Show HN: Math.ly (MVP) Do you think there's a market for something like this? - <AUTHOR> http://math.ly

<comment><USER2> Not sure what the market is for this, but if the questions were simpler, I'd play @ my desk while eating my lunch.

A few suggestions: \- find a way for me to challenge my friends so you get some virality and the game is more meaningful \- offer multiple skill levels. Start easy so you can get teachers to recommend it in their classes \- let us "boast" if we got a question right or a streak of questions right

<comment><USER3> Agree with everything Andrew said.

If one could select an easier level, I'd push some nephews / nieces to that site. Then, I guess a bit of "challenge friends" could aid in them actually using it to improve their math skills.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know it's backwards to create something, then wonder if there is a market for it. But, I created this site after I tried to find some random algebra questions to practice and found nothing clean, for lack of a better word. So I made this to fill my own need/want. But I wonder if others would actually use a site like this.

<comment><USER4> What's the business model? Or do you plan to keep this a pet project of sort?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'd like to have free random problems, and a pro account would include problems that have a video explaining that particular problem's solution. Something along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a student studying engineering. This year, I did really well in physics because my lecturer had given us a list of 40 questions from the textbook that covered everything we needed to know. I spent the day before the exam going through all the questions, and when I got into the exam I knew how to answer every single question. I got an A for that exam.

On the other hand, I failed my maths exam. There were various reasons for this, but one was simply that I spend to long looking at textbook, and not enough time answering questions. A full quarter of the questions in the exam were totally new to me; I had absolutely no idea how to even begin answering them.

The moral of the story? I would pay good money for a website that provided a set of questions that covered everything I needed to know. Obviously that's a big ask, especially at the university level. Perhaps you could allow users to define what categories of questions they need to be able to handle, or even create rules for generating new sets of questions. If I could spend 2 hours defining what questions I should be asked (and then share those settings with others in my class), then spend the rest of the day practicing those questions, that would be a day well spent.

What would I pay for that? Easily $20/semester, probably closer to $50.

Another way I could use this website is for revision or passive learning. Start with basic maths, and slowly add new categories of questions (negative numbers, then algebra, then calculus). If you could somehow generate _how_ to solve the question, that would be even better - you could have an "I'm stuck, how do I solve this" button that would be perfect for learning at your own pace. Alternatively, you could just have one 'methods' page per category of questions, and every question of that type would link to that page. It would be feasible to hand-write those pages, or allow others to write them (or even just add their own notes that only they see).

Also, you might want to learn about spaced repetition learning - perhaps it's something you could implement.

If you don't want to use all (or any) of these ideas, that's fine. What you've got is great, but I hope my ideas get you thinking!

And finally, best of luck. I hope you change (this corner of) the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome input! Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it would be more compelling with a metagame offering an incentive to play. Edutainment games in which solving the equation slays the zombie are generally lame, but something along the lines of achievements might work.

You could separate the problems into classes -- the sort of thing that could be done with no algebra knowledge (3 + x = 8), simple manipulation (2x + 5)^2 = 6, factoring, quadratic formula, requires clever tricks with logs, requires a numerical approach such as Newton's method, etc. Heck, you could go all the way to Diophantine equations.

In parallel, people could select problems to attempt and earn bragging rights. "Solved a transcendent equation in 90 seconds", "Solved eight factoring problems in a row", that sort of thing.

Give people a sense of progress and achievement and maybe something to show off. They might be motivated to learn how to tackle harder problems, or jealous of their peers who can. I might play it just for fun at that point.

Perhaps monetize it by letting people spend a buck to have a public display space with what they've done?

</comment><comment><USER7> I could see this being useful, actually. Flesh it out with a bunch of options (no-variables, linear, quadratic, parens, constant ranges, number of terms, etc) and it could really help teach concepts. I remember my wife was studying for a math test and she kept getting tricked up on negative integer multiplication and division. I built something exactly like this on the command line (only in that small domain) and she was able to do 30-40 problems in just 5 minutes. It really made it all sink in and stay there.

<comment><USER8> Another good option: only integer answers.

<comment><USER9> Or give an option. Only integers / Only rationals (with denominator something reasonable) / Only reals / Only Gaussian integers / Only Gaussian rationals / All complex numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While the font gives it a real math textbook like feel, they take forever to load. I reloaded a few times before giving up and going to a new tab. It wasn't until I went to close it that I saw something had loaded.

Additionally, the first problem I saw was 5x^2 - 2 = 0, all possible answers were really long floats. Intimidating if that's the first thing you see.

I could see it being interesting if there was a Help button that walked you through the next step of the problem (ie: it changed 5x^2 - 2 = 0 to 5x^2 = 2, then click help again, you get the next step, and on and on until the answer).

Also adding levels of difficulty, different problem types (quadratic equation for example), maybe some kind of completion thing. I don't know. Making it more of a game than a chore.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool idea. One thing:

1\. When the page loads, the question & answers flash for a second then disappear. Using Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows.

Otherwise I have the same suggestions as Andrew.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Ok, I think I got the FireFox thing figured out. Let me know if it's still wonky. (You might need to flush cache? Hopefully not.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're going after students, have a look at <http://www.mathletics.ca/> and <http://www.rainforestmaths.com/>

We signed up our kids for a year for ~$200. It was pretty good, but there are ways it could be improved, such as not using Flash everywhere. But there's a lot of activity on that site, and therefore a lot of money to be made.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea, however my first question was a bit confusing (not the math!):

"2x - 2 + -1x + 2 = 5x2 - 4"

Is it necessary to use 'x' for multiplication? It's a bit confusing to be solving for x and have multiplication be represented as x as well.

I clicked through a few more questions and found this:

"-4x - 3 = -3x + 3 - -9xx2 - 9"

Can you use a '*' to represent multiplication?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, it sounds like the javascript font rendering isn't working for you. Do you have JavaScript disabled?

<comment><USER13> You are correct. I had allowed math.ly in NoScript but not the additional sites. Fixed. Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! I'll move those JavaScript files to the Math.ly domain soon to fix that problem for users that might have the same issue. Good insight. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who's the target audience or what's the prototypical use case?

Also, I'd switch it from multiple choice to having a free-form text input field that allows the common ways of expressing rational values, e.g. "5", "10/2", and "5.00". (And make the equation generator generate only problems with simple rational representations.)

<comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts are that it would be used by students for practice, and possibly by teachers to generate quizes.

Excellent feedback on the free-form text input, and rational answers. I was thinking about randomly alternating from multiple choice to free form. Maybe eventually adding a switch for the user to decide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A feature I would like is for the site to suggest to me what my weakness is.

I answer ten questions, you tell me that I don't understand _________.

<comment><USER16> How about use a star-diagram to show results and then use a thumbnail version of that same one (coloured for scale) as a users avatar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> khan has something similar <http://www.khanacademy.org/exercises?exid=linear_equations_1>

</comment><comment><USER18> I could see something like that being useful. Would be nice if you could select a category for "what kind of question" do you want. I'd also like to see immediate feedback after each question, including an explanation of how to solve the question properly (if the wrong answer is submitted).

I could see paying for a service like that. Especially if the scope of the material ranged all the way from high-school algebra through - at least - college level calc, diff eq, linear algebra, etc. I say this as somebody who's just now attempting to go back through his old college algebra/calc notes, refresh on calc, and then trying to teach himself differential equations and linear algebra. For somebody like me, a site like this could be really, really useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking about creating a paid service like you're describing. Free random questions for all, but a pro account would get explanations on how to solve the particular questions. Ideally in video format.

<comment><USER16> Could you scale this by having experts that have reached a particular level paid to answer enquiries for solutions. Then a student could pay for the answer to be explained there and then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps link to/embed the Khan Academy videos for the topic if answered incorrectly?

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure, but I once made something similar to help a friend pass her test. Something regarding history in literature.

<http://filo.heroku.com/>

I was planning on extracting this to a general flashcard app for people to collaboratively create quizzes with facts from their curriculum.

This was coded in a day with Rails, but I have a pretty good idea of how to abstract and scale it up. Get in touch with me if you're looking for somebody to team up with.

</comment><comment><USER21> See also Project Euler <http://projecteuler.net/> . Maybe you can use these as advanced captchas?

<comment><USER22> Take the one thing a computer can do better than humans and use it as a captcha? Huh?

<comment><USER21> For Project Euler, they are all textual questions and require reasoning rather than mere calculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome. Should be easier at first and then, instead of just a "Next" button, you could have 2 buttons: "next" or "next but harder".

</comment><comment><USER24> If you turned it into a wiki and allowed people to see other people's answers written out then maybe but no not in its current form.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ultimately I was thinking of math problems with perm URLs, and possibly blog style comments underneath. I wonder if a wiki would be better than inline user comments.

<comment><USER25> Nice, I was thinking of building the site that contains every published math problems or algorithm to generate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've got enough real math problems to solve than to mess around with these. They're also a bit hard to solve -- nothing I couldn't handle with paper and my HP48, but not fun... I don't get the sense that there are any clever little secrets that would make short work of them.

</comment><comment><USER27> There are some problems with displaying in firefox 3.6.13. The symbols appear for a split-second, then disappear for a few seconds and then reappear again.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I got the FireFox thing figured out. Let me know if it's still wonky. (You might need to flush cache? Hopefully not.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This tool is for teachers not students. Then the real question is, how easy is it to create a page like that?

</comment><comment><USER23> How did you get the .ly?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://libyanspider.com/>

<comment><USER23> Thanks, hadn't seen that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've emailed it to a couple of homeschool lists I belong to. Homeschoolers love stuff like this.

Good luck with it.

</comment><comment><USER30> One way to monetize it is for standardized test preparation. Companies like Kaplan charge an arm and a leg for sample tests.

Likewise you could align the questions with common curriculums and sell separate fortifying study packs for primary and secondary school subjects.

I'd probably sell a 12-month pass to each individual subject for $1 and have a set of achievements for each that will drag you through a variety of questions multiple times to unlock them all. Hopefully you get the person to buy another subject the next semester and so on.

All of this requires actually studying the standardized tests and curricula and may need customization per state.

Your competitor in this space: <http://www.ixl.com/></comment>


The Case for "Bad" Design - <AUTHOR> https://theringer.com/craigslist-case-for-bad-design-silicon-valley-67e9e933764e <comment><AUTHOR> "For plenty of reasons, Craigslist's sustained success on nothing more than a basic HTML website has been particularly maddening to Silicon Valley. A recent Forbes feature on startups looking to disrupt online classifieds described Craigslist as "the cockroach of the internet," and argued that "in the technology industry, where survival depends on constant innovation, conventional wisdom suggests Craigslist should have vanished long ago." "

Sometimes I read about Twitter, or whoever, losing hundreds of millions of dollars, in a quarter, and I'm totally baffled by it

I mean, the code to make twitter be twitter was written long ago right? what are they spending hundreds of millions of dollars on?

seems like Craigslist is putting that idea, roughly into practice

</comment><comment><USER2> I think it's important to acknowledge that Craigslist simply doesn't have bad design. People just don't understand what UX is all about.</comment>


Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html <comment><USER2> After about six seconds, a pop-up window obscured the article, so I immediately hit the back button.</comment>


Twitter Bootstrap with themes, enhancements, and other goodies - <AUTHOR> http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/

<comment><USER2> Jesus this is ugly. The _whole_ point of Bootstrap is that it's super easy for anyone to make a visually non-jarring website. Bootstrap effectively democratises good design basics on the web. What this is doing is precisely the opposite.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it doesn't feel clean and solid. Appreciate the effort from the makers, but the result is not appealing at all.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I think it's more of a color-scheme and element spacing problem than a real failed twitter-bootstrap experience...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always intrigued by the concept but then I visit the site and want to have nothing to do with it. Awful colors, fugly fonts, can't read some of the gray type, weird space between "Using LESS" and "Examples", undisclosed Bootswap usage, barely disclosed HTML5Boilerplate usage, unclear WrapBootstrap relationship, etc.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget the "Kickstrap Only" OLCG on the Scaffolding page. It misses the point of Bootstrap's fluid nesting that does a much better demo of the same functionality halfway down the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> May as well plug this here as well.. Drag / Drop form builder for bootstrap.. <http://bootstrap-forms.heroku.com>

<comment><USER8> Thanks Adam - that's just lessened my form building pain considerably

<comment><USER7> Great! The javascript is a bit rough but it puts the bits in the right place!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quick review:

The CS3 animations and the Chosen form input plugin look pretty slick. I don't see the new icons being that big an upgrade over Glyphicons. The performance stuff seems like stuff I'd rather set up on its own rather than as part of my design framework.

These guys should provide instructions for "Kickstrap-izing" existing bootstrap sites rather than just how to create a Kickstrap site from scratch. Having already invested a bunch of time into getting a bootstrap site set up, I'm more likely to cherry pick from this than use the whole thing.

<comment><USER9> Also, an observation about marketing copy: The main headline for Kickstrap describes it as Twitter bootstrap with "with themes, enhancements, and other goodies."

This doesn't tell me how I benefit from using it over bootstrap or another framework. I had to spend 15 minutes reading their site trying to figure that out.

A better line might be "Twitter bootstrap with more icons, animations, and 5x the page performance."

<comment><USER10> I didn't see the 5x page performance claim, and I've looked for it. Care to point me to it ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like this uses themes from over here: <http://bootswatch.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> OLCG: "For example, you may want to split a div with a "span8" class into three. However, 8 is not cleanly divisible by three."

Kickstrap has implemented One Line CSS Grid for this case which could just as easily be handled by making the row fluid with three span4s. Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> Nope, you're not missing anything. row-fluid resets the grid, allowing you to pretty much arbitrarily dice up your columns however you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be a good time to introduce keerthana-bootstap:

<https://github.com/zachrose/keerthana-bootstap/>

It's the complete opposite, for people who want to learn how to make webpages.

<comment><USER15> I think the JavaScript console is a pretty steep requirement for someone who is learning how to change the color of text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Themes with Twitter Bootstrap are a double-edged sword. On one hand, the themes add diversity to the visual design of bootstrap sites, which tend to rely on the default styles. You can frequently spot a bootstrap site a mile away because it features the black gradient header bar and Helvetica for the body copy. On the other hand, themes provide more options for being lazy with your site's look, as opposed to taking the time to tailor styles to your match your product/brand/content. Bootstrap is supposed to help you get a decent site up faster, but it shouldn't do all of the styling for you.

</comment><comment><USER17> Previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3794885>

I like the idea a lot. I'm not a fan of most of the themes, especially the one being used for the site itself. But the classic Bootstrap theme is starting to look quite plain (which is a good thing to be able to say about the web, mind you), and I'd like to see a few other solid options emerge.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi folks, thanks for all the comments and helpful criticisms. In order to best respond to this, I've published a document answering many of your questions for now.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228989>

Thanks,

Adam Kochanowicz

</comment><comment><USER19> Um, this is the exact same guy, repurposing his site and reposting it to HN.

All of these are his:

<https://wrapbootstrap.com/> <http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/themes.html> <http://bootswatch.com/> <http://builtwithbootstrap.com/>

All the same themes. This shit hits HN every few weeks.

<comment><USER20> WrapBootstrap guy here. Only WrapBootstrap is mine. Each of those are owned by different people. In fact they're all members of HN.

<comment><USER19> Ah ok. But they all seem to offer the same themes

<comment><USER20> I'll try to clear it up:

\- Kickstrap is a complete fork of Bootstrap that uses Bootswatch for its themes

\- Bootswatch is CSS themes that are drop-in replacements for the default Bootstrap styles

\- Built With Bootstrap is a gallery of sites using Bootstrap for their designs

\- WrapBootstrap (my site) is a marketplace for Bootstrap-based templates

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The fact that they've included HTML5 Boilerplate is nice. I use them together so frequently that I rolled my own solution not too long ago: <https://github.com/brianchitester/hotplate>

<comment><USER22> Have you gotten the H5BP build script to work with Bootstrap? Last I tried it would error and exit on some of the Bootstrap files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Typo on the front page: "Javscript plugins"</comment>


Siemens (140K+ employees) and 11 other large companies embrace remote-work - <AUTHOR> https://www.prospercircle.org/signals/remote-companies <comment><USER2> FYI, You cant add company without a twitter profile.</comment>


How to deal with crappy people - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/06/how-to-deal-with-crappy-people/

<comment><USER2> _Do you do this also?_

No, and I believe that there are a lot of people like me, I think there are two types of people, those that default to negative projections and those that default to positive projections. I may be in the minority, but I tend to project positive attributes to people. Now I do see an occasional person from time to time that wears a certain thing or does a certain thing that will cause a negative thought but those are my own prejudges and I try to quickly correct myself.

 _Most people crossing the street probably think that about me also. Who is that freak?_

I think the author struggles with projecting, it appears that they project negative traits on others and worse they project that other people are doing the same things. This creates all kinds of imaginary issues that can cripple an individuals ability to find profound connections with other people. I have come to believe that this is done as a defense mechanism by some people and it is an effective defense. Being an optimist I do sometimes get the worst end of the deal in believing in the good of people, but I also am afforded a lot of undeserved opportunity for doing so as well. As such I think I am no worse for wear because of it.

The rest of the article is pretty good advice, one area I would add is to the last personality type, the one that will do you harm. I don't think the article goes far enough, it recommends ignoring them, which is sound advice but I would go so far as to say learn to forgive them the thing about forgiveness is it frees you, if they are truly that bad of a person they care nothing about your seething disdain for them, they may rather enjoy it, so in the end your lack of forgiveness is just eroding you. Forgiveness allows you to put them completely in the rear-view.</comment>


Show HN: I Implemented a HSTS Super Cookie - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ben174/hsts-cookie <comment><AUTHOR> I'd been made aware of the possibility of using HSTS redirects to create a fingerprint, but I've yet to see someone make the code available. Please feel free to dig in / contribute / critique.

<comment><USER2> Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the need for a wildcard cert? Could you use 24 lets encrypt certificates for each sub domain? Genuinely curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea my first thought was that 24 bits should be able to grow to accommodate more fingerprints, so it would make more sense to have a wildcard. But you could definitely have 24 individual certificates.

I wasn't aware of Let's Encrypt, I'll look into grabbing 24 certs from there and spinning up a demo. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> AlexanderS makes a good point here: [https://github.com/ben174/hsts- cookie/issues/1](https://github.com/ben174/hsts-cookie/issues/1) You can request one certificate with multiple SubjectAltNames from LetsEncrypt, might save you some trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't know about this vulnerability. This just blew my mind. Great work on the PoC!</comment>


Millionaires on Unemployment? There Must Be a Better Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/millionaires-on-unemployment-there-has-to-be-a-better-system/19657740/ <comment><USER2> If my understanding is correct, unemployment is unemployment _insurance_ which means that people (are forced) to pay in now so that they can cash out when they become unemployed. It's one thing to call it a tax and sell it as a redistribution package - but that's not how the law was sold to the voting public. If it's a pay-in-to-cash-out scheme, then you're entitled to it. Period. I'm saying this as someone who is currently unemployed and unable to take out unemployment because, well, my previous employer hired me as an 'independent contractor' and didn't pay into my unemployment insurance. I get to do it the old fashioned way, which is to save my money in the bank, and lean on the generosity of family and friends. Of course that's easy for me to say when my employment turnaround time has been fairly low in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> They paid into it, so they're entitled to it, and the benefits are capped _far_ lower than their salary, so they don't cost the system any more than more typical workers.

If it's the first time they've been eligible for benefits, then they've paid in a lot more than they're likely to collect.

To be honest, though, I can't see many millionaires bothering to file.

</comment><comment><USER4> That averages on the order of 1000$ each. This is entirely reasonable. I think I can live with that.</comment>


Athens, Sparta and Rome: The Ancient Election - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/athens-sparta-rome-ancient-election/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised that there's no mention of sortition, the electing of people by random lottery. Lots of people (including Aristotle and many Athenians) thought that true democracy was this kind of election by random lot, not by voting. Voting is just begging for corruption. Most Athenian magistrates and juries were picked by sortition.

Aristotle:

> Democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are > equal absolutely. All are alike free, therefore they claim that all are free > absolutely... The next is when the democrats, on the grounds that they are > all equal, claim equal participation in everything.

> It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and > as oligarchic when they are filled by election.

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

<comment><USER3> I think we've all now seen what it looks like when someone who is unqualified for the job and doesn't want the job is given it.

In fact hereditary offices are a form of sortition, and they have proven not to be a particularly good system.

(I've never been a fan of Aristotle anyway)

<comment><USER4> > _I think we 've all now seen what it looks like when someone who is > unqualified for the job and doesn't want the job is given it._

We all also seen what it looks when people qualified AND wanting the job were given it -- we have been seeing that for centuries and it's not pleasant either.

> _In fact hereditary offices are a form of sortition, and they have proven > not to be a particularly good system._

No, they are not. Sortition must be random in background and circumstances among the represented people. Hereditary office is the least random way of distributing power. Even democratic elections bring more randomness to the pool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For reference, the author, Mary Beard, is a renowned classicist with many interesting historical shows produced by the BBC: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GYjnRAFFy4g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GYjnRAFFy4g)

<comment><USER6> She also wrote some quite accessible books: [https://www.amazon.com/SPQR- History-Ancient-Mary-Beard-ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History- Ancient-Mary-Beard- ebook/dp/B0108U7IHO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497055074&sr=8-1&keywords=mary+beard)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Info tech of ancient democracy": [http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.ht...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> >in Sparta they did it by shouting (loudest won — which the Athenians thought very weird)

I don't know why the Athenians thought this to be weird, I guess they had their reasons. But I can think of one benefit of the Spartanian way.

If you raise hands, you can quickly change when you see what others are doing. When you shout, you have to inhale as much as you can to shout as loud as you can. You first have to make up your mind, before you can hear others.

<comment><USER9> Maybe they "thought" it was "weird" retroactively after the Peloponnesian War. Athens was mishandled pretty badly after it's defeat by the pro-Spartan government of the Thirty Tyrants. That on top of being at war with Sparta for more than twenty years would have made them pretty averse to anything Spartan.

<comment><USER10> Athens was mishandled pretty badly prior to the defeat as well, but that one is on them. Ostracizing the lead architect of an invasion right before the invasion is not a smart move when you've got an adversary willing to hire him to plan the defense.

<comment><USER11> Another slightly similar situation was the loss of Constantinople [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban)

<comment><USER12> Constantinople was already doomed to fall before 1453. The 4th crusade hollowed out the city, and even after being retaken it was never the same -- by 1453, it was an island in a sea of Ottoman territory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansions-are-increasingly-going-to-the-richest-americans.html <comment><USER2> Beyond a certain point more wealth has zero marginal utility (pure greed). I don't envy the rich nor am a communist so let them be as rich as they want as long as we don't compete for the same resources. Yes. Houses (actually Land). Let them bid up Mona Lisa, Diamonds, old Ferraris til infinity if they want. But don't park your money in land inflating house prices beyond what local wages can support making me pay 30% of my salary in rent for 10 years waiting for a house price "correction". Wealth should be chased out of non productive pure rent seeking "investments".

<comment><USER3> At some point wealth moves past material goods and into the realm of your ability to influence society. If only everyone with money had noble goals when it came to this influence...

<comment><USER4> If only we could separate the power to reshape society for personal benefit from the ability to score "mine is bigger than yours" points. Zuck, Gates, the Kochs, and others probably have "buy a President" money, and could probably also develop personal nuclear arsenals. Let them play that video game and compete for new high scores.

<comment><USER5> Net Neutrality

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The analysis in this article was based on data from Thomas Piketty and collaborators, who have also compiled an extremely detailed and comprehensive analysis of the subject of capital & wealth & inequality. I highly recommend Piketty's book, "Capital in the 21st Century" (see Goodreads comments for abridged summaries and reviews by readers). Not only is it totally convincing (and depressing), but it also provides a very clear understanding of the course of modern history since the 19th century. It's amazing to see how clear economic policy (whether Marxist or Capitalist or anything in between) becomes when viewed through the lens of society grappling with the problem of capital/income/inequality.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in- the-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty- first-century)

<comment><USER7> There are few known ecosystems, without a small bunch of apex predators.

If nature hasn't figured out how to do it any different, given the time she has had, neither are we.

If you are not powerful, make yourself useful to the powerful. And that doesn't mean working for a douchebag.

<comment><USER8> > If nature hasn't figured out how to do it any different, given the time she > has had, neither are we.

Not following the logic here at all. What does an economy have to do with an ecosystem? What is "nature"? Are there Apex predator bacteria? How does an Apex preditor map to an economic actor?

This is as lazy naturalist fallacy as it gets.

<comment><USER7> Nature doesn't have any great goal just like economies don't. They are just chaotic systems we pretend to understand to claim control. The temporary periods such systems achieve some temporary stablity is when heirarchies form. Talk to an ecologist, if you want more plankton in a fixed amount of ocean you have to kill whales. If you want more whales you have produce more plankton as in you need a bigger ocean. Same story with the economy whether you pick Genghis Khan or Mark Zuckerberg you can't produce them without millions of plebs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is that surprising? Economic expansions are largely driven by monetary (stimulus, QE<N>) and fiscal policy (bailout, contracting), as a part of deliberate politics ("we _need_ to create jobs", e.g.). As these events are derived from centralized, hierarchical organizations (Fed, us gov't, ECB, EC), the benefits will disproportionately flow to those that have access; part of the reason why the richest are the richest is because they have had success in the past obtaining exactly that access.

It's rather ironic that the keynesian perspective in the article is that the policies "aren't targeted" but in reality they couldn't be anything but.

<comment><USER10> Well they _could_ increase the amount of public spending and increase the tax rates for the top brackets and it has been historically in periods where rates of income inequality have gone down.

But no, for some ridiculous reason those ideas seem to be unacceptable with the Overton Window defined by mass-media (conglomerate-owned, of course) and economists who propose small-state solutions.

<comment><USER11> If inequality goes down because the rich become less rich, is that a win?

<comment><USER12> The people that answer yes to you might not even realize they are actually part of the richest group, particularly since software engineers are in the top 10% of income in the US.

<comment><USER10> The very top of the bracket (0.1%) is the one paying proportionally far less than the rest of the upper class, given their access to all sorts of accounting tricks and exemptions that you have when you are making money from capital gains or when you have tons of active assets to shuffle money around.

<comment><USER13> Do you have data to back that up? From what I've seen, the top 0.1% pay a far larger share of taxes than the rest.

Based on federal gov't data on total taxes paid, the top 0.01% (even higher income than you 0.1%) pay over 20% of all taxes with an average rate of over 49%.[1]

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573269)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The effects of globalism... Upper management stays employed and gets richer, everyone below (the middle class previously) are out of a job. Child labor and inhumane working conditions overseas and mass pollution of our entire planet. How is it that progressives actually think this is a good thing? (this is an honest question).

<comment><USER15> It's not globalism, per se, globalism is a symptom of monetary policy implemented in tandem by most of the world's central banks.

The root cause is that every developed nation on earth runs an inflationary monetary policy coupled with perpetual deficit spending. Money creation via central banks and deficits is not uniform, it pours into economies via cheap credit, subsidies, spending on boondoggles, and it's the people who have first access to this newly created money who benefit the most, and these tend to be the people with a lot of capital, political connections, etc. The average person simply sees their limited buying power decreasing over time.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but it's not strictly the inflationary / deficit issue right? It's primarily (as you say) a matter of _who_ gets the increased currency, right?

<comment><USER17> The cheap credit perverts the entire economy away from productivity growth, which is what produces real wealth that tends to be widely shared. It doesn't matter how the cheap credit is distributed, the credit just redistributes wealth and doesn't increase it.

There's that and then also the problem of the global monetary system. The average American is getting crushed by the dollar reserve currency system. America can't be globally competitive in labor intensive industries in substantial part because of it. Triffin's Dilemma. But the ability to issue endless USD denominated debt that the rest of the world eagerly gobbles up is fantastic if you're closely attached to the DC cash spigot or NYC banking. So there's this direct opposition of interest between the current elite who derive enormous power and wealth from the system, and typical Americans who just want a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 2014\. And the headline result from the last recession only captures 3 years of the recovery, through 2012, when equity markets had climbed back significantly, but always-lagging labor markets had not.

I'd be shocked if the numbers didn't look very different if you looked at the expansionary cycle to date.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hey, this article isn't news! US median income has been stagnant since 70ies, while mean income has grown steadily. The gains obviously accrued to highest income earners. We should talk about it. But we shouldn't think of it like something new.

<comment><USER12> At this point Im fairly convinced that LVT is the way to go.

There is a tremendous confusion in separating wealth from producers to non- producers.

Taxes very frequently end up going from the poor to the rich, because of how benefits are given away (ex. prop 13, mortgage interest deductions, rent control). Not only that, taxing the rich for producing would make less production, which is fundamental for economic growth.

Why should a developer build a 40 apt building and pay 100x the taxes a month single family home next to it pays? Didnt he just make everyone a lot richer by his planning and exhertion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 2014, but still shocking.

</comment><comment><USER21> Because the balance between capitalism and the state is out of whack. Capitalism has far too much power and influence. It needs to swing back a few degrees so that the common man can get a bigger cut of pie (or a slice at all)

<comment><USER22> A better word for it is corporatism.

Ironic how the state (at least in the case of the US) is the largest it has ever been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's almost as if wealth doesn't follow a Gaussian distribution and the Pareto power law applies to a few extreme cases.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why are people obsessed with this topic lately?

Do you think fame inequality is a problem? There are people who have 100s of millions of followers/fans and then there are people who are not famous (vast majority).

Why is that not considered a problem?

Fame inequality:

1\. Undermines democracy. If you have a tiny group of famous people who have a massive cultural influence, their ideas and opinions matter almost infinitely more than ideas of those who are not famous. This by definition undermines the idea that everyone's opinion/vote should have equal weight.

2\. Damages people's health. When people see someone famous it can make them depressed because they are constantly being compared to cultural icons. This can have serious impact on psychological health.

3\. Perpetuates itself. People can become famous and get a leg up in life just because their parents are famous. Is that fair to all talented people who don't have famous parents?

<comment><USER25> People are obsessed with this topic because they are looking for justification to steal from those wealthier than them. Its textbook Marxism.

<comment><USER26> Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They lead to flamewars and are reliably some of the most low-quality subthreads we see here.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, I guess something similar like a "land reform" would be of help

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

<comment><USER25> This would not help. Land in of itself is not that valuable. What has value is what people develop/produce with the land. Or location to those who have developed their land. Property rights are better thought of as extensions of human rights. The reason why you build a factory is because property rights will protect your ability to use and eventually sell the factory. The reason why you plant crops is because property rights protect your exclusive right to harvest them. If someone wants to acquire land it really isn't that difficult or that expensive until you want land that people have invested in or around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> FYI, 2014.

</comment><comment><USER29> except cryptocurrencies

<comment><USER16> you think that the winners in wealth redistribution happening around cryptocurrencies are mostly the not-so-rich? There may be a decent number of non-rich folks who are now rich this way, but I doubt that cryptocurrencies are effectively working in reverse of the wealth-inequity trends…</comment></comment>


How Do Writers Get Paid - <AUTHOR> http://expertscolumn.com/content/how-do-writers-get-paid I think he's cracked it. <comment><USER2> Everyone knows this.</comment>


A troubled SAP S/4HANA migration caused a gummy bear shortage in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-a-troubled-sap-s4hana-migration-caused-a-gummy-bear-shortage-in-germany/ <comment><USER2> I don't envy IT teams responsible for migrating to SAP S/4 HANA. With so many companies running SAP and the need to move to S/4 HANA before the due date, we are going to see more of these types of articles.

For every x number of successful migrations we are ultimately going to see an x number of unsuccessful ones.</comment>


The difference between geeks and nerds, settled by a geeky infographic - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/the-difference-between-geeks-and-nerds-settled-by-a-ge-590379134 <comment><USER2> Original posting here: [http://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek- versus-ner...](http://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-nerd/)</comment>


Wittgenstein's Handles - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/05/24/wittgensteins-handles/ <comment><USER2> An alternative proposal: Wittgenstein studied engineering before he became a philosopher, his doctorate is on planes and kites, and he did some research on how kites behave in certain situations.

Could this be another reason for the focus on mechanics in his architectural work? He had no prior knowledge of architecture (he did design his furniture though, as far as I remember), and if you'd ask me to design an entire house, I too would focus more on the areas I'd know about ("here's a plan of the house with optimal WLAN access everywhere, and good space for cat 5 cables in all walls - what do you mean there's no bathroom?")

<comment><USER3> See this book! [https://www.amazon.com/Wittgenstein-Flies-Kite-Story- Models/...](https://www.amazon.com/Wittgenstein-Flies-Kite-Story- Models/dp/0131499971)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is a pity that the only image in the article provides such a limited view of the actual handle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Those interested in the philosophy of door handles will enjoy Don Norman's classic:

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465050654/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OkRx...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465050654/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OkRxxb9JY1X1A)

</comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant. He's relevant to programming because he popularized truth tables, too ...

</comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating, had no idea the common door handle was designed by Wittgenstein!</comment>


UN privacy head slams 'worse than scary' UK surveillance bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/un_privacy_head_slams_uk_surveillance_bill/ <comment><USER2> _Cannataci read Cerf 's full quote: "Privacy may actually be an anomaly. [...]"_

 _" I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."_

What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has _destruction of privacy_ as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them).

Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)

<comment><USER3> Quoted ad nauseam on HN but always fitting: _It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it._

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France, the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious. There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?

<comment><USER5> Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Most people don't have time to think about lofty goals like "privacy" when they need all the focus they can get to care about more basic needs like "shelter" and "putting food on the table".

<comment><USER4> A very valid point and an equally troubling problem with modern society. Worrying about things like shelter and putting food on the table should be a non-issue in the 21st century, instead it is a modern epidemic and must be fixed. Having said this non-corporeal but none-the-less essential concepts like privacy, liberty and an expectation of trust in leadership should also be a given, sadly they suffered the same fate.

<comment><USER6> People have to worry a lot less about putting food on the table in the 21st century than at any other time in world history. Calorie counts have been going up a lot, for decades, across every country that formerly used to suffer deficits. Major famines are practically non-existent today, and were not uncommon in prior centuries.

See: calorie count increases across Africa, Asia, South America.

Poverty and global inequality also have been dropping gradually for decades.

Instead of being modern epidemics, these things are former, ancient epidemics that are being eradicated rapidly.

<comment><USER7> Just because famine no longer exists doesn't mean people aren't having to worry about putting food on the table. In the UK over a million people had to visit emergency food banks last year[1], compared to only 125,000 in 2012. Hospitals are seeing such levels of malnourishment that they have started discreetly giving away food parcels to patients[2]. It's estimated that up to 40% of patients admitted to UK hospitals are malnourished and the number of people admitted to hospital specifically because of malnutrition has risen dramatically in the last year.

If you are wanting to suggest that this is due political decisions rather than a famine or overall lack of food then yes that is true, but it doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people in the UK struggling to feed themselves and their children.

What's happening in Asia or Africa isn't particularly relevant to the level of political engagement in the UK, which is what this discussion is about. That fact that things are getting worse in the UK while improving in much poorer countries just makes the situation even less excusable.

[1] [http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank- projects](http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs- hospital-...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital- tameside-food-parcels-patients-risk-malnutrition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mind losing some privacy but it has to be symmetrical. Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward.

<comment><USER9> That's not enough. Government is a service for you - it should be naked by default, while you're clothed by default.

<comment><USER5> It's impossible as long as there are real actors that are a threat to it - i.e. as long as there is more than one government in the universe and all want access to the same resources.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain why? "Default" doesn't mean "always" \- we can talk about hiding something, which is related to external threats. Why this can't work?

<comment><USER5> I stupidly misread you as saying "all-public". Let's call it a brain-fart.

I'm all for government transparency, but I also accept that as long as nations compete with each others, there are areas in diplomacy, trade, espionage and military that need to stay secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cannataci read Cerf's full quote:

> Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern > industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained > communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what > the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en > mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization.

>This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."

I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?

<comment><USER5> I always thought exactly like Mr. Cerf said in that quote, so could someone please tell me why is this exactly "pure, undiluted rubbish"?

<comment><USER11> It's worth reading the rest of it too.

Specifically he feels that the way Vint Cerf argued may have been applicable to his culture but many others less so.

His point was that privacy was present in many of these cultures before the advent of cities and that cities did not simply invent privacy out of thin air.

That said I think a lot of this is misconstruing on both sides.

My personal opinion is privacy and an expectation of it existed well before cities or even towns and that what really come with cities was anonymity. Which is a different concept entirely.

I think it would be fair to say if you sent a rider or a pigeon so a trusted advisor you had an expectation others would not hear/read your message, this is true of the postal system and one would expect of telephone and Internet communications.

However, things get really rough when cities happened. Because of the rise of anonymity law enforcement needed new powers to actually find perpetrators of crimes. As such some privacy was sacrificed in the name of making our communities safer. Mostly in the form of allowing law enforcement some limited wire tap and post interception powers.

Unfortunately this didn't map very well to the Internet because of the nature of the 2 mediums. Intercepting someones written and spoken communications between another human is one thing. Being able to spy on what is effectively their thoughts and interests is entirely another. The bandwidth and expression of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of today. They don't realise how much damage they are potentially doing to the future of such a promising system.

<comment><USER12> > However, things get really rough when cities happened

When did "cities happen"? Rome had more than a million residents about 2,000 years ago. Cities like Athens and Alexandria had over 100,000 residents centuries before that. I think I understand the point you're making, that anonymity within a community is easier to achieve when the community is large, but that's not the only anonymity available.

Before cities, we already had anonymity due to fleeting associations (e.g. nomadic groups, traveling merchants), due to separated communities (e.g. soldiers did not know each others' past, their homes would not have known their actions), or due to migration (e.g. leaving one community and joining another).

Those forms of anonymity have mostly disappeared, not because "cities happened", but because of better administration. So far, our administrative capability has always been limited by the amount of effort it required. What has changed with the Internet is that we now leave a (digital) papertrail of almost everything we do, so there is no longer an effort-based limit on the amount of records we can preserve.

That to me is what makes Cerf's comment unpalatable (I hadn't encountered it before): to pretend that "we've never had anonymity" is foolish at best, and manipulative at worst. Given his current employer, I'm more inclined towards the latter.

Another poster already commented that "what we now call privacy, used to be called freedom and liberty". I think that's a very good one-liner, but it's not really accurate: privacy is a requisite for freedom and liberty, but it's not the same thing. This is probably the first time (since the StaSi) that that requisite has come under so much attack, which is probably why it's receiving so much more attention than before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's shame that The Register had ruin a good story with their shoddy, tabloid- esque journalism by claiming that the UN privacy head called Vint Cerf "dumb". He never called him "dumb", he actually highlighted his intelligence but claimed that he said something "dumb". There's a huge difference. One implies a personal trait whereas the other refers to a single occurrence which may be an anomaly.

</comment><comment><USER14> After all of Cameron's "let's ban end-to-end encryption" remarks, it unfortunately seems like many key interests are just relieved it isn't _worse_.

Nice strategy, now that I think of it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I always wonder if UK politicians had to read Orwell in high school, 1984 was mandatory reading for me here in Austria.

<comment><USER16> Probably. As a textbook.

But if you look throughout UK history - the only freedoms they really cared about are the strong individual property rights. When property is equal-ish distributed - all the other rights also are. But with property increasingly concentrated ...

So this bills are not unexpected - they don't infringe on anyone's property - so they get a pass from the powerbrokers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The worse something is for the citizens, the more governments seem to want it.

Government: "Oh it's REALLY bad for the people? Well we certainly need that."

The more complaints, the more valuable it must be to the government.

</comment><comment><USER18> Imagine a new device to read and record people's thoughts at all time is invented.

That UK surveillance bill is "worse than scary" because according to how its proponents/supporters rationalize it, the logical consequence of this rationalization is that it's perfectly acceptable that all citizens should be permanently hooked to such device if it existed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non- technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle.

I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.' Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with you...I KNOW you have shit to hide."

She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least.

So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing.

Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the pitchforks are still in garages.

Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings.

Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately want to believe they do.

As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically, discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and, frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum.

So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT much interest in her meant that she mattered?

I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the first place.

It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am, in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey, only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on.

I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2 deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay, feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.

</comment><comment><USER20> "I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments"

Human reasoning doesn't work on logic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ)

So you shouldn't, the vast majority of the public is stupid, uneducated and illiterate.

Lastly capitalist societies are not set up to defend themselves vs the rich... see here, the spying is for dissidents not terrorists.

Important:

[http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137](http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137)

<comment><USER21> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


WebKit and Chrome prerendering - <AUTHOR> http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2011/06/webkit-and-chrome-prerendering.html

<comment><USER2> This sounded like a potentially useful feature for web developers, to improve perceived loading speed without having to use JS (which may be desirable in some situations). But reading Google's notes on the subject is like a splash of cold water: <http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html>

TL;DR: Only one page may be prerendered at a time _per-instance_ of Chrome (not per-tab).

It would be nice to know if this just limits simultaneous prerendering, or if only one link may be prerendered and it must be clicked on or "evicted" before any more prerendering will occur.

<comment><USER3> I can't speak definitively, but I doubt the prerendered page needs to be visited before another one can be prerendered. If that were the case, I could open a google search and leave it in a background tab and never ever get prerendering ever again.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. It's not clearly stated if that is or isn't the case. Their wording is ambiguous. I'd test this myself using the dev build of Chrome, but I can't install it where I am.

Anyone else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Somewhat concerning: "What looks like a real pageview from a modern browser might be a browser downloading your page resources in the background before possibly being presented to an actual visitor. Websites that care about separating eyeballs from machines should add new JavaScript to their pages to create awareness of the current loading state."

So won't this be confusing, as non-discriminating sites choose to inflate their page views by ignoring whether those were prefetches or real loads?

And what about ads?

<comment><USER5> Nearly everything that has to do with ads (both tracking and serving) is already standardized client side script, so it won't make much difference for publishers/advertisers. Ad agencies already want data vetted by someone like Comscore, and most publishers use tools like Google Analytics for their own purposes. I suspect those tools already account for invisible pre-rendering.

This doesn't really effect much, to be honest. People who want to inflate their stats already do so by counting bot traffic, iframe requests, etc. Google's been doing partial javascript evaluation for a long time as part of their spidering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Security implications? Now your browser will execute JavaScript from sites you didn't even visit. Awesome.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure it doesn't just download?

<comment><USER8> The article outlines a technique to check whether your page was preloaded or not using JavaScript. So the JavaScript would need to be run in order to make that check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this Google Web Accelerator, all over again, with the same problems?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator>

</comment><comment><USER10> That's great. Now, how can I opt-out my web server from this?

<comment><USER11> You can't. Which is great for users.

Think of it like an iframe. Any page can already trigger pageloads of your page that the user might not had intended.

<comment><USER10> When some random site throws my pages into an iframe, at least the user _sees_ what I've served, and I at least have some control -- I can break out of it with Javascript, or I could even serve completely different content.

It's a bit different though when the biggest fucking site on the internet joins in.

Why should I be forced to expend bandwidth every time Google decides a page on my server is relevant to a search result? This could double or even triple my bandwidth costs.

<comment><USER12> If you're worried about Google being a bad web citizen, they've already said that they only use prerendering for the tom search result, and only if they think it has a very high probability of being clicked. (Based on my limited testing, this only ever seems to happen with navigational searches.) So you'd be spending that bandwidth anyway, and your users are getting a better experience out of it.

If you're worried about the technology itself being abused to DDOS people, I don't see how it enables any attack methods that didn't already exist.

<comment><USER10> If it is as you say, only the #1 result for searches that have a high probability of it being clicked, then it's generally fine with me. If they were blindly pre-loading the first few results, I'd have a problem.

I guess I should give Google more credit, and assume they're not idiots.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firebase expands to become a unified app platform - <AUTHOR> https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/05/firebase-expands-to-become-unified-app-platform.html <comment><USER2> (firebase founder here) I'm thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we've been working on over the last 18 months! When I said "big things are coming" in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : )

We're really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote configuration, updates to auth, etc. Perhaps more important though are the new solutions for later in your app's lifecycle. We've added analytics, crash reporting, dynamic linking, and a bunch more so that we can continue to support you after you've built and launched your app too.

I'd suggest reading the blog post for more info: [https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/05/firebase-expands- to-...](https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/05/firebase-expands-to-become- unified-app-platform.html)

This is the first cut of a lot of new features, and we're eager to hear what the Hacker News community thinks. I look forward to your comments!

<comment><USER3> Is there an Open Source version of Firebase which we can use on our own hardware if we wish to? Vendor lock-in is the biggest fear I have with Firebase.

Like Facebook (Parse), if Google also decides that Firebase is not profitable and decides to close down, how do we run our applications without rewriting?

How do we protect ourselves, if Google decides to increase the price of Firebase 3-4 times in a single day?

Even just a public pledge from Google saying that they will open source the full featured Firebase if they decide to close down the devision will go a long way to alleviate this fear.

<comment><USER4> Horizon[0] was announced yesterday; it's basically an open-source Firebase built on RethinkDB.

[0]: [https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon](https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon)

<comment><USER5> Horizon is only the "realtime db" portion of Firebase and it's only for Javascript, not Android or iOS. The mobile app realtime network connection tech is especially tricky to get right without draining a user's battery by doing things like constantly polling the backend. I have not seen anything from RethinkDB along those lines.

<comment><USER6> > by doing things like constantly polling the backend

RethinkDB doesn't require polling. It's like their #1 feature and differentiator from other non-sql databases.

<comment><USER7> What do they do?

We use websockets in our realtime platform.

<comment><USER8> The Horizon client uses websockets to connect to the Horizon server. The Horizon server uses RethinkDB's protocol[1] to connect to the database.

[1] [http://rethinkdb.com/docs/writing- drivers/](http://rethinkdb.com/docs/writing-drivers/)

<comment><USER5> Websockets cannot be as efficient as native network management code.

<comment><USER9> What does this even mean? WebSockets can be used natively. In fact the Firebase client uses WebSockets, same as Horizon.

<comment><USER5> Sorry I was confused about terms, what I was thinking of was Javascript vs native. Native code can do more than a browser sandboxed client can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a "democratizing force" in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Firebase hosting with a single command. After exploring this new update, I can say with confidence that _literally everything_ is easy-to-use now.

Whenever there is a Firebase announcement there are many replies along the lines of "this won't work for me because it's owned by Google, may be discontinued, doesn't have on-premise solution, etc". If these are your thoughts then you are missing the point of Firebase. It enables small web development shops like mine to focus on building beautiful web applications without having to give up manpower toward backend engineering. The cost of using Firebase is peanuts compared to the savings in employee hours.

Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

<comment><USER11> We are not missing the point. Some of us just happen to value other things more than convenience.

There's no shortage of discontinued products that were cancelled even though a lot of effort and money was poured into them. Amount previously invested is a sunk cost and shouldn't even matter when deciding if continue a service/product or not. Just because you have already dig a hole doesn't mean you should keep digging even though you can't profit from it.

<comment><USER10> This is a good point. However, products are usually discontinued because they no longer fit in with the core business of the acquirer. In this case, Google is making a clear statement that Firebase will be an integral part of the Google Cloud experience for everyone (hobbyists all the way to apps at scale).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We were part of the Early Access Program for the expanded Firebase and used it to build our music collaboration app Kwaver. With the new features, they did a nice job of collecting a bunch of related mobile products (Analytics, Push Notifications, Storage, Authentication, Database, Deep Linking, etc) into a pretty cohesive platform, and it's saved us a bunch of time.

With Firebase Analytics we can track events, segment audiences (according to user properties; active, dormant, inactive) and take action according to the user segment. We are able to send push notifications (also using Firebase) to dormant male users who play the piano for example. Another cool feature is Remote Config, which gives you the option to ship a number of separate experiences and track the user interaction. Like A/B Testing but way more flexible.

For us, the best product is the existing database product they had, as it really improves our user experience to ditch the 'pull to refresh' button' and have our app respond to changes live.

We have been waiting for Google to provide developers a more complete mobile solution for a while now, and they've done it superbly through Firebase!

Feedback; It would be really cool if Firebase could implement UTM codes to be able to track user acquisition and be able to automate actions according to User Properties.

Shameless plug: if you're a musician (or a music fan), we'd really appreciate if you could download our music collaboration app, try it out and give us feedback. It's available for free on the app store; The following link will re-direct you there later today. [http://kwaver.com](http://kwaver.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> I love Firebase, but the Swift code in the iOS guide is of really low quality. For example ([https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/ios/save- data#dele...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/ios/save- data#delete_data)):

        if currentData.value != nil, let uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid {
            var post = currentData.value as! [String : AnyObject]
            var stars : Dictionary<String, Bool>
            stars = post["stars"] as? Dictionary<String, Bool> ?? [:]
            // ...
        }

What this should really be:

        guard let post = currentData.value as? [String : AnyObject],
        uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid else { return FIRTransactionResult.successWithValue(currentData) }

            let stars = post["stars"] as? [String : Bool] ?? [:]
            // ...
        }

<comment><USER14> Great suggestion! Pull requests welcome as well if you have time: [https://github.com/firebase/quickstart- ios/blob/master/datab...](https://github.com/firebase/quickstart- ios/blob/master/database/DatabaseExampleSwift/PostTableViewCell.swift#L50)

<comment><USER13> Oh cool, I already sent feedback through the Firebase website but I'll do this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that Google is doubling down where Facebook divested. The obvious difference is that Google has a cloud platform and Firebase is a funnel into it, whereas Facebook had nothing to funnel Parse users into.

I wonder if Facebook will ever launch a cloud platform. They've got the computing resources for it.

<comment><USER16> Your first hint that Google was very serious about cloud, was when we hired Diane Greene:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hires-diane-greene- to-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hires-diane-greene-to-run- cloud-2015-11)

Also when Urs publically states he wants Google Cloud revenue to be bigger than adwords, that ain't nothing:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/urs-holze-talks-google- cloud-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/urs-holze-talks-google-cloud-beat- search-2015-11)

I know it's popular to be cynical about Google and how we'll deprecate everything just as it's popular, but that kind of cynicism isn't really good for your health.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We've been using the Firebase platform for a while now. It's pretty cool to see them expand from 3 products to ~15 overnight. I'm most excited about their analytics and crash reporting. I must say that their system has been one of the best we have used in a longtime, I am really excited to see other aspects like analytics and ads being housed under this same umbrella, as I think it is going to help with development time overall. One area that I'd like to see improved though is a deeper querying language for database, or even better would be a way to automatically export the system in realtime to a postgres database for better SQL type analytics.

</comment><comment><USER18> The concern I've always had with Firebase is the lack of a business logic layer between clients and the database. This tends to force the business logic into the clients themselves.

Trying to change the schema if you have Firebase clients deployed that can't be instantly upgraded via a browser refresh (i.e. iOS and Android mobile apps) seems an extremely challenging task.

<comment> atom-morgan > Trying to change the schema

That's the biggest question I have after looking over the site. Coming from the Mongo/Mongoose world what happens in this case?

<comment><USER18> There used to be a thread in the Firebase Google group about this which is gone now. It still lives on here:

[http://grokbase.com/t/gg/firebase- talk/154mr25k86/firebase-m...](http://grokbase.com/t/gg/firebase- talk/154mr25k86/firebase-mobile-app-future-proofing-strategies-for-handing- schema-evolution)

That thread is not encouraging.

Edit - found the original thread here:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebase- talk/LjHATl...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebase- talk/LjHATl8_XBs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We used the original Firebase database product to build [http://socrates.io/](http://socrates.io/) 3.5 years ago, and I remember getting Socrates running in a few hours. I'm looking forward to seeing them up the bar on speed of development / ease for their next 10 products :) Nice work team!

</comment><comment><USER20> way too risky to use it for startups. Google may discontinue this project at any time and you have to spend months to rewrite everything for another database. IF google open source it and we will be able to install it on premise and patch without Google, that would be ok. So, I would recommend to use PostgreSQL instead.

<comment><USER21> Google is dogfooding this in it's other companies, like Nest, fwiw.

<comment><USER22> They always say that. Google's internal customers also get to continue access after a product has "been retired" (eg. Chrome Web Store still using Google Wallet's web payments) and are in a different position than Google's external customers when it comes to negotiability and notification period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When will it support a count query? now to be able to count number of children I have to download all the data. Count is such an important feature for me.

<comment><USER24> You could run your writes as transactions that increments a count wherever you need one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have build apps with firebase in the past and the feature I missed the most was performing scheduled tasks on the database. Now we are getting this BIG app platform update and this feature is still not in there. AWS Lambda with Scheduled Events for a long time to come :sad-panda:

<comment><USER26> Do Google Cloud Functions (referenced above) not fit that bill? [https://cloud.google.com/functions/](https://cloud.google.com/functions/)

I'm also keen to use Firebase without having to run a separate server to handle logic for payments, email alerts on search terms, etc.

<comment><USER25> Last time I checked it was impossible to do scheduled tasks. But it's in alpha stage, so maybe that's coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember walking into Firebase's offices about 4 years ago when it was 4 people on Townsend St in SOMA in a 300 square foot share office space. It's amazing to see how far they've come; Congrats to the whole team.

<comment><USER2> Thanks Joe! : ) I remember that day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even if you don't want to use any Firebase service you might still want to use it only for Analytics. Drop the firebase SDK in the App and you are done. Free, unlimited and unsampled Analytics reports for your App.

[https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/#implementation_p...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/#implementation_path)

[https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317517?hl=en&ref...](https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317517?hl=en&ref_topic=6317489)

</comment><comment><USER29> As a current Firebase customer, I'm pretty thrilled about all this (especially since I was afraid Google would pull a Facebook here). However, there's quite a bunch of API changes and absolutely no info about how long the old JS library, endpoints, etc etc are to keep working. Should I get stressed out?

<comment><USER30> (Firebase engineer here)

The old SDKs will continue to work! We worked extremely hard to make sure everything was backwards compatible with them. We most certainly do not want to break any existing customer apps. Check out the migration guides [1] to get your app updated to the new SDKs.

We understand migrating is not easy or always convenient. If you run into issues or something that used to work seems to be no longer work, please let us know. We will be giving you advanced warning if and when things get turned off.

[1] [http://firebase.google.com/support/guides](http://firebase.google.com/support/guides)

<comment><USER29> Great! I found the guides but I couldn't find this info in there.

I like the new features and also the new JS API so I think that's plenty of incentive to migrate. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This may be a stupid question, but: What do you use it for? Cannot everyone basically edit the client code and do whatever with your data? I've only used Firebase for prototyping.

<comment><USER32> I use it for its main selling point: a realtime backend.

With Firebase, Vue-Fire (Firebase bindings for Vue.js), crossfilter and chart.js, you can whip up a functional and sweet analytics dashboard or [insert pet project here] in a weekend.

It gets the headache of a backend (and user auth) out of the way.

As for security - the Firebase security rules and server side authentication allow you to lock things down.

<comment><USER33> > With Firebase, Vue-Fire (Firebase bindings for Vue.js), crossfilter and > chart.js, you can whip up a functional and sweet analytics dashboard or > [insert pet project here] in a weekend.

> It gets the headache of a backend (and user auth) out of the way.

You can get the same if you use other tools.

The realtime stuff is the only big thing they do most other projects don't, and even for that there are currently several quite well working implementations out there.

<comment><USER32> Sure. But now I have all this in one service. And when that pet project moves from web to a native app, Firebase has all the trappings to make it easy.

A lot of eggs in one basket admittedly, but that basket looks pretty robust for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The thought of reliable, managed hosting is interesting.

But how does one extend an app outside storing and fetching data? What if you want to run a background job to send emails, parse a complex csv or create a custom pdf and write to firebase storage?

<comment><USER35> Firebase projects are deeply integrated with Google Cloud, so you can spin up backend resources such as Google Cloud Functions, App Engine, and Compute Engine. Using the Node.js server SDK you can watch for changes in the Firebase Database and act on them. We're thoughtfully considering more holistic ways we can help here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm in talks with a company regarding building an application for users in developing countries, where Android 2.0 is still the dominant OS version.

Firebase 2.0 looks like a great fit for their needs otherwise, but is the new sdk backward compatible to Android 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER36> So how would one address server side logic?

Like for example doing something with the data before sending it to the client?

<comment><USER37> I think this is the biggest issue with firebase that I can't find an answer to. It seems everyone is ok with just doing everything on the client side. Schema changes, business logic, etc.

<comment><USER36> From what I've seen, all backend duties are implemented in a server acting as another client to Firebase. Usually a Node server since Firebase has provided a JS SDK from the start, but I've seen implementations in all major languages.

You either implement some cron task in that server that periodically makes stuff with Firebase, or you use an endpoint in Firebase and use it a task queue for the server.

I'd would be great if someone with more experience could provide more info on how these backend duties are performed.

Edit: see this for more info [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebase- talk/r4d5H7...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebase- talk/r4d5H7ffsZM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think services like firebase are a very scary thing. Too much dependence on one vendor, too much black box magic, too much logic that is beyond control. And services like this contribute to general dumbing down of software developers. We're heading towards world of script kiddies where html and js rule and all complex logic is handled and controlled by service providers. Is it a good thing? You can deliver fast, but in the long term is it worth it?

</comment><comment><USER39> From my experience with the new API, it's a little less intuitive and worse documentation. I think it's rad that Google invested a ton of resources into firebase.

we have been super successful with firebase, and are proponents of using it as a notification system and less of a datastore. That would be easy, but unwise. Use it to notify clients of changes so they can fetch data. Read from Firebase, write to your own server/DB.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't think it was explicitly mentioned in the keynote, but it looks like they updated pricing:

[https://firebase.google.com/pricing/](https://firebase.google.com/pricing/)

Can't find the old pricing now, but it seems similar, but with less plan types.

<comment><USER2> Yes! We updated our pricing. We have fewer plan types (just 3 now), and now have a pay-as-you-go plan which is designed for maximum flexibility. This pricing is cheaper for almost every developer.

<comment><USER40> Oh sweet, I just noticed that under the new pricing, the free plan includes a custom domain and ssl cert. This was literally the only reason I updated one of my legacy hobby apps to the old Spark ($5 per month for the uninitiated).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It looks like it is here to stay... But that surprise Parse shutdown will leave me asking, what if...

</comment><comment><USER42> As a server engineer already having trouble finding a new job, how worried should I be about this?

</comment><comment><USER43> This appears to just be a way to limit the growth of third party tracking which threaten Google by encouraging user acquisition from many sources.

I say this because they dont specifically say they will postback events to advertising networks other than Google's.

</comment><comment><USER44> For Firebase/Google Cloud Platform engineer: does it mean Google Cloud Endpoints is being phased out? if i'm already using Google Cloud Endpoints, should i move to Firebase? what's the advantage?

<comment><USER45> Hi -- PM for Endpoints here.

Endpoints is going strong and will have a release later this year that adds support for hosting APIs on more of our compute offerings (Compute Engine, Container Engine, App Engine Flexible Environments). We'll also be adding features, reporting, etc.

<comment><USER44> thanks! I just feel Endpoints doesn't get enough love from Google. It works nicely, but with minimum feature compared to Firebase (which I don't mind, let it be boring as long as it's not deprecated)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've had only good experiences with firebase. They added an HTTP api, web hosting, multiple security rule preprocessors (pain point), and got faster and cheaper. Yeah only good things.

</comment><comment><USER47> The biggest problem with any Google cloud services nowadays is you don't know if it was/will blocked in China, of course it is okay if you don't care the users in China.

</comment><comment><USER48> I intend to use Firebase as at least a temporary backend while developing my app. Maybe I'll move to a real server later, but during development it's really easy to just have some place you can shoot json at. And I can always add interaction later by having some other application listen to it.

I don't really need the actual realtime communication stuff all that much (though it might turn out to be useful), but just a lightweight place to store json is really useful.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not expressly mentioned anywhere that I've seen: the Free plan now includes custom domains + SSL cert. Under the previous firebase.com, that was $5 a month.

Sounds good to me!

</comment><comment><USER49> Is there a tutorial that explains how to setup a backend for user-taken videos? for an IOS app

one thing I liked about Parse was that it's documentation was newbie-friendly.

<comment><USER50> I've used firebase for other apps but not video storage. From what I've read about how it works, its better to store the media in some 3rd party system such as S3 and keep the link to the file in firebase. Here is one good thread I found with a little searching: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/firebase- angular/xb2be...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/firebase- angular/xb2besi__lU/1MyHJfwCerUJ)

<comment><USER35> Firebase Storage launched today and is perfect for things like storing video! [https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Can somebody explain the new Firebase reframing towards GCP? Maybe with another provider analogy? (e.g.,Firebase is to GCP like Parse is(was) to Facebook)

<comment><USER52> I cover this briefly in my talk today: "Migrate to Firebase" [1]. Google Cloud Platform gives you massively scalable & robust building blocks at the IaaS and PaaS level. You can use these to do just about anything as long as you have the time and expertise. Combining building blocks to follow best practices isn't always trivial, so Firebase offers the next layer higher in the stack. With Firebase you can mix and match pieces that integrate together to be a turn-key backend. We also offer additional services to help you make your app successful once it's been built.

Firebase and Google Cloud Platform play nicely together and we've made sure you can mix and match the pieces you need. E.g. Firebase Storage lets you use Firebase Rules to secure Google Cloud Storage. The new server-side APIs for Firebase are authenticated with the Google's IAM policies.

The two teams are partners and we're excited to be working together.

1\. [https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?sid=b4641ff7-0bef-...](https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?sid=b4641ff7-0bef-e511-a517-00155d5066d7#day1/b4641ff7-0bef-e511-a517-00155d5066d7)

<comment><USER51> This is great! thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Question: Would Firebase be a good option where the desktop/web app is the main access point, mobile been secondary (around 3:1) ?

<comment><USER2> Most likely, yes. Everything we have for mobile web works just as well for desktop web too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> FYI, new docs on data structure mention rooms, which was an example in the old docs. Should read messages or conversations: [https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/structure- data...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/structure- data#flatten_data_structures)

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm building a simple web app where I want signed in users to be able to add a JSON object to a database and then list all JSON objects publicly. Only the user who created the object should be able to edit it. Is this a good use-case for Firebase or should I look into something else?

<comment><USER55> yes, Firebase allows you to isolate user data, and it has built-in auth API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Feel like the new Wordpress/Drupal/CMS, just in App space.

</comment><comment><USER57> What is the state of AngularFire library, there are no guides for angular in the new documentation? And when will the angularfire for angular2 be ready to use?

<comment><USER58> We launched AngularFire2 into beta at ng-conf earlier this month:

[https://github.com/angular/angularfire2](https://github.com/angular/angularfire2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is user email confirmation finally supported by Firebase? Last time I checked it wasn't.

<comment><USER60> Hi dmitriz! Yes. We have it (currently in iOS and Web, soon on Android), and we're eager to get feedback and work to improve it!

If you try it out, ping me at alfongj at google dot com and let me know what you think!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> "... and earn more money." Is this really necessary on the homepage? Sounds like a old misleading spam page

</comment><comment><USER62> for all of you looking for a real-time api platform that's open source and not owned by a cloud giant come join us build telepat.io

</comment><comment><USER63> So, Still no offline persistence for JS. What a huge disappointment.

<comment><USER35> Check out my I/O talk on Friday (Progressive Web Apps on Firebase). While the Firebase Web SDK doesn't support persistent offline just yet, we do have some new ways to get the job done.

[https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?filters=Firebase&s...](https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?filters=Firebase&sid=ff641ff7-0bef-e511-a517-00155d5066d7#day3/ff641ff7-0bef-e511-a517-00155d5066d7)

<comment><USER36> Um... what about this?

[https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/offline- capabi...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/offline- capabilities#section-presence)

<comment><USER35> The Firebase JS SDK currently supports non-persistent offline. So long as you keep the tab open, Firebase works great offline!

However, if you go offline and then try to refresh the content, none of it will be persistently stored or accessible until you go back online.

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the clarification.

I was hoping to use Firebase on a React Native app but I do need persistence. Do you have or plan to make some wrapper of the native iOS/Android SDKs for React Native?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Provide a self hosting option or GTFO.

<comment><USER65> [https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon](https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon)</comment></comment>


Scaleway introduces new x64 virtual servers up to 8GB of RAM for €9.99/mo - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/04/05/vc1-new-affordable-variants/ <comment><USER2> Last I checked they were using some pretty old 32-bit ARM cores (probably Cortex-A9). They should try and get some of these, if the offer is good:

[https://www.apm.com/news/appliedmicro-announces-x- gene-3-the...](https://www.apm.com/news/appliedmicro-announces-x-gene-3-the- industrys-first-armv8-a-finfet-server-s/)

Also, I assume these are Atom cores? (Avoton or whatever Intel calls them for servers).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's Avoton CPU [https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/#-Why-did-you-go- back-to...](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/#-Why-did-you-go-back- to-x86-for-the-C2)

<comment><USER3> Here's the ARK page for them: [http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton](http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton)

It seems like they're actually not that bad: [http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel- Xeon-E3-1220-v2-vs-Intel-Atom-...](http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel- Xeon-E3-1220-v2-vs-Intel-Atom-C2750)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are the servers using ECC memory? Can't find any information about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> No

<comment><USER5> Why Avoton then? You just lost a sale.

I shouldn't have assumed ECC, but if you have a group designing your own hardware then routing another 8 wires shouldn't be a problem.

I'm disappointed.

<comment><USER4> Same here. We have actually run into ECC issues before and it's a bloody nightmare when local files and backup files are overwritten with corrupt data. If you don't notice it in time (we noticed it after two days due to widely different MD5 checksums of backups) all of the data might be lost and if you are lucky, you will see some service go down (as a sort of warning) before it's too late.

And no, ZFS is not a guarantee here! (It can actually make it worse since it keep a ton of data in RAM)</comment></comment></comment></comment>