Xi Jinping's colleagues rejected an 'unequal' trade deal - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/How-Xi-Jinping-s-colleagues-rejected-an-unequal-trade-deal <comment><USER2> The part I find most interesting is about the strength of Xi's grip on China.

Either _Xi_ has rejected this (at least for the moment), and has directed his puppets to "reject" it (to give the appearance of them stopping him from doing something he was reluctantly willing to do)...

Or Xi is not as firmly in total control of China as various events had led me to believe.

His thought is enshrined in the constitution. He's breaking precedent by remaining in charge for life, not just for ten years. But he can't approve a trade deal if others don't like it? Is this "you can be dictator as much as you please, but mess up the economy and you're gone"?

I also find it telling that "you can't keep taking our IP just because we're doing business" is termed "unequal". Interesting idea of "equality" there...

<comment><USER3> You will then be horrified to learn that US intelligence has a written mandate to obtain foreign technology that the US lacks and make it available to US industry.

A well-kept little dirty secret.

<comment><USER2> Classic what-about-ism.

And I deeply resent you putting words in my mouth (or at least attitudes in my brain). It's a dishonest, cheap rhetorical trick.

And apparently you can't see the difference between the government trying to take it by spying, and the government forcing you to give it away by contract as a condition of doing business. Hint: One you can take countermeasures against; one you can't.

And, like others, I would like to see your source.

<comment><USER4> Please keep the whataboutism cliché off HN (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862258) for more).

Also, please keep deep resentment off HN. If that's how you're feeling, find some other way to process it before returning to comment here. (Edit: I know that's not easy, but it's necessary for this place to not burn.)

<comment><USER2> What I'm trying to fight is this trope: "If you are in favor of A, then you must also favor X", where X is something almost-but-not-quite-completely different from A. (That's why I picked X instead of B.)

And that's usually the end of the comment. There's no explanation of why X and A are like each other in any way that matters. There's no conclusion, like either "Since I presume you're not in favor of X, you can't consistently be in favor of A either", or the opposite, "Since you're in favor of A, you really ought to reconsider your position on X".

What there is, though, is what feels to me like an attempt to put words in the other person's mouth. This feels to me like a step beyond whataboutism. It's not just "what about X", it's "You must also agree that X is true".

I've been seeing this pattern increasingly over the last 6 to 12 months. (Alternately, I've become more sensitive to this pattern in the same time.) I consider it to be... let's just say it's not a positive contribution to the discussion.

So: How should one respond to this? Flag every instance? Ignore? Simply respond "Non sequitur" and leave it at that?

You don't like how I responded. Fine; you have the right. But what do you think I should do instead?

<comment><USER4> I'll give you two answers, one specific and one general. The specific answer: your post above already contained a good reply. The trouble was that it also broke the site guidelines. One can turn it into a good comment by editing those bits out. If I do that, this is what I get:

 _There 's a difference between the government trying to take it by spying, and the government forcing you to give it away by contract as a condition of doing business. One you can take countermeasures against; one you can't._

That cuts not only the first two paragraphs, but also the flamey bits from the third ("Apparently you can't see" and "Hint:"). Doing all that yields a substantive, respectful reply. (I'm not considering whether it's a good argument here—just whether it's offside or not.) And of course it's fine to ask politely for the other person's source, or how they know what they claim.

The general answer: one good way to reply to a comment of the form "If you are in favor of A, then you must also favor X" is to mention significant difference(s) between A and X that show why A doesn't imply X. For example, something favorable in A that X lacks; or something unfavorable in X that A lacks. And to show why the difference is strong enough to break the assumed arrow from A to X.

There's an aspect to this that is unfair. pinkfoot's comment was pretty lazy (opting for snark and a drive-by rather than giving the reader enough information to really establish anything). If you're going to reply to a comment like that, the temptation is also to take the path of least resistance—for example, to vent, rather than to put much thought or work into a reply. The other person didn't put much thought or work into theirs, so why should you?

The answer is that you don't owe it to the other person, but to the general reader and the community. Your reply to such a comment will either raise the quality of the site or lower it. (Responding on the same level is lowering.) The two good options are: put in the thought and work to come up with a specific reply—cutting any flamey bits because by then you don't need them and they weaken your case anyhow—or, if you don't have the time and energy to do so, simply not to post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> China manipulates world currencies, does not enforce or respect copyright and trademark law and finds other ways to bend international laws around IP. This is holding them to account and in so far as that is concerned, this seems in the long-term interests of America since China just rips the tech and localizes/monetizes while restricting access to their domestic markets from the foreign players that developed the tech in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER6> > These cries came not only from the party's conservative left but also from > the rank and file -- from the core of workers and management at state-owned > companies, from industries that rely on subsidies for survival and from the > bureaucratic institutions that protect them. The proposed deal threatened > their interests.

That might not sound good to these particular special interests but this sounds good for China as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is largely the same story as can be read here:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3010456/wh...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3010456/what- killed-us-china-trade-talks-tale-two-texts)

I find it amazing that this deal appearantly was close to coming through.

<comment><USER8> Why is it so "amazing"? They're between a rock and a hard place. Their economy is guaranteed to collapse if the US keeps erecting trade barriers. The US is much less dependent on them than they are on the US. It will hurt here (with a nice side-effect of import diversification), but it will be totally unbearable over there. They know this perfectly well. The US has a tremendous leverage in this negotiation. China's main sticking point is they want to remove this leverage and make the deal unenforceable. Yeah, that might have worked with Obama (who was, IMO, too eager to please), but the current administration knows better than to sign something like that.

<comment><USER7> The article really explains it well.

It is USA, a foreign power, dictating detailed law in China; that digs deep.

<comment><USER8> Um, yeah, trade deals tend to "dictate law" in other countries. TPP would have done a lot of that. What's so bad about not forcing industrial espionage on US companies if they want to operate in China? No one is forcing China at gunpoint to take the deal. If they have another market they can sell to, they should consider doing that.

<comment><USER7> "No one is forcing them at gunpoint to take the deal."

The Trump administration did choose the "nuclear option" just one day later.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/trump- s-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/trump-s-huawei- threat-is-the-nuclear-option-to-halt-china-s-rise?srnd=technology-vp)

I think the above bloomberg article explains just how extreme an action it is; and also sprinkle it with comments from american politicians which seem to reveal that this is about more than "reasonable guarantees".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I could never understand why export subsidies are bad for the importing countries, I mean, we have the Chinese taxpayer directly putting their money in the pockets of their foreign clients (this point about subsidizing exports was made by Jean-Baptiste Say two centuries ago). And while the Chinese are kind enough to help us pay for their products with their own money we can focus instead on other stuff which we're really great at building/providing as a service.

<comment><USER10> It hurts domestic industry in the other country. The negative effects are concentrated while the benefit is diffuse.

Example: China subsidizes solar panels to the point where all US solar panel companies go bankrupt. The US solar panel industry is badly hurt, even if the rest of us get 40% cheaper solar panels.

<comment><USER11> > It hurts domestic industry in the other country. The negative effects are > concentrated while the benefit is diffuse.

> Example: China subsidizes solar panels to the point where all US solar panel > companies go bankrupt. The US solar panel industry is badly hurt, even if > the rest of us get 40% cheaper solar panels.

What is the end game in this example for China? Do they expect to subsidize now and raise prices to exorbitant levels once there is no competition? That can't possibly last for a long time. If prices go high enough, surely the industries in the US will spring back up. The pain is temporary at worst.

I think what it shows is a fatal flaw in democracy. I think I read somewhere that if there is an issue that at least about five percent of the population care deeply enough (I don't know the numbers but for example the fanatical religious people in the middle east or pro-birth or pro-gun people in the US) to be single-issue voters, they will have an outsize effect on policy even though their position is bad for a majority of people.

<comment><USER12> How is the US supposed to even develop the technology effectively if the companies keep going under? Solar technology isn't a commodity, it's high-tech R&D, I don't think it's a temporary pain.

<comment><USER9> Memory chips used to be high tech RD until not that long ago but afaik the US isn't producing any of them anymore and one of the biggest players in this market is South Korea through Samsung, a conglomerate which 100% receives State subsidies in one way or another. My perception is that no-one in the US is losing any sleep over this because the people who could be potentially upset by this state of affairs are pretty busy investing their money and time resources in other, more lucrative endeavors.

But trade wars have always relied on demagogy and plain nationalism, and saying stuff like "we should build our own solar panels" when it has been rationally proved that the best course of affairs is to take the money handed on a silver plate to your own consumers/tax-payers and move on to other economic tasks is plain nationalism bordering on isolationism.

<comment><USER13> Micron produces DDR4 memory in the US.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like entrenched interests in SOEs forced Xi and Liu's hands. It's not necessarily about IP protection, but state subsidies then.

<comment><USER15> Agree. Wonder which (if any) subsidies the U.S. is willing to drop in return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let me try to write something that may permit and generate fruitful discussion.

Do you think the repeated US copyright-term extensions, widely attributed to Disney, have been good public policy? Patent IP (Industrial Policy;) has lots of knobs and dials (duration, obviousness, scope, FRAND, etc) - do you think their current settings, nailed down by US pharma, are well adjusted to support innovation in other industries, like say tech? Do you think California's severe limits on non-compete employment agreements are bad for innovation? No? Neither do some other countries.

For example, TPP was spun as a free-trade treaty. But it was also sometimes described as bag of multiple treaties. One, free-trade. But also "IP" (copyright and patents). And ISDS. Let's leave the mess of ISDS aside. When the US dropped TPP, it was continued by other countries as CPTTP, keeping the free trade parts, and dropping IP and ISDS. After a time, the US came back with USMCA, forcing their inclusion. Canada was forced to agree to change its laws, to extend its copyright term. Something the US had long tried to force, and Canada had long resisted. The canadian press described it as arm twisting, and coercion. Here are US trade negotiators, acting, at root, on behalf of Disney. Why pay for regulatory capture piecemeal, country by country, when the US provides one-stop shopping for world-wide regulatory capture?

If Russia, with declining oil revenue and growing trade imbalance, but having nukes and bioweapons, forced the United States to permit the mass importation of Russian-provided narcotics, dwarfing the current opioid epidemic, would you be pissed? Yes, the Chinese still are.

But this isn't some vague "trigger" similarity. US trade negotiators, on behalf of the subcultures in which they're embedded, and the interests which determine their positions, _are_ trying to coerce them. As with Canada and others. Maybe China will fold too. Or maybe not. Canada did push back on ISDS.

Call it a conflict of two cultures of corruption. In one, large incumbents do regulatory capture, and use it as moat, to avoid a threateningly competitive and innovative market. In the other, everyone pays off the government, and there's lots of other ugliness, but... there's a ferment.

Current US press coverage of China repeated reminds me old regime Europe writing about the US in 1800's. The US economy and governance and society were really corrupt and messy. And they changed the world. And the world is perhaps fortunate, maybe, that the dismal stagnation of Europe was unable to stifle that.

[Fyi, I'll likely not follow up on comments - sorry, I lose days that way. And this isn't the kind of topic HN does well. But there seemed some significant bits absent from the discussion, at least as of when I started writing this. So I toss it out there, FWIW.]

</comment><comment><USER17> I think people forgot about China's experience at the hand of the West in the past i.e Opium Wars and how it affects their moves today.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/KagEm](http://archive.is/KagEm)</comment>


What happens when you attack DeFi? - <AUTHOR> https://bankless.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-you-attack-defi-9fe <comment><AUTHOR> Background: DeFi (decentralized finance) is the movement on the Ethereum Network to build and use finance building blocks to allow for any kind of financial instrument needed, in a trust-less, decentralized way.

Using these building blocks, this weekend someone borrowed $2.7M USD to make $350,000 in a single transaction (that is, atomically - the loan was repaid as part of the same transaction) by exploiting some weaknesses in at least one of those building blocks. This is one of the better explanations of how that "attack" worked, plus some cheerleading about why it's actually a good thing.</comment>


Space Nazis, From the Dark Side of the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_IndUbcxc&hd=1

<comment><AUTHOR> The (Finnish) humor/sci-fi/diesel-punk movie also has an interesting business- model, selling "war-bonds" to fan. See: <http://www.ironsky.net/site/></comment>


John Carmack coded Quake on a 28-inch 16:9 1080p monitor in 1995 - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/games/john-carmack-coded-quake-on-a-28-inch-169-1080p-monitor-in-1995-20110920/ <comment><USER2> Sony FW900, last, best CRT ever made (that was affordable).

23 inch 16:10 CRT, 1920x1200 - weighs nearly 100 pounds and draws 150 watts if I remember correctly.

Originally like $2000, down to $300 at the end (refurbished).

Had variable phosphorus pitch, denser at the corners and an internal cpu adjusted the corners to correct for (earth?) magnetic field.

Only went to LCD when mine finally died and there was no one who could repair it and getting another was out of the question because shipping prices have gone through the roof.

There is a huge fan thread on them in [H]ardForum with lots of photos.

The colors on them are unbelievable.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely my favorite resolution, and is what's currently setup on my HP ZR24w, as well as deliberately defocussed a couple of notches to fuzz the text up a bit.

In comparison to the $2000 and $10000 crts, this is a great monitor with an ips panel, a standard sRGB color-gamut, and a cheap for an ips panel price of about $380 right now.

Yeah, I'm happy to be programming now, though 6 years ago was a great time for 'if you can haul it, you can have it' deals on crts.

<comment><USER4> _Absolutely my favorite resolution, and is what's currently setup on my HP ZR24w, as well as deliberately defocussed a couple of notches to fuzz the text up a bit._

What do you mean by "deliberate defocus?"

<comment><USER5> My ZR24w has sharpness control in the menu (image control section). Lower levels make the image somehow fuzzy. I guess that's what he is using

<comment><USER6> Actually, the "sharpness" control on any type of monitor applies a deliberate distortion to the image that produces a sensory effect that gives an _impression_ of a sharper image. The image isn't actually sharpened at all. It works much like unsharp masking in photography. Particularly on an LCD monitor with a digital video connection, a sharpness setting of 0 is absolutely the way to go.

<comment><USER7> I just played with the sharpness control on a HP Compaq consumer 24" display, and the lower sharpness settings seem to actively blur the image. Why would you possibly ever want that?

<comment><USER6> I believe that if you peer at the individual pixels with a strong magnifying glass, you will see there is no blurring going on.

If you're using a recent version of Windows properly set up for an LCD display, it does use sub-pixel rendering, a resolution-enhancement technique (Microsoft calls it ClearType) that increases the resolution of text. Although it can make text look slightly soft, most people agree that it's also easier to read than text that hasn't been enhanced this way.

If your LCD is anything like mine, the fake "sharpness" it adds can un-do the benefits of the sub-pixel rendering. Maybe that is what you are seeing.

<comment><USER8> Many displays do indeed do blurring at the lesser end of the sharpness scale, as mseebach notes, and their 'no alteration' point is then normally about 10% from the bottom. It can be easily observed on edges that aren't text, even if text is subpixel rendered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's lots to learn from Mr Carmack, and other impressive programmers for that matter.

He had/has an amazing talent for producing truly great work at great speed. Is it just magic that he can do this? Or does he have techniques that help him?

It seems obvious, but great tools help a great craftsman. So can great methods. He combined so many techniques from different disciplines.

What tools can a developer use today that propel them above what others are doing? If you're just using a standard issue macbook at this point, your tools are not better than what others are using.

His techniques for focusing on development tasks are also very useful. It boils down to a bubble sorted todo list, constantly refined and structured for high throughput.

I also like his approach to C, and learned a lot about being pragmatic and keeping things simple. For example, his approach to file io. He would read in a whole file at once, rather than reading chunks at a time. This was at a time, when most file readers were mixing file io in with their parsing code - making them slower and more complicated.

His business techniques have always been amazing to watch too. Like how he used blogging in the 90s to gain a wide audience. As well as doing demo software for shareware. Finally his move into space craft after his successful game development career has been inspirational too.

<comment><USER10> > _What tools can a developer use today that propel them above what others are > doing? If you're just using a standard issue macbook at this point, your > tools are not better than what others are using._

Depending on what you're doing, hardware is mostly a commodity at this point. You need sufficient hardware speed to maintain flow, but that's about it. Otherwise a big monitor (maybe several of them) and good keyboard / mouse / ergonomics are all you need.

Workflows though, I think that's where the magic is. And a great workflow is perfectly suited to the task at hand. The true master programmer optimizes the workflow without descending into wasteful fiddling.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, customised workflows are great.

Resources can always help though. An SSD vs a HD, 64GB of ram compared to 1GB, 16 fast CPU cores vs 1 slow core, will all help with development. Things like integration servers and such can help too. A testing rack of 30 mobile devices is another useful thing. If you have 100 times the amount of processing power as a standard macbook pro I can assure you, a good programmer will be able to use it to increase their productivity. Even something like a backup internet line could save 1 day a year. Fast backup and restore tools could save another 1-5 days per year.

There's one script that helps a lot with improving productivity...

sudo echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts

<comment><USER11> when calling this as a normal user, it will most likely fail. try echo 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's really sad how it seems like we're stuck with the 1080p craze for monitors, we've made negative progress in this area, it's becoming really hard to find higher resolutions. Which is weird because normally computer marketing is to absurd levels all about bigger numbers, but the HDTV crap has apparently trained everybody that 1080p is the ultimate in video. Luckily mobile seems to have dodged the HDTV bullet and they're competing on DPI.

<comment><USER13> I think the 1080p craze is driven by consumer demand. For the average consumer (not a gamer, not a power user), the ultimate visual experience is an HD movie. There is no need for better quality than HD (1080p), because you won't find a source better than that, so the most sensible thing for a hardware provider is to deliver 1080p at the cheapest point possible. Or to improve on other areas than purely pixel count (colour accuracy, brightness, viewing angle...)

It's hard to keep in mind, but the majority of buyers, and therefore the majority of income, may not be like you.

<comment><USER14> You're half right. But there's more to the story.

In the consumer's mind, there is no better quality than HD because it doesn't exist. Look at the way marketing speaks to the average consumer. In marketing, perception is reality.

You may know what 1080p means, but most consumers have no clue what the '1080' or the 'p' means, or how it relates to their viewing experience.

<comment><USER15> I think a lot of is placebo, too. I bet people convince themselves they're enjoying things more because they consciously know they're getting "higher quality". It would be interesting to do a double blind study to see how many consumers could tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I doubt this is Quake in 1995. Maybe WinQuake / QuakeWorld / GLQuake, or even Quake2.

* It looks like Visual Studio on a post-Windows-3.x GUI, which means Windows 95 (unlikely) or Windows NT 4+ (1996 or later)

* Quake was developed on NeXTSTEP and DOS.

* John Carmack blogged (well, as close as you'd come to it in those days) that he was going to start looking at Win32 in the "near future" on Jul 1, 1996: [http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1996.html...](http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1996.html#d19960701)

<comment><USER17> It's Quake __2 __, the image was in the other recent submission about the Quake 2 source code analysis (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018539>).

<comment><USER18> That document show an astounding rate of progress. It's when you read a document like that that you realise just how impossible it is for a team of mediocre developers to compete with a team (or in this case an individual) great developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ugh. Dear intarweb, please stop trying to outsmart safari on iOS. It works just fine as-is. We don't need your fancy-pants JavaScript-based paging implementations.

<comment><USER20> That's Onswipe, a company founded on the idea that mobile websites should consume as much CPU, RAM, and network resources as possible, because your time isn't valuable, your battery is overcharged, and you have unlimited bandwidth.

<comment><USER21> You forgot causing safari to crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _"I wonder what Carmack uses now? Whatever it is, he could probably have several of them hooked up to a machine each running at 1920 x 1080 and still come nowhere near close to drawing 180 watts."_

That's a little optimistic. The 27" and 30" TFTs which are becoming increasingly commonplace consume upwards of 100W, at least at or near full brightness so you'd only need about 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess when you're talking about the 27" and 30" displays that's the case, but 24" seems to be where the very low power use can be seen. LG has a display it claims only consumes 28 watts, so an array of 6 of those and you'd still have some watts to spare on the InterView.

<comment><USER23> A 24" dell Ultrasharp uses 75W. I doubt he is using anything lower quality than that.

<comment><USER24> That's true for the U2410. The new 24" Ultrasharp (U2412) uses an LED backlight and has a typical power draw of 38W. Contrary to popular belief, LED backlighting doesn't lead to a better picture. It is significantly more efficient than CCFL backlighting though.

On a sidenote, and apart from the gains in efficiency, the new Ultrasharp doesn't seem like much of an upgrade, at least at first glance. What a shame/thank god I don't have to buy a new one.

<comment><USER23> The 2412 isn't a newer version of the 2410, it is a budget version and significantly worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This would bring back some expensive memories for a few on HN I'm sure. I remember, as a multimedia trainee in around 1996-97, buying a 21" NEC CRT for $2,200 _second hand_. I couldn't give it away today, so it sits in the shed along with a few other CRTs.

Seeing Frank Pritchard's CRT "sculpture" in Deus Ex: Human Revolution certainly made me think...

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's the answer to the question "what monitor does he use now?":

[http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/11636594701461094...](http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/116365947014610944)

</comment><comment><USER27> That reminds me of this: <http://xkcd.com/732/>

Speaking of which, what is the highest resolution monitor available today that isn't outrageously expensive? Apple's 2560x1440 Thunderbolt/Cinema display is nice. Any WQUXGA (3840x2400) monitors available like Toshiba's $18000 one[0] but that don't come with a "medical imaging" price tag?

[0] [http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1032529/toshiba- lau...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1032529/toshiba- launches-22-inch-wquxga-monitor)

<comment><USER28> I picked up a pair of IBM T221s (22.2", 3840x2400x48hz) for around 900 USD each. They work beautifully.

<comment><USER27> Do you run both from one machine?

<comment><USER28> Currently no; waiting for custom LFH-60 <-> Dual-Link DVI cables.

A pair of these cables will allow one Radeon 6750 to power a T221 at full 3840x2400@48Hz resolution as two 1920x2400@48Hz displays in an Eyefinity configuration if you hack some EDID values. I chose the Radeon 6750 because it's the cheapest AMD card that has two dual-link DVI ports.

I chose AMD because Eyefinity supports framelock on a single card under Windows 7, whereas it seems like nVidia Surround only supports framelock across more than one card (which is inconvenient).

Framelock is necessary because Windows 7 doesn't have built-in support for desktop spanning across the two 1920x2400 displays like XP. (I believe this isn't an issue under Linux either). Without framelock support you'd get display tearing in the middle of the full 3840x2400 display.

It's a pity the nVidia route isn't an option: the AMD Catalyst drivers aren't as good as nVidia's (mouse cursor corruption in 2011? WTF AMD...), and the T221 was originally driven by nVidia cards it seems so the you'd think engineering design is there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why is a 1080p monitor for 1995 "amazing"? It was quite common for 21" monitors to be 1600x1200 and 1920x1080 isn't a giant leap from that. I picked up a cheap 21" CRT capable of 1600x1200 in the late 90s and I'm no John Carmack.

I think it's because that sounds amazing to average consumers, who were lucky to have 1024x768 on a dot pitch better than 0.28, but why is this on geek.com? Shouldn't most of their readers remember having large, heavy monitors in the 90s? Really makes me wonder what Matthew Humphries (author of that story) was using in 1995.

CRTs weren't like LCDs, the image didn't push off the side if you pushed the resolution too far, you could pretty much push them as far as they could go until you couldn't read it anymore or until it became all vertical lines. Ah, the good ole days...

</comment><comment><USER30> I had a SGI 1600SW LCD and a Sony FW900 CRT on my desk in 1998. That was a bitchin' desktop setup back then. The SGI required this special graphics card from Number Nine, which ended up going bankrupt, thus ending driver availability. Even by today's standards, the quality of the SGI display was outstanding.

Still, one of the most expenses displays I've seen belonged to a dorm mate of mine in 1993. He had a 20" CRT (Viewsonic maybe?) that was connected with four component cables to a Matrox video card. I'm sure that it would be laughable today but damn, in 1993 that thing was unbelievable.

</comment><comment><USER31> does anyone know what those glasses they show at the bottom are for? And that strange looking charging station thingy?

Also, the monitor, _by itself_ was $10k back in the day: [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/New+Ultra- Wide+Format+Monitor+...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/New+Ultra- Wide+Format+Monitor+for+Panoramic+Viewing.-a019381586)

<comment><USER32> The glasses are 3D LCD shutter glasses. They sync the frame rate of the shutter to the video output using to the box on top of the monitor. This is a old school version of what the 3D TVs are doing now. We had a whole lab setup with active 3D at work and it was truly amazing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment)

<comment><USER33> In the 1990s it seemed like every day there was some new Virtual Reality device or at least talk of it, people were waiting for their own holodeck but it never arrived VR faded away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone know what machine he was using? I guess it was some SGI machine but it didn't say the exact model.

<comment><USER35> Not sure about the machine but according to Romero[1] Quake (as with Doom) was developed on NeXTSTEP 3.3, which they continued to use, later running on Intel hardware, until 1996.

QuakeEd on NeXTSTEP: <http://rome.ro/uploaded_images/qe_dev-726646.gif>

[1] <http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I loved my Intergraph. I had a TDZ-2000 but for monitors I had a Sony GDM-F500 monitor, which was amazing and weighed a ton.

For a bit I had SGI 1600 LCD, but it required a special video card which died.

The Intergraph TDZ-2000 was a great computer though. I bought a floors model after Siggraph in 1999 or 2000. They were pricey: [http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/intergraph_g...](http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/intergraph_gx1_reviewhtm.htm)

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a hard time believing today how much code I wrote years ago on a 24*80 tty.

<comment><USER38> Heck, I spent my first four years programming on a 25*40 screen displayed on a crappy old TV set... When I finally got 80 columns, it seemed like magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I had an Intergraph machine like that back in the day. Same giant case, except in blue. I think that one was dual Pentium II, 400MHz, running Windows NT 3.5 or so. Came with a fast array too and a similar keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER40> Was 1080p relatively unheard of in 1995? What about 16:9 displays in general?

<comment><USER41> They were very expensive. A typical high end CRT monitor might be 19-21", with the ultra high end being 24". 1600x1200 @75Hz refresh was what you wanted, but you usually had to use lower color depth to achieve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I like the way it looks like his hands are a blur, for moving so fast.

<comment><USER43> I imagine that's a photographic issue given that his untouched mouse is also a blur.

<comment><USER23> Nope, he is moving the mouse with his mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I never cease to be amazed by Carmack.

</comment><comment><USER45> Also, Diet Coke.

</comment><comment><USER46> That was a $10,000 monitor back in the day. Seriously.

"The InterView 28hd96 Color Monitor is priced at $9,995 (U.S. List) and will be available in May 1997."

Source: [http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies- offi...](http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies- offices/7292416-1.html#ixzz1Yb5jIIJj)</comment>


Guerilla Marketing: TaskRabbit Flyering in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cameralends.com/2013-03-21-guerilla-marketing-taskrabbit-flyering-in-san-francisco/

<comment><USER2> This is a really clever idea!

</comment><comment><USER3> Shame we don't have a service like that in Australia. Hmm</comment>


America: The Grim Truth - <AUTHOR> http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/

<comment><USER2> Obviously there's hyperbole here. America sucks in some ways (the vacation stats make me sad), but we're not the only ones with a government fiscal crisis right now.

But what bugs me most is this:

"... playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway)."

Seriously? We're still doing this cliche?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States."

This does not appear to be a well researched post.</comment>


60% of Americans with European Ancestry Can Be Identified by DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/genome-hackers-show-no-ones-dna-is-anonymous-anymore/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Those interlocking family trees, connecting people through bits of DNA, have now grown so big that they can be used to find more than half the US population. In fact, according to new research led by Erlich, published today in Science, more than 60 percent of Americans with European ancestry can be identified through their DNA using open genetic genealogy databases, regardless of whether they've ever sent in a spit kit."

<comment><USER2> The database means that soon everyone in meatspace (pun intended) not taking special steps will be possible to identify from a small sample. It is problematic and highly abusable.

What they're not mentioning is key error rates...

Combine that with electronic identification and advertisement kind of databases, suddenly few will be pseudonymous, not to mention anonymous.</comment></comment>


Cosmic radiation exposure and persistent cognitive dysfunction - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34774?error=cookies_not_supported&code=01085646-d8e1-4d84-b74f-893382c8aeb5 <comment><USER2> Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society and author of "The Case for Mars" and "Mars Direct", has a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. In his review of a different article on the same topic, he writes [1]:

"On a Mars mission, astronauts would receive a dose of 1 rad per month during the 6 month outbound and return transfers, and about 0.5 rad per month during 18 months on Mars, for a total of 21 Rads. (1 Gray = 100 rads)".

In the paper, the animals were irradiated "at dose rates between 0.05 and 0.25 Gy/min".

Zubrin writes that the huge difference in dose rates (0.01 Gy per 60 * 24 * 30 = 43200 minutes vs. 0.05 Gy per minute) makes such studies completely useless because at the lower dose rate the body can self repair and at the higher dose rate it can't.

Quoting him again:

"For example, if an individual were to drink one shot of vodka per second for 100 seconds, he would die. But if the same person drank one shot of vodka a month for 100 months, he would experience no ill effects at all. This is about the same ratio of dose rates as... ".

1 - [http://www.marssociety.org/r-zubrin-radiation-hucksters- stri...](http://www.marssociety.org/r-zubrin-radiation-hucksters-strike- again/)

<comment><USER3> > Zubrin writes that the huge difference in dose rates (0.01 Gy per 60 * 24 * > 30 = 43200 minutes vs. 0.05 Gy per minute) makes such studies completely > useless because at the lower dose rate the body can self repair and at the > higher dose rate it can't.

I think it's worth pointing out his views, but I also think people should know Zubrin is going against the grain here. Most researchers, as well as nuclear regulatory agencies, use the Linear No-Threshold model for connecting radiation exposure and risk. This is exactly what it sounds like: the model assumes that risk accumulates as a linear function of dose. Whether the LNT is true at small doses is a matter of considerable debate (it's hard to study in humans because the purported effect size is small and it's hard to do such a study ethically), but Zubrin should not talk as though the matter is settled.

<comment><USER4> Like most things where one cannot do repeated, controlled experiments, no one really knows where the truth lies apart from some vague notions. What is used as the "truth" will be a political decision.

I think in the case of going to Mars, building a ship that can get there, land, and come back is the hard part. Finding out how bad or not the radiation will be on people will be found out by the people who end up going. Inform them the best we can, so they can make their own decision, monitor their radiation doses, so we can learn more about long-length, high-level radiation exposure in humans, and let people decide if they want to risk it. As long as the radiation dose is not so high to make them sick in the first few years and ruin the mission, let people take the risk if they want to. I don't see why going to another planet should have to be less risky than taking a wagon on the Oregon Trail, to allow people to try it. A safety first philosophy will not get humans living off of Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a persistent and PERNICIOUS myth that mass is an effective shield for cosmic radiation.

To quote this page -

"""Manned missions to planets such as Mars require extended missions that will expose astronauts to harmful radiation in the form of energetic particles from solar and galatic sources. Traditional methods for protecting spacecraft and occupants from these forms of radiation involve some configuration of a massive material shield to absorb the energy of incoming particles. For the high energy galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) that astronauts will be exposed to, these so-called passive shields are too massive to be practical and will likely produce showers of secondary radiation that could be more harmful than the GCRs themselves."""

[https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shieldin...](https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shielding/)

It's concerning that so many people that are interested in space exploration are unaware of this.

The primary enabler for actual space exploration is most likely superconducting magnetic fields but this is an unsolved problem, though the European Space Agency did complete some work in 2016 towards it by reusing technology from CERN

[https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/08/superconducting- shie...](https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/08/superconducting-shield- astronauts)

It's unfortunate that propulsion is where everyone seems to focus their attention when the shielding is so much more important to human settlement.

<comment><USER6> Getting there faster is one of the best ways to reduce the amount of radiation absorbed. Nuclear power is needed for faster rockets and powerful magnets; safe and reliable access to LEO is the first step to getting reactors in space.

<comment><USER5> "There" isn't safe either.

Mars has no magnetosphere.

Estimates are that people exploring Mars will have to spend 20 hours a day under 10+ meters of rock to protect from solar radiation alone. I don't believe this protects from the GCR.

Much of that time in the cave will be spent on the conical treadmill to make up for the .3g low gravity. The impact on human biology over longer term is unknown.

I think for actual work, living and use space is almost uninhabitable without the active shielding problem being solved. Risking cancer for a select few isn't the issue, its making space a place humans can live.

However with active shielding, approaches like L5 colonies and in deep space become viable. They could be made far more human habitable then any of the planets or moons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed:

The polyhydroxylated fullerene derivative C60(OH)24 protects mice from ionizing-radiation-induced immune and mitochondrial dysfunction. : [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19914272](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19914272)

<comment><USER8> What the... where did this idea of injecting hydrolyzed fullerenes come from? Fantastic that it works, but coming up with the idea in the first place sounds completely bonkers (in a good way).

<comment><USER7> They did a study a while back to see if fullerenes were toxic in mice and they doubled the mice life span. Lots of research outside of the U.S after that. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961212...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961212003237)

Nobody cares about this kind of research in the U.S because it's a synthetic substance that's not patentable.

<comment><USER8> That's amazing! I had no idea of this result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully this problem with radiation exposure when traveling to Mars can change the way people evaluate nuclear propulsion. One could offset a lot of radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant by getting to Mars in weeks instead of months. People traveling to Mars are not going to have a "safety first" philosophy that is dominant in the current US culture and would be able to understand and accept the trade-off.

Maybe someone will start working on nuclear rockets again. I think a large number quality people would come out of the woodwork to be able to be part of such a project.

<comment><USER9> The trouble with nuclear propulsion is not the safety of the astronauts travelling to Mars, but rather the safety of people on Earth. If you launch a large reactor from Earth then a catastrophic launch vehicle failure could cause a radiological incident. Space agencies have launched RTGs before, but those are much smaller and more durable than the real reactors that would be needed to drive a useful propulsion system.

Maybe someday we'll be able to mine fissionable materials from asteroids and construct nuclear rockets in deep space with no risk to Earth. But that technology is firmly in the realm of science fiction today.

<comment><USER4> If one gives this problem a bit of thought I think it is really political problem, not a safety issue. First, nuclear fuel is just pieces of metal or ceramic. If it blows up on launch these won't explode in a nuclear chain reaction like what happens in a nuclear weapon. They will just scatter and fall into the sea. They have not been activated yet so they have very low radioactivity at that point. Brand new nuclear fuel is basically harmless. The worry with nueclear fuel is after it is used it becomes very radioactive.

And, even if the fuel was a problem, reactors are going to be designed to be refueled. One could send up the reactor and fuel on different launches with the fuel sent in packaging the would survive any explosion (although the fuel itself already would)

RTGs are actually more of a radiological hazard, as the fuel for those are necessarily very radioactive.

In the end I do agree with your position that the safety of the people on Earth are likely to be a problem because safety is a feeling, not some well defined risk factor. Without some large generational educational project (or maybe change the name?), most people will think that nuclear power can never be safe, even when driving their gasoline powered car on a two lane road to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Radiation shielding is either heavy, or difficult. Heavy is too expensive, and the quietly cold calculus of many seems to have been, "well these early explorers won't live as long as us." This however injects the possibility of mission failure, not just a bad end for early Mars colonists on slow boats from Earth.

</comment><comment><USER11> One possibility is to find an asteroid that moves between earth and mars orbits, and hitch a ride on it for the bulk of the journey. The asteroid's mass can serve as shielding, and also as a source of raw materials.

<comment><USER12> Electromagnetic shielding with superconductors is probably better than a mass solution.

<comment><USER13> Hmm. How hard is it to get superconduction in space? Its not like it has to be room temperature.

<comment><USER14> Objects in space heater up significantly on the sun facing side though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many of those with the qualifications to be selected for a trip to mars would make such a sacrifice.

If you knew you weren't coming back, would you still be willing to be the first person on mars?

<comment> T-A Immediate response: no way, why would I want to do that? Second thought: maybe if I were terminally ill and had nothing special left to do on Earth. Third thought: ... but given my usual luck, in that case a cure for my condition would be announced as soon as I had passed the point of no return. :P

<comment><USER13> Theoretically they could send the cure but they announce cancer cures every other week.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which compiler book to pick? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
For years I have been interested in programming languages and their implementation. I have made many attempts over time to create my own (experimental) programming languages, mostly interpreters.
The problem is, my knowledge of this area of computer science is fragmented, to say the least. I picked up things here and there, but I never learned how to properly implement a compiler, interpreter, virtual machine, or even a parser.
So, I have decided to pick a book and work my way through it. I just don't know which book. They all seem equally intimidating. A few candidates that I am considering are:
- The Dragon Book (new version, 2006); seems awfully big though, making me wonder whether I should pick a book that is a bit less comprehensive first, then come back to this one later;
- The Dragon Book (old version, 1986)
- Engineering a Compiler, by Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon
- Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide, by Dick Grune; focuses on parsing though rather than the whole package
So my question is, which of these books, or any others, do people recommend? (My main interests would be interpreters and languages that compile to bytecode, either custom or targeting existing VMs. "Traditional" compilers that produce a standalone executable, not so much.)
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER4> Actually, before you worry about the other resources in this comment - <USER2> with _Let's Build a Compiler_ (<http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/>) - it'll make compilers seem much less intimidating. Follow along in Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever.

Earlier today, somebody asked about parsing. There's much overlap with my answer to that (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820858>), though I would doubly recommend getting one of the Appel books.

I'm Not A Fan of the old Dragon book. I haven't read the new one or _Engineering a Compiler_ (yet), though.

I highly recommend _Essentials of Programming Languages_, though it focuses on interpreters rather than compilers. There's a chapter at the end of the _first_ printing (they cut it from the second and third editions, _le sigh_ ) about taking a CPS-based interpreter and turning it into a compiler, too. Very cool.

_Lisp in Small Pieces_ has good content about compiling "dynamic" languages (with a Lisp-y flavor, of course). The Rabbit and Orbit papers at <http://library.readscheme.org/page8.html> are good, too.

Also, since you seem to have the same quirky, self-taught background I do - <USER3> found tinkering with low-level implementations of Forth to be _very_ helpful in understanding virtual machines. Read the source to jonesforth (<http://www.annexia.org/forth>) and/or write a Forth in C, it will teach you quite a bit. Also, read about Lua's virtual machine - it's small, clean, and very well engineered.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"Read the source to jonesforth (<http://www.annexia.org/forth>) and/or write a Forth in C, it will teach you quite a bit."_

:) That is actually what I did last month. (The assembler source doesn't always translate well to C, so it required a lot of careful thinking about what is going on and how to expres it in C.) I think I ended up writing three Forths, and I did indeed learn a lot.

I did some of the other things too... used to have LiSP, worked through the first few chapters of EOPL, did the Crenshaw tutorial too back in the day.

I still feel that the way I do things are, well, hackish, and incomplete, and suboptimal. I was kind of hoping that there would be a Book that would solve these problems...

<comment><USER4> Definitely check out the Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_, then. And don't forget to do the exercises, then you'll know you know what you know. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Search the net for one or another of the SmallC compilers (Ron Cain wrote the original one) published in Dr. Dobbs Journal. Later authors tarted up the original code adding more of C to the mix to make it more useful and managed to confuse things.

Chris Fraser and Dave Hanson's _A Retargetable Compiler_ is another good example system with code to read and modify.

[http://www.amazon.com/Retargetable-Compiler-Design- Implement...](http://www.amazon.com/Retargetable-Compiler-Design- Implementation/product- reviews/0805316701/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1)

</comment><comment><USER6> Possibly my favorite programming book is Shared Source CLI essentials.

It walks you through the internals of a functioning Virtual Machine for the .NET platform. You get JIT (compiling), GC, class loading, etc. It's presented very straightforward and there is lots of code to look at.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059600351X/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059600351X/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo- top- stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0321159837&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0QBCT9069JX6E4MRFGJS)</comment>


Show HN: I decided to change careers, Random Chat is my first app - <AUTHOR> http://biaanghel.github.io/randomchat/

<comment><USER2> It's a really, really fun app. I wish I'd made it.

Don't get intimidated by the hype about all that crazy stuff you have to know. Everybody learned one language or tool at a time, same as you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really cool. I like that it looks simple but elegant. Did it take some effort to make it that easy to use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, a few iterations. I tried to reduce everything to the bare minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a blog post about my journey in building this ([http://biaanghel.tumblr.com/post/117116852474/building-my- fi...](http://biaanghel.tumblr.com/post/117116852474/building-my-first- application-a-story-of-how-i)). After writing it I'm wondering if it's even possible for a new programmer, let alone a female programmer, to get a real, good paying job as a developer. It seems that there are so many technologies to learn and the bar is ever higher. Would be interesting to hear any successful / unsuccessful stories. I guess what I'm asking is: do I even stand a chance?

<comment><USER4> Definitely possible. I started learning how to program when I was 28, I coded every day, learned frameworks, databases etc. I still program every day for fun, but I also do it professionally for a silicon valley startup. It's not easy, but if you're determined it's definitely possible. I can't comment too much on the gender issue, but I know there is at least some subset of companies that wont discriminate against you based on your gender. I look forward to seeing your next project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why does your gender matter?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of fuss in the news about girls in tech recently. I thought that's somehow relevant...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be more fun if people would actually respond...

</comment><comment><USER7> line 2 of randomchat.js throws the error 'syncninja is not defined' (on both Chrome and Firefox)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe syncninja.min.js didn't load?</comment></comment>


The butter shortage in France - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/world/europe/france-butter-shortage.html <comment><AUTHOR> From the story: "But only France has seen shortages, because of the way its food supply chain is organized. In France, Mr. Calbrix explained, prices between suppliers and big retailers are negotiated once a year, in February... ...many retailers were refusing to pay the increased market price for butter."

It feels like a big problem with the French economy is simply a failure to understand how supply and demand works. I live in France and my local SuperU was completely out of butter. I would have been willing to pay €10 or more for butter -- if they only had it. Instead everyone hoards it when it's €2, causing shortages and people with freezers full of butter they don't even need.

The failure to understand supply and demand extends to labor law as well -- an increased cost of labor results in a decreased demand, yet here people are wringing their hands over why unemployment is almost 10%, while just over the border in Germany, unemployment is 3.7%.</comment>


BackboneJS is not the best option for MVC in the browser - Jeff Deville - <AUTHOR> http://jeffdeville.com/javascript-development-and-frameworks <comment><USER2> Sigh, why do people always do a versus comparison with tools...?

Backbone like Knockout are tools. You choose the one that fits the job.

It's like comparing a hammer to a mallet. "Oh but the hammer is cast, and is sooo durable! Versatility at it's finest!" Until you notice that cast hammer doesn't work well on more delicate surfaces.

The beauty of backbone is it's just enough to get things done. Need more? Then go Knockout, by all means! But do not choose one tool just because it has more more more!

Just as in programming you choose to use switch/case, if/else, or do/while so should you decide on the macro lexical level of languages _and_ frameworks.

Sigh...

</comment><comment><USER3> We tried Knockout first. We encountered browser incompatibilities and performance issues that indicated an extremely alpha framework. We switched to Backbone and haven't looked back.</comment>


How the Virus Got Out - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html <comment><USER2> The Chinese government told us in early January that there was no human->human transmission of the virus, when this was not the truth. Doctors and medical professionals were silenced until it was blatantly obvious that the world had a problem on their hands.

If we had known the virus was this contagious at that time, more countries could have prepared and put a stop to travel from some of these areas.

It happened way too late with Italy, which is why the cases skyrocketed.

I've seen reports that patient zero in Wuhan was back on November 16th. I know many people that had symptoms (including myself) at the end of November/early December.</comment>


The Evolution of the Beast, a 144 Raspberry Pi Cluster, Continues - <AUTHOR> https://resin.io/blog/the-evolution-of-the-beast-continues/ <comment><USER2> Looks really cool and must have been a fun project.

I guess it's not hugely practical, partically as each Pi has a display attached.

Mythic beasts in the UK are doing Pi based co-location. I think this could be interesting. Not perhaps in terms of performance, but the isolation between users in nice.

See here: [https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi](https://www.mythic- beasts.com/order/rpi)</comment>


Windows 8 App Store Screens Leaked - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows8-win8-app-store-download,12554.html <comment> X-Istence Don't they mean the Windows Exe Store?

\--

All joking aside, App has been cemented in my brain, and the brains of consumers across the globe as being distinctly Apple. I was recently telling my friend that Amazon now had an App store as well, and his first reaction was "Apple allowed that on the iPhone?"

Now it seems everyone and their mother has an App store:

RIM - App World

Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone Apps

Android - Market Place (Although if you search in Google Apps - Market Place)

Apple - App Store

Apple - Mac App Store

I don't know who is right, and who is wrong or who should be able to use what. App wasn't something mainstream on anything besides Apple for a long time. I don't remember having discussions with friends about apps for Windows, I remember it being about wares, software, or programs for Windows. I do remember when I got Mac OS X for the first time that .app extension made sense and I remember talking about Mail.app, Disco.app (burning program) and asking friends what app's they would suggest for me to install.

Either way, I think it is awesome that these new stores are popping up giving many developers the ability to market themselves through an officially sanctioned "portal" into the users computers thereby giving the more exposure. Also it makes downloading more secure, instead of coming from download.com and having clicked 6 links you simple click install and it takes care of the rest for you, it should hopefully with good quality control lessen the amount of damage that malware can do.

<comment><USER2> While it's true that Microsoft has tended to favour 'programs', the term 'applications' and 'apps' has been used generically for years. The earliest reference to the term in Gogle News is a paywalled article in the Washington Post from November 1990, which discusses PC Magazine shortening 'applications' to 'apps' because the word is too unweildy.

I think "app store" could be seen as analogous to "media player", a generic term Microsoft coined and popularised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft has a store for downloadable software _right now_ at <http://www.microsoftstore.com/>

They also used to have a store called Windows Marketplace that sold third- party apps, but that closed in 2009.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's more likely that the UI will be based on the Metro look of Windows Phone 7 (cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Design_Language>), so I wouldn't judge anything from this screenshot. I think the leaked roadmap from June 2010 was also far more insightful: [http://msftkitchen.com/2010/06/windows-8-plans- leaked-numero...](http://msftkitchen.com/2010/06/windows-8-plans-leaked- numerous-details-revealed.html)

What does HN think of <http://allmyapps.com>? We launched this application store for Windows in December and we've recently passed the 100K members mark. We want to make the app store experience on PC as seamless as on smartphone, and make sure you never get any third-party software (e.g toolbars & extensions). 1500+ applications are already available for download & install in 1-click, from your browser or our desktop client. The website has a nice list feature to get multiple apps at once, and you can get silent updates for all your apps via the client (opt-in feature). Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER5> I agree. The screenshot given isn't the same direction that MS has been going with their most recent apps. Look at Zune or even Office 2010.

allmyapps looks interesting. I like the idea of auto-updating. Just needs some better polishing and some unique apps. Being lightweight is always a plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, there was a comment the other day asking "what could you do on Mac that you can't do on Windows" and I wanted to reply: "well you could get an $99 dev account and have apple sell your stuff world wide".

I guess Windows is getting an AppStore too...

I'm curious though how will Microsoft handle this. In terms of internal bureaucracy and support for non-US developers. It seems that except Apple, nobody (not even Google with the Android marketplace) got this right.

<comment><USER7> _well you could get an $99 dev account and have apple sell your stuff world wide_

Maybe this is true for the Mac App Store but it certainly isn't (anymore) for the iOS App Store. Even though Apple's hosting your app, the massive barrage of existing items in the app store means you have to find ways to sell it yourself.

<comment><USER6> I'm not talking about the App Store from a marketing point of view.

I'm talking about the App Store as a world-wide, easy to use credit card processor.

It is non-trivial (technically, legally) to implement credit card handlind yourself, especially the further you are from the US. Also, people will never trust a small player as much as they trust Apple.

So, Apple takes care of a lot of international red tape for you, for $99/year.

<comment><USER8> $99/year _and_ 30% of your income. Don't forget that.

<comment><USER6> True, but it still might be worth it due to the market size.

I guess after a point the AppStore becomes expensive and it might be worth it to sell your own stuff and keep the 30%.

But $99 is a really low barrier to entry for non-US individuals and companies to sell software to the whole globe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 99.9% sure these are fake. The UI style doesn't match recent or new Microsoft design trends (what is with that menu bar?), and the text and details are just weird (Office's category as "Efficiency"? Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade just thrown in with the other apps in an "OS" category?) It hasn't been posted by any of the more reputable leakers, either.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know this was a "leak", but I wonder if they got permission form Rovio this time for the Angry Birds logo.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, the fact that Windows 7 Ultimate as one of the apps either means this is a fake or Microsoft has a decent sense of humor.

<comment><USER12> Since you can already buy upgrades to Windows 7 Ultimate from other versions Windows 7 online as a "Windows Anytime Upgrade" this is just the kind of thing I'd expect to see in Windows App Store.

[http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/pd/product...](http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/pd/productID.216649800)

<comment><USER9> I really doubt they'd just plop it in with the other apps.

<comment><USER13> This is pre-beta software. What do you expect? Some QA guy would've just seeded the data so that people can see how it looks. You people are talking as if this thing is a leak of something releasing tomorrow.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough - though I think senior people would probably have worked out the major categories by now, and there definitely wouldn't be an "OS" category.

The Chinese site where this originated has posted both real and fake stuff in the past; they seem to be fairly indiscriminate about their sources. That's why I kind of have a "presumed fake until shown to be real" mentality with their leaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> MS never has been a great innovator. This is one of the best examples of that.

<comment><USER15> Oh common ... Kinect, C#, F#, Linq, Office, Win7 (this one is debatable but I really think it's full of innovations even if I'm using OSX principally).

Of course some of them are here through acquisitions but they made them great products.

<comment><USER16> > Kinect, C#, F#, Linq, Office, Win7 (this one is debatable but I really think > it's full of innovations even if I'm using OSX principally).

Erm... Kinect is the only product even remotely innovative there.

Office has never been innovative in all its lifetime (apart from the Ribbon if you stretch it), C# is as innovative as mud (== it was innovative a few billion years ago), F# is an OCaml crappified by making it compatible with the .Net framework and LINQ is a bunch of collection methods, a preprocessor and a common interface (yeah that was innovative about 30 years ago).

> Of course some of them are here through acquisitions but they made them > great products.

Obtino was talking about innovation. Apart from Kinect, none of the things you mentioned is even remotely innovative.

<comment><USER7> _F# is an OCaml crappified by making it compatible with the .Net framework_

It's very difficult to take you seriously when your argument is that a piece Microsoft technology is crap based solely on the fact that it happens to be compatible with another piece of Microsoft technology.

If you had any actual critique of F#, the language, you might make more sense.

You could start by explaining how F#'s support for monads doesn't already make it a superior language to O'Caml.

 _and LINQ is a bunch of collection methods, a preprocessor and a common interface_

Even worse, it's all just a bunch of _1s and 0s_!

<comment><USER16> > It's very difficult to take you seriously when your argument is that a piece > Microsoft technology is crap based solely on the fact that it happens to be > compatible with another piece of Microsoft technology.

That's a weird statement to make. I'm not saying it does not make business sense, I'm saying F# is worse than it could be because it needed to be compatible with the .net framework.

Furthermore, I didn't say F# was crap, I said it was a crappified (aka worse) OCaml due to that. And as a result it would have a hard time being innovative (due to being an inferior version of a 16 years old language)

> If you had any actual critique of F#, the language, you might make more > sense.

That it's compatible with the .net framework and its imperative APIs, with all it entails (such as nulls or mutability galore) is very much my critique of F#. It's a worse language (than it could have been and that its ancestor) because of that.

> Even worse, it's all just a bunch of 1s and 0s!

Wonderfully missing the point, which is the part between the parens. Building a library is not innovative in and of itself, and there is nothing in linq's concepts or execution which is novel or innovative.

You seem to have taken an extremely defensive stance on my view that, apart from Kinect, none of the things mentioned is innovative. I guess that you disagree, do you have any argument as to why those things would be innovative (outside of a microsoft-driven world)? What makes LINQ innovative exactly? Or F#?

<comment><USER17> LINQ is innovative because it brings a generic query language as a first-class citizen in the language. I.e. LINQ is more than just a library as they added syntax constructs for it.

<comment><USER18> Innovative implies new.

Other languages (LISP, APL, in many senses even Python) had this a long time ago.

The fact that they had to add syntax is because C# isn't sufficiently flexible without it. It does not imply any form or manner of innovation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Squeak 5 is out - <AUTHOR> http://news.squeak.org/2015/08/12/squeak-5-is-out/ <comment><USER2> I should try out version 5. After many years of using Squeak I jumped to the fork Pharo for reasons I now forget.

I blogged many years ago that if/when I retired I might mostly only use Squeak for the rest of my life for learning/hacking projects. I have largely used Lisp languages since the early 1980s, but the Smalltalk environment is so much fun!

Congrats to the Squeak team.

<comment><USER3> With Lisp (mostly ironscheme, guile and racket for me) and smalltalk, I have this feeling that just about every other language has been playing catch-up.

It is just recently that some scripting languages have started giving me the same feeling of bliss.

<comment><USER4> Just delve into the Xerox PARC archives of Smalltalk, Interlisp-D and Mesa/Cedar and you will see how much catch-up is still left.

It is really a pity that those ideas didn't spread as they should have been.

<comment><USER2> I hear you. I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in the 1980s and the development environment was awesome, even by today's standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm just curious how people share projects with modern Squeak these days. I learned Squeak at GaTech and while I some what appreciated the language I really hated Squeaks tools and development style (basically monkey patching and sending big changesets and by god I want to use emacs not Squeaks Mattel/Fisher price kids editor... I'm sure its better now).

Sadly Squeak was the start of my slow and gradual hate of OOP languages (Java later on did not help) but it did have some really cool things like traits and continuations.

<comment><USER6> Pharo is an effort to make a "grown-up" Squeak. It's hard to get the kind of interaction that makes Smalltalk work when you're inside a general-purpose text editor. When I'm working in Smalltalk, even though it's always a "toy" program, I feel like I'm sort of reaching into the computer's inner world and fiddling with things in a way you can't do with a plain old text editor.

<comment><USER7> > When I'm working in Smalltalk, even though it's always a "toy" program, I > feel like I'm sort of reaching into the computer's inner world and fiddling > with things in a way you can't do with a plain old text editor.

There's always [http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/](http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I so often realize, when I look at my efforts in my own recreational programming, that I want to recreate and recapture the joy of working in smalltalk (which I've only ever done recreationally w/ Squeak/Pharo). Just with tools/APIs that I'm more comfortable with in my day-to-day programming.

Also lisp.

<comment><USER9> If you'd like to see an attempt at the best of both worlds (Smalltalk and Lisp), check out Robert Krahn's work on Cloxp: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQvvgzvPgQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQvvgzvPgQI)

</comment></comment><comment> st-enthusiast I remember Squeak used to have a bunch of different window colors for different tools, which always made Squeak look like a toy unfit for serious work.

I downloaded the latest, and now there seems to be uniformity in the UI, with a single window style for all tools. It looks like Pharo has pushed them in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Spur is just a stepping stone to a more ambitious goals planned over the next five years." Does anybody know of a document describing these goals?

<comment><USER11> These ones maybe: [http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/cog- projects/](http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/cog-projects/) (linked from the Release Notes: [http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6207](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6207) )

<comment><USER12> And just to give the quick summary, Spur enables:

      * More immediate types. The classic Squeak/Pharo image type only allows for
        objects, strings, and integers as immediates, if I recall correctly.
        Spur adds individual characters, floats (soon), and some other stuff
        I'm spacing. Since all Smalltalk values are nominally heap-based,
        having more immediates is a really big deal.
      * Allows for a segmented heap. For desktop apps, this isn't a big deal,
        but for server apps, it means that the VM can actually relinquish
        RAM.
      * Better object pinning, which makes FFI a lot easier.
      * A more GC-friendly design, that should enable a much faster GC pass.

The only downside, IIRC, is that the total image size grows by about 15%, but that's a pretty good trade-off, given a normal image is usually in the tens of megabytes.

<comment><USER13> Threaded FFI has been on that list for a long, long time as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the relationship between Squeak and Pharo? Do they have the same goals?

<comment><USER15> Pharo is a fork of Squeak, loosely along the lines of "let's rip out and replace as much old cruft as we can" vs. "let's maintain backwards compatibility where reasonably possible", respectively.

The big news here, however, is the new VM and image format, and since Pharo and Squeak have never diverged in that area, it's likely that Pharo will benefit from these improvements as well.

<comment><USER12> It will indeed. The current plan (subject to change) is that Pharo 5 will ship as Pharo 4 + Spur (32 bit), then Pharo 5.1 will be Pharo 4 + Spur (64 bit), and then normal releases will resume. But as I said, that's just the current plan, and so much has landed on the 5.0 branch already that I'm a bit dubious they'll stick to that.

<comment><USER13> Isn't NativeBoost what's currently blocking the migration to Spur?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations to the team.

I learned Smalltalk with Visual Works back in 1995, it was a great experience.

</comment><comment> fake-name > a new segmented heap allows memory to be given back to the OS when its no > longer needed, a great benefit for application servers.

 _Application servers_? Is anyone writing servers in squeak?

<comment> st-enthusiast The people interested in that sort of thing left for Pharo long ago. The Pharo platform seems much more practically-minded, and the website has some case studies of businesses built using it: [http://pharo.org/success](http://pharo.org/success)

<comment> small-talking What makes you think no one is using Squeak as an application server?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will it run seaside?

<comment> st-enthusiast It should. There is even an install script for it. But I believe the development shifted to Pharo as the primary platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is it?

<comment><USER18> s|news.squeak.org/2015/08/12/squeak-5-is-out/|squeak.org|</comment></comment>


The Rise of Emoji on Instagram Is Causing Language Repercussions - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/the-rise-of-emoji-on-instagram-is-causing-language-repercussions/?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000 <comment><USER2> Something about emoji makes them less annoying to me than most text smilies. Maybe it's the broader selection making individual emojis more likely to actually add some context.</comment>


OWebl v0.1 Release Candidate Now on OPAM - <AUTHOR> http://meetowebl.com/v0.1

<comment><USER2> this is a neat idea, as ocsigen is rather intimidating to use for the simple case.

are there any plans to make use of cohttp and/or lwt as the underlying network abstraction ? my concern with hand-rolled http is it may not handle the edge cases correctly and cohttp is more battle tested. also i believe it's more idiomatic ocaml to include interface files to hide the implementation details.

<comment><USER3> If you want something cohttp based [https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium](https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium) might serve your needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> rgrinberg is right. If you want a good web framework built on cohttp that is NOT as challenging as ocsigen/eliom then I'd definitely point you to opium.

NOT using cohttp/lwt/core/batteries fills a niche on its own - i.e. owebl is very lightweight.

There is also currently no major reason (read: production users or interest) for me to stop using owebl as an educational tool to grok HTTP, concurrent/distributed computing, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Avoid Vendor Lock-In Risk with Multi-Cloud Deployments - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/gs-response/ <comment><USER2> I can't find any documentation on how, exactly, ACID is achieved across all these partitions. It's impossible to reason about performance characteristics in the absence of documentation.

For example, if they use two-phase commit, what is the granularity of locks ( table, row, etc )during an open transaction? Table locks during two-phase commit with, say, 50ms coast-to-coast latency would be an _immediate_ dealkiller.

Or, if it's eventually consistent as most asynchronously distributed DBs are, they can't claim AC.

I really wish Cockroach had better documentation - not so much how to use it, but how it works so as to let engineers reason about performance characteristics.

<comment><USER3> (working for cockroach labs)

As explained in the blog (as linked by another response) and the documentation ([https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/strong- consistency...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/strong- consistency.html) and [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/distributed- transa...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/distributed- transactions.html)) CockroachDB does not use locks, and write intents in the concurrency control scheme are expressed by K/V pair i.e. per table cell.

Meanwhile, I acknowledge that CockroachDB does not yet convey well its performance model so that engineers can get an intuition about it. There is documentation, but it's either too detailed (like the design doc) or too high- level (most of the docs site). This needs a new sort of documentation, which we are working on.

<comment><USER4> From the first link:

> Employs Raft, a popular successor to Paxos.

I don't believe that is correct and that is not a good meme to promote. Successor implies the 'deprecation' of Paxos, which is certainly not the case. For the architectural sweet spot where both protocols can be used, it is fair to say Raft provides the more accessible approach, and that for those who insist on rolling their own consensus mechanism.

Paxos and Raft serve distinct architectural concerns in the shared context of providing a distributed state with formally defined consistency guarantees. And to the point, it is entirely reasonable to see a distributed system that utilizes both to address system component specific concerns.

CockroachDB, ironically (in context of your OP), in fact could benefit from a vendor lock-in were the candidate cloud provider to provide atomic clocks and GPS cards in their offerings.

<comment><USER5> What are the GPS cards for ?

<comment><USER6> A lot of synchronization problems are solved with access to a very accurate synchronized clock. E.g. with it you can determine a reliable "happens-before" relationship between all in flight transactions, among other useful things.

Literally all GPS does is provide a way to determine the time very accurately in relation to a bunch of synchronized atomic clocks in orbit. (As a side benefit, knowing the time like this will also give you your position.)

<comment><USER7> To expand:

Windows for concurrent operations are bounded by clock uncertainty. If you say you did something at 2:00 and I say I did something at 3:00, you probably did your thing before me. But if it's 1:57 vs 1:59, there's strong possibility my clock is fast or yours is slow. If I know both our clocks are within 5 seconds of the correct time, then I can say your action happened before mine. So accurate clocks allow you to provide ordering to more events.

Additionally, If you do identify operations as concurrent, you can explicitly deal with them. Dealing with them is doable, but expensive. If your clocks are in sync with a small margin of error, the rate at which you will have to do expensive things to resolve concurrent operation is low.

Google's Spanner database uses atomic clocks to have a max clock skew of 7ms. That eliminates most concurrent conflicts, and dealing with conflicts is fast because we can recognize conflict quickly. Basically, it waits 7ms on all writes to see if any other nodes have a conflicting write.

CockroachDB can operate in "spanner mode", but without atomic clocks it uses a max clock skew of 250ms. This is a much bigger window and identifying conflicts on write takes a lot longer.

CockroachDB recommends that you don't run in "spanner mode" because of the performance hit. Instead, the default mode does lazy conflict detection, where instead of waiting after all writes, it will sometimes wait to read data until the clock skew window has passed.

Here's a great read on the topic:

[https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic- clo...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not convinced this helps much with lock in. Assuming you want to do things like deployments, scheduled backups, monitoring, etc, you're either:

a) Using "lock in" features like Cloud Formation, Lamba, Cloudwatch, etc, to do so, such that you use some of the "value" of the cloud.

==or==

b) Rolling your own solutions for these peripheral functions (deployment, backup, monitoring, etc) and running them on the bare VPS instances. In which case...why are you on this expensive cloud? You can get a VPS with lower bandwidth costs elsewhere.

Basically being sort of "half in" on the cloud, where you use it as a glorified VPS makes no sense to me. Either be all the way in, or all the way out.

<comment><USER9> Alternatively, you can use tools like Kubernetes and Terraform as abstractions around cloud environments while still being able to utilize them fairly effectively. Kubernetes is a clever product for Google to release, because it makes migrating loads to GCP much easier if you already run them in Kubernetes.

<comment><USER8> Similar decision for me though. If you want k8s, use Google or Azure, where they take care of it for you.

K8s on AWS, at least right now, means you are in the business of being a plumber. For example, if I remember right, the solid k8s ingress controller means ELB, which has issues like the need for cache warming. ALB is better, but has only bleeding edge support as an ingress controller in K8s. Similar for getting it installed on AWS in the first place.

Rackspace or Digital Ocean or similar is a cheaper better place if you want to roll your own k8s solution.

<comment><USER9> I'm hosting K8S on AWS in production. Kops takes care of most of the details, though I _do_ understand the low level details of what's going on. Gotta be able to debug somehow.

Google Cloud Platform is definitely cheaper than AWS, and their hosting of Kubernetes seals the deal for me. The only problem? Legacy. If I want to link two virtual machines across cloud environments, it introduces somewhat unacceptable latency, and throughput will be less reliable. So connecting to things like extremely busy Redis or AMQP clusters is not really as safe and downtime is more likely.

Still, I don't feel like Kubernetes is terrible on AWS. It works fairly well. I'm not using Ingress resources right now, just a bunch of services with their own ELBs.

<comment><USER8> Sure, I concede it can run well. It just feels like renting a furnished house and storing the supplied furniture in the basement so you can use your own.

Why not just rent a cheaper unfurnished home if you insist on bringing your own...

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying I entirely disagree. I'm mostly suggesting that moving toward systems like Kubernetes and Terraform help you to reduce lock-in so that you can pick the best tool for the job. 7 years ago, it made sense to use AWS and not look back. But I'm sitting here now, and a lot of software in our stack is pretty tied to AWS when I'd much rather use GCP.

The furniture analogy is a bit flawed. I can get comfortable in a new, furnished house, but furnishings don't come with vendor lock-in. Cloud services naturally do, at least the highly proprietary ones. I'm not saying put the furniture in the basement, I'm just saying throw a slipcover over it so we don't touch it directly. :)

DigitalOcean meanwhile is a lot more limited. The new stuff they've added is nice with firewalls and load balancers, but the tooling with AWS is more complete and I can utilize a fair bit of that tooling from within Kubernetes, including things like Amazon's certificate provisioning.

Basically to be clear, I'm saying maybe now embracing GCP and Azure seems like a solid plan, but years down the road you might want to have some more mobility. If you're already using things you can bring with you to the next provider, you're going to be ahead of the curve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone interested in multi cloud deployments at the IaaS layer I recommend looking at [https://libcloud.apache.org/](https://libcloud.apache.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is a poorly written blog post that completely ignores the challenges and difficulties that arise when going multi-cloud. Multi-cloud introduces huge amounts of latency, requires additional load balancing and routing logic, requires twice as much administration, etc.

Multi-cloud is a huge decision that need lots of planning and application level support. I'd go so far as to say it is an order of magnitude easier to design an application that can be moved between clouds easily than it is to design a multi-cloud application. This still defeats vendor lock-in.

I think CockroachDB is interesting tech, but this blog post reads like a pretty empty marketing piece.

<comment><USER12> It's true that operating your own cluster (of any technology) spanning cloud providers is not for the faint of heart. However, at FaunaDB we've found performance of multi-cloud globally consistent operations to be acceptable. We currently run across AWS and GCP, with Azure on the way, and we have customers running their own clusters in hybrid configurations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd cloud vendor lock-in a serious concern for most businesses? It always feels like a requirement that originates from the technical side rather than the business side. But it never feels like it's that important actually.

<comment><USER14> We have a bunch of work that requires large, process heavy, calculations, so yes, vendor lock-in is a concern for us as it can mean either huge cost increases, if the vendor changes pricing for the required instances upwards, or huge savings if a competitor can do the same computations for less. We solve this problem by making sure we can trash servers and spin them up elsewhere if needs be (mostly via terraform etc).

I don't think this should apply to anyone running some hosts for web applications though.

<comment><USER15> Just out of interest, when have AWS increased their prices?

<comment><USER16> Never.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still waiting for some benchmarks by the team.

What I would be curious, is, how much faster the db would be if it was in c++/rust instead of java/go. I know bigtable claims 3x faster than hbase. Scylla claims ~10x (though also different architecture) faster than Cassandra. Trinity ~2x compared to Lucene. etc etc.

Also: incoming comments about the name of the db.

<comment><USER3> Note that the underlying data store where a lot of the byte churning happens is RocksDB, written in C++. Also the Go/C++ interface in CockroachDB is coarse to reduce overheads.

<comment><USER5> In that I would be curious on RocksDB vs LMDB. There was an issue about this but it didn't progress: [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/14#issuecomm...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/14#issuecomment-41171979)

For some reason(s) nobody is using LMDB on distributed dbs (only know actordb). While for single-nodes there are many cases that have switched and been better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's like operating systems. In the end, you will have a limited number of options, aws, gcp, and azure, like windows, mac and linux.

<comment><USER18> Yup. And the amount of work it takes to be competent in just one (such as AWS) will make it nearly impossible / not worth it for most people to run cross- cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Haha cloud lock-in is what they think I'm worried about?

<comment><USER20> So... What are you worried about?

<comment><USER19> Database lockin. Guess that was not clear enough.

<comment><USER21> FWIW, CRDB should be a good fit for people worried about database lock-in. You'd only be "locked in" if you discover that we're much better than the alternatives :) CRDB uses the standard SQL language. Also, CRDB speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol; for using CRDB you'd be using the Postgres drivers for different languages. So, more or less, any application that can work with us should also work with Postgres (and vice versa). Moreover, the Postgres drivers generally respect other higher interfaces (odbc, jdbc) so, more or less, a CRDB application should also work with any other established SQL database (and vice versa). CRDB can also export your data in formats easily importable by other SQL databases.</comment></comment></comment></comment>