America Isn't a Racist Country - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-isnt-a-racist-country-11595628914 <comment><USER2> >The operating thesis of a significant segment of the leadership in these states is that America is a racist nation, governed by a horde of white male supremacists who use the pretense of equality to maintain their superior position. When asked for evidence to support the claim of white supremacy," the only response I have been given is, "Look all around." They hold this untruth to be self-evident.

I'm sure some are able to offer specific evidence beyond 'look all around' to support their claim.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, he seems to be illustrating the point. "I'm not listening, and a major newspaper will publish my failure to listen as news."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My home country (UK) has plenty of its own problems with racism, but the one thing that stands out about the US is the level of unquestioned de facto racial segregation in society. For example, I lived for around a year in a smallish town in a very progressive area of Massachusetts. Almost uniformly, waiters in restaurants were white and kitchen staff were Latino. Similarly, the town was almost all white, and almost all of the African Americans in the local area lived in another town. Naturally, all of the white progressives advised me in hushed tones not to live there. Racism is so deeply ingrained in the US that a lot of it simply passes unnoticed. Similarly, a lot of British people are blind to the amount of class snobbery that still exists in British society. Sometimes you need an outsider's perspective to see clearly.

<comment><USER5> Sure buddy.

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

<comment><USER4> I said quite explicitly that the UK also has problems with racism. In any case, a UK/US comparison is not really the main focus of my comment. I'm not saying that the UK is "less racist" than the US. (Amusingly, Brits and Americans are often each equally convinced that the other country is the more racist.) However, I do think that there is de facto racial segregation in the US on a larger scale than there is in the UK. Certainly, this difference was visible to me, and I think it is a notable feature of American society and race politics.

Football is an odd one. For some reason professional sports in general, both in the UK and the US, can be very socially regressive. For example, there are hardly any out gay footballers either, but you'd be wrong to infer from this that the UK is a massively homophobic country in comparison to others. (We legalized gay marriage before the US did, and through legislation rather than a court decision.)

Anyway, these are all complex issues, and "sure buddy" plus a link to a Wikipedia article doesn't really add much to the discussion, does it? Anyone can find innumerable examples of racism in both the US and the UK just by googling.

<comment><USER5> The US legalized same sex marriage in 2003 via a ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and it came into effect in 2004. That's ten years prior to the UK. The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution made those marriages binding everywhere in the US.

Comparing a European country to the US is, in the vast majority of cases, _blub_ provincialism. On the US scale, Qaddafi's atrocities were in every Londoner's back yard. England is the size of Alabama and the western leg of the first US trans-continental railroad was longer than all the high speed rail in France.

It's that convenient smugness that glosses over the historical fact that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a European endeavor. Europeans in Europe were turning profit by selling slaves to Europeans in the Americas.

And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the UK's official churches which in 2016 kicked the Episcopalians out for performing same-sex marriages. The same year the Orlando Pride started playing. The next year, they moved along with the Lions to the stadium with the 49 rainbow seats.

<comment><USER4> >The US legalized same sex marriage in 2003

This an extremely disengenous thing to say. As you well know, in most of the US, it was not possible for gay couples to get married in 2003. Nor, if they did, were their rights as married couples guaranteed or enforceable across the whole nation. You should also note that the UK introduced civil partnerships in 2004. So for most of the period from 2003-2015, a typical British gay couple had better legal protections available than their American counterparts. But all this is off topic, really.

>And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the UK's official churches

It's also against the policy of many US churches, and they are similarly not required by law to perform same sex marriages.

Beyond that, you are reading much into my comment that clearly isn't there, and going off on a number of tangents. There's no "smugness", or suggestion that the UK is better than the US. I am merely talking about one specific feature of US society (extensive de facto racial segregation). Please take the time to actually read what I'm saying rather than responding to some imaginary caricature of a smug Brit.

In any case I'm at a loss to see what your overall point is. Suppose that the UK is worse than the US in every way. Does that somehow mean that segregation in the US is ok? Of course not.

>49 rainbow seats

Those are a memorial to the victims of the Pulse shooting. It's quite sick and weird to use that memorial as evidence of progress in LGBT rights.

<comment><USER5> The Church of England is a state supported institution headed by the monarch. It's positions are those of the head-of-state. The US does not have an official state church and it's head of state is not by right the head of any church. Or to put it another way, the Queen could change CoE policy by the same means Henry VIII created it.

The smugness is talking about the US like it is the UK. Nearly 300 million Europeans live in countries with constitutional bans on same sex marriage.

Pulse happened less than two miles from the house where my parents live. Where I grew up. In 1991 I had arthroscopic surgery in a building on the same block but fronting Kaley. In the 80's I worked in a sandwich shop on the next block north on Orange Ave, had a friend with an apartment on Esther two houses down on the other side of Orange Ave. I took a date to eat in the building Pulse was in during High School...it was an Italian restaurant for many many years. I went to the site two months after the shooting while visiting my parents.

One of my high-school soccer teammates at the high school a mile down the road from Pulse was a youth coach on the girls side of the Orlando Lions academy. I was at the Lions first home game in 2015. I've been around Orlando's soccer culture since 1977.

The WSL team is called "The Pride." It's a double-entendre. For the Lions and for Gay Pride. The rainbow seats aren't military propaganda ala poppy pinning. Yes, they honor the victims of Pulse. They honor them by recognizing that the shooting was an act of hate. An act of homophobia. They honor the victims by asserting that the hate at Pulse affected all Orlandoeans because it was hate.

I know people who went to Pulse while it was Pulse. My siblings have friends who were directly touched by the shooting. What I said about Pulse makes me sick, but not in the way you impute.

San Francisco has had domestic partnerships since 1990. California since 1999. Vermont since 2000. Stonewall is a National Monument created by Obama.

England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial. The Orlando Pride is full of "out footballers". And though Robbie Rogers had to leave English football for coming out, he had full public support by the MLS and was able to resume his career here.

<comment><USER4> I think you want to have a silly argument about the US vs the UK (or actually the US vs Europe, which is even less relevant to my original comment). I did not make any claims about which is "better", so there's really nothing to talk about here. That is, unless you wish to continue going on long rants, telling your life story, using the mass murder of gay people as an example of progress, and making wholly inaccurate claims about the history of gay rights in the US. State-level civil partnerships are, as you know, of marginal value when not recognized by the federal government, which all Americans have to deal with. And it's inarguable that in the years following the introducing of civil partnerships in the UK, gay people in Britain were able to have their relationships recognized legally more effectively than gay people in the US (particularly with regard to e.g. spousal visas).

>England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial.

Alabama has a population of 5 million. The UK has a population of 67 million. England has a population of 56 million. London by itself has a higher population than Alabama and is vastly more diverse and outward-looking.

From the examples you use in your comment, I can only assume that you just don't know much about the UK. E.g., there are also plenty of memorials to various LGBT causes in the UK. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this.

> [The Church of England's] positions are those of the head-of-state.

America doesn't have an established church, so it's hard to make a sensible comparison. The current American head of state doesn't support gay marriage either, by the way :) It's not really true that the Church's position is the Queen's position. The Queen, though head of the Church, also signed into law the legislation that legalized gay marriage. The girl wears a lot of hats.

>the Queen could change CoE policy

Actually she couldn't. This would be a violation of long-standing constitutional norms.

<comment><USER5> England doesn't have a constitution. English "norms" are what forced Meghan from royal duties. I mean it's hard to come up with anything more inherently racist than hereditary monarchy. But one which maintains an armed overseas enclave to enforce anti-Roman Catholic policy is unfortunately a good start.

Saying "it's our tradition" doesn't make the monarch's inaction any less a condoning of hate and discrimination. Tradition, however, is how they justify hate and discrimination in Alabama.

<comment><USER4> >England doesn't have a constitution.

Yes it does. It doesn't have a _written_ constitution. (Or at least, the main elements of the constitution are not codified in a single privileged written document. There are documents such as magna carta that form an important part of legal tradition that feeds into British constitutional law.). The constitution of the UK defines quite clearly the role of the monarch, which is not anywhere near as wide-ranging as you imagine. If you don't even know this basic fact about the UK, you really have no business commenting on the UK vs the US.

With regard to Northern Ireland, Meghan, etc., you are framing your comments in a way that makes a sensible discussion impossible, so I won't take the bait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> America's racism is kind of lazy and cowardly. It's mostly just leftovers from the 20th century that we keep because no one wants to reverse it all. We have anti-homelessness laws, housing laws, education laws, drug laws and prosecutorial discretion that all target or allow non-overt racial discrimination.

On the surface they aren't specific to a racial group like the Jim Crow laws. It's just like:

"Oh hey black people are doing this. Let's make that illegal!" (Crack, Loitering, etc...)

"Let's give cops and prosecutors the ability to choose who they enforce this law against." (White boys will be boys)

"White people already have an advantage in this area. Let's cement that advantage with a carefully planned regulation." (Housing, tax incentives, education system)

Then 50 years later we just keep those laws. Now it seems "Normal" to us to say:

"School districts should be funded based on standardized test scores."

"Credit scores for those who buy a home will be higher than those who pay rent on time."

"Student loans should be non-dischargeable so people don't run out on loans after graduating."

</comment><comment><USER7> > _put his knee and the full weight of his body on Floyd's throat for roughly > nine minutes_

I don't see any possible way in which dishonestly stretching the truth will benefit the national conversation.

The knee on Floyd's neck was not the only load-bearing point of contact with the ground, i.e., was not bearing Chauvin's full weight; and it was on the side of his neck, not on his throat.

That is bad enough without exaggerating.</comment>


OmniFocus 3 for iOS released - <AUTHOR> https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omnifocus-3-for-ios <comment><USER2> I am currently comparing OmniFocus 3 with Things 3 to decide which one better represents my working habits or preferably improve it.

\- Things 3 is simple and captures everything I need from a todo-app. It is like writing down the things you need to do on a paper.

\- OmniFocus 3 is complicated. There are ~5 buttons whenever you go in the app. No question, it is more customizable but does it really make a difference?

EDIT: Typo.</comment>


Is Facebook finished? 'We're not far from Zuckerberg getting subpoenaed' - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-data-sharing-privacy-lawsuit-mark-zuckerberg-subpoena-a8690641.html <comment><USER2> I though Zuckerburg was already subpoenaed?

<comment><USER3> I don't believe he has received an actual subpeona from anyone yet. The US Congress requested he appear but didn't issue a subpeona which would have compelled testimony (because he came when they asked). A quick Google search looks like the UK Parliament didn't issue a subpeona (or whatever the equivalent there would be). Maybe you're thinking of those two times? A request like the Congressional one isn't as serious as a full subpeona specifically because you can decline (though it's usually not the best idea).

<comment><USER4> He was also not under oath so it was basically just a sideshow.

<comment><USER5> Lying to Congress (or any part of the federal government) on a matter within it's area of responsibility (which for Congress is universal) is a crime whether or not it's under oath. (Fraud against the United States, whether or not it's also perjury.) Congress and anyone with competent counsel appearing before Congress realize that, even if lay audiences sometimes don't.

So, while neither is simply a sideshow, it's the sworn testimony that involves a theatrical display for the uninformed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Redux-Tiles – library to deal with verbosity of Redux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bloomca/redux-tiles <comment><USER2> I've looked at literally hundreds of Redux-related libraries and addons (and listed anything that looks decently useful in my Redux addons catalog [0] ). As part of that, I've seen dozens and and dozens of libraries that promised to "reduce Redux boilerplate" \- usually functions for generating reducers based on lookup tables rather than switch statements, but also other approaches as well.

redux-tiles adds a bit more abstraction that I personally like, but it does look useful and appears to maintain the overall spirit of Redux (as opposed to many other "wrappers" that wind up trying to add OOP/class layers on top, or obscure the fact that there's actions, reducers, and dispatching going on, per some of the examples I listed in my blog post "The Tao of Redux, Part 2 - Practice and Philosophy [1]).

I don't think I'd use this myself, but it seems like a reasonable approach to "reducing boilerplate" overall. As always, it's up to you the Redux user to decide how much abstraction you are comfortable with and want to use in your own application.

Thanks to the author for putting this together and posting it.

[0] [https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem- links](https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem-links)

[1] [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux- tao...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-tao-of-redux- part-2/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your feedback!

I've tried to keep the Redux spirit -- I completely agree about too much abstraction, so I tried to build something much more simple, more basic thing.

Can you please describe which parts of abstractions you personally think are too high here? I see it personally in `waitTiles` function to do SSR, and in `createEntities` (while it is a pretty simple function, it looks like a magic).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

I worked with different domain models using Redux, and also different codebase sizes, and it finally led me to this library.

Originally I was involved into building data layer for collections (e.g. how Netflix shows list of series), and I was building a very complicated factory to produce kind of the same thing -- actions, reducer and selectors, with aggressive caching and normalizing.

Later I worked with less amount of entities, and more RPC style APIs (a lot of interaction with user, which are pretty much bunch of requests, where you track pending state, error and success -- think about reset password, obtaining a token, etc). When you have not so many entities, normalizing becomes not so necessary, but I have noticed couple of things which are constantly used and were giving me pain points: \- tracking async code (e.g. dispatching start, failure and success) \- universal approach to caching (each action creator often had slightly different caching mechanism) \- nesting results (e.g. put `terms` under `documents` reducer) \- because of verbosity I personally tended to combine a lot of logic under a single action (so sometimes several raw API requests were made from a single action, not just dispatching other actions)

I have tried to address all of these issues here. The idea is pretty simple -- the library creates a so-called "tile" with everything: actions, reducer, constants and selectors, allowing you to nest it in the state (so you can easily separate let's say `user` part), and to nest results, universal approach to caching (all async requests are aggressively cached, so if you dispatch the same action, it will wait the already made request, and you can safely await returned promise). Also, I expose function back, so it is much easier to test it, in case you inject all dependencies to the middleware (I personally like it, but seems that it is an anti-pattern).

And the last thing -- in case you instantiate middleware for each request on the server side, you get back `waitTiles` function, which after dispatching all needed actions will return you a promise, awaiting which will give you fully resolved tiles. So, you can do dry run of the react render on the server, wait for tiles, and then safely render again, knowing that everything in `componentWillMount` under the render path will be fetched. This SSR part still has few questionable parts, but I feel it is a good idea in general (I want to write a post about possible scenarious, how to prefetch for SSR).

In case you have any questions, or just want to chat about different approaches in reducing boilerplate size for Redux, I'd be glad to answer!

<comment><USER3> Happy to see people trying to solve this problem. Can you talk about how this compares to redux-saga?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

As @acemarke mentioned, they are really different (and there is nothing to stop you from using them together, if you want -- tiles expose constants).

Even if you use redux-saga for all side effects, you would still have to write some redux code, e.g. for `usedLoggedIn`, and even it is the easiest action and reducer, it will take from you about 30 LoC. And usually we tend to group reducer hanlders together, combining only the higher level (so, usually there is only `user`, but only in case of big amount of actions we will separate `userAuth`).

So, I've tried to make it as easy as possible to nest them (so you would use type like `['user', 'auth']`), and to nest data under let's say ids. You don't have to think about it -- there is just a little amount of magic under the hood, which will nest it, merge data and combine reducers.

So, saga adresses side effects problem (especially when they are pretty complicated, and depend on each other), while this library provides some sugar on top of raw redux "ducks".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of creating another level of abstraction that a dev has to learn, how about just creating smart IDE tools that help with Redux? E.g. noticing that you're creating another action and automatically creating a statement in the reducer

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there are several problems here. While you are correct, that we don't really have tools which will automatically create constants or generate a reducer based on them, I personally don't think that it is a right direction.

First of all, there are too many tools around. So, unless it will be really popular, it will be achievable only in couple of most-popuplar editors. Secondly, there are some things which this approach won't solve -- for instance, universal approach to caching and merging data in reducer (it can be done via some helper functions, but you still will have a lot of boilerplate).

And also, some things are just hard to do -- for instance, combining reducers with decent amount of granularity and complexity of maintaining it later. Also, here I provide a way to do prefetching for server-side rendering, which is another problem you'd have to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very nice, one of the major issues I have with the frameworks that are coming out is the large amount of boilerplate. Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I've tried my best to simplify typical use-case for Redux, which should be enough for majority of users.</comment></comment>


Using accumulated snow to inform safer intersection design in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/208614780 <comment><USER2> What is the message?

<comment><AUTHOR> Extending the curb would increase safety for pedestrians because it would decrease turning speeds, improve sight lines by making the incidence angle of the car and crossing closer to a right-angle, and reduce crossing distance. Furthermore, the snow serves as an experiment proving that this road space is not necessary, and that car traffic would not be harmed by its reallocation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneckdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneckdown)</comment></comment>


How to intern in Silicon Valley (and get a J1 visa) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jorilallo.com/post/17144715009/how-to-intern-in-silicon-valley-and-get-a-j1-visa

<comment><USER2> Can you pay your cost of living with the salary? In how far does it differ from standard job salary? I could imagine this is very hard without reserve assets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on the salary. As the demand is so high I would try to negotiate a proper intern salary which is still lower that regular >$80k paycheck for engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excellent post! BUNAC (<http://www.bunac.org>) also sponsor J-1 visas...</comment>


Using Wittgenstein for Understanding and Evaluating Technology (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6209041/ <comment><USER2> If I can't extract even a speck of nutritional value from an article after three minutes I give up. Terribly written.

>I proposed a holistic, transcendental, social, and critical phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that discusses technologies – understood, after the empirical turn, as technological artefacts – in the context of the technology games, form of life, and other grammars that make possible and structure that use.

Huh?

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Ironically it's exactly the sort of philosophical muddle that Wittgenstein sort to dispel. I was hoping to find an application of the private language argument to tech, but it seemed like the author only picked up on games and forms of life. None of the emphasis on external performance, feedback from others and rule following that we get from Kripke's famous reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The overall stirring is that technology, interfaces to leveraging processes with less energy than otherwise, depend on existing cultural and linguistic artifacts—which are themselves technologies (they facilitate social agreement, cooperation by providing norms, signaling, and metrics e.g. rituals, mathematics, and behavioral disambiguation through communication). That is technology serves to further the abstractions provided by existing linguistic, cultural, and technological means. However, once those abstractions become integrated, if they are a "game-changing" technology they will begin to alter the very cultural and linguistic abstractions in which they depend on. In this way, they mutually manifest a feedback loop to accelerate the utility of each other.

This viewpoint was actually the implicit argument of Operationalists like Bridgman, Fourier.

It was the explicit argument of Bohr, who believed "we are all suspended in language". Bohr took this further and believed that perceptual experience itself was a linguistic model to communicate the stimuli, the outside world, to the perceiver. In the same way, everything is a language, a game (set of rules) for communication.

The utility of this viewpoint is to create technology which conforms and supports existing cultural/linguistic/behavior norms rather than one which obstructs them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just started digging into it, but seeing as he's using the Investigations, I'm expecting a bit more emphasis on linking up technologies with a nominative signpost that more clearly elucidated the essence of what it is actually doing.

I.e. ripping away the Facebook moniker for the social media platform and replacing it with descriptive language indicating what it actually does. Will update or reply with inevitable disappointment when my expectations fail to be lived up to.

<comment><USER5> Okay. About halfway through. (Philosophical reading is not an activity to do lightly. It's a bit like climbing a mountain.)

I advise anyone to put in the time to read the article, but as someone pretty familiar with Wittgenstein already, I'll try to condense it, and provide some lower level context through which more immediate everyday application of it can be made use of.

For starters:

There are two major flavors of Wittgenstein generally discussed. Early or _Tractatus_ Wittgenstein, or late _Philosophical Investigations_ Wittgenstein.

We're concerned with the latter.

Major points: Language is a toolbox. Meaning is derived from assigning uses of language through "language games" to "forms of life". Language that cannot be traced back to a language game is meaningless, as the "language game" is basically a nominative signpost through which the underlying linguistic grammars and the forms of life the use of language is meant to represent intersect to confer meaning.

Meaning in reference to language comes in two flavors:

Explicit (surface) meaning: meaning can clearly be articulated grammatically; includes syntax, basically the "what you said" part of an argument with your Significant Other

Implicit: meaning communicated through living. Cultural meaning. The sun will rise tomorrow. You grab a towel to dry off. Know how. You do X which leads to Y, which leads to Z. The "what I meant" part of an argument with your Significant other. Just to make sure I'm getting this across clearly, let's use a Hemmingway story.

For sale: Baby booties. Never worn.

Explicit meaning: A seller is offering to sell something. The something is a pair of baby booties. The baby booties have the quality of never having been worn.

Implicit meaning: The seller is trying to part ways with a pair of baby booties. This suggests someone was expecting a child to be born, normally a happy occasion, but since the seller is trying to get rid of them with the quality of never having been worn, it suggests something tragic has happened; I.e. death of the child, or mother and child.

None of that is explicitly stated, but nevertheless, can be communicated through common experience. Explicit meaning derives from rules, implicit requires common experience to be communicated properly, and is much harder to formalize.

Now that you've had a crash course on Wittgenstein, let me try to condense the rest of the piece.

<comment><USER5> Okay. Latter half basically takes the fundamentals of analyzing language vis a vis it's use, and the general transcendental natures of grammars, and applies the same process to technology.

So the author posits that there are transcendent grammars which shape our use of various technologies, and that these grammars by necessity transcend their merely technological context, and also incorporate facets of the culture and forms of life of the communities utilizing the technology.

Examples I'd extrapolate:

Internet/networking as used by Americans: Primarily disseminative in nature. Censorship extremely difficult. Robust. Limitations or control are far harder sells, due to cultural norms.

Vs.

Internet/networking by China: Tightly controlled. Increasingly difficult to freely/anonymously transact through due to intense regional regulation. Ubiquitous, utilized to enable pervasive Informational Awareness/Personnel tracking.

The author focuses on social robots in particular, but to be quite honest, toward the end, I just wasn't getting that much useful.

I think there's validity to looking at the ways differences in cultural values will lead the same technology to wildly divergent use cases; there is value there.

Not really feeling like there's a breakthrough here though. I'm not quite mind blown enough yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the paper doing what it talks about?

<comment><USER4> Yes it is, I'll explain it in a top-level comment for any other frustrated readers.</comment></comment>


Fully self-directed replication - <AUTHOR> https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/fully-self-directed-replication/ <comment><AUTHOR> A self-constructing "0E0P" Conway's Life metacell is finally in working order!

The structure behaves like a single cell, obeying the rules of Life or whatever CA rule it's programmed to emulate. Unlike previous metacells, if a new cell has to be born, one of its neighbor metacells has to construct it starting from empty space.

<comment><USER2> metacells blow my mind. i'll leave this here for anyone else interested: [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build- a-w...](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working- game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

</comment></comment><comment> gene-h While making interesting constructs in cellular automata is a fun exercise, there is the possibility that the constructs might be useful in the real world. In the near term, it is much easier to make a molecular scale cellular automata than it is to make a conventional processor. The latter requires a complicated means of stitching together molecules, the former is a crystal which is much simpler to make. So a molecular cellular automata could potentially enable us to make a computer with a mole quantity of logic gates, but we need some way to program said computer. All this work in cellular automata constructs provides a way to do this. Although the more likely application of such molecular cellular automata might be the formation of patterns below the wavelength of light.

</comment><comment><USER3> That made me think of a DMT trip. Makes me wounder about the nature of reality.</comment>


Stop Me If You've Seen This Word Before - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001186.html

<comment><USER2> I ran into a similar problem teaching myself perl a couple years ago by doing a short tutorial then foolishly jumping into a co-worker's code. "What the hell is '$.'? Hmm, well I'm sure Google can help me. What? No matching documents?!? What is this crazy s.o.b. doing here??"

<comment> a-priori Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's had trouble with this. I remember reading some C code once and I saw some strange operators I had never seen before... <? and >?, if I remember correctly.

I eventually figured out they were GCC extensions for "min" and "max", but only after a painful experience trying to get more info out of Google than "here's how you do addition and multiplication in C!"

<comment><USER3> [http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...](http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3Ac%2B%2B+%22+%3E%3F+%22&sbtn=Search)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Way back in 2004, I ran a little experiment with Google -- over a period of a week, I searched for an entire dictionary of ~110k individual English words and recorded how many hits Google returned for each._

Of course, a word can appear on a page multiple times. That's why, I think, folks used to ignore the stopwords. They introduced noise when trying to access the content words. Now, with span constraints, you can incorporate them into the analysis. So "a matrix" and "the matrix" returns very different results, even without quotes.

</comment><comment><USER5> > "The" is one of the most common words in the English language

"the" is THE most common word in English.

</comment><comment><USER6> It makes sense that low-information terms would have a lower preference when searching without any context. If your index models the context around terms, you can get better results from a low-information search.

I think...I'm kind of shooting from the hip here relating it to context modeling in lossless compression schemes like CABAC and PPM.

Could you overcome stop words with some sort of Bayesian phrase matching over some learned hidden states?

</comment><comment><USER7> POPFile has stopwords because people in the community insisted on it. My commercial email filtering software does not because it turned out that in my tests that the accuracy difference they made was so small as to be in the noise. And they were costly in terms of time to check, and to maintain across different languages.

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess the idea was to help allow English search queries (i.e. exclude words people were using to describe their query but shouldn't be searched for).

</comment><comment><USER9> it is about how to sort with stop word. Tranditional tf-idf method didn't work well as it didn't contain any information about each word relative location in its context. a simple method is to index "the the", the word group instead of single "the". I guess it is what Google does now with "to be or not to be". However, the word grouping tech is a common method in CJK full text search.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like how the top Google words are all generic web marketing words, with the two exceptions of "hotels" and "women."

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22the...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22the+the%22+band&btnG=Search)

as soon as the article asserted this wouldn't work, i tried googling, and it worked fine. i stopped reading after that.

edit: for whatever reason, if you follow the link directly, the search results are wrong. you might have to submit the query again after the page loads to get the right results. weird! maybe he was onto something (nope)

<comment><USER12> He says in the article: _Google doesn't seem to use stop words any more_. (in fact he makes a point of that fact).

<comment><USER13> And in this case, yahoo seems to be better than google: <http://twingine.no/search.php?q=the+the>

Now all we need is a MySQL stopword story contest...</comment></comment></comment>


DNA Biohackers Sold a DIY Kit for Glowing Booze and Here's What Happened - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/biohacking-booze <comment><USER2> Flagging because of linkbait title.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, and the relevant bit of the HN guidelines for anyone unaware:

"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."</comment></comment>


Youtube is down. 500 Internal server error - <AUTHOR>

500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information: Y3wfubpVZkG5DhE8BQWQ_FJeIFFmu-WxzMlFaNAwTNReOI3luroQ-NEHgnBi 7jXX7U8-Sme7GJL8cBo7E7dwvAu5blxCuIjPqLuVWCv0YNRzuJgYj8U0vpNT <comment><USER2> Seems like it's fixed now

</comment><comment><USER3> It was down for a solid 10 minutes a week or so ago.

</comment><comment><USER4> Had this too

</comment><comment><USER5> it's down again right now

</comment><comment><USER6> who cares</comment>


Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye: The auto industry's change curve - <AUTHOR> http://www.autonews.com/article/20171105/INDUSTRY_REDESIGNED/171109944/bob-lutz%3A-kiss-the-good-times-goodbye <comment><USER2> From my cold, dead hands...

My wife and I were discussing American culture today and some of the reasons we'll be hard pressed to do anything to solve our present issues with mass shootings and I look at car culture and see the same kind of value. Americans aren't really good at giving up freedom, for any reason, no matter how many people will die. Cars and driving represent a freedom that I don't think we're going to be giving up any time soon. As you likely assumed from my first line, I'm part of the side that would fight tooth and nail against any attempts to legislate away independently owned and operated automobiles.

I won't waste any time trying to convince people who hate cars that I'm right but I'll tell you that Uber doesn't come near my house and that's a perk. I live 30+ miles outside of the nearest "city" and loooooooove driving/riding (motorcycles) back roads and hills. I'm not trading in my car or truck or jeep or bike or bike for a blob that slips in and out of a pneumatic tube, no matter how much I love Futurama.

ps- Some of my neighbors ride their horses on the same road I drive. We wave.

<comment><USER3> I think it's more likely going to be your cold empty wallet that prompts the change.

As the shift moves on the insurance pool of manual only drivers is going to get worse and worse and the rates are going to skyrocket.

<comment><USER4> Let's say we get to a point where being driven autonomously is cheaper and more convenient than owning and driving your own car. Wouldn't the people that still choose to drive, despite the higher cost, be the people that _like_ driving? And wouldn't it make sense that these people would be pretty good drivers, get into accidents less, and therefore cost less to insure than the average driver today?

<comment><USER5> I would not bet on it, given that most of those who have, for example, crashed while drag racing on urban streets would probably fall into the 'like to drive' category.

<comment><USER6> They'll just quit insuring their car. What's one more law broken?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned, though my 15 year old daughter who's anxiously waiting to learn to drive may see things differently. She could very well be amongst the last people who learn how to drive.

The article doesn't discuss how far-ranging these impacts will be. Automakers and dealerships are just the tip of the iceberg. Part suppliers are impacted, as well as auto insurers and gasoline filling stations. Perhaps less obvious are auto repair shops of all stripes, auto repair stores, parking garages...this is a HUGE impact to the U.S. economy. It's amazing how little discussion this is getting beyond unemployed taxicab drivers.

<comment><USER8> It's not sexy talking about how we have the potential to put millions of Americans out of jobs, and would rather handwave the discussion with a "Oh they said the same thing during the industrial revolution."

<comment><USER9> Present your argument that we'd be better off with 500,000 people employed as farmers and ditch diggers working by hand without automation and equipment.

<comment><USER10> Yes, of course. How is this even a question?

If we had the resources to give 500,000 people a living wage, a home, health care, in exchange for performing a completely meaningless task then that would be a pretty good deal (that many would also be happy to take).

<comment><USER11> You're basically suggesting the broken window fallacy:

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

Basically, it's foolish to have people do unnecessary work because in doing so you have squandered time and resources that could have been spent creating additional value.

<comment><USER12> The broken windows fallacy is not apt in terms of what lobotryas wrote. If we had enough resources so that everyone had a home, health care, and access to a livable amount of money each month then that would be good. Wouldn't it? Lobotryas did not state how to accomplish this. Just said it'd be great if we lived in such a world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My counter to this line of thinking, when it's come up in conversations before, is this:

Horses are still legally permitted on basically all of the roads they were before automobiles were invented.

Granted, they're generally quite rare, expensive to maintain, and a luxury ... but they're still with us.

<comment><USER14> Horses have been relegated to back country roads. If there is any amount of traffic, the horses are on the shoulder of roads, in the grass. I have never seen a horse on an interstate or highway.

<comment><USER15> The OP's point still stands. There were no interstates or highways in the horse-and-buggy era.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Unfortunately, I think this is the demise of automotive retailing as we know > it.

I wouldn't start this sentence with "Unfortunately".

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think it will happen anytime soon. I can see autonomous car mode enabled in " controlled" environments like highways and advanced cities but there are a lot of countryside roads and trails where even cell phones don't work.

<comment><USER18> In the UK I don't imagine B roads or smaller being autonomous and the UK road structure is different to the US highways in many ways that make autonomous driving that bit harder.

The bit I am seeing is private ownership of cars with a view to the batteries in the car partnering up with their solar panel and cheap overnight electricity. In this mode the car plays a really important role in evening out the peak power demands on the grid by selling electricity back at a higher rate than purchased overnight.

Due to the culture of private ownership I see people getting electric plugs on the lamppost in their street, hooking up to that and buying their electric car on a favourable 5 year lease arrangement. It is very much the family vehicle with child-seats and whatnot permanently installed. These cars will be conventionally driven except on A roads and motorways when the car is allowed to drive. There will still be some expectation of the driver being at the wheel.

There are trucks from all over Europe, until that guy from Turkey also has an electric, self-driving truck then the road is not going to be a fully automated zone, as proposed in the article.

If you don't own an electric car then you won't be able to use it to even out the power demand at home, you would need a Tesla PowerWall or equivalent to store your solar and do that. I am not seeing people buy those things as quickly as they are buying iPhones. Most people don't even have decent insulation.

The ownership of the car jumpstarts this transformation in how we use the electric grid and gets people involved in a way 'Uber' services will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article mentions "handset providers" as a thing that General Motors doesn't want to be.

I'd like to observe that "a handset provider" is the most valuable public company on earth.

<comment><USER20> That's one handset provider who captures about 95% of all the profits in the industry while the others fight over table scraps.

General Motors knows they won't be Tesla and they don't exactly looking forward to fighting over table scraps.

<comment><USER21> What makes you think Tesla won't be fighting for scraps while a company like GM does?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am in a minority of skeptics in this case. I still believe that the "imminent" arrival of autonomous cars on scale is a pie in the sky and it will take many more decades to really make this leap.

I believe we are in the same time period as AI was during 50s, 60s, 70s when huge promises of great things it would achieve were made but it took many more decades before AI started to really take off (meaning just recently).

I believe Waymo and others are still in very early stage and it will take decades to get reliable enough product which can be rolled out en masse.

</comment><comment><USER23> My intuition is this seems like futuristic thinking that you might have found from the 60's where everyone thought we would have bases on the moon and flying cars. I'd love if someone could post some well written rebutals.

<comment><USER24> I don't think it's quite that far fetched - the reason we don't have flying cars or moon bases is that neither was actually all that desirable; neither was better than what we have by enough of a margin to make the short-term capital investment worth it.

The same doesn't really hold true for driverless cars. It appears they will be cheaper, traffic and road safety would improve significantly and we're already now used to calling for a car with the push of a button on our mobile phones. Plus, we've already got billions being put into the development of them, by real public companies with a lot of shareholders and boards to answer to.

We never really had that with flying cars or moon-bases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 20 years is not soon enough. My mother is aging and I don't want her to lose her mobility.

<comment><USER26> Has she consider using Uber of Lyft as they are right now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bizarre that co2 emissions are not mentioned in the article or the first couple of pages of comments here. That's the obvious high bit of why private car culture is unsustainable and immoral.

</comment><comment><USER28> Riiiighht.

> _traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn 't matter._

What about pedestrians? Or an animal, such as a moose, that wanders, or bounds, onto the roadway from the nearby forest? Even an autonomous vehicle, even a _group_ of autonomous vehicles traveling as a well coordinated group, need to be able to stop for the person/moose, or they risk killing their occupant or that person. (or the moose.) The top speed will be dependent on how far you can clear around the vehicle. (A quick Google says a speed of 150mph has a stopping distance for a car of a fifth of mile!)

> in 15 to 20 years — at the latest

That is, by 2037, there will be no vehicles that aren't fully autonomous. It won't happen. Even _if_ the technology manages to progress that far, I doubt society is capable of that kind of rapid deprecation, even if we limit it to just the mainland US.

> _Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for > scrap or trade it on a module._

Such legislation is going to be _terrible_ for the individual; how are you going to propose that people make such a selfless trade, because in my experience, they'll never do it. For some people, you're going to legislate away their current means of transport, require them to start paying either for a new vehicle or for the cost of renting one (through a provider, e.g., Uber, counts as renting), and expect them to be fine with it, when for some folks, this might be hugely financially harmful?

> _That is the death knell for companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi._

Seems to me like they could easily pivot to making luxury cars (which isn't really a pivot?); want a decent ride? $X. Want _nice_ ride? $Y, where Y > X. There will still be people who want to go from point A to point B, and other people who want to do so in style.

> _computer terminals with full connectivity._

No, there will be WiFi. Maybe. And unless we make big improvements to mobile connectivity (which in 20 years, hopefully we will), it must be limited by that.

> _This transition will be largely complete in 20 years._

That would be nice, but I just don't see us going from "I can't buy a fully autonomous vehicle" to "manually cars are illegal" in 20 years.

I'm still also curious about a few aspects of (what I know are hypothetical, since nothing is on the market yet) autonomous vehicles:

* Will it bend the law, particular during the transition when there is a mix of human and computer driven vehicles? I, as a human, will regularly bend the absolute letter of the law to keep myself and others on the road safe: e.g., to avoid hazards, to allow a motorcycle to lane-split, because I don't believe the fool next to me will remain in his lane, etc. I.e., I'd rather be alive than right, as the old saying goes.)

* Navigation of a car is sometimes a hideously complex thing. E.g., I need to stop on a long road trip. I might not know where, yet, but we need to take the next exit. Today's mapping apps have always, in my experience as a user, failed terribly here: searching for something always shows results in a X mile radius around you; this includes useless results that are behind me, or completely irrelevant due to being hard to get to.

<comment><USER29> > Today's mapping apps have always, in my experience as a user, failed > terribly here: searching for something always shows results in a X mile > radius around you; this includes useless results that are behind me, or > completely irrelevant due to being hard to get to.

Google maps does have a nice search feature for on the way while you are navigating. [https://www.greenbot.com/article/2995423/google- apps/google-...](https://www.greenbot.com/article/2995423/google-apps/google- maps-now-lets-you-search-for-food-gas-and-more-along-your-navigation- route.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What the fuck is up with the scrolling on this article.

(Mobile Safari.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Meanwhile, I saw an amazing cabin this fall that had a stunningly low price because it still requires fording a major river to access.

</comment><comment><USER32> Good thing he is finally admitting reality. Did this guy regularly come on tv to bach Tesla?

</comment><comment><USER33> Lutz is the visionary who brought us the Pontiac Aztec.

I hope is vision is just as good here.

<comment><USER34> Wrong wrong wrong.

Lutz arrived at GM just as the Aztek/Rendezvous were being released, way, way after anything could be done about it; in fact, in one of his recent books he talks in detail about the process failures at GM that resulted in those cars as well as others being sent to market when even many people inside the company were acknowledging that they were nowhere near what they needed to be to be competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I feel like we should start organizing the resistance to this "you just call for it" now.

I liek my car. I like owning my car. I like keeping my random stuff in my car. I like being able to jump in my car and go on a trip if I want. I like having my dog in my car.

How is "oh well you just call for a car" better?

<comment><USER36> That's great. I like my car too. I think it's important to note, though, that while I enjoy _owning_ my car I do not enjoy _paying_ for it.

If there was a reasonable alternative to that $10,000 a year luxury that is car ownership, many people would take that alternative. They might take it gladly or take it reluctantly, but they would still take it.

<comment><USER37> >a reasonable alternative to that $10,000 a year luxury that is car ownership

This fundamentally isn't true. I've had a used Camry for almost a decade and the annual cost of ownership including purchase price, maintenance, registration and insurance is around 2,500 dollars. It has given me a place to store my things when I have limited housing, it is always ready with all my effects when I want to leave, and I am very much in tune with how the car should feel when it is on the road which gives me considerable comfort. Politically, expect any sort of legislation trying to force "legacy" cars off the road as being anti-poor, because it is. Cars don't have to be expensive.

<comment><USER38> [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/16/aaa- ca...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/16/aaa-car- ownership-costs/2070397/)

As of 2103 the average yearly cost of ownership was $9000. I doubt it's gone done since.

<comment><USER39> That includes depreciation, which is effectively the cost of the car.

If you own the car outright and aren't planning on selling it, this is effectively zero.

<comment><USER36> Depreciation is the difference between the price of the vehicle when you purchase it, and the value of the car when you can no longer drive it - whether that's because you sold it, because it died, or because you died.

There are different amounts of depreciation between a 2-year-lease of a new vehicle, a purchase of a 50k mile vehicle sold at 150k, and the purchase of a 200k mile vehicle that's sold to the scrapyard to be melted down for steel...but it's all depreciation.

<comment><USER39> The thing with including depreciation in the "cost" is that it doesn't actually matter to individuals.

To a business, depreciation is a real thing that affects their tax return. The Canada Revenue Agency has a lot of rules around how to depreciate assets and how they affect income. I'm sure the IRS has similar rules.

To a person, this is not the case. If I have a $10,000 car loan on a $20,000 car, the only things that matter are the down payment of $10,000 and the regular loan payments. If I pay the loan off over five years but the car has a 10 year useful life, those last five years are effectively free.

Yes, from a pure accounting perspective I would debit the asset account for my car, credit cash for the down payment, and credit a liability account for the car loan. But in reality, that doesn't actually matter. There is no impact on my taxes by amortizing my car over 10 years vs 5 years. The only impacts are how the down payment affected my savings and how the loan payments affect my cash flow.

<comment><USER36> After those 10 years, you can ostensibly sell the car when you feel it has outlived its usefulness to you.

Whether you can then sell that car for $8,000 (and thus finance your next vehicle down payment with it) or have to scrap it for $500 has a huge impact on your total cost of owning a vehicle. The loan payments are factored into our sum of car payments, registration, insurance, gas, and maintenance already, yes, but some of your down payment should be factored into the annual cost. Not all of it, because then you'd be ignoring the value of the car when you sell it. The resulting factor in the sum is equal to the depreciation of the vehicle.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kolkata to get its first self-driving metro trains by 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://thetechgraph.com/2016/12/18/kolkata-get-first-self-driving-metro-trains-2018/ <comment><USER2> That is what Transport For London needs...that would reduce the number of strikes I would imagine!

<comment> david-given The DLR (Docklands Light Rail, one of the London Underground subnetworks; it's mostly overground, ironically) has been fully automated since 1987.

[https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/what-we- do/docklands-...](https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/what-we-do/docklands- light-railway)

It serves the financial districts of London. If you're visiting London, it's worth a look; it's always hilarious to watch people in high-powered suits subtly jockeying for the coveted front-right seat, where the driver would normally sit...

<comment><USER3> Out of interest, why is it that only the DLR is automated and not any of the other Underground lines? Is it an infrastructure issue?

<comment><USER4> Bits of it does have similar levels of automation to the DLR, bits of it don't. The Underground is a large systems where some lines have been upgraded to fully modern ATO, whilst others have manual control and signalling systems dating back to the 1950s.

The DLR is automated but there is still a human aboard who makes the decision to close the doors and start the train moving. They can also take manual control of the train if needed.

If that is counted as automatic the Victoria, Central, Jubilee and Northern lines are also automated. They have modern ATO systems as well, it's just the train operator gets their own compartment for historical reasons.

The "sub-surface" lines (Metropolitan, District, H&C and Circle) will have similar levels of automation once their long delayed signalling upgrade is complete.

The more interesting thing is the New Tube for London programme to replace trains and signalling for the Picadilly, Central and Bakerloo lines that plans for ATO without anyone aboard the train (at least where possible, various bits where the lines are shared with other services will need human supervision). But that's currently about a decade into the future, they're mostly still at the planning stage, a report about it is at [http://content.tfl.gov.uk/ntfl- feasibility-report.pdf](http://content.tfl.gov.uk/ntfl-feasibility-report.pdf) (PDF).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paris has some since a few years

<comment><USER6> Copenhagen (Denmark) has as well

<comment><USER7> Vancouver, Canada has since 1985.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_\(Vancouver\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What kind of journalist/writer doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its", and what kind of publication publishes an article with an error like that _in the heading_..?!

<comment><USER9> I _believe_ it's based in India, so probably people who don't speak English natively.

<comment><USER10> It's their offical language, along with Hindi. Many of the Indians I've known have a much better formal command of the language than many native English! Including myself.

<comment><USER9> Making a language "official" doesn't make it your native language, unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> Oh FFS.

To stay on point it's a matter of ignorance not nativity. The article is crap not because it is Indian, which is irrelevant, but because the domain is a minimal effort blog that has no place on HN.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry but that simply isn't true. Pretending like the English literacy rate in India isn't 12% is silly and false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Copenhagen Metro has been running driverless since inception in 2002. Functioning smoothly, with trains every few minutes, no delays woth mentioning, and no serious incidents so far.

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.asianage.com/metros/kolkata/181216/kolkata- metro-...](http://www.asianage.com/metros/kolkata/181216/kolkata-metro-to-be- driverless-by-march-2018-yatish-kumar.html)

A much better source.

</comment><comment><USER12> Turin (Italy) has a fully automated metro line (including doors operation) since 2006, I believe.

<comment><USER13> Do you have any data about delays ? If anything gets broken, does it get faster to repair it ?

<comment><USER12> No hard data, sorry. I used it extensively until mid-2014 (I am now an expat) and rarely experienced any delays due to technical problems.

"Rarely" means that I used it on average twice every day, including weekends, and I cannot remember more than 3-4 cases where we had delays (from 2007 to 2014)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gibberish. How did this end up on the front page?</comment>


RxDB – Local JavaScript-Database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb?x=1 <comment><USER2> This looks like a wrapper around the PouchDB replication and storage, but with user-friendly APIs. It's high time somebody did this. They should make a bigger note of the fact that by using RxDB you get access to a large and established ecosystem. Not just PouchDB, but also IBM Cloudant and Couchbase Mobile, are part of the stack you can interoperate with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are right with the wrapper-thing. Before I started creating RxDB, I used pouchdb, minimongo, gunJS and lokiDB and had just too many things to handle by myself. RxDB is an approach to create a database which is easier to use and does not create discussing-point when using it in a big team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> the title seems like click bait. Its very misleading to the point of being intentional. The title to me implies that there are intention to replace the use of sqlite with this javascript database.

sqlite (from their website) "SQLite is a self-contained, high-reliability, embedded, full-featured, public-domain, SQL database engine. SQLite is the most used database engine in the world."

When I click on a link I see a nodejs application with a bunch of info on how to use it. No justification or details on implementation, or how real problems were solved.

How portable is RxDB (PouchDB)? Can you run it on a embeded device without a browser? How full featured is it? Is it crash safe?

For instance see how sqlite is tested [https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html](https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)

Finally how is this any better than simply using the databases built into the browsers, like html5 storage?

<comment><USER4> Its exactly what i was expecting, but i've been looking at projects like [https://github.com/ngrx/db](https://github.com/ngrx/db) lately. Maybe the title should say IndexedDB somewhere.

Server side rxjs db... I'm not sure what that would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty impressive at first glance, but it seems that most of its features come from dependencies such as PouchDB, RxJS, JSON Schema, crypto-js, and more. The built version is 1.3 MB, minified file is 520 KB, or 140 KB gzipped.

I found the "key compression" feature to be an amusing micro-optimization. It truncates names of keys, making DB migrations tricky. There are better ways to save more bytes, namely by using an actual compression algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just today I swapped SQLite out for NeDB in the electron app I'm building.

Does RxDB handle persistence to disk easily?

<comment><USER7> How do you deal with the corruption issue of NeDB? From their page:

> corruptAlertThreshold (optional): between 0 and 1, defaults to 10%. NeDB > will refuse to start if more than this percentage of the datafile is > corrupt. 0 means you don't tolerate any corruption, 1 means you don't care.

I personally don't want a database that "allows" corruption at any level. I understand that there are going to be bugs, but this seems different to me.

<comment><USER6> Yeah that worried me but I just presumed all persisted data is at risk of corruption, and the library simply provided some options to help manage it.

Im not really very clued up in this area though. Does the way NeDB saves data (serialised json to plain text files) increase the chances of corruption?

I don't really know how I'd handle a corrupt data file

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Possible replacement for Meteor's minimongo?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends. RxDB can be used completely serverless, while minimongo always needs a stream to the server. But minimongo is better integrated into your meteor-server-side. The approach of RxDB is to fullfill the principles of offline-first ( [http://offlinefirst.org/](http://offlinefirst.org/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also checkout js-data.io

</comment><comment><USER10> Curious where "to Replace SQLite" came from in the title.

It doesn't appear to support SQL. The word "SQLite" isn't anywhere on the repo. And, this is a client side browser database...sqlite is not.

<comment><USER11> And sqlite is going to be an order of magnitude faster, being written in cross platform C.

I do think there's a gap for a sqlite-like cross platform native "in a file" nosql-db however..

<comment><USER12> There's already leveldb and bdb. However both have kind of odd interfaces, but other than that their nice. Bdb not so much however, because it has a very odd license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does it compare to [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) and [http://lokijs.org](http://lokijs.org) ? Does it handle concurrency and conflict resolution?</comment>