White graduates of Harvard make $94,000 more salary than their black classmates - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/how-to-get-the-most-from-business-school <comment><USER2> The title is disingenuous. It said [Will] and what fields is the writer referring to? And then it proceeded to,

 _Thankfully the study wasn't all bad for non-white business school grads. In three industries — real estate, manufacturing, and government — people of color earned more than Whites and Asians._

So, what exactly is the writer saying?

<comment><USER3> It's based on a survey. 6-8 years after graduation, white MBA grads report $94k higher annual earnings than Asian grads.

<comment><USER4> That's not what the chart in the article shows

<comment><USER3> This chart? [http://thehustle.co/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/1x-1.png](http://thehustle.co/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/1x-1.png) What does it say then?

<comment><USER5> That to me shows an income disparity of approximately 20,000 between white (and asian) men and black (and hispanic and native american) men 6 - 8 years after getting an MBA.

<comment><USER3> Oh you're right. That chart aggregates values from all the schools. But only Harvard Business School (mentioned in the headline) had a gap of $97,800.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't see how they got that information from the linked Bloomberg source. There is this information about a gender gap though: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/the- real-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/the-real-cost-of- an-mba-is-different-for-men-and-women) What I'm mainly trying to figure out is if this is the mean (possibly affected by a few outliers) or a median. The gender pay gap is visible in the median.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's the original article from Bloomberg Business that this article ripped off: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-07/business-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-07/business- school-is-worth-22-000-more-if-you-re-white-or-asian)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is hardly surprising given the greater than 100 point difference in average SAT scores between the two groups.

<comment><USER7> This note makes no sense. School source would equalize SAT differences.

I doubt HBS would allow a 100 pt difference in SAT score for minority students vs. others.

Instead, you can argue, despite normalizing for SAT score and for School choice, you still show inequality via income a few years later.

Common HN opinion is that if only minorities would reach the same schools (Stanford, Harvard), they would not experience discrimination. However, as the OP shows, even adjusting for School, you end up with unexplained income variances between racial groups.

Discussed here a few weeks back in the comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741116)

<comment><USER6> Actually, 100 points is an underestimate. At elite schools, there is a significant difference between the average SAT scores of admitted white students and admitted black students --- usually several hundred points. The average SAT scores of Asian students are about 30-50 points higher than those of admitted white students.

These are facts and easily verifiable.

<comment><USER8> If it's easily verifiable, do you have a source?

(It might also help if the article was even talking about undergrad and/or SAT scores.)

<comment><USER7> I agree with rmtx - show your Data & sources. The recent Supreme Court case on Affirmative Action (Fisher II) doesn't even present any SAT criteria reference in respect to affirmative action. More info below

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_cour...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_court_dispatches/2015/12/fisher_v_university_of_texas_returns_to_scotus_the_justices_can_still_barely.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If programming languages were religions… - <AUTHOR> http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2011/02/16/if-programming-languages-were-religions/ <comment><USER2> Programming languages ARE religions. Just check those language wars out there!

</comment><comment><USER3> smalltalk is the Anglican Church. Historically important, but nobody really believes in it anymore.

If javascript is lisp with C's trappings, then the religious equivalent of javascript is obviously Bahai.

</comment><comment><USER4> And what about Javascript? Smalltalk?</comment>


Alaska will be home to the highest-flying wind turbine, floating at 1,000 feet - <AUTHOR> http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/officehours/2014/apr/01/alaska-will-be-home-highest-flying-wind-turbine-floating-1000-feet/

<comment><USER2> That's an awesome idea.

If the tether was attached to a winch then they could lower or raise the turbines depending on the optimal altitude for wind speed.

Maintenance could also be much easier because it can be lowered rather than sending people up a turbine.

If you add a turbine behind the main turbine, how much less efficient would it be?

Wouldn't the tether be the most difficult part of this? Why is that not discussed more in the article or even shown in the picture?</comment>


Raspberry Pi Zero production getting on track - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-zero-production-getting-on-track/ <comment><AUTHOR> _" "This isn't quite the same as the other Pis, because the other Pis are made by RS and Farnell. We make these Pis, so you're actually looking at a small company trying to scale." "We've got good resources and good engineers, but you're looking at a small company trying to scale production,"_ \-- Eben Upton

Explanation as to why the PiZero is hard to get.</comment>


Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533 <comment><USER2> This really is something

>"Google's Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry's concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. "There's a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to _kill people incorrectly_ ,"

I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.

<comment><USER3> > I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where > tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must > have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in > killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.

Sure, it's valid to disagree with Google's involvement in this project, but I find it incredibly hard to justify the claim that private enterprises traditionally don't equip armed forces. Providing technology and hardware to armed forces is something that private companies have been doing for centuries. Heck non-state groups selling arms to armed forces likely predates the existence of states as we know them. Most armies prior to the modern era were militias that privately purchased their own equipment.

This project is "assisting in killing people" to at most the same degree that developing munitions guidance, military radar systems, and sonar are "assisting in killing people" (I'd argue less since this technology is purely about reviewing reconnaissance data, not about the actual deployment of weapons) and private companies have been developing those systems for over a century.

<comment><USER4> That's not a very apt analogy. Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public utility. They collect vast amounts of personal information / intelligence because people willingly give it to them.

Google assisting in drone strikes is like the military using the electrical grid to electrocute people in their homes or delivering lethal poisons via the Starbucks Rewards program.

What if your favorite cereal brand started participating in assassinations? It's not inconceivable to deliver poison that way. What if, due to a software error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned Cheerios.

There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non- militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime, "preventative" military campaign.

<comment><USER5> > Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public > utility.

That is not an accident. They worked overtime to construct that image.

Yet it might come as a little surprise that they are more in bed with the government than Northrop Grumman, Verizon, Goldman and Comcast: [https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000067823) they spent about $18M in lobbying last year outspending all those other "evil" companies so to speak.

Schmidt was directly involved in Hillary's campaign and there is a picture circulating of him at one of campaign events wearing a "staff" badge: [https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae...](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae4080001) that coupled with the "killing people the right way" is all you need to know what Alphabet stands for and where it is headed.

> There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non- > militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime

I claim that there isn't in the sense that once a company becomes large enough it will start participating in killing people "the right way" as Schmidt put it. That happens regardless if we still want to have that cutesy, colorful, not-evil search company image. Amazon (AWS) is selling billion dollars worth of services to the CIA, I am sure that's not for cat pictures and buying books. Microsoft's hands I am pretty sure are not exactly clean either, etc.

<comment><USER6> And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly and without any moral qualms offer their products to whomever who can pay for them, be it a terrorist, a government agent, or a common run-of-the-mill criminal, each of who then goes to perform their horrible acts, aided by the purchased product.

These manufacturers are playing both sides and should definitely be kept an eye on, I tell you!

<comment><USER5> > And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly > and without any moral qualms

Good point. Not just moral legal as well. There is a whole bunches countries companies cannot do business with because of embargoes. In many cases it is because of terrorism. Depending on what technology there are also export controls to watch out for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We faced this at work recently (at our decidely sub-Google scale) when sales guy refused to bid for an opportunity at a weapons manufacturer so we had some interesting discussions around the issue.

Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.

An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.

And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.

<comment><USER8> > Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad.

In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].

Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.

1\. [https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more- than-20-mil...](https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more- than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051)

<comment><USER9> Your link attributes the 2.5 million victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide to the US. How does that make any sense?

<comment><USER10> It's fairly obvious that if not for US military activity in the region, US backing of Lon Nol, and the massive covert US bombing campaign in Cambodia, that Cambodia would have never been destabilized to the point that a fanatical regime like the Khmer Rouge could have come to power. A lot of Cambodian people would make that connection too, just so you know.

<comment><USER9> So let me see if I got this right. The US is in a mighty struggle to stop the expansion of communism, a communist faction takes control of Cambodia and proceeds to kill one in four people, and this is US's fault?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ethically, I wonder if this would be any different if Google built a similar software for consumer applications and licensed it similarly to Android being used for surveillance in both the US and far more paranoid governments. I would imagine that this allows both Google and the US government to have far more insight and control over the direction of this and possible applications.

Not to dismiss the obvious ethical issues of Google having possibly harmful incentives and having their hands tied by the US government financially and legally, but all things considered, I think the main difference here is that Google is already doing this on a massively large scale for the sake of selling ads. It is possible this can help save lives.

<comment><USER12> > It is possible this can help save lives.

Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed. You _can_ prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved any other way.

Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the possibility of saving American lives.

<comment><USER11> This may get me some downvotes, but I imagine that the same ethical issue exists with any weapon. Guns and bullets exist to kill, and in both human society and the animal kingdom, elimination of a few people can increase the overall population and livelihood of the entire group.

I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their use.

However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is the elimination of death of people or animals. Sure, you could take a bullet to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their redemption.

But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is better than widespread killing. My big worry isn't so much the killing part (not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance employed in the name of security.

That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking collectively rather than individually there).

<comment><USER12> You're making a good point about handling criminals. The US still has the death penalty. The death penalty exists to "protect the public" but most civilised countries have agreed that it's inhumane compared to other alternatives. Its harm outweighs the good it does. We have also banned other inhumane practices like solitary confinement.

Where you're wrong is that drone strikes are a necessary evil. There is no way to measure the efficacy of drone strikes. Sure, you can determine whether the drone strike destroyed the target and with Google's help you might even get a machine to tell you a confidence level of whether the target was correctly identified, but good luck proving that that drone strike even saved as much as a single life.

What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define who can be considered a civilian. It's easy to have zero dead civilians when you're the one who gets to decide whether those unidentified adult males caught in the blast radius couldn't also maybe have been terrorists all along.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for your response and I apologize for the delay in responding.

I think you're using an ineffective metric to argue against something you're against ethically.

Here's what I mean: saying it's benefit is immeasurable is arguing for better metrics. If it could be demonstrated that it did effectively end more terrorists lives and saved civilians, would you be celebrating it? I think you'd still want us as a society to invest in a more humane way of handling it.

> What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's > nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define > who can be considered a civilian.

Which, in my opinion makes it immeasurable, currently. It still sounds like your arguing for more data, not a better approach.

I think obviously drone strikes have a benefit to those who use them, otherwise they wouldnt keep using them out of some philosophical attachment to unmanned aircraft.

I do agree we need more and better metrics and data on both their efficacy and civilian cost, but for me, even better would be a solution that doesn't even need the killing.

But if you're asking for the military to abandon something in favor of a more ethical response, you should use a better argument and show how it will lead to less death overall. Otherwise, they'll dance around the semantics of what's being argued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a history of large companies helping the US government, and they're not all defense contractors.

Why are they surprised? Google is the Bell Labs of our time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government)

<comment><USER14> The word used is "outraged" and not "surprised" though. I think that's more than just a semantic point. In fact there is no mention of surprise in the article. I think that's a reasonable reaction, whereas surprise is a straw man, largely implying a naïveté which is notably absent in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Government contracts are extremely lucrative and usually long term, most companies would accept this work.

<comment><USER16> Most companies are run by people with souls, so I doubt this. Most corporations though, there you might have a point.

<comment><USER17> Not sure what you consider the difference between a "company" and a "corporation", but I know a lot of people who work for small government contractors that definitely have "souls". Not everybody has the same ethical standpoint on military technology.

<comment><USER16> I know many people who work for large multi-national defense contractors that definitely have "souls" as well, but hiding behind moral relativism won't save you from the fact that in the real world moral bright lines exist within societal contexts. And that said, I'm fairly confident how history will see our current drone program.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of moral relativism in this context when it's incredibly relevant. Someone who believes that developing and exploring this technology will enable us to save the lives of soldiers and better prepare to encounter the technology in the wild is going to have very different opinions than someone who views it as yet another tool to oppress the third world with. Both people hold ethical beliefs that consider and value humanitarian consequences.

Edit: I was slowed down for posting too fast so I'm adding my reply to IntronExon here:

It's an interesting hypothetical but I'd argue its appeal is mostly in its simplicity with little evidence to support the claim. The instances you've cited happened either due to a failure of accurate intelligence or because intelligence indicated the structure was being used by enemy combatants. It's very possible to arrive at the conclusion that any unnecessary casualties which occurred happened as a result of poor military intelligence which better reconnaissance drones could help with. It's equally possible that someone working on this kind of technology could see its field use against groups like ISIS as evidence that weaponized drones are a useful tool in fighting terrorist organizations. Obviously neither of these will be true in every instance, but without strong evidence it's hard to believe that the matter is as simple as "some people are just unemphatic".

<comment><USER14> Maybe the real difference is that some of us lack the empathy and imagination to consider the plight of some poor bastardized having their wedding, school, or hospital drone-striked, and some of us do. For those who can't, this is never an emotional issue, just a sterile cost/benefit analysis. Formthe rest of us, worlds die in those blasts, and were partially responsible, and that _matters_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a US citizen concerned with our bloated military budget but who also wants the US to remain the strongest military nation on Earth, I'd like to cut $100 billion from the $600 billion plus yearly US military budget, and allocate that money to infrastructure and social programs. We would still have by far the largest military budget in the world after this.

Whoever knows about the US military budget, how feasible would this be? What is the bulk of the military budget dedicated to?

<comment><USER20> You could cut a number of non-essential items, even if they're not the largest - the US Army is the largest employer of musicians in the country [0], and the entire military spent at least $437M _in one year_ on musicians in 2015 [1].

[0] [https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2010/09/29/130212353/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2010/09/29/130212353/military- marching-bands)

[1] [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/pentagons-bands- battl...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/pentagons-bands- battle-223435)

<comment><USER21> That still leaves $99,563M. I'm not familiar enough with the details of the defense budget, but when looking at budgets, in general, the focus should be on line items that move the needle significantly.

<comment><USER20> I guess the point I was trying to make is that there is plenty of room for budget trimming - you could go straight to the budget for fighter jets or soldiers or whatever the big ticket items are, but you're going to get a lot more resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks like Google is going to be the next 800-pound gorilla in the Military Industrial Complex.

<comment><USER23> Then why did they sell Boston Dynamics? Or did they ...

<comment><USER24> They tried to sell it but nobody wanted it, AFAIK. Note that when they bought Boston Dynamics they made a big deal about not renewing military contracts because they didn't want to be in the business of autonomous weaponry.

Look how a mere couple years has changed things.

<comment><USER23> They sold to SoftBank btw, this was widely reported.

<comment><USER24> Oh, that's right! I remembered hearing about it, but then thought it fell through for some reason.

Maybe I was thinking of Toyota: [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077620/toyota-said-to-be- in...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077620/toyota-said-to-be-in-talks-to- acquire-two-google-robotics-companies.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So next time resolving Google Captcha images -> increasing accuracy of US army drones ?

Same apply to my Google Photos ?

</comment><comment><USER26> It worked for the UK and the British East India company , it should work fine for America. Tesla can set up mining camps on Mars and eliminate ten percent of it's "underperforming" population every year, just like it does at it's factory.

<comment><USER27> Source? The article I remember about Tesla layoffs said it was a lot less than 10%, and mostly not factory workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What happened to "do no evil"?

<comment><USER29> "Do no evil" is not and has never been their motto. Their motto is and has always been "Don't be evil".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google's new cloud offering "flower express" you just type someones personal id, and then the Google database looks up last known position and sends a drone.

</comment><comment><USER31> are they working with them as in building the system or are they just helping them with understanding the technology like TensorFlow APIs.

<comment><USER32> It sounds to me more like lending their already existing Cloud AI for analysing video.

This stuff already exists to some extent and can be used by anyone (within Google's terms & services).

[https://cloud.google.com/video-intelligence/](https://cloud.google.com/video- intelligence/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Let's be completely speculative and alarmist about the potential of AI: It could be like developing nuclear weapons first; if the US gets military AI wrong, it could quickly become a poor vassal state to the world's new superpower.[0]

People are alarmist and speculative because AI's potential is unknown. If the potential of the new blockchain technology is unknown then you can wait and see what happens. But given the stakes with military AI, you can't take even tiny risks; you can't wait and see if your country will be in history books as an experiment that lasted 250 years.

By declining to help the US military, Google engineers take that risk to a degree. But if they participate then they gain enormous leverage: Given the stakes, the US military can't afford to alienate them. I'd hope they can use their leverage to achieve related goals: Agreements banning the use of this technology against civilians, foreign or domestic, and banning sharing the tech with law enforcement. Leverage Congress into passing privacy and civil rights laws protecting Americans against abuses of the technology.

[0] Note that AI changes things in another way: For all human history, military power was tied to population size. In the future, with the right AI and some underground robot factories, potentially a small country could dominate. Maybe Singapore?

<comment><USER34> Yeah there's a real risk of a blitzkrieg sort of situation where some country builds a drone army that just picks a traditional army apart on the battlefield.

Eventually someone is going to cut the cord and have truly autonomous armed vehicles and whoever does it first is going to have a tremendous tactical advantage.

<comment><USER35> Why do people only talk about weapons of mass destruction and dominance in these discussions? Why is Big, Bad & Heavy seen as the only way to win wars and worlds?

I'd say the first group who thinks outside that box would have a major advantage:

– Artificial viruses and other biological/nanotechnological infectious agents that only your side has an "antidote" or immunity for, to "cleanly" wipe out everyone else but you, without causing physical damage to cities/infrastructure/terrain.

— Insect-like drones the size of flies or mosquitos that you remotely control to inject poison directly into individual enemy leaders, shutting them down before they can form or command a military opposition.

– Having a permanent presence on the Moon so that some of you can survive in case of the whole world going tits up due to events you cannot control or plan for.

<comment><USER12> Sound familiar?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am surprised that this is news. Google has done US government work for a long time. After 9/11 the newly formed homeland security wanted pictures and accurate data in regards to residential addresses in the US. At first they went to the credit bureaus and data brokers to collect and store this information due to the fact they already had researchers on the ground collecting data. Google came along with Google earth and not long after that Google street view. Think about how long it was before they where able to actually monetize google earth & maps. They perfected the art of geodata collection and was likely paid for via government grants [0] and contracts. Even today they sell access to different government agencies[1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History)

[1] [https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/](https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/)

<comment><USER21> Google Maps was basically pieced together from smaller companies they acquired. From Wikipedia:

 _Google Earth was originally developed by Keyhole, Inc., a Mountain View- based company founded in 2001. Keyhole, after being spun off from Intrinsic Graphics, received funding from the Central Intelligence Agency 's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in addition to smaller capital from Nvidia and Sony._

<comment><USER37> I believe that Keyhole itself was named after a spy satellite series:

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

(But I don't know whether there was any other connection between the company and NRO.)

<comment><USER38> IC-funded startups are often founded by ex-IC people. "Keyhole" was the logical name to choose, since In-Q-Tel is more than familiar with the real deal. it makes the VC pitch much clearer to .gov backers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As long as there's two people left on the planet someone's going to want someone dead. Defense contracts will always be a good investment and it can let you get close to people in power more easily than by lobbying, no wonder Google is taking the opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER40> I predict the US government will start taking Net Neutrality seriously in the next few months.

"You scratch my back, I scratch yours."

</comment><comment><USER41> So when Damore released his manifesto a lot of people wanted Google to fire him, otherwise they would quit themselves.

Where is the Google employee outrage now? I mean, this right here is bad, it has serious implications. Drone killings are the most outrageous thing the U.S. has done in a while...

</comment><comment><USER42> "Don't be evil" hm?

</comment><comment><USER43> Continuing to have worked for Google (as a software engineer, with other options) after 2018 will become like having worked for Uber through 2017 -- an indelible black mark on your resume.

</comment><comment><USER44> Good! Thank you Google.</comment>


Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06262 <comment><USER2> There is something badly wrong with this paper. Their example shows them restoring μηδέν ἄγαν from μηδέν ἄ??ν. The diacritics are human provided, and _very_ much limit the search space. The inscription to start with would actually be μηδενα??ν (that is, if the number of characters between α and ν is correct, which is also a human provided guess.

All of their other examples seem to start with diacritics as well. What a mistake!

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the algorithm from a Canticle for Leibowitz one of the monks was working on. I do have to wonder if things like this do more harm than good. A guess done by deep learning is still just a guess, the difference being the additional danger of it looking more authoritive and certain than it is.

<comment><USER4> It seems like this particular alogrithm has two main components that are highly important, and human-oriented:

a) The search space is limited with human-supplied options.

b) The output isn't deterministic, is offers a series of best guesses.

I would say this is closer to a NN-powered spellchecker than an authoritative source on the restoration of the work. It still requires a decent amount of interaction from an actual expert for the system to work.</comment></comment>


If the US Government used personal finance software - <AUTHOR> http://budgetsimple.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/the-us-government-budget-in-budgetsimple/

<comment><USER2> That's not a budget, that's a cash flow statement. Budgets are expected income and expected expenses.

The problem with the US budget is that income is down and they always lie about expenses. The income is down because every budget show rosy projections for the economy which means they expect a larger tax base ("Unemployment is going to magically drop 3% in less than a year!") The expenses are higher because they add more all the time without paying for it ("Oh we need to do X, what's a couple million on top of a trillion anyway.")

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't an article about the US using budgeting software. It's swipe at war/military spending. It would have been nice to see an unbiased and full feature article on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really not biased about this (I'm very apolitical), it's just clear when you lay it out like this that the main discretionary spending that needs to be cut to get a balanced budget is what they classify as "Security". Stealth bombers and other fancy things are nice but it's clear we can't actually afford them at this point.

<comment><USER4> There is a pretty good case based on how many times money changes hands that the "Stealth Bomber" is a pretty good economic stimulant.

Two things: First, The US pretty much hovers between 15 - 20% of GDP being brought in as revenue for the federal government. This is despite a lot of tax policy changes.

Second, when Clinton did his defense cuts, one of the things cut was various supply buying from small contractors (mostly minority). We had two factories. One lost all its contracts (although it did stay open just a little longer to ship tents to Florida after a hurricane). The other lost half its workers. All the people who these people bought stuff from had hard times. Of course, welfare spending went up in the area. The plans to move into civilian supply never got off the ground. Welfare doesn't make as many hops through the economy as defense spending.

Target spending cuts based on what happens to the money afterwards.

<comment><USER5> > Welfare doesn't make as many hops through the economy as defense spending.

What does that mean?

<comment><USER4> Sorry, should have given references. The concept is called velocity of money <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money>

Although, I learned a slightly different definition than the wikipedia article. When I saw the studies, it was defined as "Number of different players a $ changed hands from before returning to the government". The study I saw said each $ spent on defense made 12 jumps, where each $ spent on welfare made 7 jumps.

<comment><USER5> thanks. Interesting idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OCRopus: high-quality open source OCR sponsored by Google and used by reCAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/

<comment><USER2> I've used <http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/> by Google too. It appears OCRopus uses that as one of the plugins for OCR.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a webservice that allows you to send in files (PDF with images, png, jpeg etc.) through an API and have the service send you a .txt, .doc or a pdf of the same file with the text embedded?

<comment><USER4> Docsplit comes to mind, but it's not in web-API form: <http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this the same one as featured here:

<http://recaptcha.net/digitizing.html>

If so, I'm not impressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> What exactly do you expect? Some of those old documents they're trying to digitize are in such bad shape that you practically need an electron microscope to decipher them. Document recognition in its full generality is still an open problem. The examples shown on that page constitute highly adversarial challenges. For simpler examples of the kind that would prevail with recently printed material, much better results can be achieved.

<comment><USER5> > Some of those old documents they're trying to digitize are in such bad shape > that you practically need an electron microscope to decipher them.

Red herring. I'm talking about the examples pictured.

Do you know _for a fact_ that this is the same software package?

I don't want to waste my time arguing about why it doesn't live up to my expectations, if it's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> what evidence do you have that this is used for reCAPTCHA?

<comment><USER7> A quick search revealed that this title ("...and used by reCAPTCHA") has been reused many times and is likely just a rumor at this point.

I would definitely be interested in seeing evidence of it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there something similar for handwritten text?

<comment><USER9> The links says: " _The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90's and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods._ ", so it appears so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uh, why is Google releasing this? Wouldn't this code give hackers a good head start to create an OCR system capable of trivially defeating CAPTCHA everywhere?

Or maybe they've realized any human computer test based on text recognition is flawed, and so what better way to force the web to upgrade than to make OCR trivial? I rather like this shotgun approach to AI.

<comment><USER11> I think the benefits of having high quality free OCR tools available to developers outweighs the CAPTCHA abuse risk. Information organization is a huge problem/area of opportunity, and being able to extract text/content/context out of scans/photos and the like is key.</comment></comment>


Bigotry via Software License - <AUTHOR> http://www.treefinder.de/ <comment><USER2> If this is bigotry, then what would we call the Russian and Iranian sanctions?

I would suggest researching the definition of the word before using it.

As far as I'm aware the software is free, it's in the developers right to choose who he/she awards his software to.

We see a lot of women-only or ethnic-minority only projects in tech, yet nobody is calling those bigotries.

Having said all this, I don't agree with the developer's world views, however this is like free speech, you have to allow it, wether you like it or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bigotry - top contender for the 2016 most watered down word in the English language award.

I think that the licence is perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER4> Indeed.

It's a higher level of consciousness to take into account the consequences of your acts and of your work.

Commercial developers just go as far as the money paid by their customers, and don't care what their software is used for.

Some commercial developers restrict some use of their software (but more for their own protection, because they know the limits of the "quality" of their products, than for moral reasons). For example, you're not allowed to use Apple software to develop nuclear power systems.

cf. [https://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/MacOSX.htm](https://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/MacOSX.htm)

        C. Except as and only to the extent permitted in this License and by applicable law, you may not copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof. THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

In addition, corporations under USA jurisdiction must restrict the use of their products to authorised countries only.

If a country feels threatened by another country, it's understandable that it wish to avoid providing this other country with any help that would heighten the thread.

Similarly, if an individual feels threatened by another country or by other individuals, it's understandabel that we wish to avoid providing them with any help, most notably when it's in the form of gratis software.

Of course, this contradicts the ideal of free(dom) software.

But we have to take into account the circumstances, we don't live in an ideal world.

You have also to take into account the fact that you cannot in general control the application of your free software license. Those using BSD or MIT and similar license basically abandon all control on their software use and distribution (or non-distribution).

In the case of GPL, the copyright owner keeps control of the distribution if his software, under the terms of the license (which mandates the derived works authors to distribute the sources along with their derived works).

But in practice, GPL software owners don't have the means to control what corporations in the USA do with their software and whether they respect the terms of the license or not, and even if they detected license violations, they don't have the power to do anything about it. We're counting here more on the self discipline of the potential users of the software than on anything else, and this means that it can be abused easily.

Therefore beyond the restrictions the license may put on the use or users of the software, the questions of the distribution of free(dom) software itself must be considered, in each case.

It's probably better to distribute widely and indiscriminately software whose success is based on network effect. For example, things like GNU or Linux.

But for more specific software, one should ponder whether even its users wouldn't be better served by a more restricted distribution.

In practice, we know that most open source software is not read by a lot of people, and not used by a lot more either anyways.

Distributing the sources of the software you sell to your customers or give to your friend still seems to be a very important act of software freedom. Distributing it to the whole wide world, doesn't seem so important. The GPL itself clearly distringuishes this point: you can use, read and modify a GPL software, keeping your derived work entirely private, as long as you don't _distribute_ it. This covers use of derived work inside some artificial boundaries (one would have to revise the legal definition of "distribution" IANAL), such as corporation, family, and why not friend circles. I think it can be argued that if you got diner at your friends' and install some derived work of some GPL software on his computer, this won't consitute a distribution. And while the GPL spirit would have you give your friend the sources of your derived work, nothing in the terms of that license imposes you to distribute them to the public at large.

The corporations are so greedy that in general they won't be using GPL software as the basis of their products (they may still use it internally, and this is questionable, as we've seen from the scandal of the openssl and bash bugs that remained undetected for decades); so this provides some indirect and implicit limitations on the distribution of GPL software. But we cannot depend on it.

I think the argument should be made for a more direct control, and given the current spirit of free software and the current terms of the GPL family of licenses, which doesn't distinguish human individuals from corporations and political (ie. armed) entities (eg. countries or "rebel" groups), the individual author of powerful tools should definitely consider and explicitely control the distribution of his works, instead of pushing it naively to the whole world.

Now, TreeFinder is not distributed under a free software license (the sources aren't distributed), but the new terms "I do no longer permit the usage of my TREEFINDER software in the following EU countries: [...]" restrict the execution of the software geographically. As a programmer, I understand that a program runs on some computer hardware that is localised geographically; the presence of a human user is optional, and therefore the location of this optional human user cannot be used to determine the geographical location of the "use" of the program. Only the position of the hardware running this program. Therefore, as a French citizen, currently present in France, and currently under the domination of the EU oligarchy, I could install this software on a server located in Cameroon and have it run there, in Africa. Honestly, this doesn't represent much of a restriction, and not even an inconvenience, I already routinely use computers located in different countries.

This restriction is not really effective to advance the goals of the author; the buzz around it does more. (And definitely, the publicity is nice, TreeFinder seems to be a nice program).

One could design better license terms.

To begin with, we would have to distinguish different entities, such as human beings, for-profit corporations, political entities, etc, and classify them on the wanted criteria (is, belongs, helps the oligarchy, or not). A human being who's salaried by a corporation who wants to have immigrants to lower the salary, shall he be discriminated against for working to that corporation? Or shall he be helped in his human endeavour? How will we distinguish use of the software at home, for personal purposes, from a use that would eventually benefit the corporation, and therefore lower his salary (and everybody else's)? We can assume that all employee of corporations making a profit, being willingly exploited and willingly contributing their share of the profit to the oligarchs are parts of the enemy, so they could be distriminated against. The point here is that there is some information available about the relationships between corporations, and with some parts of the political system, and some of those high up individuals, but you might need even more information, eg. about employees, about customers of free lances, etc.

[http://theyrule.net/drupal/topics/watching%20them](http://theyrule.net/drupal/topics/watching%20them)

[http://api.littlesis.org/documentation](http://api.littlesis.org/documentation)

On the other hand, you may discover that everybody is enslaved and contributing. Why not exclude the Chinese? They definitely contribute to the decadence of Europe thru delocalizations. And why not the Africans who provide cheap minerals to the Chinese factories?

[http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis- Cousin...](http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis- Cousin/dp/2355120471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443611550&sr=8-1&keywords=francis+cousin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! I guess writing scientific software doesn't prevent you from being a profoundly ignorant twat. Bigotry is an understatement. Have a nice day, Adolf!

<comment><USER6> Already a Godwin that early into the "discussion"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even more bizarre - [http://www.treefinder.de/downloads.html](http://www.treefinder.de/downloads.html) \- the author seems incredibly butthurt that he hasn't been made rich off this piece of software (at least, that's the vibe I'm getting)

<comment><USER6> There is definitely a certain frustration on the author's side (justified or not, I can't tell), but I wouldn't necessarily attribute that to him not having been made rich by his software in particular.</comment></comment>


Business Lessons from the Ancient World - <AUTHOR> http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial-Columnists/Business-lessons-from-the-ancient-world%E2%80%A8/1003

<comment><USER2> Platitudes + anecdotes = content! Rinse, lather, repeat!</comment>


Email marketing from tech perspective - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andreirebrov/email-marketing-from-tech-perspective-d0b5707b3533#.tqy5y5r7d <comment><USER2> I've worked with my team on marketing software for the past 4 years. We've managed to make segmentation, targeting & personalization a few mouse clicks away. Yet without a strong, quality message that's well timed most campaigns fail.

Good article and useful general advice at the end.

<comment><USER3> To add, all the segmentation data in the world won't help you unless you have the volume of personalized content to use that data for providing relevant communications. If you have one writer that can barely keep up with the current demand, telling them you need five versions of a newsletter with very different content is a moot point.

That said, having the data available to enable this level of personalization down the line is better than not having it from a marketing perspective. The house email list is often a company's most valuable marketing asset. The better segmented it is, the more valuable that data asset becomes.</comment></comment>


Peruvian puquios were a "hydraulic system constructed to retrieve water" (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160408-the-ancient-peruvian-mystery-solved-from-space <comment><USER2> I curious as to whether the spiraling ramp helps direct the wind through the tunnels in some way, or if it is for some other purpose, such as to help remove construction debris.

Somewhat tangentially, I recall reading, years ago, about an ingenious pre- columbian self-regulating aqueduct in northern Peru. It had an asymmetrical constriction where a vortex formed if the flow reached a certain speed, restricting the flow and causing a hydraulic jump that directed flood water into an overflow channel.

<comment><USER3> from the side view here [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22797254.2018.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22797254.2018.1537684)

It's clear they follow the "funnel" shape. Optimized for laminar (air) flow. Not for hauling (which you'd want a fixed slope for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They remind me of qanats:

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

<comment><USER5> There was a documentary about these on the BBC maybe 15 years ago, part of a series the theme of which was dangerous places or similar. The presenter walked the length of a Qanat and seemed genuinely worried by the poor state of it in parts, which was unintentionally amusing, but he did make it out in one piece in the end. Can't find it on the web sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how such technology develops since it is not something you discover by accident. Like 'Hey let's dig a whole there and see what happens?'

<comment><USER7> Don't underestimate unintentiofnal lucky accidents and coincidence.

Many cultures were burying things such as fruit, fish and cattle in fields before planting the seeds and burning fields after the harvest as a form of a religious offering without understanding what was going on, on a chemical level in the soil.

No one would think of burning "sky rocks" to make daggers and swords out of them either in a rational manner. But it makes sense that they would do so in some odd religious ritual.

Pretty much every initial technological advancement in human history was likely driven by an irrational thought completely unrelated to what would be achieved in the end before the scientific method was developed.

<comment><USER8> > Pretty much every initial technological advancement in human history was > likely driven by an irrational thought completely unrelated to what would be > achieved in the end before the scientific method was developed.

This strikes me as highly unlikely, considering how recently the scientific method was formalized.

It's hard to imagine, for example, that the Babylonians' or Egyptians' use of the Pythagorean theorem[1] was irrational, even though it undoubtedly had mystical and religious overtones to it. (The idea of separating science and religion as such is a relatively modern invention. The medievals called theology "queen of the sciences," for example,[2] perhaps due to their belief that rational study of the universe required a rational cause of the universe.)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology#As_an_academic_discip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology#As_an_academic_discipline)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain why they didn't build the canal on an incline? Do these holes have other uses to make them worthwhile (wells, 'manholes')?

</comment><comment><USER10> If you try to dig a hole in the ground, without machinery like a ground drill just something like a shovel, it is only natural that one requires to extend the diameter of the whole? It is like one tries to dig a hole in the sand. So it seems like these people just went stepwise, that digging deeper was possible. Would they had any other possibility to dig a deep hole into the ground?

<comment><USER11> Not sure if this will happily link directly without a referer but here goes:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t...](https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/tejr20/2019/tejr20.v052.sup01/22797254.2018.1537684/20190322/images/medium/tejr_a_1537684_f0011_oc.jpg)

The funnel shape of the ramp appears very deliberate, and not the kind of thing you'd naturally arrive at digging in sandy soil.

The agressive slope towards the botttom would be especially frustrating. If the ground is very loose and wants to crumble and cave in like sand, getting the steep part of the ramp to hold its shape all these years required a lot of deliberate effort.

At first I thought maybe it was just a spiral ramp for the laborers, since there's a lot of material to remove manually making such holes in general. But that agressive slope towards the end is not doing them any favors. It really does appear to be engineered with fluids in mind.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for your explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They remind me of Indian Step wells.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sure, it's not a easy way to walk to the water and clean the tunnel, it's an atmospheric pump.

Common in other cultures -

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22797254.2018.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22797254.2018.1537684)

Pics of the tunnel

[http://people.umass.edu/proulx/online_pubs/Zurich_Puquios_re...](http://people.umass.edu/proulx/online_pubs/Zurich_Puquios_revised_small.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I do not understand how the following sentences can be coherent in the same article about why these wells exist -

"Could only be solved using space technology"

"Some of the wells are still operating today"

<comment><USER15> Happens a lot on articles about non-western civilizations technological advancements. The writers -of this articles- assume that western technology is the best/most advanced (most probably without malice) and the others' are just cute or magical.

<comment><USER14> Right, and if some secondary source called out the fact that they are still in use and these guys are idiots then at least the original article would have made the sin of omission, and not the sin of outright contradicting yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >8 April 2016

>This story is featured in BBC Future's "Best of 2016" collection.

[2016]

<comment><USER17> The admins asked us to email this kind of thing to them using the footer Contact link, which I'll do now.</comment></comment>


Serious Fraud Office Fined £180,000 for Data Breach - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/latest-security-news/serious-fraud-office-fined-180000-for-data-breach/#.VRk3k6RIgg4.hackernews <comment><USER2> I suppose how bad this is depends on who Witness A actually is. I feel sorry for the poor temp though - everyone makes mistakes in their first job(s). Many times in that kind of a role, people don't tell you enough to enable you to make smart decisions. That is because supposedly you are just robitically doing a task, and also because managers underestimate how many edge cases there are in 'easy' admin jobs.</comment>


Apple bought a 3D-like advertisement on NFL.com's homepage - <AUTHOR> http://www.nfl.com

<comment><USER2> Youtube has a few of these the Wario one was the first I saw but it appears to have been taken down..

What is interesting is, its the first time I've seen this NOT in flash... another silent dig at adobe?</comment>


Goldman's Rules of Acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2010/05/03/goldmans-rules-of-acquisition/

<comment><USER2> I am so tired of hearing about "confounding financial products that no one can hope to understand".

An intelligent person willing to spend a few hours would have no trouble gaining a basic understanding of CDOs, credit default swaps, and the like.

There's no excuse for that kind of thing in mainstream journalism (where you often see it), and I'm kind of surprised that you hear it from Jason.

<comment><USER3> _Warren Buffet_ has said he doesn't understand CDOs. If he doesn't understand them, I think most people can be forgiven for not understanding them.

<comment><USER4> > Warren Buffet has said he doesn't understand CDOs.

Buffet has also said that he doesn't understand tech companies or computers.

Buffet is always playing angles. When you can't spot the angle, he's probably playing you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a big fan of GS, or the current finance setup. That being said:

"These bastards are reveling in their financial mischievousness – they're enjoying explaining exactly how they fucked us."

If you go up against people who are smarter than you, and greedier than you, and who know more than you, and you trust them not to fuck you, they will fuck you.

That's capitalism.

<comment><USER3> However, that doesn't make it right for them to fuck you. That's ethics.

<comment><USER4> > However, that doesn't make it right for them to fuck you. That's ethics.

The folks who lost were planning to keep their profits. They thought that they knew better than the other side of the deal. (And yes, there's always another side.)

You can't con an honest man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _It feels like Wall Street's moral benchmark has fallen from Gordon Gecko's credo, "greed is good" to "well, it's not illegal."_

Well said.

<comment><USER7> Heh. I've always thought of exotics as transactions that weren't illegal... yet.

<comment><USER8> There's really no correlation. You can do pretty dangerous things with vanilla options, and some exotic options are pretty tame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately like many others Jason is mis-informed about what was really behind this crisis. Let's not forget that the Federal Reserve has been maintaining exceptionally low interest rates for much of the last 10 years, with a few exceptions, and that both previous presidents cheered the rapid increase in home ownership rates seen in the early parts of the new millennium.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't expect things to change any time soon. The problem is systemic, on a global level. This is not just GS; they only happen to play the market better than most.

Banks have an incentive to take on greater levels of risk in order to attract deposits (which are a highly liquid, short-term source of capital); hence, investors must find a way to out-do the bank returns in order to justify their existence.

People can point to specific flaws within the system (of which there are many), but we live in a global economy with many banks competing for profits. Given that the possibility of eliminating greed is near zero, this really is a catch-22.

Global regulation ( _see the Basel Accords_ ) would result in significantly diminished economic growth, but is the only viable "solution" (you can begin to see how Marx justified communism).

Result: the global banking system tends not to incentivise long-term investment, which then leads to asset bubbles. While we can not prevent bubbles all together, regulatory regimes can help to make them less frequent.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has Calacanis ever written .. anything that didn't mention that he's wealthy enough to drive a Tesla?</comment>


Card Shark - <AUTHOR> http://www.foundread.com/view/card-shark <comment><USER2> "My 27th birthday is right around the corner, so while I'm still young, that youthful feeling is fleeting."

Only if you let it be that way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Matt Maroon is a new entrant on my cool people list.</comment>


Streak's (YC S11) New iPhone App Is A CRM Service With Gmail Baked In - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/streaks-new-iphone-app-is-a-crm-service-with-gmail-baked-in/

<comment><USER2> Founder here... for obvious reasons, the article didn't dive too deeply into the technical details so happy to answer any questions on how we embedded Gmail into our App.

<comment><USER3> How are you going to avoid Google from shutting off your api access/detecting your client and blocking it?

<comment><USER2> If they deliberately and specifically don't want us doing this then we'll most likely just end up writing the email portions ourselves. For now this is a great way to have full email functionality relatively quick and easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone looking for a bare bones CRM, this tool is extremely helpful. We use it for quoting multiple projects within a small team. Opinion of 1.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have worked with the Streak team for a little while - they're incredibly sharp (and have helped us improve our product a ton). Congrats guys!</comment>


Brain-like functions emerging in a metallic nanowire network - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191226084403.htm <comment><USER2> Wasn't able to read the paper, how groundbreaking is this work actually?

<comment><USER3> It reads like they have found a model that mimics how the brain's electrical signals propagate, in a visually familiar manner. I couldn't read the article either, but the summary doesn't really point at anything that suggests what the title and subtitle suggest.

Spending the 90's studying Artificial Life, I got quite used to reading about code and chemical reactions that were clearly endowed with dramatic flair and excessive personal projection. Eventually you find yourself having to read between the lines in hopes of figuring out what the studies _really_ discovered.</comment></comment>


Graph Databases 101 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cray.com/blog/graph-databases-101/ <comment><USER2> I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to deal with a large graph a couple of years ago. My conclusion - there will never be such a thing as a "graph database". There are many efforts in this area, someone here already mentioned SPARQL and RDF, you can google for "triple stores", etc. There are also large-scale graph processing tools on top of Hadoop such as Giraph or Graphx for Spark.

For the particular project we ended up using Redis and storing the graph as an adjacency list in a machine with 128GB of RAM.

The reason I don't think there ever will be a "graph database" is because there are so many different ways you can store a graph, so many things you might want to do with one. It's trivial to build a "graph database" in a few lines of any programming language - graph traversal is (hopefully) taught in any decent CS course.

Also - the latest versions of PostgreSQL have all the features to support graph storage. It's ironic how PostgreSQL is becoming a SQL database that is gradually taking over the "NoSQL" problem space.

<comment><USER3> In my point of view, the fact that you can add an expert index very easily to a graph database written in a modern language (say no C/C++) makes it even easier to customize an existing graph database to suit your direct need. In turn, storage and runtime can be tunned more easily. Making so easy to have the performance you need. But at the end of the day not dealing with algreba is the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone's curious about Network Science/Graph Theory in general here's a free online textbook used by a grad student friend of mine

[http://barabasilab.neu.edu/networksciencebook/downlPDF.html](http://barabasilab.neu.edu/networksciencebook/downlPDF.html)

<comment><USER5> Be careful about Barabasi: [https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the- network-non...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-network- nonsense-of-albert-laszlo-barabasi/)

(FWIW, I had previously read some Barabasi papers and had come away seriously unimpressed, see also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555547))

<comment><USER6> I misremembered Albert-László Barabási for Laszlo Babai - I was wondering why you were unimpressed!

Yes, scale-free networks (and so on, and so on), are oversold. Is his work really that bad though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Question as someone new to graph databases: Are there any open source graph databases worth looking into?

<comment><USER8> Cayley is a good option; we use it in production.

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

<comment><USER9> Might I ask what sort of dataset size, servers etc you are using? I'm looking for an graph database and Cayley seems the best fit, though I'm not sure what sort of limits on the data there would be in the real world.

<comment><USER10> Cayley can store 130 million quads (2 nodes + connecting edge) on 20 GB harddrive. Join #cayley on freenode and [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cayley- users](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cayley-users) and be part of our community!

<comment><USER11> Virtuoso, does 2 billion in 50GB. Just so you know. And hard graphs like the complete UniProt data of 20 billion+ in 800GB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everybody's focused on graph databases here but let's talk about Cray! One of the most forward-thinking computer technology companies ever to exist is starting to get out there again. If they got a few hundred million dollars from an outside investor, they could do friggin' incredible things. They already do incredible things but not out there in the way it so easily could be.

<comment><USER13> Cray is a brand name that has been passed around between half a dozen companies (including Sun and SGI) dotted by various kinds of product reboots and commercial failures. Cool stuff but supercomputing isn't the most financially sound business it seems. The current name holder is the company previously called Tera, originally famous for making an aggressively multithreaded HPC computer.

<comment><USER14> I'm not clear how Sun ever owned Cray care to explain?

The provenance was Cray Research -> SGI -> Tera/Cray according to those that have been around since the Cray Research days.

Source: err, I work here and asked a couple people a few cubes over. :)

The Sun deal was apparently more SGI wouldn't be caught dead with a supercomputer that ran on sparc so it got sold off to Sun.

<comment><USER13> My bad about Sun. Yep, Sun just bought the SPARC-based stuff & developed further under their own brand (E10k etc).

<comment><USER14> No worries, just thought i'd clarify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am huge fan a graph-y stuff. I did several iteration over a graph database written -- in Python -- using files, bsddb and right now wiredtiger. I also use Gremlin for querying. Have a look at the code [https://github.com/amirouche/ajgudb](https://github.com/amirouche/ajgudb).

Also, I made an hypergraphdb, atom-centered instead of hyperedge focused in Scheme [https://github.com/amirouche/Culturia/blob/master/culturia/c...](https://github.com/amirouche/Culturia/blob/master/culturia/culture.md).

Did you know that Gremlin, is only srfi-41 aka. stream API with a few graph centric helpers.

edit: it's srfi 41, [http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-41/srfi-41.html](http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-41/srfi-41.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> The author's next post describes RDF and SPARQL in the context of the Cray Graph Engine:

[http://www.cray.com/blog/how-cray-graph-engine-manages- graph...](http://www.cray.com/blog/how-cray-graph-engine-manages-graph- databases/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've seen people using graph databases as a general-purpose backing store for webapps/microservices. What are people's opinions about this?

My feeling is that graph databases are not suitable/ready for — for lack of a better term — the kind of document-like entity relationship graphs we typically use in webapps. Typical data models don't represent data as vertices and edges, but as entities with relationships ("foreign keys" in RDBMS nomenclature) embedded in the entities themselves.

This coincidentally applies to the relational model, in its most pure, formal, normal form, but the web development community has long established conventions of ORMing their way around this. The thing is, you shouldn't need an ORM with a graph database.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1-Would it be more efficient to store objects that contain its relations if you only do (simple) read operations? (e.g. JSON database)

2-Instead, do graph DB engines try to break through bottlenecks for big data and analytics scenarios?

</comment><comment><USER18> It introduces false dichotomy "graph vs relational".

In fact, most (if not all) graph algorithms can be expressed using linear algebra (with specific addition and multiplication). And matrix multiplication is a select from two matrices, related with "where i=j" and aggregation over identical result coordinates.

The selection of multiplication and addition operations can account for different "data stored in links and nodes".

So there is no such dichotomy "graph vs relational".

<comment><USER19> Strictly speaking yeah. Practically speaking: Not really true.

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it can be done easily or well. I've done a lot of work with relational databases, and I love them for a lot of data sets. But I also have done a lot of work with graph databases - and they make working with graph shaped data a pleasure. I could do a graph in SQL, it's even moderately straight-forward in postgres these days by using WITH RECURSIVE - but it's still not as simple as just loading orient or arango for those tasks.

It's the same reason I keep multiple knives in my kitchen. Sure I could do everything with an 8" chef's knife, but the paring knife and the boning knife just make some tasks easier.

<comment><USER20> Facebook has a very good paper descriptions on how they do graph on top of relational database. Google "facebook tao" for details.

I read that and implement my own version with SQL in < 500 lines of python code and found it just perfect for my own use cases. I can easily query any edges, notes in web speed ( < 10 ms) from databases with millions of nodes, edges, GBs of info.

I am curious what I might be missing with that approach as compare to a real graph database?

<comment><USER19> From my quick read of tao, it seems to be doing essentially what graph databases do but with the data storage layer being in sql rather than some other object store. And with the interface layer being not quite as feature complete. So the query layer in tao seems to lack a way to follow multiple edges without first returning to the application code, which graph dbs present as a native feature. The other thing that's lacking, which some graph dbs provide, is labeled edges - that is edges that contain data besides just an "edge type".

<comment><USER20> I implemented a table for Nodes, one for Edges. The Nodes table has an entry for JSON for that Nodes.

If I need more info for particular "Edge type", I just add new Node entry type "Edge_info" that link the Edge type to a JSON that content such info. I found that very flexible, but I have not used any real graph database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anybody know dgraph.io? it's a Scalable, Distributed, Low Latency, High Throughput Graph Database over terabytes of structured data. DGraph supports facebook GraphQL as query language, and responds in JSON and the storage engine is facebook rocksdb a very fast database. see more in [https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph](https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph)

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the biggest challenges in databases is handling concurrency and sharding, wish this would have talked a bit more about how that changes between a graph database and a relational database.</comment>


Support freedom by joining the FSF during the year-end fundraiser - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/news/fall-2008-fundraiser

<comment><USER2> Alternatively, you could support open source software without all the politics, by participating in the FreeBSD Foundation's year-end fund raising drive: <http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/fundraising.shtml>

(Disclosure: I'm a FreeBSD developer, and the FreeBSD Foundation paid for me to go to a conference a few years ago.)

<comment><USER3> The Apache Software Foundation has no such year-end fundraising drive, but is another place that does more "business-friendly" open source.

<http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html>

(I'm not a badass developer like cperciva is, but I am part of the ASF).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Desktop or SaaS for a low-maintenance product? - <AUTHOR> I've read what I could find about this, including patio11's excellent blog post. A SaaS product makes licensing and version/upgrade issues irrelevant. However, you can offer a better desktop experience for many focused tools. And you can sell a desktop product with a simple download website and set up a bug tracker, which you have to run for the SaaS product too<p>As a source of passive income, I'm attracted to selling desktop software (standalone or browser extension) because I don't want to have to worry about uptime/my provider's uptime and hosting costs, I'd rather be running on the customer's hardware. Am I thinking about this the right way? Everything I read says desktop software is dead, but people seem happy to pay for it still. <comment><USER2> Sure, server side software avoids update issues, piracy, and fits naturally in a subscription model (more $$$ over time). No argument there, but those are considerations for the seller, not the consumer (me).

As the consumer, I don't like server side software when running locally is a more natural fit.

Client side programs will work forever, even after you go out of business. As long as the system it runs on doesn't evolve out from under it.

It has a feeling a permanence. Of an heirloom. Not some ephemeral service. A feeling of ownership like a hammer in your hand.

It may not be as good for you, but if it's software I want, where running locally is the most natural fit, I will glady pay several hundred without blinking. If I really need it I'd pay a few grand without blinking.

</comment><comment><USER3> SaaS pretty much addresses every downside of selling Desktop software. To the point where everybody who sells Desktop software these days is trying to convert to a subscription model for it.

Desktop software sees its entire Customer Lifetime Value handed over on day one, and is constantly competing against a free, pirated version of itself that anybody can download if you dare set that CLV value above $50 or so.

Software as a Service keeps paying you money every month regardless of what happens, and generally pays you more each month as new customers sign up. And it is by definition un-pirateable.

The only downside you mention is that you have to run a webserver. But you have to run a server anyway. And if you pick the right tech stack, those things don't tend to go down all that often. You don't need "Five Nines" of availability for most types of business software, anyway. Three Nines is fine. Even Two won't generally lose you any customers.

And, of course, Scaling Problems are a Good Thing in the SaaS world. That means that so many people are giving you money each month to use your thing that they're overloading an entire server. That takes a lot of people, so you can use a tiny fraction of the piles of cash they're throwing you to add another machine to your cage. Let's hope that happens a lot.

So yeah, this is not a question that needs asking anymore. Build your thing on the web.

Good luck!

<comment><USER4> > So yeah, this is not a question that needs asking anymore.

Clearly it is a question that needs to be asked, because... it was asked. That's how questions work.

> Build your thing on the web.

You literally side-stepped all the maintenance bullshittery that is required for a _reliable_ SaaS app with "but you need a website anyway", as if desktop app developers don't use GitHub Pages, SquareSpace, static HTML served from S3, or any number of other "zero maintenance" web SITE hosting solutions that will not in any way support running a web APP.

<comment><USER3> > You literally side-stepped all the maintenance that is required for a > reliable SaaS app

My post was only a few paragraphs long, but one of them does in fact address this. I've spent maybe 400 hours this year working on my little handful of SaaS products. Zero of them were spent maintaining the server that they run on.

On the effort scale, it's nothing compared to writing the software and supporting customers.

<comment><USER4> > The only downside you mention is that you have to run a webserver. But you > have to run a server anyway.

Not necessarily. Plenty of desktop app 'brochure' sites use a hosted solution, so zero web server maintenance required.

> And if you pick the right tech stack, those things don't tend to go down all > that often.

What's "the right stack"? I'm sure Amazon and Google would love to know your secrets to maintenance free SaaS.

> You don't need "Five Nines" of availability for most types of business > software, anyway. Three Nines is fine. Even Two won't generally lose you any > customers.

Two nines is >7 hours a month downtime. That's basically one business day per month, the app is unavailable. Given that this is _in addition_ to any scheduled downtime for things like upgrades, server maintenance, I'm not sure I'd be aiming for that as your baseline.

I _get_ that the OP wants passive income from this endeavour. The way to achieve that is _not_ to half-ass the infrastructure on a SaaS product.

<comment><USER3> I'm having trouble understanding where you're coming from with the hostility. It sounds like your experience must be a lot different than mine.

I run a fairly standard Microsoft stack of ASP.NET, IIS, C#, SQL Server. Chosen for its boringness and reliability, because as I've said before, I really don't like having to worry about hardware:

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a- boring-...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring- stack.html)

I'm also speaking from experience about the downtime thing. I used to have a rather sketchy ISP, and would see those 7 hour downtimes from time to time. I would occasionally get an email or two from customers who noticed, but never lost a single paying account as a result of downtime. Maybe it's just picking a market that can live without your thing for an hour if need be, but then that's the goal we're talking about of a SaaS business that runs itself without your intervention.

People worry about a lot of things before starting a business. They use things like "what if the server goes down" and "what if my customers call me every night at 3am" as excuses not to even try. But when you actually do try, you find that none of those things you worried about end up happening.

That's not to say it's easy. But the things you're raising as issues just aren't. In my experience.

<comment><USER4> Servers absolutely do "go down", and it absolutely is an issue.

How this is even a discussion point is beyond me.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but as a one man operation trying to get Google level reliability is out of the budget.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of difference between running a webapp on a single unmaintained server and "google level reliability"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real problem with SaaS is that offline use is still sketchy and users really do need that functionality. I'm working on an "Offline First" app now, but it's not really offline "first" because "App Cache Sucks" and "Service Workers" are not fully implemented yet.

For example, in my test with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, on Mac OS 10.11 my app using "App Cache" for offline use requires the user to click on a page that loads a resource before it can be used offline, even after the "cache manifest" has been updated and all the files downloaded. And Safari doesn't support "Service Workers".

Beyond that, Safari doesn't really use the updated files when you update the cache manifest. I have had to use the "Empty Cache" link under the "Develop" menu to insure that when testing.

So, if a user empties their cache for whatever reason they break the app for offline use so that's yet another issue that presents a problem.

That said, Service Workers do look promising and the apps I'm working on are blazing fast and work great offline when everything is working as designed.

The age old problem with desktop apps is developing for multiple platforms. You either spend the time and money to do that or you lose out on the market you ignore.

There is another promising viable option that's been mostly overlooked...

That's shipping your app on a Raspberry Pi and integrating that into the user's office. They can use it as a stand alone desktop PC or as app server connected to their LAN, and/or the internet. This approach is getting a lot easier, but since it's not being done yet it will require some hand holding for most end users to integrate into their LAN or set it up as an internet server.

To me, that is really the most interesting option when looking forward.

<comment><USER7> I haven't found offline to be much of a concern but I may encounter this in the future so this is interesting to hear - what reasons makes offline necessity so important?

In my experience security/privacy is the greatest concern. This is actually a fairly big concern actually and for saas there's no solution other than developing trust. In my case in particular, working on Tesults ([https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com)) we don't even store customer's real data, it's all test/fake data and it's still a concern for some so I'd say it's a huge problem compared with desktop/on premises.

<comment><USER6> As to offline concerns, it depends, I suppose, on how the app is used. Some of my users work away from their offices and use the apps while in transit or on a job site so internet access can be iffy.

Shoot, my access was down from last Friday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon. CenturyLink kept telling me it was working and finally on Tuesday I insisted they send a service tech out. They found and fixed it. I live in a rural area so this is pretty common.

Think about how you could improve both your product and your customers experience if you could tweak your software just for them and both the app and all their data was onsite at their location?

I've given this a lot of thought and now view it as potentially the next big shift in how software is designed and delivered and used. The advantages are huge and the total hardware costs don't even amount to a half day's pay for a decent developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without knowing what functionality you intend (i.e. if it's even practical/reasonable for a web app - lets skip that and assume it _could_ work for either environment), if you can see people in your segment will pay for desktop apps on whichever platform(s) you intend to support, I'd say try that approach.

Given your specific goals, a desktop app seems like the obvious choice to me - the _only_ difference might be, if it's a multi-user app (let's say its an app to vote on the colour scheme for an office renovation), you could also go the 'appliance' route, and build it as a web app, but distribute it as a VM image that customers run on their own hardware.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you should start your approach with your target audience. Depending on what you're planning to build and where your users are, that will drive your decision as to whether you should build a desktop product or a SaaS product.

All the hype about desktop software being dead is fluff. Some products are meant to be desktop and some products are meant to be SaaS. There are advantages and disadvantages for both so you'll have to see what value you're providing for your users.</comment>


Oracle is now publishing split-out patches for Red Hat kernels - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/introducing_redpatch

<comment><USER2> Well, thank goodness Oracle has such a commitment to the open source community.

<comment><USER3> I can't believe the nerve of Oracle. They claim to be part of the community while distributing Linux -- _Linux_ -- with deliberately obfuscated source so that others can't compete with them, which turns out to be a mere nuisance for big companies but actually problematic for end users' freedom. I can't think of a bigger affront to the community than obfuscating Linux itself for commercial gain.

... Oh wait, is that not Oracle? ... Oh ...</comment></comment>