Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion - <AUTHOR> http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/7539-fide-world-championship-2013.html <comment><USER2> Reading more about this match and Magnus in general, I learned of a measure termed "Nettlesomeness" which has been used to measure which players do the most to make their opponents to make mistakes. Magnus, with his highly creative style of play and unexpected moves, not surprisingly ranks the highest in this measure.

He seems to have this remarkable gift of making moves which aren't just strong, they get inside his opponent's head and cause them to either overthink/break down. I'm interested in the technical details behind this metric. Has anyone heard of it before?

Regardless, congrats Magnus. You are truly a generational talent, and I'm excited to see what your win will do for the game.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/net...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/nettlesomeness- and-the-first-half-of-the-carlsen-anand-match.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment, the concept of nettlesomeness intrigues me.

"...Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his "nettlesomeness," to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes."

I was surprised to see that this isn't just some subjective measure but can me measured using computer analysis. In chess this can be a great tool against one's opponents but in collaborative endeavors it can be a detriment to team productivity. I wonder whether the same analysis can be used to pin-point nettlesome members of team e.g members of an open source team whose contributions sidetrack collaborators and cause them to make more trackable errors...

<comment><USER4> I think this is actually based on subjective measures. An annotated game[0] will have ?!, ?, and ?? added by human commentators to indicate varying levels of mistakes. A computer analysis can make use of these subjective move evaluations within an annotated game to easily measure which players cause their opponents to make mistakes at a significantly greater frequency than their normal rate of mistakes.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols#Move_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols#Move_evaluation_symbols)

<comment><USER5> Since computers play chess (better than humans) by looking at moves and ranking them as advantageous or disadvantageous, I would think it would be relatively straightforward to use a computer to decide whether a move is a mistake or not.

<comment><USER6> It would be able to tell if the move was a mistake _if playing against a computer_. A move that would be bad against a computer opponent might throw a human opponent off balance through surprise, or take the game into a type of board state which was unfamiliar and disorienting to the opponent.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that's precisely why the computer _can_ measure it. This is the scenario:

1\. Player A makes a move the computer considers suboptimal.

2\. Disoriented player B responds with another move the computer considers an important mistake.

3\. Player A capitalizes with moves the computer thinks improves his position, even relative to the original baseline.

4\. The computer concludes that A is nettlesome.

So it's measuring the delta of what it considers optimal with what actually happens against real humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats Magnus Carlsen! You finally unseated our beloved Vishwanathan Anand and made the beautiful game even more beautiful.

Allow me to go on a tangent to let me tell my personal story with chess. I began playing at age 7 when my elder brother borrowed a chess board from a friend. It was a nice break from the physical altercations between us(read mat fights). My maternal grand ma called it "Satan's Game". And my mother toed the line. Why? I don't know the exact reason, but I guess it was an amazing time sink. Or maybe they both had watched this Hindi movie by Satyajit Ray: The Chess Players([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076696/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076696/)). When the game s between my brother and me became violent(You moved it when I was off to the toilet...) it was banned from our home. But we didn't give up. Our summers were spent playing chess in a nearby mango orchard or the graveyard a mile away. The chess board made out of paper with plastic pieces was the only "toy" we never broke. Those were the best days of my life. And it's still safe 20 years later. With every piece intact. What a game.

<comment><USER9> Intro to that film (amazing): [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zCsn- he5Kk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zCsn-he5Kk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> <blasphemy alert> Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.) On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety in world- class intellectual matches, similar to what exists in physical sports. Something like a "board game Olympics".

Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...

<comment><USER11> Magic: the Gathering? It's a game of infinite possibilities and strategies and has a big meta game around it, too. Plus collectibles. Plus cool artwork. Plus good apps.

<comment><USER12> In some ways, the internet ruined games like MTG. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of tournament decklists stifles creativity.

There are still formats where you see a wide variety of decks, but T2 play normally involves picking one of maybe 5 or 6 viable options.

<comment><USER13> The netdeck argument is probably for a different site, but I strongly believe that MTG as a tournament format benefits enormously from widely available top- performing decklists, video and text coverage, and articles on deck strategy as well game tactics with particular decks or deck archetypes.

<comment><USER12> The publicity definitely helped the game grow, but at the same time, people who play tournaments rarely deviate from decks based on the ones that the pros are using.

<comment><USER13> The people who play tournament chess rarely deviate from proven opening sequences as well. As such, publishing move by move accounts of Chess tournaments for documentation and study hinders creativity. See what I did there?

<comment><USER12> For ranked players, you are absolutely correct. That being said, there is still quite a bit more variety in chess at any level than there is in any given T2 cycle of MTG.

With MTG, even if I went down to my local card shop for Friday Night Magic, there would be enough people there with netdecks to ensure that creative attempts at deck building don't succeed very often.

In a local chess tournament, the level of play isn't even close to being that standardized. Most of the local chess clubs I've been to don't even have more than one or two rated players.

The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours. On the other hand, highly standardized play in chess usually only occurs after years of intense study.

There is, however, an easy way to fix MTG's shortcomings. I just play casual/peasant/other unorthodox formats. It makes things more interesting and its cheaper.

<comment><USER14> _The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours._

So, I spend my weekends putting on a black uniform and working as a tournament judge at professional-level Magic events. And... maybe you're right that someone could do well at a local FNM this way. But at any sort of serious competitive level (even at the Pro Tour Qualifier level), your assertion just doesn't hold up.

You can see this in tournament results, by the way. Card availability is basically only an issue for casual/FNM play. At any sort of real competitive tournament, the field is made up of players who have access to the cards they want, and the winner is determined by a combination of preparation and skill.

Most importantly, you can see this in results from Limited formats (where players build decks using cards opened on-site from standard booster packs, which are unpredictable enough to constitute a random per-player card pool). Though there are certainly "Limited specialist" players, for the most part you will see similar lists of names among the top finishers in both Limited and Constructed formats, which drives home the point in a frankly undeniable way.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't really claiming that its easy to win MTG tournaments. I was just illustrating that fairly standardized play begins at a much lower level than it does in chess, because even beginners can buy a world class deck for a small amount of money.

Limited is a great format that I'm glad you mentioned. Anything involving a draft is going to be pretty creative.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that MTG is inferior to chess. I like both games equally well.

<comment><USER14> I usually reply like that because often I see the attitude that Magic is just a game of spending money on cards -- whoever buys the best cards wins. When in reality, card availability is more of a barrier to entry, and all it does is get you to the point where you're on an even field, card-wise, with actual competitive players. From there it's up to you to have the skill to hang in there.

Beyond the decks/openings analogy though, I'm not sure Magic and chess really compare well.

I think the most interesting distinction is in innovators vs. honers; Gerry Thompson is now out of the game at the professional level, but he was one of the greatest honers who ever played the game. Gerry was not known for coming up with new deck ideas, and in fact the few times he tried it he did horribly. But his ability to analyze the tournament landscape week to week, and make the perfect couple of tweaks to existing deck shells, was unmatched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 60 minutes from last year. pretty cool stuff right here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_v9mTfhC8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_v9mTfhC8)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm super excited to see the impact this will have on our noble game. I think it could see a real surge in popularity in the years ahead. And at the age of 22, Magnus is only just getting started.

<comment><USER17> It will be interesting to see if Chess, or other boardgames for the matter, will benefit from streaming services as much as video games have.

I've seen the Chess-Network on twitch.tv break 1k viewers which is tiny compared to the 300k League of Lengends and Dota 2 tournaments but still a substantial amount regardless.

<comment><USER18> I get really annoyed with the commentators on Chess Network, they have a tendency to overanalyze and talk way too much. The best commentator I've found is an Australian named Mato: youtube.com/matojelic

<comment><USER19> Austrian?

<comment><USER20> He is European-born but has lived in Australia for some time now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's quite fun to see the media attention he has gotten here in Norway. For the last few weeks the sport segment of most news show spent as much time devoted to chess as football, which is not something i ever expected to see.

I'm not much a chess player myself but it still very satisfying seeing so much attention brought to a intellectual sport. I hope at least some of it will stick around.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am Norwegian and fucking proud of it right now, due to Magnus Carlsen.

He comes from a Nation consisting of 5 mill. people, compared to Anand's billion people.

This is probably the greatest sports achievement our country will ever make, as there are really no comparable sports achievements in the world, not now, anyway.

IMHO: They should knight him the second he gets of the plane when he returns home. Because no other Norwegian has ever accomplished anything close to this, with regards to bring honour to our nation.

Gratuler Magnus!

<comment><USER23> I'm always amused by how people tie their pride to things they have absolutely no control over. In case of sports, it's even worse. Most sport outcomes aren't repeatable. When "your" team/person wins it is very likely due to random mistakes others made or you were fortunate to avoid _this time_. They may very well loose if the game was repeated again. Would your pride wash away then? Even if sport events were repeatable, why _you_ should take pride when you had almost no contribution to their success (may be except buying a ticket or offering your eyeballs for TV ads)? In US, its even worse, considering teams are not even "national", they are actually owned by random zillionairs. I was almost floored to see people spending spending significant portions of lives and money in to cheer leading what is essentially absolute random team where members are pretty much from anywhere, sometimes even opponent teams! Why anyone should be spending their precious Sundays and take monumental amount of pride when some random zillionair's team wins because of what are essentially random non-repeatable events? Sometimes I think sport fans are people who skipped any or all education on probability and statistics.

PS: Before you all get on my case let me tell you I do get the fact that sports does have display of skills value (same as skills of artist) that is worth paying for. I also get that professional sports is hard and money hungry adventure and without fans it won't exist. What I don't get is why is it a matter of _pride_?

<comment><USER24> If someone loses "he lost".

If someone wins "we won"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> After spending the last 18-months immersed in the professional StarCraft 2 scene, I can totally appreciate a lot of the meta-stuff around Chess now. I always enjoyed Chess, and was not too bad at it (compared to those around me, certainly nowhere near even an amateur-pro!), but for some reason SC2 "clicks" better for me (I think being addicted to Brood War while spending 6 months in South Korea probably has something to do with it).

The discussion of "mind games" {"nettlesomeness" here) is something that SC2 has an obsession with, and certainly can play a _massive_ part in pro tournaments, and I'd never considered it applying to chess... but now that I think about it, everything in SC2's meta really came from Chess to begin with, only applied in real-time with 300+ actions per minute and hundreds of pieces with few illegal moves. And yet I struggle more with grokking the advanced strategies of Chess than I do for StarCraft!

<comment><USER26> Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough), is silly. Chess is as balanced as it gets.

<comment><USER27> >Chess is as balanced as it gets.

It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.

>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.

>Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.

>Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.

[http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level- chess.html](http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html)

[http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing- chess-2.html](http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html)

<comment><USER28> As much as I recognize and appreciate the limitations of chess, it pains me physically to see the strategic depth of it compared to something like Starcraft. It's not close by orders of magnitude.

I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.

<comment><USER29> A 4 pool isn't a sucker punch. It is a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly. If your opponent does not scout it quickly, he is very likely to lose. If he does, you are very likely to lose. The existence of this early all-in option does much to "keep players honest" during the opening phases of the game and greatly expands the strategic depth of the beginning minutes. Without this option, each player's optimal strategy would always be to sacrifice defense and scouting early in favor of better late-game economy.

<comment><USER28> > a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very > quickly

In other words, a sucker punch?

<comment><USER29> Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.

<comment><USER28> It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.

I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.

<comment><USER29> Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible.

The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.

<comment><USER28> Well certainly individual preference is a matter of taste. For me, "4 pooling" and these kind of largely random rock-paper-scissors choices -- which can often be decisive, as is the case here -- put me off Starcraft and a lot of games in general, at least as anything more than casual entertainment. But I do remember enjoying the game before I yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.

<comment><USER31> I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well- studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

<comment><USER30> >I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.

Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not a particularly good player, but the match was rather boring IMO, other than game 9, which Anand cut short with his blunder. I wonder if the dull first game, described by Anand as a "satisfactory draw with black pieces", set the tune for the remaining games.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Press conference is live right now for anyone interested: [http://chennai2013.fide.com/fide-world-chess- championship-20...](http://chennai2013.fide.com/fide-world-chess- championship-2013-live/)

<comment><USER33> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFJNESXsRkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFJNESXsRkY)

<comment><USER34> My god those comments. Even chess streams are not safe it seems.

<comment><USER33> A couple of month ago my browser update( or an incompatible addon ) glitched and I can't see youtube comments anywhere anymore. Its great actually. If I'll want quality content I'll read Hacker News( and equivalent ), otherwise I'm interested in the video itself and i don't need others to form my opinion of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Brilliant! Magnanimous. I am a Vishy fan, but this match was really one-sided when Vishy faltered at critical moments. Does it mean age matters? Will Vishy rebound? I hope so, but perhaps it's the sad reality that I acknowledge -- better player won and the problem with the chess world (the number 1 elo-rated player was not the WC for so long) got corrected.

Where do we go from here?

<comment><USER36> Highly unlikely. It seems that most super-GMs start to decline around 40. Vishy is 44. There have been some that have stayed quite strong into their later years - Korchnoi, quite a strong player at his peak (Peaked at 2695 @ age 48, quite late in and of itself), played for the world championship in 1978 and 81 (age 47 and 50), and stayed a regular on the tournament circuit - he beat a 2700+ ranked GM in a 2011 at the age of 80, and continued to to play seriously until he had a stroke late last year.

<comment><USER37> V. Korchnoi is (was) a great player. His matches with Karpov were always interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Chess is amazing it blows my mind why simple tools and games like this are not incorporated in some 'fun' way into the education system. By 'fun' I mean that if children were told to play chess they would not. A system would be need to be designed so that they look forward to chess class as they do for PE and art.

<comment><USER39> I've been teaching, middle school and high school, for the past 15 years. I have always had a stash of chess sets and clocks in my room. They see pretty consistent use.

I love chess in schools for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting things about watching chess in schools is seeing who rises to the top. The best players tend not to be the brightest academic students. The best players tend to be smart kids who fight some of the bs that schools make kids endure. These kids are smart enough to 'get' chess, and have enough fight in them to stick out the difficult moments in games and tournaments that separate the best from the really good. These are the kids who tend to get in trouble a lot, who get bad reputations among teachers. Watching those kids show everyone up by winning chess tournaments soundly against the brightest academic kids is pretty awesome, and can be life-changing for some students.

I love teaching chess because you can teach anyone some simple ideas such as opening strategies, piece values, and simple endgames, and they can then beat anyone who hasn't learned those concepts. Kids who never thought they could learn a "smart person" game like chess suddenly play well, and start to realize they can do intellectual things. Then you start to see natural talent come into students' games.

Playing chess with kids is fun! If you have the chance, introduce a kid to chess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It seems like the official commentary is of sub par quality. According to the /r/chess subreddit, this commentary is pretty good and fun: [http://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork/profile/pastBroadcasts](http://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork/profile/pastBroadcasts)

</comment><comment><USER41> Now what the heck happened in the end? Anand gave up a knight advantage, purposedly for a clear cut draw. I have no clue why he did that this time.

He took queen with queen, clearly, knowing it would be lost to king, and then again the pawn with knight. He had a knight, of all things!

<comment><USER42> > Anand gave up a knight advantage, purposedly for a clear cut draw.

When you assume that a world-class GM played "purposedly" for a draw that would lose him the championship title, you're probably wrong.

> He took queen with queen, clearly

He was in check. Taking W's queen was the only way to avoid losing his own for nothing.

<comment><USER41> are you sure about that? the king could have moved back up, but in front.. moved from right side to left side between those two lines, without moving in front of the queen line.

<comment><USER43> If Anand played the king to the eighth rank instead of to h6, Carlsen would have kept checking on the seventh and eighth ranks, with a draw by perpetual check.

<comment><USER43> Just to make sure I am absolutely clear, I am talking about 61...Kh6, which enabled Carlsen to play 62.Qb6+ forcing the queen trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Cool, it was held in Chennai, my home town. I remember some of my friends along with others (25 at a time) lining up to play Anand at the same time about 15 years ago. Anand was a Grand master at that time. Who else is from Chennai here at HN ?

</comment><comment><USER45> A well-deserved win. Can't wait to see what else Magnus goes on to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER46> You can watch IM Danny Rensch & GM Ben Finegold review the game right now on [http://www.chess.com/tv](http://www.chess.com/tv)

</comment><comment><USER47> Honest Question : So now Chess will be more fashionable game?

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish they gave the girl announcer access to the laptop as well so she could describe what she's saying using the screen just like the guy can.

</comment><comment><USER49> As someone who played chess as a child but gave up after high school what are some apps that would get me back into the game?

<comment><USER50> Books.

<comment><USER25> I have to say, the combination of your username and comment was rather perfect (even if it was on purpose).

And you're pretty correct there, too, according to the last person I asked this question of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> But has he played Judah Friedlander?

</comment><comment><USER52> Move #14 (Nxc6) does not make sense. Why did Magnus do that?

</comment><comment><USER53> Is the site down for anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER54> Magnus seems more like a guy I could invite over for a couple of beers. No offense on Anand he seem to be more like a KOOL-AID type of kid and always a boy scout but a douche!

<comment><USER55> Anand is a total class act. All the other top chess players only ever had good things to say about him. And Anand is one of the people who coached Magnus.

He's known to be focused strictly on the game and never do mind tricks to throw an opponent off. A lot of top players respect him for this.

<comment><USER56> What do you mean by mind tricks?

<comment><USER57> Things such as Emanuel Lasker's cigar: [http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/nimzowitsch.html](http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/nimzowitsch.html)

and other such stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Of course he won the name alone speaks for itself "Magnus!" Just fucking HUGE at anything you can think of! Compared to Viswanathan which sounded like a vegtable ready to be consumed or a rubbing oil or even like a dip for your prata.

<comment><USER58> Viswanathan means lord of the Universe.

<comment><USER59> Didn't quite help him though.

<comment><USER60> Helped him for a long time. He was champion since 2007.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows 8 Consumer Preview hits 1 million downloads - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/03/windows-8-consumer-preview-hits-1-million-downloads.ars <comment><USER2> Just downloaded it and installed it in virtualbox.

First thing I clicked on was Photos, for no particular reason. So, I'm in Photos and there is nothing there for me to do (obviously). I want to go back to the main screen (where I came from) but there is nothing I can do. I'm suck in Photo land. The is nothing to click on that will take me back. ESC doesn't do anything, or any other key for that matter. Right click brings up a Feedback form. How the hell are you supposed to navigate this thing?

EDIT: Hovering at the top of the screen changes your mouse cursor into a hand. I can drag the entire screen which makes it small. I guess the purpose of this is to dock the current application or something.

I still can't go back to the main screen however...

</comment><comment><USER3> Apart from metro, what are the advantages in having Win8 instead of Win7 in a non-touch PC?

/Just curious

<comment><USER4> (disclaimer, I'm a MS employee).

some advantages:

* Hyper-V support([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx)).

* Refreshing to a clean state without reinstallation. ([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/04/refresh-and-re...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/04/refresh-and-reset-your-pc.aspx))

* Better support for large disks.([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/29/enabling-large...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/29/enabling-large-disks-and-large-sectors-in-windows-8.aspx))

* Easier setup([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/21/improving-the-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/21/improving-the-setup-experience.aspx))

* Less restarts after updating.([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/14/minimizing-res...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/14/minimizing-restarts-after-automatic-updating-in-windows-update.aspx))

* A task manager which I certainly like much better.([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/13/the-windows-8-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/13/the-windows-8-task-manager.aspx))

* Reduced memory consumption([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runti...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runtime-memory-in-windows-8.aspx)).

* Better malware protection([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/15/protecting-you...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/15/protecting-you-from-malware.aspx))

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question: On Windows 7, my current workflow for starting applications is:

Widows key + start typing app name

This starts searching the start menu and installed apps. I press enter and bam -- no mouse requried.

Is there something comparable for Windows 8?

<comment><USER6> It's still the same. The new Start screen doesn't explicitly show a search box, but it'll start searching as soon as you type something.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I really wondered about that as a UI decision. I'm sure many of the users here will figure that sort of thing out, but I'm curious whether or not my parents will ever discover the existence of that sort of thing.

<comment><USER8> My parents never noticed the search box in Windows 7, got confused when I mentioned it. Working tech support when my company released Windows 7 laptops to the employees, very few of them understood the search box either.

I think it will take a few software generations before people really "get" it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case you don't know where the download page is, like I didn't: <http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso>

<comment><USER10> Thank you. This is why I came back here after visiting the official download page.

All I was able to find there was an exe-file, which is of little use when I'm running Ubuntu as my main OS..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only complaint I have so far (more like a WTF thing) is that Mail doesn't do POP3. Otherwise loving it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Am I correct in my assumption that Windows 8 features a basic tiling window manager?

<comment><USER13> Depends. If you mean a tiling window manager for Win32 windows, then no -- old Windows apps continue to run as the always did, as overlapping windows within one desktop "space".

The new WinRT APIs and Metro UI offer some variations on tiling windows, however. (They don't support overlapping windows at all; apps are launched full-screen but can be tiled with others within some specific design limits.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The ability to dock apps on part of the screen is pretty good for multitasking, like IM'ing while browsing without constantly switching apps back and forth.

<http://wordament.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/snap.png>

Here's a link to the presentation video they had for the launch demoing the new features.

[http://cdn-smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/news/HTML5/FINAL_PRESE...](http://cdn- smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/news/HTML5/FINAL_PRESENTATION_030112.mp4)

All the form factors that Windows will be supporting seem exciting for me, especially touch Ultrabooks like the IdeaPad Yoga.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6jnrRRAcZc&hd=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6jnrRRAcZc&hd=1)

Here's a comparison with the iPad:

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/1/2835346/windows-8-vs- ipad-f...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/1/2835346/windows-8-vs-ipad-feature- comparison)

</comment><comment><USER15> 1 million silly donkeys.</comment>


How To Get Listed On Google - Just Blog It - <AUTHOR> http://www.spicywebdesign.com/how-to-get-listed-on-google-just-blog-it/ Want to get your blog or website listed on Google?  This tutorial will discuss a giant step toward getting your blog or website listed on Google. <comment><USER2> Where is the substance of this article? We all know there are certain on page SEO factors but all this article really talks about is getting your site ready to be indexed, when most people care about getting ranked...

You need to do keyword research and link building to get ranked.

"Spicy Web Design shows up on the first page in Google when you Google the words Spicy Web Design." Spicy Web Design gets searched about 16 times a month according to Google, and they rank number 4 behind the site "spicywebdesigners.com". Weak.</comment>


Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mail-order-crispr-kits-allow-absolutely-anyone-to-hack-dna/ <comment><USER2> _Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. "People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, " he says. "How big is the risk? It's not zero, but it's fairly small." Gersbach agrees. "Right now, it's difficult to imagine how it'd be dangerous in a real way," he explains_

It's hard for "normal" people to imagine how sociopaths or those with destructive aims will behave when given flexible tools like this. It's kind of like how no one anticipated how social media networks whose ostensible purpose is to connect friends could be used to undermine elections, abet fraud, commit character assassination, and drive people to suicide.

And while the real-life example of using CRISPR to switch the limbs of tiny crustaceans sounds harmless, wait til someone mutates something bigger and more familiar for "better" attributes or capabilities that can cause direct harm or inadvertent effects. It's probably already happened ... but we may not understand the impact for years.</comment>


The Places in America with the Highest (and Lowest) STD Rates - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-places-in-america-with-the-highest-and-lowest/ <comment><USER2> Alaska was not my first guess, but made sense after thinking about it.

This got me thinking about what Scandinavia is like, and sure enough they both share high rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea: [https://www.thelocal.se/20130605/48350](https://www.thelocal.se/20130605/48350) , [https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/std-us- eu/](https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/std-us-eu/)

Could this be a cold-places thing?</comment>


3 months maybe, 6 months definitely (Jan'17) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823632597284691969 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.tesla.com/autopilot](https://www.tesla.com/autopilot) video continues to scam and sell unsafe adaptive cruise control.</comment>


Minetime.ai – A Calendar for the 21st Century - <AUTHOR> https://minetime.ai/ <comment><USER2> Hello everyone! Marco here, main contributor of MineTime. Even though I didn't start this thread, I am very happy to see enthusiasm about the project and I am very interested in hearing your feedback.

Here are some background information and (opinionated) replies to some of the concerns:

\- I know that for many 21st century means "mobile-first". There are several great calendar apps for iOS and Android and I believe the focus on these larger markets only has prevented the progress of productivity tools for desktop environments (see, for example, lack of a fully-featured calendar application on Linux). At some point we surely want to have a mobile version but at the moment we need to focus on something, and I believe desktop calendaring has some important gaps to be filled.

\- Electron vs Native. This discussion is as old as Electron itself. Everyone would prefer a native app for his/her platform but the truth is that we (and many others) don't have the resources to do that. Electron allows us to focus on developing new features, instead of spending time porting the old ones onto different platforms. Performance are surely not optimal but MineTime can be still largely optimized in this sense. And I am sorry for your RAM, it's either this or nothing until somebody finds a way to optimize Electron. Calendar.google.com is not always an alternative.

\- Web vs Installed App. We believe web apps cannot provide the same UX of a native app. Yes, I used the term "native", although controversial, because MineTime still uses many native OS APIs to integrate into your system, something that a web app can simply not do! But the main reason why we decided for Electron when we started this project is different: user privacy and security. Any web-based calendar application would require us to sync your calendars on our servers. Now, we want to integrate all calendars, not just the easiest ones. Microsoft Exchange is still used in many corporations and they don't provide an OAuth mechanism . This means we would have to store the user email and password on our servers, something that is simply awful. This is also the reason why no web-based calendar synchronizes with Exchange and will never do. With MineTime, your usernames, passwords or access tokens never leave your computer. Yes, if you agree, we transfer some calendar data and provide some interesting features in return. In the future, we expect to be able to provide all these "advanced" features without any data transfer at all, thanks to the fact that everything runs on your computer.

\- Advanced features and AI. This is still WIP. Besides focusing on adding and improving all the necessary and well-deserved traditional calendar functionalities, we are doing research on Visual Analytics and Assisted Scheduling. Great improvements in this direction are expected to come during the summer, so stay tuned... An important side note: the calendar data is only used to provide these features, not for monetization, definitely not for espionage.

You can download MineTime for free on Windows,macOS and Linux from minetime.ai. Feel free to use the contact form for any question, feedback, or to tell us about your use case.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used minetime for a bit after getting frustrated with some bugs in Thunderbird with lightning. It stopped updating my calendar mysteriously on my desktop but not my laptop, but was good besides that. I'm uncomfortable sending them my data so never used any advanced features - I guess its their selling point but really the main app was fairly user friendly.

By contrast, I can't switch an event's calendar in Thunderbird successfully, gnome calendar isn't working with caldav, California didn't support click and drag last I checked, and evolution is really clunky (why is the week view not a normal week view for example?). Gnome calendar used to also move events inaccurately when click and dragging, being off by X hours...

Tempted to switch to a web calendar tbh, these apps need to team up and make a single version that works better. Each is so close to being good but none is quite there.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER4> > why is the week view not a normal week view for example?

Can you please clarify this a bit further? I'm not a regular Evolution user, but happen to have v3.22.6 installed. There's a Day, Work Week, Week, Month and List views. I couldn't find anything specifically abnormal about any of them.

I am interested in a better calendaring solution that can integrate both my work calendar (Outlook) and my personal calendar (whatever I happen to be using at the time; Thunderbird, Fastmail web calendar, paper diary). Mobile syncing via CalDav would also be nice.

<comment><USER3> Work week is the week view I'm used to I guess and needs to be configured slightly to get the weekend days included. Week view is like an upcoming events view separated by day of the week, which I'm sure many people like, but I cant get used to it personally.

<comment><USER3> (that said, I think evolution works properly and I'm glad it exists. I don't recall the specific reason I moved on from it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised a basic, open source calendar with a simple API doesn't exist. I've looked really hard for one and can't find it, it seems like something that should be part of the LibreOffice suite. The last thing keeping me tied to Google is a calendar and spreadsheet with a custom script that forecast my finances. The script just queries the calendar API for all events from today to a year later.

<comment><USER6> You can do that with remind[0].

[0]: [https://linux.die.net/man/1/remind](https://linux.die.net/man/1/remind)

</comment></comment><comment> VvR-Ox I use it since some weeks and so far I noticed the following.

PRO: \- best desktop calendar app I tried on Linux (which is really f _ed up - it 's 2019 and there really isn't a good calendar???) \- easy appointment typing feature is very nice and helps me to get appointments into the calendar easier even when typing and not speaking

CON: \- minor glitches (sometimes just doesn't save my appointment) \- cool features only available to people who give their data to everyone (that's just not me). It would be nice to have something like that without a potential whole for entities to spy on me

I'd love to have something like this as an open source desktop calendaring solution with integrations to all important services / data sources and export functionality (incl. print).

Learned by using it: _ It's 2019 and Linux doesn't have a decent calendar- & contact- solution :-( * mineTime even with it's bugs is by far the best (which is unsettling)

So thx for providing this app - it already helps me to stop using my nextCloud web calendar in the browser (which sometimes sucks).

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks pretty cool, but I would've expected a calendar for the 21st century to either be a mobile app or at least be mobile friendly on the web. Instead, I was greeted by a message telling me to visit from a desktop computer to download.

<comment><USER2> Although it might looks like a weird design choice, an installed app was the only possible choice not to store the user credentials on our servers. I have elaborated this in another post.

<comment><USER8> You have localStorage and indexedDB on the web. Web is a pretty powerful client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> \- wants access to your google contacts when you add google calendar integration

<comment><USER10> It probably needs that for contact lookups and insights, since you can compose invites using natural text.

I'm not comfortable with it either to be honest, seeing that it could delete contacts according to Google's prompt.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately Google gives no granularity to ask for read-only access. We definitely don't delete calendars or contacts: in fact, there is no code in MineTime that can do that, neither on purpose nor accidentally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While the concept sounds great, I was really disappointed with the performance of app (even for Electron) and the design needs quite a lot of polishing, multiple events happening at the same time overlap quite badly, and the positions of the buttons are confusing.

I think a webapp should've been an obvious choice, but I'll be keeping a close eye on the project, it seems promising.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does it need to be able to delete contacts & calendars:

\- See, edit, download, and permanently delete your contacts

\- See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar

So, I am a bit paranoid, but I bet some on HN will enable this for their corporate calendars. If I were a government-sponsored entity or small organization I would definitely spend a few grand on designers & engineering to create a product like a calendar or a shiny new email client to learn some trade secrets. Just saying... why hack your way into a corp when you can ask nicely to walk in the front door.

<comment><USER13> It's not their fault that Google's permission system isn't fine-grained enough. Besides that, what trade secrets are you going to glean from a contact list or calendar entries? I doubt even your meeting agendas are going to contain much info.

<comment><USER14> good for you that you have nothing to hide in your calendar and contact list.

<comment><USER13> Then don't use the "advanced features" where your data is sent to a server? Or don't use the product at all until they open the source? I don't understand what your point is. This isn't being forced on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks awesome. If I put it on my work PC for Outlook and my personal Mac can they sync up?

</comment><comment><USER16> Was unable to get it to authenticate with a NextCloud instance that had 2FA enabled. Will take another look into this later, seems interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think "Siri's" integration with calendar is as good as I desire. Contact inference and calendar meeting suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the time analytics... I've missed email analytics ever since I stopped using Eudora

</comment><comment><USER19> >Please visit this page from your desktop browser to download MineTime

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is a Desktop app. Would you like to see a download button for a Linux installer while browsing from iOS? What would you suggest to show alternatively?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> how did you design the website?

I'm pretty much a noob at responsive web design and if there is a template like this, that'd be super awesome. the website itself looks really nice.

</comment><comment><USER21> Holy shit HN is extra today. In this thread I counted maybe three responses that were meaningful. The rest were armchair quarterbacking from a lot of folks on how to do it better or how the product sucks without substantive feedback. What happened to HN? Nearly every thread is like this anymore. This quote is becoming more and more relevant here.

"You write your snide bullshit in a dark room because that's what the angry do these days"

<comment><USER22> In this spirit of this thread being completely useless to talk about the app itself I'm going to comment on your use of the word "extra" which is a decidedly recent usage for the word and, as a person born in the 20th century, I'm still getting my head around it. I love watching language evolve around me.

<comment><USER23> I assumed they made a typo. What does it mean in this context?

<comment> master-litty This is a funny word. I use it often and I'm finding "extra" difficult to explain.

My best take is that you take the general expectation or main thing about a situation -- Then when something is "extra," the magnitude of the expectation or thing is large. But usually there's an unusual spin involved too, only very slightly.

Example: My fiancee's makeup is extra. Makeup is typically accenting beauty and lightly applied, so when it's extra, it's overwhelmingly pretty and heavily applied.

In this context, Hacker News is known for mostly serious discussion and polite chains of building thoughts. The users are extra today by being dramatically serious and having impolite chains of volatile thoughts, or maybe even chains of echochambering.

<comment><USER23> That is pretty tough to wrap one's head around. I guess it requires reading into the subject from context and estimating the most likely characteristic being magnified.

Thank you for the explanation.

<comment> master-litty It was a tough one to write out too.

Hopefully more help than ramble. Thank you for coming to my TED talk :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "MineTime is a calendar built on Electron, allowing it to run natively as desktop application on Windows, Mac and - yes! - Linux."

So, not a native app then.

</comment><comment><USER25> AI-powered? As if calendars weren't incomprehensible enough, now you'll need to reach fourth level support (that one PhD graduate who is chained to their desk) to understand why your second Sunday every quarter, 9:00 Europe/Oslo to 12:00 next day Pacific/Auckland event now occurs every Monday.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure when they say AI-powered under "Smart scheduling", it's just turning scheduling into 3-SAT.

The NLP stuff, fine, but those kinds of queries tokenize extremely well

<comment><USER27> Hey, would you mind explaining how scheduling is turned into 3-sat? I've read some Wikipedia and SO but I'm still not clear how scheduling generalises to solving this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> written using "modern web technology".

</comment><comment><USER29> O tempora o mores. Even calendar app requires Electron. Somebody please show them Qt.

<comment><USER30> For years, people complained that Linux was left out of the equation when apps were released. Then electron came along that made it super easy to be cross- platform with a performance loss. Now people complain that it's not written natively which seems silly for a calendar app. It's not like performance or look-and-feel is a huge issue. If they made it natively, people would complain it doesn't have a command-line API.

<comment><USER31> When people asked for Linux support, I don't think they meant make poor performing apps for everyone in exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How the art of desktop applications has plummeted over the last ten years or so. Used to be that cross platform releases were - often - tight, well crafted, native looking, nicely functional apps built with care on some suitable abstraction library. Qt, Gtk, whatever.

These days more and more otherwise worthy projects seem to be delivered via the monstrous deformity known as Electron.

Another half gigabyte or so gobbled up to keep a simple calendar running? I'll stick to my Osmo.</comment>


Show HN: A radically more scalable alternative to Bayesian Optimization - chroem- https://github.com/chrisstroemel/Simple <comment><USER2> I know that's too much to ask, but if you implement simple into a "chooser" in [https://github.com/avantoss/loop/tree/master/lib/choosers](https://github.com/avantoss/loop/tree/master/lib/choosers) you'll have at least one company using this method!

We use a solution inspired by Jasper Snoek's Spearmint, which allows to somewhat parallelize bayesian search through a concept called "fantasies". If you've never read his paper I encourage you to find it on arxiv. The most gentle and thorough introduction to this topic that I've seen.

<comment><USER3> Any chance you could link the specific paper you're talking about? This seems like a area I'd love to explore and the older you mentioned seems like a good starting point - I looked up the author on arxiv and there seems to be a few papers you could be referring to

<comment><USER2> This is the spearmint paper, describes how bayesian search algorithms can be parallelized in practice. There was also a very gentle introduction to bayesian optimization, I think it's one of the referenced papers. Cannot seem to find it right now.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a little problem understanding how to make a meaningful comparison. Your algorithm explore a simplex, whereas Bayesian optimization explore a cube. In terms of volume to explore when dimension grows, the cube is exponentially larger than the simplex with respect to dimension of space. Isn't the speedup due to that ?

If you take a simplex of length size d as starting simplex so that it contains the unit cube, does it still beat Bayesian Optimization ? Or maybe map the simplex to the cube but it will distort things a lot.

What is a typical value for the dimension of the space where your algorithm should perform ?

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

You're right that it's tricky to make a direct comparison between different shaped optimization domains, however in the comparison animation each algorithm was given an optimization domain of equal area. For comparisons in higher dimensions it is up to the user to specify optimization domains with equal content.

Simple's runtime performance is not affected by the size of the optimization domain, however any global optimization algorithm will necessarily need to make more samples to chraracterize a higher dimensional space because these spaces inherently have more content to explore. Essentially the runtime performance of the algorithm and its sample-efficiency are two orthogonal concepts. Simple promises to be at least as sample-efficient as Bayesian Optimization while offering significantly lower computational overhead. Its main selling point isn't improved sample efficiency so much as better performance.

Does that answer your questions?

EDIT: Regarding the appropriate problem dimensionality, that will tend to depend quite a bit on the specific optimization problem. Simple is a global optimizer, so for extremely dimensional problems like training a deep neural net it would not be appropriate because the optimization domain would be too massive. The algorithm needs more testing, but as a rule of thumb I would say that anything under 500 dimensions is feasible.

<comment><USER5> I think you may underestimate the scaling of global optimization with dimension. You split each simplex into n+1 smaller ones in n dimensions, so even in 99 dimensions, the number of areas to consider grows as 100^k! After only a few subdivisions, the regions may be still pretty large, but suddenly you're dealing with thousands or millions of reasonable candidates. If your optimization problem is particularly easy, you might manage it, but in tricky cases it just cannot scale. This isn't a flaw in your algorithm - <AUTHOR> optimization of non 'nice' functions in high dimensions is essentially impossible for the same reasons. Luckily, turns out that in a lot of cases you don't need a global maximum, only something good enough, so the NN folks aren't bothered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The algorithm looks nice. However, the comparison to Bayesian optimization doesn't really hold as-is. The slowness of naive O(n^3) Bayesian optimization is well-known, and while I've never personally needed a faster solution, there's literature on eg. using approximate matrix inverse or special factorizations to speed up the process. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone actually suffering from the O(n^3) limitation.

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

That's a fair point about the time complexity, though the algorithm does at least demonstrate a real-world speedup of several orders of magnitude against fmfn's Bayesian Optimization implementation. However, I am not sure which performance optimizations he has implemented. Simple boils down to a handful of constant size matrix multiplies and a heap insertion at each iteration, so its performance is hard to beat.

I will update the first paragraph of the readme.

<comment><USER7> Bayesian optimization is often applied on problems where the cost of function evaluation greatly exceeds the cost of any posterior updates etc. In this case sample efficiency is the real benchmark, and you should be looking at realistic problems with d>>2.

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

Generally speaking the heuristic for applying BO to optimization problems is that the objective function must take at least as long to evaluate as an iteration of BO. For an equally sample-efficient algorithm with negligible overhead, you can now take twice as many samples and find better optima for a large class of problems.

The shown examples are all 2D because plotting high dimensional space is rather difficult. Also, this is intended as an early proof of concept. A more formal description of the algorithm is coming, along with better examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gaussian processes are only one implementation of Bayesian optimization- afaict, you have created another using a different prior which has nicer computational properties, mostly due to assuming the function has little global structure, a reasonable one for tricky optimization problems. I wonder how it would compare to a GP approximation using a space-partitioning data structure, only considering nearby points when calculating sample utility.

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

While it shares a lot of similarities with conventional Bayesian Optimization, I was reluctant to call it BO since it doesn't have a concept of explicit error bounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I noticed that the paper mentions constructing a triangulation of a set of initial sample points, which would allow for the optimization domain to be any convex polytope. Is this something you are planning to explore/incorporate?

EDIT: I see now that this is not an implemention of the algorithm in the paper, but its own algorithm entirely. Even so, it appears to me the same technique could be used in this case.

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

Yes, I hope to add that feature soon-ish. The reason I left it out of this first release is that computing Delaunay triangulations scales very poorly with dimensionality. That was why TRIOPT was restricted to low dimensional spaces. I will have to implement a more efficient way to compute nonoverlapping triangulations. In the mean time, you can simply make the optimization domain bigger to encapsulate the shape of your problem domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone comment on how the performance of this is compared to evolutionary strategies such as CMA-ES? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA- ES](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA-ES))

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

I'm currently away from my computer but I can produce a comparison animation in a few hours. While I am biased, I strongly suspect that Simple will have superior sample efficiency and at least similar performance.

<comment><USER9> Cool, I'd be really interested in seeing that and might try out myself later. It'd be really interesting to see a comparison of the two on optimization problems with a large number of dimensions which stock CMA-ES takes a while (and a lot of samples) to get "warmed up".

<comment> chroem- I ran into some issues when comparing the two algorithms, but here is a comparison with CMA-ES.

[https://github.com/chrisstroemel/Simple/blob/master/cma- comp...](https://github.com/chrisstroemel/Simple/blob/master/cma- comparison.gif?raw=true)

Simple is a constrained optimizer while CMA-ES is unconstrained, so I ended up choosing a sigma value such that the three sigma cutoff could be considered its faux "optimization domain." I gave the two algorithms equal areas to operate on, however CMA-ES is very sensitive to where it's initialized at. If I had started it near the global optimum it would have instantly converged without performing any optimization at all, so then there was also the issue of deciding on a "fair" starting location. Trying to get around this, I briefly tried the comparison on the Griewank function from -5:5, however CMA- ES showed nonconvergent behavior.

CMA-ES seemed to have a higher startup cost than Simple, but very similar per- iteration runtime performance. Sample efficiency ranged from totally nonconvergent to instant convergence without global search, depending on where it was started.

If you have any suggestions for a better testing methodology I would really appreciate them, because I'm still not quite satisfied with this comparison.

<comment><USER9> Thanks that's quite interesting. Your results of seeing higher startup costs definitely mirror my experience.

When I need constraints on CMA-ES for real world stuff I've been using a simple equation to map the output of the parameters before using them:

      y = a + (b - a)*(1 - cos(pi * x / 10)) / 2

Where a is min, b is max and x is the unconstrained input value. (I saw some random paper recommending this years ago and have been using it ever since).

If I get a chance today I'll try and run your code and play around a bit. Really cool stuff!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any connection to LIPO [http://blog.dlib.net/2017/12/a-global- optimization-algorithm...](http://blog.dlib.net/2017/12/a-global-optimization- algorithm-worth.html) ?

<comment> chroem- Hi there,

Very loosely, but not particularly. Simple makes an effort to interpolate between points rather than using the Lipschitz constant to estimate an upper bound. This is important for regions of the search space which are "objective deserts." LIPO would continue to sample a large but poorly performing region of the search space even after it had been demonstrated to not contain good candidates, simply because its estimated upper bound varies linearly with distance from a sample. Simple combines a separate measure of how much it has already explored a region of space with the interpolated objective value to handle these cases better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with a huge MySQL database - help - <AUTHOR>

We have been dealing with a huge MySQL database on one of our projects.
Total byte size: > 150GB, Record count: > 100M (and growing daily)
Primary issue is of performance (this is a live site), currently hosted on a (fairly powerful) VPS.
Not having had in-house prior experience with such data volumes on MySQL, we hacked our own table partitioning architecture of sorts and also optimized the queries, table structures etc. to the max of our abilities. All this has been working reasonably well for us so far.
But now, with rising traffic levels, things are beginning to slow down again.
At this point, we're considering the following 3 options:
1) Throw more hardware resources at it
Pro: Instant gratification :)  Cons: Cost + vicious cycle(?)
2) Try to optimize the database/config, table structures and queries further
Pro: Always useful   Cons: Time + Effort
and
3) Migrate to PostgreSQL (or something else?) Pros/Cons: Still studying
What do HNers with experience in such matters suggest? We're open to all suggestions. Thanks in advance. <comment><USER4> There is no silver bullet.

1) Analyze your indexes on all tables. Start with the high volume insert/read tables.

2) Look at your slow query log. Pick the slowest three queries. Optimize them. Setup a recurring meeting with your team to do this every week.

3) Start looking at what data can be flattened and is less important and could be stuck in a key value datastore.

4) Consider loading a replica slave server. Off load some of high volume read queries to the replica. Also serves as redundancy.

5) Consider where it may make sense to move tables to InnoDB. Table-level locking can be extremely time consuming when traffic is high. Row-level locking can help here.

6) Figure out what your hardware upgrade path looks like. You will have to do this eventually. Identify when you might hit a hardware ceiling with your hosting provider and get a plan in place. Coordinate with your marketing/sales team and upgrade before you hit a traffic peak, not during.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. 1) and 2) - we've done to the max. 4) already in place, with some differences.

<comment><USER4> Unless your development is completely frozen, #2 is never done

<comment><AUTHOR> Development froze almost 2 years ago :) Since then, just the data volume keeps growing.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't it be interesting to unfreeze the development and see if you can't refactor to avoid unnecessary queries? Code topology can heavily affect the amount of queries.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I meant was feature development... that's what got frozen long ago... code revision exclusively for performance optimization has been ongoing continually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a little bit of experience dealing with large datasets and MySQL. This is going to be a little counter-intuitive to standard startup culture advice, but generally, the engineering effort to optimize databases past the initial live flow is not worth throwing money at the problem. You have to weigh the fixed cost of the optimization and the variable cost of the upkeep of the system against simply patching the system for now.

If you are willing to throw money at the problem, which you seem like you're wavering on, here are some options on how to throw money at the problem:

1\. If you are willing to be hands on and maintain your MySQL cluster yourselves, you should move away from EC2 (I am presuming) and to a local collo where you can install super fatty SSD computers with massive RAID setups that will greatly improve your performance per server (on the magnitude of up to 10x)

2\. You can do a hybrid solution with your existing infrastructure. It sounds like a lot of the data is not necessarily going to be used that much (tracking all events probably, from what I am assuming, or something big data intensive like that), you can throw that into a separate database infrastructure.

If my assumption is correct, I am presuming you are using a large portion for the database for stat tracking, and not user information, then the "proper" way to throw it somewhere is to put it into S3 as fat logs that you can later use something like map reduce to process. Other options for more efficient storage are Redis and MongoDB.

3\. We have taken this to the extreme and actually moved all of our live data to DynamoDB. It is a NoSql database storage system operated by Amazon. This has let us concentrate on features and the user experience. The cost is our database is probably 5-10 times more expensive than a self rolled Redis SSD backed equivalent hosted at our local collo.

\</comment><comment>

Just some other general database scaling advice for MySQL. The steps to scaling your MySQL database for live use are as follows:

1\. Do not use any relational calls on your data. Relational calls are useful for databases that aren't used to manage live web transactions as it can seriously back up your system.

2\. Put indexes on all of your heavily used columns for finding data.

3\. Look at the slow queries and optimize those queries out.

4\. Call up Percona and ask for a full consultation to make sure your configs and systems are set up properly for MySQL.

[http://www.percona.com/products/mysql- consulting/overview](http://www.percona.com/products/mysql- consulting/overview)

5\. Email me if you have more questions charlesju gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'll have to check with the others here, but I think we have not been aware of 1. !!! Will certainly investigate this ASAP - thanks.

2\. and 3. - already implemented to the max (of our abilities :)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Not having had in-house prior experience with such data volumes on MySQL ... At this point, we're considering the following 3 options:"

4\. Hire or contract a consultant/expert. Part of their assignment could be to teach you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks :) We are actually considering this, but it skipped my mind while making the post.

<comment><USER8> This is probably the right answer. Look at it from a cost-benefit POV - <USER2> much money will getting the right answers _now_ save you in the long run?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What exactly is getting slow? Inserts? Updates? Queries? Which ones? Have you looked at the slow query log? Have you checked the plans for the slow queries?

Are these MyISAM tables or InnoDB?

150GB and 100M records is not huge, not even close. You are looking for a quick fix and there isn't one. You need to start with (2).

<comment><AUTHOR> > 150GB and 100M records is not huge, not even close.

Close to what, if I may ask?

<comment><USER10> not even close to 'huge,' although my english syntax is a little rusty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regardless of your English syntax (rusty or not), what would you define as 'huge' for a MySQL app?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Caching is definitely a must have, both an external cache (Memcache, Redis) and tuning MySQL's own caches in the configuration, using InnoDB and MySQL means you can configure a large buffer in the MySQL config to speed things up considerably

Disk speed could also be a huge issue, especially on a VPS where resources are shared between many virtual machines, consider migrating your database off to a dedicated server (Preferably one with an SSD), depending on where you are in the world OVH might be a good choice.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here are some guiding questions:

1) Do you actively need all 100M records, or is there a period after which you can archive them?

2) Have you partitioned data across multiple servers, or just multiple tables on one server?

3) What are the nature of your expensive queries? Are you generating reports? User dashboards?

I think a general idea of what your application is doing would help us provide some guidance.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Yes, and no 2) Both (3 servers) 3) We've analyzed/optimized this to the max (of our abilities)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my experiences, the size of the database nor the number of records really matter. It's the number of queries that you are handling at one time that can really affect performance.

Sure, if you have a single table with a ton of records this can slow things down - but not nearly as much as dealing with a high number of queries.

I highly recommend this book - [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596101716/?tag=stackoverfl08-20](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596101716/?tag=stackoverfl08-20)

Yes, caching can really help. Logically placed indexes can too. Switching to postgres will not help. The bottleneck will still be there. The key is to find that before you start tuning/optimizing: [http://www.singlehop.com/blog/analyzing-mysql-performance- an...](http://www.singlehop.com/blog/analyzing-mysql-performance-and- bottlenecks/)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Will get the book and check out the blog soon. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would not migrate to postgres without knowing the issue first. Here are some suggestions: Enable replication master/slaves+, assuming you have a read heavy architecture. Enable the " _The Slow Query Log_ " [1], which will give you something like /var/log/mysql-slowquery.log, then you can look in here to find queries that take a long time. Find out what the bottleneck is, I'm willing to best you have limited I/O and that is the source of your issues, can you use memcached [2] to limit the database hit rate? You need to remove/limit direct access to the database when people get duplicate data out.

Before you start to optimize I would profile things to get a baseline for how many select/inserts you are doing and how long they are taking, and system load, etc. Based off your 100M statement, you are doing roughly 1157.4 inserts/s. Maybe that's 250 inserts/s during a slow time and 3,000 inserts/s at peak, but it would be nice to know.

      100,000,000 (inserts) / 86,400 (seconds/day)
      = 1157.4 (inserts/s)

I guess it all depends on the insert size and index but you should be able to scale this. If you cannot then you need to partition/shard your data. After reading all this, you are probably thinking, I should just throw more hardware at the problem ;)

ps. Have you stopped to ask if you really need all this data?

[1] [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/slow-query- log.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/slow-query-log.html)

[2] [http://memcached.org/](http://memcached.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> [1] Been doing already and [2] Will re-visit soon

Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmm.

Bringing in a consultant is probably your best bet. Database optimization needs to generally take into account YOUR data and usage patterns.

If you want to learn a bit yourself, pick up a copy of "High Performance MySQL." I've found that to be the most useful MySQL scaling book I own.

Figure out your slow queries. Run "SHOW PROCESSLIST" on the server and see what's typically running.

Look at the actual queries - if you're frequently running a query that looks through most rows of your biggest table, that's going to be a tough query to optimize. Instead, look to either caching or regular pre-computation of the results.

I've found that an unfortunate number of people aren't aware of "EXPLAIN" and its use to help figure out query issues. Learn and use it.

You're on a VPS. That may be fine, but it may have horrible I/O throughput. If you're writing a lot of data, or having queries that hitting some sort of mysql or OS cache, IO will be your bottleneck. Make sure it's fast enough. Look at average IO wait times. Test max. throughput.

MyISAM tables may be an issue. MyISAM tables use table level locking - <USER3> one session at a time will be able to update the table. This is quite possibly a problem if you're doing any updates or inserts to a table that is also frequently read from. Look to move to InnoDB soon. See: [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/internal- locking.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/internal-locking.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> >Database optimization needs to generally take into account YOUR data and usage patterns.

I'd say this is quite true.

>I've found that an unfortunate number of people aren't aware of "EXPLAIN" and its use to help figure out query issues. Learn and use it.

Yes, we discovered this some years ago.

Thanks for you input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like your database is roughly the same size as the database that we work with, and MySQL performance has been a recurring issue for us. Assuming that you've done a reasonable job of option 2, I gravitate towards option 1 and maybe option 4 (depending on how confident you are of your team's technical capabilities and how expensive consultants are relative to additional hardware).

These are intermediate steps that have helped, giving us some time to figure we whether want to migrate to a different database:

1) We started using InnoDB a few years ago.

2) One of our common queries joined parts of multiple large tables; we essentially cached the useful parts of the join and put the results into a memory table.

3) Our non-production server is under a lot of load from our back-end processes, and we decided to move the database to a RAM disk, which greatly improved performance. It's important to note that, while inconvenient, a power outage is not catastrophic in our case (e.g. we don't deal with financial transactions); we do daily backups to non-volatile memory. For around $5,000, you can build your own server that has over 250 GB of RAM and then put it into a co-location facility.

We seriously considered migrating to Postgres, but #3 has bought us some time on that front. It might be that we eventually still migrate, but we prefer to do it after the company is on better financial footing. It might also be that while we wait, other less painful options open up over time (e.g. maybe MariaDB will suffice).

I hope the situation resolves well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Consider that 37Signals probably has a much larger dataset and is still happily scaling vertically due to Moore's law.

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/1/30/37signals-still- ha...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/1/30/37signals-still-happily- scaling-on-moore-ram-and-ssds.html)

It's probably the cheapest, quickest, and least risky option if your engineers' time is expensive (which it most likely is).

Of course, you'll ultimately also want to find bottlenecks and tune the DB and cache the hell out of everything, but scaling vertically will at least buy you some good time so you can do that in a more relaxed time-table.

Related links:

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3202-behind-the-scenes-the- ha...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3202-behind-the-scenes-the-hardware- that-powers-basecamp-campfire-and-highrise)

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3090-basecamp-nexts- caching-h...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3090-basecamp-nexts-caching- hardware)

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got- to...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to-be-so- damn-fast-without-using-much-client-side-ui)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi!

There are some good suggestions in this thread already. Step #1 is to determine why it is slow.

If it is slow under load, then I am going to suspect that you are hitting table locks - which means you need to migrate to InnoDB (row locking + MVCC). Important to point out: a bigger server may not actually help enough here, because while you are waiting on locks nothing can be done while there is free capacity waiting to be used.

If it is just generally slow related to growth, it can probably be improved by indexing - which will help you reduce what data needs to be in RAM.

In either case, two third party tools to suggest: \- pt-query-digest: aggregate your slow query log. You want to use 0 seconds as the threshold, record 20 minutes of slow queries during regular activity. Methodology described here: [http://gtowey.blogspot.ca/2012/07/slow-query-log-is- not.html](http://gtowey.blogspot.ca/2012/07/slow-query-log-is-not.html)

\- pt-online-schema-change: you can migrate from MyISAM to InnoDB online via triggers (not online by default).

Both tools part of [http://www.percona.com/software/percona- toolkit](http://www.percona.com/software/percona-toolkit)

<comment><AUTHOR> We did use a tool (perl script) called mysqltuner.pl on this sometime last year and it did give us some useful/actionable insight. Will check out what you've suggested too.

Thanks. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inline with questions 2 & 3 - what's the bottleneck? reading or writing or both? if you haven't already, it's worth looking into a master (writes) / slave (reads) setup - provides a bit of redundancy and lets you scale reads very easily by adding more slaves. It also helps with writes because it can take a lot of pressure off the master.

...assuming you're webvet.com it looks like you're scaling drupal, so these would be my first questions: are you using the views module? if so, kill that, as well as anything else by merlin (panels, etc). and look at your indexes. setup pressflow + percona. master & slave db. reverse proxy caching (varnish or nginx) are all good places to start. hostwise if you're not already on amazon, you can get a lot of mileage out of a service like voxel that lets you mix VPSs (cheap webheads) with physical hardware. it's not great and it may well be worth biting the more expensive bullet and going to AWS for long term needs, but it's a lot better than linode for an underwater db.

my email is in my profile if you'd like more detail - drupal is a bear at first but it can be scaled for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input - and no, we're not webvet.com

<comment><USER19> ah ok, cool - good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the less documented tuning parameters I found is the threa dcache size. Normally it is a very small value for the number of simultaneous connections you likely support. Increasing it can result in elimination of random pauses/slowdowns.

In general, it is impossible to "tune MySQL" though. You can allow it to use more system resources and in some cases you can get it to be less durable to gain write performance, but to get orders of magnitude increases you need to restructure your data. Try sharing or partitioning data. Increase or reduce the number of indecies. Denormalize data. Archive logs to flat files. Put the OS, /var/lib, and /var/log on separate physical drives. Run MySQL on bare metal since disk IO is often a bottleneck and virtualization can add overhead. Restructure the data. At one point a write heavy app I was optimizing was logging things to the database (that needed to be queries). Each log entry contained extra data we did not query. One speed up that worked was throwing the majority of the extra data into a single gzipped JSON blob. This made it easier for MySQL to fetch fewer pages. Less IO, faster operation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe we did tune and tweak the heck out of my.cfg, but will investigate thread_dcache_size all the same.

I also believe we're archiving at least some logs (and such) to flat files already, but will re-visit this soon too.

Thanks for all your input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have you considered rewriting MySQL in Go?

jk. What is the real nature of the queries, what kind of caching is being used? MySQL should not really get hit that often if you have 150GB of data and a site, unless it's not getting content but running some sort of deep processing. In such a case MySQL seems like the wrong tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER22> Without doing an analysis, which is really warranted, here are some coarse grain recommendations:

1) Get off VPS if you can. If you can't check out linode.com; they offer better price/performance than most cloud services.

2) Take a look at the Percona build of MySQL - it is faster, especially with more cores.

3) Use in memory tables if possible

4) Switch to InnoDB or XtraDB (in the case of Percona) tables... MyISAM implements table level locking, whereas InnoDB and XtraDB implement only row level locking.

</comment><comment><USER23> My first recommendation would be to get a dedicated server with a decent amount of RAM (32GB or more) and put MySQL on that.

1\. Greater memory bandwidth 2\. dedicated disk resources 3\. you can ensure that extra RAM is used as read and write cache.

I am not the cheapest provider by far, and I rent these kind of systems for $200 a month. If you go with someone else the price could be under $100 a month.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cleanup - Probably one the most effective but often ignored tips for DB management. Do you really need all that data in real time? Are you querying all of it in your app? If not, it makes sense to archive parts of it to another disk. The size reduction would boost performance tremendously.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Do you really need all that data in real time? Are you querying all of it in your app?

Yes and yes. ALL the data records could potentially be queried via site navigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do you have any sort of caching in your app? Memcache, for instance, can go a long way in helping you scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have Memcache (or anything similar) presently, though I do believe we looked at it sometime last year. Will get a re-check done on this - thanks. :)

<comment><USER26> You should look into caching. If you are talking about webvet.com it looks like a perfect site for using something like Varnish. Most of the content probably doesn't change often so you should be able to have a long TTL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Option 4) would be to hire an expert in these matters.

100M rows is not a lot of data nowadays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - 4) has been on the cards, I just forgot to mention it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not particularly large for MySQL. Consider using master / slave to separate reads and writes, cache heavily and consider sharding if appropriate.

Alternatively, as suggested elsewhere, give Percona a ring.

</comment><comment><USER29> You give us two values (150GB and 100M+ rows). That is not enough to give you ANY suggestions other than give us more info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please let me know what more info would be helpful and I'll be happy to provide the same.

<comment><USER30> are queries uniform over the data. For instance most of queries conerns only a little fragment of one table for instance most recent rows. Can you shard them ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Call Percona first. $10K well spent.

Then (probably, and assuming you have the basics right) just throw hardware at it.

</comment><comment><USER32> How slow is "slow" for you right now? And writes vs. read? Which MySql storage engine are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me try to answer: Slow - as in average Top loads (on CentOS) staying between 1 and 2 pretty much throughout the day; closer to 2 rather than to 1, peaking ALL the way up to 10 and even beyond several times a day, for periods as long as 15 to 30 minutes.

Storage engine: MyISAM

<comment><USER33> Do you have some other measurements? slow_log, queries without indexes, low key cache usage? Load is just one metric and can be very deceiving. Do you have any backup system which hits the disks at the same time, batch jobs, or something similar? Depending on your workload, "load" can vary - it just means the writes are being queued up.

It's definitely not a good sign, but try to get more specific. I've seen servers doing heavy network I/O with "normal" load over 5 times the number of cores.

Also, unless you're doing loads of selects and very few modifications, you could gain a lot by switching to InnoDB, or XtraDB, rather than MyISAM.

<comment><USER34> Have to second this. You should monitor load for sure... but depending on how many cores you are running a load of 1 or 2 could be absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Personally, the most important metric for us is average query response time.

Additionally as others have stated where you can use memcache or some other key/value store you should be working on implementing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> stackoverflow -> this way</comment>


The Listener - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/coast-to-coast

<comment><USER2> > "Freaks, geeks, and rebels have got a very, very strange advantage," Bloom > says. "In most things we're sort of disadvantaged, but society needs us very > badly—we're its eyes and ears, we're its antenna, we're the way it stretches > out and finds new things."</comment>


Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tools-for-the-ai-driven-digital-transformation/ <comment><USER2> I have a PhD in AI and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what's being announced here. Like, check this out:

> Building on advanced research in program synthesis (PROSE) and data > cleaning, we have created a data wrangling experience (Figure 1) that > drastically reduces the time that data scientists have to spend in > transforming data for machine learning.

Huh?

> Figure 1: AI-powered data wrangling in the workbench learns from examples > and automatically synthesizes code for data transformations using program > synthesis technology.

What?

> Models can be containerized in Docker and deployed to network edge devices, > allowing models to score closer to the event and in real-time. Local docker > deployments can be used for debugging, while for scaled out production > serving of AI, these containers can be managed with Kubernetes, using Azure > Container Services.

English, Microsoft. Do you speak it?

<comment><USER3> Do you have enterprise experience as well? I have an ML Ph.D. and 20 years of enterprise AI, and from my perspective these do make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Currently reading the work of Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus was widely ridiculed in the 60's and the 80's for coming out against AI simply on the grounds that it wouldn't work, but for those decades at least he was certainly right as it turned out. Reading his book "The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer" from 1983 is haunting and eerily sounds a lot like today.

>"AI entrepreneurs and researchers will climb a tree, sometimes even a tall one, and then tell you they've got all the workings of a space program"

<comment><USER5> _" simply on the grounds that it wouldn't work"_

That is a weird position to hold. Surely he must realize that it will work some day; or does he believe there is something more to human-like intelligence, that can never be achieved in silicon? I'm not saying we are close, or that the currently available tools are enough, but at some point in the future we will be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like Microsoft is trying to make a big push specially considering the 8000 strong number in their AI division. Interesting juncture as they seem to have an opportunity to catch on. I hear there is a holy war within Microsoft where one sanct feels Windows and Office are still the bread and butter and therefore all AI related investment should go in the direction whereas the other sanct is pushing towards independent offerings through Azure like Cognitive Services,

<comment><USER7> I interned at MSFT working on Word. Engineers and PMs in Office see a lot of opportunity in AI. PowerPoint Designer and the newer ML based proofing in Word are good examples of things that have already shipped. I never saw anything resembling a war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.

<comment><USER9> Something about me feels that these efforts by IBM and Microsoft around AI are less around providing Open Source tools to democratize AI and more around providing "big data" style tools to "big enterprise". Both companies made TONS of $$$ selling Business Intelligence tools (SQL Server Analysis Services, Cognos, etc). They are smart enough to see the danger in open source tools like TensorFlow, Spark, etc. cutting into their lucrative revenue streams in the enterprise.

In particular, Microsoft has always been great about providing tools for no to low cost at the entry level, to get you (or more likely your company) hooked into the ecosystem. Not making a criticism, they have made some great stuff over the years (see the Visual Studio ecosystem for example).

The other angle is providing these tools, which can be complex to install/configure/manage, as a service offering via a subscription as part of the Azure platform. Recently MS has been hiring every superstar/rockstar evangelist/advocate/architect/engineer/etc to help design/build/promote/advocate for Azure that they can find (See Jessie Frazelle, @catie, and a ton of key people in the Golang world). Microsoft isn't just coming to play, they're playing to win.

<comment><USER10> IBM and Microsoft can embrace the open source tools Tensorflow and Spark by offering Enterprise Support (I know IBM has made a large investment in Spark). Their competitors would be databricks and Google. By being simply not Google that could win over people. Also, both of them need something to differentiate their cloud offering from Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their Text Analytics offering is still for some reason behind IBM Watson (and I don't even like Watson). Missing: named entity recognition, and multi-label classification (if they did a hierarchial multi-label classifier, the would be amazing).

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow now we can look forward to half baked AI implementation for several years and then abandonment like every MS marketing fad.

</comment><comment><USER13> MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1 on the web and on mobile.

However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product.

This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Microsoft needs to understand that more and more features doesn't mean more perceived value.

<comment><USER14> Integration into VS is a huge value add, by doing so MS guarantees that VS becomes the most easy platform to do ML development in

<comment><USER13> Many people doing AI/ML right now are not using Windows. By asking them to move to Visual Studio you are implicitly asking them to move to Windows. Only by doing that you are making it extremely difficult to adopt such technology.

<comment><USER15> vscode runs on Windows, Mac and Linux

<comment><USER16> VS and vscode are two entirely different projects.

<comment><USER15> The product we're talking about is Visual Studio Code Tools for AI; "full" Visual Studio IDE isn't even mentioned or shown in the announcement article</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Live MySQL Schema Changes on RDS with Percona Toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mrafayaleem/percona-presentation <comment><AUTHOR> Resources for a presentation (meetup) that I did on "Live MySQL Schema Changes on RDS with Percona Toolkit" in Dubai, UAE.

Includes:

\- Blog and Presentation.

\- Github repo with pre-configured Dockerfile to play around with MySQL 5.6 and pt-online-schema-change.

\- A minimal Django website based on DRF Snippets tutorial.</comment>