Homegrown DevOps Tools at Stack Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://blog.serverfault.com/2013/09/05/homegrown-devops-tools-at-stack-exchange/ <comment><USER2> I think Stack Exchange has a secret weapon which will likely greatly improve their backend systems. Tom Limoncelli, who used to work at Google as a Site reliability engineer (SRE), now works at Stack Exchange [1]. He pretty much wrote the bible for sysadmins entitle " _The Practice of System and Network Administration_ " [2]. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more posts like this!

[1] [http://everythingsysadmin.com/2013/09/the-team-im-on-at- stac...](http://everythingsysadmin.com/2013/09/the-team-im-on-at-stack- exchan.html)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321492668/tomontime-20](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321492668/tomontime-20)

<comment><USER3> Wow that's cool I would love to work with those guys wouldn't be much help though only have basic Linux administration skills.

<comment><USER4> Keep learning and soon you will be beyond basic.

If you have passion, you will have plenty to offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This oddly sounds like a death knell for Windows. I am not seeing anything here that is not in the LAMP / OSS stack as standard (graphite, nagios / Munin)

If we rephrase the blog post as "we could not find any good tools in the Windows devops space so we wrote them" and add it to the departure of the only CEO willing to dance on stage chanting developers developers developers and Windows is not an ecosystem but a hub with a few brave outlying satellites.

I am impressed by the stacke change folks and their story and skills but it feels like amazing stories of software skill written for one company and never released in the open - it just leaves no legacy

<comment><USER6> In my experience, Windows tooling for serious admin work is either terrible or massively expensive/enterprise.

For instance, a key problem I had in a prior gig was that I needed to automatically log into a Windows machine, run a job, and then log out. Pretty bog standard; didn't need careful error recovery or anything particularly sophisticated.

In Linux, you configure your SSH keys, then ssh automatedjob@server -c "./run- my-thing", and that's that. I literally could not find any identical analog in Windows besides _telnet_ (if anyone knows of a solution here that approximates the Linux one for simplicity, I'd love to know about it). Today I'd probably just requisition a copy of a Windows SSH server and be done with the sorry mess. Better yet, throw Windows out and go full Linux. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Windows has advanced in a lot of ways over the past several years. We hired Steven Murawski a little while back (Powershell MVP) and he has been able to automate just as much as would expect in the Unix world.

He is also priming out infrastructure for Desired State Configuration (configuration management (like Puppet/Chef) for Windows).

<comment><USER6> What I'm deriving from your statement there is, "So we hired a guru to bring our Windows systems up to par with Linux base point".

I'm glad its working for you, I use stackexchange daily and am generally quite happy with it!

<comment><USER7> Not at all. The Windows OS now has command line accessible management points that are similar to Linux. There is still a great deal of difference in their management models (I blogged about this a while back - [http://blog.serverfault.com/2013/06/03/cross-platform- config...](http://blog.serverfault.com/2013/06/03/cross-platform- configuration-management-is-hard/))

That I was hired as a Windows specialist was so that we can go deeper on the OS side and the PowerShell side, just as we have a Linux expert to go deeper on the Linux side. Our sysadmin team was just more tilted with experience on the Linux side (though you wouldn't know it - as almost everyone I work with would qualify as a senior admin in any Windows shop in the world).

<comment><USER6> Steven,

Thank you for your response.

I am glad to see that there are comparable capabilities in the modern Windows world and will dig into the WMI side of things next time Windows admin tasks come up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's always nice to see new products in the DevOps space, but be careful not to re-invent the wheel if you do this kind of stuff as the open source world is coming on leaps and bounds.

LogStash, ElasticSearch and Kibana are a great open source stack for log management.

StatsD and Graphite are nice tools for metric tracking and visualization.

There are lots of open source dashboard offerings which combined with a bit of scripting can get you far.

You are also spoiled for choice with SAAS monitoring stuff such as NewRelic and Server Density, even if the OP isn't a fan of cloud based tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did an experiment with logstash, elasticsearch, and Kibana for our HAProxy logs. The default with logstash was to store each field, and then the whole text so stuff go quite large for our web logs. Also the Kibana interface was pretty buggy. Parsing our logs (~2k entries) a second doesn't work well with Regex so in our version we do a bunch of substring stuff. I'm excited about Kibana/ES for the rest of our logs over with their recent hire.

When I looked at StatsD and Graphite last time I didn't really see an API. I really like the model of data being queryable and returning nice serialized format like json (like OpenTSDB does). I'm also not that fond of the "many files" model and the automatic data summarization as it ages (it does save space, but makes forecasting difficult as it can skew data).

<comment><USER9> We're parsing 2k lines/sec with logstash using regexes. We scaled it out to 6 logstash processes across 2 nodes. They pull off a shared redis queue and then insert the results directly into elasticsearch. (That said, I'd like to configure our apache logs to just output the json logstash expects.)

Graphite has a very simple and powerful JSON API [1]. Any graph URL can include &format=json and you'll get back the raw JSON values for the datapoints. I haven't used OpenTSDB yet - I'm curious how its API is better.

You get to choose the levels of summarization. If you want to keep 1 second intervals for a year, you're welcome to do so.

[1] [http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/0.9.12/render_api.html](http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/0.9.12/render_api.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That dashboard looks really neat. I've been searching for a good Windows dashboard, and I like the patching views. Where's the download link?

<comment><AUTHOR> None of this is open sourced yet. Nick is investing a lot of time to get what we currently call "status" ready to open source.

Part of the reason for the open position linked to in the post ( [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/39983/developer- site-r...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/39983/developer-site- reliability-team-stack-exchange) ) is to make it so we have more manpower to get this stuff open sourced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> jmelloy ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334778)) had a really good point that wasn't covered in the post, since it was a post about what we are doing not necessarily why we are doing it.

One of our major problems with existing monitoring and management systems is the lack of good APIs. We are a shop of developers and sysadmins who all understand the real management systems need to be composable. The system needs to understand that it won't solve every case out of the box and expose hooks into management and functionality, allowing us to tie disparate systems together and enhance their coverage. I'd rather take a bunch of existing products and put some cool dashboards on top, but most enterprise solutions (and some of the open source ones) don't offer a decent API to work with.

<comment><USER11> It's quite likely that I'm confusing "decent API" and "ease of extending and integrating" and all that gets wrapped up with my long term familiarity with Nagios.

Nagios check plugins don't have an API per se, but they have a very simple standard for exit codes to be interpreted by the Orchestration component.

Nagios reporting/alerting plugins primarily use RRD, so you always have _that_ API to do interesting things like trend analysis.

(One theory I have is that there is a such a large and growing culture of technologists that are thinking "integration tool" but only know how to _say_ "HTTP API")

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> OK, I'll be that guy.

This makes that page much easier to read. Especially the headings, which are all mashed together for some reason...

        #content {
            margin-left: auto;
            margin-right: auto;
            float: none;
            width: 40em;
            font-size: 15pt;
            line-height: 1.4em;
        }

        h1 {
            font-size: 180%;
            line-height: 1.2em;
            margin-top: 2em;
            margin-bottom: 0.5em;
        }

        h2 {
            font-size: 160%;
            line-height: 1.2em;
            margin-top: 2em;
            margin-bottom: 0.5em;
        }

        #wrap {
            width: 100%;
        }

</comment><comment><USER13> An interesting consulting niche would be to help companies open source software they want to release.

Basically:

\- clean up code,

\- make sure the infrastructure is sufficient,

\- help with marketing and adoption,

\- write documentation

<comment><USER14> Very few companies want to pay for that, fewer still when in-house and third party devs are often begging to do that work if they'd just let them license the code as OSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how much investment they have in this vs. going with a pre-existing monitoring system like ExtraHop?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't aware of extrahop so I will have to look into that. We currently use Solarwinds Orion which is where status gets some of its data.

We have definitely outgrown Orion, and a lot of stuff in Orion is very rough, sloppy, and not well integrated.

We don't really like the idea of cloud hosted monitoring (which is a lot of what more modern monitoring systems are). Alternatives also seem very expensive.

So if we are going to make a investment (cash or labor) I would rather we get a system that fulfills all of our needs (fit) and share it with everyone.

<comment><USER16> "We don't really like the idea of cloud hosted monitoring" Can you elaborate on the reasons?

<comment><USER17> I'll bet one of the reasons is the amount of data. At a previous employer I built a system similar to this which produced nightly, weekly, monthly, and annual reports of weblog analysis for an app that had 6 million+ http requests per day. It was tough enough to consolidate those logs across the load- balanced servers in a single data-center. We never consolidated across data- centers (separate reports for each instead) and I doubt we could have shipped all of that data to a cloud service in a reasonable amount of time.

BTW, we made heavy use of setting and logging http headers too. One trick I liked was capturing performance timing metrics as a request was processed and stuffing it into a response header as the response went out. We then logged the response headers, which gave us the ability to report on the performance metrics. We also had a debug mode in the app on the browser side so we could see the performance metrics from the headers there too.

<comment><USER11> When was this?

~70 events per second doesn't sound like much to capture and aggregate. How much of this parsing did you need to perform in real time? Creating a unique token to pair requests/responses shouldn't add much overhead at all.

<comment><USER17> Development started around 2000, and stabilized around 2008. As far as I know the reporting scripts are still being run every day. During this period we had purchased a 1TB storage rack from EMC for a million dollars, to give you some perspective on the differences between then and now.

\- No real-time parsing; it's all nightly batch processing after devops rotates the Apache server logs to a storage volume. The logs sit there for a while then get compressed and moved to offline tape archives.

\- No DB storage of the logs; space was too expensive and the Oracle database we had couldn't have kept up. It was already heavily burdened with a completely separate usage statistics system that fed into user-facing reporting and billing, which had a much higher event rate, about 100x higher, than the http logs.

\- We had unique tokens, but they identified a particular user session that tied together all of the user's http requests from login to logoff/abandonment, and which also tied into the Oracle-based statistics for that user, that user's organization, and the customer responsible for the user (often multi-organization). My reports had breakdowns for individual user experiences, session-level metrics, and user type/organization/customer/region/etc metrics.

\- I don't recall how long the analysis took; it was between half an hour to two hours I think. A lot of that time was spent on disk I/O reading the logs. I had optimized the parsing, analysis, and results recording about as much as I could.

\- This stuff was written in Perl, and ran on Solaris servers from that time era... probably not a lot more powerful than a handful of smartphones today, though they did have lots of cpus. I don't think traffic has grown much since I left the company (we had pretty full market penetration already) so it's likely those servers haven't been upgraded.

<comment><USER11> I suspected it would have to be a system of that era.

I think I have a good idea of how businesses (at a high level) have failed to understand Moore's law from 2000-present. I'm curious what those failures of understanding were like from 1985-2000.

We all know that technology has been advancing rapidly, but these specific anecdotes of organizations paying a million dollars _just for the backing storage_ of a system that you can essentially get for free from Google now...

<comment><USER17> Yeah, it's pretty amazing how much things have changed. That raw log data was about 250GB/year which is nothing today but when we started collecting it we were paying $1000/GB.

Actually, they're probably still paying over $100/GB. The whole datacenter was outsourced to Perot Systems in the mid-2000s, and the storage fees were astronomical. We calculated that Perot must pay a separate tech to stare at each individual hard drive with a replacement in-hand in case any errors were reported. At least, they could afford to do that with what we were paying them for storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Where does the patching dashboard pull data from? Is it tracked by hand or is there a scanner? We use Orion at work, and it's got a decent amount of data in it, but is kind of kludgy and slow.

<comment><USER7> The patching dashboard has scheduled jobs on the clients (PowerShell scripts on the Windows boxes and Ruby scripts on the Linux boxes).

We use Puppet to deploy the client to our Linux boxes and for Windows we deploy the task and scripts with Group Policy (soon to be replaced by Desired State Configuration).

This information isn't something we need to poll often for (and on Windows, there are difficulties interacting with the Windows Update apis remotely). We add and replace servers often, so the client adds themselves to the dashboard, as well as updating their status.

We have integrated some reporting into Orion, but that was a side effect of not having the dashboard before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am curious to how they deploy database schema and stored procedure updates. That is a much harder problem.

<comment><USER20> We have a forwards only migration runner that takes care of the deployment for us. We don't use many stored procedures, but they're taken care of the same way (in a migration). Our policy is that pushed code be backwards compatible by however many migrations are being deployed in a production build.</comment></comment>


WhatsApp doesn't understand the web - <AUTHOR> http://andregarzia.com/posts/en/whatsappdoesntunderstandtheweb/ <comment><USER5> This web client, even in it's current horrific form, is something I really needed.

Many a times I find myself working on my laptop, with the phone carelessly lying somewhere else in the room. It's a pain to go find it when a new message arrives.

The bottomline is, I guess WhatsApp doesn't need a Web Client to compete with other services. If you've been to India, you will realize how pervasive WhatsApp is, with or without a Web Client.

This is just an added convenience feature for some power users. So it is understandable that they went this route.

<comment><USER6> I am 100% agreed with what you said.

But I have problem with the way they have implemented it as of now. I mean to use it via web I need to scan the qr code every time.

Plus my phone needs to stay connected to internet. In India you can easily find lots of whatsapp users who wishes to use whatsapp via PC just because they dont have net pack on their phone.

Hope they remove this restriction soon.

<comment><USER7> I didn't have to re-scan the QR code when I got into work this morning after setting it up yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? How about widely used programming languages and frameworks? Flash for cool web effects anyone? The web is open, open wins. No matter how monolithic a market leader is, if it can't figure out how to be open and make money: it will succumb.

<comment><USER9> > _Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history._

The only lesson from history is that all tecnologies succumb at some point. General infrastructure standards (like TCP/IP or HTTP) persist longer, but that doesn't say much for application level technologies.

> _Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less > than 10%?_

If anything that's a counter-example. Netscape, that "now has less than 10%" is the open source version. It had that 90% when it was proprietary. Besides, the current 2 big players that trump Firefox in users (Chrome and IE) are proprietary too.

> _Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with > its propietary chat /email network?_

Yeah, it got pwned by Apple and Android. Of which Apple, which is proprietary, has most of the smartphone profits, and Android has a lot of the share, mostly in lower cost phones. Not really about open vs closed. Meebo, a totally open phone never got anywhere, and neither did Mozilla's phone attempts.

> _Flash for cool web effects anyone?_

What about it? It dominated its niche of the market for like 15 years. If it dies its mostly because of general incompetence by Adobe. They never managed to create a mobile version that doesn't suck donkey's balls for one. They also died because a proprietary platform make a decision not to include it (iOS), which is not really about "open" winning.

<comment><USER8> The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards.

<comment><USER9> > _The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my > argument: open wins, eventually._

Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this.

> _And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they > need to be open to become protocols and standards._

Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but de- facto standards too, from the .doc format to .mp3 (patent encumpered), to GIF and h264.

<comment><USER8> The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.

<comment><USER10> But this is a faith-based attitude; the reasoning and evidence you presented could just as easily be used to support a "closed eventually wins" argument, where any open platform that's currently winning is only doing it temporarily until a closed platform dominates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).

<comment><USER12> All the nerds here only think about standards etc. Don't forget whatsapp is a company and it has to protect its market. Without controlling all the clients, whatsapp is worth a lot less.

<comment><USER11> By that logic any e-mail service should be incompatible with the rest, but that's clearly idiotic and no one would try arguing it. Try also imagining that your mobile carrier would tell you that by no means you are allowed to call to users of another carrier, since that would not "protect their market". Would you ever use such? When it comes to instant messaging however some lose common sense and start thinking that dark ages approach is acceptable.

When communication service instead of enhancing communication tries to hinder it by intentionally gutting interoperability, one should avoid it like a plague.

<comment><USER13> You are comparing two different things. Email is a generic concept - it's not proprietary . A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message. Basically, if we push your analysis further, Facebook, which is a communication application, should let you send a message to your twitter account, that you could read with twitter, and reply with a comment on an Instagram picture. That'd be the same thing - I mean, they are all "messages" somehow, aren't they? See, it's - as you say - <USER2> idiotic as no one would open its platform that much.

<comment><USER11> _> Email is a generic concept - it's not proprietary_

Concepts can't be proprietary altogether. You can't own ideas. Instant messaging isn't proprietary either.

 _> A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message._

If you are talking about certain implementation of ideas being proprietary - that's exactly the point of my original comment. Making it intentionally incompatible to "control the market" is crooked lock-in tactic. Which is especially the case with Whatsapp which internally uses XMPP which was designed for interoperability and as IETF standard.

And I brought examples with e-mail. A long time ago Compuserve and AOL e-mail services used to be incompatible on purpose. But pressure from users to end that stupidity forced them to reconsider. There is no valid reason that a lot of IM services can't interoperate to a good degree. Except for greed and backwards thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to > work...

What? Is this true? I can't think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.

<comment><USER15> WhatsApp does not store messages on their servers. It's a clean passthrough from one device to the next. They only hold onto message until all clients in the group text or one-on-one text have received the sent message. So, if you have two clients using the same phone number, the system wouldn't know when it is able to delete the message. Right now the single phone receives the message and simply passes it up to the web browser. It's a simple solution that fits into their data model. They claim that they cannot get this working on iOS which prior to iOS 7 may have been true. However, on iOS 7 and above we can run code (even async network calls) when we receive a push notification so they should have been able to work with that API to produce similar results.

<comment><USER16> I believe you're wrong. This is how WhatsApp USED to work before they were acquired by Facebook. Remember how messages used to stay in the waiting (clock) state and you could delete them if the recipient wasn't online? Well now the first tick appears immediately because there's an intermediate server storing them for delivery and they can't be deleted from the client. It's similar to what Microsoft did to Skype.

<comment><USER17> The first tick appeared immediately since I'm using WhatsApp which has been long before Facebook acquired them.

<comment><USER16> And? That just means the recipients you were texting had a reliable connection to the internet at the time.

<comment><USER17> I'm 100% sure that this wasn't the case. I'm not saying that there always was an intermediate server, but it definitely was before Facebook acquired them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Here in Brazil WhatsApp is basically ubiquitous since its cheaper to send > IM messages than to send SMS._

From this I conclude that OP has fallen for the bizarre nonsense argument I've heard in Brazil a lot of times when WhatsApp was gaining traction: "You must use it! It's free SMS!"

What? No, it is not "free SMS", it is internet messaging. Internet messaging has existed since... since there was internet. Yeah, it is "free" as long as you have unlimited internet, but if that qualifies for "free SMS" email was free SMS much before WhatsApp.

<comment><USER19> Actually there are carriers in Brazil that allow free connection to WhatsApp server even if you have a limited connection plan...

People say that it is free SMS because of some reasons such as the fact that WhatsApp transfer your whole list of contacts to their server and thus populates the application contact list to the point that it is as convenient to use as SMS. Emails require email addresses. WhatsApp contacts are matched by phone number which are already on your phone address book anyway.

Its about perception. People here tend to place SMS, WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram all in the same collection because they are used to exchange small instant messages. Email is usually used for longer text that doesn't require immediate action.

<comment><USER20> > Its about perception

It's not just about perception. In their early days, they used to advertise themselves as a "Free SMS" service, at least in Portuguese.

> Actually there are carriers in Brazil that allow free connection to WhatsApp > server even if you have a limited connection plan...

This is very recent, after they got massive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Standards defiance notwithstanding, the web client appears to work as advertised and will surely save many a neck and thumb from premature aging.

It's interesting at this point to think about identity and authentication in WhatsApp. They've never had a username or password and their use of your mobile phone number as your identity seems to have been key to their success (the other factor I'd cite is good cross-platform support).

WhatsApp authn on mobile consists of a once-off SMS verification to confirm you are running WhatsApp on the mobile device hosting the SIM card corresponding to the phone number identity you've claimed for yourself. That said, I recently saw a case of someone using a temporary pre-paid SIM card while she was traveling here in South Africa yet her WhatsApp messages from that phone still appeared to come from her New Zealand number. Not sure how that passed the authn.

The lack of username and password, I believe, is what has led to some of the unnaturalness of the WhatsApp web app. I don't think that their remarks of "the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device -- this means all of your messages still live on your phone." reveal all of what guided their design choices. I also doubt that they "don't get the web". Instead I think they need the phone there and online because they have no username and password (or other device-independent authn) and they have thought quite carefully about protecting what got them ahead of the myriads of other perfectly functional IM apps out there in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why you think the biggest SMS system in the world (which it is in practice) should open its API or use non-proprietary system. Moreover you have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever on their technical infrastructure or their constraints as a business and a technology company. Making this kind of blog post, based on arguments made out of thin air, is the same as putting a redesign of Amazon on Dribbble and bitch about their current design.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can it be a money issue? Remembering that WhatsApp is not free, the 1$ for a year of service should be how they make money (I think they did a very good job there because no one that I know remembers that). Maybe the on-line phone solution suits them technically and economically, because they don't want to provide you with an alternative client that you might use for free. As they say this is simply and extension of the phone client.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's that no-one remembers that, but I don't think WhatsApp actually enforces this seriously. I have never paid for the service and each time the deadline for doing so approached, it had been extended.

<comment><USER24> I've paid for it once, but before that I had at least two extensions, and since I paid I've had one extension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would be interested to understand more about why WhatsApp made some of those decisions. The requirement to keep your phone connected to the Internet seems strange, perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device? Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? Why has iOS been left out?

<comment><USER26> > Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much?

There is nothing the FileSystem API can do that others cannot, although it might be less convenient or less optimized. Even that shouldn't be true any more, but it still might in some browsers.

Regardless, this was a wrong decision by WhatsApp. FileSystem is no longer standards track. The API document itself says

> "Work on this document has been discontinued and it should not be referenced > or used as a basis for implementation." [http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system- > api/](http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/)

Browsers should not implement it, and should in fact remove it, because it is nonstandard and never will be standardized. It is therefore dangerous for WhatsApp to use it - Google might do the right thing tomorrow and break their site, and it would be WhatsApp's fault.

However, Google has so far not shown much sign of intending to do the right thing here. As much as I admire many people at Google, and the company does many good things, this is a point that Google keeps getting wrong: Shipping nonstandard APIs, and keeping them active forever: FileSystem, NaCl/PNaCl, WebSQL, probably others I forgot.

I can only guess that Google simply finds those APIs convenient and uses them in its own websites, and has decided to never remove them. In other words, Google just doesn't care that they are nonstandard, which shows a lack of respect for the standards process. And as Google's market share rises over 50%, these are becoming de-facto standards, through an act of force.

One might say that this is an abstract "ethical" point, but WhatsApp shows exactly why it is not just that. Google keeping nonstandard APIs in Chrome for its own convenience opens the possibility of other websites using them. Either through ignorance - they don't know it's deprecated and nonstandard - <USER3> because they trust Google to not break them, and don't care about standards. The result is a web that works only in one browser.

Google, please do the right thing and remove nonstandard APIs.

<comment><USER27> > Google keeping nonstandard APIs in Chrome for its own convenience opens the > possibility of other websites using them. Either through ignorance - <USER4> > don't know it's deprecated and nonstandard - or because they trust Google to > not break them, and don't care about standards. The result is a web that > works only in one browser.

This is what happened to XMLHttpRequest, or have you already forgotten that it was originally an ActiveX control?

There is not (and there never will) a single way to define how the web is built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If all of this is true, its worse then I expected and I did not expect much. Why do all these companys wage a war against third party, even from a buissness perspective I don't get it. It creates innovation that you can copy for the offical app and its a perfect to test new features.

<comment><USER29> The same reason Apple has consistently waged war against clones?

<comment><USER30> Yes. But don't be too specific about those reasons, though, or you will be downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hrmm I really like the web client. It's not great (image viewer is really small) but serves my needs perfectly

<comment><USER32> I agree, 90% of my serious daily communication (i.e. not IRC) is done via Whatsapp. I can't explain how horribly annoying is to have to pull out my cell phone and write in that tiny screen every time I want to send a message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One more update to your article: several mobiles can't use that, because it seens de animation on the QR Code Scan screen is not responsive. My phone is a example, I just can't scan the QR Code:

[http://i.imgur.com/QTmTdJ4.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/QTmTdJ4.jpg)

<comment><USER34> I think your screen is to small for the message window. There is a button below it which dismisses the white window and enables the scanning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The linked article could have been titled "andre garzia does not understand that mobile messaging is not the web" jajaja ;)

I am not going to comment on the chrome only and non standard API complaints.

The key insight behind modern mobile messaging that allows them to scale cheaply is that for most consumers the phone is persistent enough that the server does not need to store messages. Ask a 19 year old if they need their old whatsapp messages. Most will say no. In fact, many proactively delete them. Turning a mobile messaging into a CPU and bandwidth only problem is a clever hack instead of it also being a disk and indexing problem.

This is hard thing for a lot of us to understand because we come from a world where our business has message retention and surveillance requirements. We want to run quantized self and sentiment analysis reports for the last 10 years. But most people either don't know that might even want that.

The other key insight is that knowing the user's identity can be more important than the user themselves.

<comment><USER19> author here.

I don't think you understood what I am complaining about. I am complaining exactly about chrome only and usage of non-standard api.

As for storage, the web client is requesting non-standard file system permission exactly to store things. I am saying they should use a standard API such as IndexedDB for that kind of thing.

I do understand a thing or two about IM having worked on more than a client before. There is no need whatsoever for the hacks they did...

As for surveillance, thats another can of worms that is not protected by what they are doing. Traffic is intercepted at other vulnerable spots such as the carrier itself or ISP.

<comment><USER35> I do understand. One of your complaints is "Mistake three - It doesn't work if your phone is not connected to the internet."

That is not a mistake. It is a direct result of the fundamental insight that enabled whatsapp to become what is is - being stateless. Your first two complaints are technical, but the third is a business decision that optimizes their product to fit the needs of the market.

This is a by the by, but surveillence in the context of business requirements means something different. For example, financial companies need to surveil their employee's messages for illegal activity.

<comment><USER36> What does being stateless mean, in this context?

<comment><USER37> Storing your IM data & meta-data on their servers. i.e. Pending, delivered, read. If they allowed phone to be offline, that data would need to be synced when it comes online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wasn't Whatsapp's success attributed to their policy of inclusion (all major mobile platform/devices). This seems like coming from a different company altogether.

<comment><USER39> Not at all.

First of, these modern messaging/social/mobile-first messaging apps we see getting popular have a fundamentally different model than what most of us desktop-first are used to.

They are not centred around an account, but around a device.

If you delete your Line app, all messages are gone. Hell, even if you log into Line from a new device, messages on the old one will be deleted. A friend of mine recently lost her phone and she saw no other way than to create a new account. Another friend had Docomo help her in-store to transfer all her Line messages when she upgraded her phone.

I don't use WhatsApp, but reading other post here, it seems that they use a similar model (but not as extreme). Your phone is your account, and all your stuff is stored only locally on your phone (or at least only accessible locally).

This explains why the web-app works so poorly.

Yes, WhatsApp got big by being on all devices, but they provide the software and the software model is a "one device per user"-model. This works great in a mobile-first (or should I say mobile-only) fashion.

This is SMS on steroids, not messenger for your phone.

<comment><USER26> I don't see how this explains the poor functionality of the web client?

All a web client needs is persistent, large storage - which is provided by IndexedDB - and to access the network to reach the service's servers.

WhatsApp should be able to make a fully-functional web client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So? Why should WhatsApp "understand" the web?

<comment><USER19> Because they are claiming that they released a "web client" that doesn't actually work on the web but only on a single browser and is not independent (it requires a mobile app running on a phone connected to the internet).

People release crippled software on the web because they don't understand what it is all about. The day we lose interoperability between browsers it will all be doomed. The fact that most of the websites work well on the top browsers is a victory that only those that lived thru the 90s will appreciate in its full glory. ;-)

<comment><USER9> That would be a problem for them only if it hurts their main business, which is their mobile clients.

I'd say a functional web client might be more of an issue for them than a broken one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Author here, will monitor this thread waiting for feedback and general comments.

<comment><USER40> Hate the gifs.. Made the article almost unreadable.. Just have them loop once or twice when I scroll to that part of the article.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the feedback. The gifs are the way I use to express my sentiments without reverting to cursing in all languages I know. I am aware that they are not every ones cup of tea but I liked them. I will consider not abusing gifs in the future (even though I love them and will probably use).

<comment><USER41> I love the gifs ヽ(⌐□_□)ノ♪♬

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The web doesn't understand WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER16> It also works in Opera, fyi.

<comment><USER43> Operas browser user agent is basically the same as Chromes. Firefox also works if you spoof it, which makes the point of OPs article even more prominent.

<comment><USER16> Opera is the same browser for all intents and purposes now anyway

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yes. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been using XMPP on my phone just fine. Why do I need WhatsApp which is not open? It offers me nothing new other than having to verify my phone number. But I can just use Google Voice if I wanted to message someone who knows my phone number. If I'm talking with someone in India there is no reason why I shouldn't just use XMPP.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "Why do I need WhatsApp which is not open? It offers me nothing new other than having to verify my phone number."

The common answer: because al my friends are using it. I don't understand why people don't use SMS when most smartphone contracts come with unlimited messages now. Why send your info through ANOTHER third party? But my friends are using it for the group feature so unless I don't want to be left out of the loop I have to as well.

<comment><USER46> Whatsapp is hugely popular in India where phone contracts are not popular and most people use pay-as-you-go prepaid mobile services. Very few, if any, of them come with unlimited messages. Unlimited messages are a US-only thing I guess.

<comment> k-mcgrady I'm in the UK. That doesn't change my point though. Despite the unlimited text messages in UK/US people still use Whatsapp.

<comment><USER47> My 2 cents...

Group text via SMS is a PITA. The main reason why I use WhatsApp for certain messaging tasks.

Having Wifi but no phone signal - WhatsApp gets used again.

WhatsApp also lets you see when a message has been received and also when it has been read. Spooky, but useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apple has ushered in a new era in which a high level of centralized control is considered acceptable to consumers.

WhatsApp is obviously trying to keep total control, like apple.

This doesn't explain all of their failings here. For example, I'm sure they will eventually find ways to address their control issues and still be usable in other browsers.

They might never do a web interface that runs in iOS, due to apple's own controling approach. Of course there is still the whatsapp iOS app.

<comment><USER48> Its the opposite - Whats App is storing nothing which limits what they can do.

<comment><USER30> That hardly makes it 'the opposite', unless you presume only the most limited interpretation of the words.

The fact that whatsapp stores nothing has little to do with their cease and desist orders. 3rd party clients can still be built on a system that stores nothing.

<comment><USER48> Using servers paid for by whats app without compensating them is stealing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The childless, aging future - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-c7902702-0ed3-46b0-97ba-77a77cd1d16c.html? <comment><USER2> The article is quite interesting, it sums up many numbers and projections I had read in several places.

But there are 2 other interesting factors to an aging society that they did not mention:

\- what will the retirees (~60+ y/o) do with their time? Not a small issue, I'm not thinking about economical consequences but simply social consequences & people's well-being. For some people, their job means A LOT, and once they retire, they don't know what to do. My dad is an example: R&D engineer, worked a lot until he retired, nowadays he just roams around the house (a sad view).

\- what is going to be the impact of such a huge number of older people on the moral views & technical progress? As you know, many older people grow more & more conservative ("stuck in their ways") or even reactionary as they age. This creates a serious number of potential issues with social progress and probably technological as well. Older people are often "left behind" by new technologies & social changes. This was not a major problem when they were a small minority, but once they'll become a not so small minority, their voices will be heard much more. I wonder if this could not lead to some stagnation or at least a slowdown in some areas/subjects (things like gay marriage, acceptance of alternative sexualities, etc.), or -at worst- a throw-back in some areas (look how HARD sexual freedom -in the broadest sense- has been hit those last 10 to 15 years, will you expect conservative/reactionary people to hold liberal views on that?).

<comment><USER3> >what will the retirees (~60+ y/o) do with their time?

Depends on the country. In countries that place importance on family (e.g. central/south america), I assume they will be content with helping their children raise their children (i.e. grandchildren).

In the US the decline of communal activities (including religion), culture of independence, and people associating their identity with their job seems like a recipe of disaster to me. A coexistence of entitlement and boredom creates an addictive poison. If you've ever worked in customer service before, you deal with these people every day.

<comment><USER4> I've got a dozen hobbies that I don't have enough time for now. Plenty to do, watch and read. I'd probably also have a go at building a greenhouse to grow more of my own food.

<comment><USER5> I'm right there with you. The world is so incredible!! I could work 70 hours a week on my own hobbies. I've never even though of building a green house; but I bet it would be a ton of fun. There is so much to see and do, how do people become bored and listless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've sometimes thought that it might be nice in an abstract sense to have kids. I'm sure there are some nice moments. But in practice whenever I see my friends with kids, they look so beleaguered and complain about never having time. I just think: Who needs it?

I think typical people have a real blind spot to the incredible personal costs to having kids. Something about it makes them forget about or discount the bad times and keeps them from dispassionately weighing the pros and cons of having kids. Many (for whatever reason) will simply not realize there is a choice at all.

Having kids is such a hassle, that to me it's no wonder that people are opting out once effective birth control came onto the scene.

Edit: @codersbrew (to whom I can't reply because your comment is dead) I don't understand why you think my opinions are short-sighted; I actually think they're the opposite. Also, people without kids have to be able to form opinions about having kids, otherwise how could anyone make an informed choice about it? And if it's an actual, real, choice, people can make either decision. I'm not sure if my opinion is correct either, but it's all I got.

<comment><USER7> From what I can tell, people's desire to have kids is like how many react to religion: it's beaten into our brains from a very young age that it's the right thing to do, the only true path through adulthood and life, "real men" sire children and "real women" bear them. Pressure throughout adult life continues to reinforce it: parents wanting grandchildren (and using guilt in order to persuade), parent friends wanting you to "join their club", others playing the fear card and asking who will take care of you when you're old.

Until recently, it's been taboo to talk about reproductive desires (or the lack thereof), the very real (often permanent) toll pregnancy takes on women, and the personal, career, and financial sacrifices parents must make to raise children responsibly. (And there's still a persistent stigma around discussing the negatives of child-rearing.) Many parents will even get aggressively defensive if you express a desire not to have your own kids, as if your decision has some negative effect on them.

That kind of conditioning is hard to shake off, and many people don't even seriously realize (outside of the abstract) that not having a kid is even an option.

<comment><USER8> You do realize having kids is a biological necessity to continue life, yes?

There would be no careers and financials to worry about if people didn't exist. And there's no reason to put those things on a pedestal, because they won't matter once you're dead.

Choosing not to have kids is effectively genetic suicide. Your DNA will be a dead end on the evolutionary scale.

For someone like me who enjoys life, seems odd that you wouldn't want to create new life to pass down the experience to your children. That's why it seems selfish and short sighted to me.

<comment><USER6> That's what you DNA "wants". Are you a slave to your DNA?

<comment><USER8> I think we are all slaves to DNA to the extent it determines our genetic makeup. In terms of having kids, like I said, I enjoy life and so I naturally want to pass down the experience of life to my children.

There is a biological "want" built-in of course (oxytocin, etc.) but it's something I consciously want, too. So, no I'm not completely enslaved by my DNA.

I see myself in the context of my past and future, and I want to actively continue my chain of existence through my children. In comparison to that, extra free time and money seem trivial to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Growing up in Canada (now living in usa) every student was propagandized about how population growth was bad, etc.

Now we are told how much immigration is indispensable i.e. more people are needed.

Were we lied to?

<comment><USER10> In Asia, population growth is a problem. Canada can benefit from more people. Vast tracts of empty land; vast, still-untapped natural resources; 37 million people in 9 million square km.; sound infrastructure; educated, productive populace.

India has about 1.3 billion people in under 3.3 million square km. with 1/6 Canada's per capita GDP. Population is a huge problem for them.

If Canada were to double its population in this century, they'd probably be better off. If the World does, we'll be screwed.

<comment><USER9> The actual arable land is much less, however. As well as habitable land, that is, places most people would feel comfortable living in year-round.

Agricultural yields per acre or hectare are often less than in the USA, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interested to see that the top ten shrinking countries on Earth are all in East Europe. Any Eastern Europeans here that can attest to the impact of this?

<comment><USER12> I'm from Belarus. There's lots of propaganda around having more children. Our president regularly says that women should stop having careers and start making more children.

Lots of people are leaving Belarus, but since we're not in EU and it's not as easy to leave, I don't think it's the main factor.

Education levels are very high in Belarus. Check out these stats. [https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html](https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html) Literacy rates are close to 100% and majority of women get higher education.

Belarus has a very poor economy and low salaries (families can't afford to have more than 1 child).

And finally, a lot of people are dying. Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example. Women would have to have looots of babies to offset the mortality rate.

It's probably a combination of all of these factors and more.

<comment><USER13> > Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example.

Not surprising given this is happening also in the states in non college educated males.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The gist of this seemed to be that we need to either allow unrestricted immigration, mainly from Africa, or up our robot game.

So really, if the "robots are going to take all our jobs" people are correct, we should just stay the course? Since we'll need those robots soon?

<comment><USER15> Or promote having kids. Just think if all of those money and propaganda for migrants was used for families with kids.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if you've read the news, but a lot of those migrants being made into ``propaganda" are families with kids.

<comment><USER15> I was talking about promoting locals to have kids to fix their own societies. Instead of leeching off other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's probably for the best, for now at least. At these very gradual population decline rates we don't have to worry about humans going extinct for a long time, and in the meantime we'll take pressure off a lot of critically overexploited resources.

<comment><USER18> this topic always reminds me of David Benatar's "Better Never To Have Been," wherein he lays out a moral and practical case for general cessation of human reproduction. [Famously condensed by Matthew McConaughey in a 'True Detective' monologue.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I breezed over the article but I did see longevity mentioned.

My parents are in their mid 70s and they are more active and independent than their parents were. Even my Dad sick with COPD is quite active.

My Dad's father died at 52 his mother at 64, both were smokers. My mother's parents lived to age 96 for her dad and late 80s for her mother. Neither smoked both ate mainly vegetables, small portions, but were not vegetarian.

I can recall my mother's parents being in a retirement home in their early 70s. But contrast that with my own parents the difference is quite dramatic.

I can see it with my own generation (Gen X) many do not have kids, neither do I. And it seems Millenials the "childfree trend is a thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only reason this is an issue is because of how governments setup the social security system. Each generation should have to pay for their own retirement not the next. Manufactured issue imo.

<comment><USER20> I agree with the manufactured bit, but given that generations are fluid, and alternative policies exist for realigning bad tax policy (inheritance tax), i fail to see any kind of grand problem. SS in the US will run up to a 10 trillion dollar deficit in a country with, currently, 240 trillion in assets? And a military that spends half a trillion a year without that total being a problem? Yeah, I call BS.

<comment><USER13> I also have an issue with our military spending but this post is in the context of SS so that is what I was discussing. Unreasonable expectation to have to list all the different issues with the govs spending. At some point the gov needs to get its spending together because it will just lead to massive austerity on its citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Society made incredibly risky to have kids, or even marry. You are culprit of an infinite number of crimes unless you prove yourself innocent all the time. What could go wrong?

<comment><USER22> > You are culprit of an infinite number of crimes unless you prove yourself > innocent all the time.

I don't understand. What crimes are these?

<comment><USER21> Domestic abuse, misogyny, intellectual abandonment (in case you don't spend your last penny giving your kids the absolute best trips and toys), there is a _whole industry_ dedicated to make you feel belittled and a failure, especially if you are a man (but there is a lot in this store for women, too). The pressure comes from the least expected places - your own parents, for example.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Parallel Algorithms - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
I want to directly cut to the point: for a university project, I am required to think of an algorithm, implement it, make it run on a cluster in parallel and compare results, write a report, ...
I have a few ideas, but I already know those algorithms quite well and would like to use the chance to learn something new and exciting :)
The question is: which algorithms can you think of, that would be fun to choose? <comment><USER2> evolutionary optimization algorithms: particle swarm, ant colony, etc...

</comment><comment><USER3> Nolite has a good suggestion... doing evolutionary computation in parallel can be fun. Another suggestion would be to look into graph algorithms and find something there. Graph algorithms, in general, aren't known for parallelizing very easily and there should be a fair amount of active research going on in that area. I imagine you could find something there that would have some value, and that might be fun.</comment>


Kevin Fox: Translation of the Microsoft-Nokia Open Letter - <AUTHOR> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/furycom/~3/TF6aZczmbXg/

<comment><USER2> In response to: "Microsoft will continue to invest in the development of Windows Phone and cloud services so customers can do more with their phone, across their work and personal lives."

I liked this part... Translation: _Microsoft swears not to pull a Kin. ForSure._</comment>


Google lands cloud deal with Defense Department - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/google-cloud-deal-defense-department-da619f1b-4d84-4d57-8e5d-4ddc1c0bf46b.html <comment><USER2> I can't help but laugh because I've heard Google referred to as "Skynet" so many times... and in the movie Skynet's first operational use was for to neutralize a cyber attack.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Seven-figures"...In other words, a couple of code monkeys in a room, block- chaining together cloud servers for a few years. This should fit well into a quad-chart.</comment>


Launch of CelloHost.com - <AUTHOR>
 Warsaw, Poland (July 18, 2016) Jaaz Company has launched a new web domain. CelloHost.com will become a hosting place designated for average and unskilled users of social networks and bloggers that want to have their own website.
The company is going to launch free version of their service in September 2016 but in July they plan to launch beta version for selected customers.
The new web domain CelloHost.com will be offered to everyone that will setup their own site through company's Jaaz Portal service.
The company is currently looking for people that want to become Beta Testers and would want to join their international team. Everyone that will register now can be rewarded with 50 Euro on promotion and up to 10 Euro for every bug he will find.
In addition he will be given a life time license for commercial versions of their software.
"We hope that thanks to our Beta Test program we will find testers with whom we will create a lasting cooperation" - said company's CEO Marcin Gregorczyk.
Jaaz Company has been founded in 1998 by Marcin Gregorczyk and Sebastian Walos. Since then it is providing IT consulting and web designer services for variety of clients including Chancellery of President of Poland. In February 2016 Jaaz Company has started working on its flagship product Jaaz Portal.
Visit us: http://cellohost.com <comment><USER2> Oh my god the website looks awful. I usually don't say bad things about other people's work but in this case I can't ignore it. I mean if this is for real then the "team" behind it probably are in the same boat as their target: average unskilled blogger. My opinion is to shut it down and make it look decent if you really want to make a profit with it.

<comment><USER3> I think it's not malice or trying to disguise their relation. The last line says "Visit _us_ :". It looks like standard PR speak, like the usual third person biographies in the side of most of the blogs. (I once read that the third person conjugation is more friendlier to journalist that can just copy and paste it to a news article.)

Anyway, I think that for HN a first person conjugation would be more welcome. Also, waiting to have some content generated by friends and family helps to showcase the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you please not write as if you were unaffiliated with them? Its obvious that nobody would share such a fugly website on its own, especially not with that wall of text.</comment>


Monitor how many online users on your site using your Android device - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.userlook.application

<comment><USER2> Cool app, but not for my iPhone... Create app like this for Apple devices ;)</comment>


Gitlab Handbook: CEO - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/ <comment> valiant-comma Although I appreciate the attempt at transparency, there's an awful lot of info here for potential attackers.

Examples: Where the CEO prefers to dine and drink, or how to send an email so it has a higher chance of being read (or acted upon) — the latter is quite helpful to phishing / whaling attempts.</comment>


10th grader claims his high school project is 47% more accurate than Google - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/anmol-tukrel-meet-the-10th-grader-who-claims-high-school-project-is-47-more-accurate-than-google/articleshow/48549690.cms

<comment><USER2> Same story ...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093292)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101743)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102256)

Some scepticism expressed in the comments ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks. Tried to search for the story, but didn't find it.

<comment><USER2> Words to search for are "accurate" and "Google"

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=accurate%20google&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=accurate%20google&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Searching for "47" did quite well:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=47&sort=byDate&prefix=false&pa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=47&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I implemented Pong as a cellular automaton - <AUTHOR> https://ericu.github.io/CellCulTuring/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'd been explaining sonic booms and high explosives to my kids, and thought that showing them a simulation of wavefront propagation might be a fun way to illustrate how they worked. I figured I could do that with a simple cellular automaton, so I threw something together in a few hours, but my sim didn't have anything like the right behavior. So there I was with a general cellular automaton framework, thinking about wave propagation, and wondering what else I could do with it. Inspiration struck, and I just had to try doing this.

<comment><USER2> Reminded me of a problem set I was once assigned. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_squad_synchronization_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_squad_synchronization_problem)

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat--I hadn't heard of that. The wave propagation makes me think back to the problem I was working on the first place.

<comment><USER2> The nice property of the "firing squad" is that the number states is independent of the length of the firing squad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That is pretty dang incredible. I love the debugging colors etc.

Maybe someone has already done this but I'm surprised someone hasn't made an LLVM -> Life compiler just because. Might as well do LLVM -> sh while they're at it.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is super cool! By any chance have you seen Dave Ackley's Movable Feast Machine and related projects? He's working on some similar ideas – cellular automata with different classes of cell that pass local state around to build large-scale systems.

Here's "demon horde sort", which is a kind of stochastic self-healing bubble- sorting automaton: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbgzXndaNKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbgzXndaNKk)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen that; thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is remarkably beautiful. Could you, perhaps, give some detail as to how it functions? I see wave propagation, but I'm interested in the state dynamics of a particular cell.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some general background at [https://github.com/ericu/CellCulTuring/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/ericu/CellCulTuring/blob/master/README.md) but basically I've got a number of different general classes of cell [background, counter, wall, ball, paddle, etc.] and each knows the kinds of situations that will cause it to change into something else. Within each class of cell, there's further state, so e.g. the ball's a different color when it's moving up and to the right than when it's moving down and to the left. Each cell is basically its own state machine, taking its state and the states of its neighbors into account, and progressing through the substates of its class until it turns into something else.

Say a blank background cell sees a ball cell to its left. It looks at the precise color of the ball to determine that the ball's moving to the right, so the next cycle, the background cell must become a ball cell with the same motion. It's a bit more complicated than that because balls only move every other cycle, they've got internal counters [colors] to deal with moving diagonally, bouncing off walls, hitting the paddle, etc., but that's basically it.

The actual state machine code takes thousands of lines of JavaScript to express.

<comment><USER6> Is the score and game over message part of the automaton? Couldn't quite tell from the debug pixels output.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, everything inside the canvas is part of the same giant automaton, and follows the same rules.

In fact, @imode, if you want to look at one of the smaller state machines, look at the scoreboard code in [https://github.com/ericu/CellCulTuring/blob/master/scoreboar...](https://github.com/ericu/CellCulTuring/blob/master/scoreboard.js). It's a seven-segment display with some tweaks and a hack to show the game-over message. I initialize the scoreboards by drawing the segments in hard-to-see colors so that they're invisible when they're turned off. Each cell of the scoreboard always knows the current score; they propagate the updates to each other as fast as the find out about them. Each segment has an ID [a different color field] and a lookup table that tells for which scores e.g. ID 3 should be visible. So then when each segment is supposed to be visible, it sets a high-order color bit to show up. That's one of the few places that I actually have to set bits just for visibility. For the ball, wall, paddle, and such I just chose the bits such that you could see what the cells were naturally--I didn't have any bits to spare. For the sub-space of bits allocated to the scoreboard, I've got plenty extra. I was considering doing a fancier font using a 1-hot encoding instead of 7-segment, but I wanted to get this done.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's awesome. The score display makes me think of some of the stuff that's been done in Wireworld: [https://unnikked.ga/simulate-logic-circuits- using-wireworld-...](https://unnikked.ga/simulate-logic-circuits-using- wireworld-cellular-automaton-11391bc26b1c)

(There was a similar thing posted here a while back, too, that used modified rules to make it a bit quicker and simpler, but I can't remember what it was called...)

<comment><USER8> The Powder Toy includes Wireworld elements, among other electronic bits: [https://powdertoy.co.uk/Wiki/W/Elements:Electronics.html#Wir...](https://powdertoy.co.uk/Wiki/W/Elements:Electronics.html#WireWorld_Wire)

<comment><USER7> That's really cool, I'd never encountered Powder Toy before. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. Now I am wondering if you could do effectively the same thing in Conway's game of life, where if you zoomed out far enough you would see the game's graphics.

<comment><USER10> You mean something like this?

If you don't want to be "spoiled" as to what exactly the video is going to show as it zooms out, use this link.. and don't pay attention to the browser tab title, or the video title in the top left corner, until it disappears in about 3 seconds along with the rest of the UI:

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/xP5-iIeKXE8?autoplay=1](https://www.youtube.com/embed/xP5-iIeKXE8?autoplay=1) [1:29]

Canonical link:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8) [1:29]

<comment><USER9> Yep, the OTCA metacell was exactly what I was thinking of. We know that the game of life is Turing complete, so the only challenge is figuring out how to make the graphics look presentable when zoomed out. Someone must have just implemented a 2d graphics environment on top of game of life.</comment></comment></comment>


OWL 2 Came Out Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/ <comment><USER2> I have to admit that I find more value in just using RDF and RDFS, along with simple to install and admin RDF data stores like Sesame, and perhaps Redland (nice, but does not fully support RDFS inferencing).

Something that works for me is always keeping Sesame running (and OpenCyc, but mostly for learning/experimenting - I have never done anything practical with OpenCyc, after years of playing with it) on a server on my LAN at home. If you always have a RDF data store available, then it is easier to use it as an alternative to a relational database, if that is appropriate for a project.

Anyway, I like "semantic web 'light'" :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is how to say "NY", according to the wiki article on RDF:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> xmlns:dcterms="[http://purl.org/dc/terms/>](http://purl.org/dc/terms/>); <rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x-states:New%20York"> <dcterms:alternative>NY</dcterms:alternative> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF>

hehe. That's funny...

<comment><USER4> That actually says something slightly different, defining NY as an alternative for New York. But yes, the RDF syntax is terrible. Turtle was my favorite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honest question: does anyone actually /use/ OWL? My only experience with it was in a class, and it seemed to me like a very verbose and overly-complicated way of describing some pretty simple stuff.

<comment><USER4> All general purpose ontologies look like very verbose and overly-complicated ways of describing things. OWL is no different, and the fact that it has taken on the challenge of relating several different preexisting ontologies to each other complicates it further.

Now, that doesn't mean it's useful. The largest ontological framework I'm aware of is Cyc, which uses its own proprietary ontology and is at least as complex as OWL ever was or will be. Ultimately I think it's about as useful as reasoning about RDF ever is, which is to say not very at this time--but that's not really its fault.

<comment><USER6> You're comparing Apples and Oranges a bit. OWL is formal framework that can be used to describe ontologies. Cyc is an attempt to create an ontology that describes the world.

You are right that a lot of these "glob everything together" ontologies inevitably get too unwieldy to actually use. And wouldn't be so far off saying that OWL itself is a bit hard to grok. But it is important to see what the difference is. What is important about something like OWL, OWL-DL, or OWL Light is that they specify the _types of axioms_ you are allowed to use. For example, the following statements are very different:

\- Humans have exactly two biological parents

\- Humans must have biological parents

\- Humans must have biological parent(s)

\- Humans can have parent(s)

OWL, and its subsets, are attempts to carve out logical axioms that allow you to specify the nature of conceptual classes and their properties. You need a framework such as OWL to spell out what you are allowed to state about concepts like this because different types of logical relationships have algorithmic complexity implications. What you are allowed to state is incredibly important to people who want to perform logical inference, for example, because certain types of axioms will take a dataset on which inference would otherwise be O(P) time, and turn it to O(NP) time.</comment></comment></comment>


The Web plan - a must have for any online business - <AUTHOR> http://articles.bplans.com/index.php/business-articles/running-an-online-business/what-is-a-web-plan/ what is a web plan? read on <comment><USER2> nice crap</comment>


Show HN: Carwala – get notified if something happens to your car - <AUTHOR> https://www.carwala.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I got inspired a few weeks ago and had some spare time to hack on a side project.

Long story short, a few days after shelter in place started, my car brand new car was broken into. The back window was broken, and the car could've been sitting around for at least 3 days before we needed to use it again. My partner was devastated when she found the car in that condition.

I decided to make a windshield sticker that allows anyone to contact you to tell you if you need to move your car, or if your car has been broken into, without sharing your personal contact information.

Anyone can walk up to your car, scan the QR code on the sticker and push a button to contact you.

I hacked this together over the last week or so and would love to hear what y'all think.

Would you use something like this?</comment>


Why SEO Companies Are A Waste Of Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.binkd.com/social-media/seo-companies-waste-of-time/

<comment><USER2> Link doesn't seem to work

<comment><AUTHOR> It does for me. Maybe the host went down for a few minutes?</comment></comment>


Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikipedia-and-the-death-of-the-expert

<comment><USER2> There are two issues here. On the initial point about Wikipedia's accuracy I'd offer this very article as proof of the problem Wikipedia has. In the opening sentence of the second paragraph the author says...

"It's been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed "few differences in accuracy" between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica."

But if you follow the link provided you find the study " examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy." So the analysis wasn't of the encyclopedia as a whole but only scientific articles.

So the author chose to bend the truth to make the point he wanted. This is the problem with Wikipedia. Of course most scientific entries will be largely accurate because very rarely are empirically observed facts controversial. But compare an entry on a political topic and you'll find a greater variance (or at least that's what I found when I just compared the Wikipedia entry of George W. Bush with the Britannica 2010 Deluxe)

The rest of the article is basically just a rehash of two widely discussed ideas: Social Learning and the Wisdom of Crowds. Both are issues too complex to address in this already overly long comment.

<comment><USER3> The biggest problem with Wikipedia is not that entries about current politics may be biased by national/religious propaganda.

The real problem is when the political propaganda influences the scientific entries. For example here I loosely refer to entries on evolution and pharmacology.

But, perhaps Wikipedia handles this better than other encyclopedias?

<comment><USER4> My biggest problem is when politics influences articles about history. Trying to smash all previous ideology into modern factions is insane.

<comment><USER5> True, but has it not always been the case that writers have tended to view the past through a lens shaped by their contemporary mores? When I studied history (we used Books -- it was that long ago) I was taught that the development of arguments about a historical thing was part and parcel of the knowledge of that thing (rather like the article suggests). The critical evaluation of historiography must take into account the prevailing attitudes of the time as well as any other political biases. Reading around helps to elucidate these, so crucially one never relies on a single source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Experts got replaced by administrative bureaucrats who delete other peoples knowledge and work.

<comment><USER7> The counterpoint to that: sufficiently advanced trolling is indistinguishable from expertise, except by an expert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh no, another "death of something" scare. This is more like "death of creativity in titles".</comment>


How to Use WordPress Cron to Schedule Events - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibenic.com/use-wordpress-cron-schedule-events/ <comment><USER2> Or use real cron outside WordPress for faster performance ;)</comment>


Mitch Lowe co-founded Netflix, now he's hacking movie night - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41197966 <comment><USER2> Forget the cinema in this product.

The real product is a new model for subscription services based on the issuing of prepaid payment cards and a payment system that enforces how it is paid.

That's pretty huge.

Imagine your employer giving a transit allowance and food allowance via this, and that it could only be used on a given transit mode and with the n local places to the work place, at some set amounts per month.

Or that parents could use a Uni subscription card that allows for purchases from the campus grocery store and the bookshop to be capped at a reasonable rate.

This is essentially a new breed of subscription that can be used across multiple outlets and yet have a set of controls built into it that make it seem more like a coupon.

As a new mechanism for subscriptions... this is far bigger than the cinema model.

You could even allow for the creation of custom controls to create subscription models that are totally personalised, or go further and sell this capability to other businesses.

<comment><USER3> > Or that parents could use a Uni subscription card that allows for purchases > from the campus grocery store and the bookshop to be capped at a reasonable > rate

A bunch of unis already have this model and their own card for it, and even extend purchases to local businesses

e.g. [http://bluebucks.umich.edu/p/home.html](http://bluebucks.umich.edu/p/home.html)

<comment><USER2> It is the control mechanisms that make it interesting, not just the group of retailers and funding source.

With the control mechanisms you have the basis of a food subscription, a book subscription... allowances for very specific purposes at a rate that is pre- determined and could be set per retailer or even for specific products if such integration were achieved.

This is what makes it more interesting than any pre-paid card or coupon system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I don't know in the US, but in Spain, cinemas have been closing en masse in the last few years due to unrealistic prices. I still go, but most people I know say paying €8 for a ticket (the same price as one month of Netflix, a 3-course set meal, or four beers in a bar) is just outrageous. Something like this could save cinema here.

<comment><USER4> They are expensive (though I find it's usually the refreshments that're marked up the most vs the ticket in the UK), but I'm not so sure on your price comparisons... can you really get a 3 course lunch or 4 pints for ~£8 in Spain? I think you'd be lucky to get one course or 2 pints here for that.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi You can definitely get a 3 course lunch for €8, which is less than £8. Not in highly touristic places or in the center of Madrid or Barcelona, but I live in a 250K city and there are many places offering simple 3-course meals (salad or entrée + fish or meat + dessert) with that price. And if you go to €9 you can get fancy meals and all.

The beer analogy may have been misleading, though. You can indeed get 4 beers for €8, but the standard size of a beer here is 300 ml, which is much less than a pint (568 ml I think).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea.

I don't have Netflix subscription. Because where I live Netflix catalogue is laughable - this is one of the reasons. Anyway, that's another matter.

I really like watching films in theatres and prices are going sky high. Some of the films turn out to be really bad and I would rather like to leave in the middle (of course not walking out abruptly blocking others' views). Something like MoviePass could be very handy to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am surprised that the article says that moviePass is looking to get a share of beverage revenues from theaters to turn a profit.

I remember when the price drop happened there were articles circulating that MoviePass aimed to make a profit by collecting the data they get from the movie goers. Which makes more sense when you realize that Helios and Matheson Analytics owns a majority share of MoviePass.

</comment><comment><USER7> This may be derailing the core of the intended discussion, but this is again one of those things which is only available in the US, whereas the rest of the world (at least western Europe) is lagging behind. It really makes me wonder why this kind of innovation isn't available here? I can't even get an unlimited pass to the only cinema I frequent.

<comment><USER8> Here in the UK, it's available in a couple of the big chains.

[http://www.odeon.co.uk/limitless/](http://www.odeon.co.uk/limitless/) [https://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited](https://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited)

<comment><USER9> Cineworld is £17.90 per month, which is roughly $23.

<comment><USER10> It also doesn't have the limit to one film per day as far as I know, but unlike the other is limited to the one chain of cinemas and is a yearly thing - can't just do one month.

I still think it's an incredibly good deal vs buying a ticket @£12 for one film

<comment><USER8> Also I think both Odeon and Cineworld charge more if you want to include Central London cinemas.

But definitely still a good deal even if you only go twice a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They are literally selling $20 for $10. That's one model for growth.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting concept, but I am afraid this will (if ever) only work in the US.

Here in the UK and in Europe people would get the cheap tickets and then still smuggle their own drinks and snacks into the movies, because that's what we've always done and that's the culture here - especially among the millenials who think they can outsmart everything and everyone and feel entitled so. Also people on this side of the pond don't really fancy the massive buckets of sugary drinks or XXL sized hot dogs like our American friends.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> especially among the millenials who think they can outsmart everything and everyone and feel entitled so

While I agree with your comment mostly this bit seems ridiculous. When it comes to going to the cinema in particular I find (anecdotally obviously) that it is the older generation unwilling to pay for snacks. I've lost count of how many times people of my parents generation have asked me to fill my pockets with all kinds of stuff when I, the broke millennial, am happy to pay for a drink/snack. I think the last time my friends or I tried to sneak in food/drink was when we were young teenagers below working age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is this remotely sustainable ?? I do not see avenues for Add on's which can still make MoviePass profitable !

And the article compares it to Uber , but I highly doubt that Uber is making that heavy of a loss when someone hails a cab ! Infact Uber even takes a cut of each transaction unlike Moviepass . What could i be missing ?

</comment><comment><USER14> The $10 pricing certainly seems extremely unsustainable. I don't get it.

<comment><USER15> The key point is sort of buried in the article. They hope to parlay this into revenue-sharing deals. I could actually see something like this making sense-- provided that the card issuer gets at least a cut of refreshments. I don't know the exact numbers but my understanding is that movie tickets are basically breakeven for the theater. They make most of their money on refreshments.

(Of course, people also buy subscriptions and then don't get around to using them much but I suspect the revenue sharing is key. I'd also wonder though if the theater chains aren't really in a better position to go this route.)

<comment><USER16> AMC's 10k is pretty informative: [http://investor.amctheatres.com/Doc/Index?did=39811732](http://investor.amctheatres.com/Doc/Index?did=39811732)

Page 17 or so is good: "We predominantly license "first-run" films from distributors owned by major film production companies and from independent distributors on a film-by-film and theatre-by-theatre basis. Film exhibition costs are accrued based on the applicable admissions revenues and estimates of the final settlement pursuant to our film licenses. Licenses that we enter into typically state that rental fees are based on aggregate terms established prior to the opening of the picture."

and then: "Food and beverage sales are our second largest source of revenue after box office admissions."

The ratio, seen later in the document, is basically 65% admissions, 33% food/beverage.

(This surprised me, I had thought it was around 25% admissions.)

I don't see theaters being willing to give up any of that in exchange for a vague promise of extra customers.

On the other hand, I don't see why theaters feel antagonistic towards a company that promises to take investment money and buy full-price tickets with it. That's a complete win for the theaters.

<comment><USER15> That's revenue though. If you look at the income statement, films have about a 50% profit margin while refreshments have about an 85% profit margin. If you allocate all other expenses evenly, that makes it about 50-50 between film and refreshments. That may or may not be appropriate cost accounting (there's another big chunk of operating expense that isn't under G&A or rent) and I just took a quick glance. More of their profit comes from film than I thought --or at least used to be the case--but refreshments still makes a good 50%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Moviepass is hurting AMC's business and doesn't seem to have plans to make a profit.

If I were AMC I would buy this company just to shut it down.

<comment><USER18> Its there any explanation as to how this hurts their business?

<comment><USER17> They have a competing card service that's more expensive</comment></comment></comment>


Leading a DevOps Movement - <AUTHOR> https://calebfornari.com/2019/05/31/leading-a-devops-movement/ <comment><USER2> What do you do when the company doesn't want to change or adopt DevOps culture?</comment>


Ask HN: Everything already exists - <AUTHOR> I am so tired of this all , every other day i get a brilliant idea , i start working on , start learning stuff but then i do a web search to see if it already exists , and it always exists.
And then i have to trash it , it really demotivates me . What should i do HN ? <comment><USER2> Well, if you keep notes, then you can move on from 'getting a brilliant idea' to connecting the dots between ideas that exist and the motivations for creating them.

The goal is to switch from "getting ideas" (which is sort of level 1 entrepreneurism) to "seeing problems" (which is, in my estimation level 2). This is important because 'brilliant idea' but can't answer the question 'what problem does it solve?' is not worth spending a lot of time on, from a money making perspective (can be from a fun perspective but that is another comment).

So hopefully you're keeping a diary/journal/notebook of these "every other day" ideas, and once you've got a couple dozen, maybe a hundred, you can start asking questions based on the ideas you come up with. Things like "What do I spend my time thinking about?", "What problem spaces are my ideas clustered around?", "Given that they have been done by other people, what was it that made them obvious in retropsect?", and my personal favorite, "Where is the hole in these ideas?"

If you have the ability to generate ideas, you can leverage that into the ability to see where changes will be needed or could be presented. Sometimes existing ideas have "baked in" assumptions (like people assuming you'll have a car so you need a gas mileage app) sometimes they are more subtle. If the underlying assumptions have changed (like it costs too much to make gas out of algae because oil is less than $75 a barrel) ideas that used to not make sense might start making sense, and then you look at changes that are going on around you whether it is spending habits, climate change, or population demographics, and try to ask questions about ideas those changes will make useful in the future.

On an unrelated topic, trying to cultivate an appreciation for "learning stuff" will serve you well, as it can be the only reward you get for the time invested. Appreciating the value of knowing, and knowing well the 'new stuff', will help with the motivation. If you think "10 ideas, all worthless because they are already done." that is demotivating, but "10 ideas, learned 10 new things, score!" you'll be much happier with the outcome. And while you may not realize it now, if you actually do _learn_ the stuff that the idea entailed then you will start to recognize in your own thinking ideas that are probably already out there and more rapidly converge on solutions to problems that are unlikely to have been implemented yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> "It already exists" at first looks like a reason not to build something. But, is the version that already exists _really_ the same as your implementation would be?

Outside of software, it's obvious that "it already exists" doesn't stop anyone. Does the long list of Italian restaurants, gastropubs or microbreweries stop anyone from starting another one, with their unique twist?

Even in software, did existing social networks stop Facebook from starting another one and taking over the top spot?

Does the existence of "a web application framework" stop anyone from building a better one that matches their opinions/approach?

The only real sin would be to make an exact copy of something that already exists without making your version better in some way. Make it more user- friendly, more powerful, more configurable, cheaper, more business-friendly, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had an idea around 2 weeks ago , thought about it worked on it, made the initial designs. Then just today i did a web search to see if there was something similar to it . What i found out was that it was already being done in some European countries for the past 12 years . Sure my app was going to be a little different but the basic idea was same , and if they had patented it , they would have sued me if my app ever got big. So it demotivated me and i trashed it .

<comment><USER4> Why did it demotivate you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you sure it happens in that order?

You don't HAVE to trash it, you choose to. :)

Is being first to an idea the important part? It seems that not being first demotivates you because your passion is invested in being new and unique not in what you are actually building. When the uniqueness has gone, you lose interest.

You're in love with the idea of having a great idea.

Next time you get an idea you have two options :-

* Research FIRST, then be glad if it already exists, it's proof your idea is a good one and you're free to move & spend your time on something else.

* If your heart is set on working on something see the others as competition, learn from their examples, what do they charge, where they advertise, who writes about them. Learn what they're bad at and improve up on it. For the customers you serve you'll always be the first!

</comment><comment><USER6> I challenge the notion that everything exists.

Even an incremental innovation will separate you from the pack.

You must always see niche markets as opportunity markets where you can fill.

Big companies are great to have around when you are trying to fill a niche market. Grow big enough and they'll buy you out.

Apart from the concept of addressing a niche market, I think you should try keeping this in mind:

"being everything to everyone" is the worst way to start an idea of.

Remember, FB started out as a social network for students, now it's everyones social network, which would explain why smaller niche networks have grown reasonably big (Pinterest, Instagram, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER7> Everything already exists and most of it is crappily implemented. There are billions of dollars to be made in simplifying existing products and solutions.

Doing something better is the idea that no one can take away from you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thats something thats traditionally supposed to happen on the last week f your PhD.

But instead, try to make things you need. If someone else has already made them it saves time, you can use it.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should realize that although everything exists, most things can be massively improved.

</comment><comment><USER10> 80% copy / 20% innovation

<comment><USER7> In case of China its: 120% copy / -20% innovation.</comment></comment>


This Startup Can Help Run Your Airbnb Rental Like a Hotel - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/05/Pricemethod-airbnb/

<comment><USER2> The professionalization of the peer-to-peer space is getting incredibly interesting. Hotels must be realizing that hosts are starting to offer places that are essentially like hotels... only with much more diversity, many more locations, more unique features. Tools like this are definitely driving some interesting changes in the space.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, very cool to see tools like this coming to peer-to-peer hosts.

And, I remember a few years back, when peer-to-peer accommodations were considered a novelty.

Now, it's pretty clear that I will probably spend most of my future trips renting someone's home, as opposed to a hotel. Hotels must be shaking...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool to see new tools emerging to give individuals access to the data & tools that larger companies have. I think the challenge here is to make tools that are powerful, but also simple enough for anyone to use.

PriceMethod looks like they might be on the right track.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey all, I'm part of the PriceMethod team.

Appreciate your comments, and certainly agree, whats taking place in the peer- to-peer space is fascinating.

Excited to play a part in helping host build out what we think is the future of the accommodations space.</comment>