Fancy honey might not actually be honey - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-might-not-actually-be-honey <comment><USER2> I'm not sure globalization is very effective for economic growth when we're unable to enforce consistent rule-sets. If that growth is just regulatory arbitrage, we're only exchanging capital for fragile optimizations instead of production efficiency. Things seemed to be working pretty well when countries made good-faith efforts to not undermine the rules for local maximization. New actors have since entered the system who don't seem to mind playing the game exploitatatively even if it destabilizes the long-term equilibrium. Ironically, these players are often described as having "multi-generational thinking" but I won't name names.

To normalize the playing field, investments are needed to fund port-of-entry enforcement, quality control, and authenticity, among other things. Tariffs are the most sensible tax to fund these kinds of expenditures, which brings us back to square one. In fact, I think tariffs are probably a good quantitative measure of how egregiously another country violates it's trading partner's standards at the margins.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another downside of globalization, it has become cheap and easy to move food items across the world, so Vietnamese sugar syrup can be sold here as "honey" and it becomes a race to the bottom - actual honey producers either go out of business or have to do the same thing. Then a free trade advocate will point to how much the consumer price of "honey" has declined to show how well it works.

This should be straight up regulated, the FDA apparently has no source origin or testing requirements for honey, unless someone actually is sickened by a batch it's all caveat emptor and this stuff is all labeled "raw", "pure" or even "organic" and it takes an NMR machine to know differently.

I do find it surprising that the one sample out of four that wasn't obviously adulterated was the brand from Wal-Mart.

<comment><USER4> Balsamico, Cider and Pine Nuts suffer from this problem.

The Balsamico you see in the supermarket is red wine vinegar with added sugar and flavourings. The real stuff it fermented, it's closer to whisky than vinegar.

Cider should be made from pulped apples, sadly it is all too common for it to be made from commercial apple syrups. These are ultra-processed mixes of sugar from various apples. The production process removes the aromatics, so those have to be re-added.

Chinese pine-nuts are far more common than the real Italian pine nuts. They taste nothing like the real thing because they come from a different species of tree.

I've come to the conclusion that anything you buy at a supermarket or chain store is basically fake rubbish. If you want the real thing you need to go visit farm shops at the source.

<comment><USER5> >visit farm shops

And come up with a good estimate for their production capacity vs sales...

<comment><USER6> You know, I'd rather live in a world where the supermarkets are well stocked with product that anyone can afford, but where it's still accurately labeled as "cider-like product" instead of cider, "honey-like syrup" instead of honey, and "frozen dairy dessert" instead of ice cream.

Because the genuine article isn't always cheap to make, but it shouldn't have to compete with imitation products that are disguising themselves as it with no way for consumers to know the difference.

<comment><USER7> I used to laugh that Kraft singles were labeled as "cheese product" instead of just, you know, cheese. Now I can appreciate Kraft for their "honesty" (even if it may have been mandated by law). Still don't buy their products, but I don't have a negative view of the brand. I'm sure there are things they are actually good at/for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And your olive oil might not be olive oil.

Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash.

For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,

<comment><USER9> I used to trust the California Olive Ranch brand for olive oil, but lately noticed they started labeling their some of their bottles as imported and accidentally bought some. It tastes fine, but if I recall correctly the problems with olive oil usually come from imports where laws and regulation rules change from country to country.

Luckily I live close to a real olive mill, but there really is no way to know. Plus you have people arguing the vast majority of olive oil sold in the USA is "authentic" for some measure of authentic, which is really hard to discern: [https://www.aboutoliveoil.org/the-facts-about-uc-davis- olive...](https://www.aboutoliveoil.org/the-facts-about-uc-davis-olive- centers-olive-oil-report)

This feels like another one of those areas where as a consumer following the research and knowing what products are good to buy is almost a full time job.

<comment><USER10> FWIW, they were probably forced to import to meet demand due to the poor California olive crop last year.

<comment><USER11> After I noticed the change I went to the website to see what it was about and this is exactly what happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an immigrant, I see most if not the entirety of the US food industry as a deadly practical joke.

We're all stuffing our face with sugar, dairy, fatty red meat and processed food and nobody really seems to care. Most of the so-called healthy alternatives aren't healthy at all. Just look at what are called "protein bars" at your local market and check how much sugar those have, to name one example.

<comment><USER13> > Just look at what are called "protein bars" at your local market and check > how much sugar those have

Something to bear in mind here is that products designed for athletes won't be healthy for people who aren't training at high volume. The metabolic pathway for sugar is very different when taken during or after training.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but Luna Bar Protein isn't designed for athletes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem, if it is even a problem, is that 99% of the reason we initially sought out honey no longer exists. We liked it because it was the purest source of sugar that was available. We didn't care that it happened to be bee vomit flavored with a bit of plant sperm, or that we were exploiting the reproductive strategies of flowering plants, we just wanted the sweet.

This is similar with maple syrup, which comes from sugar maple trees. We sought it out for the sugar. Now that it is a really, really expensive way to get sugar, we still love it. Nevermind that other trees produce very similar flavors. Ever try birch tablets? They taste a lot like maple, probably just as complex a flavor, but of course they need regular sugar to sweeten them because birch trees make plenty of flavor, but not much in the way of sugar. Still, we seek out pure maple syrup because of tradition.

Now that we have far cheaper and purer sources of sugar, we still want honey, but again, more for traditional reasons than anything else. We try to convince ourselves of the benefits, because we really want to keep these traditional foods in our lives. And while we don't want it to be fake, we also can't actually tell the difference if it is.

This just lends itself to fraud.

<comment><USER15> Well, I like honey because good honey tastes different from plain sugar. Traveling in Greece I tasted some honeys that were unlike anything I had ever tasted before, ranging from bitter, to floral, to earthy. It's the sweetness, sure, but not only the sweetness.

<comment><USER14> I suspect you can get equal or better flavors elsewhere. If it comes from the clover, couldn't you just get them from the flowers?

I'm not suggesting honey flavors have no benefit, but it just seems odd that we have chosen those specific flavors as being tasty (honey and maple), when their primary attraction was that they came with sugar which was otherwise scarce (but no longer is).

<comment><USER16> But that's all flavor is. Yes it's an obsolete sense, but we are animals not computers. We can't download a new taste program to change what we like.

<comment><USER14> Are you saying that desire for honey is hard wired into us? I believe that's true for sugar, but not the additional flavors in honey.

Anyway, people buy fake honey simply because they think it is honey. So I don't think it is the specific taste that you can only get from actual honey.

Most people these days buy fake maple syrup (since real is so expensive), and tests have shown most can't tell the difference from real, and many prefer the fake.

<comment><USER15> Rob I'm not disagreeing with your greater point but do you mind linking me to some of these taste tests with maple syrup? I could only find one in a cursory search online and it was between two people. Sorry to bug you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I only buy honey that has crystallized a bit. AFAIK only natural honey does this. It's insane that people don't like this, so sellers are heating the honey to stop the crystallization.

<comment><USER18> I have a jar of honey that stays a soft solid around room temp, sort of like coconut oil does. I assume that's crystallized honey? Or maybe it was just adulterated with coconut oil.

It comes in a wide-mouth jar so it's at least easy to scoop out.

<comment><USER19> honey can have natural source maltose and that will make a honey crystallize like you describe. these are often sold as creamed or whipped honey, and are often stirred to promote crystallization.

A honey lacking maltose will crystallize into large hard crystals that have to be melted .

<comment><USER18> Ah, thank you. That will help me research it more.

<comment><USER19> check out these

[https://honeypedia.info/honey-ingredients-a-comprehensive- li...](https://honeypedia.info/honey-ingredients-a-comprehensive-list)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I grew up eating hyper-local honey (from my backyard) and the decline of honeybees is a real tragedy. Luckily I still know folks in my area who keep their own bees and my family can still get enough propolis and filtered honey for now. To us, the health benefits of eating local raw honey seem legit. I have never had allergies - my wife, who grew up in a big city and has terrible springtime allergies, notably improves when she eats local propolis. It also seems to improve sore throats and other minor illness discomfort (although that could be the "Mary Poppins Effect," being a spoonful of sugar)

You can buy 10lbs-50lbs at a time and eat it over the course of years. So pay attention to your local classifieds (craigslist, nextdoor, facebook) in late summer and early fall, and buy honey as local as you can get.

</comment><comment><USER21> While the adulteration problems appear to be real, this reporter goes out of their way to exaggerate the problem. They diss Whole Foods honey for not being raw, when it's...not labeled as raw. Whole Foods certainly does sell some honey labeled as raw, but you pay more for it.

<comment><USER22> Headline: "might not actually be honey" Article: "adulterated" with no mention of degree

It seems likely the whole article was a part of the strategy of the class action lawsuits mentioned near the end. Extremely exaggerated rhetoric, little in the way of verifiable claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did I miss something or is this article a bit light in details?

This testing organization claims 70% of honey they tested was adulterated in some way after talking about the most egregious offenders, making you assume it's all just imported sugar filtered with hydrocarbons with a little honey mixed in. But they also claim just heating up raw honey to make it easier to work with is an offense according to their rules.

While I'm all for more transparency or standardization this feels a bit submarine like.

</comment><comment><USER24> So you're telling me the "crazy hippies" who demand to buy only local honey from local farms were actually right? That it is actually better for you?

Guess I'll have to start finding local honey.

<comment><USER25> > That it is actually better for you?

Nutritionally, honey isn't that different from sucrose, so no. It's like the HFCS vs sucrose argument; they're basically the same, and you're still eating sugar.

I do actually buy local farm honey, though. It's incredible how you can see and taste difference in monofloral honey.

<comment><USER26> Mind explaining how it tastes different? I'm curious as to what the difference is.

<comment><USER27> Think of the difference between a Vienna sausage, bratwurst and chorizo.

Consistency, smell, flavor varies a lot, same for the honey depending on what the bees "ate".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Every time i'm reading something like this, i'm wondering where my f-ing Tricorder from Star Trek is. What would it take to get the equivalent of mass spectrometry into a miniaturized clip on module for a smartphone which you could point at anything for a few seconds, and get the results on your app just from the backscatter? I don't care about the means, just the results.

Oh, and not as something exotic but massproduced and cheap, so that everyone can afford it, use it casually on a daily basis and make a wide berth around all the fraud that is always out there even before putting it into the shopping cart.

<comment><USER29> They do exist, they are just expensive. probably the price would come down if there were more demand. It's Probably on its way to a smartphone in 20 years or so if demand justifies it.

[https://www.spectro.com/products/xrf-spectrometer/xsort- xrf-...](https://www.spectro.com/products/xrf-spectrometer/xsort-xrf-gun- handheld-analyzer)

<comment><USER28> Oh! Wow. Interesting. But unsuitable for "casual" use. I'd imagine some questions from the manager if i'd were to hold that over some fruits in the supermarket :-)

I got these when i did that with a borrowed gammascout maybe 10 to 15 years ago, even with the beeping disabled.

Panic, Panic! Don't do that here! What do you think the customers think? Don't come back here! Go, go, out, away!

Well, what do I as customer think if that's forbidden?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anybody remembering the blue honey in france, coming from bees gorging on the trash from a nearby factory producing M&Ms?

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-blue-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-blue- honey-honeybees-animals-science/)

While searching that i learned about another kind of "blue honey", which is also _very interesting_.

</comment><comment><USER30> I could be wrong about this but... from a European perspective this strikes me as an American problem. It'd be interesting to see if the same problems applied to European honey.

<comment><USER31> One example: [https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/food-safety/tesco-honey-test- not...](https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/food-safety/tesco-honey-test-not-fit-for- purpose-say-food-safety-experts/599902.article)

<comment><USER32> I suppose the key there was that it was withdrawn after this was found out (and own brand supermarket stuff is often the cheapest variant if a product with all the corner cutting that implies)

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I'd say this supports my hypothesis, in that the article is about whether or not good honey was rejected by the processes in place, not whether bad honey was making it onto shelves despite failing tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> To me, the most interesting thing in this article was the purification method using aliphatic resin. This seems almost magical in its ability to pull out pesticides and other impurities.

I'm interested to see where that goes, as I can see that actually being a selling point rather than something to hide.

I'm adding that to my food safety/purification/sterilisation methods list.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know the honey I eat is real because it comes from the bees that live downstream of my driveway. My beekeeper tells me they have the best flavor of any of his hives, probably because it is in the middle of a complex beaver habitat.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Our bees get their nectar from from the many nearby gardens. It is really very interesting how much it influences the taste to have nectar from cherries, apples, pears, spring flowers etc. Most of our neighbours say we have the best tasting honey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> There's a company nearby that we joke has 6 billion workers for them.

They do a lot of testing if it's actual honey and most of the fake honey comes from China.

</comment><comment><USER35> 90% of the aticle is spent implying that heating up honey to prevent crystallization somehow makes it "not honey". I'm not sure I follow the logic there.

<comment><USER36> It makes it no longer raw honey (depending on your definitions).

<comment><USER35> Sure, but it's still _honey_.

<comment><USER36> Yes, but that's not all people care about which is what the article specifically states. It's still honey but not "raw" honey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I buy my honey locally in south Louisiana, they're usually in generic Mason jars and can be found in places like hardware stores and barber shops, from local bee keepers.

What the heck is "fancy" honey? Did not read the article.</comment>


000197AF COBOL/mainframe date problem - <AUTHOR> http://computer-programming-forum.com/48-cobol/76d9e90711e06694.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Referenced in the article "Critical and Significant Dates" posted earlier [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052528)</comment>


Ask HN: What does it mean to work in the 'Office of the CTO'? - <AUTHOR> I have been recently running into people that work in the 'Office of the CTO' at their respective companies. They tend to be engineers, sometimes with graduate degrees, that may be doing in research, integration, or advanced development. Is there a broader definition or guideline for understanding someone's role when I encounter this terminology? <comment><USER2> If it's an engineer, it's normally touted as a kind of progressive gloat.. Such as "We get free water AND it's organic!", "Our desk chairs are made from recycled plastic bottles!" and "Our company doesn't really have a hierarchy or chain of command, I sit near the CTO!"

Joking aside. It's tough to draw a conclusion from that single statement. I've 'sat in the in the office of the CTO' as a 1st line engineer, and he spent 90% of his mingling with other engineers performing engineer duties (such as technical support or hands on switch installs) and 'sat in the office of the CTO' as a Product Manager where I conducted more 'organisational' duties alongside him.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the companies I'm familiar with, they're either programmable pundit (technical pre-sales or social marketing) or project manager for trendoid stuff beyond the interest/budget of engineering.

In larger companies, CTOs have become like VPs at a bank - lots of them with little if any strategic influence. The "office" can be so large that a member may never see or even talk to the CTO proper.

I once looked into one of those jobs but decided I'd rather be honest and work in sales or marketing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would have assumed that they are secretaries, but I suppose, in this case, they are more likely to be independent researchers who report directly to the CTO in an organization that is hierarchically structured.

Too intelligent or useful to let go, but too independent to toss into the regular worker pool. I would say that they are mid-level management ranking, maybe less depending on the business.

</comment><comment><USER5> At my first real job I was working for the CTO I basically just developed internal tools. The goal was to improve the workflows. So I guess an engineer working for the CTO work to improve the workflow.</comment>


The Perks of Working From Home  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/telecommuting-perks/

<comment><USER2> Crap, I've been working at home for two years and it never occurred to me to try to get my auto insurance lowered. I probably drive an avg of 15-20 miles a week. Doh!

</comment><comment><USER3> After reading this I wonder if there are certain industries that fear telecommuting? That is if the amount of telecommuters increases then certain industries stand to lose out: auto manufacturers, oil companies, and construction companies that build and maintain the roads.

</comment><comment><USER4> perk #1: no. pants.

<comment><USER5> Related: My wife works at home, too.

<comment><USER6> Haha, I'd never considered this benefit. I'm one of those morning people whose energy flags in the mid-afternoon, and this is definitely one way to get the juices flowing again (quite literally).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good overview, though I wish they'd balanced it out with some of the negatives.

<comment><USER8> It takes an adult sense of responsibility to be able to work effectively from home;

You miss some of the human interaction you'd get from working in an office;

Online relationships aren't as strong as real-life relationships;

You have to be mindful of how to correctly deduct living space/utilities for taxes

I've worked from home for a bit now. I quite enjoy no longer having to sit in a car for 2 hours a day. That's 40 hours a week I've gained back.

<comment><USER9> _I quite enjoy no longer having to sit in a car for 2 hours a day. That's 40 hours a week I've gained back._

Excuse the mostly pointless post, but how many days are in your week? :)

<comment><USER8> Meant 40 hours a month! Sorry.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new frontier for Google Maps: mapping the indoors - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-frontier-for-google-maps-mapping.html

<comment><USER2> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kT0KMsfD4d8)

Finally, a way to short circuit the IKEA deathmarch. That place might not be so god-awful anymore.</comment>


Give 'n' Go - A curated gallery of Dribbble shots reworked on CodePen. - <AUTHOR> http://give-n-go.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> This is actually pretty amazing. The codepen links are kinda hard to see though.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you review a CV received without a subject line in your inbox? - <AUTHOR>

When you are looking for a good talent for your company what would you do if you received an email message with Resume/CV without a subject line?
A) Mark message as a read / Low prioritize applicant
B) Star it / Review applicant
C) Delete it / Ignore applicant
Personally I would choose C, it's a case of non-responsibility... I don't need such employee in my company. <comment><USER2> B

Unless you've never made a dumb mistake on a critical task in your life, then C.

It takes 5 minutes to review an average resume. Yeah, it sucks that the email had no subject, or if the resume has bad typos, or other stuff like that. If the resume is a stinking pile of fail in all ways, then you can safely ignore it. Getting overly anal and rightous about 1 typo on a resume or a missing subject line, or an applicant that didn't realize you spell your name with an I instead of a Y, or have an extra E in your name or other dumb shit is just pretty lame, IMO.

Don't be a prick - cut people some slack.

If his resume impresses you, there is plenty of opportunity to screen for fatal flaws during the rest of the interview process.

You also didn't mention if you're interviewing a CEO or an IC-level person, thou much of my above comments would be the same either way.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd put it in the pile with the rest of the applicants.

The reason being that we where doing mass interviews years ago something like 200 people for 30 positions.

One guy missed his interview time slot by over an hour. Most people would say 'forget it', but for some reason we decided to bring him in at the end of the day.

Not only did he get one of the spots, he was an absolute rock star employee and won numerous corporate awards.

There is no doubt his resume is going to have to impress you, so if it doesn't then he doesn't get an interview.

If his resume is great, and you bring him in for an interview, bring up the lack of a subject, and you might get some interesting insight out of his response.

Really, what do you have to loose? it took you more time to post this to HN than it would have taken you to take a quick look at his CV.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Personally I would choose C, it's a case of non-responsibility... I don't need such employee in my company._

This is by no means an attack on you or your organization, but I absolutely despise this knee-jerk reaction to emails, resumes or anything really that's so prevalent in the hiring sector where Hiring Managers are LOOKING for a reason not to even blink at a resume.

I get that companies want the best candidates available, what I don't get is how willing they are to shrink the pool of qualified and excellent candidates because of something resulting from human error. The absence of a subject line in an email isn't non-responsibility; as pedalpete said, his organization reached out and interviewed a guy who came an HOUR LATE. That's a death sentence in the conventional wisdom of job hunting, and look what happened.

No, the exception does not prove the rule, but I think hiring managers-if they want to hire and if this disease of near double-digit unemployment is to shrink-need to get their heads out of their asses and actually HIRE people.

The first step in this is to stop demonizing things that _genuinely do not matter when put next to a resume that bleeds talent, organization and character_. Missing a subject line is one of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> C- Everyone in a smaller company will ultimately have to sell the products, the vision, or the job at some point. Quality social skills count. They may end up being a pain to work with later as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> C - lack of online etiquette isn't a great start for a prospective employee of a tech company.</comment>


A common antimicrobial additive increases colonic inflammation - <AUTHOR> http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/443/eaan4116 <comment><USER2> Since the title and abstract neglected to mention it: The FDA ruled in September __2016 __that Triclosan is no longer Generally Regarded As Safe /Effective, and as of September 2017, you can't get antimicrobial washes that contain it in the US. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan)

It's common, but we've already started taking big steps to limit its use. This is a good thing.

<comment><USER3> But it's still in a lot of toothpastes. In that form it's really easy to ingest it...

<comment><USER4> Several years ago, my dentist recommended avoiding triclosan toothpaste. She said it leads to gum inflammation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad triclosan is no longer allowed to be used as an antibacterial soap: [https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/u...](https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm517478.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> In mice.. not that this doesn't warrant further research but it's very reminiscent of the aspartame scare.

<comment><USER7> At least aspartame provides a benefit to some people who use it. Triclosan doesn't work well. [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://amp.timeinc.net/time/4035442/antibacterial- soap-ineffective&ved=0ahUKEwjshcyTzbPbAhUN658KHdk9DdMQFggoMAE&usg=AOvVaw1gUKw- dtZkSu5oo2R8HJms&ampcf=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> America is effectively a giant poorly documented clinical trial for a wide range of untested new chemicals.</comment>


WhatsApp illegal in Europe - <AUTHOR> http://futurezone.at/netzpolitik/legale-whatsapp-verwendung-ist-praktisch-unmoeglich/189.971.340 <comment><AUTHOR> Bing Translate: [http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=htt...](http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Ffuturezone.at%2Fnetzpolitik%2Flegale- whatsapp-verwendung-ist-praktisch-unmoeglich%2F189.971.340)

</comment><comment><USER2> I always suspected this can't be legal if i don't get asked. Awesome to know that it in fact is.</comment>


Amazon's Glacier secret: BDXL? - <AUTHOR> http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ <comment><USER2> The author quickly dismisses hard drives because at the time of the Glacier launch SMR drives were to expensive because of the Thai flood. But after a few years of running S3 and EC2 Amazon must have tons of left-over hard drives which are now simply too old for a 24/7 service.

So what do you with those three year old 1 TB hard drives where the power- consumption-to-space ratio is not good enough anymore? Or can of course destroy them. Or you actually do build a disk drive robot, fill the disk with Glacier data, simply spin it down and store it away. Zero cost to buy the drives, zero cost for power-consumption. Then add a 3-4 hour retrieval delay to ensure that those old disk don't have to spin up more than 6-8 at times a day anymore even in the worst case.

But that's just my personal theory anyway.

<comment><USER3> This is probably close, at least for launch.

The problem with this theory, however, is that tape still would have been cheaper with roughly the same footprint, and tape has the benefit of often being forward-compatible too, as the drives improve, so does the storage capacity of the tape.

The author dismisses that amazon wasn't using tape, but I haven't seen much evidence to support that necessarily.

Maybe the reality is they probably use a bit of everything. A robotic disk library, a robotic tape library, maybe a robotic optical library. Maybe they're secretly ahead of the rest of current tape technology and are getting 20TB out of a single tape. They could be using custom hard drives, or even having a robotic platter library.

One thing for sure is that it's not active disk drives, and I don't believe they keep all the data on optical disks alone, given that optical disks degenerate much quicker than magnetic storage.

<comment><USER4> I dont understand how tape infrastructure would be cheaper than free used disks that are on only 4-5 times a day for mostly very short periods of time (actually some discs would be off for months). Disks are easy to use, they are not that easy to damage and you can have each copy of data synchronised on 2-3 different DCs easily using Amazon network during night times (low network usage).

<comment><USER5> The server and network to host those disks ends up costing much more than the disks, so even MAID built from free disks isn't that cheap.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't be possible to just stack them in custom/modified racks, connect them to the tape and custom switch? Then get very cheap servers to switch through them? The hard drives don't generate much heat anyways so only basic ventilation would be needed. Using enterprise servers for Glacier sounds like an expensive luxury. Most discs would be mostly offline anyways (small amount of changes) and I bet more than a half discs would be used less than once a week so cost of. Then if you want to increase speed of the whole structure put 1u server with 4 x 4TB SATA3 discs in Raid10 for caching the most used/changed parts, connect server to 1Gbps line and you are all done on budget. The cost is just 1 simple server, modification to racks (that would cost really small money), tapes for discs and custom hdd switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A "former S3 engineer" commented on HN during the Glacier launch. Nothing verifiable, but it suggests some contrast with the idea that Glacier is optical backed [also interesting: he suggests that S3 has an erasure encoding strategy.]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065)

"They've optimized for low-power, low-speed, which will lead to increased cost savings due to both energy savings and increased drive life. I'm not sure how much detail I can go into, but I will say that they've contracted a major hardware manufacturer to create custom low-RPM (and therefore low-power) hard drives that can programmatically be spun down. These custom HDs are put in custom racks with custom logic boards all designed to be very low-power. The upper limit of how much I/O they can perform is surprisingly low – only so many drives can be spun up to full speed on a given rack. I'm not sure how they stripe their data, so the perceived throughput may be higher based on parallel retrievals across racks, but if they're using the same erasure coding strategy that S3 uses, and writing those fragments sequentially, it doesn't matter – you'll still have to wait for the last usable fragment to be read."

<comment><USER6> "he suggests that S3 has an erasure encoding strategy"

Apologies for the diversion - what does this mean? Does it mean that when an item is erased from S3, S3 "encodes" the data so that the next person who gets the same physical disk space can't read what was there before?

<comment><USER7> No, "erasure encoding" refers to a specific type of forward error correction.

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

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

<comment><USER8> If you push hard enough erasure coding, you can use extremely unreliable components throughout the infrastructure while maintaining reliability. That introduces high latency depending on the hardware specifics, but that's what Glacier is about.

Imo, they found a sweet spot of $/GB on a much higher latency/lower reliability region (this is analogous to increasing overall capacity in a communication channel by instead of using a few highly reliable high powered symbols use optimally many unreliable low power ones with error correction) -- disk manufacturers already use this aggressively for soft failures within the disk, but are obviously restricted on more systematic failures (i.e. if the whole drive fails there's nothing they can do).

If a single drive has a P_failure, with many drives they can achieve close to 1-P_failure reliable storage capacity [1]. So all they have to do is seek the optimum

$/GB_opt = min over C,D [ C/(D*(1-P_failure(C))) ], where C is the cost per drive and D is the drive capacity

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_erasure_channel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_erasure_channel)

<comment><USER9> Yes, but this doesn't explain 4-5 hours data access latency.

<comment><USER10> Latency could be artificial, in order to get:

-differential pricing

-ability to switch to transparently switch to slower technologies in future

<comment><USER8> If they're aggressive enough, I'd say there could justifiably be a quite large latency. Say for example their block size is 55 disks with 10% redundancy. Then the seek time is the maximum seek time of the lowest 50 seek times within the set of disks which haven't failed. Now there's a queue to read each drive, and it may very well frequently be a huge maximum queue pretty much every time. Even if the queue is typically short, they would still have to show a typical high value, which I'd say is essentially read time of an entire disk.

Now factor that the disks are both large and crappy. A 120 Mb/s read speed and 1Tb disk size would imply 8000 secs ~ 2 hours. Factor possibility of differential pricing as you mentioned (even longer queues), and you may get an upper bound of 3 or 4 hours.

I'm just speculating though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do BDXL discs have greater longevity than other types of optical media?

Back in 2000, our studio switched from archiving our audio recordings on DAT to CD-R. Thinking the greatest threats were loss and scratches, they made three copies of every disc and stored them in different locations. Around 2007, all of those CD-R discs started becoming unreadable around the same time.

Video recordings were archived to DVD-R starting in 2003 with the same three copy approach. In 2009, after having successfully rescued all our audio recordings on to RAID5 network attached storage, we weren't so lucky with saving our early DVD-R data.

I always assumed the reason DVD-R discs lasted less time than CD-R discs before chemical decomposition was because of the greater density, but I never looked into it enough to know for sure.

I have to imagine if Amazon is indeed doing this, they have some sort of plan in place to write all data to fresh optical media every five years or so. If so, that would create a very different cost equation.

<comment><USER12> For the same reasons, I've been investigating M-Disc. Requires special writer (but sub-$100), but can be read by any DVD reader.

Etches instead of dye, result is claimed 1000 year lifetime. DOD has evidently certified.

[http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/](http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/)

However, I worry about even finding optical readers in 10 years time.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. I hadn't heard of M-Disc. Thanks for the link!

The worry of not being able to find a device to read/play back your media is a common one for all storage types, analog and digital. For example, we have hundreds of reels of quarter inch tape from the fifties and sixties down in our library. The tapes themselves are safe (some may need a day in an easy- bake oven), but otherwise they still sound great. We recently had our Studer A-820 refurbished and it's probably in better than new condition, but I worry there won't be any people to do the service, or parts to do the service with if it needs attention in ten years.

The more obscure, the medium, the trickier it gets. We have a bunch of early digital recordings stored on Betamax tapes, that need both a working Betamax deck and a PCM encoder-decoder box in order to be read. Fortunately, those have all been transferred now.

This is why I'm a believer in thinking of maintaining an archive as being an active rather than static process. It's important to be periodically re- evaluating your digital assets to make sure they can be losslessly transferred to current file formats and modern storage media. It was probably never a good idea to simply "put it on a shelf and forget about it", but thankfully with digital assets, these migrations can be lossless, automated, and tested.

<comment><USER13> If you don't have restore drills you don't have backups.

<comment><USER11> Yes, of course. However, backups != preservation. You could have a textbook backup strategy with restore drills and fixity checks making sure that your integrity is 100%. If your audio is stored in Sound Designer II files and your print documents are Word Perfect files, you are probably not being a good steward of your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are several interesting "dead" comments on this thread from people who say they have specific knowledge:

secretamznsqrl 20 minutes ago | link [dead] [-]

      Here is a Glacier S3 rack:
      10Gbe TOR
      3 x Servers
      2 x 4U Jbod per server that contains around 90 disks or so
      Disks are WD Green 4TB.
      Roughly 2 PB of raw disk capacity per rack
      The magic as with all AWS stuff is in the software.

jeffers_hanging 1 hour ago | link [dead] [-]

      I worked in AWS. OP flatters AWS arguing that they take
      care to make money and assuming that they are developing
      advanced technologies. That't not working as Amazon.
      Glacier is S3, with the added code to S3 that waits. That
      is all that needed to do. Second or third iteration could
      be something else. But this is what the glacier is now.

<comment><AUTHOR> The math on the first "dead" post only works out to 1PB per rack. Unless there is somehow a way to jam 90disks into 4U. The backblaze and supermicro 45 disk 4U chassis suggest that would be pretty tough. Besides, there is still a good bit of rack left at 24U of JBOD plus 3 servers and TOR.

<comment><USER15> 2PB per rack sounds about right for a very tightly packed rack. Most DC's can't supply power and cooling for that kind of density, though.

<comment><USER16> The power requirements would be precisely why a Glacier HDD rack has only a fraction of its HDDs powered on at any given time. This also explains the 3-5 hours latency: you have a queue of jobs and you have to wait for other jobs to finish (eg. reading gigabytes of data) before your drive can be powered on.

It all makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook is doing this. They have a video of the machines too! [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152128660097200&set=v...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152128660097200&set=vb.9445547199&type=2&theater)

<comment><USER18> That's really cool. I feel like it'll be years before the rest of the world sees that in datacenters.

<comment><USER19> In the meantime, keep eye on this guy; [http://gigaom.com/2014/03/25/facebooks-open-compute-guru- fra...](http://gigaom.com/2014/03/25/facebooks-open-compute-guru-frank- frankovsky-leaves-to-build-optical-storage-startup/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Therefore, by a process of elimination, Glacier must be using optical disks. Not just any optical discs, but 3 layer Blu-ray discs._

What? You partially eliminate a few strawmen, and thus conclude that your pet theory is the only answer? The logic in this article is so weak that I presume this must be an example of 'parallel construction'. I have to guess that someone he trusts but is not allowed to quote has told him that Amazon is using BDXL disks, and he's pretending to reason himself to the same conclusion. My next best guess is that he's a few weeks late on his April Fool's post.

 _Assuming aggressive forward pricing by Panasonic or TDK, Amazon probably paid no more than $5 /disc or 5¢/GB in 2012. Written once, placed in a cartridge, barcoded and stored on a shelf, the $50 media cost less than a hard drive – Blu-ray writers are cheap – Amazon would recoup variable costs in the first year and after that mostly profit._

OK, maybe the April Fool's explanation should come first. Because if you were trying to come up with plausible logic, surely you could do better than declaring that Amazon's private price for BDXL media is 1/5th that known to the public and that all other costs are zero. And even if one were to assume this admittedly unlikely scenario, wouldn't you need to write more than one disk for redundancy? But that's easy to solve: just wave the magic wand and halve Amazon's secret price down to a level where it make sense.

Powered down hard drives seem like a much simpler explanation. The robotics don't seem that difficult if instead of bringing the disk to the backplane you keep the disk fixed in place and just attach the cable. Presumably you could design your own sturdier and easier to align connector, and leave the adapter in place. Or maybe there is some way to do it with a mechanical switch? Or do you even need a robot? If you built a jig so you could plug in a whole drawer of drives at once, maybe you could just hire someone to do it.

<comment><USER20> Tape is dismissed far to easily, tape is around $25-40 a tape, which $15 a TB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Although Glacier is interesting and I use it every day for some of my backups (a few TB of ongoing backups via Arq).

But I have always assumed it was just -- like the mysteriously/inappropriately killed comments from jeffers_hanging on this thread claim -- just S3 with hard delays enforced by software.

If you are already doing S3 for the entire world at exabyte scale, and you have petabytes of excess capacity and a bunch of aging, lower-performance infrastructure sitting around... do you really need to fuck with risky new optical disk formats?

It seems to me that you could just start with selling slowed-down rebranded S3, and then iterate on it.

<comment><USER22> IIRC there was a similar rumor that S3 reduced redundancy storage was just cheaper rates for the exact same service. Not sure if that is true, but certainly meets the minimum viable product.

Glacier as S3 with sleeps seems to be a pretty reasonable extrapolation of that same idea. Plus, the sleeps are long enough that if and when they build it for real, it could be economically viable.

That said, if the quoted 0.3 cents is true, it should be viable as it is by just stuffing way more density in a rack and keeping them powered down most of the time... Though that rack would probably weigh tons, so you'd probably want to reinforce the floor of the data center a bit. We saw equinix facilities with concrete floors and ventilation delivered from above, so something like that could be an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was thinking the basic strategy of Glacier was to power down whole racks, accumulates requests until they have enough of them to power up the rack and serve them all in one go. If you combine this with some kind of erasure coding (typically Cauchy-Reed-Solomon) you get even more freedom as you can treat powered down racks as temporary erasures. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's tape nor optical.

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazon Glacier has some small letter hidden costs that can pile up to THOUSANDS of dollars quickly if you retrieve the data "too fast". It can happen with only a few hundred gigabytes.

I fail to see how it is useful as a backup service. This got me into serious trouble. Built a whole backup system around it and now it is not what it was supposed to be.

<comment><USER25> I mean, it's not like Amazon suffers from opaque pricing. The offer with Glacier is exactly what they said it would be, and the trade off for lower per-gig costs is the toll on retrieving the data. That's still perfectly reasonable IMO; I have a couple of terabytes backed up, and worst-case if I actually need to hit glacier, it'll cost me a few hundred dollars.

<comment><USER26> In general I agree, but the problem with Glacier's retrieval pricing in particular is that it's quoted as dollars-per-byte (like all their other prices), but in fact it's really dollars-per-(peak-bytes-per-second).

It's easy to get a nasty surprise. If I pull enough to saturate my 28Mbps DSL downstream for 4 hours (~51GB), I'd pay nearly $100 that month, not 51GB*($0.01/GB)=$0.51. You really need a Glacier-aware restore program that is told your maximum budget, knows the pricing formula, and carefully schedules the retrievals to keep the peak rate below that threshold.

<comment><USER27> It's for long term offsite backups/archival. If you need to retrieve lots of data from it on a regular basis (e.g. because of a single dead drive) you're doing something wrong.

If our office burns down, and I had our offsite backups in Glacier, the retrieval costs are peanuts compared to cost of losing the data (going out of business). If my home burns down, and I have my offsite backups in Glacier, a few hundred dollars to retrieve data would be nothing compared to the emotional loss of years worth of photos etc.

But I have _triple_ copies at home - minimum - of almost all of my data (mirrored drives + regular snapshots on a third drive; and a lot of the stuff is also synced to/from one or more other computers), and similar setups at work: An offsite backup is _last resort_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am an AWS engineer but note that I am not affiliated with Glacier. However James Hamilton did an absolutely amazing Principals of Amazon talk a couple of years ago going into some detail on this topic. Highly recommended viewing for Amazonians.

From what I remember from it, its custom HDs, custom racks, custom logic boards with custom power supplies. The system trades performance for durability and energy efficiency.

Robin Harris' deductions in this article are worthy of Arthus Conan Doyle...

</comment><comment><USER29> Glacier uses hard drives, and the thing the author missed is that the MTTF of infrequently utilized drives is _much_ better than frequently accessed drives.

</comment><comment><USER30> It is interesting to note that while S3 prices have more than halved, Glacier prices have remained the same during that period. Does this mean that extremely low margins is at play here?

Or is it that Amazon has no competitor here yet, good enough to push it to lower the prices?

<comment><USER31> Could be either, but note that Amazon has a history of introducing new products at or below cost and then gaining a profit margin by keeping their prices fixed while their costs drop. A while back I heard that the fully loaded cost (to Amazon) of m1.small was $0.15/hour when EC2 launched, but they priced it at $0.10/hour because they knew their costs would drop and they wanted to win market share.

<comment><USER32> That history may actually be over as Google is aggressively undercutting them and they are scrambling to match pricing.

Glacier now costs the same as a Google drive, except drive has none of the restrictions. AWS on-demand prices have been cut so much they've actually left some of their prepaid discount prices ('reserved instances', in their parlance) higher than what they sell on demand.

<comment><USER31> _Glacier now costs the same as a Google drive, except drive has none of the restrictions_

Only if your usage is exactly equal to the maximum usage from one of Google's pricing tiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was just talking about this yesterday. My conclusion has always been that they are powering off the drives.

I came to that conclusion while modeling cost for Eye-Fi. Power is the big driver.

I'm not even saying robots. Just leave the disk there and power it off.

</comment><comment><USER34> Where did Amazon deny that Glacier was tape? I don't believe that the climate control requirements debunks dape.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really wish BDXL would hit the consumer market. I archived terabytes of data on single layer 25GB blurays and it's tedious to span across 10 discs for a larger storage folder.

<comment><USER36> I'm mildly curious why you'd do that - at a quick look on Amazon a 4TB hard drive seems to work out at less / GB than writeable blue rays, plus way less hassle plus in my personal experience hard disks seem more reliable than optical media - my 10 year old hard disks all work, cd-r's I made of similar age usually not?

<comment><USER35> I have 2 drobos maxed out at about 32TBs. The blurays are my cold storage. Blurays will last a hell of a lot longer than hard drives when kept away from the sun. Just because you have hard drives that last 10 years, doesn't mean you're not experiencing bit rot.

<comment><USER36> Ta. I just googled and found blurays use a completely different technology to my old CD-Rs which used organic dye and were awful for lifespan. Though I think I'll stick to my Moore's Law type disk strategy where I buy a new HD every few years and copy the entire old HD onto about 15% of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 1cent/GB still isn't that impressive to me.. I have terrabytes I need to archive -- mostly family photos and videos (and my oldest kid is 5!). 1 terrabyte = $10/month. It's still cheaper to just buy external hard drives.

There are those online backup services that are unlimited for $X/month, but I have been bait-and-switched by those services twice now, and it takes such an incredibly long time (months) to upload everything.. so I've quit relying on those as well.

<comment><USER38> I also have about a terabyte of videos of kids and so forth.

You are right that external hard drives are a cheaper option, but you must actually take the time to transfer the drives offsite. I'm lazy and since I can't automate physical transfer of drives, that does not work for me. That's why I use Glacier via Arq.

Aside: CrashPlan and a few others allow me to backup to drives I've placed at a friend's house. But I'm not interested in setting that up.

<comment><USER39> What about having a small device, say based on a BeagleBone board (or similar low power) hooked up to a USB drive and wifi. Then set it up in your car to power up for a while when the car is turned off. When it power up, it looks at the network that it can connect to -- if it is your home network, then rsyncs from your home backup server. If it is an alternate (say, office network, or another place you visit frequently), it can rsync to that server.

If someone marketed a turn-key solution like this (home backup appliance, plus vehicle-based transfer appliance), would this be a good alternative to online based services?

<comment><USER38> That's a clever idea.

<comment><USER40> I have been wishing for something like that for years. I'd love to have all my music sync'd to car automatically when I get home. Even better if it can take all my docs and whatnot with me. Security would be an issue; you're upping your exposure immensely by driving your data around.

<comment><USER41> Ouse a pair of mirrored drives (software raid1) for my main home storage, with a corn job rsyncing that to an external USB drive running encfs (which I swap out approximately weekly with a duplicate in my office drawer) - I could happily wifi sync that encrypted drive to one in my car without worrying about it if/when it goes missing. (and I've got a spare RaspberryPi and wifi adapters on the project box too… I can just see the hassle of getting a DIY power supply from the cars "12v" system to reliably power the RaspberryPi being more time wasting than I'd be prepared to invest in this though… Noisy automotive power systems are a pain in the ass…)

<comment><USER39> Take a look at one of those phone power pack batteries. These already have clean USB 5.0V output, and can charge while it is in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> And let's not forget holographic technology. The first enterprise hardware is geared towards 2015, where one recordable optical disc reaches storage capacities of at least 300GB. Both Sony and Panasonic are working on that. The future is plenty... plenty of gigs that is. If Amazon was indeed using optical disks for their cloud storage, then this could only mean even lower prices for us in a very foreseeable future.

<comment><USER43> > The first enterprise hardware is geared towards 2015

I've been hearing about this since pets.com was a hot investment and not a whole lot has shipped since then. For a new storage technology that's particularly concerning since you don't know how accurate current guesses as to cost will be and, critically, nobody has a baseline to say what reliability will be like in the real world.

<comment><USER42> Costs and reliability - very good points. Regarding reliability, couldn't we say the same about BDXL technology? Certified discs for BDXL have a 50 to 100 years media longevity, or so it's said. Question is, how accurate are these numbers? The first rewritable 100GB BDXL discs hit the market in 2011. Would three years real world experience be sufficient to extrapolate the findings to the next 97 years?

<comment><USER43> I wouldn't disagree completely – anyone predicting longevity greater than, say, 5-10 years is simply making up numbers and hoping you don't ask about methodology.

That said, BDXL has shipped in volume for years and has less new technology involved so I would be surprised if it's significantly different than older Blu-Ray or DVD/CD systems which have been heavily tested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Interesting analysis. That forward pricing suggested (5c/GB) for the 3-layer media is incredibly aggressive, and even then, it seems to be 2.5x the cost of drives and doesn't take into account the 3-layer RAIDed 10-disc product.

The cost issue just doesn't seem to compute for me. And that's leaving alone the custom storage system setup costs.

</comment><comment><USER45> I worked in AWS. OP flatters AWS arguing that they take care to make money and assuming that they are developing advanced technologies. That't not working as Amazon. Glacier is S3, with the added code to S3 that waits. That is all that needed to do. Second or third iteration could be something else. But this is what the glacier is now.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why is the author so quick to write off the idea of robotic hard drive management? It seems like the simplest explanation. Designate racks of hard drives for "new data," and "retrieving data." Write all new data to the "new data" hard drives, until they're full. Then a robot replaces the hard drive with a new one, and puts the full hard drive in cold storage. When a client requests data retrieval, the robot locates the hard drive and puts it into a "retrieving data" rack. The data retrieval servers are connected to this and actively work to retrieve data as the hard drives come online.

Considering Amazon bought Kiva Systems, which made highly intelligent floor robots for warehouses, they obviously have the talent to build the robots necessary for such an operation.

</comment><comment><USER47> Having a robot juggling the hard drives would not make that much sense. The reason why we have optical disc and tape robots is that the tape and discs need a separate device that reads/writes them. With hardware there's not such need.

With hard drives it would make more sense to do some development on the electronics side and build a system where lots of drives can be simultaneously connected to a small controller computer. All of the HD's don't need to be powered on or accessible all the time, the controller could turn on only few of them at a time. And of course also part of the controllers could be normally powered off, once all the harddrives connected to them are filled.

</comment><comment><USER48> Makes me think it would be really cool to work in an amazon data center and get to see and work with all this unreleased hardware. Very cool article.

<comment><USER45> It's very funny to hear you say that. Full article assumption based on the assumptions of the authors. The truth is much easier and more interesting. Amazon launches minimum viable products, doing as little as possible engineering and then iterates on those for the production of the product. The cheapest way to test the idea of a glacier was add waiting to S3. So Amazon did that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem is that BDXL is just no proven for any long term storage. It's got a very bad track record when it comes to delamination, oxygen and sunlight.

TApe is awesome, cheap and proven. It fits the MO of glacier. This is not to say that its not BDXL, but I'd be very suprised if amazon bet the entire house on something so untested.

</comment><comment><USER49> Here is a Glacier S3 rack:

10Gbe TOR

3 x Servers

2 x 4U Jbod per server that contains around 90 disks or so

Disks are WD Green 4TB.

Roughly 2 PB of raw disk capacity per rack

The magic as with all AWS stuff is in the software.

</comment><comment><USER50> There have been disks packs in Spectra tape libraries for 10 years, so you don't even need custom hardware for "disk drive robots"; it already exists.

</comment><comment><USER51> Interesting that the article doesn't have the question mark in the title, but the HN link does. It inverts the implied conclusion of the article.

<comment><USER52> It's a longstanding convention on HN that we sometimes add a question mark when the title is overstated, but the article is still interesting.

<comment><USER51> "It's a longstanding convention on HN that we sometimes add a question mark when the title is overstated, but the article is still interesting."

Really? I don't think this is true, I have only seen the question mark when it is on the original article as well. Any other examples?

<comment><USER52> _I don 't think this is true_

I'm a primary source on this, having done it many times myself, and I know PG has as well. Sorry, but I don't have time to dig up examples. It might be fairly straightforward, though, if you wanted to write code against the HN Search API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The Amazon Glacier is hidden in plan sight.

I think is just a virtual product. Probably unused S3 capacity, at a much lower price, not a different technology.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm guessing cheap disks.</comment>


WSJ: Amazon Testing Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://one37.net/blog/2012/7/11/wsj-amazon-testing-smartphone.html <comment><USER2> The smartphone is the "browser" of the 21st century. Remember the old days when tons of browsers were coming out? The situation is going to become like that. By controlling the phone, you control the user's access to the 'net. You decide which search engine s/he uses, which maps site, which IM client, etc. You give prominence to your buttons (shopping in this case), while denying/delaying competitors.

The whole browser war is going to play out over the next year or two, this time via smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am actually looking forward to an Amazon phone. I think the media consumption model is a good one for these devices. Amazon could easily become the #2 or #3 Android phone maker behind Samsung and HTC. Also, in the US, Amazon could do something like Straight Talk SIM and partner with AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint and offer an "unlimited" talk/text/data plan for $45 a month that runs direct through Amazon.com. They could even throw in Amazon Prime on top or maybe for an extra $5 a month. Then for $50 a month you get phone, internet, movie streaming, book rental, fast shipping...

That could be very compelling.

<comment><USER4> i'm more pessimistic. i'm expecting something along the lines of a smaller kindle fire....useless unless you are getting amazon e-content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ignoring the news for a second - am I the only one who thinks this dark grey on slightly lighter grey makes for a terrible color scheme for reading?

<comment><USER6> Dark grey on slighty lighter grey? Try light grey on slightly lighter grey.

The Readability (<http://www.readability.com>) bookmarklet comes in handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok. They are testing a smartphone.

What is Amazon going to do here? I look at Palm, and saw an awesome OS that rivaled (at the time) iOS in many ways. Yeah, the hardware was lacking (this article cites Amazon shopping China and analogous hardware concerns, though they couldn't be as bad I would hope), but in the end, it was a platform that could not attract developers among other things. Didn't happen under HP. Look at what has happened to RIM, another platform sans developers. It's the same concern you hear repeated over and over again with Microsoft. Can they, _somehow_ manage to make a convincing case to developers en masse?

And looking at Amazon's app store and forked Android strategy, all I've seen with their Kindle platform is yet another tablet without developers.

I know they are all trying, but I have to wonder when one of them are going to come up with some strategy that is so out of the box and different that we all have collectively no choice but to say "Damn. That is exciting. This could get them in the game."

I think that the value-add for someone else trying to get in the game has to almost come outside of broad app offerings. They need to avoid the 'chicken- egg' scenario by breaking in from the side.

For me, one of the little bouts of genius that Apple implemented on iOS was that you could not download completely free apps unless you had a valid credit card loaded into their system (yeah, I know you can get around this by purchasing a 5$ gift card). Believe me when I say that I told myself that I would _never_ actually buy an app from the Appstore, as free software covered essentially all core functions and services in some form or another. But with the mandatory credit card filing, breaking that promise was _effortless_ , and break it I did. Many times. With a tap.

Amazon and Apple both have their customers connected to their stores, and they both have terrific stores that are best in class, but while Apple sells media, Amazon goes one better and sells real world goods. All goods. Everything you can possible think of.

I think Amazon could benefit from this in a big way if they play their cards right.

I didn't know this for years, but Amazon has a service that lets you set a recurring schedule of products to be delivered at specific times, -could be every week, month, etc. I thought "How cool, -I can completely eliminate my trips to Target and just have all my non-perishable goods delivered to my back door every month or two." Cleaning supplies, paper towels, shampoo, -you name it.

It solves a problem for people, but it is hidden and not obvious or intuitive. I think it would be at least interesting if Amazon took a service like this right to the user and made it a prominent feature of their phone. What if, part of setting up your Kindle phone you were prompted to set up your shopping list, or at least had the option in a not to intrusive way? It wouldn't have to be turned on, but with the push of the button the users knew they were turning on a stream of goods, already effortlessly connected to their credit card, that would eliminate a massive percentage of their shopping. What if there was a grocery list app baked in (not a generic shopping app, but one tailored to an IRL behavior specifically) where you could just jump to your products and smash the 'send now' button when you run out of something and it arrives the next day.

Having the phone be the hub that eliminates a lot of your shopping and manages how you do that could be a big selling point if done right. While Amazon would love to reap the benefits of more online sales, they shouldn't treat that as the goal, -the whole experience would have to be focused on solving a problem for consumers and providing a value, which would be eliminating as much time spent on shopping IRL. It could be hard to do, but these are the kinds of value adds that a player like Amazon might need to execute, and execute exceedingly well, in order to get the platform beloved by consumers enough to make developers one day sit up and pay attention.

Maybe it's a terrible idea, but I just have this nagging feeling that new players are gonna keep failing unless they find a hook that leverages some other asset. I think Microsoft has a similar opportunity with their phone and the xBox, and while I know they see it too, it remains to be seen whether or not they will exploit it to the hilt.

<comment><USER8> You're overlooking Amazon's go-to weapon: price.

Price is tricky - you can already get free subsidized phones - so I'll be interested to see what they do here. They'll really need to work with a carrier (Virgin? Cricket? Sprint?) to offer a breakthrough value. In any case, I don't think they'll put something on the market that doesn't have attention grabbing value.

I don't think the OS is that important. %90 of people use computers much like they used them 10 years ago, and we're nearing that point with smartphones. If it has a browser, e-mail, a camera, maps, and good hardware most people will be happy.

The OS wasn't the Pre's problem - it had questionable hardware (slow, tiny screen) and was attached to a dorky brand. If it had a 4" screen and said "Sony" on the back, it could have been a hit in 2008.

<comment><USER7> " I don't think they'll put something on the market that doesn't have attention grabbing value."

I would submit that having attention grabbing value isn't remotely enough. It has to have _actual_ value, hopefully in a way that goes beyond price. The Kindle Fire is a perfect example. They won't say how many they have sold, but at the end of the day, it yet another Android tablet with a crappy, laggy software experience and an App store that lacks broad developer support. You _can_ argue that it does provide good price value.

"I don't think the OS is that important. "

I don't agree. For a myriad of reasons the OS is important. You can't just have email, a camera, a map, and good hardware, but rather you need to have an ecosystem and content delivery machine (at the very least good partnerships). And how this ecosystem is executed on every level is crucial. Not only that, but none of that even matters if you don't have developer support for apps. Sans that, your platform is going to die eventually, if it ever even scales to begin with, no question. I think providing some additional value is needed in order to get adoption up to the point where developers start delivering the broad app offerings that are required.

But I do agree with you that price is a great weapon in Amazon's arsenal. If they let consumers have them free or cheap, keeping their margins near zero with the aid of the carrier subsidy, that could be huge, especially if they deliver an experience competitive with newer, non-forked Android offerings. But the Kindle Fire hasn't exactly spoken much to this point thus far.

Regarding Palm, the OS was the only thing good about it, as I mentioned. The problems were no apps and poor hardware. I'd put all my money on it failing if it had a 4" screen and said 'Sony'. Sony is one of the last companies I could see bringing a new mobile OS to market. Not to pan them, but I'm trying to think of the last innovative initiative they've executed. All that comes to mind is a clear demonstration of their inability to handle content delivery with the inexcusable Playstation debacle, their flailing 'Sony Style' stores that nobody goes to, and a hope to return to profitability this year (the company made no money last year, registering a loss of 67.3 billion). HP had a much better shot, but they failed too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing to know about Amazon is that they use PR to leak things.

I think there's an ethical problem in reporters not revealing that a "leak" is coming from a PR agency. "people familiar with the situation said" conveys a very different impression than "according to amazon PR off the record."

When I worked there, they released dozens of products a year. They would have teams work for 6 months to create a product for a press release and then the team would dissipate over the next 6 months, the "product" would simply get stale and eventually be cut.

Amazon movie times, local menus, catalog ordering, etc. Amazon is a hype machine, driven to keep their PE in the stratosphere. I understood this in the 1990s, I have not understood it since, but that's how they operate. They do have a solid business in Amazon.com (but notice how the international expansion stopped dead. Easy to do a big PR campaign about going worldwide, but then you don't have to follow thru).

All those kindle fire rumors before it was announced? They came from Amazon PR. This is how MG got his hands on one early... it wasn't some amazon employee that snuck it out of the building, it was an amazon PR Flack that handed it to him.

This is how they also say things like "The kindle fire is selling like crazy" to create that perception, without actually releasing any numbers. If they released numbers it would allow direct comparisons and be embarrassing. If they released fraudulent numbers it would be actionable in a shareholder lawsuit. But they can release whatever "Whispers" they want and create the perception that the kindle fire is selling like crazy... because Amazon PR said so.

I can't say it doesn't work though. These rumors come out, the stock price is goosed. They eventually release a phone, the stock price is goosed. By the time they give up on the phone, people will have generally forgotten about it anyway. Or it might be one of those few products that does make some money. (or that they figure is a sufficient PR generator to keep pouring money into-- if legions of people will call every leaked upcoming kindle fire an "iPad killer" then maybe the PR value is sufficient.)

Frankly, I think it is a form of fraud. They have way mislead people about amazon fire sales. Some people even think they sell as many fires as Apple sells iPads. But that's the kind of company they are.

<comment><USER10> > _""people familiar with the situation said" conveys a very different > impression than "according to amazon PR off the record.""_

Well "according to amazon PR off the record" is a contradiction in terms. If you identify them as the source, they're _on_ the record in every way that matters.

That said, I completely agree that the press has long been horrible at passing along glorified press releases as 'news' and it ought to stop.

I just can't think of any feasible system to stop it. Even a community attempt to catalog and shame people out of it would just force the practice to evolve into using intermediaries, however deep as necessary, to establish plausible deniability.</comment></comment>


An Ontology of Technological Dynamics - <AUTHOR> https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww <comment><AUTHOR> Born out of a frustration with existing classifications and ontologies of technology, and in looking for a _dynamics-based_ ontology.</comment>


Bing Maps Aerial Victory  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/quentinhardy/2011/04/27/bing-maps-aerial-victory/ <comment><USER2> That is so very true. I've been using Bing Maps back in 2006 (they were named Live Maps or something like that back then) - the aerial imagery provided by the service was hands down better than satellite images done by Google in the same area.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't the aerial photography provided by Pictometry and not by Microsoft themselves?</comment>


Existence of UFOs confirms advanced technology that nobody admits to having - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/existence-ufos-confirm-advanced-technology-nobody-admits-having/ <comment><USER2> Absolute nonsense. The presence of an artifact on a FLIR recording proves nothing except that we are too quick to make assumptions and very gullible as a species.

</comment><comment><USER3> Except for what the US Navy's openly patented.</comment>