Ask HN: "How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in working on a small side project to roll my own short URL, similar to how TechCrunch recently unveiled their version of http://tcrn.ch/.<p>If you know of any detailed How-Tos for creating your own version of a short URL, I'd appreciate it.<p>(P.S. To keep the question on topic, I'm not interested in debating the merits of whether short URLs promote spam, acts as a middleman, etc as was covered some weeks ago here by joshu.) <comment><USER2> I made one for Tipjoy where I mapped a content ID to short string, and loaded a frame like the Digg Bar where people could donate to the site and view the content. For example: <http://tipjoy.com/2w/>

Here is the python code I used to "shrink" and unshrink the content ID.

      def shrink( id ):
          validCharacters = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ._-~"
          base = len(validCharacters)
          characterArray = ""
          d = id
          while d > 0:
              ind = d % base
              characterArray = validCharacters[ind] + characterArray
              d = d / base
          return characterArray

      def unshrink( code ):
          validCharacters = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ._-~"
          base = len(validCharacters)
          val = 0
          revCode = code[::-1]
          power = 0
          for r in revCode:
              i = validCharacters.find(r)
              if i==-1:
                  raise
              val += i * (base**power)
              power += 1
          return val

If you think this code is bad for some reason, please tell me in the comments. I spent little time reviewing it when I wrote it about a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> input.php - input box asking for url. call create.php on form submit.

create.php - generates random string, adds url and random string to urls table

redirect.php - takes random string. finds url associated with it. redirects

.htaccess - catches http//domain.com/<random string> and maps it to redirect.php

<comment><USER4> and make sure to redirect with a 301

<comment><USER5> i.e. header($final_destination, true, 301)

<comment><USER5> Wow, I really botched that up.

header("Location: " . $final_destination, true, 301)

In my defense, I generally wrap this call into my own redirect function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote up my experiences building a vanity short URL service a few weeks ago: <http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/> \- algorithms and code included

</comment><comment><USER7> I would associate each URL with a sequential number. And express the number using base-36 (0...9 + a...z). I don't see the need to use obfuscation for this application but if desired I'd hash the URL + a secret and prepend that fixed-length hash to the base-36 sequential number. I'd express the hash in base-36 too.

<comment><USER8> Well, originally, tinyurl just went for sequential short URLs too. But as those were predictable, abuse was afoot: "Early on, the resulting URL aliases of the service were predictable, and were exploited by users to create vulgar associations. The URL aliases dick and cunt were made to redirect to the White House websites of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Second Lady Lynne Cheney." Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinyurl#Early_abuses>

<comment><USER7> Interesting... tack that hash on. :) Probably does not need to be a hash actually. A few random base-36 digits would do it. You'd just need to store the random digits with the URL in whatever sort of persistent storage system you're utilizing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        1.to_s(36) #=> "1"
        10.to_s(36) #=> "a"
        100.to_s(36) #=> "2s"
        123456.to_s(36) #=> "2n9c"

Ruby. Where the number is the id of the record in the database or something.

<comment><USER9> Also forgot to mention, you can do the opposite with:

        "2n9c".to_i(36) #=> 123456

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Create your own URL shortening service with Heroku and Shorty: <http://brad.posterous.com/create-your-own-url-shortening>

Some useful stuff to go on there even if you're not using Heroku.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is a related question. Is creating a hash of letters and numbers instead of just using an ID beneficial in anyway?

<comment><USER11> By an ID I simply mean starting at 1 and moving up from there

<comment><USER12> It prevents people from iterating over all URLs in your database. Whether or not you consider that a plus or a minus, is mostly up to you.

It also prevents people from easily seeing how many URLs you've shortened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can write the basics of that sort of thing from start to finish in half a day - easy stuff. You need:

1) Database table to store the "codes" - two "main" columns: Code, DestinationUrl

2) Random code generator to generate the "Code"

That's really the gist of it.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. The "win" tinyurl.com (etc.) was that someone had the foresight to see the need at all and do it, not that it was hard to do.

Amazon got patents on less.

<comment><USER8> Wasn't it services like learn.to, beam.to and similar that came first? With the intend to have freely pickable shorthand URLs, where the shortness of them was just a byproduct?

I'm not sure of this, but iirc the learn.to/beam.to etc services were around in the early web already, mid-90s, while tinyurl and friends came later.

<comment><USER15> Those services were different because they were meant to provide an alternative URL for _your_ website, not someone else's. Also, they required you to go through a signup process and I remember some of them displaying ads.

And of course, there was no Twitter back in those days to create an artificial need for short URLs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Grains of Sand Reveal Possible Fifth State of Matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/sandgrains/

<comment><USER2> Technically this would be the 6th state of matter. The 5 others being:

Liquid

Gas

Solid

Plasma

Bose-Einstein Condensate (this one is really overlooked)

</comment><comment><USER3> Linkbait. This guy is noticing admittedly interesting characteristics of "grain dynamics," but it's not a new state of matter at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this happen in a vacuum?</comment>


Show HN: Aufeed, my weekend project turned into RSS Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.aufeed.com/

<comment><USER2> Like the idea of RSS feeds aggregator. Created a Pinterest styled mobile news app myself. Do you plan on adding images ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'd like to eventually. I was thinking of organizing articles in a Pinterest-like layout.</comment></comment>


What's really behind Slack's crazy growth? - <AUTHOR>

Slack is a messaging app that is less than two years old and already worth north of $2B with over 500,000 users.  Many people are calling it the fastest growing business application ever.
Slack CMO Bill Macaitis (formerly CMO at Zendesk) is interviewed on this podcast to go behind the scenes on Slack's explosive growth and talks about why they care so much about brand and NPS.
What do you think is behind such crazy growth? IM and chat has been around for ever and other services like Hipchat are very similar.  What do you think Slack's secret sauce is?  If Hipchat didn't sell to Atlassian in 2012, would they be valued at $2B?
Here's the link to the audio on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-slacks-explosive-growth/id963131164?i=338838103&mt=2 <comment><USER2> I think it's because it is the only group chat product that teams/companies can reliably adopt. Many companies would like chat, and it's always been available, but the employees don't use it. Slack's onboarding process and interface make it really easy to get people addicted to it, and make it easy for it to grow inside a company.

Our company is a good example of that; we have a lot of habitual resistance to improving communication methods and now some of the more unlikely people are on it and loving it.

The unlimited free tier certainly helps. I know we would not be using it if we had to get everyone going on a free trial, and I think other companies are similar.

Finally, now that a lot of companies have used it and talk about it, word-of- mouth is carrying the company into its high valuations.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's the "only group chat product that teams/companies can reliably adopt". There are others like Hipchat that are just as good. I'd be interested in knowing Hipchat's numbers...

<comment><USER2> Right, what I am saying is that Slack can be _reliably_ adopted, whereas products like HipChat, while successful, meet more resistance and it feels a bit more random whether a team will actually use it well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really get why it's better than Hipchat, but all my clients have switched to it. At least one switched because Hipchat had a long period of downtime right at the peak of Slack hype. I wonder how many customers that drove away?

<comment><USER5> I know a few people who switched because of HipChat unreliability. But all seem to be adamant that Slack is actually a substantially better product too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that Yammer and Slack both exhibited many of the same "enterprise messaging rocketship" attributes. What's ironic is they are in similar spaces. While correlation/causation issues aside, it seems to me that at any point in time, there needs to be a hot, "innovative" enterprise startup that captures the minds of people and wallets. The same thing will happen when Slack exits. I think this logic also applies to consumer messaging startups too. Communication and collaboration are massive needs that will always be around and need addressing.

Edit: it's like a vacuum (as in, power vacuum) that needs to be filled by some entity to restore equilibrium to the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> Enterprise salesmen.

Real capitalistic business deals are made on the golf course or at an expensive dinner paid by somebody else. Why target the users when you can target their bosses. Convince a corporate CEO to switch to Slack and you suddenly have thousands of users.

As much as we like to dream about it, the world does not run on merit. And politics can bury amazing products while proliferating shit. Read about Tesla, Turing and all the other guys that pulled us out of the mud. Innovation doesn't bring success. Being a ruthless greedy salesman does.

<comment><USER8> Isn't this completely opposite of how Slack actually grew in businesses? Everything I've ever read says they took a bottom-up approach by getting employees to adopt it outside of work.

<comment><USER9> Employees don't make decisions of choosing "what tool I would like to use", otherwise a ton of non-tech employees may even go as far as using things like Facebook chat.

The original OP actually provides the real answer (under the greying of the words).

CIOs/CTOs at bigger companies make the decisions that cost money (evaluate risk when depending on external communications tools), so with the right network and the right investors, Slacks high-level sales team managed to get the guys at the top to buy into their product and thus, even less than 1000 organizations gives them 500,000 paying customers per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At UC Berkeley I'm seeing a lot of student groups switching to Slack. For example, several CS classes (including one of the largest ones, Data Structures) are using Slack for internal communication. A lot of student clubs (including one I'm involved with) are using Slack now.

So the idea that Slack is only popular because of enterprise sales doesn't really hold water in my opinion. It really is a great product. All of these groups heard about Slack through word of mouth.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good question. My department just switched to Slack for our chats and I really don't see what the big deal is. It's great, but I don't see why it stands out.

<comment><USER12> It is web IRC as far as I can tell... again, am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> Comparing slack to IRC is like comparing an mp3 player with the first iPod.

And the answer is "yes" you're missing a lot.

<comment><USER12> Funny analogy. Because most of the mp3 players I had before the iPod I actually preferred. I still miss my Rio Karma ;)

<comment><USER13> Well in that case, the IRC might be a better fit for you.

<comment><USER14> I've used both, I prefer IRC--but not strongly.

I like being able to use any client and not a web browser. Doing things like pulling in images/videos is cool, but most of our use of IRC is just communication & "logging" to a degree--bots reporting new deployments, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it seems to me that Slack and HipChat are similar (and they are), I now know more than 10 people at organizations that switched from HipChat to Slack, and they are all absolutely adamant that Slack is better, and a substantially different experience. I'd really like to work somewhere that uses Slack, as I don't really have a good way to try it out within my workflow.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been wondering about this myself. I don't really see anything that separates it from HipChat or even Glip (Which we are using)? Am I missing something?</comment>


Ask HN: Hiring an overseas freelance programmer? - <AUTHOR>

Two cofounders and I are about 2/3 of the way through a version 1.0 of a web application. All three of us have full time jobs, so we have been coding the site in our spare time.
Right now, the site is entirely in Flash 9 because our main programmer was most familiar with it (compared to Ajax) and we were looking to get a working demo up as quickly as possible. Flash allowed us to build in a lot of features pretty easily, but obviously has drawbacks.
At this stage, we are looking to port the site to a wider audience by rebuilding it in AJAX-ified HTML. The lead programmer does not know his way around Ajax and javascript nearly s well as Flash.
The question is: in your experience, would it be better to hire someone overseas to recreate the site from the Flash template, or would it save hassle to just have our main programmer figure out  the necessary code himself? At this point, we would prefer to have someone else do the porting, since we all have limited time and there is more important coding to do. However, we do have some experience with outsourcing portions of the code, and know that it sometimes just leads to more headaches since the quality of the programmer and the reusability of the code can be suspect.
What are your experiences? <comment><USER2> Overseas? Overseas is not very descriptive of what you are looking for. I am an American working as an overseas developer to people in Europe and it works great. They are not outsourcing things to me though because I am a part of their team. We all work together.

If you are talking about outsourcing to save money then this likely will not live up to your expectations. Outsourcing can be to save money or it can be to farm out work to people who have skills you cannot find elsewhere. A good pro will charge what he/she is worth (probably not much different than what an American/European counterpart will charge) and will likely give you a better experience because an experienced pro is more likely to smell disaster before it strikes.

A "warm body" who is filling a chair for you at much cheaper rates than you can get anywhere else will be a mixed bag. Outsourcing is not fire and forget. If you simply shove your work to someone and expect great results then you will likely be wasting your time and money. Outsourced help needs to be managed just as well as the rest of the team. Certain things (data entry) might work well, but dev projects not so much.

Or you might get lucky. Again, mixed bag. YMMV.</comment>


Inside Ideo: How a leading design firm innovates - <AUTHOR> http://konigi.com/notebook/inside-ideo

<comment><USER2> the link is broken dude..what the hell..for the youtube videos</comment>


Update on Google Self-Driving Car Project [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik&noredirect=1 <comment><USER2> Really interesting talk. The accident with the bus is explained at 22 minutes. also- hilarious wheelchair duck chase at 26:15.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good to see this update. Sometimes it seems that very little is known about their progress.</comment>


Ask HN: Why has X not been updated from X11 since 1987? - <AUTHOR>

Is it simply perfect and can not be any better?<p>I find reading this statement incredible considering how widespread X is:<p>"X originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The protocol version has been X11 since September 1987." as seen here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_server <comment><USER2> And IPv4 has been the same since September 1981. Duh!

<comment><USER3> I hope you don't get downvoted for this comment. It illustrates the point perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Version numbers are such a mess as to be meaningless. Chrome advances in major version every few minutes, does it bring significant change? Linux was stuck at version 2.6 for a _decade_ , while undergoing turbulent change and progress.

X11 from 1987 is very different from 2013's X11, part of the name notwithstanding.</comment>


The Legacy of Lisp (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/baker-slides.pdf

<comment><USER2> one. word. clojure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably. Clojurists have attempted to have DB/ACID through STM/Datomic. core.logic and core.type for robustness. transit for intermediate representations (xml.nextgen).

<comment><USER3> I agree that Clojure is continuing to rapidly gain mind share – among long- time Lispers, relative newcomers to programming, and also seasoned "curly bracers" that a few years ago never thought they'd see a day when Lisp would make it into mainstream dev shops. Personally, I like it a lot and use it on a daily basis. The excitement around it is in no small part due to the insightfulness and ongoing hard work of Rich Hickey[1], his close collaborators at Cognitect[2], and some amazingly dedicated community talent (e.g. Philip Hagelberg[3]). Not to be overlooked is the brilliant decision to have it be a "hosted language" that interoperates with non-Clojure code on the JVM with little to no hassle _– that opens a lot of doors, better believe it!_

That being said, I attended RacketCon 2014[4] last Saturday and was blown away by the work going on in that community. Michael Fogus[5], a well-known name in the Clojure community, even gave the keynote[6]. The language's creator, Prof. Matthias Felleisen[7], and his grad students have been doing truly cutting- edge work over the last 18+ years (what became Racket was "conceived" at Rice University in Fall 1995). It's a fair question, though, whether the Racket team even _wants_ the language to "make it big," i.e. along the lines of Clojure's rapid rise in popularity. I got the impression they have mixed feelings about that prospect, and those concerns have certainly shaped (and will shape) their marketing of Racket.

My thought is that if, in the next couple of years, they are able to achieve a really good compile-to-JS story (some work has been done already[8]) and a solid JVM-hosted implementation, then they may get a bunch of spill-over from the Clojure community without even trying to "steal sheep". There are some tremendously powerful language-level facilities already built into Racket that will likely _not_ be implemented in Clojure any time in the foreseeable future, e.g. delimited continuations[9]. Also, the Racket team seems to have the right mind about learning from other languages, e.g. picking up some of the popular idioms from Clojure.

So, all in all, I think Lisp's legacy is far from definitive and it will be truly exciting to see what comes out of the Clojure and Racket camps over the next 5 years or so!

[1] [https://twitter.com/richhickey](https://twitter.com/richhickey)

[2] [http://cognitect.com/](http://cognitect.com/)

[3] [https://github.com/technomancy/](https://github.com/technomancy/)

[4] [http://con.racket-lang.org/](http://con.racket-lang.org/)

[5] [http://blog.fogus.me/](http://blog.fogus.me/)

[6] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe2tK5Lxybc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe2tK5Lxybc)

[7] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Felleisen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Felleisen)

[8] [https://github.com/dyoo/whalesong](https://github.com/dyoo/whalesong)

[9] [http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/conts.html](http://docs.racket- lang.org/guide/conts.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Restaurant getting bad reviews for slow service, hired a firm to investigate - <AUTHOR> http://news.distractify.com/culture/craigslist-surveillance-restaurant/?v=1

<comment><USER2> Customers are spending nearly twice as long at the restaurant because they are busy with their phones, yet the restaurant says "the number of customers we serve on a daily basis is almost the same today as it was 10 years ago." How can they serve the same number of customers if each is taking twice as long? Were half of their tables empty 10 years ago?

<comment><USER3> or they have more tables.

In any case, they conclude by asking people to be more "considerate". Whatever that means.

Perhaps there's a market for restaurants where you can be fed in 30 seconds, I could imagine something.

Or perhaps there's also a market for more expensive restaurant where you can take time to eat and have other social activities like talking, texting, taking pictures and having pictures of your table be taken. Also perhaps they could widen the space between tables so that we don't bump into one another when walking while texting.

Otherwise, it might suggest a feature in smart phones: a little camera on the top side of the phone that would display on the screen when the phone detects movement in that direction.

(only the last paragraph was half a joke, the rest is serious).

<comment><USER4> I was quite recently fed in 30 seconds at Umami Burger in Oakland. I placed an order online, walked there en-route to BART, they had my food ready.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Europa – An Open Source Self Hosted Container Registry - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/distelli/europa <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the founder at Distelli and we just launched a new container registry. For more checkout [https://www.distelli.com/europa](https://www.distelli.com/europa)

I'm happy to answer any questions and get your feedback.</comment>


Denis Johnson's God - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/looking-for-god-in-the-writing-of-denis-johnson/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to see this on here. I love Denis Johnson, discovered him after reading his last book.</comment>


Ask HN: ways to enable gifting in your app? - <AUTHOR>

'tis the holiday season, and many of us might like to integrate gifting in our products. Bonus points if it is something that can be integrated in a day.
ps: although all ideas or showcasing how your app enables gifting are welcome, for my demo i'm actually interested in a p2p api where personA can gift money to personB to buy a product my app recommends, without getting me involved in the t'xion
happy holdays ~B <comment><USER2> Maybe a user-creatable discount/coupon code and e-mail field for the friend?

E.g., something like: "Hi, your friend [Jane Smith] is a user of [Service XYZ] and is inviting you to use it! Use the following coupon code to get started! www.yourservice.com/random-hash/</comment>


How long would it take for a Foxxcon worker to buy an iPad? - <AUTHOR> http://robs.im/how-long-would-it-take-for-a-foxconn-worker-to-save-enough-money-to-buy-an-ipad/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the purpose of this post is?

Is it to show how expensive the iPad is, or to show how little Chinese workers earn on average?

When I was younger and less experienced as a developer, I worked as the groundskeeper for some posh apartments that I would never be able to afford. Is this the same thing?

Workers working at an assembly line factory don't make much money. I don't think that's news to anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the feedback, I've updated my post with a little section on what this means.

<comment><USER3> Not really sure about what is unfair about it. An iPad and iPhone is a luxury item.

It's actually startlingly easy for a worker in China to be able to afford something as amazing as a tablet computer.

There are certainly concerns about the factory "cities" that the workers have to live in and spend 95% of their annual income on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm all for higher wages for Chinese workers, but what does the final price of a manufactured good have to do with the manufacturing wage? If they happened to be applying their skills to something with a lower final price, like remote controls, wouldn't it be fallacious to assume that to be more just?

</comment><comment><USER5> What exactly is the point ?

How long it would take for the guy who washes the dishes in my favourite restaurant to buy the shoes I'm wearing? How long would it take a techie in a hedge fund to buy a yacht? How long would it take the sales guy a Cartier store to buy that 75kUSD watch?

More importantly, what would knowing this tell us about _anything_?

</comment><comment><USER6> Another important question to remember: How long would it take him to buy an iPad if he wasn't a Foxxcon worker?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure of the point.

How long would a Ferrari worker take to buy a Ferrari?

How long would it take a construction worker to buy the house they're building (in cash)?

And the list goes on...

</comment><comment><USER8> I apologize in advance for being off-topic, but the quality of comments on this post is really disappointing.

This article has only gotten 8 upvotes so far, but nearly as many complaining comments with pointless analogies about building sports cars or airplanes.

If you're going to complain about an article being pointless, you could post some useful fact or insights, instead of comments that are entirely devoid of any information.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't take this as the author making a protest about the Chinese workers being exploited (and I'm not getting into an argument about any potential exploitation.) If anything this article is just the author highlighting the living and working wage disparity between the east and west.

Honestly, I just took this article as a guy doing some maths about an interesting situation without any judgement about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> How long would it take a Boeing worker to buy a Boeing 777 Freighter?

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit The 2013 Bentley Continental Flying Spur Speed carries a $209,600 base price (with options can go to $245,440)[1]. How long would it take for a Bentley factory worker to buy one of those?

[1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentley>

<comment><USER3> Having been one of those factory workers -- it was not really something I lost sleep over.

I did get a laugh out of the thought, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ok, there's lots of backlash to this on here but I think the focus is a little wrong.

No, it doesn't make sense to use the cost of the manufactured item as a benchmark - it's not completely relevant as has already been pointed out.

You could look at it a different way. We are in a very privileged position - I'd bet almost everybody here could walk out and buy an ipad right now if they wanted to. The people in these factories are not so lucky.

The numbers just give a little perspective to reality of what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the positive feedback. I thought I'd just present the numbers and let people interpret them, but I guess I should've been more concise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not particularly informative. I worked on an assembly line for four months during the aftermath of the DotCom collapse building Mercedes M-Class SUV's. I've never _ridden_ in a Mercedes much less driven one.

Of course I could if it was a life goal but I still wouldn't waste my money on something like that.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know that there are machines that automatically solders all the chips and electronics on a board which I think is the hardest part, why isn't the whole electronics manufacturing process automated yet? Whatever the reason I don't think it will last long and then I wonder where all these workers will work then.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a tricky issue. They are being exploited, sure, but without foxconn jobs, where would they work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How many iPads could a (foxconn) worker have bought before China became a technology manufacturing hub is the real question?

Hell of a lot less I'd image. A lot less medicine and school for their kids as well I'll guess.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know, how long would it take a US factory worker to buy one? How long would it take for a Apple employee in Cupertino?

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, let's shut down the factory. Then it would take infinitely long.</comment>


Snowflake Computing raises $263M for its data warehouse - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/25/snowflake-computing-lands-whopping-263-million-for-its-data-warehouse/ <comment><USER2> > this latest round brings Snowflake's total funding to $473 million

Absurd. When I see deals this large, especially in enterprise software, it raises alarm bells. It seems likely there are at least a few "quid pro quos" involved here. When your customers and investors overlap and run in the same circles, it's hard to avoid the nepotism inherent in that world. The board members, investors, and customers are probably all executives at the same 50-100 companies. They have the power to purchase the product (demonstrating growth), invest in the product (demonstrating increasing valuation), and then acquire the product at a multiple of what they invested in it for.

I also wonder how much the founders are controlling, or if this is a case like Box where the founder owns <10% and the rest of the huge valuation is spread across dozens of different investors.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it is quite the opposite. Once an enterprise software company has crossed the $40m revenue threshold, has low churn, and growth is >2x, you got yourselves a winner.

Now Snowflake has grown 3x over consecutive years, and with all these big enterprises coming in, there has gotta be a true advantage.

Now the question is if this current advantage can survive an upgrade of say e.g. the capabilities of Amazon Redshift, that moves the latter to almost feature parity.

</comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano The question for me is, does Amazon buy Snowflake or beat Snowflake?

Snowflake is built on AWS, you can be sure Amazon has been watching them for years.

I'll put my money that by 2020 AWS will have a strong Snowflake competitor. Honestly, Athena/Redshift Spectrum are getting somewhat close.

<comment><USER4> I'm astounded these days when I pull up an overview list of all of the AWS products. They currently list 142 products (several should be excluded). It seems like that has tripled in maybe four years. One of the nice things about AWS trying to do everything, it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level. As they aggressively expand that product list, the number of things they suck at will increase.

<comment><USER5> _it 's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level_

Why?

If it was a smaller company then spreading resources out across more and more products could result in a drop in quality, but this is Amazon. They have practically unlimited resources. They can afford to put far more in to products than other companies, and they've already got a team who can build some really good stuff. If they can capture what works and use it to understand how to build their products that should result in _better_ products rather than worse.

<comment><USER6> By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge resources.

Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can make it good.

Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to suck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hadn't heard of this company so I looked on their website for more information about what they do. I came across this demo video that's a bit under 5 minutes that was pretty helpful:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUL8GO4ZK9s&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUL8GO4ZK9s&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER8> Here's a helpful link to understand their success: [https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark- dce9f4c529c1](https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1)

Essentially, their product is (at least) on par with major competitors like Google and AWS, no small feat for a young company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazon Redshift has some architectural problems in an enterprise environment that Snowflake solves. Redshift does not scale up well - everything has to fit on one cluster and eventually you hit limits.

When a Redshift cluster gets too big: 1\. Takes forever to take backups, create read-replicas, modify anything 2\. Redshift clusters can still only handle X concurrent queries, no matter how big the cluster is 3\. Also Redshift is dragging their feet on adding new features i.e. Active Directory support.

Snowflake clusters allow a theoretically unlimited amount of users to query the same tables in a database - so it scales up forever.

And each team can create their own "compute cluster" which allows teams to track and divide costs much more easily then trying to associate this-batch- user on Redshift with this-team/line-of-business.

Snowflake is well-designed for an enterprise environment where line-of- businesses need to share/access each others data but still have separate infrastructure. Redshift does not make it easy go between Redshift clusters.

Also Snowflake as a company is still hungry and is willing to add features if you pay enough

EDIT: However Snowflake is more expensive than Redshift

EDIT: Splitting data between two Redshift clusters was not efficient for us and trying to have the same table in multiple Redshift clusters requires you creating your own tooling and the data might not stay in sync so the only real option was keeping everything in one massive cluster

<comment><USER10> What makes you think snowflake is more expensive? When I have tested it, it has given higher performance / $. Have you seen different results with your workload?

<comment><USER9> If I remember correctly, Redshift became more cost-effective over Snowflake the larger your compute got.

Snowflake would just run an EC2 instance in the background for compute, and the very largest EC2 instances were more expensive to run than a Redshift cluster of similar power.

<comment><USER10> Snowflake is most definitely running multiple instances for anything but the smallest clusters. It's plausible that one warehouse might scale better as you increase the number of nodes but I would really be surprised if there was a big difference---the techniques for query execution are pretty well-known, so Redshift and Snowflake are probably doing the same things. I did a benchmark I while ago [1] and I'm definitely planning on adding multiple scales to evaluate how they compare as you increase data size.

[1] [https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark- dce9f4c529c1](https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Why would they call this Snowflake? What an awful name.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_schema](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_schema)

<comment> cup-of-tea Thank you for the answer. I'd never heard of it. It struck me as odd given that a snowflake is delicate and ephemeral which is exactly what you don't want for this kind of technology.

<comment><USER8> I agree with your previous post, even though the product's name is eventually related to a concept on the same field (snowflake data models) it doesn't seem like a very good choice of branding. I work for one of their customers and only now do I see their website on Google's top results; namely because they also don't have a .com for the brand name.

Even though this is less relevant in a B2B context, because research is usually more thorough, it's still a warning sign in terms of branding when you have a different brand that could be confused with yours: [https://snowflakesoftware.com/about/](https://snowflakesoftware.com/about/) (as posted by another user, strangely downvoted)

Also, snowflake data models are actually not very common (or appropriate/useful) in data warehouse/mart environments, as they tend to be harder to understand and use on a self-service approach, and require more joins between datasets/tables, unlike dimensional models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not to be confused with [https://snowflakesoftware.com](https://snowflakesoftware.com)</comment>


Why the P2P Foundation pays salaries in Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-the-p2p-foundation-is-paying-its-salaries-in-bitcoin/2012/03/28

<comment><USER2> I am still wondering why Bitcon has not created a scheme for user-friendly addresses. Remembering something like 19HcFgnnJseANJAHUjFifVwz68AGYrHc7v is way harder than Donate.P2PF or something like that. I think there is a URL service that offers a personalized handle, but implementing a better solution in the Bitcoin codebase shouldn't be so hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an interesting scheme called 'firstbits', which uses the blockchain (global, public, immutable) to determine the shortest prefix which uniquely identifies an address. At this point in time, an address can usually be identified with 5-6 hex digits.

Your 19HcFgnnJseANJAHUjFifVwz68AGYrHc7v address for example, firstbits down to 19HcFgn: <http://firstbits.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry... not hex: base64 (or whatever the bitcoin variant is.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am the guy who got paid, AMA (seriously)

<comment><USER4> Was the amount you were to be paid specified in bitcoins or in some other currency at the conversion rate on the day you were paid?

<comment><USER3> The honorary was agreed in Euros before starting my employment. When I was asked for the first invoice I included my Btc address, and wrote an email requesting to be paid in Bitcoin. The reception to the idea was so enthusiastic, including ending up writing a blog post about it (which I co- wrote). An account was created in one of the exchanges and the Btc were bought at market price, after which they were transferred to my Btc address.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. So from the sound of this, rather than being paid with a fixed amount of bitcoins (treating it as a currency), you were paid with a fixed amount of Euros (treating it as a currency) and it was transferred using bitcoins (treating it as a financial instrument).

This satisfies my curiosity: I have seen uses of bitcoins as a financial instrument (although this is the first time I've heard of it being used for salary payments), but I have yet to see it used as a currency (except for speculators).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You better convert it to $ fast. Otherwise, you many not have been paid as much as you earned.

<comment><USER6> Or depending on market conditions the exchange rate could move in your favor and those bitcoins can buy much more than what they could on the day they were earned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Schrute Bucks would've been my choice. /sarcasm</comment>


Databases: One Size Fits All - A Concept Whose Time Has Come and Gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html

<comment><USER2> Is the submarine at work again?

CPUs are also still running almost the same kind of instructions as conceived 30 years ago, but the internals have changed a lot. I suspect the same is true for databases - there must have been some technological progress, even if SQL itself hasn't changed.

And for CPUs, there are also special interest flavors (signal processors) that outperform the standard ones in special cases, but they don't make the "generic" CPUs superfluous.

</comment><comment><USER3> > it provides built-in features appropriate to the needs of 2007 customers

I get that they're arguing that the database should fit the customer, but isn't that rather a drastic market size limit to impose on oneself?</comment>


Where Should I Eat? Chain Restaurant Flowchart - <AUTHOR> http://eatingtheroad.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/where-should-i-eat-chain-restaurant-edition-flowchart/ <comment><USER2> Utterly useless as long as Waffle House is missing.</comment>


The Future of Augmented Reality - <AUTHOR> http://thomashunter.name/blog/the-future-of-augmented-reality/

<comment><USER2> Google Glass is cool, but I really dislike all these phone camera AR applications. They just don't seem at all innovative to me and it seems that when people mention AR, thats what most people think of. People seem to forget that AR really applies to anything where reality is augmented and there are much cooler applications than overlaying data on a location and orientation aware video feed on a phone using the phones camera. This comment isn't really about the article, but more about people talking about AR in general, since the article does talk about much more interesting forms of AR!

At the risk of tooting my own horn too much, here's an augmented reality framework I built as my final year undergraduate project: <http://dublindan.posterous.com/things-ive-worked-on-1> Basically, its an augmented reality system that uses only audio as feedback. One example application could be to guide blind people through obstacles.

Personally, I'd love to build something like that combined with Google Glass...

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is pretty much a few pages agreeing with your first paragraph, that AR phone apps aren't useful, but one day AR will be much cooler.</comment></comment>


Compare Multiple GPU Providers for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/maximize-your-gpu-dollars-a9133f4e546a <comment><USER2> Vectordash is also cool if you want to make money by leasing your GPU</comment>


No, really, the headphone jack is more useful than you think - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/applejack/ <comment><USER2> I agree that the headphone jack doesn't necessarily need to go right away, especially on larger phones, but I'm not one of the people who think it's the worst thing in the world to remove either. It does take up a lot of internal space because of the depth required. With how small the PCBs are on modern phones that actually matters.

That said, none of the points this article raises would matter if Apple would just stop insisting on being needlessly different and adopt USB-C like they should. Lightning was arguably slightly better than MicroUSB but USB-C does everything it does and more while also being standard instead of a pointless special snowflake.

I say keep the jack on devices where the space is available and use USB-C with alternate modes for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Removal of the headphone jack on the iphone is an idiot test. Idiots will buy apple products no matter how functional or not functional they are, simply because they're named iProduct.

Anyone with any sense will see this as a good opportunity to give Android a spin.</comment>


Test your *.js files against jshint before committing - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/1597099

<comment><USER2> You can use Sublime Text 2 and install Lint plugin. Voilà, automatic JSHint- ing while coding in JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Perl and Objective-J. [http://1p1e1.tumblr.com/post/14262857223/9-reasons-you- must-...](http://1p1e1.tumblr.com/post/14262857223/9-reasons-you-must-install- sublime-text-2-code-like-a)

<comment><AUTHOR> If I used Sumblime Text 2, I'd absolutely use the Lint plugin. Looks awesome and I've heard great things.

I've really grown to love my MacVim setup, though.

Thanks!</comment></comment>


DST Invests $50 Million Into ZocDoc - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/02/dst-invests-50-million-into-zocdoc-so-they-can-finally-get-a-decent-logo/

<comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone booked with ZocDoc? It seems pretty amazing. I was shocked to see that I could get appointments all over the city for as early as this week. It seems usually you have to wait weeks or months.</comment>


Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for trying to be objective - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/freshloaf/2010/02/15/atlanta-progressive-news-fires-reporter-for-trying-to-be-objective/

<comment><USER2> It seems like a very reasoned and logical firing to me, and it's a nice touch that they aren't glossing over the reason.

If you want to be a partisan newspaper, that's legitimate, particularly if you are willing to state that is what you are aiming for.

<comment><USER3> _If you want to be a partisan newspaper, that's legitimate,_

If you want to be a partisan editorialist, that's legitimate. Leaving out key facts, say, because you claim that there is no objective reality, is wrong. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. No one is entitled to their own facts.</comment></comment>


Chad Rigetti on Building Quantum Computers [video] - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/chad-rigetti-on-building-quantum-computers/ <comment><USER2> The story of how Cray and his team created the CDC 6600 is really great [0]. Cray decided they had to get away from corporate interference so he picked a bucolic town a couple hours away from corporate HQ, moved his whole team there, and they worked in peace to develop a machine that was 10x faster than anything else.

It's unclear today if quantum computers will be useful, just as it was unclear in 1962 if supercomputers for large scientific numerical calculations would be useful. It'll be interesting to see.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards- Su...](https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards- Supercomputer/dp/0471048852/ref=sr_1_1)

</comment><comment><USER3> For anybody interested in quantum computers I very enthusiastically recommend taking a look at Scott Aaranson's blog - [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER4> His last bit reminds me of a quote I first heard on the West Wing:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43DOgo2VzGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43DOgo2VzGU)

<comment><USER5> Genghis Khan: a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens. I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think quantum computing will have any sort of impact on drug discovery. Chad mentioned quantum computing's impact on drugs. Anybody know what he's referring to?

I haven't seen anything to suggest that there's big problems out there waiting to be solved by powerful computing capabilities. Has anyone else found something that suggests there's active problems waiting for quantum computers?

I've always found the missing thing in life saving pharmaceuticals is sick people to test compounds on.

Nonetheless, good to see YC pushing the envelope on impactful stuff.

I hope they desperately bring some inorganic and organic chemists with 10+ years of experience. It would open a new can of ventures that are meaningful. The good problems, the great ones, are in chemistry.

<comment><USER7> The main computationally intractable problems around drug discovery surround protein folding and identifying macromolecule shapes. This is necessary to infer receptor sites for potential drug targets.

The problem is massively intractable. QC could revolutionize the space.

<comment><USER8> Remember though, NP complete problems still are intractable (exponential complexity) even for quantum computers, to say nothing of NP hard.

Unger and Moult (1993) have shown a three-dimensional protein folding model to be NP-complete, and a two- and three-dimensional mathematical model describing the folding process as a free energy minimization problem is NP-hard:

[https://www.gwern.net/docs/1993-fraenkel.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/1993-fraenkel.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea of "pumping entropy out of a system" and getting people do that vs. leaving more in than there was before.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious what the MVP is? Despite the whole counterargument to Eric Ries school of thought, even YC's thesis is that "hard companies" should have some sort of initial stepping stone.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious why he pronounces Regina incorrectly (he went to the University of Regina), when he is from Moose Jaw, a 50 minute drive away. It's really really strange. 7 year old children all across Canada know how to pronounce that city correctly...how does a guy forget something so basic?</comment></comment>


Why Startups Have Fewer Dilbertian, Pointy-Haired Bosses - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/2691/Why-Startups-Have-Fewer-Dilbertian-Pointy-Haired-Bosses.aspx <comment><USER2> At large companies, much of the busy-work that you remember from school goes on. It's important for everyone to have something to talk about at their weekly status meetings. At large companies, there are lots of useless people, useless management, etc.</comment>


Power harvesting shock absorbers increase mpg by 10% - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/shock-absorbers-0209.html <comment><USER2> _Avadhany [...] adds, "it is a completely new paradigm of damping."_

The article neglected to mention the similar Bose [Amar G.; MIT 1951] system, which also generates electricity: [http://www.bose.com/learning/project_sound/bose_suspension.j...](http://www.bose.com/learning/project_sound/bose_suspension.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "This is a disruptive technology," Anderson says. "It's a game-changer."

It certainly is a slick hack, but "disruptive technology"?

...I do not think that that word means what you think it means...

<comment><USER4> Of course it does: this is Industry 2.0!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmmm. Another piece of technology which increases the cost when buying the car, increases the cost when you need to replace it, for a marginal increase in efficiency ( _up_ to 10% -- more likely to be ~2%, and on urban routes, I'm not betting on those gains on the highway).

Just like xenon headlights, huge starter engines for fast start-stop times, complex injection systems, etc, these increase the costs of building and maintenance, for little benefit, and huge profits for the auto industry.

When do we get mass-produced electric engines already?! They're not as complex as Otto engines (thus lower maintenance costs), so when do we start producing them in large scale to get lower prices?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't believe the 10% number. I would think energy lost to vibration and lateral motion would be negligible compared to air resistance, tire friction, etc.

<comment><USER7> It did say "up to 10%", which I think is fairly believable since they were testing with large vehicles.

<comment><USER8> Only problem is hydraulics aren't very efficient and waste much heat. They claimed a recovery of 1 kilowatt, which is just over one horsepower (746 watts by definition.)

Now if that vehicle has a 200 horsepower gas engine and is boosted by a 1 horsepower, a 10% claim might be stretching it. An older generation Toyota Prius has a 10 horsepower electric motor, which can propel it over 30 mph. One horsepower might be good for about 5 mph. I suppose there might be unusual driving conditions that might realize a 10% increase in mpg, but not in our world.

<comment><USER9> The average car needs ~25HP to maintain highway speeds. So 1hp could be ~4% of the car's energy needs. It takes a lot of energy and HP to accelerate quickly but you don't spend a lot of time accelerating like that. At lower speeds over bumpy roads I guess 10% might be possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the same Zack Anderson that built the warcart (<http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/warcart.html>) and created the fiasco with the charlie tickets. He is quite an impressive hacker.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember tossing this idea at a friend, and being told that someone was probably already working on it. I didn't have the drive and/or to follow up on it anyway, but it's nice seeing a good idea being executed.

</comment><comment><USER12> My buddy lives down the hall from Zack Anderson and told me about this.

I remember chuckling when I heard that Zack parked his hummer w/ shocks in a handicapped spot. He got some ugly glares.

</comment><comment><USER13> The code to detect reposts clearly needs updating. If a story submitted contains a link to a previous post, shouldn't that raise a red flag?</comment>


Scaling SQLite to 4M QPS on a Single Server (EC2 vs. Bare Metal) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a-single-server/ <comment><USER2> Colocation seems to have fallen out of favour over the past decade, but it still provides the most bang per buck for server performance. The only difference is that provisioning takes weeks to months vs seconds to minutes via an API call.

Where this has the most impact on performance and cost is visible in storage systems. Low tier solutions on AWS have notoriously bad storage performance. 20MB/s is useless for just about anything modern.</comment>


Netflix changes terms to terminate accounts that use a VPN - <AUTHOR> http://www.information-age.com/industry/services/123459269/netflix-changes-terms-terminate-accounts-use-vpn

<comment><USER2> I'm sort of in this category - using a DNS redirecting service in order to access US based streaming services.

I'm in a particular painful category too - I live in Jamaica, an English speaking country that gets lumped into "Latin America" for the purposes of most US media - so we actually do have a Netflix Latin America & Caribbean service available, at the same price, except that the selection sucks compared to the US service, and a lot of the content is overdubbed in Spanish. Same things happens to us for HBO, TNT, etc.

Netflix will get the big torrent-based FU from me if they do this... they're going to lose thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of customers from this.</comment>


Effective workout you can do if you're stuck in a room with no equipment - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZnsLVArIt8 <comment><AUTHOR> This has been my "excuse-buster" workout for years. No equipment required. You just need a room with a tiny bit of space. I've done this in small hotels room before, no problem. If you're stuck somewhere right now and unable to access a gym, this is a great way to keep your conditioning up until the situation improves. I have no association with the publisher of this video, I just think it's a great workout.

These days, people are having a lot of anxiety about the sate of the word. And staying indoors and sedentary is going to make that anxiety 10 times worse. Make sure you're able to get some exercise to keep your mind healthy during all this.</comment>


Code let lottery vendor predict winning numbers, police say - <AUTHOR> http://www.wral.com/lottery-insider-s-brother-arrested-in-jackpot-fixing-scandal/15624521/ <comment><USER2> Six prizes? Should have just done it once and then laid low (if he wanted to get away with it, not saying it was ethical). Seems like he got greedy.</comment>


Self-driving technology is going to change more than cars - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/self-driving-technology-is-going-to-change-a-lot-more-than-cars/ <comment><USER3> There's going to be a tipping point in the near future. When autonomous vehicles reach a big enough share of miles driven, there's going to be a snowball effect. All of our roads and infrastructure are built for human drivers. Robot-only roads could far cheaper and more efficient. No more signs or lights. No more lanes. Not even partitions. You can dynamically adjust your 8-lane freeway to be 6 lanes one way and 2 the other and flip it morning and evening.

Once the tech is proven and accepted by enough people, it will become mandatory and we're going to rebuild everything with a much smaller footprint.

<comment><USER4> > There's going to be a tipping point in the near future.

I'm not holding my breath. I grew up hearing people talk about how we would have Mars colonies by now. Imagine my surprise a couple of decades later when the shuttle program ended and the U.S. lost the ability to send people into space for a time.

The way I see it, the clock is ticking. If self-driving cars don't reach a certain level of capability soon, I suspect they simply won't; the technology will have plateaued at a point where it will not be viable in the foreseeable future. It'll be like supersonic flight: full of promise in the 1960s and 1970s, but mothballed for decades after that waiting for some engineering breakthrough to make it commercially viable.

<comment><USER5> Another problem is consumer confidence. Self driving accidents have a much higher impact in the news and people's minds than human error accidents.

The perception problem is the same as air flight. If self driving cars can't be essentially accident free passengers will be filled with the anxiety of lack of control. Even if the self driving car is 99% safer than human operated cars it's a hard sell to the buyer when you face that 1% risk that the consumer doesn't perceive as being a mitigation toward their own driving safety skills.

Apologies for the incomprehensible last sentence, hope you get the gist though.

<comment><USER6> Government investigators will not have that bias. I expect in ~10 years it will be illegal make a new car that is not self driving because self driving cars will be statically safer. Some years (10?) after that and human driving cars will be limited to parades.

Note, I include in self driving cases where there is a human seemingly in control, but the computer will override bad input and even take over all driving as needed..

Edit: originally this implied that it would be illegal to posses a manually driven car. Governments will not remove all the existing cars from the road that quick.

<comment><USER7> You think all cars that are not self-driving will be illegal in 10 years ?!?!?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame What's going to be more interesting:

\- Police departments won't get revenue from traffic violations anymore.

\- Police won't have the source of suspicious, law-ignoring driving to find people who need to be found.

\- Towing & crash repair shops will drastically drop in business (maintenance will probably increase, but not commensurate).

\- Auto insurance won't be able to justify high premiums anymore.

<comment><USER8> \- transplant patients won't have access to as many organs if vehicle fatalities drastically decrease

<comment><USER9> There's a hypothetical world in which organ distribution is so efficient and prevalent that the average fatal car crash saves net lives. What a strange kind of "trolley problem" that raises...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What will really change is your ability to hop in a car and literally drive anywhere you want; be it some random corner of your yard, backing down a boat ramp, or some unmarked gravel road deep in the country side. Not to mention the day companies and governments have the ability to electronically restrict where you or the population at large can visit. It will become trivial to look down entire cities and road systems.

I think people will under-appreciate this incredible freedom in travel which we have now until it's gone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting read, though I think they're overestimating the cost of the human driver in relation to the total cost of running a route/taxi/shuttle/bus/etc. If you go completely autonomous, maintenance costs don't go away. (And in fact vandalism probably goes up.) Fuel costs, which at some point are going to become a big deal again, don't go away. And permitting fees either stay the same, go down or go up, depending on how local governments handle it.

<comment><USER12> I guess we can approximate vandalism very easily through both shared car platforms such as car2go (for vandalic users that are left alone in the car), and vandalism against taxi substitutes such as uber (for rage against displaced driver jobs).

It doesn't seem that car2go-style cars get vandalized a lot; next-user reporting controls most of what goes above a level of vandalism (smoking users and some trash in the car is normally not reported).

Rage against uber by taxis has been more rampant (imho); so if we add bus drivers, lorry drivers, taxi and Uber drivers, etc. there might be a lot of damages on the short term. But once these displaced workers find another job that vandalism will disappear, so it will be transient during adoption times only.

<comment><USER11> You haven't captured every motive for vandalism, but I agree with you that it's probably mostly transient. Kind of like how the people who go crazy with drugs & prostitution in Amsterdam (well with pot legalization I probably no longer have to travel quite so far to fetch this example, but anyway...) are mostly visitors for whom such a thing is novel. Most Dutch natives are pretty blasé about having access to those things.

I notice the Car2Go (or e.g. Zipcar) next-user reporting system depends on their knowing the identity of each user at every point in time. Which is presumably also true if you've used an app to hail or summon an autonomous vehicle... Still I guess I was nostalgically imagining something like the relative anonymity of today's cash-fare bus services. (Though even those are loaded up with surveillance cameras.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that a large amount of skepticism is justified... There's a reason that all self-driving car trials are running in states with mostly sunny weather and no snow.

Let me know when a self-driving trial is being run in Vermont or New Hampshire. In November.

<comment><USER14> > all self-driving car trials are running in states with mostly sunny weather > and no snow. Let me know when a self-driving trial is being run in Vermont > or New Hampshire.

Would Detroit Michigan's snowy winters count? Google, Ford, and Chevy already do routine winter testing there : [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/alphabet-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/alphabet- s-waymo-will-test-self-driving-cars-in-wintry-detroit)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen any info about wintertime testing. Sadly the article has no info on the results of the testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When this starts scaling, there is definitely going to be a culture clash between these autonomous vehicles which follow the exact letter of the law, and the human drivers who routinely don't.

When you get stuck in the line of cars behind one of these things in the fast lane, and it's not going 3-8 mph over the posted speed limit like everyone else...

I'd bet that they are going to have dedicated lanes.

<comment><USER16> The letter of the law in many states says that if you are not passing you must use the rightmost lane. So, these cars should pool up in that lane while human drivers zip by to the left of them. There are humans that go the speed limit today, and this is usually what happens.

<comment><USER17> In my experience, the cars in the slow lane are often going well below the speed limit. So you could easily have self-driving cars, driving at the speed limit, in the passing lane.

I'm curious if they would be programmed to 'move in' to allow a faster (exceeding speed limit) car to pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't help but think there are going to be significant unforeseen consequences of this -- consequences that will give rise to business models we haven't even begun to consider yet. Off the top of my head: why have retail stores to which you have to drive 5 to 15 miles? Put a densely packed warehouse (one that looks more like a large home than a warehouse going ten levels below grade) of the most commonly needed groceries right in a cluster of neighborhoods and orders can be made online, picked by robots, and delivered by autonomous vehicle (and restocked from larger, more central warehouses in a similar manner).

And kicking it up a notch: how about the domestic robot signing for the order and beginning dinner preparations with the just-in-time delivered products while the humans in the house... well, play video games....

<comment><USER19> While I am enjoying the Jetsons-like future that is envisioned in your post, I'm quite curious how we can maybe do simpler solutions. For example, we used to have a milkman who just dropped off milk on our front door. I can easily imagine dairies owning their own regional distribution networks with autonomous vehicles performing milk deliveries for much cheaper. No domestic robot really needed to sign for the order.

Same goes for groceries, I suppose. A co-op of farms operate an automated warehouse together whose responsibility is to consolidate the various fruits and vegetables and distribute via autonomous vehicles to homes. It gives a competitive advantage to regional farms so they can actually still do things at a reasonable economy of scale.

Just my two cents. Also, yes, video games all day. :)

<comment><USER18> The domestic robot and video games part was tongue-in-cheek but your idea of locally-sourced, fair-trade, free-range, antibiotics-free, non-GMO, brownie- points-loaded options could greatly benefit from this type of logistics setup. Really what this does is make it a lot easier to never have to leave your home for any reason if you don't want to. There are some people with this type of phobia now who can work from home and have everything they need delivered to them, but they are an abnormal exception. As the cost over going out to get your own stuff versus staying at home and having it all come to you drops toward zero I wonder if anti-social reclusion might become an unintended consequence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the concept car of Nuro, looks like a moving shelf, maybe could be possible to scale that to a bigger size. Where each customer, can pickup his groceries. random thought: an autonomous milk car with fresh diary from your local farm

<comment><USER21> In the not too distant future. It will be something more akin to:

1) Fridge finds several items low and proceeds to order groceries.

2) Website schedules car to be driven to store.

3) Store Robot packs groceries and finds car in car-park.

4) Negotiation between Car and Robot occurs, groceries placed in trunk.

5) Car drives off home.

6) Car notifies domestic robot that groceries have arrived.

7) Groceries put into fridge by domestic robot.

8) Lazy human requests that domestic robot gets them a can of beer. Unaware that the whole process occurred.

<comment><USER22> A lot of efficiency and responsibility/insurance issues will be solved if the store used its own fleet of delivery cars. Other than that, we can hope this materializes. Domestic robots will be a revolution.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure. I'm thinking it will be on my way home my car stops at the grocery store for a few minutes to fill my trunk, thus saving the energy to drive my car and their car to my house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Living in a popular rural area with a lot of seasonal tourists ... I see the future of self driving cars as mobile homes and hotels. Sort of like a mobile air-b-and-b. A lot of my friends chase wind, waves and events around the area. So they pack up a caravan or home made camper van and drive to the location and party and surf. There is a crowd of 20 or so who share van space and give lifts. I can only see this getting more popular. They already rent vans out. When these become custom self driving surf wagons complete with shower kitchen etc people will live on the move. Travelling at night while the passengers sleep.

<comment><USER6> They don't even need the kitchen/shower. When traveling I tend to eat at restaurants, or find a park with a grill (sometimes I bring a camp stove). Truck stops already have showers - they will need new users for them as there are no longer truck drivers.

I've long wanted this, travel for 10 hours at night while I'm asleep, check out a historical museum in middle of nowhere Kansas, drive an hour, have lunch, and check out some county park (again in the middle of nowhere), then have supper, drive a bit and watch the sunset over some historical marker and the process repeats until I'm at Grandma's house. Much better than the current plan of watching cotton fields go by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The first thing that will happen is self driving trucks.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not mentioned here but likely highly dependent on Self-driving technology is all the various forms of flying vehicles (example [https://lilium.com/](https://lilium.com/)). The advantages are endless, 3d traffic, zero road cost, direct line flight, speeds exceeding highways. Primary real downside is energy cost.

<comment><USER26> Energy cost is only worse for quadcopters. A small fixed wing airplane gets roughly the same gas mileage as a car in traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Self Driving RVs and Bay Area rent/realestate prices. Imagine being able to wake up in front of your office, then walk the 10 feet back "home" at the end of the day. Then after an hour or so of hanging out in your mobile home's living room walking outside to your spot in the Muir Woods.

</comment><comment><USER28> Integrate into this mix all the future possibilities created by new materials and AI including better drones, flying cars, advanced forms of collapsible bicycles, and new forms of intercity transport including self carrying luggage and we can expect churn in the ways we transport ourselves and our stuff for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER29> See also Ben Evans's:

[https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars- and-s...](https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second- order-consequences)

</comment><comment><USER6> Somebody needs to start working on the last 10 meters problem: from my driveway to the fridge.

<comment><USER30> It won't be an issue if your fridge is inside the autonomous vehicle, that just parks to your kitchen wall.

<comment><USER6> Interesting idea, but I don't think it works in practice.

I have foods and spices scattered across many cabinets in my kitchen - <USER2> like every other family in the world (except for a few hunter/gather families). Making them all autonomous vehicles would be expensive.

I also sometimes come in at random times and snack - the fridge with the snack I want better be there, not out to the store to be refilled. This again is a situation that every family in the world faces some variation of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Narrator voice: It won't.</comment>