels would be welcome. Only time will tell if YCx could be an adequate staging area for YC, but that intent is not baked in. <comment><USER2> Can you put this in the invite for May's meetup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.</comment></comment>


SpaceX: CRS-10 Hosted webcast - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giNhaEzv_PI <comment><USER2> Gorgeous external video of the landing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glEvogjdEVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glEvogjdEVY)

<comment><USER3> Watched it this morning... extremely cool. I missed why they landed on land instead of on a barge. Anybody know?

<comment><USER4> The landing is all based on how much fuel is left after the primary mission is complete: some missions require more fuel to get to their destination orbits, others require less.

This launch was an ISS resupply, which is on the low end of fuel requirements. So the first stage can get all the way back to its launch site.

Other launches are in the middle of the fuel range: they just follow their ballistic path to the barge, and do not have the extra fuel to get turned all the way back around for a return to the launch site.

A few launches are at the very high end: the upcoming Echostar mission has such a high fuel requirement that SpaceX isn't even attempting a landing: they're just dumping the whole stage into the ocean like we've been doing for 60 years.

SpaceX is saying that this upcoming Echostar launch will be their last "expendable launch", ever.

<comment><USER3> Very helpful. Thx!

> A few launches are at the very high end: the upcoming Echostar mission has > such a high fuel requirement that SpaceX isn't even attempting a landing: > they're just dumping the whole stage into the ocean like we've been doing > for 60 years... SpaceX is saying that this upcoming Echostar launch will be > their last "expendable launch", ever.

Can I infer that they won't be doing launches that require high-end fuel usage? Are they just giving up on those types of use cases, or do they have another solution for those moving forward?

<comment><USER5> Something to keep in mind is that for space exploration, all that really matters is achieving low earth orbit (LEO). After that, ion engines/solar sails/space tethers, all manner or propulsion can get us out to further reaches. But it takes dedicated engineering to build craft powerful enough to get through the atmosphere with only a small fraction of mass going to engine and airframe.

The cost of fuel is generally pretty negligible compared to the cost of spacecraft. Even 1,000,000 pounds of kerosene only costs about $500,000 ($3 per gallon at 7 pounds per gallon). I'm having trouble finding current prices on liquid oxygen but it looks like about 15 cents per pound, so a 2.56:1 ox:fuel ratio gives $384,000 for 2,560,000 pounds of oxygen. (500,000 + 384,000)/(1,000,000 + 2,560,000) = 25 cents per pound of fuel+oxidizer (honestly I have to saw wow here, as this is much lower than I expected). If a shuttle launch cost $1 billion, less than $1 million went to fuel at 2017 prices (assuming that more expensive liquid hydrogen and less expensive booster solid fuel roughly match the cost of ox-kerosene). Another way of saying this is that the design tradeoffs of the shuttle cost 100 to 1000 times more than other designs might have (mainly due to reusing the orbiter rather than the first stages). A lot of people knew this in the late 70s and warned about it, but due to political reasons NASA went with the more expensive shuttle system and now here we are.

My guess is that from here on, SpaceX will do incremental launches, using a rocket to carry a stage to LEO and then assemble those stages in orbit into new rockets to go further out, landing the first stages to reuse them. This is scalable all the way out to Mars and further, which is pretty remarkable and obvious in hindsight. It wasn't until I considered how one would land a stage on Mars with such a thin atmosphere that I realized why SpaceX has been so committed to retrorocket landing.

[https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/Researchers-and- Policymakers/Ener...](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/Researchers-and- Policymakers/Energy-Prices/Kerosene/Average-Kerosene-Prices)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen#Industrial_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen#Industrial_production)

[http://www.astronautix.com/l/loxkerosene.html](http://www.astronautix.com/l/loxkerosene.html)

[http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/268-How-much-did- the-...](http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/268-How-much-did-the-Space- Shuttle-weigh-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Current_hydro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Current_hydrogen_market)

<comment><USER6> Why are you guessing? This is SpaceX's announced plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU Oh god, 30-60 FPS during the entire landing except for the 15s burn. Fucking brilliant, SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazing to live in times when the first stage landing back has started to feel like routine! Great job SpaceX!

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome. Just watched it with my 7 year old son and he had so many questions. I love being able to pass on my love of space. :)

<comment><USER9> My son is 7... months old, so he doesn't really understand it yet.

I can't wait until he's getting excited about these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The landing video for that was beautiful - great footage all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER11> Always cool being able to watch these and understand how my dad felt during the space race of the 1960s.

</comment><comment><USER12> Recap of the landing bit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP0ficDsOkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP0ficDsOkE)

</comment><comment><USER13> Did anyone see the debris fly past before the second return burn of the first stage? Some ice I assume?

<comment><USER14> Yes! I saw it at the 36 minute mark on the video. That had me curious. I think it was a trick of perspective, it first looked like some huge chunk of debris that the first stage flew past, but after watching it again, it looks like a little chunk of ice that got blown off of by the cold gas thrusters.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's it, a few seconds after the 36 minutes mark. I think you're right, and it does look a lot smaller upon rewatching!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For some reason I found it really cool that it was immediately gone into the overcast.

<comment><USER16> I didn't! I was irritated that I couldn't see anything, so then had a quick scoot to see if the NASA feed would show the on-board view (unlikely!) before coming back again to miss the first stage separation!

The landing through the clouds, on the other hand, I did appreciate. Once my irritation has subsided, anyway!

<comment><USER17> I recommend watching the Hosted Webcast on one device and the Technical Webcast on another. Either mute the Technical Webcast or have it on lower volume. They're both easily found on YouTube under SpaceX.

I did this for the previous launch, Iridium-1, and was treated to unbroken views live from the first stage on the technical stream, while the hosts narrated and switched views more frequently on their stream.

<comment><USER16> Oh, that's a good idea, thanks! Next launch!

Yesterday I was stuck with just my phone though, so my 'alt-tabbing' was particularly tortuous :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hadn't seen the landing from the rocket before. That was cool. Makes me wonder what else in corporate america warrants employee cheering?

<comment><USER19> This is only the second time they've had live video all the way down. Getting that much data back from the thing must be tough. They've been making steady improvements, though, and it's now paying off delightfully.

<comment><USER20> Probably easier when it's coming down on land, and not offshore past the horizon.

<comment><USER21> The last one was offshore, and had video all the way down: [https://youtu.be/tTmbSur4fcs?t=26m4s](https://youtu.be/tTmbSur4fcs?t=26m4s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given ...and here's the technical webcast for those of you who can't stand talking heads:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDLxFUMC9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDLxFUMC9c)

(Although they don't show the onboard footage for the takeoff, unfortunately. Or in-tank footage, which is always cool.)

</comment><comment><USER22> NASA Live can be found here: [https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive](https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive)

</comment><comment><USER23> How long does it take for Dragon to reach ISS?

I should be able to see ISS tomorrow night from my location. Do you know if I would be able to see Dragon too?

<comment> J0-nas In the webcast they said that if you can see is ISS you'll see it

<comment><USER24> Rendezvous isn't scheduled until the 22nd, so there will likely still be quite a distance between the ISS and Dragon tomorrow. They will be in trail, while the Earth rotates, so depending on where the ISS passes relative to you there's a possibility the Earth might have rotated enough by the time Dragon comes around to not see it. It's definitely worth keeping a look out though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is exhilarating! Perfect lift off, separation, landing and deployment. I am OK with this becoming routing and boring .

</comment><comment><USER26> It looked so routine, therefore so exciting.

</comment><comment><USER27> Bravo! Congrats SpaceX! :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Launch at 9:49 AM EST

</comment><comment><USER28> Successful landing!

</comment><comment><USER29> Nailed it!</comment>


Linus Torvalds is pissed at Change.org, starts a petition - <AUTHOR> http://www.themukt.com/2014/08/08/linus-torvalds-pissed-change-org-starts-petitions/ <comment><USER2> I can't believe that they allow you to do anything without confirming your email first....</comment>


Where does the Ubuntu Linux desktop go from here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/where-does-the-ubuntu-linux-desktop-go-from-here/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14096555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14096555)</comment>


Selenium WebDriver wrapper framework for clean and maintainable tests - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WasiqB/coteafs-selenium <comment><USER2> This looks very cool!!!

We maintain an open source testing proxy that lets you do things like make assertions about performance, network requests, and other things like capturing a har. It would integrate really well with this if you're interested.

[https://github.com/browserup/browserup- proxy](https://github.com/browserup/browserup-proxy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ericb, will surely have a look at it.</comment></comment>


Practical Deep Learning for Coders - <AUTHOR> http://course.fast.ai/ <comment><USER2> I took both of these courses and recommend. Practical is the key word in their description that differentiates them from other courses. The focus is on getting you up and running ASAP, then explaining the details and variation, then finally introducing you to learning how to translate the newest papers into usable code. You're not going to get a PhD from the course, but it will get you started on real-life projects.

<comment><USER3> You might get an MSc, however :P Half of my master's thesis was based on practical understanding and skills I learned from the first Fast.ai course. It's also inspired me to start a PhD in a more quantitative field to persue probabilistic models in medicine.

(Here's that's master's thesis if you're interested :) Warning, big PDF ahead: [https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jszymb/thesis/260528685_Szymborski...](https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jszymb/thesis/260528685_Szymborski_Joseph_Experimental_Medicine_thesis.pdf))

<comment><USER4> Same here! Still busy with my MSc thesis though because I'm too busy applying some of the other stuff I learned from Fast.ai on other projects ':)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, from my understanding deep learning is actuially a fairly complicated subject, a bit more than learning the JavaScript framework of the month.

So is there any point in treating it as such? Just another skill we should all learn superficially, so that we have a lot of very shallow knowledge?

<comment><USER6> It depends on your goal. If you want to make advancements in the field and find innovations that no one else has done (e.g. GANs and Reinforcement Learning), then a superstrong mathematical background is helpful. But if you just want to _find the best output given a set of inputs_ and tune things for business needs, modern tooling like sklearn and TensorFlow/Keras is more than sufficient, and following a set of modern data transformation and model heuristics can get you 80% of the way there.

Medium thought-pieces/YouTubers conflate both perspectives, which has become a problem.

<comment><USER7> _cough_ siraj raval _cough_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some of the best instruction I've ever received (and I have too many degrees). These courses are intensely practical. Making sure people understand the theoretical underpinnings comes second to making sure people can actually use DL/ML software for their own purposes.

The site could use a reorganization, though. Jeremy and Rachel have created a number of courses, but you have to hunt through their YouTube and fast.ai forum comments to find all of them. So much good content should not be buried!

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're looking for a group to take this course with (Jeremy recommends it [1]), we just started a Fall session of the TWiML Online Meetup's Fast.ai study group. More info here: [http://twimlai.com/fastai](http://twimlai.com/fastai)

[1] [https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/996445183456690176](https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/996445183456690176)

</comment><comment><USER10> What are the math prerequisites? Couldn't find anything in about page [0], all it says is:

> We assume that everyone taking this course has at least one year of coding > experience.

so, no math background required? Would really appreciate an input from someone who has done the course

[0] - [http://course.fast.ai/about.html](http://course.fast.ai/about.html)

<comment><USER11> Maybe just start watching it if you are interested in learning, instead of trying to put yourself in a box that you might not have the math skills needed for it.

It is free, you have nothing to lose. If the topic interests you than I am sure you will figure it out. You can always google a math concept that confuses you. There isn't a test and no one will even know.

<comment><USER12> > It is free

Just as a warning for anyone price-sensitive interested in taking this course, its cost is non-zero due to cloud costs. It is free to audit though! I'm not trying to dissuade anyone; it is just good to know going into it.

<comment><USER13> I did manage to setup the notebook and cuda on my local machine. I have an older GTX card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > we teach "top down" rather than "bottom up". For instance, you'll learn how > to use deep learning to solve your problems in week 1, but will only start > to learn why it works in week 2

That sounds more like bottom up to me (practice before theory).

<comment><USER15> I think they mean it in the sense that:

Theoretical _foundations_ \--> practical problems = Bottom Up,

practice without theory --> building up the theoretical legs to stand on == Top Down

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone here actually built an ml product? A product people use?

<comment><USER6> That's setting the goalposts a bit narrow in terms of practical applications of ML. You can apply deep learning to solve problems aren't public facing, such as analytics forecasting.

Additionally, a lot of public ML products don't use, and don't _need_ to use, deep learning (e.g. NLP applications).

<comment><USER17> Analytics forecasting doesn't really seem like a good candidate for deep learning. There are plenty of established methods for forecasting that are simpler, more robust and generally more effective in terms of effort to reward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand the big deal about state of the art result. If you know the algorithm (from paper) and the high level tool is available (pytorch) then it is not difficult. If you find it difficult then you are not a good enough software developer and you are not able to produce anything substantial. With fast ai you would mostly end up burning energy in gpu and waste your time. I would better learn c++ then deep learning.</comment>


The Size of the World Wide Web (The Internet) - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ <comment><USER2> What caused the drop? Or rather the spike?! How strange.</comment>


StarCraft: The past, present and future - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/6/9670176/starcraft-2-future-history-dlc-blizzard <comment><USER2> Interaction design is a craft, and gaming is the subcategory of interaction design that most often ventures into the world of art. But the thing that most constrains the artform is this "little brother" mindset. Instead of waiting for society to understand and comprehend the medium, those who craft video games work to make their medium more like film or novels or music or other "high" artforms.

So I get a little twitchy when a gaming website does a story about a franchise like StarCraft and features the writing as the game changing aspect of it. StarCraft is not great because it's a sci-fi game. Warcraft is not great because it has ogres. Super Mario Brothers is not great because it has a chubby Italian plumber.

Interaction design often requires some metaphor - some analogy to inspire your first interaction with the system. The plumber, the ogre, the Zealot. But once you push that first button, and the system responds, the analogy is no longer the inspiration for delight, for frustration, for joy or pain. The interaction itself becomes the driving factor. And the most perfectly crafted interactions can inspire the full range of emotions without relying on a coherent plot, orchestrated sound, or ten minutes of FMV.

And StarCraft is one of the greatest examples of this. I don't care what a Zealot's motivation is, I only care about how much ground he can cover before the Hydra destroys him. My pulse is rising because the HP of my units is falling and my army is shrinking faster than my opponent's, not because I feel bad that the Zealots didn't procure the glory their race yearns after.

If gaming is ever going to take its proper place in the pantheon of higher artforms, it needs to stop acting like something it's not. Video games aren't movies, and they never will be. I hope the video games industry figures this out someday.

<comment><USER3> You're talking about two different types of games: Games of Sport vs. Games of Immersion

The difference: Context

Starcraft multiplayer is a Game of Sport, where character and story are nonexistent and mechanics/"interaction" are all that matters in a game of chess completely removed from any context other than the tournament you are playing in.

Switch over to campaign mode and the context becomes the story line and plot. Sure, the game still relies on mechanics but you advance through different scenarios where you meet new characters, form alliances, explore new worlds, and even switch sides and play as a different race based on the plot of the story. Solo play is a Game of Immersion.

The Dark Souls franchise has a good balance of the two. You advance across the world (semi) linearly in a movie-like fashion, learning about the various NPCs and lore of the world. You are also regularly invaded by other players, and then the game becomes completely mechanics/interaction-based until one of you wins the duel.

You're basically arguing that video games are/should be more like a football game than a movie. They can span both forms of entertainment, and people will choose to engage with one or the other based on personal preferences.

<comment><USER4> I would say that Dark Souls is still fundamentally driven by mechanics, as most of the gameplay stems from you adapting to various enemies/AI patterns and physically learning to overcome them, while the depth of the story is mostly up to you to piece together.

<comment><USER3> Sure, you're right that good mechanics are a prerequisite to a good game. But they're not everything. Driving to work every morning requires mechanical mastery and adapting to various environmental factors, but I'm not masochistic enough to call it a game :)

In real life: do you derive pleasure from understanding and mastering the physical laws of the world, or from spending your time creating a mental narrative for yourself and building emotional relationships with those around you? Perhaps a combination of the two?

<comment><USER5> The Souls franchise became popular solely because it dared to provide complicated mechanics and harsh trial-by-fire instruction in a time where the vast majority of AAA games are dumbed-down handholdy themepark rides with all of their edges filed off. The kind of people that play games only for their stories would never have suffered through any Souls games if it weren't for the massive hype that the "mechanical gamers" generated around it.

Likewise, Starcraft had a story, as did Command & Conquer. But one of those games is played to this day, both in its original incarnation and its sequel, on a massive scale that makes people question their definitions of the word "sport." I don't think this author would have cared to write filler about the story of Command & Conquer today.

<comment><USER6> > complicated mechanics and harsh trial-by-fire instruction

Super Metroid anyone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blizzard's initial offerings were surprisingly dark and mature - both diablo, warcraft I&II and starcraft. Only starcraft's tone has not been degraded much so far (although the writing is weaker).

I guess legacy of the void concludes a chapter of the company history. They are a e-sports company now. Their three latest games are gameplay driven with barely any story at all. Overwatch, HoTS and HS.

Diablo III got a pass on its writing only because of the RMAH that was taking all the ire. I am not sure why the writing declined so much beginning with warcraft III - probably the gameplay requirements prevented the (extremely talented) team of giving their best.

There is still great writing in Blizzard's games - but their last character I cared about was Thorim in Storm Peaks (pre model change - while he was a huge varkul). The writing in the ICC and Cataclysm main storyline was quite meh. It just felt like the writers have written some amazing storyline then got their leashes pulled and told to simplify and make absolutely understandable for a lot younger audience.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, Blizzard had a gothic tone in a lot of their early games. Unfortunately, they've replaced it with cartoony stuff for the most part. Writing wise they've fallen a long way, but it doesn't matter.

Blizzard's primary success since their early games (pre-WoW) is understanding and abusing the psychology of addiction and creating videogames around that concept. They make ultra-streamlined (sometimes to the point of being nearly featureless) and ultra-polished games which are usually super easy to approach but tough to master. The writing is generally cartoony/poor, but the moneymaking potential of each game is very large. They still produce some winners, if you can get over the above.

<comment><USER9> Warcraft 2 was arguably their most cartoony pc game. Maybe excepting heartstone. Writing probably peaked around Warcraft 3 but was pretty simple pre-Starcraft. So I don't see nearly as much doom and gloom about the state of blizzard as you do.

Except the music. The twangs of diablo 1, the perky tunes of Warcraft 2, the terran theme of sc1...!

<comment><USER7> It was simple, but now is bad.

As a dutiful orc in the army I only needed for the warchief to tell me where to hit hard.

Same with Diablo - the rudimentary story was simple and got the job just fine.

Also warcraft 2 had ships. Their lack from III was a crime.

With WCIII they tried to make an epic story - and it was just meh at best. Pitching so hard Orc Jes .. I mean Thrall created such damage that the whole Horde feeling is suffering to this day. I enlisted Horde to play Kharn and instead got Roboute Guilliman

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's unfortunate how much the original game has rotted, the online servers are up but the program itself is becoming more are more unplayable. The OSX versions have been dead for a long time, on windows it seems to be getting harder and harder to run as well. The recent job posting hopefully indicate they're interested in de-breaking them, couldn't care less for a HD remake, just a version that actually works again.

Impressed that Blizzard still runs the IRC servers necessary for that part of Battle.net though, far more modern games have lost all of their multiplayer within a couple of years let alone two decades on. There's third party remakes of the server daemons but you need a hacked up client to use them, or at least you did last I looked a decade ago.

<comment><USER11> IMO, the game works great on Windows. I can't imagine playing games like SC2 or CSGO on OSX. It's just not economical for Blizzard to do an OSX port.

The game has been kinda dead for a while now, because it's so unaccessible to the general population. Games like Dota and League of Legends have taken the place of Starcraft 2 because it's pretty accessible to newbies yet offers a very high skill ceiling for those who want to play competitively. Starcraft 2 is simply too difficult of a game - you have to micromanage not only whole armies but also create new buildings and new units, looking for ways to boost your economy, and micromanaging research, all at the same time. It's simply too much to ask for a new player looking to break into the game.

Dota existed because players just wanted to play a single hero inside an RTS game, and not have to control an army. The army is automated, there is no research, and there is no building/economy to worry about. You simply control one unit. Then League came and made it even more accessible to new players. Starcraft just simply cannot compete with both of these games, it just takes too much effort to even be remotely good at the game.

<comment><USER12> I played SC2 heavily when it came out and for some time after and I loved it. But you're right - the game does not allow someone to be casual or even semi- casual.

It is an unbelievably stressful game and you have to not only master all 3 races abilities but understand numerous and ever changing strategies around them, have excellent macro skills and understand timings, etc. If you don't keep up aggressively with practice and all these other things you'll simply get slaughtered over and over. And although their rating system tries to pair you up it has become harder and harder to find casual players.

I think it's one of the best games ever made and I love watching the top players to this day even though I do not play any longer. But I wish they could come out with a scaled down version with fewer units, easier macro and certain rules in place to limit cheese play, etc. Have smart units or something where different strategies can be used throughout a game and various units will intelligently play a certain role of scouting, attacking, defending, etc.

The truth is the game is amazing because of its difficulty and also unplayable for most people for the same reason. I am not "gosu". I have a life and can't play for hours every day - or every day for that matter.

<comment><USER13> SC2 needs a game mode where one player is run by 2 casuals.

<comment><USER9> Depending on what you mean, that is a feature of the new release: archon mode, where two players have shared control of a single base. This was also a feature of starcraft one but was never very popular. This time it should be easier to use and find matches through matchmaking. The recent blizzcon had a match between 4 pros in this mode, and the casters really couldn't keep up with the side engagements that were happening. So it's even interesting from a competitive scene as well.

<comment><USER13> Oh thanks for the info, I had no idea. Too absorbed in the Hearthstone coverage I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was just at the Legacy of the Void launch event at the Coex in Seoul. There was one developer on hand who took questions from the crowd and tried to answer them without giving away any spoilers. There were also a few show matches between popular players, and a wedding for a former Broodwar pro player; it was quite the event.

Even though other genres are a lot more popular than RTS is now, the packed venue makes me optimistic about the future of the Starcraft franchise.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there any scientific resources about how almost every mainstream success is based on a rather "direct" copy of something that already existed?

Like here with WarCraft/StarCraft and Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000.

<comment><USER16> I would say it's 50/50 between Warhammer 40k and the Alien franchise when it comes to StarCraft. Both StarCraft and WarCraft steals from a ton of other franchises and glues them together, reaffirming the saying "Good artists borrow, great artists steal!"

<comment><USER17> Actually, Starcraft is almost 90% Starship Troopers. From the armored exoskeletons (why do you think there's a "Marauder" unit in the game?), to the bug-like Zerg and the skinny-like Protoss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish they went more into the history behind SC1 [1].

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fV5KADifY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fV5KADifY)</comment>


My hobby: Troll hugging. - <AUTHOR> http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging.html

<comment><USER2> I wish I had some idea what you're talking about? Can someone fill me in with some context?

<comment><USER3> Audrey sometime (couple of days) ago joined the #padre channel with a username user6209 or something like that. The maintainer of Padre was both helpful and courteous to this user who was asking for some help/pointers without knowing that this was Audrey Tang, the maker of Pugs and a big name in the Perl community.

The guy in question here "asdgasd", did almost the same thing after reading that article presumably which made its rounds on Reddit and HN. However his/her talk was bordering on trolling unlike Audrey's in the same channel.

<comment><USER4> Understood. But because the commentary is so poorly written, it would probably make more sense if the conversation from the channel had simply been printed as-is. Hard to believe this was written by someone of note in the programming community.

<comment><USER5> Lack of context happens when someone isn't targetting the various aggregators in their post.

I find it refreshing actually. It's nice to read a post once in a while that eschews the preamble/genericity that typically accompanies posts that are designed to be voted up somewhere or other.

<comment><USER6> It is part of a larger conversation, and references the other parts of the conversation; blogs used to do that a lot, and the folks who've been doing it for a while tend to still do so on a regular basis. It definitely made sense to me. It can be hard to follow IRC chat logs, since there's so much said between the lines in such an environment (any insular community will tend to develop shorthand and a pidgin; IRC is probably an extreme example of that)...but I thought it was reasonably well explained, if you don't try too hard to understand all the trollish undertones and in-jokes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To those who are wondering, the reference to mtfnpy means: "mtfnpy totally fucking now pwns you". Traveling to mtfnpy.com in your browser will send you back to google. Does anyone have any information on what this is all about?

It almost seems like by redirecting to a search of itself in google, and referencing itself in its own definition, it created a black hole in the interweb.

<comment><USER3> It used to be a meme in the Perl community sometime ago. Not too many people used it but it used to come up in a long chatlog.

<comment><USER8> That and we configured all the servers to cloak 'buu' as buu@mtfnpy because it wound him up.

But as Alias notes in the comments asdagd was already using mtfnpy in his whois, so it was already an in joke known to the target :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This only brings me to ask: Why was asdgasd acting like a weird-boy in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that you can sometimes get a troll to drop the mask and have a genuine discussion with you.

But, other than the novelty or challenge of it, why would you want to get to know such people? Is it because they're fundamentally more available? That is, an attention-seeker may be more willing to spend time with you than a less needy person.

<comment><USER11> That is a fair question.

Usually though, like in the case with asdgasd, when they became a genuine person, they also became far less needy; the neediness is largely just anxiety at not being understood.

As for my own motives, I guess restoring balance, and prevention of disrupting folks in #padre's productive dopamine cycles, was my primary goal.

Also I guess there's some reciprocating going on here; people has treated me gently when I was young (~10 years ago) when I first joined #perl, when my English was really poor and can't communicate well.

The language barrier made some of my utterances sound close to trolling, but Elaine Ashton in particular was very kind to me, which steered me into improving my English and doing creative/constructive work. So I guess I'm just passing on her tradition. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If someone is "really a good person," it should not take special effort to pierce through a layer of hostility and destructiveness (even such low-level hostility and destructiveness as trolling an IRC channel).

<comment><USER13> The (former?) troll was described as a 'rather likable fellow', not 'really a good person'. If the latter was the case I would agree with you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't decide whether this really is about troll hugging (which is what it's about in the beginning and at the end), or a shameless plug about Pugs and himself (which fills the middle of the story).

<comment><USER11> Ah, but one does not need deciding between the two; when you hug someone, you are also fulfilling your own desire to be held. :-)

IMHO, one needs not feel shame at saying one wants to be noticed, understood or remembered; that is what makes us human in the first place, and only by communicating we can "unplug" the inhibitions that prevents useful communication.

I've been out of the blogosphere for two years, and only recently began re- familiarizing myself with the various communities formed by aggregator-forums, so naturally there will be some contextual drifts.

But I do try to form real discussions when I was involved in building the blogosphere, which involves telling part of my life-story, then listening to the other person's life-story so I can understand why they made their comments.

So... jvdh, what is your story that prompted you making that comment? I'd be glad to listen, if you would like to share.

<comment><USER14> What prompted me in making the comment is that the title suggests your post is about troll hugging. But in describing that whole story, you do some large side-stepping, that in my mind are not related to the subject that you gave the post.

<comment><USER11> I see. There was another half of my title, though: "My hobby" (a xkcd meme). I was trying to self-analyze why troll hugging has become my favorite pastime, so the sidesteps were mostly about those reflections.

I'll take the Judo/Aikido paragraph as an example, in an attempt to form relations between that self-plugging paragraph and the concept "troll hugging" in your mind.

The Judo meme was first introduced to me by mjd in "Conference Presentation Judo" ( <http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/> ) -- and because Larry Wall and Damian Conway both practices Aikido, they sometime use those two memes interchangeably.

I was reflecting why I've always refrained from using Judo/Aikido to describe what we've been doing in #perl6.

During writing that blog post, it occurred to me that it's about the destination; Judo/Aikido tries to contain and then throw out incoming attacks by making the attacker lose balance, while what we've been doing is quite the opposite; it aims to restore a conversational, one would even say hermeneutic, balance.

So by writing out that paragraph I feel I understand the "My Hobby" part a bit better, whilst also trying to explain that reflection to people who joined in the aikido/judo meme circle before.

That is how the relation was formed in my mind. Hope it helps!

<comment><USER14> I see. I apologise for my harsh tone in my first response. I've been reading too much focused articles, and this stood out.

I missed the reference to the xkcd meme upon first reading (my bad! can't believe I missed that :( ) and upon rereading this does make it a lot more focused.

<comment><USER11> Cool, glad we reached some sort of mutual understanding, then. :-) _hugs_

<comment><USER15> By the way, Audrey, welcome to the HN community. :)

Just noted that you were new here, or at least, the account was. Enjoy your stay!

<comment><USER11> Will do, thank-you!

Gosh, I felt ancient in internet-time, and it's so nice to be a newbie in various communities again. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Possible progress on the Hadwiger-Nelson problem (chromatic number of the plane) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/QBxTFAsDeBp <comment><AUTHOR> Consider a graph on R^2 where two points are joined by an edge iff they have distance 1, in the 50s people wondered what the chromatic number of this graph is and established the trivial lower bound of 4 and upper bound of 7.

By a classic result of De Bruijn and Erdos this problem is equivalent to finding the maximum chromatic number of a finite unit distance graph in the plane, but no further progress was made in decades.

In a preprint published yesterday De Grey claims to have constructed a 1567 vertexes graph which can't be 4-coloured, as can be seen in the comment section of his polymath proposal this was raised to 1585, the non-4-colorability of this new graph seems to have been verified independently with SAT solvers by a couple of people, so that's promising.

As usual that's huge if true, the result looks promising, but time will tell</comment>


8 bit crop circle hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygrail.com/Essays/2010/5/Planck-found-Eulers-Identity-Crop-Circle

<comment><USER2> The errant 'h' is almost certainly not a reference to the Planck Constant; much more likely it's a mistake for an open paren as the author mentions.

You have to wonder why the crop-circle artist didn't use the same number of ascii characters to make the much more clear message:

        01100101
        01011110
        00101000
        01101001
        00101010
        01110000
        01101001
        00101001
        00101011
        00110001
        00111101
        00110000

<comment><USER3> e^(i*pi)+1=0

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making a crop circle with that equation in it is one of the most awesome things I've ever heard of anyone doing.

Somehow that makes it extra tragic that they got it wrong (it's missing a rather critical +).

</comment><comment><USER5> Talking about coincidences. The top post right now is about John Resig going to Khan Academy. So I am watching the Khan TED talk and in the beginning there is a video in which the equation is mentioned. So I am wondering, what is THAT equation? And bam, this article answers my question. Hmmm....

</comment><comment><USER6> the thing that really bothers me is that the 'aliens' are using ASCII and not unicode

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't UTF-8 without a BOM look identical to ASCII for the "normal" characters?

<comment><USER8> Yes because UTF-8 doesn't have a BOM. Well, it's not recommended at least. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark#UTF-8></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub is down - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/

<comment><USER2> Second time in a week. Still github is one of those companies that really have to mess up to make me hate them. It's probably a DDOS attack again, I don't understand what kind of people could do that to our octocat.

<comment><USER3> People on the internet whom hate things for the purpose of hating them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Might be a good opportunity to push your code to bitbucket.

It's come a very long way in the last 12 months including unlimited private repos.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel people have become reliant on GitHub though. They use the web interface to do daily tasks. They like the one click fork to move a repo to their own account.

The problem is, on a daily basis when you're looking for an open-source project, where do you find it? It's always on GitHub. It has established itself as the market leader.

It happens all the time. Other companies may provide better support for certain things(private repos in this instance) - but people flock to where the rest of the market is. It's like PayPal, we all know they're better alternatives and yet we all still use PayPal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's already up again for me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems back up.</comment>