Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5964998/banned-from-making-money-these-youtubers-share-their-stories

<comment><USER2> I'm glad the word is getting out about this. Google's abuse of content creators on AdSense has been going on since before they acquired YouTube. As usual, the only way to make any headway with them is to get some media attention.

For anyone considering anything resembling a professional relationship with Google (i.e. you are relying on them for income), make absolutely sure that you have _real_ alternatives that you can move to if/when they screw you. You might think "I'm totally above board here, and have no intention of violating their TOS, so I won't ever have a problem", and you would be wrong. It isn't under your control, so you need to make sure you have a backup plan.

In fact, ideally you need to _already_ have non-Google sources of revenue, so that if Google drops you, you aren't left high and dry until you can switch to something else.

<comment><USER3> This applies to more than just Google. Your income should not solely depend on one party, unless you're in an employment relationship with them, which carries with it various sorts of legal and social obligations that are a lot harder to simply end on a whim.

Does your revenue depend entirely on being in Apple's good graces, and being dropped from the App Store would end it? Does it depend solely on Google's advertising money? Or even if not solely, if 75% of your revenue comes from one source, it will be game changing if you lose that.

This is why monopolies are a bad idea, and duopolies aren't much better. A healthy market will have at least three viable players, with none controlling over 50% of the market, allowing you to diversify and be save from any one of them deciding not to play.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this basically an argument against ever creating any iPhone app?

<comment><USER3> No. It's an argument against having all of your income based on an iPhone app. Now, sure, you might start out on the iPhone; but rather than focusing all of your effort there, once you've got some traction, it might be good to work on porting it to Android, and possibly Windows Phone or Blackberry. Of course, even there, it's mostly a duopoly; I don't think that Windows Phone or Blackberry are really viable platforms at this point, so you are going to have to deal with the duopoly nature of the business for now.

<comment><USER5> I would add that it's also an argument against being _dependent_ on the income from an iphone app.

If your income is from one source, you should default to saving more of it than you would if you had a diversified income base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was banned from AdSense for a similar reason.

When I was 14 I made a flash games/funny videos website, and used AdSense as my only income. I learnt a lot about driving traffic and things just started to pick up - and then I was banned.

It later came to my attention that a few friends and (at the time) girlfriend had taken it upon themselves to 'help' me by clicking an ad once a day. Annoying, since I was making about $10 a day from ads. I didn't need help. $10 a day was great for a 14 year old.

That was nearly eight years ago. I recently contacted Google about it, and was completely ignored. I understand why, it makes sense for them to protect their business - but it's annoying none the less. I could think of good uses for AdSense right now.

<comment><USER7> With all due respect, and I agree that it wasn't your "fault", but _your friends were engaging in click fraud_ , and you admit as much. (I'm not completely sure I'd believe they were doing it just "once" a day, but that's between you guys). What should the response to click fraud be for a $10/day account? They simply can't afford to dedicate a human being to something that small.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I absolutely agree. What my friends did was wrong, and I fully respect why Google did what they did, I would not have done anything different if I was them.

My point is more that it's interesting how easy it is to use this as a DDOS type tactic and it's a shame they don't have better appeal system in place. These days I am sure I could contribute to the AdSense ecosystem in a substantially more positive way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you think about it from Google's perspective, its working like its supposed to.

Overzealous fans going on click-fests are a problem for Google's customers (the advertisers). Automatically banning that account and showing those ads elsewhere completely solves that problem. Simple load-balancing at work. What more do they need to do?

<comment><USER9> The problem is the wrong person is punished, and the content creator has no recourse, and it nets out worse for everyone. Somebody who used to be rewarded for producing good content no longer is so they stop. Google's content gets worse, advertisers venue for selling their ads gets worse, consumers have less good content to watch. Nobody wins.

Would you want me to be able to shut down your business with a relatively simple action for me to take, without you being able to take any recourse, without you even having any relationship with me? It has terrible externalities with seemingly innocent actors, imagine what could be achieved with a bit of malice, as you will find among competitors.

<comment><USER8> It might be more of a supply and demand thing. Google thinks it has an endless supply of small bit-players willing to supply content so it doesn't value any of them. They might be right.

It really hasn't cost them anything so they haven't spent anything trying to fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a great way to seriously injure a competitor's ability to conduct business. In a sense, it could be used for a denial of service attack.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. Mass click fraud (and you don't even need to enlist the services of a botnet; there are Asian companies that will do this for you at a flat rate), YouTube shenanigans such as mass flagging or fake DMCAs (resulting in videos being pulled for significant lengths of time).

That's one of Google's primary problems and it will only get worse with popularity - they _need_ better CS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So basically Google has enabled trolls/people with bad intentions to destroy someone's cash flow. This seems ridiculous! That's the one thing I hate about Google...their lack of customer service. Regardless if their service is free, they are making more than enough money to set up a call center or something.

<comment><USER13> You'd think if they could identify 'suspicious' clicks, they could just ignore them: don't hold the impressions/clicks against the ad-buyer, don't reward the ad-bearing site operator. Problem solved.

If it's an honest misunderstanding: no harm done. If it's a money-making scheme: they'll give up and go elsewhere, guaranteed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If it's possible to get banned from using adsense just by few persons questionable actions, and if google is too big to answer properly but not that big enough to skip watching even the tiniest "fraudilent" actions, then be it and become big enough to get google's attention by reaching out others in the same position.

How would one find the others? Well... <http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117> might work for creating one's own community.

Sometimes, the best way to show a structure's flaws is to bring down the structure by abusing those flaws.

</comment><comment><USER15> These stories are getting tired. Google is too big to investigate every single exception to their machine rules. We know. We get it. When you have 100 accounts, you can devote time to every exception. When you have 100,000,000 accounts you can't. You have to automate it and with 100,000,000 accounts there are going to be a lot of exceptions to the rules. Even a failure rate of 0.0001% would be enough to fill that cheap blog poach, I mean post, with examples of failures -- some of which were actually successes.

Even at that rate, youtube/google implemented an automated success rate of 99.9999%. Let's get some articles about how they accomplished that. That'd be more interesting than this sensationalist drivel.

<comment><USER16> Are they too big to provide some basic customer support and an escalation path? Interestingly enough, if they did this, we wouldn't be seeing their .0001% failures either.

<comment><USER15> They do provide that. That's why accounts were suddenly re-enabled.

The advertisers are the customers and customers want to know they are paying for clicks from valid opportunities. Google is handling the customer appropriately by banning those that are committing fraud. If you're my sales guy and you defraud my customers I'm going to fire you too.

<comment><USER16> The dozens of HC comments to the opposite aside, here's a quote that sums it up from the original article:

> "It is not possible to directly contact Google," he said. "No one will speak > with you, and there are no other avenues unless you are friends with someone > who works there. Once your appeal is rejected, they will not reply to your > emails or speak with you further on the issue (they actually tell you that > in the rejection letter). It is essentially a LIFETIME ban for your account. > Seems fair, right?"

His account was reinstated due to the press coverage, just as many HNers get their accounts back due to the many Googlers who frequent here.

That's not what I would define as customer service.

<comment><USER15> Right, dozens out of dozens of millions.

It's totally irrational, sensationalist, click bait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> i suffered this several years ago. even had a good friend explore, in person, the team who banned me. no movement, no appeal.

my adsense account still shows hundreds of dollars to pay out that they wont. sadly no other easy to launch-with ad tool (e.g. yahoo) for a regular home user with a site can yield much money. they really have a monopoly, and this behavior just screws people.

in this scenario, fuck google.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I'm hoping the staggering lack of concern for proper customer service for any of their products will someday start to affect their bottom line.

These stories are not new and seem to be adding up. I'm still confused why they haven't invested in a call center or some type of dedicated customer service for the products they support.

It makes absolutely no sense to me.

<comment><USER17> margins. it doesn't affect them yet so why invest the cost? in fact it will always benefit them until /advertisers/ pull their participation, and they have them covered.

you, as the small person showing ads, are so insignificant that they wont listen to these complaints.</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL Gains Support For Logical Decoding - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYyMTM <comment><USER2> Such an interesting direction. Replication at the level of individual tables would be killer!</comment>


Misfortune - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/misfortune <comment><USER2> If you've never used the Tesla autopilot its a weird feeling.

It's not a fully self driving car and its obviously not strictly human controlled. Unfortunately it ends up being more mentally taxing to use this hybrid approach than to just drive yourself.

Consider highway driving, with normal human powered mode you are in full control so if you see brake lights a half kilometer up ahead you can disengage the cruise control and react on your own, everyone who has driven is comfortable with this.

With this assisted driving the car doesn't slow down right away, and its not clear if the car just can't see the tail lights lighting up yet or if its decided it doesn't need to react yet and as such you start to second guess the car,

\- should I drive or should I leave it to the car?

\- what if it turns when I grab the wheel? Will I make things worse by driving?

\- does the car even see the object up ahead? How can I tell, its impossible to expect the car to tell you of an object that it cant' even see.

It becomes just more taxing to use the hybrid approach to driving and as such I don't use it at all. I have no doubt that the Tesla auto pilot is safer than driving, but I also have no doubt that it can royally screw up.

I've come to the conclusion that some assisted driving, like auto braking for obstacles that you will imminently hit is good but the kind of assisted driving where it can almost automatically drive for you is not really anywhere near ready, if you follow Tesla's rules on how to use it, it actually makes driving harder:(

<comment><USER3> I have a completely different opinion. What do you have your following distance set to? I have mine set to 6 or 7 and it starts slowing down well ahead of when I would slow down.

I think you're over thinking things - just let it do its thing, but be ready to resume control if needed. I drive 90% of the time in Auto Pilot, and it makes driving exponentially more relaxing and safer.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but that's the problem. Just "letting it do its thing" and relaxing/trusting/ _expecting_ it to "do the right thing" is what leads to accidents like this.

And if you trust Autopilot to do the right thing, and get into a fatal accident, Tesla will say you should have been paying attention!

<comment><USER5> Isn't that similar to saying horseless carriages cannot be as good as horses? Our experience in driving is never compared to the experience of riding in a carriage or even harnessing a horse. Driving is considered a discrete experience in its own class. Perhaps our fears and expectations of mechanical error is ignorant of our own overconfidence in our own driving control. Are we always in control of our attention? Do we always make the most accurate observations as we drive?

Why do we establish the experience of being driven by autopilot as something comparable to the actual action of human, hand-feet-sight-controlled driving (steering wheel-acceleration/deacceleration-dashboard/windshield/mirrors)?

We cannot trust the horse to do the same things as the car nor can we trust the car to do be same as horse.

We are on the cusp of moving responsibility from the human engineered transport (car) to the machine engineered (autopilot) transport, which transfer was previously animal to human engineered transport (horse to car).

We will believe what establishes our worldview and ignore what demolishes the same foundations.

<comment><USER4> No, it's not the same. Not sure why you think that analogy even makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Context is probably [http://fortune.com/2016/07/06/tesla-autopilot-crash- material...](http://fortune.com/2016/07/06/tesla-autopilot-crash-material-ceo- elon-musk/)

SEC statements are usually covering a lot of stuff, so I doubt it's very surprising.

But I'm still not convinced by their argumentation on the safety of the Autopilot.

>That contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all.

I can only cite German data [0], but on the Autobahn there is a death every 90 million miles driven. But that includes drunk drivers, old cards, old drivers etc. Teslas Autopilot being save in over 100 million miles doesn't really sound that much better, especially considering the smaller sample size. And in this case, the death could've probably been avoided by not using autopilot.

[0]: [https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/statistik_4_5_Unfallgeschehen_S...](https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/statistik_4_5_Unfallgeschehen_Strassenarten_42780.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Tesla itself claims knowledge of a statistical inevitability that a collision will occur while Autopilot is engaged.

Some questions now are: What did Tesla do to warn of this inevitability? What did they do to mitigate it? What are they doing to mitigate it? Is there any way for users to reduce their chance of being a count in the collision statistic, other than reading and following all relevant disclaimers and warnings?

<comment><USER3> Yeah they can pay attention, even while AutoPilot is engaged

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that another possible Autopilot Crash is now being investigated: [http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/nhtsa-probing-tesla-model-x- ro...](http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/nhtsa-probing-tesla-model-x-rollover- accident-pa-autopilot-involve-tesla-updates-statement/)

As I have noted before: [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=12012688&goto=item%3Fi...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=12012688&goto=item%3Fid%3D12011419%2312012688)

TESLA really needs to tread carefully here to avoid giving the whole Self- Driving Tech a bad name.

You CANNOT move fast and Break Things in this particular case.

<comment><USER9> >TESLA really needs to tread carefully here to avoid giving the whole Self- Driving Tech a bad name.

What does it matter if it cannot be proven to be better than regular driving?

<comment><USER7> Valuations of companies in the space may drop unless they can provide an alternative prospectus.

<comment><USER9> As someone who owns no stock, I don't care about that. I thought we were talking about advancing the mankind and that kind of thing...

<comment><USER10> Talk is just talk, follow the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tesla is surprisingly aggressive with media organizations. I think it's one of their hallmarks actually -- I'm not sure why they are this way, but I would guess that they have over the years hardened up in response to one-sided press (I'm thinking of the NYT article claiming their car died and Top Gear in particular).

At any rate, it's refreshing to read rebuttals to journalists. My own experience is that it is very rare that journalists both want to get a story right and have time to get it right; the vast majority of modern 'news' is written by glorified bloggers on a deadline.

<comment><USER12> Personally, I think Tesla and Musk should shut up. This bantering back at the media might have been "new" and "cool" with other topics, but not when it involves somebody's death. While it's fine to respond to inaccurate facts, the catchy headlines ("Misfortune", "A Tragic Loss") and the condescending and confrontational tone is totally out of place. Stick to the facts. Talk about how you take this very seriously, are going to look more into it, but do believe the autopilot is safe.

After a decade in the military, where bad things happen frequently, I couldn't imagine public relations acting in this manner: "We bombed the wrong house, but this happens, it's war, the media just doesn't understand". Don't give people the impression you care more about your business than their lives. Don't dismiss someone's death as a statistic.

I want Tesla to succeed, but they are starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I remember my XO saying, "never get into a shouting match with an idiot, bystanders can't tell the difference." Ignore the media if you can't respond appropriately. The real misfortune here is that somebody died in what was probably a preventable accident, not a poorly sourced Fortune article.

<comment><USER13> Wanted to say that, in addition to agreeing with what you wrote here, I've noticed myself frequently nodding in agreement with your other nicely worded and considered comments.

I prefer your version, but I would like to share a slightly different formulation of that aphorism that is equally amusing: never argue with idiots, they'll bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The numbers he quotes of "world wide accident deaths" and "do the math" is a totally ingenuous argument. It's nowhere near an apples to apples comparison.

The fact of the matter is, a Tesla driver is not your regular driver. A better test would be to give everyone with a Honda Civic some kind of autopilot.

The data that they do have is a curiosity at best, and cannot be compared vis a vis regular joe blow accident data.

<comment><USER15> Wait, what? Do you mean that buying a Tesla makes you a good driver, or the kind of driver who watches Harry Potter movies while tooling down the highway?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These comments are absurd.

Fortune did not "assume that Tesla had complete information from the moment this accident occurred." Fortune merely noted that there was a long period of time between the time of the accident and when the information was disclosed. Fortune is not saying that Tesla _did_ have knowledge of what happened, it's saying that Tesla _should_ have had knowledge. And Fortune is saying that Tesla should have investigated more quickly _especially_ considering the impending stock sale. Perhaps they did not because Tesla feels as though the death is not "material." Musk's logic on whether the death was material is so convoluted it defies any sort of logical counterargument, and is ultimately for the courts to decide.

Regarding whether or not the accident was not an Autopilot failure, of course _technically_ it appears that the truck should not have turned, but this is what happens in normal traffic. We do not design autonomous driving systems with the idea that nobody ever breaks driving rules or laws, rather we design them with the idea that every crazy situation that we can think of, and a lot that we cannot, are likely to happen and we should attempt to avoid or lessen the impact of a crash whenever possible. When Musk says that there is "no evidence to suggest that Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users," I seem to have missed the marketing material where they say that the features work only when other drivers follow traffic laws. It's one thing if a construction crane drops on top of the vehicle (cannot be reasonably avoided); it's another when a truck crosses in front of you (where we can take various evasive measures to lessen the impact of the crash even if we cannot entirely stop the crash from occurring, none of which were taken in this case).

Regarding vehicle accident statistics, as someone who worked in active safety for several years (i.e. systems like radar-based crash avoidance that did not trigger in this case), when we look at these numbers to make comparisons, the entire idea as of 2016 is that when we combine a human driver with a lot of electronic help, you are far safer than driving without that assistance or if the electronics were driving for you. But Musk only compares autopilot, which is only usable in certain scenarios, with the entirely of vehicular death information (which by the way, is largely much cheaper, older cars with worse safety systems that lead to more deaths). We know for a fact that autopilot lulls drivers into becoming distracted and doing other things, taking their eyes off the road, etc, because it does not enforce drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel (See NYTimes report today). The simple, obvious fact of the matter is that a Tesla would be far safer if it were using all of its accident avoidance technology _and_ required the driver to be engaged with the steering wheel. Yet it does not.

As someone with experience with this technology (though not at/with Tesla), I would greatly like to see them push a software update that requires you to have your hands on the wheel while autopilot is engaged. Saying that you should do so is not enough when the tools to enforce it are there. Is is clear and obvious that that would make the technology even safer. Yet rather than accept even the tiniest shred of responsibility, Tesla has entirely closed ranks and blamed everyone else. I, for one, am disappointed in Tesla as a whole and Elon Musk in particular.

<comment><USER17> Tesla is pretty clear with users that auto pilot is little more than an advanced cruise control feature and you can't rely on it. The whole Auto pilot name is just marketing. It is really no different than a Mercedes with the same features getting in a crash. As these systems are widely deployed people will continue to die. What's important is that the deaths per million miles is lower than with auto pilot off, and that's already true today's.

<comment><USER16> I worked on the Mercedes system and have driven it for thousands of miles. How the systems approach enforcement is entirely different. If you remove your hands from the wheel for more than a second or two, the system turns off. I can watch dozens of videos of people with their hands off the wheel of their Tesla while speaking into a camera on YouTube. I consider that very different.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps but at some point software has to let people take their hands off the wheel. It's very hard to say when the software is "good enough" to let people do that but it's a leap we need to make to get to where we're going.

<comment><USER18> > at some point software has to let people take their hands off the wheel

At that point, drivers shouldn't be expected to put their hands back on the wheel. They should be in the backseat, which is Google's plan.

There isn't time to put your hands back on the wheel in the event of a car accident. Planes get minutes to react to errors. Cars have seconds. Car drivers are more akin to train conductors who, these days, have complex deadman's switches that guarantee the conductor is still focused on driving the train.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why do you care what View Source looks like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/JavaScriptIsAssemblyLanguageForTheWebSematicMarkupIsDeadCleanVsMachinecodedHTML.aspx

<comment><USER3> _JavaScript is an assembly language._

Uh, no. Not at all. Not even close. This is a ridiculous premise, and can't possibly be taken as a supporting argument for ANYTHING.

Also - Has the author not heard of compression? Especially since Google uses that as a site metric for rankings?

There is no need to "tighten up"* a page if the output is going to be compressed before transmission to the client.

* This assumes sane markup

<comment><USER4> I tested this with jQuery:

       236k  jQuery not minified, not compressed
        91k  jQuery minified, not compressed
        68k  jQuery not minified, compressed with gzip
        32k  jQuery minified, compressed with gzip

Looks like minifying is still a substantial savings, even if it is going to be send compressed.

<comment><USER3> There is nothing like hard numbers. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another thing that Hanselman and I disagree on.

The problem is not HTML/JS minification. Everyone agrees that's a good thing, even though it effectively breaks "view source".

No, the problem I have is that he uses this to defend WebForms and the ViewState. Google has its own "WebForms" in the form of GWT, but that doesn't make WebForms any more OK. The problem with WebForms was that it was too far of an abstraction from the underlying HTML and Javascript underneath that developers spent more time working _around_ WebForms than with it. That hurts the developer. The garbage that WebForms produces is not the same thing as minified HTML and Javascript, especially since the ViewState can bog down each request with extra data if you're not careful. Post backs aren't free in ASP.NET using WebForms and the ViewState. Regular HTML is not hard to develop for or debug, but WebForms makes it difficult enough to require a debugger. With regular HTML, you can develop with plain text and publish minified text so "view source" isn't broken during development.

<comment><USER6> I don't know ASP.net all that well since I'm the open source skunkworks guy in my organisation. But sometime I look at applications produced by our ICT department and I notice that they carry a whole load of crap in this ViewState thing. I'm only vaguely aware of what it does, which is apparently more than ICT do because lots of weird behaviour happens when you use the back button in the browser.

Coming back to the actual point: I don't care what your source code looks like when it's sent to my browser. Presumably the developer features of modern browsers should be able to show/export a cleaned up version of the source? I've never checked since I only look at my own pages, which are of course beautifully indented...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never used GWT but there are three things that I spend a lot of time dealing with in my day job:

1\. WebForms controls mess with the markup that is output, this used to be a real nightmare in v1 with tables being inserted everywhere. It's better now but you still don't _know_ what IDs you're going to get and there are still issues like the GridView doesn't output thead rows in the table unless you set certain properties explicitly. All this makes using ASP.NET with third party CSS and JavaScript tools hard because They often rely on markup being defined a particular way

2\. ViewState is on by default and posted back to the server every time the page posts back. Most people have slower updoad speeds ti download speeds, so this causes real issues. The whole design of WebForms assumes that every control will be setup once on initial page load and then rebuilt from ViewState each time after that, whereas usually each postback only requires some of the page state to be posted back and a few controls to be rebuilt. Some sort of ViewState group would be useful to tell the page "if the user clicks that button, then these fields are needed at the server end and these other controls will be rebuilt. This would be virtually impossible to retro- fit into WebForms though.

3\. UpdatePanels are a performance nightmare and still post back the entire page, usually they are only needed to update 2 or 3 of the controls on the page and a page method would be far more efficient, but UpdatePanels are just so darn convenient (especially given point 1) that they get over used.

Some abstractions are really nice and I totally don't care what happens beneath them, but WebForms is not one of them. Markup matters, IDs matter, upload bandwith matters. WebForms abstracted the stuff I care about and made bad some bad assumptions too.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I was learning web dev I cared since it's a useful way to learn.

Now it's not that I care what my View Source looks like, it's that I care what my Source looks like. If big sites want an extra compile step before publishing that minimizes/compresses/optimizes/assemblies my nice-looking source, I don't really care. (And if your stuff is actually under an open source license I hope it's readable somewhere.) I just happen to not do that so my default non-caring state is a less-work state, my view source looks the same as my source (at least once a template is done populating).

I don't buy the "JS is the assembly of the web" line. If that's true, JS is a crap language for being an assembly. Have W3C make a standard for a language that would be a better assembly than JS and have JS compile to that. (Perhaps after the current set of browser wars dies down and a clear winner of a JS engine can be determined.)

</comment><comment><USER9> The "end result" approach with a diminished focus on clean markup doesn't make sense. The "end result" is not going to be the same for every user - <USER2> starters, people use different clients, and not everyone is sighted.

Of course, this is also based on the premise that code is bad because it's not human readable when it reaches the browser. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the details when it seems like the article was written only to defend the use of WebForms.

</comment><comment><USER10> the standards have changed. instead of viewing source looking to find a clean and concise markup, you now look for some minified and mangled source. if you dont find either, condemn that site to hell.</comment>


Long-Lost Avro Arrow Model Found at Bottom of Lake Ontario - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/09/08/long-lost-avro-arrow-model-found-at-bottom-of-lake-ontario.html <comment><USER2> The fascination with the Avro Arrow is a mixed blessing for Canada. On the one hand its confirmation we could be technological leaders, but on the other hand it lays bare exactly how Canada has failed for the 60 years since to push the envelope.

As a country we really need to look forward. Not talk about that one time we almost, just about, did something amazing - but then cancelled it.

Its not mentioned in the article, but at least when I was taught about it in school the subtext is the Americans forced the cancellation. Discussion about ICBMs making long range bombers obsolete (and therefore interceptor planes like the Arrow) weren't brought up.</comment>


I'm learning to code at 56. Here's an epic beat-down of my critical inner self - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/yes-im-56-and-learning-to-code-f33abea6fd4c#.taav0dfn4 <comment><USER2> Interesting perspective. How many 55+ coders do we have lurking on HN I wonder? (rhetorical only)</comment>


Show HN: A simple password generator - <AUTHOR> https://simplestpasswordgenerator.com/ <comment><USER2> Why is it telling me to press Command+C to copy the password on my Linux machine?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

And yes, anybody who would use a password that was generated on a foreign server is very silly indeed. The password should be generated locally in the browser.

Other than those things the visual design is nice at least.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The author here.

Sorry guys if I completely missed the points regarding the security. I just wanted to create a cool tool for me, and I didn't think too much about storing passwords or having enough entropy or whatever.

I've build this because I store all my passwords with VIM instead of the popular 1Password and I need to generate passwords most of the time.

I'll update the tool to make it client-side only.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, to be an asshole, but I'll use pwgen[0] over some website that gives me a password everyday. Even if it's client side only it's still a bad idea.

[0]: [http://linux.die.net/man/1/pwgen](http://linux.die.net/man/1/pwgen)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your constructive feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few issues:

\- password generated server-side (why?)

\- mixed http/https content

\- no info on how the password is generated

<comment><USER5> first point is enough to kill this and similar services for all times.

Nice simple UI though. :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So.

The tool is now 100% front-end. I used the library @mykii posted below ([https://github.com/mykiimike/jen](https://github.com/mykiimike/jen)) and there should not be any HTTPS errors now.

The code is even on Github ([https://github.com/djaiss/simplestpasswordgenerator](https://github.com/djaiss/simplestpasswordgenerator)) - so you can see that I don't do anything nasty with our precious passwords.

<comment><USER3> > _Math.random()_

That's just not acceptable, even as a fallback, I'm sorry, the whole idea of this service is just horrible. Please don't use this.

<comment><USER6> I talking about failsafe not fallback, U will never reach the condition on browsers or nodejs. This mimic is there just to avoid a null return from .password() (generaly not checked by user) which could be more dangerous.

<comment><USER3> Right because completely aborting would break things, who cares about security?

This is just horrible and I honestly hope nobody will ever use this, I'm sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe generate the passwords client-side instead of server-side?

</comment><comment><USER8> Quick question, it seems that the generated passwords never make use of special characters (only digits and letters). I feel that it restricts their entropy, doesn't it? I am not a security expert by any means, though, just genuinely curious.

<comment><USER9> Some terrible websites limit the characters you can supply for passwords (for telephone password input reasons, sometimes).

Also, someone who's trying to take advantage of a low-entropy password probably doesn't know what the character-set of the password actually is. In other words, they'd have to know _this_ is where your password came from in order to recognize that special characters are off the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really liked the design, and since it is done only in front end right now, I also liked the idea.

It may not be suitable or the perfect solution for hackers like in this website, but we should remember that incredible number of people are using "password1" and "123456" and alikes. This website can really help to those who are not very well at using computers. Oh, but they will probably write these password onto a post-it and stick it on their monitor, but an effort is an effort :).

</comment><comment><USER11> Why would I go to a website to make a password when I could avoid leaving my terminal?

alias mkpass='head -c 9 /dev/random | base64'

<comment><USER12> What's the Windows equivalent for that? (without Cygwin or likes)

<comment><USER13> 'head -c 9 /dev/random | base64' works in my cmd.

<comment><USER14> Since when does Windows have /dev, let alone /dev/random?

<comment><USER15> cygwin.com

<comment><USER14> The parent of the comment I responded to requested something without Cygwin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the colors.

Most browsers these days implement window.crypto.getRandomValues() so you could use that and do the generation client-side in Javascript. That way, I don't have to trust that you're not storing these passwords in preparation for a later attack.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been using [http://makemypassword.com](http://makemypassword.com) for a few years. The Copy my Password button copies the generated password to your clipboard instead of using a keyboard combo.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Jen is a portable and safe Javascript password/number generator" [https://github.com/mykiimike/jen](https://github.com/mykiimike/jen)

It works both on browsers and nodejs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I ended up using it in the new version.

<comment><USER6> Cool :]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always wondered if these services store the passwords...

</comment><comment><USER19> easy bash version::

function password(){ cat /dev/urandom | base64| tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w ${1:-20} | head -n 1 }

</comment><comment><USER20> HTTPS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops I forgot to link the https version.

[https://simplestpasswordgenerator.com/](https://simplestpasswordgenerator.com/)

<comment><USER5> I like your tool from a UX point of view, but nothing can fix the security issue that you use passwords created on a website which could at any time choose to store them.

PAAS (Password as a service) can and will never be a thing ;)

<comment><USER21> I actually had an idea for password as a service.

The security implications are all rubbish, and obviously it fails if the site goes away, but hear me out and then offer a local way of doing this, cause I'd love it:

Let's pretend you have some set of computer files that are distracting you. (A video game, or old high school/pre-divorce/estranged family photo albums, this could be anything). You want to keep them, but you want to restrict your own access to them.

Password as a service: you go to some little widget site, enter an email address, a date, and it gives you a password. Unless you have a photographic memory, you just paste it into a protected archive, forget it, and then wait until the date to get emailed a password reminder. Until then, you are locked out of your archive and there's nothing to be done until that day.

I haven't figured out a clever way of this that can't be defeated if the password is generated locally.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toyota develops technology for brain waves to steer wheelchair - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-as-tec-japan-brain-controlled-wheelchair,0,2892848.story <comment><USER2> This technology doesn't seem to have come a long way in the past several years. I remember reading about that Duke University experiment in 9th grade (I'm a 5th year college student now).

I guess it's progress because it's Toyota, not a University research project.</comment>


Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice - <AUTHOR> http://www.csicop.org/si/2009-03/spector.html

<comment><USER2> Thank you. It's great to have someone "within ranks" saying what many have been saying for decades.

One of the problems in the field is summed here> _"Why are certain long-term epidemiology/observation studies (EOS) continued in spite of the persistent publication of pseudoscience from these studies?"_

Those type of studies are why they keep flipping on eggs. It's _oxidized_ cholesterol (and saturated fat) which helps along heart disease, not the generic form. In fact, the body makes both if you don't eat enough. [1][2] Are our bodies trying to kill us?

 _"there is no convincing comparative outcome evidence (as I defined above) that common foodstuffs, e.g., saturated fats like butter, rapidly absorbed carbohydrates like white rice and potatoes, or animal proteins, are especially helpful or harmful."_

The body prefers saturated fat as a fuel source. Body fat is mostly saturated. When you burn fat your running on "artery clogging" saturated fat. Secondly it likes glucose. It converts all carbs sources to glucose then glycogen. But when you overload calories (from say, rice), the body trans-saturates it to palmitic acid, a saturated fat. [3]

Hi-GI foods, like rice and potatoes, turn to glycogen quicker. Supposedly high-GI = bad. But I think the better theory is high-GI = bad, given qualifiers x and y.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipogenesis>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad to see someone put some thought to what is obvious- that nutritional research (or at least the recommendation that people create from it) are broken.

What is one to do?

       "BMI between 20-25"

OK advice, but others have pointed out that BMI is a misleading number.

       "only follow nutritional advice if proven to be safe and effective."

Unfortunately the advice that meets that criteria is extremely limited.

       "Practice moderation in nutritional matters"

This statement is meaningless, as people will define moderation to fit what they want to do.

       "ingest enough vitamins and minerals, especially vitamins B-12 and D"

Good, if vague advice.

Kudos for tearing down modern nutritional research. However, the author seems to end up making the case that there is nothing we should do to improve our diet- that we must sit and wait decades for things to be proven.

If you don't have good enough modern research one idea is to look to history, to examine traditions and see if there is value in them. Here is one example of someone doing that. <http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html>

<comment><USER4> I'm happy to settle for Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Although I admit I don't follow that as closely as a maybe should. Sure, it would be nice to have some better science in this area. But I think eating a wide variety of food in moderation is enough to keep us generally healthy (the flaw being that Americans are absolutely terrible at doing anything in moderation).

<comment><USER3> Again, I have to ask, what does moderation mean? In my experience, I have found that almost everyone believes they eat in moderation. The sole exception would be with respect to calories/weight gain. I can only conclude that it is meaningless except in the context where it means eat the amount of calories that you burn.

<comment><USER4> This is an incredibly tough question, both because it varies widely from person to person and because it's very hard to quantify in numbers.

We are in love with numbers, and we think that we can just count the calories that go into our bodies and that is the secret to becoming skinnier (replace "calories" with "carbs" or any other measurement for the latest diet trend). The BMI is another (albeit much saner) manifestation of this desire to have magic numbers.

We're also enamoured with single-focus solutions: eat less tortillas and get fit, eat a stalk of celery every two hours, chug a glass of water before a meal, whatever the magazine rack at the grocery store tells us.

I am of the opinion that this is all badly misguided, especially because it needn't be that complicated. Eat on a regular schedule, in portions that leave you full but not satiated. Try to buy more raw food products and less highly- processed stuff. Include different types of food in each meal. _Exercise regularly_ (there really is no substitute for this). Set your goals with yardsticks like cardiovascular endurance (for the layman, "can I jog up a flight of stairs without gasping?") instead of trying to lose x number of pounds in a week.

So no, I can't give you an exact answer. It will probably be centuries before nutritional science can do so, if ever. But I firmly believe that we can make ourselves a lot healthier by taking some simple steps to compensate for the fact that our modern lives do not follow the patterns that our bodies evolved to cope with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A well-reasoned piece, although I understand that using BMI without considering muscle mass can be misleading.

<comment><USER6> Indeed -- There is a article/discussion on BMI here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689349>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've recently started an(other) effort to lose my excess weight. Since this time I am on the web I have been looking for more research. It appears there is very little useful information available. The biggest problem, it appears to me, is the lack of any financial incentive to run large controlled trials of diets as there is in drug trials. What we really, really need for nutritional science to advance much more, is for large-scale controlled experiments, but without the millions of dollars drug companies put into testing their products, in the hopes of making it back from sales on successful drugs, it is not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER8> Meaty, well-referenced, scientifically based article. A pleasure to read once I ran it through Readability (<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>)

</comment><comment><USER2> More detail by the author in this article: <http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/nutrition/></comment>


The Economics of ASICs: At What Point Does a Custom SoC Become Viable? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21808278/the-economics-of-asics-at-what-point-does-a-custom-soc-become-viable <comment><USER2> This article is just an advert. I have worked on practically the same project as the second example with a different manufacturer and can tell you it is a lot more expensive than 5 million. This project was 90nm,3 years ago so comparable to 55nm nowadays, and minus the mcu, so there is no licensing costs. NRE of 20 million for design, development, and bringing to production. And I think it ran over budget, with only 1 silicon revision. With a final component cost of $1.20, it finishes up cheap compared to the cost of individual components, but the up-front costs are much larger than they are suggesting. They only list mask sets here, not mentioning engineering time for 12+ months and design license tools, costing upwards of 1 million per seat. Then on top of that the PDK from the manufacturer. I would love to see the full cost breakdown and see where it becomes viable.

<comment><USER3> I work at a company that does these sorts of custom ASICs for a variety of customers all the time. $5M for the second example is a bit low but the right ballpark. Even allowing for 2 mask sets (mistakes happen) and $1-2M for an off the shelf bluetooth IP it would be difficult to see this going much over that.

I'd estimate a team size peaking at < 10 over 12 months to go from initial specification discussion to GDS-II. Another $1-1.5M for qual and support through production plus silicon validation.

Put that all together and <$7M sounds to me like a good estimate and I've seen a lot of more complex projects come back for less.

Not wanting to be a gobshite here but how did you manage to spend >$20M for something like this? It sounds like you were being seriously ripped off if you were paying $1M per engineer for design tools - you might want to push your tool vendors on that next time negotiations come round.

<comment><USER2> I agree, there probably were some wastage on our project, but I'm only a lowly engineer so cannot really comment on high level decisions. There were a lot of engineers working on the project, wages tends to drive prices up quickly, and all the ip was developed from scratch. I don't work there anymore, moved to a smaller more nimble outfit. Thanks for your insight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sure they're expensive to design and make, but with appropriate volume or margin you'll get the lowest power device possible for your application. General SoC's are just that: general. Moore and Dennard stopped helping, so they're missing what you need and have what you don't, requiring a SW stack that ends up working around it all.

Example from HPC 10-15 years ago: Opteron had a fast start but gen2 was really late. Intel Sandybridge Xeon was their first with PCIe 3.0, which was 6-9 months minimum after adapter cards supported it. Both products caused headaches for interconnect and system builders because they couldn't ship with parts that didn't exist.

Apple can of course control their execution of their A series, but they can also be first to AirPods and a smart watch with that integrates Siri. This from a company that famously waited for a market to look like it was going to take off before getting in because they let other companies shake out the issues with merchant silicon before they'd integrate. Now they don't have to wait.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if anything ever came of the 'Bespoke Processor' [1] approach? Essentially you run your application on a simulated MSP430, and it prunes out all the gates you don't use. Seemed promising, but then I don't actually know this field.

[1] [http://people.ece.umn.edu/~luo../jsartori/papers/isca17.pdf](http://people.ece.umn.edu/~luo../jsartori/papers/isca17.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a horrible idea if your application ever needs to receive an update. Which is basically 100% of applications that aren't abandoned.

<comment><USER7> Ship new processor with update?

<comment><USER6> Man, getting software updates installed in a timely manner is already a problem for large parts of industry and government/administration.

No need to make it even harder by requiring a hardware update at the same time.

Don't even get me started about the incentives for the vendor: way easier to sweep a security bug under the rug than roll out an update that requires a new processor to be manufactured and rolled out.

Or about the economical and ecological impact. What do you do with the old processors? Just throw them out because they were optimized for an old, insecure version of the application?

<comment><USER7> > What do you do with the old processors? Just throw them out because they > were optimized for an old, insecure version of the application?

We do the same shit with tablets and phones and noone bats an eye... instead of updating an existing phone and just charging for an update, we'd rather release a new $1000 phone every year and just 'recycle' the previous one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Japanese companies seem to have a boner for custom ASICs. I never understood that. For example Roland uses custom chips [1] for their synthesizers and effects, where they could use almost any DSP on the market.

Likewise printer manufacturers go for a huge SoC where they could get an application processor that suits their needs and couple it with a specialized printer chip. [2]

What's the deal?

[1] [https://www.flickr.com/photos/psychlist1972/37188679832](https://www.flickr.com/photos/psychlist1972/37188679832)

[2] [https://news.synopsys.com/2020-05-21-Fuji-Xerox-Adopts- Synop...](https://news.synopsys.com/2020-05-21-Fuji-Xerox-Adopts-Synopsys- ZeBu-Server-for-Multi-Function-Printer-SoC)

<comment><USER3> Because its cheaper.

An off the shelf AP is often going to have a lot of functionality you are not going to use but you are going to be paying for. It's going to consume power driving signals back and forth to the specialised printer chip. Its going to cost money to control inventory and deal with two chips when one could do the job. It may be end of lifed at an awkward time causing you to have to redesign or store a lot of inventory.

And it really isn't that much more expensive to develop one big SoC if you are already developing a specialised chip to go with the AP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article makes several huge leaps of faith and the intended audience is definitely not intended for the typical Ycombinator crowd. To clarify:

1\. All his examples are large companies (eg Tesla & Amazon) with internal demand for components which a custom ASIC could provide some cost efficiencies). For a startup to compete for such business, they would have to be proven, well capitalized and/or have unique IP. \-- It is hard for a startup to land business with these giants. --

2\. He ignores to other SoCs as a potential alternative. The IoT segment is full of standard parts and it would be a challenge for a chip design house to compete unless the company contracting the development has high enough volumes to offset the NRE cost. \-- see point #1 above --

3\. SoC is generally bad business for startups. There is a lot of IP that needs to be aggregated. Your value-add is small unless you have fundamental value-add. And there is high risk in of integrating someone else's IP as it is not in your direct control. If you need cutting edge IP like DDR6 memory controllers, SERDES interfaces or PCIe Gen4, it's usually out of reach unless your startup has mid-7 digit back accounts. \-- Sourcing IP can be expensive and time-consuming. License terms are typically not favourable to small startups and require "large" upfront payments --

4\. The examples cited have long product life cycles. Most startups excel at Greenfield or new market opportunities where the risk is higher and lifecycles are much shorter.

5\. I would not do a design in nodes larger than 45nm today. The PPA (Performance, power and area) differences are small compared to your engineering and EDA tools cost.

Basically the article is an advertorial, self serving and not appropriate advise for startups to follow. I agree with noone10101's comments below.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stupid question: has the pandemic made creating custom/any HW in places, specifically, Shenzen, even more economical/cheaper??

If i have a product definition, would i be able to get prototypes for say, $1000 assuming its a fairly (seemingly) simple product?

Edit:

As ones will probably ask "define simple"

\- i want what is in effect a body cam, but with multiple cameras providing a 360 degree view, ideally affixed to the "button" location on a baseball cap. Or a small pole on a bavkpack.

I actually thought of this years before gopro existed hut i couldnt convince any of my HW friends in silicon valley of its interest...

There are many iterations on this, for example, one iteration i would like is effectively what has been developed into the "google hike view/walk view"

Lidar on a bavkpack for mapping out in 3D your walk hike...

Regardless, the most simplistic veing a multi cam 360 camera on a hat....

Could this be something done more cheaply in the pandemic climate?

<comment><USER11> You've got no idea what simple or complex means.

If you had asked for a 3 or 4 cameras with 5mm lenses on 25x25mm base boards connected by MIPI ribbon cables under your collar to a few Raspberry Pis and a big battery in a backpack, you can do that today with off-the-shelf hardware for half your budget. They won't be synchronized, you can do that after the fact in your video editor. Getting someone to hold your hand and configure it for you will still cost the rest of your budget, but it's job done.

Or buy an off-the-shelf 360 degree action camera with included mounting pole and just use that.

Miniaturizing it into an ASIC and custom optics? That's man-years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And both DARPA and the private sector have put millions to billions into miniaturizing and reducing power requirements for LIDAR into the baseball cap and it's still humanly impossible at the moment to fit it into the button of a baseball cap.

It's not even necessary to ask whether the pandemic makes these tasks a few percent cheaper. If you have an idea, get some basic information about the problem domain first.

<comment><USER12> Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. If you know more than others, it's great to provide correct information, but please don't put other people down.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER13> I typically agree with your calls on being a jerk vs. not, but LeifCarrotson is being pretty factual here.

Hardware is incredibly expensive and time consuming to create from scratch in ways programmers usually don't appreciate. If the GP is asking those questions after thinking about the problem for years they do clearly need to be told they have no idea what the problem is.

In the hardware business we are constantly approached by people who have little more than a vague idea and a hobby-money budget. I've seen what happens when you encourage them, and it usually involves fucking up their retirement if you let them get too far.

Much more humane to see it for what it is and shoot the idea down as fast as possible, or at least help them understand they probably need VC level funding to get anywhere.

If someone has been simmering on an idea for years and can't even formulate a clear explanation of a problem he wants to solve (so that people can explain what's required past "it's really expensive, don't do it") it's clearly not sinking in and there's no product there, just a guy who wants to play with technology and waste manufacturer's time while doing it.

<comment><USER12> I certainly wouldn't argue against any of that. But it's easy to make such a case without putting someone else down. In fairness, though, the bits I was objecting to in LeifCarrotson's comment were pretty borderline.

There's a long long tail of weirdness and variation in any large population (such as an internet forum like HN), so it's best to give people the benefit of the doubt. It can easily seem like someone else is doing one thing when in reality they're doing another. I feel like half of the moderation we have to do in comments boils down to this.

<comment><USER13> Not disagreeing, just adding more info:

I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufacturer when someone wants to use the infrastructure they've sunk years into as a playground with no hope of actually making it to production.

If a manufacturer takes on 10 projects in a year and none of them do anything but endless prototyping they will quickly go out of business. Unlike in software where you make your money in the design phase.

If someone has been trying to make a hardware project happen for years and they still don't understand this dynamic then there's not just an understanding issue, there's a track history of being a drain on other people's resources, or at least a willingness to be one. Establishing a relationship with everyone needed to make hardware has a much higher drain on partner resources than would happen if a consumer called a help line or a programmer read some API documents. Just making a quotation can take a week or more for a non-trivial hardware project, and prototyping is generally not that profitable either, if at all.

An analogy: If someone came in here and said they wanted to hire CS grad students to work on Blockchain (but no clear idea of a specific problem) during the shutdown and was hoping they could pay them half of what they make on their already lower than market rate research stipend but still take advantage of the research topics they are involved in, I think expressing a certain amount of "hey, those are real people you are hoping to screw over" would be appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is the largest node/process that is currently available? Does that large size mean the lowest cost for development? I assume the trade is that fewer chips are produced from a wafer, so lower development costs are related to higher unit costs.

<comment><USER15> > I assume the trade is that fewer chips are produced from a wafer

Not really true once you scale down to a minimum viable size for your application, since you'll need plenty of area regardless for bonding pads, vias, interconnects etc. Nowadays the partial failure of Dennard scaling means that smaller chips may also be a lot harder to cool; it may be more advantageous to try and spread out logic in a way that might be a bit "wasteful" of area, if this makes the thermals more manageable. The real tradeoff wrt. very coarse nodes is performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Naive q: does RISC-V potentially impact any of this?

<comment><USER15> In a way; if you're doing a custom ASIC at an older process node as discussed in the article, there's basically no real reason _not_ to use RISC-V (perhaps RV32E when applicable for minimized area requirements) for your logic. (16-bit and 8-bit logic might also be viable but is really quite constrained these days.) But RV is only one part of what might become a thriving open-hardware- blocks ecosystem over time, that would be especially compelling for these sorts of designs.

<comment><USER17> I've been watching RISC-V for the last year, and for me it represents a coming tipping point that I've seen in other tech areas in the past. Having an open standard that people are rallying around is a game changer. I don't know how it effects ASICs specifically, but it seems to be helping open up FPGA development and tooling, making it easier for people outside big established companies to work. I see chip design getting easier (or at least more approachable) in the next 5 years, and I think it will only accelerate from there.

Mind you, I may have rose colored glasses on. I've been dreaming of JITs all the way down to the hardware layer ever since I first heard of an FPGA that could flash itself in a single clock cycle over a decade ago...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> tl;dr: 1 million units

<comment><USER5> $2M component costs, actually</comment></comment>


My Year of Riak - <AUTHOR> http://inaka.net/blog/2011/08/25/when-to-use-riak/

<comment><USER2> Most people label Riak a key/value store, as does the author, but I get a more useful mental picture thinking of it as a distributed file system. The same kinds of things that are fast on a file system are fast with Riak (direct access), and the same kinds of things are relatively slow on both (find(1)ing a file based on a pattern match compared to M/R for data). They both also excel at storing binary data assuming you understand the limits.

This model has helped me make better decisions about when & where to use it and the cost involved. For example, if you're on AWS, just use S3 and keep metadata in an RDBMS or search engine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking into Riak mainly because its key-value style, but what I'd _really_ love to see is an exact replica of Redis which is purely disk-based.

I don't know if anyone else feels a need for this, but I'd love to be able to do my entire DB with it, but the problem is RAM is really expensive to scale compared to disk space.

<comment><USER4> You may be interested in <http://inaka.github.com/edis/> .

<comment><USER3> Oh that's really cool. Its using leveldb got me thinking, how hard would it be to create a Riak client that emulates Redis?

<comment><USER4> Well, I use redis quite a lot and I find that the feature I most value is sequential consistency. That's not something that can be tagged on later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only at the end did I realize this was written in August of 2011, before 1.0 was released!

<comment><USER6> i should (and will) update it soon; the post comes off slightly more negatively than I would like at this point - We are now really happy with secondary indices and are happily deploying Riak on (relatively) cheap physical servers at stormondemand. The more I use Riak the more I love and recommend it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing that concerns me is that Riak pushes two solutions for doing queries that operate on collections of objects: Riak Search and MapReduce. Both are implemented in a way that is pretty unacceptable for "real-time" use (eg., live application use, as opposed to background maintenance jobs).

Riak Search should in theory be good stuff. It uses Lucene underneath, which is known to be rather slow, and last I checked it could not properly distribute documents across nodes, severely limiting its scalability. It is, in short, known to perform pretty badly.

MapReduce is interesting, but evidently not designed for "real-time", since it relies on traversing inter-object links, key by key. It does not scale to large number of links, either, since it's not possible to add or remove links incrementally. To add or remove a link, you have to rewrite the entire object and all its link in a single update operation.

I am sure Basho is working on those problems, but in the meantime, I'm surprised not more people complain about these issues. Riak had awful, awful performance before they released 1.0 with LevelDB support. Now the performance is much better, but it's still "merely" equivalent to the basic CRUD support of S3 (minus ACL support and so on).

It's not fast enough to replace Memcached or Redis as a first-level cache, and unlike Cassandra it does not do range lookups well, and anything that needs to scan the dataset sequentially will end up sucking, performancewise. These things limit its usefulness for many apps.

Right now you have something that is quite decent for implementing a distributed file system, session store or persistent fallback cache (behind something fast such as Memcached or Redis), but is a bad fit for many other applications.

</comment><comment><USER8> The post mentions that the disk performance of Amazon small ec2 instances was poor enough to justify the relatively expensive large instances. If the blog author is on HN, were you using Amazon EBS or ephermeral storage to back Riak? I have seen different advice regarding using ephermeral storage to increase disk performance at the expense of data integrity in the event of instance termination. I remember Reddit programmers saying they run Cassandra on ephermeral storage.

<comment><USER6> (i'm the author) - we have used both at different points. At this point, we deploy everything we used to deploy on EC2 to StormOnDemand physical servers, and sometimes Storm SSDs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chad, us South American Erlangers are few and far between. =)

I could not believe that your (Inaka's) posts on Riak and scaling Erlang had not yet been submitted to HN. Very useful stuff!

I also really enjoyed the edis preso, that's what got me to the blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a similar blog post back at my old job about our usage of Riak.

[http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/10/using-riak-for-ranking- col...](http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/10/using-riak-for-ranking-collection/)

Keep in mind we used Riak pre-1.0, so YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER10> (August 2011)</comment>


The Food-Truck Business Stinks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/the-food-truck-business-stinks.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Alternately: NYC doesn't really want to encourage a bunch of trucks to idle their 2MPG diesel engines all day while serving $10 waffles to ignorant tourists.

The idea of a "food truck" is based on trying to cheat the system. The system is: you have to buy or rent property in order to locate a business there. However, the system has a loophole: large swathes of the city are designated as roads, sidewalks, highways (which is a technical term for the road allowance). These areas of the city are completely free to use, for anyone, on the condition that it's a short-term, passing-through, sort of use.

So Mr. Brilliant says, "Hey! What if I just take over part of this free-to-use area without paying? I'll be able to charge as much as a property-leasing restaurant, but I'll get my land for free! I'll make a killing!"

Except the city has self-defense measures against people who try to do that. They're called tow trucks and bylaw inspectors. Because your business model is not actually innovative or new but has been around since the dawn of cities.

And so the white blood cells of the city harass the invading parasites that are trying to damage the city's ability to function, and life goes on, evermore and without end.

<comment><USER3> Your data is wrong, sir.

Most trucks cook with gas, and it would be crazy to idle their main engine. If they need power they use a portable generator.

Having just returned from a week in Portland, I can personally vouch for the amazing diversity and quality of the food truck scene and what it's done for the city and people.

Price? All over the map, from $2 tacos to $6 noodle plates. The best part is that you can literally try a different one each day.

Finally, I know that you are not a racist, but that thing you said about parasites invading was pretty fucking racist. Immigrant entrepreneurs should be encouraged, food trucks are an excellent way to do that, and we get to enjoy amazing food. Portland's restaurant scene is thriving as ever, unless it's Subway you feel sorry for. Heck, many of the best restaurants (Pok Pok) started as a food truck.

<comment><USER4> We love our food trucks here in Portland and anyone who loves good business should too. Carts have many great advantages:

1) Cheap(er) proof of concepts. Why open a big restaurant that can cost an insane amount of money and (likely) fail? Try out that niche food option and see where it goes, if you need to pivot it's not going to bankrupt you.

2) The American Dream. You can start something with passion and little capital and become fairly successful.

3) We all win because we get great food options.

4) Low overhead if you run it yourself and/or with your family. No need to deal with employees and the accounting that comes with them.

5) Flexibility. A great Thai food cart up near Portland State (Thai Pasta) was closed for a month due to a family trip to Thailand. Try doing that with a brick-and-mortar restaurant.

<comment><USER5> For what its worth a local vietnamese shop closed up for two months while they took their entire staff back to Vietnam. <http://huynhrestauranthouston.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is entirely about rules and regulations specific to the the NYC area, the title is misleadingly grandiose and implies there is something inherently wrong with the food truck model.

At the very end, the author barely mentions that Portland has a fully thriving food truck scene. Same thing here in Austin. There really are "four Wafels & Dinges trucks for every hot-dog cart." It can be done.

<comment><USER7> In its defense, it _was_ published in the New York Times. Which has some interest in the NYC area. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a new food truck owner I can relate to this article.

I'm in a different situation because my truck is more of a hobby than a job, but I do want it to pay for itself. As such we focus more on festivals, special events, and catering. Even then we are running into some regulation issues.

We are fortunate enough to live and work in a city that is willing to work with us and understands the issues we face. It isn't that the law is bias against food trucks, but that it without considering mobile food vending and because of that is overly restrictive. For example if a local business ask us to come park in their parking lot and serve or sell food to their customers we have to get a special permit _per location_. And we are limited to the number of permits we can get per year and need to know the exact dates, times, and locations before applying. We get new request every week so there is no way for us to know in advance where we will be for the rest of the year.

But just like any other business understanding and navigating the laws and regulations is part of the job. To be successful you need to plan and adapt accordingly.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't it be great, though, if the laws and regulations were able to accomodate you (and other food trucks) while continuing to afford their basic food-safety and related goals? Then everybody wins.

(Except corrupt businesses which thrive on the current system and will lobby against productive change.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These issues are exactly what people refer to as "first world problems." On the one hand, we want everything regulated just so in order to have a nice, well-engineered society with minimal risk and clean consciences when we buy food from another person. Then, whole swaths of affluent folks catch a craving for some good basic (or perhaps attractively quirky) street food and are shocked, shocked(!) when that kind of business is a tough thing to run in this environment.

<comment><USER10> > These issues are exactly what people refer to as "first world problems." On > the one hand, we want everything regulated

You need to re-read the article: the core theme is that there isn't a monolithic "we" requesting regulation but rather that the regulatory framework most of the public wants to assure safety, pollution, etc. has been captured by a smaller group of industry incumbents who are using it to prevent competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And yet the filthy vendor carts (not trucks) are everywhere you look, spewing their putrid clouds of smoke over passing pedestrians, without any requirement to display sanitation inspections (I'm not sure they are even subject to inspections).

If you want a food truck you should go out to a city with friendlier regulations and where you would provide more novelty by being a more unique thing. Then again I'm not a big fan of these new wave food trucks anyways, they are always supremely overpriced. If I'm eating out of a truck, it's because I want to pay _less_ than sitting at a restaurant.

<comment><USER12> > _"If I'm eating out of a truck, it's because I want to pay less than sitting > at a restaurant."_

Disagree heavily. If I'm eating out of a truck it's a demonstration of the complete failure of local brick and mortar businesses.

What, do people really _think_ I like standing in line baking in the hot summer sun for 20 minutes so I can have a decent lunch?

Around where I work, if you subtract the food trucks you have crappy delis and greasy steam table places. I _gladly_ pay brick and mortar prices (and more!) for good quality food, and the food trucks are the only ones willing to deliver the product.

There's nothing about "comes from a truck" that makes food inherently worth less. The food I get from food trucks is almost always _far_ better than equivalently-priced choices from brick and mortar shops in the area.

The beauty of it is that when I worked in SF the flood of food trucks seemed to get restaurants in the area to up their game. In this case the food trucks improved the landscape for consumers across the board, and injected much needed competition where there was none before.

<comment><USER11> >There's nothing about "comes from a truck" that makes food inherently worth less. The food I get from food trucks is almost always far better than equivalently-priced choices from brick and mortar shops in the area.

Of course there is. When you sit down at a B&M restaurant, you are renting space from them. You get a table to sit and eat for as long as you want. They provide you with non-plastic silverware and linens that they later have to wash. Air conditioning. Lighting. Waiters. Bus boys. The restaurant has to factor this into their prices, a food truck does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder why US cities where food trucks are common haven't gone the Singapore route and setup regulated "hawker centers". Sure, it may not be quite as convenient for consumers, but it would solve a bunch of other problems.

<comment><USER14> Portland has "food truck pods" on the edges of downtown parking lots, as well as in parking lots throughout the city. They have an incredible diversity of cheap food, and the businesses are obviously low-overhead (often in trailers instead of trucks) and generally seem to be staffed by their proprietors. Here's a random blog post with pictures: <http://blog.chowmenow.com/join-the- pod-y/> It seems like a great way for a city to take an ugly downtown parking lot and make it a pedestrian draw.

New York City doesn't really have surface parking lots anywhere with a lot of foot traffic, so that isn't really an applicable solution here.

<comment><USER15> What happens if demand for the "pods" outstrips supply? How does the government decide who can setup a new pod?

What could be interesting is if a privately owned parking lot did something like this.

<comment><USER14> All the pods appeared to be on privately owned parking lots or otherwise vacant lots.

E.G.: [https://maps.google.com/maps?q=food+truck+pod&hl=en&...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=food+truck+pod&hl=en&ll=45.521008,-122.681582&spn=0.001227,0.001741&sll=45.562471,-122.69509&sspn=0.002441,0.003482&t=h&gl=us&hq=food+truck+pod&z=20&layer=c&cbll=45.520941,-122.681615&panoid=7h1js_z5f8Q3nmVuaZF5og&cbp=12,73.91,,0,-8.65)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds ripe for an app. Grab a list of regulations regarding street food vendors, pull city data from OpenStreetMaps or Google, figure out where the "green zones" are to park, and warn food vendors when they're not parked in a green zone. At the same time, get the maps into the hands of some city lobbyists so that it's clear just how much of a tightrope walk this kind of operation can be.

<comment><USER17> I think this is based on the assumption that the regulation exist for any reason other than brick and mortar establishments want less competition.

If you introduce a technological fix, they'll merely pay the politicians to order the police to enforce random and conflicting cleanliness regulations or something like that.

The way to "fix" the problem is to organize a PAC and lobby politicians and donate an amount of money to re-election campaigns similar to what the brick and mortar group donates.

The problem is not even brick and mortar restaurants, 90% of them fail in a couple years, the REAL competition is restaurant supply houses and such who specialize in converting home equity loans into broken dreams. The food trucks are supposed to spend money at the supplyco renting tables and chairs, not buying a Ford Truck or whatever. The "real" permanent solution to the "feud" is to align goals, legislate that brick and mortar restaurants AND food trucks get all their "stuff" from the same suppliers, including tires or whatever. Or you can only rent food trucks, coincidentally from the same rich guys who own all the land restaurants also rent. Something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Manhattan resident and worker, I feel the trucks are really annoying. They are large and block the landscape and the food doesn't appear to be appealing.

Instead of the huge annoying trucks, I prefer to see that smaller carts which in most cases can serve the same food as the trucks. I would like to see higher quality food on the carts (and the trucks). Fruit stands in NYC are really nice as well...

</comment><comment><USER19> In Durham, NC the food trucks have been a big part of the city's revitalization. It is, oddly enough, an area with plenty of vacant business space, but I believe the food truck owners here value the shorter time to launch, the lower start-up costs, and perhaps they find the perceived barrier to entry to be lower (in truth, I've seen some vendors go brick and mortar, and it took them a great deal of effort to get it rolling).

In some areas the food trucks form synergistic relationships with bricks and mortars; a local brewery that doesn't serve its own food, hosts them every night and the entire area around it has become "The Spot" with 4 new businesses opening in the last year.

Having moved here from New York, I'm familiar with the situation there as well. There aren't as many swaths of urban "blight", and there is already a good amount of foot traffic so the benefits don't feel quite as dramatic -- but then I didn't work in midtown (where the food offerings are so so bad).

<comment><USER20> And as I assume it to be the case in most other food truck culture centers, many of the Durham trucks have used their mobile success to bootstrap a traditional brick-and-mortar shop (e.g. The Parlour, Monuts, Cocoa Cinnamon.) Allowing entrepreneurs to experiment with minimal risk can be an inexpensive and effective way to build a local economy.

<comment><USER21> _many of the Durham trucks have used their mobile success to bootstrap a traditional brick-and-mortar shop_

We're seeing the same thing in Seattle, as well. Some of my new favorite restaurants started life as food trucks and have moved up to more traditional quarters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The food truck business is actually great--or at least better than the restaurant business. By owning the truck, which is mobile, the operator is freed from the tyranny of landlords, who simply raise the rent on successful restaurants to the point where it is impossible to make any real money.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's like any other small business, where new people are overly optimistic about both sales and costs. If they have a business plan, it's all best cases, not realistic.

And because the total dollar amounts are a lot lower than a proper restaurant, people can embark on it with just savings and home equity loans and friend investors... all of which do not require a realistic business plan. Then the sales don't materialize, they lose money every day they are out their busting their ass for 17 hours and throwing away food at the end of the day, and they end up selling the truck to the next food truck dreamer.

<comment><USER24> Did you read the article? The author is arguing it's not because of that at all, it's because of all unnecessary and conflicting rules and regulations that is in place.

<comment><USER25> Don't forget selective enforcement, which is probably the biggest frustration and source of uncertainty and cost. Not knowing if doing one thing one day will be fine the next day are not conditions most businesses thrive in.

<comment><USER26> There isn't enough manpower to fine everyone doing anything wrong every day. Parking fines are generally much higher than the parking cost because it's impractical to catch every illegally parked vehicle every time; the whole idea is to make the expected cost of parking illegally greater than the expected cost of parking legally, while limiting the cost of enforcement. Similarly, I am under no delusion that speeding is fine on days I don't get caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Food truck businesses don't stink, New York city does. They don't want the trucks there, plain and simple, and so they craft "zoning" laws to prevent them from doing business.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think food trucks _can_ be a great business if the location is right. As some other people have pointed out, New York already has a ton of street vendors with probably half the price, so the barrier to entry is much higher. But for example in San Francisco, there are a few trucks near our offices that are ridiculously crowded because there is no other options around for at least a few blocks.

</comment><comment><USER29> In my one visit to NYC (from o/s) I loved getting food from the trucks.

They were cheap and tasty - we couldn't afford to go into restaurants or even diners.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is Biryani at 46th and 6th totally legal? Because they're running one on every corner of that intersection - I don't see how the enforcers couldn't have noticed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Speaking of Taim, does anyone know how to replicate their harissa recipe? I've been buying it in the jars, but they don't even have an ingredient list on them. And none of the CPG harissas that I've tried have been nearly as good.

</comment><comment><USER32> The food truck business is great in San Jose and other places. I agree with others: this seems to be a NYC problem.

</comment><comment><USER33> I loved eating hotdogs from the sidewalk vendors.... Quick, cheap, and tasty.

</comment><comment><USER34> As long as the food is cheaper and good I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ugh. New York Times: Bourgeoisie drivel and white house propaganda.

We need to regulate the NYT.</comment>


Apple's iTunes LP "TuneKit" format uses HTML/CSS/JS targeted to HDTV - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/14/new-itunes-lp-and-extras-built-using-tunekit-framework-aimed-at-apple-tv/

<comment><USER2> A great article but I wonder if it's actually aimed in the wrong direction.

While I own an AppleTV, and enjoy it, from the rumors it seems like the new Apple Tablet is aimed at being a portable media center, isn't it possible that these LP albums are actually made for that, to be viewed on the go or output to an HDTV through a dock connector?

I would love to see a great 3.0 AppleTV update, especially with the HTTP Streaming mentioned, but as time passes it seems less and less likely that Apple is going to overhaul the product again.</comment>