Raising Floor for Minimum Wage Pushes Economy into the Unknown - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/business/economy/scale-of-minimum-wage-rise-has-experts-guessing-at-effect.html <comment><USER2> > Their evidence rests largely on comparisons between neighboring areas with > different minimum wages. The seminal study in this vein examined fast-food > restaurants on both sides of the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border before and > after New Jersey raised its minimum wage in the early 1990s. It found no > evidence that employment there fell as a result.

This is often cited in publications that generally support a higher minimum wage. It is unfortunate that this is never challenged as there are studies that show that an increase in minimum wage does in fact result in lower employment:

> Raising the minimum wage would increase family income for many low-wage > workers, moving some of them out of poverty. But some jobs for low-wage > workers would probably be eliminated and the income of those workers would > fall substantially. [0]

Logic itself would suggest that an increase in minimum wage would result in at least some unemployment:

No employer would hire you if you make them less than the amount that they have to pay you. There are people that make more than the old minimum wage and less than the new proposed minimum wage. Therefore, those employment opportunities will no longer exist. It may not happen overnight as there is some momentum, but you can't deny this effect. Also, you can't exactly measure the people that would have been hired with a lower minimum wage.

The other interesting this is how vernacular plays such a strong role in people's opinions. Imagine if "minimum wage" was replaced with "prohibition of employees whose contributions to employers is less than the mandated minimum amount of finding legal employment"

[0] [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44995](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44995)

<comment><USER3> Your assertion may or may not be true, but there's no way I am willing to accept that as "logic". Your assumption is that the profit margin on labor is 0% which logic would suggest is pretty universally false.

Here's my logic, maybe you can help me find the flaws in it: businesses are trying to maximize sales and minimize costs, which means they have the smallest possible workforce required to support their current sales. Less staff means less sales. They are also making some profit. As long as the wage increases are less than their profit margin, they have no reason to fire anyone. They lose revenue if they fire anyone, or they would've already done it.

So to me he relevant question is: what is the ratio between profit and minimum wages at most companies? I looked at Wal-Mart as an example and they make way more in profit than they spend on wages.

<comment><USER2> In traditional economics you want to look at marginal cost versus marginal revenue. If it costs you $10 to produce another widget you can sell at $10.01, you will in order to maximize profits.

You will hire people up until the point where the marginal revenue that employee provides is equal to that of the marginal cost of that employee.

Of course companies make profit, but that's because the marginal cost curve is upward past a certain point. So on average, the average cost is less than the marginal cost

A visual representation explains it well. When you talk about profits, you're talking about average cost. When you're talking about whether you should hire an extra worker, you're talking about marginal cost versus marginal revenue.

[https://apecon3.wikispaces.com/Marginal+Revenue](https://apecon3.wikispaces.com/Marginal+Revenue)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it interesting that when the government distorts a market via pricing controls, taxes, or other means, the law of unintended consequences almost inevitably kicks in and it's result is either "bad luck" or calls to "fill in the loopholes!" Distort the market and people are rational-enough agents and will change their behavior, just not necessarily entirely in the way you hope/want. There is no free lunch.

Either the economic distortion makes it cost-effective to pay people to find ways to dodge the distortion and come up with strange, but legal, means to avoid it, or there are shortages, or the price of things go up.

It's like trying to squish one part of a water balloon -- the other part of the balloon will deform in some way.

Some examples: "The Double Irish arrangement" for tax avoidance, ObamaCare effectively limiting part timers to 30 (or 35, I forget which) hours/week, or strict zoning laws causing property values to skyrocket due to lack of supply of housing in SF.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't believe that raising the minimum wage will trigger businesses to cut jobs significantly. They will probably pass the higher cost onto the consumer. Ultimately, it's a method of wealth redistribution, which is sorely needed in our economy.

<comment><USER6> Passing costs on the client isn't something you can just do. Many products and services have elastic demand. Fast food, for example, has been has found it very hard to raise away from their dollar menu pricing.

Businesses don't have to cut jobs either. They just have to move them.

Edit2: Costumers can also shift to lower cost alternatives. Online retailers have less overhead and lower labor costs. If you make Walmart more expensive than Amazon, Walmart will shutter stores laying massive numbers of people off.

Edit: Some economists have argued that past raises in min wage have not made noticeable impacts in employment. But this is way outsides of a normal rise in minimum wage. Going to 9 or 10 makes a lot sense. 15 dollars will put people in most of the country out of work.

<comment><USER7> >15 dollars will put people in most of the country out of work.

So be it. Can't find a job that offers a living wage? We provide a social safety net and increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for it.

Make more than a million dollars a year? 95% marginal tax rate. Tax rates are the lowest they've been in the history of the US, and all we've seen is a disgusting level of income equality.

<comment><USER8> "Make more than a million dollars a year? 95% marginal tax rate."

Great. Then what? Everyone currently making over $1m a year will cut their salary to $1m. Then you gotta start taxing the upper middle class -- what rate do you want to tax people making over $500k? $250k? $100k? Those are the ones that will pay for this program.

As much as you want to tax "the wealthy", there really aren't enough wealthy people to pay for everything, and it comes down to how much you want to tax the moderately successful person who is trying to pay for their 2 kids' college expenses while saving to have a retirement.

<comment><USER7> > Great. Then what? Everyone currently making over $1m a year will cut their > salary to $1m.

Do wealthy individuals in other countries with a heavier tax burden (Europe, Scandinavia to be specific) do this? Would be nice to see evidence of this behavior before outright dismissing raising taxes.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Google "millionaires leaving X" and see what the autosuggestions are for X and choose one. While some are US states - NY, Maryland, etc - most are countries.

Here's the top couple using France: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/07/23/flight-o...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/07/23/flight- of-millionaires-reasons-to-give-thanks-for-one-percent-taxes/)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france- drops-75...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france- drops-75percent-supertax)

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the minimum wage is a helpful tool or has been historically. But as others have said when you raise the minimum wage, prices increase, and by far the largest groups that consume the same goods/services are also relatively poor themselves (so essentially you increase pay but also costs to the poorest in society).

More as a thought experiment than anything: What would happen if, instead of increasing the minimum wage, we capped the MAXIMUM wage at companies to 500x the lowest? That would effectively cap the CEO's pay at 6.9 million dollars for ANY business which pays the national minimum wage. That might sound like a lot but a lot of CEOs at larger corporations are getting in the order of 20 million right now (and this would have almost zero impact on small-medium businesses, as their CEOs don't make enough yet).

I guess what I am asking is: Instead of increasing minimum wage, what would happen if we could align the interests of the poorest employee and richest employee in a business?

PS - I am well aware that CEOs often don't take direct pay and instead take other financial instruments, such as stock. Instead of getting sidetracked into all of the potential workarounds, can we discuss the moral/legal/practical of tying the lowest/highest employee pay together?

<comment><USER11> Ben & Jerry's use to do this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry%27s#Wages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry%27s#Wages)

<comment><USER12> Yep, and they stopped it because the CEO they hired to replace Ben (or Jerry I forget) was horrible and mismanaged the company

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO one of the interesting ways to think about: "Overall, how does our economy value human-time versus material-goods"?

Even if the cost is passed on to the consumer (many of whom will, in turn, will have more to spend) it represents a shift in how we (implicitly, through costs) balance "1x Acme Appliance" versus "1x hr child care", etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> The real minimum wage is always 0.

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the difference between "raising the minimum wage" and "raising the floor for the minimum wage"? Is that just a redundant headline?

</comment><comment><USER16> Landlords will benefit, short term.

I suspect that people will move to areas offering higher minimum wages, which will drive up rental housing costs in those areas.

<comment><USER17> I think in some places the people making the new higher minimum will already be priced out of the housing market for the area the job is in. That doesn't rule out housing price increases at the other ends of their commutes, but I wonder if it will diffuse it quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment> kuni-toko-tachi It is foolish to think that this won't result in unemployment. We live in a time in which higher labor costs for marginal work can be eliminated through automation and these higher labor costs will only accelerate that transition. You may not like that fact, but that's what will happen. You don't a free ride on planet earth and no foolish government policy can change that.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. Minimum wage is a hack on labor that barely worked 60 years ago when full employment was some sort of reasonable goal. It's a ludicrous superstition now - better to just institute a basic income, abolish minimum wage entirely, and let employers pay people whatever they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is absurd. The results of raising the minimum wage are perfectly known. Learn from the other countries that have done it in the last 10-15-25 years. Australia, Scandinavian countries, etc. etc.

Why can't America look outside it's own borders and learn from what other countries have done and are doing?

i.e. watch this John Oliver video on gun control [1] where it's stated Australia is not on this planet and America can't learn anything from what they've done, because Australia is not the real world. Why do people think this way?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE)

<comment><USER20> Please don't bring generic ideological tangents into already-controversial topics. Any vector that runs through the points "minimum wage studies", "American self-centeredness", and "gun control" is guaranteed not to lead to substantive discussion.

The OP may be wrong, but it's hardly absurd. Let's stick to the substance.

<comment><USER18> How can you stick to the substance if drawing on other examples is out of bounds?</comment></comment></comment>


Make any web page a desktop application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier <comment><USER2> So now you can run multiple memory instances of chromium, one per web site, instead of sharing the core. It's not like chromium is a huge memory consumer anyway.</comment>


The Cost of Getting My Stolen Computer Back - <AUTHOR> http://thebillfold.com/2015/01/the-cost-of-getting-my-stolen-computer-back/ <comment><USER4> This is weird. In my country, if a thief sells the stolen goods, the original owner will get them back without having to pay and the person who bought them off the thief is the one who ends up paying the bill (if the thief cannot be found). This is the appropriate way to handle things because it disincentivizes buying stolen goods.

EDIT: People point out to me that this was also the case here but she wanted her computer back fast. I still don't understand why the pawn shop was allowed to keep the laptop after the discovery that it's stolen good, and how it was allowed to sell something it does not own. But I don't have the legal expertise to judge this situation, it's just confusing to me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, pawn shops are usually very wary about buying / taking stolen goods - after all, they'd be guilty of fencing if they bought / sold the stuff. I'm pretty sure people have to leave a copy of their ID too (or if not, they should). Although that can be faked, of course.

Anyway, if I was a thief I'd steal something, make sure to wipe the thing as soon as possible and power it down (due to Apple's remote location service), then leave it for a month, maybe two, before selling it on a random online auction / secondhand product website, preferably with a new / fake account and through seven proxies.

And even then I'd be hesitant. Apparently the thief only got $225 for the macbook - probably some more from the jewelry and other stuff. Is $500 worth spending years in jail or whatever for?

Then again, $500 for some is a small fortune.

<comment><USER6> The large "pawn" shops that most normal people frequent are probably quite strict about the seller letting them copy their ID, and they make sure the deal does not look sketchy. But I am sure that for every large second hand shop there are dozens of smaller ones hidden out of sight which will buy anything for cash, no questions asked.

<comment><USER7> That seems like some low hanging fruit for local police stations to target. How serious a crime is "dealing in stolen goods" in the US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish the author would have tried negotiating with the pawn shop. The pawn shop would have been out the entire 225 had she not bought the laptop back. Realizing this she could have offered a lot less and it would have still been in their best interest to sell it to her. She just needed to bluff a bit that she would be willing to let the police confiscate it if the cost was going to be over X. I bet she could have gotten it back for $50.

Also as others mentioned it's a pretty broken system that she would need to do this at all - that her laptop would be locked up in evidence for so long. But lemonade from lemons, ect...

EDIT: Also do we even have any proof that the pawn shop actually paid 225 for the laptop? It's in their best interest (financially, not morally) to lie and state a higher price. Ie. They may have profited off of selling the laptop back to her.

<comment><USER9> yea, I didn't understand how the pawn shop can hold her laptop for $225. Isn't the pawn shop in trouble for receiving stolen merchandise? If not in trouble, obligated to release it for free knowing it was stolen, etc...

I get she could have waited and then got it back at no cost, but why pay a fee to get it sooner if the dam thing is sitting in a drawer not being investigated.

Are you trying to tell me the police are waiting on her decision to investigate or not? Seems the laptop should be evidence regardless.

<comment><USER8> I think they would only be in trouble if they knowingly received stolen merchandise. It doesn't sound as if that was the case. They are obligated to release it to free to the police, as evidence. It does indeed sound like the police were waiting on her decision to investigate or not. They probably understand that it's a massive headache to be without your laptop for months, and also that there's a very low probability of catching the criminal, and thus gave the victim a reasonable alternative to having to wait so long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a question... And the more I consider this question the less "clear cut" the answer is.

If the OP walked into the pawnbroker, asked for the laptop, and then literally grabbed it and left ("stole it") would they get away with it? Now, knee jerk answer is: "no that is shoplifting" but then when you consider they'd be shoplifting their own property that the pawn broken had illegally to begin with...

Legally (or even morally) it isn't at all clear cut. In fact I don't know how the law would fall in this scenario. The pawn broken almost certainly couldn't sue the OP, it would be hard to prosecute it, and possession is 9/10ths of the law.

In fact this sounds like a super interesting question to give to a law class to debate. I'm sure you can take the question and get five different (all correct) answers.

<comment><USER11> It may be your property but you cannot break the law to get it back.

<comment><USER10> Exactly what law are they breaking? Taking their own property with them?

I didn't suggest they assaulted the clerk, threaten, or smash their way out. Those are illegal. I just said leave.

As I said before, the more you think about this question the less black/white or obvious it is. Your answer is a knee jerk one, but needs a doctoral dissertation level of clarity.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about your country, but where I'm from the theft Act 1968 seems to cover it pretty clearly, and I am most definitely Not A Lawyer:

The basic definition of theft is given at the start 1:1 'A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and "steal" shall be construed accordingly.'

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/1](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/1)

You might immediately say that this discounts the possibility of the original owner committing theft, but 5(1) partly defines 'belonging to another' as:

'Property shall be regarded as belonging to any person having possession or control of it, or having in it any proprietary right or interest (not being an equitable interest arising only from an agreement to transfer or grant an interest).'

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/5](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/5)

So, the computer appears to 'belong to' the pawnbroker, as they have possession and control of it. But let's look back to 'appropriation'.

3(1) 'Any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner amounts to an appropriation, and this includes, where he has come by the property (innocently or not) without stealing it, any later assumption of a right to it by keeping or dealing with it as owner.'

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/3](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/3)

So, regardless of who 'really' owns it, taking it from the pawnbroker (to whom it 'belongs' under the act) is 'appropriating property belonging to another' However, now we look at the definition of 'dishonest':

3(1)A person's appropriation of property belonging to another is not to be regarded as dishonest— (a)if he appropriates the property in the belief that he has in law the right to deprive the other of it, on behalf of himself or of a third person;...'

So, if the owner believes that they have a right to take it, then they can't be guilty of Theft. However, if the owner takes it without that belief, then they may be. I don't imagine that it would be hard to convince a jury or magistrate that that belief existed.

Perhaps other offences under the act are appropriate:

22(1) 'A person handles stolen goods if (otherwise than in the course of the stealing) knowing or believing them to be stolen goods he dishonestly receives the goods, or dishonestly undertakes or assists in their retention, removal, disposal or realisation by or for the benefit of another person, or if he arranges to do so.'

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/22](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/22)

This would imply that if you take stuff believing it to be stolen (which the owner would have a hard time denying, as those are the grounds on which the repossession attempt is being made), then you are guilty of "Handling Stolen Goods"

However, looking further into the act, we see:

2(3) 'But no goods shall be regarded as having continued to be stolen goods after they have been restored to the person from whom they were stolen or to other lawful possession or custody, or after that person and any other person claiming through him have otherwise ceased as regards those goods to have any right to restitution in respect of the theft.' [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/24](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/24) Therefore, it must be impossible for the owner of an item to handle stolen goods.

Section 11 governs the offence: 'Removal of articles from places open to the public.'

11(1) '... references in this section to a collection do not apply to a collection made or exhibited for the purpose of effecting sales or other commercial dealings.'

11(3) 'A person does not commit an offence under this section if he believes that he has lawful authority for the removal of the thing in question or that he would have it if the person entitled to give it knew of the removal and the circumstances of it.'

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/11](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/11)

So it can't be that, either.

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 gives provision for 'Low value shoplifting', this item is less than £200 so would be treated as such. However, this is just about whether it should be dealt with by magistrate or crown court, and requires an offence under 1(1) of the Theft Act.

Do I get my D.Jur?

<comment><USER10> > The basic definition of theft is given at the start 1:1 'A person is guilty > of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with > the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and > "steal" shall be construed accordingly.'

> You might immediately say that this discounts the possibility of the > original owner committing theft, but 5(1) partly defines 'belonging to > another' as: 'Property shall be regarded as belonging to any person having > possession or control of it, or having in it any proprietary right or > interest (not being an equitable interest arising only from an agreement to > transfer or grant an interest).'

Nothing dishonest about it. Plus using the logic of your argument the shop owner is also violating that 1968 law. So arrest them both? Or was the shop owner not "dishonest" enough but the person who originally purchased the property and wanted it returned "dishonest?"

Seems like you're using a double standard here.

> So, the computer appears to 'belong to' the pawnbroker, as 1they have > possession and control of it. But let's look back to 'appropriation'.

All the appropriation clause indicates is that if someone purchases property in good faith they effectively aren't a thief under the law. But all that means is in our scenario neither the shop keeper OR the original owner are thieves.

In the UK, and I know this for a fact, if property is recovered it is returned. You aren't charged for it. I know this because someone recovered stolen goods from a CeX store (which is kind of like a Cash Converters).

Simply bringing up the appropriations clause doesn't prove (or disprove) that the original owner would be considered a thief since you're misusing the law anyway.

> The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 gives provision for > 'Low value shoplifting', this item is less than £200 so would be treated as > such. However, this is just about whether it should be dealt with by > magistrate or crown court, and requires an offence under 1(1) of the Theft > Act.

Doesn't apply. You cannot shoplift your own goods. Just like the hat or coat you had on when you entered the store isn't "shoplifted" when you left the store wearing it.

You cannot steal your own property.

> Do I get my D.Jur?

Grow up. Your post was good, that was immature.

<comment><USER12> >Nothing dishonest about it. Plus using the logic of your argument the shop owner is also violating that 1968 law. So arrest them both? Or was the shop owner not "dishonest" enough but the person who originally purchased the property and wanted it returned "dishonest?"

You evidently missed the bit where I explored the definition of dishonest.

For clarity, I'll expand here. If I go into a shop, and pose as a customer, but then run out with it in my hand without paying, then, by a colloquial definition of dishonesty, I will have "dishonestly appropriated" it. However the Act specifically defines "dishonestly" in section 2 (the relevant line is 2(1) which I erroneously wrote as 3(1). See my comment above - "So, if the owner believes that they have a right to take it, then they can't be guilty of Theft.")

> Seems like you're using a double standard here.

In what way? For a start, I've made no assertions about the criminality or innocence of the pawnbroker. The pawnbroker may be guilty of Handling Stolen Goods, but is more likely to fall under the good faith statement in 3(2). All I've stated is that the original owner is not guilty of an offence (unless by some odd mental quirk, they took it without believing that they had a right to do so).

> All the appropriation clause indicates is that if someone purchases property > in good faith they effectively aren't a thief under the law

The first clause in the section describes what is appropriation (i.e. assuming the rights of owner). The second clause is the good-faith exception you describe.

> Simply bringing up the appropriations clause doesn't prove (or disprove) > that the original owner would be considered a thief since you're misusing > the law anyway.

Yes, that's why, after bringing up the appropriations section, I brought up the dishonestly section, to show that the only situation in which the original owner could be a thief is if they took it without believing they had a right to do so, which would be very odd behaviour. It's also why I went on to explore the other two offences, of which the original owner could not be guilty either.

>Doesn't apply. You cannot shoplift your own goods. Just like the hat or coat you had on when you entered the store isn't "shoplifted" when you left the store wearing it.

Yes, that's what I said. '... and requires an offence under 1(1) of the Theft Act.' In order to be considered shoplifting, it must be a theft. Since it isn't a theft, then it isn't shoplifting. I brought it up to point out that even though there's another act that might cover this, but doesn't, because it refers to the Theft Act for a definition, which we have already shown, does not apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think what a lot of people are missing is that the items were (most likely) recovered because the pawn shop was doing its due diligence. This article ([http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-07-13/news/fl-pawn- sto...](http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-07-13/news/fl-pawn-stolen- property-recovery-20140712_1_pawn-shops-palm-beach-county-sheriff-property)) mentions that when an item is bought, the pawn show puts information about that item in a database that law enforcement has access to. The author also didn't HAVE to pay to get her laptop back. She mentions that she could have had the police seize it as evidence, but then she would have to wait for the resolution of the case to get it back. She paid for the privilege of getting her laptop back sooner.

</comment><comment><USER14> A lot of the folks here who are criticizing the writer for "paying the ransom" (of sorts) rather than let the cops take it for evidence: slow your roll and put yourself in her shoes.

It's not that she wanted it "fast", it's that the alternative was waiting •months• for the gears of justice to turn. Furthermore, this is a person whose income was such that she had to turn to friends to scrape together a lousy $250 to get it back — the snow could be thawing by the time this person could buy a new laptop OR the original was returned by the police.

Justice is for people who can afford it (or, hate the game, not the player)

</comment><comment><USER15> So, as the rightful owner of the laptop, with proof (serial numbers, receipts, etc), could she not just have walked in, asked to see it, and walked out with it? What are they going to do, call the police? And are the police really going to charge her with theft of her own property?

* edit: typo

<comment><USER6> I am surprised the Police didn't take it away and give it back to her - <USER2> had all the proof the laptop was hers. It shouldn't be her problem that the pawnbroker paid anything for it, it wasn't theirs.

<comment><USER16> The cynic in me says the police officer got a share of the $225 under the table. Why else use an extrajudicial process for something that should be easily resolvable within the law?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For similar reasons I have 5 years old HP Elitebook 2540P. It has 8 GB memory, two ssds, lasts 9 hours on battery, dual CPU goes up to 2.6 GHz...

It costs $250 to replace it. I can leave it in hotel without ssd. And it can take rough handling, moist exposure etc...

I found that newer laptops do not offer anything new. You shave off one 1 pound, but loose most extendability options. I might update once some 13" laptop offers 24GB RAM.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good story. However, even though she got her Mac back she was still pissed! I'd have been doing handstands down the street!

<comment><USER19> This whole story is whiny white girl first world problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's why when getting insurance for your personal items you always ask to have it without any excess. It costs slightly more(on mine the difference is so small it's negligible) and it avoids stupid situations like that. She would have just gotten the money back from the insurance and it would be it.

<comment><USER20> Also, backups. The data is often more valuable than the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised the author didn't buy a cheap Chromebook or Windows Netbook and have the MacBook taken as evidence.

</comment><comment><USER22> I may be misunderstanding something but should the pawn shop not be prosecuted for buying stolen goods?

<comment><USER23> You have to prove that the pawn shop knew that the items were stolen.

<comment><USER24> Plus, it was the pawn shop's work in submitting serial numbers that got the items found. If the pawn shop gets prosecuted for turning in paperwork, they will turn in less paperwork.

<comment><USER25> Why doesn't it work in the other direction - where the pawn shops check the serial number in a police database of stolen items before they purchase it, and then contact the police silently if it turns out to be stolen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the one reason I am considering a Dropcam Pro.

<comment><USER10> So instead of paying $225 to a pawn shop you can pay $225 for the Dropcam Pro..? Dropcams are overpriced, but no camera would have stopped this, they already caught the thief, so they didn't need additional evidence.

If you think you'll see the video and rush home before the thieves leave then you misunderstand just how little time your average robbery takes. 15-20 minutes at most, most much less (10 or less minutes). Get in, grab valuables, and get out. They just presume silent alarm or neighbour spotted them, and act accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Last month I had my laptop stolen for it to be retrieved from a bin in a neighbouring council estate, screen, keyboard and case wrecked.

Because it had been retrieved (which was good in that I got my data back) it was not 'stolen', merely 'criminal damage'. Although a police matter rather than something I have to pursue with 'civil action' of my own, a lot of hoops have to be gone through before things happen.

So the original box - Dell 'high end' from 2 years ago cost £800. Trying to work out what was wrong with it and then running around town + the internet to get a repair quote has taken a good day of my time. This was quite an effort with a lot of repair shops just not able to give a quote just like that. Either they want £50 for just the quote or they don't want to bother with it as it is too much hassle - fair enough. Eventually - thank my lucky stars - <USER3> get a quote for £417 from some small repair shop, this was just the ticket I needed to be able to help the police proceed with some action.

The thief have allegedly had their 'bail hearing' and I am none the wiser as to what happened. Even if they were going to pay the £417 the quote came to I doubt that I would want it fixed given the hassle involved in that. A new replacement machine is what I would like, not something that has the scars of quite a traumatic incident. Even though prices go down it still costs ~£800 to get a similar PC (i7, HD screen, backlit keyboard, 8Gb RAM, aluminium case). A £400 'High Street' machine might be pretty good but I doubt I will get the magic 'i7' badge.

So the costs - I needed the machine for out of hours support so other arrangements had to be made for that. I spent quite a lot of time with the police at the time of the incident and following things up running around to repair shops - surprisingly draining. Plus the story is not over yet, by the time I am done it could be a week's worth of effort to get the thing back, and that is assuming that the thief just comes up with the money.

How do I value my time? If I look at lowest of the low contractor rate as a starting point and imagine how much a few days work for a client could be then my time spent running around for some notional £417 could be more profitable. Plus I would achieve something.

Oddly though, even though I am 'turn the other cheek', in this case I am keen that the thief has the criminal record and the difficulty of getting £££ together. The fact that £417 does not buy me a replacement 'i7' machine (with backlit keyboard, HD screen and 8Gb RAM) is in some ways a detail.

Although I have had the help of the police I am surprised at how things work out - thief released under caution and some assumption that I don't deserve my machine simply replaced - 'like for like' and not patched up together again. Also this burden of running around town to get quotes for a repair, isn't my time valuable?

</comment><comment><USER28> Has a 2013 MBA, but can't afford a $225 expense?? Mac users are hilarious

</comment><comment><USER29> The author seems completely annoyed at the fact that he had to pay to get his treasured top-of-the-range laptop back from the pawnbrokers (who were also out of pocket otherwise).

In my opinion the net outcome is extremely positive. He might have never got it back and then he'd be forced to buy a new one (albeit with insurance money), but he would have lost all his files assuming he has no backups. Even if he had backups, restoring his laptop back to its exact previous state isn't easy for most people.

I'd be completely stoked if my stolen laptop turned up and I just had to pay the pawnbroker for what he was out of pocket for.

The author is a "glass half empty" kind of guy.

<comment><USER30> Anyone who buys something from someone else, but _especially_ a professional like a pawnbroker, has a duty to make sure the goods they're buying aren't stolen. Failing to do that is a crime in many countries ("handling stolen goods" in UK parlance). The very least the pawnbroker should pay is the cost of whatever they're out of pocket for, but really they ought to be facing criminal charges. People being willing to profit from stolen goods is what keeps people stealing. If no one was willing to buy something that had been stolen then people would stop taking things (or at most they'd steal what they need themselves).

Perpetuating criminality is _in no way_ a good thing.

<comment><USER20> _Anyone who buys something from someone else, but especially a professional like a pawnbroker, has a duty to make sure the goods they 're buying aren't stolen._

Isn't that what the pawnshop did, by submitting the serial numbers to the cops?

 _The very least the pawnbroker should pay is the cost of whatever they 're out of pocket for_

And they would've, if she had followed the legal procedure, she just didn't want to wait.

<comment><USER9> "Isn't that what the pawnshop did, by submitting the serial numbers to the cops?"

Yes, after they shelled out $225 to a thief.

<comment><USER20> What do you expect them to do?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Autopilot avoids 45mph T-bone accident on dark, stormy night [video] - <AUTHOR> https://innovately.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/tesla-autopilot-avoids-45mph-t-bone-accident-on-dark-stormy-night-video/ <comment><USER2> I'm really looking forward to this tech -- I recently was at fault in a highway chain-reaction accident where I was trying to merge right, and looked over my right shoulder at exactly the time when the car in front of me stood on his brakes. WHAM! With collision avoidance, which many carmakers are shipping in high-end cars, I would have safely stopped. (The car behind me, fortunately, had allowed more distance and was looking ahead -- and didn't hit me.)

This video is quite similar; it's not showing anything unique to Tesla, but it does show the promise of systems that are not subject to human attention FAIL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agreed. That's why I really hope sluggish legislation doesn't get in the way of expediting the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles, and why I'm doing what I can to write about these issues as much as possible. I'm sorry to hear about your accident, but I'm glad (it sounds like?) you were (all?) ok. As a side tip, if only as an interim solution until you get a car with some sort of accident-avoidance features, may I suggest a tip for your mirrors to eliminate your blind spots? Your side mirrors should be used ONLY for viewing cars to your sides, while your rear mirror ONLY should view cars behind you. To test that it works, a car should slightly overlap from your rear mirror, into your side mirrors, and then into your peripheral vision. If your side mirrors are largely duplicating your rear mirror, then they are not set up correctly. Proof that it is possible -- necessary! -- to set your mirrors up like this and fully eliminate blind spots is that certain cars (like convertibles with the top up, or any car with unusually large/wide C-pillars) make it impossible to see over your shoulder, and require that you set up your mirrors correctly. Just a little tip, and I hope it helps! :)

<comment><USER2> 100% of the driving advice I've ever gotten is to always look over your shoulder before moving over, no matter what a glance in the mirror says. In all fairness, had I not been too close to the car in front of me, that glance would not have led to an accident.

I do have my mirrors adjusted as you suggest. From my experience with rental cars, I suspect that you and I are the only people in the world who do it that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, same. Unfortunately most of the advice we get in the US is from asshats who don't know proper driving technique. Regardless, the fact is that in certain cars, looking over your shoulder is totally futile anyway; accordingly, you'd best have an alternative solution!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It avoided a bad driver. But let's not forget that that the driver who turned without a glance is a real piece of garbage. It's unfortunate that they get the benefit of Tesla's autopilot, no consequences for them. Even when their selfish dissonance could have killed or maimed fellow citizens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. But unfortunately, here in the US, we have especially bad drivers. And even great drivers can make mistakes or get distracted. I have a virtually untarnished driving record, yet I'd still welcome such added protection. After all, pilots have enjoyed such systems for decades.

<comment><USER3> I would welcome the protection as well. I still feel that the other driver needs a good punishment though, without consequence, there is no behavioral therapy -- that idiot will continue to do their shenanigans and when the oncoming lane has a normal car instead of a Tesla, people will die. Bad driving is really an oversimplification of the fact that someone decided to take a 2 ton vehicle, and enter a lane of traffic without even looking. That's more akin to malice or shifting responsibility than ignorance. It is also very very dumb though, because the odds that there is a car in the other lane that even has enough time to stop is not a guarantee. So it's not only selfish but also dumb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, fair enough. Agreed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does everyone hate MongoDB? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.serverdensity.com/does-everyone-hate-mongodb/ <comment><USER2> I think a lot of the "hating" is a side effect of MongoDB being consistently oversold in terms of its capabilities and architecture. Many people who are not experts on databases discover this the hard way later. If the claims about it were qualified a little better and the limitations acknowledged more openly by its proponents it would help to mitigate this outcome.

I am indifferent to MongoDB but I do caution people that the internals and implementation are quite primitive for a database engine. It is the sort of database engine that a programmer that knows little about database engines would build. Over the years that has repeatedly manifested as problems no one should ever expect a database engine to have if properly designed. There is a reasonable point where you should not have to read the documentation to see if your database has a basic design flaw; there is an assumption of competent architecture for its nominal use cases.

MongoDB has improved in this regard over time and many other popular NoSQL (and SQL) databases have similar problems. Users are being asked to cut the database some slack for less than competent engineering choices but users just want a database to work. Being "simple" isn't enough.

<comment><USER3> I like the concept of MongoDB. My main problem (which perhaps is not totally clear from my post, linked in the article) is that there are certain historical conventions about what a database should be. In particular, a database will not have the following default behavior:

\- return from a write call silently, when the data wasn't written and will not be.

If you are going to break conventions on a multi-decade tradition, there should be warnings everywhere. Not just the Downloads page, but during installation (which is harder to ignore, as the Download page is not seen by people like me who use package managers).

The 32-bit issue is worse. There's no excuse for not warning people that the server they just started is a crippled data store limited to 2GB.

Again, I like MongoDB. Given my experience with software development, those issues are telltale signs of a product in its infancy. Hence the "10 years" title of my post, which of course is hyperbole. But it will take time for Mongo to be user-friendly enough.

By the way, those who say that a piece of software has no need to be as user- friendly as possible, and you should thoroughly read the manual before even experimenting with it simply live in a different world. The more of a head start the software can give you, the better. The fewer the gotchas, the better. That was the philosophy of IndexTank, and it worked.

<comment><USER4> I haven't got a 32 bit version of Mongo, but people pointed out in the other thread that 32-bit version of mongod displays a little warning every time you start it saying it can handle only 2GB of data.

Can you confirm this ( _because I don't have the 32-bit version installed_ )? It still stinks, especially because it "silently failed after hitting the threshold", but I personally would feel better about 10gen if this little story is true (i.e. they warn you about it not only in downloads page, but every time you run mongod).

<comment><USER5> Yes that is true for me, at least using the 10g binaries for Linux (not the Ubuntu package). You get this warning everytime you start the engine. You'd probably have to look at your logs to see it. It is also referenced in the installation documentation.

Look guys, MongoDB uses a memory-mapped file. How can it be larger than 2GB on a 32-bit system? There should not need to be "warnings everywhere".

<comment><USER6> I think expecting end-users to know or care about the implementation detail of a memory-mapped file is even sillier than all the other silly expectations floating around this thread.

<comment><USER5> You are right I would not expect end-users to know this. I would expect someone who writes articles about DBMS to know this though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My problems were to do with data-loss and unrecoverable corruption. I didn't write a blog-rant, but maybe I should have.

I have since learned that I could have changed some configuration options to make MongoDB less likely to corrupt and/or lose data. I'm still wary though - the fact that the default configuration was prone to unrecoverable data loss suggests that any time I use MongoDB, I must carefully research the feature I'm using to make sure I don't do it in a way that causes data loss.

I believe dangerous configurations should never be the default, and dangerous features should be clearly labeled. The default method for writing data should not fail silently, for example. The fast, fire-and-forget write should be called something like "unchecked_write".

<comment><USER8> It's not just that the defaults are dangerous, but that if you change the default, you give up much of the performance benefit of choosing Mongo in the first place.

<comment><USER9> Sorry but NOBODY is choosing MongoDB purely based on speed.

If they were they would go with something like MemSQL, Redis etc.

<comment><USER10> They did it more when it first came around. Redis wasn't in the same category. It was usually compared to CouchDB, another one I don't remember, and then traditional SQL DBs. Couch for example looked much worse in benchmarks because it tried a bit harder to take care of users' data and didn't just fling it over the fence. But it mostly lost out because OMG benchmarks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a nice summary of many of the problems with MongoDB, and a good set of fumbled excuses as to why they might not actually be problems. Most of the answers boil down to "Well, yeah, but if you know how to [long complicated solution here], then it's not a problem," while simultaneously admitting that the problem is present and that the solution (if it exists) is extremely difficult and requires specialized knowledge.

All I can do is laugh and keep on using Postgres...

<comment><USER12> Interestingly I just wrote an article on dzone (published in their NoSQL zone ;-) ) about building encapsulated data models on PostgreSQL. I discuss a bunch of ways of doing this. I totally agree with the idea that one should encapsulate data in application, but that's what an RDBMS is for if you know how to use it.

My approaches to db interfaces have been greatly inspired by REST and SOAP. The thing is giving up on the RDBMS is usually the _wrong_ choice. If using NoSQL, usually it is best as an adjunct to the traditional RDBMS (particularly for pre- and post- processing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We've been using MongoDB in production for our main content store at Conversocial for over a year now. We've gone from 1.8 to 2.0 to 2.2 and we're happy. We have ~400gb of data, 220 million documents all on Amazon's SSD instances.

We have definitely had our moments where we've screamed that we hate Mongo and are going to rip it out. That's normally where we've overlooked a detail of how it works... and we've had this same experience with every database technology we use - including MySQL and Redis.

The day after, when we've cleared our heads... we're happy again. The same as the other technologies.

I think that with all technologies you're going to get bitten by some detail you didn't know about or had forgotten. The trick is to mitigate these disasters by thinking about your failure cases.

<comment><USER14> At our company we have a much bigger MongoDB dataset in production. I can relate well to your comments, since it is the same stuff that I hear from our developers as they defend Mongo after yet another horrific situation. They have a tough time admitting that Mongo is the problem, and instead always find ways to say that it was their fault.

This is such a strange thing for me to observe, but I think that it has to do with the fact that MongoDB works so smoothly initially with a default install that it hooks you in, and then later when you have a large dataset and it stops working well, it's hard to understand how what was such an amazing technology can now fail so badly.

It's also a huge problem that once you run MongoDB at scale, you desperately need experts to fix things, but it's so hard to find any so-called experts who can help. 10gen did a great job of marketing to developers, but unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic. Running any significant MongoDB database in production requires as much expertise as someone running a big MySQL instance, but there isn't a community of database lovers around MongoDB who you can hire.

The DBAs and operations people I know dislike or even hate MongoDB, often for valid reasons that 10gen should address such as the as-yet-unfixed 'write lock' issue, code instability and inaccurate/misleading documentation. 10gen has done a great job at evangelizing to developers and making features that developers love. Now that 10gen has so much money, I hope that they can now afford to start making MongoDB a database that Ops people and DBAs can love.

As a final note, this ServerDensity guy is clearly looking at the world through mongo-colored glasses. It makes sense I suppose since he is all-in with MongoDB for his company. But we were using his service up until three months ago, and had a lot of problems with intermittent performance issues that seemed to be database-related since the site was still working and only certain pages would take 30 seconds or so to load. It's possible that the problems were temporary and no longer exist, but it brings home my point. If MongoDB experts can't make their own services 100% reliable, what hope does a regular startup have of getting MongoDB to work well at scale.

A developer may feel comfortable making the decision to go with MongoDB, but if they are wrong it won't cost them their job and they won't need to pull their hair out dealing with Ops issues all the time. If a DBA or Ops guy is being hired to manage a company's datastores, I don't see MongoDB (even 2.2) being a contender. At this point there are simply other DBs available that can perform the same or nearly the same without all the fussiness. Developers may be unhappy since nothing yet is as easy to develop on, but they'll be happier in the end when stuff 'just works'.

<comment><USER9> > But unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a > long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic.

WTF ? I have never heard 10gen say anything remotely like this. And it surely hasn't come across in their marketing. I mean seriously. Which developer thinks that in a production environment they are going to be the ones supporting the database ? Nobody.

> If MongoDB experts can't make their own services 100% reliable, what hope > does a regular startup have of getting MongoDB to work well at scale.

The fact that you base your impression of MongoDB based on ZERO evidence just conjecture that the slowness of their site is database related says a lot about you too. There are many other reasons it could equally be: app server, network etc.

> If a DBA or Ops guy is being hired to manage a company's datastores, I don't > see MongoDB (even 2.2) being a contender.

Have you even worked at an enterprise company before ? DBA/Ops aren't the ones in control. If the development team wants MongoDB installed and have business justification it gets installed.

> Developers may be unhappy since nothing yet is as easy to develop on, but > they'll be happier in the end when stuff 'just works'.

But it does 'just work' that's the whole point. Developers aren't stupid and MongoDB is not the only database around. You just need to (god forbid) understand how the thing works.

<comment><USER15> > But unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a > long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic.

>>WTF ? I have never heard 10gen say anything remotely like this.

From the "Ease of use" section of their Philosophy page <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Philosophy>,

       This means that MongoDB works right out of the box, and you can dive right into developing your application, instead of spending a lot of time fine-tuning obscure database configurations.

There goes the indirect jab to the RDBMS DBAs wasting their time.

<comment><USER9> How on earth do you equate that statement with "we don't need a DBA when we get into production" ?

Do you need a DBA to get MySQL running ? No. Oracle ? No. SQL Server ? No. That's all it means. Normal people understand that there is a difference between getting something running and deploying it into production.

<comment><USER15> Point me a doc(or a tiny little red note link, like in the 32 bit installer download page) where 10gen says that you will need a dedicated MongoDB DBA to maintain production server. You see 10gen marketing machine have successfully created a perception that MongoDB is so much magical that you don't have to worry about data. New programmers with less knowledge in RDBMS are buying this argument. And most of the time they start into development just after reading basic tutorial. This the problem GP is trying to address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does everyone hate MongoDB? - 25 Sept 2012

Headline Problem: Too many people are ranting about MongoDB.

Mistake: Too few data points. Overly defensive of MongoDB.

Comments: You should probably learn more about Riak. The "From MongoDB to Riak" is light on details but isn't really hand-waving. The author is saying that having a masterless database results in less fretting. <http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Compared-to-MongoDB.html>

Also, why two rage faces? Can't you get your point across without resorting to silly memes?

<comment><USER17> Now that Couchbase Server 2.0 is beta, it's a reliable alternative to MongoDB. Same JSON goodness, different set of user stories. (hint: less rants). Get the beta download here: <http://www.couchbase.com/couchbase-server/beta>

<comment><USER4> If you (like me) don't know what's the difference between CouchDB and CouchBase, look here: <http://www.couchbase.com/couchdb>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Comments: The 32 bit limit is noted (perhaps it should be a warning) on the > download page but the main problem was the author did not know when writes > started to fail. MongoDB uses unsafe writes by default in the sense that > from the driver, you do not know if the write has succeeded without a > further call to getLastError. This is because one of the often cited use > cases for MongoDB is fast writes, which is achieved by fire and forget > queries._

(in reference to I'll Give MongoDB Another Try. In Ten Years, [http://diegobasch.com/ill-give-mongodb-another-try-in-ten- ye...](http://diegobasch.com/ill-give-mongodb-another-try-in-ten-years))

I read the referred article and the HN discussion...but wasn't quite able to tell how much of the debate was focused on the reasonability of this default rather than "developers should read the docs, or accept catastrophic failure" attitude (which is not inherently wrong).

What immediately comes to mind is the Rails ActiveRecord update_attributes vulnerability...the default was to allow the updating of all specified attributes with the assumption that no competent developer would trust unsanitized input from the browser. After a good Samaritan performed a spectacular hack on Github, the Rails team immediately changed the default.

Is that the situation here with the 32-bit silent fail default? That it is a sensible default, but could be changed if it's shown that competent devs will nonetheless screw it up?

<comment><USER19> _Is that the situation here with the 32-bit silent fail default? That it is a sensible default, but could be changed if it's shown that competent devs will nonetheless screw it up?_

It's kind of sad that we'd need an example to show that it really could happen in every single specific case. It should be common knowledge by now that competent devs screw things up all the time.

For example, I'm sure the MongoDB devs are extremely competent. But all the same, having a database management system default to letting writes fail silently is a pretty spectacular screw-up. I can't really blame other competent devs for taking it for granted that a DBMS wouldn't do something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's not conflate "hating" (which is always pointless) with pointing out flaws in a design.

"Mongo sucks f*cking balls" is hating it. "Mongo silently does not store data in some situations" is pointing out a flaw.

It is easy to dismiss valid criticism as hate. It is also unfortunately true that some topics degenerate to flamewars on HN. Why Mongo is such catalyst is a phenomenon in itself. One that I find fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Getting your working set in memory is one of the most difficult things to calculate and plan for with MongoDB."

I am a little bothered when I see a working set described as though it was a property of the user or workload.

A large part of database research has gone into allowing the user or the system to make the working set smaller. An obvious example is an index, which makes the working set smaller if you don't mind a random I/O or two per lookup (of course, that only works for indexable queries).

There are also many operations in a database which try to work within a limited amount of memory, and therefore must have a small working set regardless of the data size. Sort and HashJoin are two examples. HashJoin doesn't tell _you_ what the working set of your data is, _you tell it_ and it works as efficiently as it can in that amount of memory.

And you can design your data layout to have a smaller working set (again, so long as you allow a few disk accesses outside the working set). Normalization and vertical partitioning (i.e. splitting a table up into several tables with fewer columns each) can help here.

So, the "working set" isn't some passive constant that can't be managed.

<comment><USER22> Isn't one of the defining characteristics of Mongo-like systems that they tend to aggressively favor using RAM to achieve performance? I.e., their strategy is to complete each query as quickly as possible rather than attempt to optimize for fairness of long-running transactions.

<comment><USER21> I wasn't referring only to long running transactions. Indexes are clearly a way of reducing the working set (at least in a practical sense) but also vital for workloads with many short transactions.

I was not criticizing mongo per se, I was criticizing this post and other misguided statements about the working set as it relates to database software.

<comment><USER22> OK, it just seemed to me that the stated goal of Mongo-like servers was to take some of our accepted notions of the "working set as it relates to database software" and put them up for fresh discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> MongoDB is really easy to get started with. It's easy to install on a VM, and it's easy to try it out on Heroku. There's drivers for a bunch of languages, and its API works in a way that fits well with the way programmers already think. It dispenses with pretty much everything that makes getting started with a new database hard (schemas, new syntax, unfamiliar concepts, needing to edit server configs).

MongoDB "just works" out of the box for testing and development. It's practically the perfect database for any testing and development work. And their marketing documentation tells you that it'll just work in production and will scale really well. That makes a _lot_ of people try MongoDB, and they're mostly very happy with it.

...the problems arise later. Because while MongoDB lives up to the hype for testing and development, it doesn't completely live up to the hype for production uses. It doesn't always scale that well. It isn't always as durable as you might hope. Performance isn't always very good. For some use cases, the default settings aren't appropriate; for other use cases the database design itself isn't appropriate. Backups and replication aren't quite as easy as you'd hope.

In short, the problem comes because MongoDB is as good or better than, say, Postgres or Riak during development in basically every way, but it's only better than Postgres or Riak in a few specialized ways during production.

Example: Riak basically won't work at all in a multi-tenant setup. Two competing services will provide you with a free development MongoDB instance on Heroku, but nothing of the kind exists for Riak; you basically need to roll your own cluster. That makes MongoDB really easy for someone thinking "hey, I wonder if Mongo would work for this proof of concept I'm working on" (hint: it will). Of course, MongoDB replication and scaling is honestly mediocre, while Riak's is basically magic. This makes Riak a better choice for someone who needs to scale a cluster of database servers - but you only find out that sort of thing first-hand during production. At which point, you make an angry blog post that hits Hacker News. And while plenty of people never run into MongoDBs weak areas, they never post anything that hits the Hacker News frontpage. :)

TL;DR: A lot of people hate MongoDB because it's amazingly easy to get started with, but harder later on, and they then feel betrayed. Other databases have smoother learning curves.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had to use it a few years back, for some data reporting that had been added to a project after the fact, and... I found it to be awful, because the task was very much a join-heavy operation. Something that would have been a breeze with Postgres, or even Mysql got turned into this big, ugly, heavy, slow process. I was not impressed, especially since the quantity of data in the DB was also something that could have very, very easily been handled by a very conventional relational DB running on a VPS, to say nothing of dedicated hardware.

Basically, they had chosen MongoDB due to the 'cool/new' factor, and it came back to bite them on the ass.

<comment><USER12> >" I found it to be awful, because the task was very much a join-heavy operation. Something that would have been a breeze with Postgres, or even Mysql got turned into this big, ugly, heavy, slow process. "

If you can't be assured of structure of data input, you can't reliably and gracefully transform that data on output. That's a pretty fundamental tradeoff between SQL and NoSQL (and historically between PostgreSQL and MySQL too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You beat me into writing this =) Great article, btw!

It seems to me that there are three camps of people when it comes to dbs - (1) The "I hate anything new" camp, (2) The "I hate anything old" camp, and finally (3) The "I will pick the best tool suited to my needs"

Those from camp (1) are the ones who hate anything that IS NOT relational or sql. The mongodb bashers would fall in this camp.

Those from camp (2) are those who hate that IS relational or sql. The "web- scale" people would flal in this camp.

Those from camp (3) are the silent majority who do their independent research, pick the right type of DB for their job, and live life happily.

For my startup (Semantics3), we deal primarily with JSON strings (which have no fixed structure). We use MongoDB because a really good use case for it is to just store JSON documents with a unique id. We only run simple queries on it - basically existential (does an id exist) or count.

We are aware that it's query performance is not as fast as that of a relational db. So we then index that data to ElasticSearch and run our advanced queries through that. We are really happy with our current system and it has been working great.

If we had some sort of "relational" data with a fixed structure I sure has hell would have picked MySQL or PostgreSQL and used Sphinx on it for indexing.

Peace.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, why the downvotes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does everyone hate infomercial salesmen that sell crap at 4am in the morning on TV? I don't know. Some do some don't.

Those that see through the lies are probably laughing at them, those that already bought the product and found out it is useless and doesn't live up to touted capabilities probably hate them.

Now don't get me wrong. In a practical way (disregarding ethical consideration) they took a risk. They quickly gained a lot of customers because their benchmarks looked very good.

So in a certain way people probably already forgot about the competitors at that time, because those competitors never made it so far. Now MongoDB is here years later and stories of hidden data corruption (and this is one of worst thing that could happen to a database) have started to emerge. Yes, by this time Mongo has the mind-share but now it is time to also pay the price for their design choice. They are probably still ahead.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article isn't exactly inspring me to give MongoDB a shot. I wasn't even aware Map-Reduce in MongoDB was single-threaded, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose? Isn't Map-Reduce an embarrassingly parallel algorithm?

If they're using a single-thread JS engine, can't they just multiprocess? No shared state, after all...

</comment><comment><USER27> While I haven't gone full production with MongoDB yet, it has been a struggle to hear the signal through the noise.

I'm glad that there are proponents of MongoDB like ServerDensity, it's nice to hear the other side of things from people who understand the issues.

Out of all the issues mentioned, I'm particularly interested in a fix for uncompressed field names.

<comment><USER28> That is very trivial to do in your ORM if you so choose - and something like the Li3 PHP framework (lithium) would handle this quite nicely.

To be honest, I'd rather have on-the-fly compression of data fields. At the moment I need to do this on my end, but it would be nice to be able to mark fields as compressible. Ah well.

<comment><USER27> Agreed, lithium user here :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> heh, I thought the domain sounded familiar:

[http://blog.serverdensity.com/removing-memcached-because- its...](http://blog.serverdensity.com/removing-memcached-because-its-too- slow/)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not about "hating", or at least I hope it's not.

NoSQL, in many ways with MongoDB leading the charge, came on to the scene very quickly with a lot of support on HN. When action outpaces education, then it's natural to expect education to play catch-up for a while, which is what's happening now.

Some of it is education by 10gen, some by users who made mistakes (the leading cause of education), and some by traditional database people who want to highlight the lessons learned that might have been missed by 10gen or mongo users.

Generalizing all of this as "hate" is not productive.

</comment><comment><USER30> You mean the mug, the tshirt or the database? The mug, and tshirt have been quite good. Haven't tried the db.

<comment><USER16> You raise a valid point. If this essay by pg holds true, you might be better off sticking to PostgreSQL (the other pg): <http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html>

<comment><USER31> Just finished reading it for first time. Clearly pg was wrong. It now reads like one of those classic wrong predictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Many suggest this default is a good way to get favourable benchmarks but there are no official ones so I don't think that's relevant."

Sure it is. People download MongoDB, run some simple workload against it, and see how fast it is. It's not an official benchmark, but it's still a strong part of the marketing message.

So, if those people don't understand the significance of sync/async, they may be getting a false impression of the speed.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really appreciated this post for its thoughtful quality. It provided a bunch of "in our experience" analysis of situations that others presented, noting both the mistakes of users and Mongo itself, without playing the blame game.

The presentation of mitigation strategies for both sources of issues was actually constructive for potential and current users of Mongo. As with any tool, Mongo is useful in some scenarios but not without its drawbacks. It's nice to have a point-by-point assessment of pain points.

Falling into the potential user category, I've opted not to use MongoDB for my current project because the particular benefits don't align nicely with my problem, but it was useful to see this and know a bit of what to expect with Mongo, good and bad.

</comment><comment><USER33> They don't all hate MongoDB, they're just singling themselves out as people we shouldn't work with. Ranting about a product without knowing much about it or even reading the documentation simply points out what type of engineer you wouldn't want to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER34> Bottom line...I DO NOT like the OO approach Mongo takes. I am in love with POS (Plain Old SQL)

</comment><comment><USER35> YES!!!! We stopped using it in production and moved to Solr.

I don't hate MongoDB but I think it is overhyped. The fact that 10gen raised 42m is crazy. I would be surprised if those investors got any return greater than the money they invested.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think it looks promising - it's not a panacea, there are things SQL works better for and there are things I can see Mongodb would really rock with.

With anything there are gotchas so you have to live and learn with em.

When I was researching Mongodb before going into it I saw forums talking about the 2gb limit on 32 bit systems; I would say the author of that article didn't see the posting - which could either be a case of not due diligence on the ins and out of the system or lack of diligence on the reference material he had originally been using to build his system.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not sure I "hate" it. But every project I've used MongoDB on that grew the least bit of data complexity left me wishing for (and often converting to) Postgres. I'll still like MongoDB if I'm doing something _very_ simple or rapid prototyping, etc. But for real work, forget it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wouldn't say I hate it, but I took MongoDB into production two years ago only to have it be a consistent source of problems for me. We integrated it to offload some activity from MySQL, it did a great job for a while, but it's a constant chore to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER39> MongoDB powers my latex doc database, and the CMS my team and I use. It's awesome.

I have an event logger, that logs "interesting" MySQL server events to a tab separated file and then out to a central mongodb database. So I can query several servers results at once.

</comment><comment><USER40> > The way MongoDB yielded was improved in 2.0 in a very significant way and > this was taken further in 2.2 with the complete removal of the global lock > as a step towards more granular concurrency.

Yes with 2.2, write locks have improved drastically. However, I'm still waiting until you can get to the point of not having to lock down whole collections (the near equivalent to a table - with caveats) as opposed to a document within the collection (the closest thing that you can call a record in db terms - with tons of caveats).

This being said, Mongodb does have really really awesome documentation and it is the right way to go for many applications and developers.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've used mongodb for a recent prototype. It was brilliant, I iterated through the data model as I coded.

However, I am now very aware that I have an implicit schema in my code that will be harder to understand in 6 months than a database schema.

I traded fantastic flexibility in initial development against easily maintained longevity.

I suspect I will move to something more relational but have also taken on the need to really understand the trade-offs I'm making. I've started reading Seven Databases in Seven Weeks to fill in some of my gaps.

<comment><USER12> _I traded fantastic flexibility in initial development against easily maintained longevity._

Great quote, btw, and spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I am a huge fan of MongoDB and have been using it for years. That said, my default data store is PostgreSQL. I have to have a good reason for choosing to not use PostgreSQL.

I especially like MongoDB for data analytics: really handy for storing data and then doing experimental data mining. Putting a read replica on each server that does analytics/data mining works especially well (very good performance when MongoDB's indices fit in memory and the read mongo is on localhost to programs doing analytics).

</comment><comment><USER43> I love that MongoDb allows me to get stuff done without much fuss even when I have not figured out the final data requirements. I have been using RDBMS + ORM ( Hibernate) for a very long time; however I found this to be very "rigid" in a start up environment where the requirements are far from frozen. MongoDB is much more flexible and forgiving than traditional RDBMS in that respect.

<comment><USER44> If you haven't figured out the final data requirements, then you have work to do. Its a corollary of the "give me your data structures and I'll understand your program, give me just your code and I'll still be clueless" mantra. The Database should have a strict schema before code is written. Having a schemaless datastore is only flexible in the sense that it lets ou shoot yourself int eh foot easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't hate MongoDB: I use it on scenarios where it is useful (eg: forms apps collecting semi-structured data, ETL apps pushing/transforming data to achieve geo-near queries etc).

For a regular web-app with less exotic needs, my store of choice is PostgreSQL these days.

And next time I have to handle large scale data, I will probably use Riak.

</comment><comment><USER46> Outstanding article. Well overdue for the Mongo community. There are always the haters whom find themselves ignoring documents then complaining about how things are setup.

Thank you for going back through mongo articles to iterate the key failures to understanding points.

</comment><comment><USER47> No I like it if you know it's limits. Schema free supports agile development much better than e.g. MySQL. Compared to key/value stores it's easier if you need to query data (and don't have Twitter scale amounts of it)

</comment><comment><USER48> I'll say this. I like MongoDB, but I've never built anything at big scale with it. For a small project, it's much less hassle to get rolling on than MySQL, so it's cool for that.

</comment><comment><USER49> Reasons why i hate Mongodb:

site:jira.mongodb.org/browse/ planned but not scheduled

</comment><comment><USER50> MongoDB is kind of like assembler, if you read processor errata sheets for fun you can make some really fast websites. Get that OS, and everything out of the way, just you and the network card.

However, if you just want to write a web app that doesn't lose data it's a really crappy idea and should probably use something creating for solving that problem, like a compiler and web framework.

</comment><comment><USER51> No it's a tool, do I dislike a hammer because it can't turn screws?

</comment><comment><USER52> It is easy to criticize the things closest to you.

</comment><comment><USER53> hell no, it's been a breath of really fresh air for us, we've been building all sorts of things, no problems so far. (including logging several millions of requests per day and performing distributed map reduce for all sorts of statistical models on a tiny 3 machine "cluster" we run on AWS, I hope I never have to go back to modifying schemas again, so much simpler to run and build with this mindset)

<comment><USER54> _> I hope I never have to go back to modifying schemas again_

Honest question. Do you actually leverage the schemaless nature of MongoDB? Not 'worrying' about managing schemas is one thing, but actually leveraging the fact that your objects can have different fields is another. I have worked on projects that did need to store objects with different fields together but it seems to be a rare case.

From what I've seen, most projects actually have pretty standard objects with specific fields. People just don't like feeling constrained but in the end I don't think managing a schema is difficult at all. I actually like the safety and performance you get when you put in the effort.

I think the single most useful thing to see when starting a new dev job somewhere are the database schemas. If done properly, it will essentially tell you the story of that company and their data. You can think up questions and get answers such as _"Is it possible for a Customer to have multiple Orders? Can a product have more than one Review?"_ (Stupid examples but they illustrate the kinds of relationships which are asked about all the time).

<comment><AUTHOR> Flexibility is useful in development. Once you deploy then things will change less frequently so the real benefit is when you do have to change something, you're not running a big ALTER statement.

<comment><USER55> > _Once you deploy then things will change less frequently so the real benefit > is when you do have to change something, you're not running a big ALTER > statement._

Instead, you're writing a bunch of code to deal with data that may be in the old format, or may be in the new format, or may be in the new-new format.

I don't see that as an improvement.

<comment><USER56> In practice, you're writing code that has to deal with records that were updated by versions 3, 5, and 7 of your code but not 4 or 6. After a few years you can be sure somebody got it wrong at some point, and now you have records in a few out of the 2^n states where not even the developers can anticipate the system's behavior. The fix is to make ALTER incremental and less painful, not to stop writing down and checking your schema.

<comment><USER57> And both MySQL and PostgreSQL have put in work to make ALTER less painful by reducing the situations where a full table rewrite is necessary. In PostgreSQL you can both add and remove columns without the table being rewritten as long as you do not set a default value. You can also increase the lengths of varchars without any rewrite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Yes.</comment>


Y Combinator invests in pay-per-install installer piggybacking bundling firm - <AUTHOR> http://www.installmonetizer.com/AT_aboutus.php

<comment><AUTHOR> PG: Is trying to sneak unwanted software onto people's computers really something to invest in?</comment>


New York City to 'break car culture' and build more than 250 new bike lanes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/01/new-york-city-bike-lanes-car-culture <comment><USER2> This bill is an offensive joke -- more than 2 years until the first plan is due? The first plan is due _after_ the next city council and mayoral election.

The new city government could completely cancel the bill if they felt like it.

How many people will be killed by cars in the meantime?

IMO if you're a city responsible for the safety of your citizens, and you agree what the right thing is to do, adding unnecessary delay for no real reason is reprehensible.

A quote from the NYT article [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/nyregion/nyc- biking-death...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/nyregion/nyc-biking- deaths-lanes.html)

"To gain Mr. de Blasio's support, Mr. Johnson's office agreed to push back the start date for the first streets plan, from this month to December 2021, around the time the next mayor takes office."</comment>


What 20 popular websites looked like at launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-websites-looked-when-they-launched.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see that amazon's current site still looks similar to its launch version.

<comment><USER3> It didn't actually start out like that. That's just a fairly recent screenshot.

Here's a similar article with an older one: <http://rosshill.com.au/big- websites-start-small/> (second from the top).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There were two websites that really impressed me: apple.com and amazon.com.

Amazon has hardly changed. Wow, it already looked great back then!

And Apple ... um ... really has gone a long way in design since then. Phew, that Apple page was ugly!

<comment><USER5> craigslist looked about the same as well (pretty easy to do)

Amazon did surprise me though. Well done Amazon. Well Done.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know it's an oldie, but it's a goodie. And Twitter is a trip.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel old</comment>


Have you heard of VR porn? Does this technology have a future? - <AUTHOR> I heard VR becomes ever more popular, even if there are almost no good VR-only video games. Porn, however, might be great. <comment><USER2> It is clear that the future of virtual reality (VR) is bright. But while Facebook's Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR, Samsung's Gear and HTC's Vive have led an overwhelming introduction to the market, it's looking like it will be 2017 or even 2018 when the technology really gathers traction.

People will want to explore and enjoy immersive films, casinos, shopping and games with their devices. First though, it will need to establish itself as a truly mainstream device, which didn't happen in 2016 as planned.

Video games consoles are also staking a case for the future of VR, with Sony already announcing PlayStation VR headsets to be launched in October 2016. These sets are cheaper in cost than the Oculus and work in a normal PS4, but this machine will be updated into PS5 by the time VR is expected to peak in six years' time, so time will tell on the price and success of both.

The potential impact of VR, however, is even bigger, as it is far more than just a hi-tech way to view adult content. Promising absolute immersion, and potentially allowing people to inhabit bodies other than their own, VR has advocates in the adult industry enthusing over everything from more creative erotic material to increased sexual empathy. [https://goo.gl/ac4n9g](https://goo.gl/ac4n9g)

For porn producers, VR offers a huge range of intriguing possibilities. "I've been shooting the same sort of stuff for 10 years," says Michelle Flynn, owner of independent Australian production company Lightsouthern, at the expo. "When I first put on a [VR] headset, my mind was blown. This is so important for the adult industry. You can break the fourth wall and really get involved."

<comment><USER3> "People will want to explore and enjoy immersive films, casinos, shopping and games with their devices." I've been hearing this line, verbatim, since the 1980s. _Will_ want to, because...um...because they will want to. I have yet to see a compelling driver for that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Requestfordata.co – tell us what data you need and we'll get it for you - <AUTHOR> https://www.requestfordata.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone - you know the feeling when you have a great idea for a project or an analysis: you're buzzing, you're excited! But then you realize how hard it is to get the data you need and this just completely stalls all progress.

Well we've been there. We've personally spent countless hours writing scrapers to collect the data we need to make our side projects happen. We know very well how hard this is and how quickly it can dampen momentum for great ideas.

Because of this davidlee1435 and I wanted to create a service where we take on the responsibility of collecting the data for you so you can focus on building the product or doing your analysis. Send us what you need, we'll see if we can help!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is either going to shutdown completely because of lack of interes or the founders are going to kill it and it's gonna grow into a huge startup that works as a middleman/marketplace for data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whats the cost associated with this?

<comment><AUTHOR> we'll requote a price based on the difficulty of collecting the dataset

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> why not have an about page or show the team behind this?</comment>


Lady Gaga Writing A New Song Is Like Investing In A Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/25/178901118/lady-gaga-writing-a-new-song-is-like-a-factory-investing-in-a-new-machine?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130425

<comment><AUTHOR> Tax law is being updated to reflect the investment of Intelectual Property and time into intangible goods. While the article talks about songs and movies, this is a good move for software developers who put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into Zeros and Ones, not all of which will pan out.</comment>


Payment Service Name Generator - <AUTHOR> http://jatchili.github.io/payment-service-name-generator/

<comment><USER2> I protest. "Brain" is missing from the word choices, so it's impossible to randomly generate "BrainTree". What kind of tool is this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted and added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> BounceChex and ShitMount were two I got within my first 5 tries. I think it needs some work still ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Payslap. Bitcoin's true killer app.</comment>


Geek pranks: 15 high-tech tricks to haunt your co-workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/81465/geek-pranks-15-high-tech-tricks-haunt-your-co-workers <comment><USER2> Not only are these lame, but this article spans a ton of pages.

This total lightweight ad-whoring content would be more appropriate for a Digg submission.</comment>


Filter Hacker News by tags (70K past URLs and hourly sync) - <AUTHOR> http://archfinch.com/tag/hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Filter old and new Hacker News link by tags.

I've gone through old Hacker News links and tagged them. Also, every hour, new HN posts are synced to Archfinch.

Only posts with at least 10 points are shown, and automatic tagging uses the Delicious API (no autotagging involved). Users can also tag things manually (and they do).

You can follow and block specific tags, e.g. you can follow linux, python and math and block techcrunch, facebook and iphone.

Some highlights:

<http://archfinch.com/tags/ycstartup> \- all YC company news

<http://archfinch.com/tags/hn/videos> \- videos that appear on HN (automatically embedded)

<http://archfinch.com/tags/hn/pics> \- same as above, except pics

<http://archfinch.com/tags/programming/history/lisp> \- an example of how deep the tags go

Bonus: some stories have wiki-style summaries

<comment><USER2> Do you use anything else than Delicious tagging e.g. some other content extraction & keyword tagging mechanisms?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. From brief testing I found such automatic systems to be unreliable.

However, perhaps I could add tagging suggestions based on content extraction / keywords.

<comment><USER3> Seems like just looking at tf-idf would be useful. Could result in some false positive tags, but this shouldn't actually break the system, just perhaps add a little noise to the tag list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For reference, here's the initial submission to HN with the discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601930>

Much good feedback there, it would be interesting to see a report of how much of that was taken up and integrated, how much was tested, and how much was ignored.

Instead, this submission is a repeat of this one from 4 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563739>

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the original submission, yes, I got a ton of very useful feedback. The site differs greatly from what it was then (I wish I had comparison screenshots handy right now), I implemented some of the feedback.

I did, however, ignore some feedback. Well not really ignore, I listen to every piece of advice I get, but I can't implement every feature request. Plus often advice is contradictory with other advice :)

For example, people tell me to get rid of 1-5 ratings and just do 'like/dislike'. I won't do that because there is a chasm between 'like' and 'love'.

I could write a detailed post on what exactly I took to heart and what I didn't do.

Regarding the repeat. The submission from 4 days ago didn't end up on the front page for some reason, even though from my observation it had the necessary upvotes (it had more upvotes than an older submission that was on the front page). I figured it won't hurt to resubmit, and it worked this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat! This just helped me find out the name of the weather site I was trying to remember on Saturday (<http://weatherspark.com>). I knew it'd been on HN but searchyc.com returned too many results in this case:

<http://archfinch.com/tag/hn/weather> (result #3, "Incredible weather information UI")

<http://searchyc.com/weather>

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad to see it's useful for someone.

It's interesting how accurate the tags are and how much more information they give. I've been playing with them for a while and I can sit and browse for hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://archfinch.com/tags/hn/spaces%20result%20in%20a%20505>

Great project though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed. Turns out memcached keys can't have spaces in them. At least using python-memcached:

                for char in key:
                    if ord(char) < 33 or ord(char) == 127:
                        raise Client.MemcachedKeyCharacterError(
                                "Control characters not allowed") ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hey any way to get an RSS feed from this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try to implement this as soon as I can, so check back later. Seems like a no-brainer but I forgot to do this :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I think I've done the feeds. I need to test them for a while to see if they work as they are supposed to before adding them to the site, but you can start using them if you'd like:

<http://archfinch.com/rss/tags/programming/history/lisp> \- example tag rss

<http://archfinch.com/rss/followed/drx> \- things followed by me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does it just pull from HN or are there other sources - if the latter, what are they?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now just HN. Plus users sometimes submit links themselves.

I plan to expand on that. Add other sources, perhaps add a way for people to add their own sources. RSS feeds filtered by topics would be cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love the site, I think it has a lot of potential. I'll be in touch through email.

</comment><comment><USER10> Where do I click to go to the HN thread?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now you have to click 'discuss this' and in the sidebar, a link named 'via HN' pops up. This needs some improvement, but I can't put too much information in the link boxes, so it's a tough one.</comment></comment>