Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/09/introducing-brotli-new-compression.html?m=0 <comment><USER25> It's fantastic to see so much fascinating work in compression these days after a fair amount of stagnation. I know there had been a lot of specialized but codec work but the recent discoveries are very much for wide use.

You now have LZ4, Brotil, zstd, snappy, lzfse, lzma all pretty useful practical codec.

Brotil is interesting though. It can be an easy replacement for zlib at level 1 with fairly higher compression then zlib at similar speed.

On the other hand with with lzma it can handily beat lzma but with an even slower compression rate (from the levels that they published in the benchmark) but on the other hand with much higher decompression speed meaning its very good for distribution work. It would be interesting to see the compression ratio, time for levels between 1-9.

It's actually a much easier replacement for zlib then lzma for some. The benchmark shows only level 1,9 and 11. It seems that it can handily beat lzma but at the cost of compression speed (I wonder who use more memory). Then again its decompression speed is so much better making it a perfect choice for distribution.

What truly surprise me though is the work of 'Yann Collet'. A single person so handily beating google's snappy. Even his zstd work looks ground breaking. When I read couple of weeks ago that he was a part time hobby programmer I just didn't know how to be suitably impressed.

Am I reading right that apples lzfse is based of a mix of lz+zstd?

<comment><USER26> Research in compression hardly ever stalled, it just wasn't getting much publicity because it wasn't coming from Google. For example, looking at Brotli it appears to be based on ideas very similar to those explored by the PAQ project [1] not several years ago.

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

<comment><USER27> The web has definitely had a problem with legacy restrictions driving thinking. We lost nearly a decade with Internet Explorer stagnation and I think that caused a lot of people to assume that the odds of something new going mainstream were too low.

Now we're in a very different place where people upgrade software much faster than in the past and that's likely to start showing up in projects like this where it's actually plausible to think of something like Brotli seeing widespread usage within 1-2 years.

<comment><USER28> On top of that Google can unilaterally upgrade the servers that serve the most popular site on the internet and ~40% of all browsers at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm curious about the viability of the following approach. Can a generic static dictionary be made to be held on the client side such that said compressor/decompressor can utilize efficiently? This would prevent the need to send along the dictionary with the compressed package every time. Even at an 80/20 - 90/10 success rate (of course we'd have a fall back to worse case), wouldn't this be a great advancement and reduce massive network load? With modern hd sizes, many could spare a few gigabites which could be dialed up/down as necessary depending on how optimized you'd want it. I would think we could identify particular binary patterns based on the users xfer habits (eg downloading text vs application vs audio vs video) and have different dictionaries optimized to their usage (eg roku would just store dictionaries maximized for video usage)

<comment><USER30> Brotli has a static dictionary, an appendix of the draft: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-alakuijala- brotli-01](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-alakuijala-brotli-01). It comes up a few times in the comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7894299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7894299) . It has words and phrases in various languages, bits of HTML and JavaScript, and miscellaneous wacky stuff--looks like the kind of thing you could generate from a Web crawl, say.

<comment><USER31> Is there anything out that let you have "pluggable" dictionaries? I have a client-server communication that often sends 90% of the same words. I'd like to build to build this dictionary on the server and ship it down to the clients.

I prototyped something myself and SHDC for the browser was the closet I could find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Additional pointers:

– a more detailed post about Brotli: [http://textslashplain.com/2015/09/10/brotli/](http://textslashplain.com/2015/09/10/brotli/)

– a MSDN article on "compressing the Web", explaining the difference between deflate and gzip, the limitations of browsers, and mentionning zopfli and brotli: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2014/10/21/http-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2014/10/21/http- compression-optimize-file-formats-with-deflate.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER33> This one goes to 11!

Seriously, the Brotli quality setting goes to eleven -- pure genius.

[http://www.gstatic.com/b/brotlidocs/brotli-2015-09-22.pdf](http://www.gstatic.com/b/brotlidocs/brotli-2015-09-22.pdf) (Fig. 1)

<comment><USER34> pigz (parallel gzip) also has a -11 option

<comment><USER35> The pigz -11 option uses zopfli which is the algorithm referenced in the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Currently being implemented in Firefox: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559)

<comment><USER37> Note that this bug originally seems to have been called something like "Implement LZMA compression", and the early comments are about that; it's some way in that someone says "oh, and Google have this new Brotli thing which might be even better".

<comment><USER38> Mozilla can be quite slow with certain features; for example work on U2F support hasn't even begun one year after a ticket was made ([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729)). I'm not exactly holding my breath.

<comment><USER39> They've already tried to land the code to add brotli support but had to back it out because of an Android build failure. They're moving pretty quick on this. It helps that they already had brotli for WOFF so there is less review required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Note that this will only be supported over https, due to broken proxies:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c92](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c92)

<comment><USER41> Aren't there any security risks when using this over HTTPS, considering past attacks like BREACH and CRIME?

<comment><USER42> CRIME: TLS compression can reveal private headers, like auth cookies. Fixed by turning off TLS compression. Not applicable to HTTP because HTTP never had header compression.

BREACH: Response body compression of a page where there's (a) something attacker controlled, (b) something private and unchanging in the body can reveal that secret, and (c) response length is visible to an attacker. Doesn't require HTTPS.

If an attack applied, it would be one like BREACH. Which isn't surprising: this is a direct replacement for "Accept-Encoding: gzip / Content-Encoding: gzip" and so we should expect it to be in the same security situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Unlike other algorithms compared here, brotli includes a static dictionary. > It contains 13'504 words or syllables of English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, > Russian and Arabic, as well as common phrases used in machine readable > languages, particularly HTML and JavaScript.

They could at least have measured the other algorithms with the same dictionary for fairness.

</comment><comment><USER44> "We hope that this format will be supported by major browsers" \- if I'm not mistaken it should also be implemented by all major webservers. In that regard I'm hoping Opera open sources or sells their OMPD proxy platform. Someone made a chrome extension which interfaces with their network and the speed is amazing. OMPD is a tradeoff and breaks certain javascript and css and is different from Opera Turbo, I am not sure what compression Turbo uses currently. Does anyone know if Brotli gets implemented in the google server and proxy compression? [http://browsingthenet.blogspot.nl/2014/09/chrome-data- compre...](http://browsingthenet.blogspot.nl/2014/09/chrome-data-compression- proxy-vs-mozilla-janus-vs-opera-turbo.html)

<comment><USER45> > I'm hoping Opera open sources or sells their OMPD proxy platform.

They won't open source it: the compression tech has for a number of years accounted for a large proportion of Opera's (browser) income. I also don't actually know what OMPD is. Opera Mini server? That's tied sufficiently closely to Presto that it'll only ever get released if Presto does.

The more recent Opera Turbo and the Opera Mini 11 for Android "high- compression mode" (though I have no idea how that really differs to Opera Turbo! [edit: per @brucel it _is_ Opera Turbo]) are certainly available for licensing; Yandex Browser supports Opera Turbo, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Just like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after Swiss bakery products. > Brötli means 'small bread' in Swiss German.

Makes sense.

<comment><USER47> Disappointing they aren't dissolving the umlaut and instead stripping it. 'Broetil' would be equivalent to 'Brötil', yet they remove it (and thus change the sound) to create 'Brotil'.

<comment><USER48> Keeping that long human linguistic tradition of information loss. Pretty on point for a compression scheme.

<comment><USER34> Well, maybe not for lossless compression..

<comment><USER48> That was the joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Really like how big and influential companies are working on foundational technologies like compression, which smaller companies would have no chance of popularising. Earlier this summer Apple introduced lzfse. But this brotli seems even more amazing as its compression ratio seems to match that of lzma. Wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER50> How does this do compressing trimesh binary data like this stream?

[https://d3ijcvgxwtkjmf.cloudfront.net/a4c3c7313b7bdeb68ad46a...](https://d3ijcvgxwtkjmf.cloudfront.net/a4c3c7313b7bdeb68ad46a7e1b761f38z?filename=object-53-batman- tumbler-lw8-12.bingeom)

Base: 6,779,000 bytes

GZip2 Normal: 2,296,362 bytes, Ultra: 2,258,967 bytes

LAMZ2 Normal: 921,600 bytes, Ultra: 920,147 bytes

<comment><USER51> Default and "ultra" give the same number: 1,513,459 bytes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how it compares to Apple's new proprietary LZFSE codec. Here was Apple's WWDC slide – [http://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/lzfse_1-png.565004/](http://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/lzfse_1-png.565004/) – but I don't think they published full details anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER53> If Google wants me to personally adopt this outside of woff2 (woff2's major change is switch to Brotli over deflate), then they should submit a patch to nginx to add modules named brotli and brotli_static, and some command line gzip-like that does Brotli.

<comment><USER54> For brotli_static, I think a header can be easily added for serving pre- compressed content. And a dynamic version may be too slow.

Zstd is better for dynamic compression. Or libslz today for very fast compression with zlib compatibility.

<comment><USER55> Brotli at compression level 1 is as fast as zstd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> So it should be "Broetli", then...?

<comment><USER57> Can't wait for Gipfeli

<comment><USER58> [https://github.com/google/gipfeli](https://github.com/google/gipfeli)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In the spec [1], they published the dictionary used in hexadecimal form. Can someone explain why there are so many 6's in the data?

For comparison here's a chart of hex character and approximate [2] number of occurrences.

(0 - 15k) (1 - 10k) (2 - 19k) (3 - 14k) (4 - 15k) (5 - 16k) (6 - 62k) (7 - 32k) (8 - 10k) (9 - 11k) (a - 11k) (b - 7k) (c - 8k) (d - 12k) (e - 20k) (f - 9k)

[1]: [http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-alakuijala- brotli-05.txt](http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-alakuijala-brotli-05.txt) [2]: counted with find-in-page, didn't bother to only search the dict

<comment><USER60> The 6s and 7s correspond to ASCII lowercase letters. Try decoding the hex strings as UTF-8...

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I don't like the name much so I'm calling it broccoli.

</comment><comment><USER62> I have an actual question. _Who can name all the decompressors that outperform Brotli both in compression ratio and decompression speed?_ As I see it, that's the ultimate goal, to boost I/O via transparent decompression.

Reading the PDF paper I see they use for benchmarking Xeon with price-tag in range of $560, how this can be reconciled with hot phrases like boosting browsing on mobile devices?!

<comment><USER63> Here are some benchmarks and discussion of data compression specialists: [http://encode.ru/threads/2313-Brotli?p=44970&viewfull=1#post...](http://encode.ru/threads/2313-Brotli?p=44970&viewfull=1#post44970)

"Input: 812,392,384 bytes, HTML top 10k Alexa crawled (8,998 with HTML response)

Output: 219,591,148 bytes, 1.799 sec., 1.355 sec., tor-small -1

218,018,012 bytes, 1.951 sec., 1.464 sec., tor-small -1 -b800mb

210,647,258 bytes, 1.736 sec., 1.328 sec., qpress64 -L1T1

210,194,996 bytes, 0.333 sec., 0.371 sec., lz4 -1

194,233,793 bytes, 2.818 sec., 1.348 sec., qpress64 -L2T1

187,766,706 bytes, 7.966 sec., 1.059 sec., qpress64 -L3T1

173,904,470 bytes, 2.995 sec., 2.721 sec., tor-small -2

173,418,150 bytes, 3.132 sec., 2.843 sec., tor-small -2 -b800mb

169,476,113 bytes, 2.072 sec., 0.352 sec., lz4 -9

165,571,040 bytes, 2.931 sec., 2.820 sec., NanoZip - <USER2>

158,213,503 bytes, 1.855 sec., 0.980 sec., zstd

154,673,082 bytes, 3.213 sec., 2.445 sec., tor-small -3

154,166,902 bytes, 3.364 sec., 2.555 sec., tor-small -3 -b800mb

152,477,067 bytes, 2.128 sec., 0.973 sec., lzturbo -30 -p1

152,477,067 bytes, 2.132 sec., 0.971 sec., lzturbo -30 -p1 -b4

150,773,269 bytes, 2.151 sec., 1.047 sec., lzturbo -30 -p1 -b16

150,219,553 bytes, 2.332 sec., 1.204 sec., lzturbo -30 -p1 -b800

149,670,044 bytes, 7.825 sec., 2.567 sec., WinRAR - <USER9>

149,642,742 bytes, 2.069 sec., 0.646 sec., zhuff_beta -c0 -t1 145,770,266 bytes, 4.586 sec., 2.285 sec., tor-small -4

141,951,602 bytes, 4.484 sec., 2.360 sec., tor-small -4 -b800mb

141,215,050 bytes, 2,751 sec., 0.938 sec., lzturbo -31 -p1 -b4

140,657,806 bytes, 5.037 sec., 2.544 sec., FreeArc - <USER9>

140,211,060 bytes, 6,970 sec., 1.775 sec., bro -q 1

138,103,483 bytes, 118.023 sec., 2.394 sec., cabarc -m LZX:15

138,051,401 bytes, 2.761 sec., 1.001 sec., lzturbo -31 -p1 -b16

137,564,310 bytes, 18.762 sec., 4.299 sec., NanoZip - <USER5>

137,211,547 bytes, 7.808 sec., 1.712 sec., bro -q 2

137,000,208 bytes, 3.763 sec., 3.852 sec., NanoZip - <USER6>

136,523,335 bytes, 2.830 sec., 1.094 sec., lzturbo -31 -p1

136,445,854 bytes, 50.932 sec., 2.344 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m0 -d24 -t0 -b

136,337,495 bytes, 14.823 sec., 4.259 sec., NanoZip - <USER7>

135,723,691 bytes, 8.318 sec., 1.677 sec., bro -q 3

135,656,476 bytes, 2.972 sec., 1.153 sec., lzturbo -31 -p1 -b800

135,315,388 bytes, 51.436 sec., 2.371 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m0 -t0 -b

135,287,357 bytes, 51.937 sec., 2.418 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m0 -d29 -t0 -b

135,071,576 bytes, 21.650 sec., 4.251 sec., NanoZip - <USER8>

132,819,515 bytes, 20.102 sec., 6.278 sec., 7-Zip - <USER9>

131,871,664 bytes, 14.052 sec., 0.899 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1 -b4

131,401,865 bytes, 9,917 sec., 1.677 sec., bro -q 4

129,184,341 bytes, 8.305 sec., 2.692 sec., tor-small -5

127,355,215 bytes, 20.866 sec., 5.825 sec., 7-Zip - <USER14>

127,045,472 bytes, 9.549 sec., 0.957 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1 -b16

126,139,033 bytes, 8.025 sec., 2.751 sec., tor-small -5 -b800mb

125,732,647 bytes, 10.642 sec., 2.618 sec., tor-small -6

125,454,769 bytes, 140.513 sec., 2.281 sec., cabarc -m LZX:18

123,169,077 bytes, 8.472 sec., 1.090 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1

123,093,411 bytes, 22.468 sec., 5.508 sec., 7-Zip - <USER19>

122,564,329 bytes, 10.074 sec., 2.680 sec., tor-small -6 -b800mb

122,480,456 bytes, 19.411 sec., 1.645 sec., bro -q 5

121,068,548 bytes, 14.536 sec., 3.289 sec., FreeArc - <USER14>

120,653,755 bytes, 16.107 sec., 2.552 sec., tor-small -7

119,969,489 bytes, 27.663 sec., 1.602 sec., bro -q 6

119,740,393 bytes, 27.370 sec., 5.259 sec., 7-Zip - <USER21>

118,343,545 bytes, 24.112 sec., 2.123 sec., WinRAR - <USER14>

118,139,032 bytes, 35.361 sec., 4.371 sec., NanoZip - <USER15>

117,500,327 bytes, 15.517 sec., 2.594 sec., tor-small -7 -b800mb

117,388,039 bytes, 23.546 sec., 2.524 sec., tor-small -8

116,526,595 bytes, 37.847 sec., 4.383 sec., NanoZip - <USER16>

116,454,906 bytes, 35.232 sec., 4.351 sec., NanoZip - <USER17>

116,269,246 bytes, 25.888 sec., 6.589 sec., FreeArc - <USER19>

116,217,001 bytes, 40.748 sec., 1.630 sec., bro -q 7

115,993,125 bytes, 192.929 sec., 2.199 sec., cabarc -m LZX:21

115,985,847 bytes, 386.192 sec., 0.850 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b4

115,729,606 bytes, 35.504 sec., 2.095 sec., WinRAR - <USER19>

115,163,486 bytes, 55.523 sec., 1.614 sec., bro -q 8

115,022,074 bytes, 49.863 sec., 2.084 sec., WinRAR - <USER22>

114,602,026 bytes, 8.403 sec., 1.218 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1 -b800

114,345,025 bytes, 78,418 sec., 1.594 sec., bro -q 9

114,281,170 bytes, 22.925 sec., 2.575 sec., tor-small -8 -b800mb

113,354,128 bytes, 29.519 sec., 2.474 sec., tor-small -9

112,376,531 bytes, 177.077 sec., 1.923 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m1 -d24 -t0 -b

111,848,802 bytes, 29.046 sec., 2.515 sec., tor-small -9 -b800mb

110,532,234 bytes, 40.580 sec., 2.496 sec., tor-small -10

110,177,215 bytes, 54.632 sec., 6.398 sec., FreeArc - <USER21>

109,908,468 bytes, 40.292 sec., 2.501 sec., tor-small -10 -b800mb

109,522,695 bytes, 208.748 sec., 1.898 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m2 -d24 -t0 -b

109,425,530 bytes, 436.824 sec., 0.893 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b16

108,520,934 bytes, 58.227 sec., 2.521 sec., tor-small -11

108,520,934 bytes, 58.329 sec., 2.518 sec., tor-small -11 -b800mb

107,850,398 bytes, 266.166 sec., 2.562 sec., tor-small -12

107,842,909 bytes, 267.559 sec., 2.550 sec., tor-small -12 -b800mb

106,128,420 bytes, 271.607 sec., 1.850 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m3 -d24 -t0 -b

105,933,030 bytes, 571,280 sec., 5.168 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1 -b4

105,692,791 bytes, 193.962 sec., 1.919 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m1 -t0 -b

104,539,771 bytes, 316.307 sec., 1.833 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m4 -d24 -t0 -b

104,094,380 bytes, 2313.780 sec., 1.693 sec., bro -q 10

104,053,219 bytes, 195.503 sec., 1.977 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m1 -d29 -t0 -b

102,895,078 bytes, 148.997 sec., 4.850 sec., 7-Zip - <USER22>

101,941,653 bytes, 237.364 sec., 1.889 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m2 -t0 -b

100,898,120 bytes, 534.627 sec., 1.097 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1

100,159,922 bytes, 239.813 sec., 1.933 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m2 -d29 -t0 -b

99,699,129 bytes, 625.001 sec., 4.902 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1 -b16

96,239,572 bytes, 347.011 sec., 1.893 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m3 -t0 -b

95,197,295 bytes, 236.139 sec., 4.587 sec., 7-Zip - <USER24>

94,133,011 bytes, 356.440 sec., 1.933 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m3 -d29 -t0 -b

93,601,386 bytes, 431.884 sec., 1.899 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m4 -t0 -b

92,303,359 bytes, 727.475 sec., 4.729 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1

91,310,894 bytes, 449.102 sec., 1.923 sec., lzhamtest_x64 -m4 -d29 -t0 -b

90,239,627 bytes, 680.976 sec., 1.170 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b800

87,715,022 bytes, 314.169 sec., 5.428 sec., FreeArc - <USER24>

82,891,405 bytes, 882.513 sec., 4.597 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1 -b800

77,286,010 bytes, 6497.059 sec., 7.715 sec., glza

Used: 7z 15.07 beta - Sep 17, 2015 (one thread)

rar 5.40 beta 4 - Sep 21, 2015 (one thread)

arc 0.67 - Mar 15, 2014 (one thread)

nz 0.09 - Nov 4, 2011 (one thread)

zhuff_beta 0.99 - Aug 11, 2014

cabarc 6.2.9200.16521 - Feb 23, 2013

lz4 1.4 - Sep 17, 2013

qpress64 1.1 - Sep 23, 2010

zstd 0.0.1 - Jan 25, 2015

tor-small 0.4a - Jun 2, 2008

lzturbo 1.2 - Aug 11, 2014

lzhamtest_x64 1.x dev - Sept 25, 2015 (own VS2015 compile)

glza 0.3a - Jul 15, 2015 "

lzturbo seems essentially better, a few other happen to be better.

<comment><USER62> Thanks, yes, very good roster, I am aware of these performers, maybe out there some hidden excellent tight/fast ones exist?!

In my view the two best are:

169,476,113 bytes, 2.072 sec., 0.352 sec., lz4 -9

115,985,847 bytes, 386.192 sec., 0.850 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b4

LzTurbo benefits a lot from bigger blocks, in above example it uses 4MB block single-threadedly, and look how fast it is, if 16 threads are to be used what the outcome would be ... maybe 0.100 sec?!

<comment><USER63> Let's look at the most interesting there:

fastest encoding:

210,194,996 bytes, 0.333 sec., 0.371 sec., lz4 -1

fastest decoding:

169,476,113 bytes, 2.072 sec., 0.352 sec., lz4 -9

149,642,742 bytes, 2.069 sec., 0.646 sec., zhuff_beta -c0 -t1

gzip-alternative:

135,723,691 bytes, 8.318 sec., 1.677 sec., bro -q 3

114,602,026 bytes, 8.403 sec., 1.218 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1 -b800

prepacked:

104,094,380 bytes, 2313.780 sec., 1.693 sec., bro -q 10

90,239,627 bytes, 680.976 sec., 1.170 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b800

best compression:

82,891,405 bytes, 882.513 sec., 4.597 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1 -b800

77,286,010 bytes, 6497.059 sec., 7.715 sec., glza

there are missing e.g. density, zpaq, and comments there suggest that brotli doesn't look that good for other than text data ...

<comment><USER62> You miss the point, your list is meaningful only in general compression cases, the Brotli thread (where we are) is all about boosting textual decompression while having/exploiting little resources (RAM mostly) as in the cases of Web Browsers.

As one (Jyrki) of co-authors commented: ``` For more clarity on the situation, you could compare LZMA, LZHAM and brotli at the same decoding memory use. Possibly values between 1-4 MB (window size 20-22) are the most relevant for the HTTP content encoding. Unlike in a compression benchmark, there are a lot of other things going on in a browser, and the allocated memory at decoding time is a critically scarce resource. ``` Source: [http://google- opensource.blogspot.bg/2015/09/introducing-bro...](http://google- opensource.blogspot.bg/2015/09/introducing-brotli-new-compression.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm just wondering what it's like for a data compression expert whether algorithm or coding. It must be really wonderful and energising to see such interest and momentum in ones field.

I wonder if anyone working on the field would have a comment on that.

</comment><comment><USER64> It's strange to see an "introducing" post for an algorithm that's already included in a deployed technology (WOFF2), especially one that doesn't point that out.

</comment><comment><USER65> Call me a noob but I can't figure out how to build it...

[https://github.com/google/brotli](https://github.com/google/brotli)

<comment><USER66> cd tools

make

Worked for me on Ubuntu 14.04. Not sure what packages are necessary. YMMV.

<comment><USER61> mhm, `cd tools; make` worked on OS X 10.10.5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wonder if the CRIME attack would still work under this compression algorithm

<comment><USER68> The fundamentals of the CRIME attack work with any compression algorithm. That's why HTTP 2.0 doesn't use compression for headers and sends deltas instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> There's a fantastic site with benchmarks for almost all compressors ever: [https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/](https://quixdb.github.io/squash- benchmark/)

Strangely enough, no one compressor is better in all situations. :)

<comment><USER70> It doesn't look like Google's paper or the results on this site consider CloudFlare's zlib fork:

[https://github.com/cloudflare/zlib](https://github.com/cloudflare/zlib)

Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857784)

And a recent performance comparison with Intel's patches:

[https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison-...](https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison- of-intel-and-cloudflare-zlib-patches.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> "At Google, we think that internet users' time is valuable, and that they shouldn't have to wait long for a web page to load."

Says the company whose business model consists of convincing publisher to put ads in their website, thus slowing down page load times. Same company that lets you integrate Web elements like scripts and web fonts from their servers, once again making your webpage slower to load.

I know I'm exaggerating it a bit, but I really hate this company mission pitches that people in big companies constantly use to open their technical communications.

<comment><USER72> You are exaggerating and your rant is not fair or relevant. They are honest with that sentence and this is potentially a big contribution to software world and Internet.

<comment><USER71> I wasn't diminishing the technology's importance in any way. My point was actually the opposite: why spoil a good communication about technological breakthrough with such lazy and fake-sounding company propaganda?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Can't help but wonder if they stole this from some anxious college dropout who left their company to form their own compression startup.

;)

</comment><comment><USER74> "We hope that this format will be supported by major browsers in the near future, as the smaller compressed size would give additional benefits to mobile users, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use."

Is this the same story everytime that G. invents something, implements it in Chrome and then gains advantage, because takes it as standard and other browser hadn't implement it yet?

<comment><USER75> No, this was first proposed for inclusion in Firefox two years ago: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/CBhSPWs3HS8)

This wasn't developed and deployed in secret. According to the comments in [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559), the GitHub repository has been public since at least November 2014.

You may not like Google, but insinuating evil plans every time they do something cool isn't helping anyone.

<comment><USER76> Also, it's used in W3C Draft Standard for WOFF2 fonts:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF2/](http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF2/)</comment></comment></comment>


Pregel: Large-scale graph computing at Google - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/large-scale-graph-computing-at-google.html <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have any more information about this?

Is it built on top of MapReduce or is it totally separate from the ground up?

<comment><USER2> And is the paper from last year available anywhere? Are examples of implementations available?

<comment><USER3> <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1582716.1582723>

only paper I found. It's only a page though!

<comment><USER4> But it's on the accepted papers list for sigmod/pods 2010, so with luck in a month or so we'll know more. <http://j.mp/aPJuyA>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Implementing PageRank, for example, takes only about 15 lines of code."

Interesting. I wonder what it looks like.

<comment><USER6> It's a white powdery substance... oh, _code_ , never mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this can be considered an NP-complete oracle.</comment>


The Percy Jackson Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/percy-jackson-problem <comment><USER3> I have a younger sister who gives me her books to read. I have read nearly all of the Percy Jackson series and I find them enjoyable.

Also, consider that since 1984, the percent of 13-year-olds who are weekly readers went down from 70% to 53%, and the percent of 17-year-olds who are weekly readers went from 64% to 40%, and the percent of 17-year-olds who never or hardly ever read tripled during this period, from 9% to 27% - <USER2> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2014/05/13/kids- do...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2014/05/13/kids-dont-read- books-because-parents-dont-read-books/)

Why are we even slightly worried that a kid is reading a fun story about Greek mythology?

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

This article repeats many of the exact same complaints that my parents and my friends' parents had about the Wishbone[0] books (not the TV series). Fortunately, reading kid-friendly adaptations of classics neither rotted my brain nor destroyed my interest in the subject matter, and I remain an avid reader today.

My first exposure to Greek mythology came from (I kid you not) a reader in school[1]. It was probably intended for a 4th grade reading level. If anything, this only enhanced my interest in the matter - I read the entire D'Aulaires collection shortly afterward, studied Latin in high school, and still know many of the stories by heart.

I actually read the entire Percy Jackson series recently. It's a quick read for any adult, and like many kids' cartoons from the 70s, it's filled with jokes and references that only an adult can appreciate[2]. The writing quality is a little lower than _Harry Potter_ , but if I may, I never thought Rowling was a stellar writer anyway (her talent is in plot development).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_%28TV_series%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_%28TV_series%29)

[1] Do they still even have these anymore? They were basically consumable workbooks that had stories that you were reading as you practice spelling, grammar, etc.

[2] I actually am surprised in some sense that children enjoy the books, because to me, it seems like much of the humor would fall completely flat without a solid understanding of the stories that Riordan is adapting. Apparently he manages to make it work, but I would say that his writing is about as adult-friendly/adult-oriented as the first few books in the _Harry Potter_ series. (As opposed to the last couple of books, which are _definitely_ intended for a slightly older audience, and contain much darker elements).

<comment><USER5> Agreed. In middle school, my English teacher had a box of compic book (!!) adaptations of classic literature -- Murders in the Rue Morgue, etc. I had already read or heard of many of the authors, but this was a quick introduction / plot-overview of many of the rest of them. It was like finding a secret stash of new jelly bean flavors: Not the best thing, but damn if they weren't enjoyable to devour.

Best of all, they gave me enough plot-summary of some of them (Fall of the House of Usher) that one can recognize references to them in OTHER works (such as Bradbury's works) which I might not previously have understood.

I've re-read several of those classics later, but I still have fond memories of that box of comic books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a problem with articles like this. The arguments _against_ the "just so long as they're reading" position strike me as ridiculous. I feel like I ought to be saying, "Both sides make good points," but I don't see it that way.

For example, FTA:

> [Tim Parks] enlisted the example of his own children's reading habits, and > those of his young students, to argue that there is little evidence to > suggest that readers will make progress "upward from pulp to Proust."

Well, maybe not. Most people don't read Proust, after all. But does he think his kids will chose to read Proust if they are denied anything fun to read?

But ... perhaps these arguments are just badly stated. Would anyone care to give me a good argument that the "just do long as they're reading" position is a poor one?

\</comment><comment>--

EDIT. After some thought, I guess I don't take the "just so long as they're reading" position to the extreme. There are some things I would never give my kids to read; as a parent, I have limits. Perhaps these people that sound ridiculous to me just put their limits in different places.

Still, my request for a well stated argument stands.

<comment><USER7> > I guess I don't take the "just so long as they're reading" position to the > extreme.

Indeed. The way the article took that argument to the extreme felt like a straw man with statements like: "The opposite argument—that the kind of book a child has his or her nose buried in does make a difference"

I don't think anyone on the "other side" would say that the kind of book doesn't matter, just that less good books are still good.

<comment><USER8> And for 99% of the kids, the choice isn't between Percy Jackson and D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. It's (at best) between Percy Jackson and something else like Percy Jackson, only probably not as good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still on side with Neil Gaiman here. I read some totally inane non- literature as a kid. Still do, on occasion. Now literature is a major component of my life.

Do I think Percy Jackson is crap? Yes. Would I a tell a 7 year old not to read it? No way.

<comment><USER10> Just as YA fiction can encourage a reader to move on to more complex literature, strong sales of their YA fiction can encourage a writer to keep writing until they can produce more complex literature.

Compare JK Rowling's #1 versus #7. The first book is not very remarkable YA fiction. It is stocked with tropes from cover to cover. The last book actually seems handicapped by the need to maintain continuity with the first. The awesome thing that happened there is that the readers developed along with the author.

We need YA fiction of dubious literary value in the same way that we need minor league baseball. Some players never make it to the major league, but by playing at their own level, some can improve to the point that they can tackle a greater challenge. Is watching Indianapolis Indians versus Nashville Sounds as gratifying as NY Yankees versus Boston Red Sox? No, not usually. But the minor teams allow the pool of available professional and semi-pro baseball players to be much larger, which makes the top talent better.

In the same way, more readers support more authors, and more authors produce more bestselling authors, and more bestselling authors produce more literary masterpieces. To produce Shakespeare, you don't need infinite monkeys typing, but you do need an awful lot of them.

<comment><USER11> _We need YA fiction of dubious literary value in the same way that we need minor league baseball._

This really hit me, because while I believe that most of the YA fiction is crap that at least adults should try to move on from, I also firmly believe that this country (USA) could use more exercise and reading. Even if it's just pulpy YA fiction, or going for a walk, hey, at least that's better than vegging out on the couch to some reality TV. Thirty minutes of reading and thirty minutes of exercise every day would probably be a good idea for just about everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If crap books are pulling kids that wouldn't have been literate into reading, that's good. If crap books are crowding out quality, and causing kids to read garbage when 20 years ago they would have read something that wasn't wish fulfillment populated by stereotypes, that's bad.

I think that the internet is good because more people are reading because of it. I don't know that young adult trash is attracting people who would have instead read good things if it weren't for massive marketing budgets aimed at children. If it is, it's contributing to making (US) society stupider and less competitive.

<comment><USER13> I can't speak for anyone else, but (almost) 20 years ago I was finishing off my public library's shelf of Hardy Boys books and starting to beg my parents for whatever the newest Star Wars novel was. I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that, by and large, modern YA fiction is high art, but it's a tough case to make that they've gotten more pulpy than their predecessors.

<comment><USER8> The Percy Jackson books I'm reading now are radically better than the Hardy Boys books I read back in the 70s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm currently reading the tenth Percy Jackson book. IMO these are extremely enjoyable books, right about on the Harry Potter level. Maybe not quite reaching the heights of the best of HP, but more generally consistent. I've not yet started my six-year-old son on the first of them, but I certainly will soon, and I'll be delighted if he likes them, because they are good stories.

Personally, I don't get the anti-YA snobbery you see so often in this sort of article. The median "adult" novel sucks every bit as much as the median YA. Many of the classic novels of the 19th century would qualify as YA if written today. YA mostly just means the protagonists are younger and the writing is clearer.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's not mentioned: some of the YA stuff is superbly written and some of it is pulp. Believe it or not, kids know the difference.

</comment><comment><USER15> One worrisome trend that the author didn't really consider is that YA fiction isn't just for young adults anymore. Countless adults are reading it instead of anything else.

<comment><USER16> Depends on what you mean by worrisome. Some adults who were not readers earlier in their life, find it more approachable and less "preachy". I wouldn't give someone Faulkner as their first novel. That said, my belief is that they move on because eventually they aren't challenging to read and so become less engaging. An author who is being explicit so that a younger adult can catch the subtleties of a conversation, might make the more sophisticated reader feel patronized. Its a fine line.

That said, I did enjoy reading the Harry Potter books with my kids (we read them aloud), but reading the Animorphs was not something I could really do for any length of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand the underlying argument from Tim Parks side ("we should read more quality"). It seems to take for granted that "quality" literature is in some way better for us. How does reading, say, Faulkner or Brontë make me a better person? Is that effect stronger than the betterment I might get from (at least what I would consider) well-written commercially successful genre fiction like George RR Martin writes? Is "low quality" pulp like we get from Rick Riordan, Janet Evanovich, or Dan Brown somehow harmful to people that read it?

(Those are serious questions, I'm trying to understand the basis of where that side is coming from.)

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel like both 'sides' are talking around each other here. Both have points, both are overstated.

Personally, I'd worry less about the headiness of these books than what seem to be common themes of characters whose defining characteristics are innate - birth as a demigod, half-wizard or having a high midichlorian count.

Does anyone still write about 'normal' people doing great things?

<comment><USER19> Can you provide some examples of stories with characters whose defining characteristics aren't innate?

It seems like you're trying to say that you want to read stories about people who are 'normal', but that doesn't really mean anything. Are you just looking for books that don't have any element of fantasy to them?

<comment><USER20> Game of Thrones has tons of examples. The characters act according to the situation they are in, how they were raised, not generally because they are archetypes.

Is this character conspicuous because things worked out for him?

Or did things work out for this character because he is conspicuous in some way?

Game of Thrones has a lot of the first, virtually no teen book does. They are imbued with something special and everything works out because of their specialness. Sometimes multiple other characters join the cause sacrificing or putting on hold their lives because this person is a prince(ss).

With all this dystopian teen drama going around, I wonder how many SF authors are out there kicking themselves for not writing a romantic triangle into their story.

<comment><USER19> I haven't read Game of Thrones, so this doesn't clarify things for me that much. It's hard for me to think of books I've read where the main character is not notable in some way, but it's also hard for me to think of books I've read where things simply resolve themselves for the main character as a result of that notability, as opposed to effort on the part of the character. So I guess the answer is "Yes, lots of people are writing those books"?

<comment><USER21> > It's hard for me to think of books I've read where the main character is not > notable in some way

It's a standard plot: ordinary person living an ordinary life feels constrained by that life; _boom_ thing happens, causing ordinary person to go on a journey. Character development happens on the journey.

I'm kind of surprised that you can't think of _any_ book like this.

<comment><USER19> Please list some. I can easily think of books which follow the plot you outlined; I have a much harder time thinking of books which follow the plot you outlined where the main character remains normal through the duration (as opposed to finding some innate quality within themselves which helps them triumph over hardship).

edit: I mean, Harry Potter fits the bill you outlined, but is explicitly called out by the parent post as a half wizard.

<comment><USER17> In "The Hobbit", Bilbo Baggins is a boring little non-noteworthy hobbit who rises to his circumstances. The same thing applies to Frodo in LOTR.

I read James Patterson's "The Beach House" on a pair of short plane flights this past summer. It's a commercial/pulp thriller. The MC doesn't acquire any superpowers during the story except for becoming a badass willing to take significant risks when his life and that of his friends is on the line.

Edit to add: Jack Ryan, especially in the early Tom Clancy novels.

In any story worth reading the main character won't stay "normal" for the duration. The protagonist's change through the course of the story is part of the point of telling a story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> when i was young, the same people were railing against enid blyton. there seems to be this unspoken belief that reading should be "difficult" or "challenging" to have any merit, and that reading for pure pleasure was somehow not just suspect but bad for you. a popular phrase was "rotting the mind", by analogy with sugary foods rotting the teeth. even as a kid i thought that was deeply misguided, and nothing has changed my opinion since.</comment>


Planting a trillion trees could be our best strategy to tackle climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/planting-trillion-trees-could-be-our-best-strategy-tackle-climate-change-can-we-do-it/ <comment><USER2> 404 for me...

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190704184600/https://www.pbs.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190704184600/https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/planting- trillion-trees-could-be-our-best-strategy-tackle-climate-change-can-we-do-it/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What organizations out there that plant trees can one donate to?

<comment><USER4> Checkout tentree

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe we could grow trees and then cut them down. Choose something that grows really fast and make the wood good for something (besides firewood).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> separate discussion now at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859)

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a great recipe for wildfires.</comment>


A punk-inspired collective beat the streaming giants at their own game - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2020/01/18/how-apunk-inspired-collective-beat-the-streaming-giants-at-their-own-game/ <comment><USER2> Poorly written article. this is the app: [https://app.ampled.com/](https://app.ampled.com/)</comment>


Ramanujan's First Letter to G.H.Hardy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/ramanujans-first-letter-to-g-h-hardy-1913-33244f545e80 <comment><USER2> Neat. Great inspiration/motivation for those interested in Mathematics.

<comment><USER3> Is it though? It's about as inspiring as Albert Einstein is for physics students. In general, taking inspiration from a genius is akin to the American Dream of becoming a millionaire when starting as a dish washer. The world doesn't work that way and most people will be happier and more successful by not aiming for the stars...

Don't get me wrong though. Back in university I loved reading these things and it is still nice to read them. But I would be careful to derive anything beyond amazement from it. It can be very frustrating to see how much you struggle with simple things, while some Indian clerk without any formal education shows you how its done. And you have to admire Hardy's character for not feeling the same way, or at least to a reasonable extend, not showing this feeling.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of a parable I like.

A man once asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart told him to study at the conservatory for six or eight years, then apprentice with a composer for four or five more years, then begin writing a few sonatas, pieces for string quartets, piano concertos, etc. and in another four or five years he would be ready to try a full symphony. The man said, "But Mozart, didn't you write a symphony at age eight?"

Mozart replied, "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lovely piece of history.</comment>


Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/stuck-why-americans-stopped-moving-to-the-richest-states/282969/ <comment><USER2> While it can give you some insight, I'm wary of this kind of state-level analysis of migration, since the conclusions aren't necessarily the same if you look at movement on a more fine-grained scale. States are big places (well, some are). Texas is not very wealthy on average, for example, but some parts of it are much wealthier than other parts. And people are generally moving to the richer parts, not the poorer parts: the largest population increases are in counties that rank in the top-50 highest-income counties in the country (Collin County, Fort Bend County, etc.). Therefore assuming someone moving to Texas is moving to some kind of 'median Texas' is an oversimplification that might produce misleading conclusions.

It's possible people are still typically moving from wealthier to poorer areas (e.g. from Manhattan to Dallas), but we'd need more specific data than state- level flows to conclude that.

<comment><USER3> That's a great point. I'm pretty sure the term of art for this would be an [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do > migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with > higher wages"

Might have something to do with the aging population and baby boomers retiring. When you stop working, you no longer need to migrate to where the jobs are. Surprised the article didn't mention this.

<comment><USER5> Housing prices are _still_ recovering from the crash as well. Lots of people are still underwater and/or their home would sell at a loss compared to 7-8 years ago. Moving means taking accepting that loss.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Being underwater on a house means not being able to pull up sticks and just move. Strategic default might get you clear of the house, but your credit rating (and therefore your ability to rent) will be trashed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Over the last 10 years, salaries have largely flattened out and while in increase in people in given area has meant demand didn't. Cost of living being high and getting higher and salaries aren't able to keep up means people don't move there.

Why struggle, working 16 hour days to move up in a career so you can afford the $700k 2000 sq ft home on a postage stamp sized property in a so-so part of town when you can move to Arkansas, work at a remote development shop and afford a $350k 4000 sq ft home in a gated community with and acre and a half of wooded property with an in-ground pool?

<comment><USER3> > Why struggle, working 16 hour days to move up in a career so you can afford > the $700k 2000 sq ft home on a postage stamp sized property in a so-so part > of town when you can move to Arkansas, work at a remote development shop and > afford a $350k 4000 sq ft home in a gated community with and acre and a half > of wooded property with an in-ground pool?

That's a pretty big strawman. There are tons of other options for someone , and not all of us and our families need 4000 sq ft (or even 2000 sq ft) and 1.5 acres of property to be happy. I like living in densely populated areas rather than the equivalent of a personal ivory tower.

I think that American dream of owning a big house with a huge amount of property has done more harm than good.

<comment><USER5> I'm just presenting a possible equation that describes the phenomenon in question.

Lots of people ask themselves similar questions, but with different metrics.

\- Why live in an old 400 sq ft efficiency with exposed ductwork and pipes <80th st. Manhattan when I can live 15 minutes away in Williamsburg and have a modern 2 bedroom for the same price?

\- Why live in SF, making below market wages working for some startup, renting a bedroom in some guy's basement, when I could live in a deluxe 3rd floor walkup in Sunnyvale?

\- Why live in either place when I can take a dev job near Miami and enjoy round the year sun and beach, own a house and have a better cost of living anyway?

I'm not saying I agree with these questions, or the motivations behind them. But then again, I live in a very walkable, high service suburb instead of the nearest big metro area also. But I'd just as happily live in a small 2 br in NY. I grew up pretty rural and remember asking myself questions like

\- Why do I have to spend 2+ hours a day driving to/from work every day?

\- Wouldn't it be nice if I could live in a place where I could walk 5-10 minutes to get any of my basic services taken care of?

\- Wouldn't it be great to live in a place where I simply didn't need a car?

\- I'd like to have more people nearby to associate with.

\- etc.

So I get the desire both ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My friend just moved to Kansas City and purchased a house for $42k, all cash. It's a good house, ok neighbors, and ok living. Now he sit's at home, hacking away at a startup we are working on. I am moving to Palm Spring soon, for much of the same reason. If you make your money online, why not live cheep, at least while you are starting out.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious, does he have a family? Although I like the idea of moving somewhere cheap, persuading my family that this is a good idea is quite impossible :)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, thats my problem. I want to live somewhere boring and cheap, because all I need is a place to live within walking distance of a grocery and a good internet connection. My wife on the other hand is concerned about things like weather, and fun things to do.

<comment><USER10> From the house that you described your friend buying, it's probably in the downtown part of Kansas City. The Kansas City School District lost accreditation 2 years ago, meaning colleges don't have to accept diplomas awarded by any of the schools in the district. Not exactly the sort of place you'd want your children growing up, if you have any.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I totally agree. If you have kids or family, this is probably not the route to go. I am personally not a fan of Kansas City. My buddy did not have family when he decided to move from San Diego to Kansas City, so it was easy for him. He moved for the Google Fiber :)

As for me, my wife and I work together. She's my partner on most of my crazy business schemes, and we are in agreement about the move to the high desert area. We are moving to a house with solar panels (and battery storage) and trucked in water and gas. So, it's completely off the grid. I am still trying to figure out the internet, so far it looks like I'll be VPNing through a t-mobile phone ;)

I think once we have kids, we would have about 3 year grace period to get our act together. You can raise a 3 year old anywhere, but once they are older you really do need to worry about things like schools, playgrounds, kid friendly neighborhoods, and all those things. We intend to come back to San Diego in the end, no matter what.

<comment><USER10> > My buddy did not have family when he decided to move from San Diego to > Kansas City, so it was easy for him. He moved for the Google Fiber :)

If I were in his position, I would've waited for Google Fiber to launch in Austin (this year) and then moved there, or just moved now into an area that's going to get Google Fiber. It's a much nicer city - a lot of young people thanks to UT Austin (meaning a good dating scene), vibrant downtown culture, and a strong ecosystem of tech companies and startups (for a city that's not SF, NY, Boston or Seattle, anyway).

<comment><USER7> You're preaching to the choir. I made that argument. Personally I would move to Povo, Utah (not well research, so don't judge if Povo actually sucks). I like the nature and the climate of Utah better. But Austin is perfect for going out, culture, and large tech community. Kansas is perfect if you intend to live in your house, sit online, and not really interact with the other residents. I have actually visited Kansas City, it's not as bad as one might think, or much worse, depending on your outlook on hipsters. It's got a lot of people who, I swear, are living in Kansas ironically. The 30-somethings with philosophy degrees, black socks to their knees, smoking thin cigarets out of their sterling silver cigaret cases, and generally looking cool just for the sake of looking cool.

It was very strange to see a large, metropolitan city, on Tuesday, during daytime, around noon, completely and utterly empty. As if a zombi apocalypse rolled through and everyone was killed. That is Downtown Kansas City. I am not even kidding, I have pictures somewhere.

<comment><USER10> > Personally I would move to Povo, Utah (not well research, so don't judge if > Povo actually sucks). I like the nature and the climate of Utah better.

Right, Provo is another option. But my distaste for warm climates is only eclipsed by my distaste for religion, particularly fundamentalist ones like Mormonism. Provo is home to BYU and the largest Missionary Training Center for the LDS church. I don't mind religious people too much if they keep to themselves, but I can only imagine how often you would get accosted in public in Provo by "missionaries in training" trying to practice their "pitch". I'd be willing to tolerate the heat in Austin if it meant avoiding that.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, I did not know that about Povo. I am religious my self, but of the live and let live, nondenominational, type. I would not want to live in a place where people try to convert me all the time. That's something to consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Some of America's most productive cities for medium- and low-income families—Boston, Honolulu, San Jose, New York—are also the most expensive. This is often due to (or at least, exacerbated by) exclusionary zoning and housing regulations that limit the number of available units, which drives up the price of housing, ensuring that low-income families can't afford to live there."

Bingo.

Real estate right now is basically Satan. Anything that can be done to break real estate markets is good.

</comment><comment><USER12> I blame NIMBYs. Landowners in rich cities stop anything that might bring down the value of their property, especially additional housing.

</comment><comment><USER13> If the housing prices are increasing, it would mean that demand is increasing. But if so many people are leaving, demand should be decreasing and prices should be soft.

So I'd be curious to know how the survey was conducted, and whether it included families immigrating to the US.

In my county, Alameda, Ca., 30% of residents were born outside the US. That's a very strong immigration level and bound to affect the housing prices and keep demand and prices strong.

<comment><USER14> _If the housing prices are increasing, it would mean that demand is increasing. But if so many people are leaving, demand should be decreasing and prices should be soft._

Housing has a few problems. One is that it's price inelastic. If you destroyed 5% of the housing in Manhattan, prices and rents would at least double, and possibly go up 4-10x. We know this because of the 9/11 Boom (which was actually fueled by speculators anticipating future supply destruction-- which, thankfully, never came). It's counterintuitive, but something that objectively destroys value can (with inelasticity) increase the bulk value of what's out there. If 5% of housing was destroyed and prices doubled, most people would say that the housing market "improved by 90%". Well, no.

Increasing housing prices are, make no mistake, signs of something bad. Supply problems (mostly, rooted in NIMBY regulations) are a big part of what's going wrong. Another issue is that most localities are losing jobs, while a few "star cities" (SF, NYC) win.

The second problem with housing is that, because people are emotional about it, they don't sell when there is cause for prices to go down. They _hoard_. This negative correlation between price and volume means that housing prices barely drop when they're "supposed to", but drop cataclysmically when the real estate problem starts destroying real wealth (as in 2008) and jobs disappear and foreclosures happen.

Real estate is the blood-engorged cancer of the economy. It's a tax that goes nowhere and anyone who thinks high rents and property prices is good is just on the wrong side.

<comment><USER15> I've been looking to move in the near future, and I'm trying to find a city with a good nightlife and good job prospects that doesn't have insane housing costs if you live in the city and insane commute times if you live outside. I'm not making a ton of money where I am right now, but anywhere I'm looking at for tech jobs I'd be taking a pay cut even if my salary doubled because cost of living is so high. Housing in cities is just insane, and investment money slash NIMBY isn't helping.

<comment><USER16> Not to sound flippant, but so are you and everybody else. I have yet to read anywhere on the Internet that someone is looking for a boring town that's dedicated solely to cars with cheap housing and crap for jobs. What you seek is in very high demand, especially with the nascent trend of moving back into cities so it will be quite expensive relative to what you get.

NIMBYism accounts for a lot because people hate change and people moved somewhere for a specific aesthetic but simple market demand accomplishes a lot.

<comment><USER17> Three years ago we made a move against this trend. We moved from a large metropolitan tech-heavy area to a low-cost but rural and isolated area. It has lots of problem - no jobs, lots of poverty, etc, but if you are entrepreneurial and can figure out how to either travel for your work or make your location irrelevant, lots of places otherwise ignored suddenly become practical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know more about the Equality of Opportunity project? I'm trying to navigate their site to figure out the methodology for determining their numbers.

At this point, I'm not willing to believe that all of the cities with the highest rents also have the highest upward mobility. I'm assuming that they just found the places where the upwardly mobile either 1. _moved to_ or 2. _grew up in during the cities ' transitions_ into rich cities from struggling cities (an awful lot of cities went through that transition in the last 50 years.)

That would still be interesting stat, but say nothing about the chances for someone moving into the city now, who would be faced with crippling rents and 3 applicants for every open position.

I think people are moving away from unlivable cites to livable cities, and that there's lots of reverse migration to get closer to extended families. I'm considering the same.

edit: I still can't figure it out, this is the closest I could find - [http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/index.php/faq-s](http://www.equality- of-opportunity.org/index.php/faq-s). I'll email to find out if they accounted for migration.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article is crap. When the evidence does not fit your theory you don't complain about the evidence: Stupid American don't want to move to the rust belt and get rich!

Perhaps ideology is getting in the way of thinking. What about cost of living, actual job opening, baby boomers retiring, skills mismatches, cultural preferences, etc.

BTW-Internal migration has actually been studied for more than a century. This recent paper from the Fed has a good survey:

[http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.173](http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.173)

</comment><comment><USER20> WTF?! This entire article is predicated on a Atlas Van Lines survey. Atlas is an expensive moving company used only by corporate/govt and fairly wealthy customers. How is this representative in the least. Maybe for a survey showing where the wealthy are retiring or businesses are trying to establish themselves in new markets.

The article shows the right approach in their leading graphics but then ignores it. Show where people renting cheap U-Haul type moving trucks are moving or no-name movers to find out where the bulk of average to lower income and/or young people are moving. That's the trend you want to look at.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm assuming ND, MT, and maybe TX are due to the shale oil boom?

<comment><USER22> ND and MT, probably yes. TX is just TX being awesome.

<comment><USER23> Notwithstanding the Awesome, there is plenty of fracking goin' on.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tight_natural_gas_plays_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tight_natural_gas_plays_in_the_lower_48_states_of_the_USA.jpg)

<comment><USER24> This meets with my experience, not to mention that north of Amarillo and Midland/Odessa are currently booming, at least as far as can see when I'm out there. Not to downplay the larger cities in the state that are growing.

<comment><USER25> Are all the improvements 'Public Works', say, highway/freeway construction? That was the feeling I got spending many months of the last two years in Austin & Dallas. Every freeway was being built, expanded or repaired... my GPS was constantly telling me to exit when nothing but dirt & Jersey barriers existed. Cannot recall the source, but I believe all this work is done w/ Fed stimulus + taxes from all the oil/gas they're pumping & petro refining.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toxic Workplaces Are Driving Video Game Developers to Unionize - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/toxic-workplaces-are-driving-video-game-developers-to-unionize-cda5c8b73317?source=collection_home---4<comment>3</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----- </comment><comment><USER2> I wonder if there is even potential for this to work out well for the workers that are unionizing (in the long term). Game development is a field that people want to work in. They're willing to take significant pay cuts and tolerate poor workplaces to be able to work in game development. If workers unionize then companies can probably just find a cheaper workforce elsewhere, eg Poland. Companies could even hire more employees over there for less money. On top of all that, these companies are also competing with a mass of indie developers that are willing to put inordinate amounts of work in. It just seems like the situation is stacked against these workers.</comment>


Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604242/googles-new-chip-is-a-stepping-stone-to-quantum-computing-supremacy/ <comment><USER2> I was excited to read this article up to the last sentence, a quote from the program manager "We're trying to get support within Google, and this experiment has been very good to get other engineers talking to us." to me, this statement negates much of the positive spin of the article. That said, the title does say 'stepping stone.'

My primary professional interest is AI and quantum computing to pushing the field forward seems almost inevitable.

<comment><USER3> I did not bother to read the article. The title looks suspicious to me. For a scientific breakthrough, you don't plan it ahead. Instead, you work hard for a long time and all in a sudden you hit that milestone. It is unpredictable and certainly cannot be planned easily.

<comment><USER4> The LHC was planned 25 years before it was a reality. In fact, one of the first pictures put on the WWW when it was created at CERN was a schematic of the LHC:

[https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/update-...](https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/update- for_the_public/2013/04/screensnap2_24c.jpg)

<comment><USER5> The LHC wasn't a scientific milestone, it was an engineering one. Using the LHC has _led_ to milestones.

<comment><USER6> In many fields, for the past several decades, scientific progress has been inextricably bound with technical progress. New tools yield new experiments/discoveries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm happy that this project is coming along. I never had any contact with the physical/chip team but I did attempt to contribute something to the theory group in a 20% project. It was absolutely the best and most challenging work I had during my stint at Google, and I can definitely say the quantum theory group were the brightest minds I met there.

I think they could be on to something with their approaches, both physical and theoretical. I could definitely see a QPU in a few years serving a role in Google Cloud for specific computations. But I don't think that the groups are currently getting the headcount and engineering power that they need, I think the worst bottleneck I saw on the theoretical side was a lack of fulltime engineers to test and implement the researcher's awesome ideas. I'm hoping that gets more attention and resources, because I think Google might actually be sitting on another goldmine here.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want to read the paper laying out the plan the article is referring to, it's here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263)

</comment><comment><USER9> When "reach a milestone in computing history" is written 4 times before getting to the content (hn title, article title, article summary, first sentence of article), the article feels a lot like click bait, which really discourages me from wanting to give it any of my time. Anyone want to write a tldr?

<comment><USER8> Martinis' group has laid out a plan to build a 49 qubit quantum computer that can solve a problem that is intractable for classical supercomputers with any known algorithm. If they pull it off we'll have the first provisional evidence that we can build quantum computers that can solve a problem classical computers cannot in a reasonable amount of time.

Caveats: it is possible there exists a superior classical algorithm that can solve the problem efficiently enough, and that we just haven't found it yet. It is also still within the realm of possibility that there exists an algorithm that can simulate any quantum computer with only polynomial slowdown, which would show quantum computers are not drastically faster for any problem.

</comment></comment><comment> mck- I'm surprised there is no mention of D-Wave systems - the quantum computer that Google bought a while ago [1] and how/why they decided to build it themselves from scratch.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the- quantu...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-quantum- computer-from-D-Wave)

<comment><USER10> The D-Wave is not a quantum computer in the meaning that term usually has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wake me up when it's ready. For two decades we hear announcements that Quantum Computers are almost ready.

Yet beside bluffs and prototypes that require superconductor with very cold -230° C to do little, none of them resurfaced later.

Quantum Computers can be exiting and devastating. What happens if the first company/state keeps it a trade secrete and uses Quantum Computers without telling the rest of the world? (what if...) With Quantum Computers all the "secure digital stuff" of today can be broken, say good bye to your cloud online security. A good/bad actor can read everything. We should think about how to mitigate this issue, isn't it?

<comment><USER12> Plenty of people have been thinking about it for years and developing encryption algorithms which should remain secure even if someone manages to build a working quantum computer.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography)

<comment><USER11> Good link. Nevertheless HTTPS/HTTP2/TLS/bcrypt/MD5/SHA-256/AES/etc need an upgrade/replacement to be ready for day X, so the internet isn't really prepared yet. Also mind all the previously already leaked encrypted data got harvested by bad actors and is waiting in archives to be easily readable on day Y.

<comment><USER13> There is a plan. There already are postquantum encryption schemes (and drafts to use them), and we can wait with signatures for a while. NIST will be making recommendations soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are quantum chips supposed to replace the current CPUs and GPUs? Or are they supposed to be "just" another component that we connect to the CPU, the same way we connect GPUs?

<comment><USER15> We are so far from talking about this that your question is nearly meaningless. Quantum computing has not even been demonstrated yet. This "quantum supremacy" is for a highly contrived algorithm and set up that has very little if any real world use cases.

A generalized quantum computer able to run standard computing algorithms is very far in the future and so much basic research in computing science has to happen before it can be talked about meaningfully.

<comment><USER16> What about quantum machine learning? assuming quantum computers become powerful tomorrow, won't they be useful in that field?

<comment><USER17> Depends on what you mean by powerful and how that can translate to a meaningful calculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, now I can finally digitally simultaneously love and hate Google.

<comment><USER19> Just don't open the box, and we will all be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is still just an annealer, right? Way cool, just nothing beyond what DWave is offering.

<comment><USER21> No, it is more than an annealer. I think they are aiming for a 7 x 7 lattice of qubits with nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates and one-qubit operations that are enough for computational universality.

(The noise rates will still be relatively high, and they might not be able to measure [and reinitialize] qubits at intermediate steps, feeding results back adaptively. Practically, that would limit using fault tolerance.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a definitive book explaining Quantum Computing from the ground up?

<comment><USER23> The best book out there is still Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. It isn't quite current, as it lacks both the advances in hardware (superconducting qubits) and algorithms (quantum/classical hybrids & the sampling benchmark that this article is talking about). It's still the best way to get started as it introduces everything from the linear algebra all the way up.

I work in quantum computing and it's the book I always recommend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> All wasted on finding the best advert to match to your search terms....

</comment><comment><USER25> I hope that doesn't finish as a "quantum bubble".</comment>


Show HN: Metaform, a simple Terraform version managing wrapper - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sevagh/metaform <comment><AUTHOR> A quick poll.

My initial idea was to put `tf-version` files in each Terraform recipe directory e.g. `echo "0.9.11" > kafka-prod-useast1a/tf-version".

I could check for the existence of such a file with `metaform` to skip the prompt (or prompt if the file doesn't exist).

However this imposes a specific workflow on people developing Terraform recipes. Does this sound like a good idea?</comment>


Offer HN: Free logo design for an open source project - <AUTHOR> At http://www.fairpixels.co, we help ambitious projects look less sucky through mainly logo and brand design as well as other design services.
We love open source, so we launched www.logodust.com a while ago and started open sourcing our own unused logo designs.
Today we want to expand our open source efforts and design an awesome logo for an Open source project that one of you is working on for free.
Here's what to do:
1. Pitch your open source project in the comments and add a URL to your website/github
2. The most upvoted project by this community, 48hours from posting this, wins the free logo design service.
3. Make sure we can contact you by having an email address on your website or your profile
Looking fwd checking all of your open source projects! <comment><USER2> DebConf17 is looking for a logo (2 days left for proposals):

[https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17/Artwork/LogoProposal...](https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17/Artwork/LogoProposals)

The Debian long-term security support project is looking for a logo. Other Debian related projects are looking for icons:

[https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/RequestArtwork](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/RequestArtwork)

Tangentially related, the Debian release team is looking for release artwork for Debian stretch:

[https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Stretch](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Stretch)

<comment><USER3> Really endorse this one, Debian project is giving to the community for years and deserve giveback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> K-9 Mail, the single largest open source E-Mail client on Android, is in dire need of a new logo!

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9)

Related info, I have been working on PGP/MIME support in K-9 full time since January. Most of that work is already merged on master, and is going to make it into a release very soon!

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with the current logo? It looks great!

<comment><USER4> It really sticks out in the launcher, next to a pile of material style icons it just looks... old

<comment><USER6> "It really sticks out in the launcher" seems like a pro, not a con.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The RaftLib C++ library (and eventually with other language bindings) aims to bring heterogeneous parallel programming to the masses. We get rid of any and all explicit thread operators, by allowing users to build applications using C++ iostream-like operators. Using our library you can build applications that are as or more performant than you could build yourself with pthreads, but with only a few lines of code. It's portable to Linux/OS X (windows support is coming).

Project Page: [http://raftlib.io](http://raftlib.io) GitHub Page: [https://github.com/RaftLib/RaftLib](https://github.com/RaftLib/RaftLib) Wikipedia Page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaftLib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaftLib)

Email is on my web page: [http://jonathanbeard.io](http://jonathanbeard.io)

Vote for me! We need a better logo!!

Thanks for reading. If you like it, please contribute. We're rolling out user space threading right now, next project is to build back in accelerator support.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Really like mine. As luck would have it, the distributed daemon I haven't released yet is called "oar" so it fits perfectly :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh cool idea! GatsbyJS definitely needs one. All we've got right now is this crappy thing I throw together in Inkscape :-) [https://twitter.com/gatsbyjs](https://twitter.com/gatsbyjs)

Pitch: "Gatsby is a React.js static site generator. It transforms plain text into dynamic blogs and websites using the latest web technologies."

[https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby)

</comment><comment><USER9> I like to propose Ledger ([http://ledger-cli.org](http://ledger-cli.org)), a command-line double-entry accounting system, which is account and currency agnostic, featuring filtered reports, budgeting, forecasting, time-keeping, a Python module, and much more.

<comment><USER10> Once you go ledger you never go back!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> HTML5 browser version of Freeciv: [https://play.freeciv.org](https://play.freeciv.org)

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hey thanks for the offer. I wrote an open source Elixir application called Magnetissimo. It goes all over the internet, finds torrents and indexes them in a simple to use UI with one-click download links.

Elixir was paramount for this project's simplicity. I leveraged GenServer and the BEAM VM to effortlessly created different crawl queues that utilize all the cpu's cores to maximize throughput. It's really really fast.

The idea is that anyone can clone the project, run it, and get upwards of 400+ torrents indexed per second immediately. Your own personal kickasstorrents. Or host one for your friends and family.

Would love to add a logo to the project.

\- Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/B9OFxTx.png](http://i.imgur.com/B9OFxTx.png)

\- Github: [https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo](https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo)

\- License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER13> How do you tell which is the most upvoted comment? Do you see comment scores? I don't.

<comment><USER14> I don't have totally sure, but I think the comments are arranged by upvotes.

<comment><USER15> I don't think they are, there's often comments at the top that are posted x minutes ago where x < 10\. I don't think posts that new could have that many votes. There's probably a weighting factor comparing votes to recency, maybe other factors too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats my guess as well. Thats why we chose to give it a 48 hour wait, so when the storm has settled, we can pick the top comment.

<comment><USER16> Scores are available via the API... you should use that.

<comment><USER17> I don't think they are, if you mean this API: [https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12372638.json?pri...](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12372638.json?print=pretty)

Maybe you could send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Snebu ([http://www.snebu.com](http://www.snebu.com), [https://github.com/derekp/snebu](https://github.com/derekp/snebu)), the Simple Network Backup Utility, is a snapshot-style agentless backup system for anything that supports GNU Find and Tar. It supports local and remote backups, compression, and maintains a backup catalog in a database (sqlite). It will eventually support encryption, cloud and tape storage, and direct backup of KVM virtual machines.

I was thinking of having a logo representing a gear shift shown in reverse (backup = reverse). But lately I was more thinking of a logo in the style of Dr. Seuss character.

</comment><comment><USER19> We don't have a logo yet!

Download an entire website from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

[https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine- downloader](https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader)

</comment><comment><USER20> Off-topic (sorta): Is there any easy way to find out about this kind of open source design offers? I think I might be interested in trying some and I didn't even know all these existed.

How would I find out about more of them in the future?

<comment> linux-modder Opensource project pages and most Open Source centric / leaning blogs are good sources for info on these sorts of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Botwiki (botwiki.org) is an open-source catalog of "friendly, useful, artistic online bots", and tools and tutorials that can help you make them.

I started this project shortly before the recent hype around bots, and it focuses mostly on the "indie" side of bots and botmaking, with things like Monthly Bot Challenge (which is currently on hold, but resuming hopefully soon), badges (using Mozilla's Open Badges), and soon, botmaking workshops.

Project's GitHub page: [https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org](https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org)

</comment><comment><USER22> WebAssembly(wasm) needs one [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/112](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/112)

</comment><comment><USER23> Please let it be Zookeeper!

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

I don't think they're looking for a new one but every time I see that logo I think they should.

</comment><comment><USER24> Open Notebook is an application for helping math teachers create content for their classes. It is designed to be extremely easy for non-technical users to pick up in just a few minutes. The application allows creating documents for print, or in the case of classrooms with students that have computers accessible at home, the application doubles as an interactive environment for students to complete their work for digital submission.

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

<comment> linux-modder @jaltekruse, reach out to me at the email on my profile, I am starting up similar stuff and may have some cross population ideas / leads

<comment><USER24> @linux-modder would be great to exchange ideas. I see a public key on your profile but no e-mail. Feel free to send me a message at the address listed on my project homepage. developers AT opennotebookmath DOT com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [http://mozilla.org](http://mozilla.org) apparently need one

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazing offer, thanks for the opportunity!

LentilDI is an ES6 Dependency Injection framework that aims to:

\- reduce the boilerplate in wiring stuff up

\- reduces the complexity of managing the ordering of dependencies.

\- make testing components easy and transparent

Github: [https://github.com/magicmark/LentilDI](https://github.com/magicmark/LentilDI)

It's a hobby side project at the moment, but it's well tested and any assistance/feedback would be great!

</comment><comment><USER27> Approach0 is willing to try a new logo design.

[https://github.com/approach0/search- engine](https://github.com/approach0/search-engine)

Appeoach0 is a math-aware search engine. It is about to publish its first source-code release very recently.

</comment><comment><USER28> vmprof could use a good logo

vmprof is a platform to understand and resolve performance bottlenecks in your code. It includes a lightweight profiler for CPython 2.7, CPython 3 and PyPy and an assembler log visualizer for PyPy.

recent updates [https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2016/08/pypy-tooling- upgrade-j...](https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2016/08/pypy-tooling-upgrade- jitviewer-and.html)

docs [https://vmprof.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://vmprof.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

github [https://github.com/vmprof](https://github.com/vmprof)

</comment><comment><USER29> Great work! Thanks for sharing your unused work.

My side project is a HN reader. (yeah, I know) [https://hack.ernews.info](https://hack.ernews.info)

Some parts of the back-end are open source, and I intend to rewrite the front- end in Elm and make it open source as well.

Maybe you want to try and make a more "modern" version of that classic "Y" logo? So far I just used some principles from Google's material design, and a free icon set. I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible, especially for mobile users.

Happy to hear any comments/advice on the design.

</comment><comment><USER30> gngr[1] is a browser that champions privacy. It is a complete written-from- scratch project, and not just a wrapper around existing layout engines.

Our current logo and website design, if you can call it that, is a developer created, few days effort. We would be very happy with some professional design help.

Notes:

* gngr is short for ginger, the spice.

* The theme would be "spicy, but not shiny".

[1]: [https://gngr.info](https://gngr.info) and [https://github.com/uprootlabs/gngr](https://github.com/uprootlabs/gngr)

</comment><comment><USER31> ZoneMinder, an open source video surveillance system. I recently redesigned the website, but that was pretty easy compared to a logo.

[https://zoneminder.com](https://zoneminder.com) & [https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/](https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/)

The contact form on the website works, but the email in my profile is probably the better option.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER32> We are currently building the Charme API specification, a JSON based API format that allows to build RESTful and RPC APIs, with support for result streaming and synchronous as well as asynchronous communication.

We just finished the core spec and are currenrly working on protocol specific specifications and the core extensions. A lot of work, so that we hadn't any time to think about a logo (only a temporary one, to not to be a Twitter egg, see @CharmeAPI).

Would be great if we could get a professional logo this way! More info: charme.org

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> I work on Tasks, a GPLv3 licensed to-do list for Android. It is based on the source code of a popular app that got bought out and shut down a few years ago.

I have no design chops and the app doesn't really have any branding.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tasks](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tasks)

[https://github.com/tasks/tasks](https://github.com/tasks/tasks)

</comment><comment><USER34> Coffer is a containerization platform for the minimalist. We are focused on creating a straightforward platform for developers who need to work in isolated development environments without the port forwarding and various other complexities that come with other platforms.

[https://github.com/Max00355/Coffer](https://github.com/Max00355/Coffer)

Thanks for doing this

</comment><comment><USER35> Mathics, a free and open source Mathematica interpreter is looking for its first logo.

We're planning to release a 1.0 in the next few weeks and really need a logo to accompany the release.

[http://mathics.github.io/](http://mathics.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Dokan Library (think FUSE for Windows) needs a new logo for their upcoming 1.0.0 release. [https://github.com/dokan- dev/dokany/issues/243](https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/issues/243)

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://ohsloth.com/](https://ohsloth.com/)

Ohsloth is an open source copy and paste manager that aims to provide contextual actions based on snippet content.

It is still super early but it definitely could use some design love!

</comment><comment><USER38> We've been looking for a logo for some time! :)

[https://github.com/thestonefox/SteamVR_Unity_Toolkit/issues/...](https://github.com/thestonefox/SteamVR_Unity_Toolkit/issues/292)

<comment><USER39> VR need love !

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My open source Vlc remote is pretty ugly. Can I nominate it to get a better logo? Source @ [https://github.com/nicolasbrailo/VlcFreemote](https://github.com/nicolasbrailo/VlcFreemote)

</comment><comment><USER41> Just getting started on paddock: Up and Running development environment built with `parse-server` and `docker`.

[https://github.com/nutcore/paddock/](https://github.com/nutcore/paddock/)

</comment><comment><USER42> [http://cropme.ru](http://cropme.ru) is a great app for instant screen sharing, still using stock logo. The project is free, used by a lot of people and for sure opensource

</comment><comment><USER43> My project is in big need for a nice logo and a Mac dock icon [http://github.com/danielravina/headset](http://github.com/danielravina/headset)

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER44> netboot.xyz ([https://netboot.xyz](https://netboot.xyz)), uses the iPXE project to network boot Operating System installers and utilities from quick and easy to use menu.

I have no logo today but would love to see what you might be able to come up with.

</comment><comment><USER45> It would be great to have a logo for bash3boilerplate.sh

</comment><comment><USER46> Please post the results in an update when you can! (=

</comment><comment><USER47> Both Diplomat (github.com/wearefarmgeek/diplomat) and Postie ([https://github.com/johnhamelink/postie](https://github.com/johnhamelink/postie)) are looking for logos.</comment>


Evolving App Store Business Models - <AUTHOR> https://david-smith.org/blog/2016/09/05/evolving-business-app-store-business-models/ <comment><USER3> I don't doubt that advertising and IAP are more successful monetization strategies than selling your app, but if I got into indie app development it would be because I wanted to make apps which I myself liked, respected, and would want to use. That immediately precludes advertising and makes IAP very challenging.

<comment><USER4> Then obviously you shouldn't do indie app development.

<comment><USER3> we have reached the same conclusion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tend to have a visceral reaction when indie devs proclaim that paid software is "over". (Which is not what David Smith is doing, but what a lot of commentary in this genre tends to look like.) It's not that ads are _inherently_ bad — podcast sponsorships, The Deck, and affiliate links tend to be decent and respectful — but what kind of software future can we look forward to if the only way to make money is to sell our UI real estate to the highest bidder? There are many ethical lines that are all to easy to cross in the pursuit of profit. This is the same path that has turned mobile games into exploitative, IAP-driven casinos — and the web into a murky bog of autoplaying videos and 10-second load times.

Here's my opinion: pay-once software will never disappear. Not now, not on an infinite timescale. For things like Twitter clients or text editors, sure — it'll be very difficult to sell your wares at a premium when there's so much free competition. But certain pieces of software are just too unique to be cloned. Nobody minds paying money for Model 15[1] because it's the only one of its kind. Maybe instead of spending years and years working on a single productivity app, we should focus on building stuff like _that_.

[1]: [https://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/model-15-app](https://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/model-15-app)

<comment><USER6> The age of consumer pay once software is dead and has been for awhile - <USER2> from non mobile games. Which software companies are actually still making real money from consumers? I can only think of one - Microsoft - and even they have moved to a subscription model. I'm a developer and if I didn't have an MSDN license, I could probably get away with only free tools that MS provides and open source software.

Adobe is still doing well, but they are also doing subscriptions and mostly prosumers who are running businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It kind of sucks people are unwilling to pay for software.

Maybe the free to play strategy is the way to go for consumer facing software.

<comment><USER8> I think one* of the reason is payment is hard. There are lots of people without Credit Card ( Non-US specific ) and this makes paying requires a little more friction.

Yes, I think IAP are only monetizing _some users_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The key is to offer something in exchange for the ad view. Like in Sim City and Abyssrium, they actually give you something. When it becomes a choice, it becomes a willful transaction, and not only do users willingly and repeatedly watch ads for you, they don't mind it.

Unlike streaming content, in a game it's easy to reward the player. In fact, it's much easier than making the player pay for the game upfront, or pay for the reward.

<comment><USER10> Can you describe this in more detail? I haven't seen this technique.

<comment><USER11> Concrete example.

In Tap my Katamari you only see ads when you choose to. You can watch an add to double the money accumulated when you where away. From time to time the king will come with gifts, cash or candy, but ocassionaly the reward will be "watch an add for plenty of candy" or "watch an add to get money/tap for N seconds".

This makes the person playing interested in watching the add, well, playing it at least while doing other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for sharing! Can you tell a bit more what ads (and ads networks) you are using for monetization?

Do you plan to use subscription models in any of your apps?

<comment><USER13> In the article the author mentions they're using admob

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> But HNers keep telling me that advertising is dead business model.

<comment><USER15> Intrusive advertising is a dead business model. Advertising in iOS apps is non-intrusive by design. Distracting, certainly, but you will not have videos that pop over content and play automatically while you are in the middle of reading the article.

<comment><USER16> _" Advertising in iOS apps is non-intrusive by design."_

Not sure what apps you're using, but in many ad-supported apps I use, the ads are always visible or takeover the full screen between screens - both very intrusive. There's one game my kids tried and they could barely go a minute without accidentally hitting an ad with their palm while tapping with fingers.</comment></comment></comment>