Why I call myself a Javascript Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-call-myself-a-javascript-programmer

<comment><USER2> "C is not like a hammer, C is like wood. [...] Knowing all about the subtle details of working with wood isn't especially portable to working with cables that carry electricity or layers of carbon fibre or blocks of solid aluminum."

All metaphors leak, but this one seems leakier than its predecessor. Turing equivalence (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness>) tells us that any program can be written in any computer language. (Except SQL. But let's not get into Turing-incomplete languages now.) Whereas electric cables can't be made from wood.

The "hammer" metaphor, on the other hand, would suggest that you _can_ do all kinds of woodwork with just a hammer; it's just needlessly difficult. Which seems more accurate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends, ..

Mr. Babbage tells me we can make a computer out of wood. And our wooden computer can _simulate_ what an electric cable does. And that's what Turing tells me. Not that we can write any program with a Turing complete language, but that we produce the same computational result, quite possibly by _simulating_ the other programming environment, just as we might Greenspun Lisp into every other programming language.

So when discussing media, no we can't make a bamboo bicycle that has exactly the same weight and strength as a carbon fibre bicycle. But then again, we can't write an assembler program with the same number of lines as the equivalent Haskell program, so those differences can be hand-waved away. The point is that we can make bicycles out of either material, and knowledge of the material is different from knowledge of a specific tool that works the material.

I think your point is interesting, but I'm not convinced that my suggestion is leakier than comparing C to hammers. I stand by my suggestion that hammers are more like IDEs than programming languages, and that there is a very important distinction between IDE as a tool and programming language as a tool. I reject the latter.

To borrow another Perlisism, "The debate rages on: Is this metaphor Bactrian or Dromedary?"

<comment><USER2> "our wooden computer can simulate what an electric cable does."

Theoretically, yes, but I still think that using C for all your programming needs is closer to the degree of difficulty of "using only a hammer for all your woodwork" rather than the degree of difficulty of "replacing all your electric cables with miniature wooden computers".

<comment><USER3> I have become completely lost in this conversation and am now contemplating writing my next project in wood.

<comment><AUTHOR> try Lego: <http://aleptu.com/images/2009/04/lego_difference_engine.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Metaphors aside, am I the only one who defines an x-language programmer as someone who is able to actually fix problems that are specific to the environment that the language provides? (e.g. buffer overflows in C, cross browser support in javascript, to give examples of the languages mentioned in the discussion)

</comment><comment><USER5> You know, if I liked hammers, and I didn't do carpentry for the sake of making houses, but just because I liked hammering nails, I might well call myself a hammer carpenter.

Not many carpenters would claim that, but that's because hammers aren't very interesting compared to programming environments.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really interesting suggestion. People self-identify for all sorts of reasons, and the pleasure of doing things a certain way is one of them. If you don't like writing queries in SQL, all the arguments in the world about SQL's efficiencies are not going to drag you away from an abstraction you enjoy.

<comment><USER6> Jeez.. so philosophical.

People say (description)(profession) to quickly describe what they do to other people. They pick the best description.

Long haul truck driver doesn't mean incapable of driving short distances, it means that most days she gets up, gets into a truck and drives a long way. If you're some place that makes outsiders cringe you might get all philosophical about whether the "long haul" or the "truck driver" part of your job description is the heart of the matter, but... no one wants to listen to that:

Internet marketers go on about whether internet or marketing are really the heart of what they do. So do leggo artists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not "Front End Developer"? Sure the tool is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS but if there was a better tool tomorrow, you would still be building front ends- just with different hammer.

<comment><USER8> You would be surprised how many people decide to stay with the hammer they know, regardless of a better hammer (easier, less intensive, less mistakes) being released. The only thing that might sway them is the master carpenters up on the food chain heavily promoting their use of their new hammer, but that still may not be enough. Having a better tool is one thing, actually getting people to use it is something else entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do we need to come up with metaphors? Isn't calling a programming _language_ a "language" already an ideal and evocative metaphor?

<comment><USER10> It is by no means ideal. It brings up comparison to languages like English and Japanese. We should reall call them notations, just as in mathematics.

<comment><USER9> > _comparison to languages like English and Japanese_ That was my point.

Just like a speaking language, you can only learn them by practicing them.

Just like a speaking language, the pedagogy has to be geared towards forcing yourself in awkward situations or problems to master the language rather than lecture.

Just like a speaking language, they have different version dialects or syntax that change over time. This is a collaborative process.

Just like different speaking languages, programming languages some differences in grammar rules as well as similarities. As learning Latin will help you learn other Romance languages, learning C helps you learn C++ and C#.

Just like speaking languages, programming languages are developed to facilitate communication. Between programmer<->programmer and programmer<->computer. They are the vocabulary for defining situations.

Just like speaking languages, programming languages influence how we think when using other languages and leave us with accents.

Just like linguistics, there is an underlying core set of operations in computer science that languages are built over as an abstraction. The languages themselves are abitrary inventions and not derivable, mathematics seems a particularly bad analogy.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, it's weird that we continue to preoccupy ourself with the carpenter analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Except that C is not like wood, in the sense that it's a substrate out of which programs are constructed. It's more of a notation for _describing_ the program, which the compiler then translates into another description, which the hardware then "runs" without the program ever being brought into existence as such. Therefore, C is more like a specific type of blueprint: it's good for building sheds, but it's not good for building motors or skyscrapers.

It's not like a blueprint, either, because you can just go ahead and build a birdhouse with no blueprint, but you can't just go ahead and build a program with no language.

We can pick holes in one metaphor after another, and fundamentally get nowhere. The point is simply to not over-specialize on any one environment, unless either you strongly believe it's the best one for every job or you're pretty sure you'll only ever want to do that job. I would contend that most people know neither of those things with any real certainty.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your argument is extremely literal. Metaphors don't sugest that X is Y or that X is like Y in every way, just that from a certain perspective, X has a lot in common with Y. So there will always be holes to pick in every metaphor.

Your argument reminds me of another Perlisism:

 _There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly._

<http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html>

<comment><USER12> It's true, and that's sort of the point. My "argument" (as it was firmly tongue-in-cheek) was more literal than yours, just as yours was more literal than the hammer argument. The whole idea was to demonstrate that there's always a more apt metaphor. When you get to the point where you can't find a difference, it's not really a metaphor anymore.

The best part about metaphors is not the conclusions one can draw from the similarities between two things. It's the conclusions one can draw from the differences.

Also. for what it's worth, I think that quote applies just as well to human languages as to programming languages. Perhaps the metaphor itself might make a good metaphor for programming? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone realizes the rant was from 2006, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Certain debates are timeless. I think that in my children's time there will be programmers and that some of those programmers will be unable to understand what their tools abstract away.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't that be considered progress?

Most programmers today don't really understand how a compiler/interpreter works, how to write assembler, how to allocate/free memory, or even a solid understanding of data structures yet work somehow gets done.

<comment><AUTHOR> My friend, I am going to have to let you go on this one. That's another, fine debate that has carried on since the invention of the first compiler, and continues today with people firmly on both sides of the fence.

I personally think that an abstraction is useful when it helps me to focus on the essentials of completing a task and allows me to ignore the irrelevant, but allowing me to ignore it today doesn't mean I need never understand it.

As an example, I was the development manager for a tool called JProbe. One of its fine tools was useful for identifying memory leaks in Java programs. We had a devil of a time explaining to people what a memory leak was and how a Java program could have a memory leak despite not having any of those complicated pointer thingummies.

To a great extend, Java's memory manager provided value by allowing a programmer to think about other things most of the time. You be the judge of whether Java programmers ought to know how memory works and what a reference is, and the difference between a strong and a weak reference, and how it is that a program with no pointers can have a memory leak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "C is not like a hammer, C is like wood. So a C Programmer is a wood-worker."

Uh, no. The data is the wood. Programming languages are tools to manipulate data. The analogy is valid, but I prefer using musical instruments.

You can make music with many different kinds of instruments. But it would be hard to call yourself a great composer if all you know how to play is the flute.

</comment><comment><USER16> I call myself a Ruby programmer, a Java programmer, a Python programmer and a Scala programmer because I like to programme things in Ruby, Java, Python and Scala.

And it is a convenient way to, you know, help people understand that I can't programme in C# or COBOL or Perl or Objective-C or Prolog or Scheme (yet), but I could certainly give it the old college try.

</comment><comment><USER17> I call myself web developer, but if I were a little bit more specific I could call myself: HTML/CSS/JavaScript/<whatever crazy sever technology you can think of> programmer. If I wanted to be a little vague I would call myself ninja or rock star.

The reason I like web developer is that it gives a clue to everyone about what I am doing or trying to accomplish, it also may give the impression that I am trying to be open minded about the technologies I use, with some bias towards the things I already know.

Frameworks are good but you should not get stuck with them. You should not use them if there is something else that may be better for the job.

</comment><comment><USER18> I couldn't agree more with <https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=147321#p147321>; one of the greatest opinions on programming. Some of the things he mentioned might be extreme; but his concerns are damn right.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hm have you taken the inspiration for the woodworker metaphor from Andy Hunts "The Pragmatic Programmer"?

I immediately thought of his metaphor with the woodworker and his toolset, that needs skills build on it, as well as the working material.</comment>


GPU Open Analytics Initiative - <AUTHOR> http://gpuopenanalytics.com/ <comment><USER2> Let me get this straight: H2O's contribution to this project is a bunch of deep-learning libraries that they didn't create? How will they maintain and extend that? Do they know how credibility in open-source works?

H2O wrote its random forests and GBMs, neither of which show large performance gains on GPUs compared to neural nets. And the neural nets in this initiative were created by Google, Berkeley, Microsoft... This looks like the OpenStack of machine learning, an unmaintainable project that will crumble under its own complexity.

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand your arguments, let alone the overt negative tone here?

>> 1\. How will they maintain and extend that?

Umm just like how everyone else does it.

>> 2\. H2O wrote its random forests and GBMs, neither of which show large performance gains on GPUs compared to neural nets.

What does your statement even means? [1]

>> And the neural nets in this initiative were created by Google, Berkeley, Microsoft...

You mean libraries?

Note: NOT an employee of H2O or anyway affiliated.

[1] [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/bidmach- machine-l...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/bidmach-machine- learning-limit-gpus/)

<comment><USER2> I'm negative on marketing fluff. You're free to enjoy it of course.

>> Umm just like how everyone else does it.

Wrong. Their ability to maintain and extend any of those libraries is limited. TensorFlow is hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Google can maintain and extend just fine. I doubt that H2O has the chops. That matters to their clients, because TensorFlow breaks things with new releases, and those clients will want someone to fix it. Do you call H2O? Do they patch Google into the conference line? I'm saying they're not in a position to offer commercial support. Anyone who has worked in enterprise will see the risks here.

>> What does your statement even means?

The algorithms that H2O specializes in do not benefit that much from the massively parallel computation that GPUs offer. If you don't understand the differences in the computation required by neural nets as opposed to random forests, you will not understand my critique. Neural nets offer superior accuracy on many problem sets and often need GPUs. Random forests do neither of those things.

H2O, for most of its long existence, has operated purely on CPUs just fine. But GPUs and deep learning are hot, so they are associating themselves with the buzzwords, even though they are not really in a position to a) build deep learning solutions or b) make their real product perform well on GPUs. Marketing fluff.

>> You mean libraries?

Why yes, I mean libraries. Thanks for clearing that up.

There's a lot of noise in the deep learning and AI space. Watson is one egregious example. H2O is another. While the technology itself is promising, some of the vendors are dubious.

<comment><USER4> In the end, most AI/DL implementations in products are fluff. It feels like a lot of products are about "HEY LOOK AT ME, I CAN DO IT TOO!", which screams immaturity of the concepts.

From personal experience, many customers ask about our capabilities - but when it actually comes to using any of them there are only a handful of actually relevant ML algorithms that are useful, and those used to be called 'statistics' up until fairly recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping this was going to be about replacing CUDA or fostering the development of clover, pocl or other OpenCL implementations. Not sure how open your analytics can be when it's all overwhelmingly dependent on binary blobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any documentation regarding how this allocates / deallocates GPU Memory. While developing Deep Video Analytics [1] one of the biggest issue I have faced is TensorFlow refusing to deallocate GPU memory [2] (freeing up for other processes to use) unless the process is killed/exits. This in combination with allow-growth allocation strategy used by TF makes it unpredictable to run mixed loads. E.g. I would prefer to run a Detector, Indexer along with some computation in a GPU data frame etc. at same time on a single GPU.

[1] [https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/](https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/)

[2] [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/1578](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/1578)

<comment><USER6> Funny I was reading about that yesterday, here is a snippet that might help you if you do not need all memory in one process:

      options = tf.GPUOptions(per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=0.5)

      session = tf.Session(config=tf.ConfigProto(gpu_options=options))

That way you limit how much the GPU can use up front and then other applications can use it instead.

Of course if you need all of the memory during one phase of the computation, want to free it and then re-allocate it at a later stage you are probably out of luck.

But if your pipeline would normally allow for all tasks to run with limited memory you might get away with this strategy at the expense of some speed.

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> I use per_process_gpu_memory_fraction extensively [1], but when you are writing code that runs on different GPUs (Titan vs 1080 vs 1070 vs K80) due to change in the total memory available you run risk of under allocating or over allocating GPU memory.

[1] [https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/blob/maste...](https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/blob/master/dvalib/indexer.py#L123)

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, I get your problem now, you have to deal with changing environments, not just your own setup to solve a particular problem. I see. That makes it a lot more complicated. Is there a way to fold the pipeline into a single process?

Not pretty from a modularity point of view but it just might get the job done.

<comment><USER3> I am using Celery workers which run a single tensorflow model in solo concurrency mode. The current workaround is to keep track of per process gpu fraction and then incorporate information about Total GPU memory available when assigning workers/celery process to individual GPUs.

<comment><USER6> Right, so essentially you are doing per process memory management because the layers lower down aren't smart enough to handle this transparently. I'm fairly sure that the nvidia libraries do support releasing memory and from what I see on my own machine memory usage of the GPU does go up and down when running longer jobs. So maybe it isn't so much a structural problem as a problem in one particular module that you exercise a lot?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For more context Timothy Prickett Morgan of Next Platform wrote about the Initiative a few days ago: [https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/09/goai- keeping-databas...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/09/goai-keeping- databases-analytics-machine-learning-gpu/) .

</comment><comment><USER8> Internal work filter kills the link. Is the website on a blackhole list somewhere?

<comment><USER9> You're not missing much, just some introduction text and a link to their GitHub here: [https://github.com/gpuopenanalytics](https://github.com/gpuopenanalytics)

Here's the full website text:

GPU Open Analytics Initiative

Continuum Analytics, H2O.ai, and MapD Technologies have announced the formation of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative (GOAI) to create common data frameworks enabling developers and statistical researchers to accelerate data science on GPUs. GOAI will foster the development of a data science ecosystem on GPUs by allowing resident applications to interchange data seamlessly and efficiently.

GPU Data Frame

Architecture

Our first project: an open source GPU Data Frame with a corresponding Python API. The GPU Data Frame is a common API that enables efficient interchange of data between processes running on the GPU. End-to-end computation on the GPU avoids transfers back to the CPU or copying of in-memory data reducing compute time and cost for high-performance analytics common in artificial intelligence workloads. Users of the MapD Core database can output the results of a SQL query into the GPU Data Frame, which then can be manipulated by the Continuum Analytics' Anaconda NumPy-like Python API or used as input into the H2O suite of machine learning algorithms without additional data manipulation.

Plus a list of founders: Anaconda, H2O.ai and MAPD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Our team at Graphistry is involved on bringing this to the world of event & graph analytics, and to full-stack interactive visual analytics, so happy to answer questions about that!

</comment><comment><USER11> Does GPU has full access to DRAM ? Or is it a 2-level access - DRAM then GPU RAM ?

<comment><USER12> Hello - Interesting to think this through! The GPU has its own bus and I think sends data to its cores according to the CUDA instructions that it is given.

I'm hazy about how instructions get to the GPU... I guess the cpu us is executing the OS and the then gets instructions to load the program from disk and then into the execution space in the GPU's memory. I think that the CPU then pushes data into the GPU's memory space for execution and reads results out from the GPU memory according to synchronisation instructions in its program?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is data size (how many GB) that needs such frameworks?

<comment><USER14> Anything from 10GB to 1TB works well with these systems. They can scale beyond 1TB if you use multiple machines.

The catch is GPU memory is more expensive than CPU memory. You only want to use it if: 1) Your workload is compute heavy - think machine learning OR 2) You care about speed i.e., you want queries to be interactive.

<comment><USER4> With these in-memory DBs, scaling beyond 1TB becomes prohibitively expensive for most companies.

<comment><USER7> Note that MapD is not fully in-memory. It can pull from CPU Memory and SSD as necessary. So its essentially as fast as the fastest disk-based database at its worst and likely two orders-of-magnitude or more faster in many common scenarios where certain subsets of the data are repeatedly queries (for example, BI workloads or when repeatedly pulling out subsets of a dataset to train a model)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to do good (on the internet) without doing much - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for services or tools that can easily be integrated into your daily life which, in one way or another, do good to others without causing you much effort.
One example: ecosia.org is a Bing-powered search engine which uses its ad money for planting trees. Using this instead of Google doesn't require any effort (okay, set it up once, then forget, so like 1 minute) but does good to others.
Do you know more services like this? <comment><USER2> smile.amazon.com its slogan is"You shop. Amazon gives."

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool, although the options are limited. Great point to start.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I learn to think more like a programmer? - <AUTHOR> While I was reading "Eloquent JavaScript", I came across this absolute eye-opener (to me at least):
https://eloquentjavascript.net/07_robot.html#p_MtO6TwqB5I
In this chapter the author demonstrates that it is wrong to solve a problem by creating a series of objects that do stuff. He shows that the right way is by abstracting the problem into its most essential elements. Do not try to emulate reality with code, but make it its own, abstract thing that solves the issue instead.
This chapter and its code felt like pure poetry to me.
I very much want to train myself into thinking like this. I've been an amateur coder for more than 20 years, and this chapter has finally shown me a path for growth in abstract thinking (and not in becoming more proficient in a language or framework, which has been the larger part of my programming related learning all these years).
Also, I have always been more of a systems kind of thinker (interconnected things modifying each other's behaviours, emergent behaviour as a result), but I am convinced that what is demonstrated in the chapter I linked to is another type of thinking that would also be very beneficial to me outside of programming.
Sorry for the rambling, but I'm a bit hyped.
So my question is this: is there a name for this kind of thinking and how I can learn to start thinking like that? <comment><USER2> It seems like the author is applying some ideas from functional programming -- that is, don't keep objects and mutable state around like you're building an ugly facsimile of reality, but rather think about programs as flows and compositions of pure functions.

Chapter 5, "Higher-Order Functions" in the EJS book used to be called "Functional Programming" in an older edition [0], and it does a great job of highlighting the main attraction of FP without explicitly naming it as such.

I've heard really nice things about the Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming [1], and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a classic [2] for teaching you how to think in this new way.

[0] [https://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html](https://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html)

[1] [https://mostly-adequate.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate- guide/](https://mostly-adequate.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate-guide/)

[2] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'm very much looking forward to reading these.</comment></comment>


Revenge of the lizard brain - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/07/revenge-of-the-lizard-brain/ <comment><USER2> Surely the concept itself is sound if you forget the misleading names and the idea of three independent modules? The more ancient parts of the brain certainly are located nearer the brainstem, and the most recent ones near the surface.

Also, even though the brain appears on a high level to function as a coordinated whole, there are certainly situations where, for instance, the ancient FFFF[1] responses compete with whatever the neocortex wants to do. Indeed, there's even a plausible-sounding hypothesis[2] that subjective experience itself arises from conflicts between the different modules.

[1] Fight, flee, feed, reproduce

[2] [http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Brain science" is ripe for debunking. Why do people still accept this humbug? [http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your- brain...](http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain- pseudoscience)

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the information, I was guilty of perpetuating this myth too.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not alone! The most upvoted answer on Quora did this too. [http://www.quora.com/Procrastination/How-do-I-get-over-my- ba...](http://www.quora.com/Procrastination/How-do-I-get-over-my-bad-habit-of- procrastinating/answer/Oliver-Emberton)

Credit to the author, he wrote an (equally well received) apology after he was corrected in this.

<comment><USER5> I disagree actually. It's obviously not a legitimate scientific hypothesis, and shouldn't be presented as such, but it's still a really useful way to think about procrastination.

<comment><AUTHOR> People do present it or use it as a scientific fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra How can you have a lizard brain when lizards are an unrelated evolutionary branch? It should be a frog brain perhaps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well a reptilian brain is what he means :) Aren't reptiles common ancestors?

<comment> guard-of-terra They absolutely aren't! Mammals are Synapsids, reptiles and birds are Sauropsida. They branched before most of brain development in both groups took place and since then we don't share ancestors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Interesting. So there is absolutely __no __basis to a reptilian brain component thingie?

<comment> guard-of-terra There might or might not be - we still have some our distant evolutionary ancestors; but the nice name for it ("lizard brain") is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having spent some time in meditation practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is true (maybe not literally, but at least in effect).

We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.

Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.

It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.

Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh? Markov chain? Just asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests.

It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.

Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.

<comment><USER7> I think you're right on this.

It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of _Nature_. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.

I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.</comment></comment></comment>


'San Francisco is rotting' story is wrong: City is brimming with soul - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/San-Francisco-isn-t-what-it-used-to-be-13901994.php <comment><USER2> If by soul you mean human feces on the sidewalk, you are correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you live in SF?</comment></comment>


Show HN: A practical credit network implementation - <AUTHOR> https://settle.network/posts/intro/?b=3 <comment><USER2> How is this different than say, bills of exchange (at least an 800 year old instrument) which are essentially over the counter iou's

Bills of exchange created tons of credit booms and busts throughout history. How does your system control leverage and make sure nothing "blows up"?

This also seems like it misses the fact that iou's become money. For example, rather than call in a loan / iou, if the iou is to someone credit worthy, then traders just trade the iou back and forth

This works a treat until some calls in a loan and there's no cash to back it up. So again controlling systemic leverage is essential.

The desire to control / smooth boom bust cycles is what ultimately opened the door for the rise of powerful central banks to be the ultimate backstop. And even without a central bank, powerful entities arose naturally in the US for example jp Morgan single handedly backstopped the credit crisis of 1907. Money and power tend to concentrate in a few hands even without central banks

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that pure credit networks left with no supervision have been quite bad historically, but it also appear in our new online world as one of the less cumbersome way to move value at scale. What changed since then I think is the amount of information we have on each actor of the credit network which may lead to other outcomes at scale. Also sub part of the network may be quite safe, as an example the subnet that allows BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange.

<comment><USER2> > sub part of the network may be quite safe

true, seems like the more something in finance resembles a utility (like a pure conduit or short term store of cash / tokens) the safer it seems to be. altho i guess even those types of agents can get infected if enuf shennanigans are going on around them (e.g. money market's breaking the buck in 2008-2009)

> BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any > other exchange

thats pretty cool. so thats how stripe's btc processing works? dump the btc for usd (for example) at market via some exchange routing algo? then forward the fiat so the merch never has to handle any cryptocurrency?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I see you've had some relationship with the Stellar[1] currency. Why didn't you use it to implement Settle, since it has innate capabilities of personal asset generation that would very much fit the model of issuing personal GBPs, USDs and so what and then trusting others? (In fact the API is quite the same.)

[1]: [https://stellar.org/](https://stellar.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good question. The cost. I wanted to explore/play with a system with free transactions, which is only achievable interestingly without a global blockchain to maintain.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Unregistered word.tld domain names for your project - <AUTHOR> http://www.dictionarydomains.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

Over the weekend, I built Dictionary Domains to make it super easy to find unregistered {word}.{tld} domains for your next project.

There's some pretty great tools out there that help find domains: I really like Lean Domain Search and back in the day I used Bust A Name a ton. But really, I'm a huge fan of simple verb/noun/adjective domains. I'd happily compromise on the .com extension to get something clean and meaningful.

Here's some of my favorites from the site:

kaput.io proud.cc jud.ge measly.co quaint.io punch.cc closed.cc bubble.io stran.ge chilly.io rainy.io dama.ge puny.io quicke.st

Hopefully you find it helpful!

<comment><USER2> Hey, nice site. I actually built a very similar tool a few months ago:

[http://shortdomainsearch.net/](http://shortdomainsearch.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Posting this here is like bringing a bottle of bourbon to an AA meeting.

<comment><USER4> I said something earlier like this, but this is a much better analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sort by length brings up some fun results that nobody wants: Sore, Gamy, Lewd, Nosy, Pale, Damp, Dull and Glib. They sound like foul dwarves.

EDIT: it goes on for pages and pages. quite an alarming list of words. you could try and turn them into poetry but it might be a bit upsetting.

<comment><AUTHOR> LUL, thanks for the bug report. I'll take a look!

<comment><USER5> Awww, don't change it! At least add a button to put the wonky unloved words back in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is like the holy grail for domain squatters - hopefully they don't read HN.

Also, mad props on the "domain hack" feature.

<comment><USER7> Actually people who are knowledgeable in the domain business do not waste time speculating with .me .io .cc .whatever because the market is so limited to resale. Chance of selling one of those is exceedingly slim.

<comment><USER8> Many .io and .me domains have sold for 5 figures. buy.me went for over $155,000. I have personally sold many for 4 figures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This triggering a maddening desire to make some impulse purchases. Well done.

<comment><USER10> I'm now up to 22 names owned thanks to this site. :P

<comment><USER11> also a victim of op.. I'm up to 15, though I do plan on using all of them.

<comment><USER12> We all plan on using all of them. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Already found & bought a domain (& marked it as taken :D) Thanks for such an awesome site!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome! Now build cool stuff with your new name :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wouldn't it be nicer if the domain names were divided alphabetically into 26 labelled pages? Right now it's 29 and difficult to browse.

</comment><comment><USER15> I couldn't figure out how to filter by .com

Are all .com dictionary words simply taken?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, legit .com dictionary words are all taken. You can sometimes find really obscure ones, but none of the ones on Dictionary Domains are available as .com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Man, I wrote a script to do this for .com names like 15 years ago. I probably should have bought a couple.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, yeah, it'd be interesting to see which domains on there became valuable and/or successful companies.

After I made this I saw Andy Baio did a list back in 2002 too: [http://waxy.org/projects/domains/](http://waxy.org/projects/domains/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a great weekend project - thanks for putting this together!

</comment><comment><USER18> challen.ge is my favourite from the page; it'd be great for hackathons/competitions/any sort of challenging or educational app.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks very nice, any chance you'll add per TLD filtering? Eg. only show me .com, .us and .io but not .ly Synonyms would also be great as others have mentioned

Edit: Ah I should have clicked the TLDs :)

Edit 2: And on the Desktop just noticed the filter button, sorry, that one is invisible when I view the site on my phone

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a filter button there too where you can select the TLD you want to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The best part about this site is figuring out what exactly might be a good use for things like creepy.io :)

<comment><USER21> There really ought to be a contest like this. Who ever wins gets the domain

<comment><USER22> What about a hackathon or something where they give your team a product name and you have to build something fitting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When given the chance to register a domain for free, I chose 0-z-0.com. The idea was that it's a simple, generic domain. I now host things at something.0-z-0.com and if it becomes more than a weekend project I might migrate it to its own domain.

</comment><comment><USER24> In the URL: words?utf8=✓

Nicely done.

<comment><USER25> can I ask what exactly that is doing? some kind of capability test for utf8?

<comment><USER24> Basically, if the GET variable returns a check/tick, then they support UTF-8. Otherwise, no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Love it! Simple, clean and really useful. Do you plan to keep adding words as time goes on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I plan on adding more words and some additional domain extensions. Follow me on twitter for updates: twitter.com/justinthiele

<comment><USER26> Done :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Welp, you've already made me buy one of them.

Any chance you could do filtering based on some of them? For example, some of them you need to have a local presence to register.

Great site.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just bought rhyme.io. Thanks for the site!

</comment><comment><USER28> Any chance to opensource this? Will be very useful for implementing in another languages and non-english countries.

</comment><comment><USER29> I find domai.nr quite useful and comfy:

[https://domai.nr](https://domai.nr)

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice work. Pretty sure Bieber is going to snatch up all the Alleged domains and extensions.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice idea. New project domain purchased (and marked). Come at me weekend.

</comment><comment><USER32> No .com?

<comment><USER33> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146763)</comment></comment>


Redis 2.4.0 final was just released - <AUTHOR> https://raw.github.com/antirez/redis/2.4/00-RELEASENOTES

<comment><USER2> Yesterday I was working on getting redis setup on a windows box. First time I have ever used it. There was a service config error on my part but before I figured it out I posted to twitter with a little passive aggressive spot asking "redis, why can't we just be friends?" Almost immediately after posting the tweet I figured out what was going on, and made the correction. Less than 12 min later I get a reply on twitter from some guy named @antirez asking if he could help.

I mentioned to him that I already figured out what was up but thanked him regardless. A few min later he replied that if I needed anything else to let him know.

I have asked for and received help on topics before on twitter, but never really had anyone contact me after I was just kinda being an ass.

<http://twitter.theinfo.org/124568006838845440>

last night I looked up @antirez and found he is (one of?) the authors of redis. I can see confirmation here with his notes on this post. Now that I know it was a day before a release his offer makes me smile even more. Kudos to he (and his team?). The overt gesture stuck with me since and made me much more willing to help out other people. Congrats on release and just being an all around nice guy yesterday to some guy whom you had never met and who was being a bit snarky.

<comment><USER3> Redis has more than one contributors, but the founder and lead developer of Redis is Salvatore Sanfilippo aka @antirez. He is clearly a programming God.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Possibly not clear from the title: 2.4.0 final was just released. All the new users are strongly encouraged to use this instead of 2.2.x.

Existing users should plan an upgrade to 2.4 if possible in order to take advantage of the new features.

A list of improvements is available here: <http://antirez.com/post/everything- about-redis-24.html>

<comment><USER5> Redis is one of the most stable components of our architecture -- thanks for the great work.

We're probably going to run it as a slave for awhile w/ a 2.2 master -- will be interesting to see how much memory we save, especially with copy-on-write improvements.

<comment><USER6> Just as a word of warning, Redis 2.2 cannot read rdb or aof files created by 2.4 (meaning I'm pretty sure 2.2 can't be a slave of 2.4. So, if you have a fail over scenario, you might be forced to upgrade your master to 2.4.

<comment><USER5> Good point. Hopefully karma will shine upon us :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I upgraded my production server to Redis 2.4 and saw a MASSIVE decrease in memory usage. 11.7GB to 3.6GB. I wrote up a blog post about it: [http://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2011/10/03/massive-decrease- in-...](http://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2011/10/03/massive-decrease-in-memory- usage-with-redis-2-dot-4/)

<comment><USER6> One thing you don't note in your post (but made a big difference for us) is that 2.4 uses jemalloc. This reduced memory fragmentation for us by around 25%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2.4.0 release of what? might want to put something more in the title

<comment><USER4> I think the author forgot "Redis" when editing the title to add "final".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> @antirez and the Redis team.

Thank you for the wonderful work you do. Redis is an integral part of our infrastructure, and we have truly enjoyed working with it.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a shame that Redis development is focused more on keeping the data on memory than using the hard drive.

Really bad for people like me that use VPSes with low memory but decent hd space. (eg: 512MB RAM vs 20GB HD)

<comment><USER11> I think the focus on in-memory only is what makes Redis great and I hope they never change.

It lives on that requirement and is incredibly stable and fast. I don't want another half-baked data store that technically "works" on disk but only as long as your volume is completely trivial. There are plenty of those if capacity is a dominating concern.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A free tool to find correlated assets for tax harvesting - <AUTHOR> https://tools.agentrisk.com/tax-harvesting <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I'm happy to share this free tool that we launched today.

Back in 2015 we started building tools to manage our own money (this is how AgentRisk started) and we share tools that might help you, too!

If you're a DYI investor (or stock data nerd), I'm sure you'll find this tool useful.

Enjoy!

<comment><USER2> Correct me if i'm wrong but TLH is only good for long term positions (>1 year)?

<comment><AUTHOR> For compliance reasons, I can't directly respond here. A quick Google search will lead you to the answer :)</comment></comment></comment>


Investing In The Cultural Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/investing-in-the-cultural-revolution.html

<comment><USER2> So can we identify any startups that would be a part of the Cultural Revolution that Wilson is talking about?

<comment><USER3> I'm almost hesitant to mention it, since they're the startup-du-jour, but Airbnb is a perfect example. Can you imagine your grandparents using it? Maybe, depending on whether or not they were hippies, but my guess is that the majority of people in that generation would be far too scared to try it out. It's definitely a cultural shift towards trust and informal arrangements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, he wants more 4chan things to invest in?</comment>


Fzf-fs: file browser and navigator with fuzzy matching - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/D630/fzf-fs

<comment><USER2> This description is too fuzzy for me :)

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly does this add to fzf? I'm not sure I fully understood the readme

<comment><USER4> whenever you pipe input into fzf, it goes into fuzzy mode and you can select one of the lines of the input.

so, doing something like

        vim $(find . -name *.py | fzf)

will show you a prompt where you can search for all .py files on the current folder. after you select a file, it will open it on vim.

it's something textmate's find in project, but for the command line.

(i hope that made sense :))

<comment><USER3> That cleared things up a bit, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's hope it doesn't fuzzy match on save.

<comment><USER6> If you're referring to file edit & save, your text editor will handle that. Fzf doesn't care about what the editor does.

<comment><USER5> I was mostly making fun of a potential absurd user interface where saving to foobar.txt would save to foba.txt or any anagram fuzzy matching 'foobar'.</comment></comment></comment>


What people are googling in real time - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=10&ncol=10 <comment><USER2> Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.

It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.

One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night before I have to type anything in.

When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.

When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in.

If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page.

Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?

<comment><USER3> >Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.

You raise a good point that very few people understand. What information you receive determines, to a large extent, what you think. The relationship between inputs and thoughts is somewhat messy, especially for those people who can take apart ideas and put them back together in novel ways. However, people of below average intelligence, who only think in analogies to concepts they are familiar with, have behaviour and thought patterns that are very regular.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps there's a market for a serendipity app that occasionally suggests new experiences. "I see you're out shopping for Father's day -- how about taking a break for some rock climbing on your way?"

PS: Do you have a reference for people of below average intelligence thinking only in terms of analogies to familiar concepts? It seems plausible, but I'd be interested in any studies done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's nothing real-time about it. The data ([http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/](http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/)) is pulled from Google Trends, but it's certainly not real-time, more like hourly updated.

<comment><USER6> I figured as since most people don't type in Title Case.

<comment><USER7> Actually you will be surprised by how many do type in Title Case. I have seen many non-techies do that. I have also noticed they do this in almost every movie and TV show, when someone is using a search engine.

<comment><USER8> That may be, for lack of a better word, muscle memory/reflex for some people. I found out last semester, when I wrote out lecture notes on an ipad that there are many words I literally forgot how to spell. I can type them, and I can write them with a pen, but writing with a stylus is different enough that it took several seconds of concentration before I could write it down. I wouldn't be surprised if there are words or phrases at I always capitalize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> True story: A few years ago, Google had screens in their lobbies showing real- time Google user searches as they came in over the wire. (I don't know if they still have this, since I haven't been there in about 2 years.) I was walking through the lobby with Sergey Brin (it's a long story), and I spotted these screens and asked him if he wasn't afraid that a bunch of porn searches would come up on the screen from doing this.

"No", he said. "We have filters for that."

Just then, the word "bukkake" scrolled by.

"I think your filters should learn Japanese," I suggested :)

<comment><USER10> They do still have those screens! I spoke with one of the engineers that worked with them, and he said basically anything triggered by SafeSearch is excluded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note that this is not actually real time. There is one http request made when page loads and it doesn't make any more requests afterwards (just cycles). It seems to just grab top X words from different languages then repeat them.

<comment><USER12> Top X words among recent searches for that language, you mean? I assure you that "Blackhawks" is not a common English word and suggests to me the data is was generated relatively recently.

<comment><USER13> The URL indicates that it's the "hot trends", which implies that it's the currently popular searches. I agree, there's nothing here that seems to indicate that this is showing real-time searches. It's just a way to visualize the current hot search terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice, is this the latest PRISM API mashup?

<comment><USER15> Hah! I was thinking the same thing. Kind of timely to release this visualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't believe the title. Even the URL reveals that this is just a visualization of Google Trends, which changes at less than real-time relative to individual searches.

Correct, non-misleading title would be: "Nice Visualization of Google Trends"

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn Ugh, how do they thing the timing of releasing this webpage is appropriate, with the NSA scandal, and people are worried more than ever about their data being harvested? Or has it been around for a while?

<comment><USER17> The same program has been running in many Google lobbies for years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ....after some heavy adult searches filtering....

<comment><USER19> What would be interesting is their process for filtering out private search terms

<comment><USER20> I don't think you have to do anything about it. It wouldn't be trending if it is private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Google does not claim its real time.Its a set of popular trending searches and it seems to update hourly.

<comment><USER22> It only updates _after_ their prop fund trades on the data.

<comment><USER23> I do wonder if their search engine trends department guys get involved with this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I refuse to believe there's that many people doing searches in this "real time" search list and there's nothing pornographic...

<comment><USER25> When I worked at Google there were projectors in the lobby which projected a sampling of queries coming through in "real time." And like you I noticed that there weren't any queries for things I knew people were querying for, so like any curious Googler I went out and found the source code for the program that did that, and yes, as you would expect, it filters out the naughty bits. (and various other searches that are attempted and of dubious moral value).

At Blekko (where I currently work) I wrote a similar application so that we could watch searches, live, on our display monitors.

It has been invaluable in identifying robotic searches and amusing to watch how some folks mangle the english language in their quest for porn, but most interestingly for me is that it is a great way to train your urban dictionary app since the OED doesn't define 'underass' but if you look at the pages that contain the term you can compute what folks take it to mean ;-), and then you can add it to the filter list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Kind of amusing how the most consistent theme I could find (in the US at least) was people searching for the weather.

<comment><USER27> Really? For me it was the Pirate Bay and Kate Upton.

<comment><USER24> I was just randomly clicking the searches to see what could possibly be so interesting about them... turns out it was just a bunch of people wearing clothes... and given the internet, I find that quite difficult to believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Someone should make a screensaver out of this.

<comment><USER29> My thoughts exactly... can someone just do this so I can use it? :)

*Update: This works awesomely. Just pop in the URL. [https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads](https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads)

<comment><USER28> Arghh not working for me! Shows a Google login page.

<comment><USER29> The screensaver does _not_ come preconfigured with this visualization.

You need to go into Options, and copy-paste the URL of the OP into the field there.

<comment><USER28> Did that... doesn't seem to work on my corp mac.

<comment><USER29> Huh, don't know what to say.. for me it just works. Maybe you need an admin user? Not sure. Sorry bout that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> this is not real time...it just pulls a whole bunch of data at once and makes it look like real time with the animations...it is actually animating the same data on page refresh and displaying them randomly to simulate real time...idk how often it's updated though....

</comment><comment><USER31> I couldn't look at that for more than 10 seconds without seeing a Pirate Bay related search.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love the way that the various ISP blocks on The Pirate Bay have resulted in people apparently using Google search as an abstraction layer over the DNS. How long before the search equivalent of DNSSEC?

<comment><USER12> I would be careful about making assumptions about people's motivation.

Lots of people use Google as their primary means of navigating the internet -- nothing to do with censorship. I would guess that a Google search for "facebook.com" is one of the biggest referrers to Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Huh, nice. They have something somewhat similar in the lobby of the Sydney office, with a 3d globe displayed on several screens with search terms being displayed on their origins.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else thing this is fake? I keep seeing the same endless repetitive searches.

"NHL Playoffs" "Apple iOS 7" "MacBook Air" "Chicago Blackhawks"

Nice try Apple/NHL!

<comment><USER35> Apparently it's updated hourly from: [http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/](http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/)

If you watch Chrome's network activity, it shows no activity after load, and near the bottom, you find that list of terms. Still a cool visualization. It would be great if it was OpenGL and I could set it as my screensaver, or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The site isn't making any asynchronous requests, so there really is no "real time" aspect to this. If you look at the bottom of the page, it says "Showing the latest hot searches in All Regions".

So, these are just the top X searches from some time period, presumably after some processing and filtering (NSFW results eliminated, capitalization and spelling corrected, maybe some categories omitted, etc).

</comment><comment><USER37> Don't they have something like this in the main entrance of their mountain view office? I could've sworn it was not filtered too, that i vaguely recall seeing something like "how to kill yourself" scroll by when I was standing in the lobby once.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm still a bit astonished by the number of times I've seen searches in the United States for "weather.com". Searches for "National Weather Service" I can understand, but "weather.com"?!

<comment><USER39> There's a huge number of people that either don't understand or do not care about the difference between the search bar and the address bar. I've seen this many, many times already.

And since it gives them the right result anyway... why should they change anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's not real time. 3 days ago, the trends it carried have not changed much as I look at it today. While this could also mean that they've actually not changed, I highly doubt that for a country like India.

</comment><comment><USER41> You can check what AOL Search users were "aoling" in 2006: [http://search- logs.com](http://search-logs.com)

</comment><comment><USER42> When I interviewed at Google this was running on a large LCD panel in the lobby. It was EXTREMELY laggy on that panel for some reason but it looks great now.

</comment><comment><USER43> how do they take out all the porn? i'm serious!

<comment><USER44> Maybe they remove the top 10% of searches?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The typing of the complete address within google (e.x. weather.com) instead of the address bar still amuses me.

</comment><comment><USER46> They must be filtering out searches from Utah.

</comment><comment><USER47> Ooh, I would love this in screensaver form!

<comment><USER47> I used this to make a screensaver out of it: [https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver](https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> WWDC iOS7 PS4 vs Xbox One

Yup I'm still in the loop.

</comment><comment><USER49> Heavy filtering... no typos ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this what the NSA uses?

</comment><comment><USER51> Aren't the search lines supposed to be private data?

<comment><USER52> [https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

You're welcome.

<comment><USER53> DuckDuckGo gets better results than Google, especially for research, but I've been extremely spoilt by Google's extra features like images, maps, and YouTube integration.

I know you have "bang-cuts" like !g and !i, but it's kind of nice to have map results show up when you just search.

<comment><USER54> DuckDuckGo also isn't very good at troubleshooting queries. For example if I'm having a problem configuring my wireless card, DuckDuckGo won't return anything useful, but Google will find some mailing lists and/or forums answering the same or a similar question. It's getting a lot better, though.

It's great for everything else though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DeePhi Deep Neural Network Development Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.deephi.com/dnndk.html <comment><USER2> My summary:

* deephi built an FPGA based processing unit specialized for sparse low precision tensor operations

* Now they have a dev kit for turning your tensorflow/caffe/mxnet models into compressed (sparse/low precision) binaries that are optimized to run on their processors.

They published a paper about how they balance compression/accuracy. [0]

[0] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00694.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00694.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> > DECENT (DEep ComprEssioN Tool)

That is priceless!

<comment><USER4> wow they really picked whatever letters they felt like picking

<comment><USER5> [http://acronymcreator.net/](http://acronymcreator.net/)

[http://acronymgenerator.com/](http://acronymgenerator.com/)

[http://acronymgenerator.net/](http://acronymgenerator.net/)

[http://acronym-maker.com/](http://acronym-maker.com/)

[http://acronymify.com/](http://acronymify.com/)

[https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/paracomp/anym/](https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/paracomp/anym/)

[https://www.allacronyms.com/aa-acronym- generator](https://www.allacronyms.com/aa-acronym-generator)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Chrome still 'call home' even if I use another search engine? - <AUTHOR> Given that I use duckduckgo and I'm not logged in, into any google accounts, does Chrome still send my data to the mothership ?<p>( ignore the updates ) <comment><USER2> You can never know for sure, because it is closed source. If it matters for you use free software, such as Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER3> What data? Run it through a proxy and check.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What data?

Browsing habits, visited sites etc...

<comment><USER3> I'd say run it through a proxy and just check. I seriously doubt it, though.</comment></comment></comment>


The Chernobyl Dice: A quantum random number generator with a nixie tube display - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/3WYxF7x <comment><USER2> Surely the Github repo is a better place to link to:

[https://github.com/nategri/chernobyl_dice](https://github.com/nategri/chernobyl_dice)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, didn't think about that at first

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I just don't get HN. I figured this would be fairly popular.</comment></comment></comment>


Thought: On Convincing - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> "Convincing people one by one for an outcome is surely a trouble than by convincing them altogether once with an outcome."</comment>


Titan Distributed Graph Database 0.5.0 - <AUTHOR> http://s3.thinkaurelius.com/docs/titan/0.5.0/

<comment><USER2> This might a stupid question but is this competing with Neo4j or Giraph? I didn't see a mention of comparison with either in the docs. I believe graph data storage and graph processing are two different things - is TItan doing both?

<comment><USER3> Might find this interestign: [http://euranova.eu/upl_docs/publications/an- empirical-compar...](http://euranova.eu/upl_docs/publications/an-empirical- comparison-of-graph-databases.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an old version of Titan. Please see 0.4.1+ and Titan's caching model: [http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/11/24/boutique-graph-data- with...](http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/11/24/boutique-graph-data-with-titan/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those interested in Titan 1.0 roadmap and the evolution of the Titan OLTP/OLAP story. Titan will be implementing TinkerPop3 API [http://www.tinkerpop.com/docs/current/](http://www.tinkerpop.com/docs/current/) ... Currently, Titan 0.5.0 leverages the Faunus Gremlin compiler ([http://faunus.thinkaurelius.com](http://faunus.thinkaurelius.com)), but with TinkerPop3, TinkerPop3 provides an OLAP compiler for Gremlin that will make things easier for Titan as well as other graph computing engines implementing the stack [http://www.tinkerpop.com/docs/current/#traversalvertexprogra...](http://www.tinkerpop.com/docs/current/#traversalvertexprogram)

<comment><USER4> We are getting a bunch of exceptions because of the Gremlin complier, I hope that TinkerPop complier performs better.

<comment><AUTHOR> ?. Perhaps you might want to ask questions on the public mailing list. [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/aureliusgraphs](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/aureliusgraphs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this one work? I spent a bit of time playing with Titan earlier this year before passing and moving on.

IMHO the project made a critical design error by trying to be backend agnostic. From a technical perspective, that gives the worst of all worlds for everyone involved.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it works :-) Support for multiple storage backends gives Titan a lot of deployment flexibility and allows it to inherit some great features like multi DC support. Software component reuse is pretty standard these days. What lead you to the conclusion that it is the worst of all worlds?

<comment><USER5> I think you've documented some of the issues on the Titan Limitations page. For us, we couldn't get Titan to work properly, which we documented in the Issue Tracker. That lead me to the conclusion that Titan was just too complex because from my perspective it's obvious that you guys are spreading yourselves too thin with the 7 different backends.

Why do you need both a BerkeleyDB and PersistIt backend? At the absolute most you should have 2 or 3. Single Machine, AP Cluster, ACID Cluster.

7 backends means 7 different database products, with the same API facade. Duh right? Well the problem is that constrains your API to a least common denominator feature set, limiting access to the unique attributes and capabilites of the underlying backend. Not to mention completely abstracting away memory/disk issues. This is a really big issue with your approach. You have some sunken costs here but I think eventually you will see the value in tightening up your focus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://s3.thinkaurelius.com/docs/titan/0.5.0/changelog.html](http://s3.thinkaurelius.com/docs/titan/0.5.0/changelog.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Some nice changes in this release. Having built-in TTL on edges and vertices would have simplified several different system's I've worked on.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would love to hear about peoples experiences working with Titan (or other graph dbs, for that matter) - I've been following the project with interest for some time now.

If you don't want to comment on HN I'd really appreciate an email to craig dot glennie gmail

<comment><USER4> We are using titan at my job and we will be releasing an open source library for interacting with the graph in PHP via Gremlin call Mogwai (there seems to be a few libs with the same name and purpose, so we _might_ change it).

We like it so far, but are having some issues with the server crashing. I'll update to this release and see if it fixes our issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's Matthias' talk on Titan at StrangeLoop 2013...

Graph Computing at Scale [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling- graphs](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-graphs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some benchmarks against other graphdbs (but it was with Titan 0.3): [http://euranova.eu/upl_docs/publications/an-empirical- compar...](http://euranova.eu/upl_docs/publications/an-empirical-comparison- of-graph-databases.pdf)

<comment><USER11> If you're looking for more up-to-date information about Titan's capabilities then check out these posts.

Titan underwent major changes to optimize in-memory operations. Here is some up-to-date info on that: [http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/11/24/boutique-graph- data-with...](http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/11/24/boutique-graph-data-with- titan/)

IIRC, the euranova benchmark doesn't discuss scalability. This post does: [http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/05/13/educating-the-planet- wit...](http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/05/13/educating-the-planet-with- pearson/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does Titan compare to OrientDB?</comment>


Renowned hacker 'tessa88' identity revealed, Hacker a Russian - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/417500-security-firm-unveils-identity-of-renowned-database-hacker-tessa88-to-be <comment><USER2> > "All share similar social media photos that are nearly identical to a > passport photo of Maksim Donakov, who is the individual behind Paranoy777"

I don't get it. How is this possible?

<comment><USER3> I get how it's possible.

I get less _why_ a hacker would create multiple social media accounts to conceal identity and use something "nearly identical to their own passport photo as a profile pic on all of them.

OTOH, real criminals are caught all the time because they did things that seem unbelievably stupid when described, so I'm not discounting the possibility that's it's true, just saying it seems odd...

<comment><USER4> People get sloppy. A Russian GRU operation in Europe was discovered (reported on within the last 6 weeks) because all of the operatives used the same address for vehicle registrations.

> All 305 names had passport numbers and, in most cases, mobile telephone > numbers attached. All information can be found on the publicly-available > automobile registration database.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/05/putins-spies- new...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/05/putins-spies-new- humiliation-sloppy-procedures-allow-305-gru/)

<comment><USER5> wow, I thought you were talking about a normal size household. 300+ of them were registered to the same address.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new Einstein cross is discovered - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-03-einstein.html <comment><USER2> WMAP measurements put the age of the universe at ~13.77 billion years, so I was initially perplexed by this part of the article:

> The object acting as a lens turns out to be an elliptical galaxy located at > a distance of approximately 7 billion light years (z = 0.556), while the > source is at least 20 billion light years away (z = 3.03).

...but I found this explanation in the Wikipedia article on the most distant known galaxy (GN-z11), which is 32 billion light-years away [1]:

> At first glance, the distance of 32 billion light-years (9.8 billion > parsecs) might seem impossibly far away in a Universe that is only 13.8 > billion (short scale) years old, where a light year is the distance light > travels in a year, and where nothing can travel faster than the speed of > light. However, because of the expansion of the universe, the distance of > 13.4 billion light years traveled by light from GN-z11 to Earth, called the > light-travel distance, has expanded to a distance of 32 billion light-years > during the 13.4 billion years it took the light to reach us.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11#Notes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11#Notes)

see also:

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe#Meas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe#Measuring_distances_in_expanding_space)

<comment><USER3> Thank you, went to the comments to learn this. So the universe actually expands pretty fast then! Faster than the speed of light? Strangely...

<comment><USER4> Space still expands lower than light speed, the moment expansions goes faster night skies will be completely dark because other objects' light won't be able to reach our field of vision. I do not remember how that phenomenon is called.

<comment><USER5> Or the night skies light up completely because there was another big bang somewhere else and the light from that universe cluster just reached us

our observable universe may be around an unobservable area whose light hasn't reached us yet

<comment><USER6> so a parallel universe somehow interferes with ours? I don't think even most enthusiastic multiverse theorists will be able to grasp that.

<comment><USER5> not really parallel like alternate dimensions, maybe adjacent to not get distracted by colliqualisms and scifi tropes?

just another area in the vast void that also had a big bang which is outside of our observable area right now, but whose light may reach us one day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite thing about Einstein crosses is that the images do _not_ appear at the same time. So a supernovae will appear at a different time in each image. See [https://www.space.com/31418-hubbles-einstein-cross- supernova...](https://www.space.com/31418-hubbles-einstein-cross-supernova- strikes-back.html) for a case where we actually saw that.

<comment><USER8> What is really odd is that we are alive to see both. At billions of light- years even a slight extension of the travel time, say a few hundred years, would exceed human perception and probably go unnoticed. For a short-lived object like a nova, we may only ever have one of the two images visible at any one time.

<comment><USER7> It may be surprising, but if you do the math, this is what we should expect.

According to [http://www.marmet.org/cosmology/einsteincross/](http://www.marmet.org/cosmology/einsteincross/), the distance between images is on the order of 1.6 arcseconds. That's a bit under 10^(-5) radians. The difference in time here is proportional to the difference in cosines of the angles taken. An cos is proportional to the square of the angle in radians. Which means we'd expect a time difference on the order of 10^(-10) of the total time taken. If the distant object is several billion light years away, we would therefore expect time gaps in arrival time that can be measured in no more than months.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand the geometry and why they occur at these four positions 90 degrees from each other?

<comment><USER7> There is a long explanation at [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14056/how- does-g...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14056/how-does- gravitational-lensing-account-for-einsteins-cross) that gives all of the details.

Here is a simplified version.

First you need to understand Fermat's principle. Light will follow a particular path from A to B when all nearby paths take approximately the same time as that one. Distant paths may be faster or shorter - consider a straight line vs a mirror. But if nearby paths are different lengths there is destructive interference and no light travels.

Now suppose that we have a spiral galaxy between us and the distant source, but tipped on its side. And that galaxy is most of the way to us. From our view it is somewhat elliptical. There are five paths from there to here that meet the description of Fermat's principle. They are a straight line through that galaxy, a bent line to either side of the galaxy, and a bent line over the edges of the galaxy. At all other angles and directions, you don't meet Fermat's principle, and therefore light doesn't reach us that way.

However the central image gets blocked out by the lensing galaxy. Therefore you only see the other four.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the short side of the ellipse represents a greater gravity gradient, which bends the light more. Therefore those two images are farther apart and we don't get a perfect cross.

Also the lensing object is never perfectly lined up. This will also affect the size and placement of the images. Plus the length of time that light takes to get here.

Your understanding matches mine if you follow the following explanation. In the 2015 supernova, the lensing object was slightly off center. This meant that light that passed to the side of the lensing galaxy more or less straight to us had a fairly short route. Likewise light that passed by the long ends of the ellipse were bent less (because less gravitational gradient) so were also short. Therefore the light of the supernova came fairly close in time along those three routes. The fourth image, which went on the far side of the center of the lensing galaxy, bends the most and therefore had a longer route. Which is why it arrived with a significant delay from the other three.

<comment><USER9> Wow. Thanks for the detailed answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why does gravitational lensing produce four copies of the star and not a whole circle of copies? I would have expected the light to bend evenly around the intermediate star, giving a halo-like effect.

<comment><USER11> I was also interested. It seems to be a combination of the intermediate galaxy being elliptical, and the star behind it being off-center from our point of view:

[https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14056/how- does-g...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14056/how-does- gravitational-lensing-account-for-einsteins-cross/14631#14631)

<comment><USER12> Not a Star behind it, but another galaxy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _> This study, which has combined images from the Hubble Space Telescope with spectroscopic observations from the GTC, has confirmed the existence of a new example of a gravitational lens_

What is the "GTC"? The article doesn't say.

It appears to be the Gran Telescopio Canarias.

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

<comment> happy-go-lucky The article is provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and this institute operates the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. One of the telescopes at the site is Gran Telescopio Canarias (GranTeCan or GTC).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_de_los_Muchachos_Obser...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_de_los_Muchachos_Observatory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Link to paper on arXiv: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10964.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10964.pdf)

Abstract: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10964](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10964)

</comment><comment><USER15> >One of the most striking conclusions of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is that the trajectory of light curves in the presence of matter.

A good example of "garden path sentence" [1]. "The trajectory of light curves in the presence of matter is what?". It took me a while to realize that curves is supposed to be a verb and not a noun.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden- path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why wouldn't it be a halo around the lensing galaxy instead of four distinct points?

<comment><USER17> Not all lenses are good lenses, especially not the ones nature makes by accident. It also matters where the background source is relative the centre to the crappy lens, see third picture here for how the same basic shape can make different images of the same source: [http://inspirehep.net/record/850223/plots#](http://inspirehep.net/record/850223/plots#)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does the lense effect produce four separate images instead of a single image in the middle or a smeared ring all the way around the outside?

</comment><comment><USER19> > With GTC it was possible to isolate and disperse the light of objects ABC, > demonstrating that they belong to the same light source.

That's pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER20> and it is not a kvasar, which is unusual

<comment><USER21> what is a kvasar

<comment><USER22> I had to look it up too, it's the German word for Quasar.

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

<comment><USER23> That's wrong, Quasar is also the German word for Quasar.

But it looks like that the Scandinavian and the Slavic languages use the form "kvasar".

<comment><USER24> Wiktionary is good for finding what languages a particular sequence of characters appears in.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvasar](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvasar)

According to that entry, it appears in both Swedish and Czech (as an alternate spelling).

Given the commenter's username is krokku and the fact that "krok ku" means "(a) step forward/towards" in Czech, I think we can assume that the commenter is Czech.

<comment><USER23> Two entries are not that much. On Wikipedia you can look at the list of articles in other languages.

Or go directly to Wikidata [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83373](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83373)

<comment><USER24> Ah, interesting. So I see it also appears in Danish, Estonian and Norwegian.

But with the additional clue from the username I'm still betting on Czech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> ELI5: How can the universe be "infinitely big" yet have a measurable "finite age" and the velocity arc of the 'expanding' universe not be some known rate? Such that we can estimate the actual farthest distance.

And WHAT THE HECK is the universe 'expanding into'?

The answers to these questions make me dubious on tiny-human understanding of the nature of reality.

Mechanical Elves, anyone?

<comment><USER26> Normally the term I hear is "finite, but unbounded", but I suppose it's hard to grok that either.

I also really wonder what is the universe "inside of"? Like why is spacetime here in the first place?

I agree that our explanation must be impoverished compared to the true nature of nature. It really boggles my mind. I enjoy the public physics lectures scattered around YouTube, but it all still leaves me realizing how limited our understanding is compared to the mundane goings ons of our universe. Our current understanding is that we'll never communicate with distant galaxies, meaning there's likely a trillion inhabited worlds full of beings we will never know.

<comment><USER27> There isn't really an "inside of". There is no other universe that our universe is expanding into. The universe itself just "is", it is made of space-time and that metric is expanding and accelerating. Why it exists is philosophy. Maybe it was made just for us to exist in. Maybe it doesn't give a shit about us and we're simply hydrogen left to own devices long enough to futilely question its own existence.

When we talk about the universe we're rarely talking about what do not know yet, but rather what is possible to know.

Whether there is another universe "outside" of ours is not just something we don't know. It's something we cannot know but it's also something that cannot matter. The observable universe is, by definition, the total encompassment of everything that can possibly ever matter to us in even the strictest mathematical sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Universe is expanding faster than the speed of light? Convenient. Simulation.

</comment><comment><USER29> > in four separate images in the form of a cross, the light of another galaxy > located 20,000 million light years away.

So that's 20 billion light years away.... Interesting. I think something's wrong here given the universe is 13 billion years old.

<comment><USER29> Ah, see McKayDavis for the explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

20 billion light-years! Truly mind-boggling.

</comment><comment><USER31> How can the further Galaxy be 20 billion light years away?

<comment><USER2> see my comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483785)</comment></comment>


How the Apple Watch Ejects Water in Slow Mo - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/EIEwy8rPik4 <comment><USER2> I have reservations about Apple, but ill never deny that their product engineering for both the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch continue to impress me.

Now if only they could get engineering like this into the Macbook line, because that's easily the worst product they sell for engineering.</comment>


'Game of Thrones Season 7 Premiere Pirated 90M Times' - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/game-of-thrones-season-7-premiere-pirated-90-million-times-170721/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like a wasted opportunity for HBO not to have a Netflix-like service that's completely separated from cable contracts.

<comment><USER3> > Sounds like a wasted opportunity for HBO not to have a Netflix-like service > that's completely separated from cable contracts.

It would be, if they didn't already have such a service.</comment></comment>


A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/business/energy-environment/a-texas-utility-offers-a-nighttime-special-free-electricity.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> _Deregulation in Texas has spurred intense competition for customers._

Huh. Who'd a thunk it.

 _made possible by the nearly universal distribution in recent years of residential smart meters_

This is key. Demand-based metering and pricing has been available for industrial customers for a long time but residential customers had dumb mechanical meters that only recorded total kilowatt-hours. This sort of thing will also become important as electric cars become more mainstream, to encourage people to charge cars at low-demand times. Otherwise everyone plugging in their car at 6pm when they get home from work, while also cooking dinner and turning on the A/C is going to stress the grid.

<comment><USER3> >> Deregulation in Texas has spurred intense competition for customers.

> Huh. Who'd a thunk it.

Anyone familiar with Enron. Or Comcast & Time Warner. Or any of a million other companies in a hundred other industries that has miraculously managed to avoid the purportedly inevitable race to the bottom. Of course, in this case "deregulation" isn't the full story:

> The incumbent utility in the area still owns and maintains the local power > lines (and is the company to call in the event of a power outage) and is not > subject to deregulation.

and "intense competition for customers" isn't the full story either:

> TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted > out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 > than consumers in the deregulated areas.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_electricity_market)

<comment><USER4> Deregulated utilities will figure out some new way to screw their customers. Probably "plans", like cellular, where you pay a flat rate plus overage charges plus surge pricing, but have unlimited off-peak kilowatts up to your feeder capacity.

<comment><USER5> Very true, but I wouldn't blame the utilities for understanding the basics of the US.

This model is really the US standard to screw lower social classes that plays out elsewhere, i.e. credit cards as the national payment system instead of payer initiated direct transfer like in most(all?) of Europe.

Richer people will tend to have strategies and resources (i.e. the money and rights to modify their residence, control over their work schedule, etc) to pay bellow average which will make them richer. People under stress will have to pay whatever the spot rates are.

This is the only defensible position for businesses as the ones with resources and time to invest in organization are the ones who have the resources to use the political system as a tool against anyone who would have them pay their full share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 9pm - 6am sounds like prime Bitcoin crunching time.

It was my understanding that the limiting factor, or rather the "cost" of mining bitcoints, ultimately comes down to power consumption. Effectively if $/kWh * kWh/bitcoint < bitcoint value, you can turn a profit.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. I wonder how long this can last before the surplus wind power is used up by bitcoin miners and residential aluminum smelters.

<comment><USER8> Or water purification. Why not just bank the power in batteries and feed it back during peak load?

<comment><USER9> > Why not just bank the power in batteries and feed it back during peak load?

What's the retail cost of electricity in Texas during the day, and what do you pay per kWh for your batteries: capital costs and ongoing costs?

If you pay more per kWh for batteries than retail power prices then any consumer is a fool to engage in the battery scheme. And even if a consumer might be able to make money, the wholesale price is definitely lower than retail. I seem to remember calculating that batteries cost about $0.06/kWh all in in the last ~6mo but wholesale power in TX is more like $0.05 and retail it's usually below $0.12.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagine having more electricity than we need in California, especially from wind. We could desalinate water from the ocean all night long.

<comment><USER11> why not solar instead of wind? So many farms dont have water, may as well cover them over with panels or mirrors, no ?

<comment><USER12> Solar _as well as_ wind. Clearly there's no shortage of electricity at night if it's being given away.

<comment><USER13> That's such as simplified analysis. Perhaps there's no shortage (unlikely given Texas' power needs), perhaps there's transportation bottlenecks creating local oversupply? That price has to lower to send the price signal that the arb is there and firms can make money building that transmission, at which point, just like the other energy products in West Texas (crude), the relative price will begin to rise again relative to the benchmark. (See: West Texas / Midland grades of crude being priced at steep discounts that are now shrinking due to increased pipeline capacity coming online.) It's not that Midland crudes were "oversupplied" it's that demand was being "artificially" lowered by transportation bottlenecks. (Economists / econometricians may argue definitions with me on that, but from the energy trader perspective, that's how I would approach it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a similar discussion from earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245805)

</comment><comment><USER15> But yet, here in Austin I don't get a choice for my energy company.

<comment><USER16> Austin and San Antonio opted out of deregulation.

<comment><USER17> As did Denton (Denton Municipal Electric), Garland (Garland Power & Light), areas served by what used to be known as the Denton County Electric Cooperative (now CoServ), and so on.

They actually didn't opt out, they simply didn't opt in. The original law putting deregulation in place exempted cooperatives and municipal utilities unless they chose to join the competitive system. However, that choice is one way and permanent. If a co-op or city opts in, it can never go back. Most of the not-for-profit boards wanted to see if deregulation would be good for the rest of the state before they put it on their members.

I remember when natural gas costs spiked and that sent Texas electric rates, _especially_ in the Texas-New Mexico and Oncor/TXU service areas, skyrocketing. Now that natural gas is less expensive, prices have dropped. Municipal systems, on the other hand, either owned their own generating infrastructure and were buffered or bought long-term hedge contracts that the competitive players were scared to buy (what if they bet wrong?) or were so new that they didn't have the credit to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perfect time to charge your EV.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's mentioned that the "Free" electricity is partly because of federal tax breaks. Will it still be viable option without the tax breaks?

<comment><USER20> The tax breaks are built in for the life of the wind farms, so they don't really expire until the farms are retired.

The culprit is not actually the PTC, it's the combination of the PTC and insufficient transmission capacity from the wind farms to the rest of the state. When additional transmission capacity is added the wind generation will be absorbed (and paid for) by a much larger region and the incentive to under- price will go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This could be especially good in the summertime if you have one of those ice- based storage air conditioners.

</comment><comment><USER22> Tesla battery pack here I come!

<comment><USER23> Just remember to calculate the cost per kWh of electricity you extract from your battery.

This comes down to roughly:

$/kWh = $cost of installation / (kWh capacity * cycles lifetime * efficiency)

So if the Powerwall costs $5000 for a 7kWh capacity with a lifetime of about 3600 charge cycles at 80% efficiency, you're looking at $0.25/kWh. If the difference between lowest and highest prices is lower than that, you're better off not buying the Powerwall in the first place.

Once the difference between minimum and maximum price per kWh of electricity from the grid exceeds the $/kWh of the battery, you have an economic incentive to install the battery.

As the price of batteries comes down, companies will invest in battery peaking plants to take advantage of pricing on the energy market. Those bulk battery installations will limit the spread of wholesale time-of-day pricing such that it will never be economically sensible for home users to install batteries as a cost saving device based on retail time-of-day pricing. Domestic units will necessarily cost more per storage/output capacity than commercial units.

For the meantime, installing batteries for your home will only be useful for people who have problems with reliable access to electricity (e.g.: you have frequent brown-outs).

There are advances on the horizon thanks to new battery assembly technology, and Tesla Energy's "Gigafactory" bringing economies of scale and integration into battery manufacturing, with an aim of reducing battery manufacturing costs around 30% for the former and 20% for the latter. There are also some theoretical (and in some cases lab proven) technologies to extend Lithium battery lifetimes to "forever". These all alter the numbers in the equation above: a moderate decrease in $/kWh output will make batteries quite attractive for many grid-connected homes.

So "watch this space," I guess.</comment></comment>