Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ <comment><USER2> I love a comment in the Reddit post where a user asks if he takes feature requests and proposes one (triple click on text to select it). The guy, shortly after, answers saying that it's a good idea, and that he just implemented it.

I don't love it because of the attitude of the developer (which is great too), I love that it reminds me how fast it is to solo develop something and how much more complicated it gets when a team grows.

(We are a small team of 15 devs in my company and it's already super complicated to be that efficient)

<comment><USER3> Can't a CI/CD pipeline + various processes be good enough to achieve a similar efficiency for under-100-engineers companies? Honest question - because I'm pretty sure I've heard some people claim similarly fast "idea to production" times.

<comment><USER4> Usually, feature requests go through a product manager who can do analysis, integrate with road map, prioritize against other features, figure out if there's overlap with another feature (maybe one coming up soon) and so it shouldn't actually be implemented, etc.

There may be some communication between product and design to figure out how it should look and feel.

Then it'll go into a sprint most probably, but not the current sprint, because that would change the scope and affect estimates and possible delivery timelines. You'd only change the sprint scope if the team is running out of work to do or there's a major customer request or other panic.

There will be some measure of QA, ideally. Some people fly by the seat of their pants, and rely on fixing things in production if it breaks in production. This is using your customers as QA. Can work if you roll out gradually and are very responsive to any reports of regressions.

All in all, this is unlikely to happen in less than a couple of weeks. The processes are designed for predictable, consistent delivery and to minimize surprise. Shortening the chain will mean less integrated decision making and will increase the amount of surprise and inconsistency in the product and its delivery.

<comment><USER5> The processes are also designed such that people do not feel overstepped and ignored. After all, most things in life are about social status, or more immediately about salary status and job position.

If someone secretly implements an awesome feature, others might be envious as it does not seem deserved if their idea did not receive the same level of scrutiny by the usual processes as other decisions did.

Theoretically, it probably won't cause much chaos _at all_ if programmers are allowed to add small GUI tweaks and the product likely benefits from it.

The degree to which this would work probably depends a lot on the extent to which the programmers have reached Kegan level 5, so practically it probably won't work all that well.

[http://i.imgur.com/K4AVFbW.png](http://i.imgur.com/K4AVFbW.png)

<comment><USER6> It's pretty rare for someone to secretly implement an awesome feature. Usually the way that works is as you hint at: someone who already has high social status in the organization gets a lot of leeway to do his own thing while everyone else is constrained to the usual process.

The envy isn't about the awesome feature: it's about the fact that this developer gets even more attention and positive notice from leadership by means that aren't available to other workers due to social status (rather than merit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately it is not an alternative to Photoshop. It's more of an alternative to Paint.net. Photoshop is vast, it's absolutely huge. It has all kinds of features that will take decades to implement for one talented person. Additionally, it relies on GPU acceleration for many common tasks.

If you want to target Photoshop userbase, you absolutely must implement 16-bit editing and the ability to open RAW camera files. This project can't do either, while GIMP does.

It's still impressive what he did.

<comment><USER8> This thing targets people who started using Photoshop back in the day when it still wasn't a subscription service for basic and mildly advanced image editing tasks, and who thus grew accustomed to the Photoshop UI. I personally know several such people, some are trying to switch to alternatives (like myself, I'm switching to Affinity Photo), but the others still use the same (sometimes pirated) Photoshop CS3 or CS4 version they have used since forever, because it's more than enough for their needs, and the usual reason why they stick to it is that they know how to get stuff done with the familiar UI.

Imitating this basic UI with nearly 100% accuracy is a stroke of genius. Not even Affinity Photo, which is clearly taking lots of ideas from the Photoshop UI as well, comes close to this level of familiarity. Photopea truly feels as if it was Photoshop from 10 years ago, which is exactly the Photoshop that lots of people not working in the graphics industry, where an Adobe subscription is mandatory, love.

<comment><USER9> This describes me. Started using Photoshop around 4, knew it inside and out. Then, over the years, Photoshop far outgrew me (and my needs). This is a wonderful alternative that probably does 95% of what I need in Photoshop.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much in a similar case to yours. I started playing with Photoshop with a 5.0 license my dad bought back around 1998, and used that same version for years. I pretty much still use the same features I did back then, and to me all those modern versions makes no difference to my workflow whatsoever. With time I just learned to do things a bit more efficiently like to use adjustment layers instead of destructive transformations, etc. That same 5.0 version would probably still meet the majority of what I would do with Photoshop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi guys, I am Ivan (author of Photopea) and I would like to thank you all.

I used to post here about Photopea in the past without much success. Now, I see a others posting it, and it makes me happy :) Thanks for all your support!

<comment><USER12> I've been using Photopea for the past few weeks since my installed version of Photoshop is too old to modify some of the more recent PSD's I come across.

Just wanted to say thanks for an excellent product!

(It's real funny how you discover something for the first time, then start seeing it everywhere like it should have been obvious before!)

<comment><USER13> You are experiencing _Frequency Illusion_ sometimes referred to as the Baader- Meinhof phenomenon: [https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the- mind/human...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human- brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm). Once I learned about Baader-Meinhof I started to notice it everywhere. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As for a fully open-source Photoshop alternative, Krita [1] goes a long way. It does however have some major UX problems in minor areas. For example, yesterday I tried updating the font size of an existing text layer, and just couldn't get a proper selection on the text.

They had a funding crisis last year [2], but currently seem to be doing well with two paid developers. They could really use your (one-time) donation however [3].

[1] [https://krita.org/en/](https://krita.org/en/)

[2] [https://krita.org/en/item/krita-foundation-in- trouble/](https://krita.org/en/item/krita-foundation-in-trouble/)

[3] [https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/](https://krita.org/en/support- us/donations/)

<comment><USER15> Isn't Krita a drawing program? That's akin to Adobe Illustrator, not Photoshop.

<comment><USER16> No, Illustrator is a vector drawing program. Inkscape or Corel Draw (if people even remember that) are direct competitors.

Krita has to to be compared to Photoshop because both are working on rasterized images. While Krita emphasizes drawing tools in its UI while Photoshop exposes manipulation tools more prominently, both programs aim to cover both sets of features. And Krita's core is actually much, much more advanced than what you would expect from a drawing program. I would actually love to see a UI for Krita that focuses more on manipulation, just to placate the "it's just for drawing" crowd.

<comment><USER17> > Corel Draw (if people even remember that)

Apparently the latest release of CorelDRAW came out in April this year. I'm a little surprised - I thought they'd disappeared. But apparently you can both buy a license, and rent it by the month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey Ivan, usually what happens to this kind of a project is corporation knocks to your door and offers a pile of cash you can't reject. Since your project isn't libre open source, it would be nice if you can consider this option. Photopea is great! And it covers all my needs. I would like to teach my son using your product. But I want to be sure that one day I won't see Adobe logo at the top.

Open source under licenses like AGPLv3 will prevent other companies/developers using it for generating the revenue without full source code disclosure (and you'll be able to sell exceptions).

Unfortunately, nowadays the threat of acquiring and killing the product is more realistic than ever.

<comment><USER19> > this kind of a project is corporation knocks to your door and offers a pile > of cash you can't reject

I hope that actually does happen for Ivan. Wouldn't that be a great outcome for him? He spent a considerable amount of time on it.

<comment><USER18> Sure. But I'm speaking from the user's perspective. Who knows, maybe it's important for Ivan what small little people are concerned about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any chance mods can replace the link to "old.reddit.com"? The "new" Reddit is extremely slow and makes my little MacBook sad.

<comment><USER21> If you're signed in, you can change your user preferences to use old reddit by default

<comment><USER22> Heh, I wish. It worked for a while but then I got force-logged out for a password change and now it flip flops between the modes and errors when I enable old mode.

<comment><USER23> [https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit- please](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: OP changed post title from "I made x y z" to "Redditor made x y z" so my question seems to have been rendered (get it?) invalid.

This is really impressive. I will be using this in the future - great work.

Are you at all worried about Photoshop coming after you for this? I know nothing about what patents they have etc., but it _is_ very similar to PS in design and functionality.

<comment><USER25> > but it _is_ very similar to PS in design and functionality

Thankfully that didn't stop Serif with Affinity Photo. The user interfaces and tools are so similar many tutorials don't even need modification.

<comment><USER26> It's pretty depressing how many image editors are just incomplete clones of Photoshop without any original ideas.

There are a _lot_ of parts of Photoshop which could be radically improved if Adobe weren't constrained by needing to preserve existing customer workflows from circa 1995 and build off decades of legacy code / organizational inertia. Most of the low-level decisions in Photoshop are based on academic research from the 1970s, reimplemented in the early 1990s to match mid-range computer workstations and typical images of that time.

Many new image editors have basically zero thought put into design or core image processing infrastructure, and are just exact copies of Adobe's ideas, without considering that computers and imaging have changed dramatically in the past 2 decades.

(To be fair, coming up with new ideas and then polishing them to the point they are ready for customers is really hard: it takes vision, cross- disciplinary expertise, new research work, multiple attempts at implementation when some ideas don't work out, integration effort fitting ideas together, etc. Clones are a lot easier.)

<comment><USER27> Well said and great argument on both sides but you missed the point that nobody wants to spend time learning another tool. Most experts are very quick at things. Unless you know you're going to beat adobe 100% and with the entire feature set you wont try an innovative way.

<comment><USER26> Sure, but if your main criterion is "I am a professional expert and I know Photoshop inside and out", then the obvious thing to do is just use Photoshop. The price is not really a problem for people doing serious work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > www.Photopea.com , which is an advanced image editor, that works in a web > browser

Free to use, not free software. I cannot imagine doing anything remotely Photoshop-related in a _web browser_...

> There was about 1.5 millions of visitors in October

Visitors do not equal users. If those were even 1% of that it would be impressive.

<comment><USER29> > I cannot imagine doing anything remotely Photoshop-related in a web > browser...

I do that all the time, we might have different definitions of what photoshop- related is, but I often use pixlr.com to cut faces out of photos and put them on other things. I will check out his product

<comment><USER30> > we might have different definitions of what photoshop-related is, but I > often use pixlr.com to cut faces out of photos and put them on other things.

This is a tiny fraction of what Photoshop does. Even back in the mid-2000s, when I was a graphics designer, I rarely used Photoshop for simple work like that. It would have been the equivalent of using a nail gun for a single nail to hang a photo frame. You could do it, but the $10 hammer in the shed will work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this Reddit AMA helped it's SEO rank, as it's now first for "Photoshop in the browser", but I've been searching for something like this for years and even entertained the idea of building one myself someday, but Google would only find old, Flash based stuff.

Really nice work, I'll check it out more thoroughly when I have the time.

<comment><USER11> Photopea exists for five years, and it was only in the last year, when Google started to place Photopea in front of flash-based editors.

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron I started using Photopea just for fun several months ago, because it seemed like a really cool project even if it just seemed like a bit of a novelty at the time.

The fact that the author now has 1.5M + users and just got a reddit hug of death is super impressive. Well done to Ivan.

<comment><USER32> 1.5 Mio. visitors =/= 1.5 Mio. people

<comment> King-Aaron Sorry for feeling happy for Ivan.

<comment><USER33> Then why not 15M, the more the happier!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seems like a herculean effort! +1 to the lad for making something that is seemingly so complex all by himself!

</comment><comment><USER35> I recently bought Affinity Photo. Yes, it's not free, but it is a decent alternative to Photoshop.

<comment><USER36> This looks good, thanks.

If one has already decided that they are no using the industry-standard Photoshop, then what would be the advantage to using Affinity instead of Gimp, which has the price and community advantage?

<comment><USER35> Probably the more similar interface to Photoshop. I personally can't stand Gimp interface.

Also commercial support.

<comment><USER36> Have you tried Gimp's single-window mode? I'm not familiar with Photoshop but I hated Gimp's old windowed interface. Single-window is what made it usable by me, and in fact I don't see how the UI could now be any better considering what it does.

As for commercial support, with the notable exceptions of Amazon and Rackspace, I cannot think of any commercial support that has been worth anything more than a good FAQ documentation would be. Can one really ask beginner questions on their commercial support, like one could do in a forum with a large user base?

<comment><USER35> Well you can use their support forum. They also have good tutorials.

[https://forum.affinity.serif.com/](https://forum.affinity.serif.com/)

Personally, I just bought it because I wanted to support an Adobe alternative.

<comment><USER36> I see, that looks like a good forum. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fantastic product! Loved it! This might not be the next big breakthrough in the design domain. But definitely a pain-point solver for budding designers who might not be able to bear cost of buying software licenses for their hobbies or learning.

We run a design service ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)) and we understand the significance of the amount paid for licenses every year. This isn't limited to learning just Photoshop; instead there are abundant number of softwares like Illustrator, CorelDraw, Indesign, Sketch, etc. that are necessary for designers to be familiar with. The cost makes it difficult for budding designers to spend time in learning multiple softwares efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER38> Well done to the guy. What an interesting time, when a person can spend 5 hours per day for 3 years creating a product that has 1.5M visitors per month, but makes just about enough money from it to not be poor. Hopefully he can think of a better monetization scheme.

</comment><comment><USER39> Interesting project. It works reasonably well and should be fine for light editing. It's comparable to other photoshop clones I've seen. It has a lot of the core features of photoshop and copies its UX. Of course Photoshop has more features, is probably a bit faster with certain things, and probably has some algorithmic edges. Nevertheless, impressive effort.

I'm guessing a lot of oss photography libraries and tools may be ported to wasm eventually. SIMD and threading are going to be two big enablers for this. That's also something that may benefit this project. T

</comment><comment><USER40> his hacker news post from a year ago, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402)

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, this is maybe the best "online editor" experience I've had so far... Very impressed.

Curious if there could be a way to use it completely offline (on a non- connected laptop while on a trip or something), but that would be a rare occurrence for me.

Since it all happens client-side, this may be my new "I need a quick edit" editor

</comment><comment><USER42> Recently I started using Gravit Designer as my go-to graphic editor of choice. It's free to use and really fast for being a web app! It does vector graphics and has most of the features I need.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have been using Photopea for a while now, especially since I moved to a Linux machine from Windows and being a Photoshop enthusiast I would say, this is the best alternative outh there.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a pretty cool tool for a one person team.

</comment><comment><USER44> What is the tech stack used?

<comment><USER45> In the AMA he says it's all client side JavaScript. Server run costs are 20$ in one year.

<comment><USER44> That's pretty cool. My question then should be, what JS libraries?

<comment><USER46> From what I saw in the AMA it's 99% vanilla.

He only uses Paper.js for computing vector graphics booleans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER48> gimp.org

</comment><comment><USER49> Can someone add the AMA word to the title to denote the author is answering lots of questions.

<comment><USER50> Ok, added above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Anyone who can tell what kind of tech stack can be used to make smth like this possible? I am assuming same stack which VSCode uses?

<comment><USER46> From the AMA it's all client side and apparently he didn't use any popular library (eg: React, Angular, etc).

He claims he uses Paper.js only for computing vector graphics booleans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's great seeing open-source web services, that seems quite rare.

<comment><USER53> The one under discussion here isn't open-source

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> whilst I don't really care so much about those things, the layout, icons and nomenclature of most functions seems to be _eghmmm_ 'borrowed' directly from Adobe. I'm not sure how I'd felt if I'd invest millions and years of research into something, and someone else would re-create ~50% of it and make it free...

<comment><USER55> >I'm not sure how I'd felt

Adobe is a company, not a person. It can not feel.

<comment><USER51> It can sue tho.

<comment><USER55> Yep. That is the difference between ethics and legality.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humans body temperatures are mysteriously getting colder, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-body-temperature-drop-colder-cause-reason-a9290621.html <comment><USER2> Already discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002734)</comment>


AMP Design Principles - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/DESIGN_PRINCIPLES.md <comment><USER2> I think they "forgot" to mention one: users can't block ads.</comment>


Heating houses with high performance servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nerdalize.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually inclined to take this fairly seriously.

I personally run a 36U rack of servers in my basement for learning and hosting for my business. It gets toasty enough that the basement temperature hovers around 30-35C.

On cold days we open the door to the basement and the warm air rises into the ground floor, giving a bit of warmth.

On warm days I have a temperature controlled fan which vents the air to the outside.

My house has central heating but if it had central air I'm pretty sure an exhaust from the top of the rack to the central air unit would be do-able (not sure what HVAC building codes I'd be compromising though).

Puget Systems did a great blog post titled 'Space Heater vs Gaming PC'. They basically found they were tied in the efficiency of heat output from both devices.

Source: [https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs- Spac...](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Space-Heater- Efficiency-511/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting. There are obvious security/integrity problems, but there is probably plenty of not very sensitive data to process, and regarding tampered results, if it's cheap enough, one can always process everything twice and compare them.

That said, the eRadiator market seems to be limited to households in places which are cold all year and which have a decent Internet connection. What does that leave? Northern Europe?

<comment><USER4> Their FAQ says it can still work when you don't need the heat in the house:

> Will the Nerdalize Heater work during the summer?

> Yes. Our Heater can expel excess heat to the outside when the homeowner does > not require heating. This way we can compute at full capacity during winter > and summer utilizing our hardware optimally.

That suggests, however, that installation is more complicated than just mounting it on a wall like you would a shelf or a picture frame and plugging in power and network. It sounds like you'd need to have something going through the wall to the outside.

<comment><USER5> They're essentially using your cooling in the summer unless it does air intake from the outside too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a joke right?

Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.

<comment><USER7> Not unix, physics.

Physical access means you can directly measure things that would otherwise be secret. Nothing stops you from reading the contents of memory wholesale, for one simple example.

<comment><USER8> A fully homomorphic encryption system would work, but I don't think we're there yet.

<comment><USER9> For some things we are, but I don't know how far along open source software is currently. It would take a major incentive to get people to even talk openly about what's possible in this space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oddly, this isn't the first startup proposing this idea, french startup Qarnot Computing is also in this space: [http://www.qarnot- computing.com](http://www.qarnot-computing.com)

I'm still critical of it, but it'd be interesting to see if it flies in a constrained scenario of condos/hotels/office buildings - there's already scenarios where data centers will take up entire floors or basements of buildings and channel heat into the building's hvac system.

</comment><comment><USER11> In theory, any heat generated without computation is a waste. I'm sure it's pretty tough to actually make that work at scale, so excited to see this!

<comment><USER12> Nice to hear, it is tough but we believe we have figured out how to do it effectively. Took a while and quite some prototypes/concepts to make it work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A distributed version of this will take place in Denmark, once Apples new datacenter is online. We have a distributed heating network in denmark, where excess heat is "sent" to homes connected with "fjernvarme" translated "remote heat". This new datacenter will dump its heat into the existing heating network and will heat x homes in the neighborhod.

<comment><USER14> I think this is a much more sensible and useful implementation, where the computation happens in a centralized location but the _heat energy_ gets distributed. The linked solution requires CPUs to be distributed for the the heat energy to go with them. As many other commenters post, this creates many questions about data security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My 7x7 foot room at university was toasty with the combination of a GeForce 3 and Diablo 2.

</comment><comment><USER16> I get an early start on my veggi garden with a few grow lamps in my basement each spring.

The energy is "free" because the furnace would run more without them anyway.

By the way, if you live in a cold environment and wondered why using LED bulbs didn't make any dent in your electricity bill, it's because your furnace runs more now without hot bulbs.

<comment><USER17> Only if you rely on resistive heating, which most people don't, because it is ridiculously expensive.

<comment><USER18> Indeed; if you must use electricity to get heat you should use a heat pump which is 2-3x as efficient as resistive heating. A resistive load is 100% efficient. A heat pump moves heat from outside to inside the home so for the same electricity you can get 200-300% efficiency. (Make sure you get a scroll compressor though; the heat they put out is quite a bit warmer than the older piston-style compressors).

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like an air conditioner you are correct: Most residential heat pumps are just A/C units that can be run in reverse during the winter. They work well so long as the ambient temperature is high enough to allow the liquid refrigerant to evaporate (some low-temperature models can effectively heat a home when the outdoor air is around -10 deg C / 20 deg F).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting idea. There's probably some clever software involved to schedule compute jobs onto the radiators; end users will want to regulate the heat output. Also, they must be using some rather beefy servers to generate an amount of heat comparable to a space heater (3kW).

<comment><USER20> In their FAQs they say they generate 1kW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is, to me, absolutely indistinguishable from an April fools' day joke.

<comment><USER22> You are not alone. How would they handle the dust and noise which comes so tightly with high performance servers?

<comment><USER23> Don't people pay good money for machines that generate white noise to help them sleep?

Not sure how I can spin the dust thing.

<comment><USER24> Servers don't generate dust, they collect it. Add a Hepa filter you have your spin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> network bandwidth is of course the biggest limiting factor. =/

Designing a data center with 1.5 mb/s upload between nodes would be.....not fun.

Excited to see if they can make a business out of this.

edit: also would suck that for half the year your data center gets turned off.

<comment><USER26> I think this is targeted to computation needs.

But on their registration page, they ask whereas you have fibre > 100Mbits/s.

<comment><USER12> Exactly we only use fiber, 10Gbps per house

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> More exciting than the free great is the idea of a reliable, high speed connection.

But I live in a South facing apartment in South Carolina, so I just bake something if my house is cold for a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER28> What about wall-mounted out of the box bitcoin miners? Get around the physical access/security difficulties by making the homeowner own the machine and capture the benefit from its computation (rather than relying on network-based resource sharing). The economics might not really work out in the case of bitcoin but maybe there are other applications where the value of (computation + heat output) would make it worthwhile.

<comment><USER29> That doesn't really get around the problem; I could install a tap upstream of the miner, and interdict any blocks that get mined. It might even be worse than the current model, since the value of the work being done is completely exfiltratable (i.e. if I steal the mined block I get all the reward, whereas I might have to work to extract value from stolen computation results).

<comment><USER30> > if I steal the mined block I get all the reward

How would you steal a block? Changing the target of the payment requires recomputing the nonce.

<comment><USER29> The value is in the proof of work; just a very hard-to-compute number. All you need to do to steal the work is to prevent the server from sending the hash to the owner, and independently submit that proof of work elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been heating my room by running stanford's folding at home. Silly but it actually works

</comment><comment><USER32> home version of this [http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-gets-green-light- heat-ne...](http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-gets-green-light-heat-new- buildings-westin-building-data-centers/)

</comment><comment><USER33> this is such a good idea, it works well in the summer too

<comment><USER34> I suppose servers could be distributed worldwide, and run seasonally, except for the population imbalance between the northern and southern hemispheres.</comment></comment>


Infected by the Entrepreneurial Parasite - <AUTHOR> http://dundat.com/blog/?p=20

<comment><USER3> interesting take on the entrepreneurial spirit. Most call it a bug, but he's named it. But my entrepreneurial spirit has been different. I would say I discovered my entrepreneurial spirit. For me, it was always there I didn't have a name for it I just knew I like doing things differently. My very first summer job at 13 give me a strong dislike for working for other people. The next summer I realized I could make more money working less hours if I was my own boss. A few years later in a corporate setting, finding out the disparity between what I was paid vs what I was bringing in for the company was like adding insult to injury. My point being, I was an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was. I think most of us, it's something that has always been inside of us pushing us to branch out and do things on her own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent point! I guess those of us with the 'bug' or 'parasite' - <USER2> you want to call it - just march to the beat of a different drummer. We value freedom over security, charting our own path over following the beaten one...</comment></comment>


I want siri on my Macbook - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I'm to lazy to search for files, apps or opening calendar etc. Would be cool if I could use siri for that, or google even better. <comment><USER2> I'd rather have a more functional Spotlight out of the box, but Flashlight and Alfred fill that hole nicely.

(actually I'd love to have a text-input Siri on my phone)

<comment><AUTHOR> Siri console input would be nice, sometimes it doesn't recognize words well. Google launch has a console input, and it's very convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's Sinus[1], but it's been in beta forever.

[1] [http://www.raffael.me/sinus/](http://www.raffael.me/sinus/)

</comment><comment><USER4> And Cortana on my Windows notebook.

</comment><comment><USER5> But "Desktop is dead!" (even though everyone uses it and everything is made on a desktop)

<comment><AUTHOR> macbook is a laptop

<comment><USER5> By "desktop" I am referring to OS/platform more than form factor.</comment></comment></comment>


My $300 Home Cloud Server - <AUTHOR> http://xrds.acm.org/blog/2014/09/my-300-home-cloud-server-a-story-of-blood-sweat-and-ebay/ <comment><USER2> Hmm seems like he made the classical mistake of thinking that an x86-64 server is somehow special and more worthwhile than just buying a bare-bones PC.

I've managed Dell servers before (real ones) and aside from a bunch of stuff to make managing them in mass easier (like DRAC), there isn't very much value in trying to retrofit one for home use.

VT-x or 24 GB of RAM support isn't exactly a hard requirement in 2014. Plus the Xeon E5410 is a 2007 chip (7 years old!) and gets it butt kicked by even a low end i3 from 2012 [0].

Plus modern systems consume less electrical power which makes running them cheaper and a PC is certainly quieter than any rack mounted server (which are designed for maximum cooling, noise be damned).

Additionally if he had purchased off-the-shelf parts he would likely have a warranty for 12 months (or more). With the eBay purchased Dell machine he not only doesn't get any warranty but ALSO Dell themselves don't even support it(!) so no firmware updates.

So while this was a fun read, it just reminds me of my more nieve days when I thought doing stuff like this was a good idea. Go over to any SysAdmin forum (e.g. spiceworks community) and they'll tell you the same thing.

[0][http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5410-vs-Intel- Core-i3-32...](http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5410-vs-Intel-Core-i3-3220)

edit: Originally linked to an 2012 i5 comparison ($180 CPU). Altered it to an 2012 i3 comparison ($100 CPU) which still out-performance the 7 year old Xeon. The $100 price tag seems a lot more comparable than a near $200 CPU. Plus the i3 supports 32 GB of RAM and VT-x (the OP's requirements).

<comment><USER3> Sysadmin here. Agreed. 1 or 2U servers for home use is fairly ridiculous. In fact, its kinda ridiculous for some business use now. We're probably only a few years away from a mainstream and popular form-factor that's a fraction of the size, with tiny SSDs instead of giant spinning drives and power-sipping x86 or ARM chips. Imagine something the size of a stack of 4 or 5 ipads replacing the typical 19" racked server.

For small and perhaps even medium business, this could be a good fit. The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers.

As far as the article goes, $300 is impressive, but the costs of wasted electricity will eat up the savings eventually compared to just dropping some cash on a new Synology NAS, and you get a warranty.

<comment><USER4> I don't think a Synology would have the horsepower that the story author was after. He specified that he was going to be chewing through large datasets, so the dual Xeons @2.3GHz were important to him. Synologies are great for what they do, but underpowered for CPU/RAM-intensive tasks...at least in the sub $500 range, which is what he was looking to spend.

I'm a happy Synology owner, but I don't use it for my dev server. It sits behind my VPN and serves media files. With the variable speed drives (WD Green) and ARM chip, it draws very little power. In short, I love it for the specific purpose for which it was designed, but I wouldn't use it for much else. My dev server is in AWS. It's just too easy to spin up and spin down whenever I need it and keeps me from having to devote space in my apartment (SF aint cheap!). Also, not having a hefty power bill is nice.

If I were advising the story author, I'd tell him that unless part of the enjoyment is building and running the thing, he should opt for a cloud provider instead. He could get a DO droplet spec'd beyond the physical server he bought for $0.12/hr and spin it up whenever he wanted to use it. Unless he's planning on using it almost continuously, you can fit a lot of 12-cent hours into a $310 budget, and that's before you consider the increased energy usage from running a server at home.

<comment><USER5> > With the variable speed drives (WD Green)

None of Western Digital's HDDs change their RPM. It is fixed.

<comment><USER4> The WD docs for Intellipower indicate that RPM is one of the things they vary to conserve power. I can't find much in the way of specifics, but since they list the RPM of the drives as "Intellipower", the assumption would be that they don't operate at a fixed RPM.

<comment><USER5> The RPM varies between different models. Each drive has a fixed RPM [1][2].

From SPCR:

> Western Digital doesn't want to say that they're selling 5,400 RPM drives — > those became second class in the desktop market years ago. Instead, they > rate the drive's speed as "IntelliPower" and take pains to emphasize that > there are other factors that affect performance.

Western Digital has caught a lot of flak for withholding the rotation speed of the Green Power, especially when the product was first launched and the marketing material listed the rotation speed as 5,400-7,200 RPM. This led some to speculate that the rotation speed changed dynamically during use — which would have been an impressive engineering feat had it been true. The reality is revealed by a sentence that Western Digital added to the description of IntelliPower: "For each GreenPower™ drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM." In other words, Western Digital reserves the right to release both 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives under the Green Power name — without telling you which are which.

We were able to confirm that our 750 GB Green Power had a spindle speed of 5,400 RPM by analyzing its sound spectrum. Why sound? Sound is vibration; the pitch of the sound corresponds to the frequency of the vibration. Hard drives vibrate at the speed of their motor, so they produce a noise at the same frequency as their rotation speed. Our sample had a sharp spike at exactly 90 Hz (cycles per second). Multiplying that number by 60 (to get cycles per minute) yielded a measured rotation speed of 5,400 RPM.

[1] [http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html](http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html)

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526...](http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526214)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why use the term cloud? It's just a server, no cloud-ness.

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

<comment><USER7> > _Oh yeah, did I mention I also wanted a beefier machine at home so I could > manipulate large virtual machine images?_

I think he's looking to create a setup where he can spin up and destroy networked VMs, which would indeed make the project count as a cloud. From your Wikipedia link:

> The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. > Virtualization software allows a physical computing device to be > electronically separated into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which > can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. With operating > system–level virtualization essentially creating a scalable system of > multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be > allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility > required to speed up IT operations, and reduces cost by increasing > infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates the process > through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user > involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and > reduces the possibility of human errors.[27]

Admittedly, it depends on what he wants to do with this that would determine whether it's "really" a cloud or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cloud research.

Working with modified hypervisor (QEMU), and modified cloud software (OpenStack in my research).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't bring a server into your home if you value your sanity. Those little fans spin at 20,000RPM and can be heard throughout your house.

<comment><USER9> I remember when the company I was working at bought a bunch of new Sun hardware, and ended up throwing out all their old Sun 420Rs. Despite being _slightly_ outdated, they were still in perfect condition, so I took the 4 of them to the house (carefully, because they were heavy) and set up a pretend data center.

The first shock, I can confirm, was the noise they made. I ended up relegating them to the basement, which was otherwise unused.

The second shock was when my utility bill came in the next month. It's very easy to know the power consumption of enterprise-class servers for planning purposes. There's a giant abstraction between the power consumption on paper, and the power consumption on your home utility bill that I think everybody working around servers should experience at least once.

They were retired, shortly after.

<comment><USER10> The noisiest system I've ever owned was a Sun T1000 1U server. Here's some examples. I tried to mute it a bit by putting it in a huge tupperware-like under-bed storage box, but even that didn't help one bit.

[http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/](http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/)

<comment><USER11> I worked on a stack of T1000s. We had a room next to our sysadmin hovel that we used for setting up systems before putting them in the datacenter. I worked remotely a lot, and would periodically reboot these servers. When they booted, part of their POST was running their fans at 99% of their RPM capability. The noise was astounding, and my coworkers grew pretty tired of me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I'm missing something, why not just use a cloud VM? On and off as like and pricing turns off. Surely that would be less than $300, wouldn't be in your house blowing air, and would be (more) easily accessible anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do cloud research.

I modify the hypervisor.

I do things that no cloud in the world can do.

<comment><USER13> This is particularly funny when you use the Cloud to Butt chrome extension.

<comment><USER14> How do you know when someone uses a text replacement extension?

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a home server, not a cloud server:

\- no remote access to the console if ssh stops working

\- no possibility to remotely power it down/up

\- if the hardware dies, no possibility to restart on a different hardware remotely

There's nothing wrong with a home server, I have one or three myself, but these limitations are why I move "essential" services (e.g.: email) to the cloud.

Home servers are better suited for exactly this, need of high CPU, and also need of a lot of storage, for a backup server for example. I used to run everything on home servers and back them out to the cloud, but I have now started to reverse this, run the services in the cloud (cheap for small service, remotely accessible etc...), back them up to the home server (cheaper large storage, it's fine if they go offline for a few days while on holiday for example).

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374003)

Not sure if I should repeat myself a lot or not.

<comment><USER16> Latter would be more preferable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I once had a 2U rack server. Proper double Pentium III's inside, ECC RAM, serial console, alarms on the case, everything. Doubled as a coffee table in my living room. Alas, I was young.

Nowadays I have an Array R2 pc case with six HDDs, one SSD for the OS, a mini- itx board and an Intel CPU with virtualization support (I really don't remember the model) and a few gigs of RAM. All (except the HDDs) were bought new at about the same cost. The SSD is a 32GB chinese model from eBay. The machine is powerful, quiet when the HDDs are spinned down, relatively small and elegant and acts as NAS, Server, testbed, etc. Also at idle it consumes about 20W.

</comment><comment><USER18> $300 for the server, $50 a month to power that heater.

<comment><AUTHOR> With my 400W and around 10 cents per kilowatt hour in my area I'm seeing for 750 hours a cost of $30.00 estimated.

Now, I do not have this running 24/7.

Only when I or she wants to run a research job.

So we're talking 8-10 hours, 2-4 times a week.

Pretty cheap actually overall :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you have a local makerspace / hackerspace, check with them. We get quite a few decommissioned servers donated to ours but we generally don't have much use for them. Noise and heat we can sorta manage, but the power usage is a bit steep. We'd be happy to host them for people if they pay for the power and aren't doing anything too crazy with the network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this super-loud? I have an old 1U server which seemed cool until I booted it up. It's like vacuum-cleaner-loud.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not horrible, sounds like a blow drier on low setting when idling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My Kill-A-Watt meter helped me determine that the best home server is a almost always going to be a fast laptop (around 2 years old) stashed in your bedroom closet. You'll get the most computer per dollar of purchase price/power price available plus a built-in UPS and quiet operation as a bonus.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense.

Unless you need, like me, 24-32 GB++ of RAM. Dual HDDs, and a whole lot of cores to run 3-4 VMs at a time.

Then the laptop is so resource-poor that it is rendered useless for the workloads I described in the article.

This article wasn't about how to make a "cheap home server"\---it was about replicating real data-center-class hardware in the home and how to do that cheaply.

<comment><USER21> Ymmv I guess. 20gig ram (2 8s plus onboard 4), 1.5 tb 7200 rpm and an i7 was enough for me to do my handful of vms.

Granted no ecc, no mirroring, no future expansion. But then no 18$/month power bill either. To each their own.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much did your 20gig of RAM cost you?

We don't run 24/7, only when we need to do our experiments.

So the power bill is much lower than what a lot of people are worried about.

This setup is definitely used on-demand :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unless you need ECC memory for some reason, next time, do your ears and your wallet a favor and just buy regular x86 consumer hardware. It's half as loud (those 10k RPM fans must be killing your ears) and half the price and will consume half the energy.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you believe I can buy 24 GB of non-ECC RAM for less than $30 ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> how is this a cloud server? that's like calling every picture a "selfie"...

<comment><AUTHOR> First, what I meant, was in its past life it was in a cloud probably.

Secondly, I do cloud research.

I run a modified KVM/QEMU hypervisor.

I run a cloud with features you can not find anywhere else in the world today.

So, it is, indeed, a mini-home cloud :-)

<comment><USER23> well now you're assuming virtualization is the same as cloud, it is not, a cloud researcher should know what a "cloud" actually is instead of the marketing usage for it. for one, redundancy is always implicit in any cloud solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe redundancy, what I think you mean---fault tolerance---is implicit in the definition of cloud computing.

The most general form of the term 'cloud' in my mind is elastic access to computational resources.

There is no guarantee of high availability (in fact, we see failed AWS instances and horror stories all the time), nor automated failover/redundancy/fault tolerance.

Chaos Monkey by Netflix is a great example of the shortcomings of the modern cloud in terms of fault tolerance and redundancy.

The cloud doesn't give it to you, you have to build that yourself.

I'm a very open-minded person, perhaps because of my academic background, so I would be happy to say that I agree that a subtype of the fundamental cloud could be a redundant/fault-tolerant one.

But the fundamental definition of cloud does not include fault tolerance.

Don't trust me.

Check out the more formal definition from US NIST (years of work, 15 drafts), there is no mention of redundancy or fault-tolerance:

[http://faculty.winthrop.edu/domanm/csci411/Handouts/NIST.pdf](http://faculty.winthrop.edu/domanm/csci411/Handouts/NIST.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Warning, this page loads 20 megabytes of huge images that might crash your mobile browser. It does that for no good reason, the images are only shown in thumbnail size..

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Sorry, I was hosting them myself and keeping them hi-res for the magazine.

ACM is fixing something at their end to host them, and at the smaller size.

<comment><USER24> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dell (T20) and Lenovo (TS140) sell quiet and low-power servers which are targeted at homes and small business. Prices start at $300. Model with VT-d and vPro Xeon E3 is $500. Dell model officially supports RedHat Linux, so there's no Windows tax.

[http://www.rackrealm.com/dell-t20-server-and- openmediavault-...](http://www.rackrealm.com/dell-t20-server-and- openmediavault-review-rolling-your-own-nas/)

<comment><AUTHOR> How much are they with 8 real cores and 24 - 32 GB RAM? And two hard drives?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure the E5410s (or any Harpertown/Woodcrest processor) in a standard configuration use fully buffered (FB-DIMM) RAM, as opposed to unbuffered. Super cool that Dell did some trickery in the CS24-SC (apparently CS means "custom server") to bypass that obnoxious requirement.

EDIT: Apparently this family of servers use a bastardized chipset that doesn't require FB-DIMMs; nothing special on Dell's part.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've got something like this sitting in my living room, but instead of using a 1U rackmount server, I opted for a Mini-ITX system with a LIAN LI PC-Q25B case.

It's quiet, holds tons of drives and actually looks like it belongs next to the TV (I run XBMC on it as well). It was pricer than the OP's configuration, but it won't keep you up at night (and bleed your wallet in power bills).

<comment><AUTHOR> Mine runs at 400W, less at idle.

We don't run it 24/7, only when we have some research jobs to run :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you want previous-generation rackmount gear, try Weird Stuff Warehouse, in Sunnyvale, CA. Weird Stuff is where Silicon Valley data centers go to die. Typical: "HP Proliant DL160 G5 2x Quad-Core Xeon E5472 @ 3.0GHz 4GB RAM 1U Server - $189.95" They have lots of older Cisco gear and all the accessories you need to build a retro data center. Not that you'd want to.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's already more expensive than what I paid for the 1U server :-)

And I packed in 24 GB RAM for less than $190 (I think $188).

Only the HDDs bring the price up, and a couple other accessories, to $300.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How is that cloud? Isn't that just... a server?

<comment><USER30> I think he meant it's a repurposed cloud server, i.e. in its original home it was used in a cloud computing scenario.

I'm with everyone else though, in thinking that a good quality workstation would be a better fit for his purposes. For the same $300 you can get a decent workstation with a quad core CPU and hardware virtualization on eBay that can handle 32GB of memory, and room in the case for at least 2 HDDs and 4 SSDs if you use a stacking mount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Figure 4. The HDDs connect fine without caddies.

Uhhh....

<comment><AUTHOR> So the SATA/SAS ports are low enough that the hard drives fit fine in there and connect nicely. They're at a very slight angle.

Are you worried about vibration? Or something else? I am a little bit.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, vibration, or accidental removal. I have cats, dogs, and kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "We'd need CPUs with VT-x or AMD-V so we could run VMs with accelerated hardware support. VMs run slow as a snail without acceleration."

This is false. This is why I use xen on a debian host with paravirtualization.

I can then have many linux guests all served with cheap older hardware that doesn't have the hardware hooks.

<comment><USER33> If you do have hardware extensions for virtualization optimization in your CPU, you're probably missing out on performance with Xen by using paravirt.

System calls and memory access are slower in PV than HVM (See: Problems introduced with paravirt when x86_64 removed two of the protection rings from CPU architecture) , and PV-on-HVM drivers for block/network devices get you PV level performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> HP-built Itaniums go for $100 on eBay. I bought one the other day (for kicks). The performance is pretty nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's pretty fun :-)

Also, if you're the real RWMJ, hello :-)

I work on introspecting virtual disks with QEMU/KVM (someday hoping to patch QEMU to support my research).

We've interacted a few times before.

<comment><USER34> Interesting .. got a link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Off and on, little threads like this:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu- devel/2013-05/msg016...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu- devel/2013-05/msg01687.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you want old hardware, Ebay is one route. If you don't want to deal with bidding or need a warranty, there are places like [http://www.servermonkey.com](http://www.servermonkey.com) that specialize in refurbishing and reselling old servers and workstations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, as a hobby eBay is fine.

I avoided these guys (and others like them) because of the premium cost on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> On-the-fly survey for what I'm currently working on: [http://utter.io/](http://utter.io/). Vote up if you have a server(s) at home which you are already virtualizing. I have 5 machines running OpenStack at the house.

</comment><comment><USER37> I hope he has a basement or something to put it with all the noise it's going to make. I wonder if he would be better off financially buying a second-hand desktop PC due to power usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> This guy uses 400W, less at idle.

If I could find a cheap desktop with 24-32 GB RAM (again, also cheap, like $60 cheap), than that would be an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Personally I want to make a huge Raspberry PI and Netduino cluster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds awesome :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Home and cloud are mutually exclusive I think. Cool build though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Au contraire.

See the cloudlets concept: [http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/](http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/)

<comment><USER40> Perhaps this is a cloudlet then? Cloud computing is not merely VMs on demand. An essential nature of cloud is multiple distributed machines with the ability to transfer applications (or VMs) between machines for various reasons including load balancing, fault tolerance, and high availability. Furthermore, the application user is abstracted from which physical machine the application is running on. In your case, you have a single machine which you are likely addressing directly. This is not cloud computing.

Perhaps you mean "cloud storage", where your personal devices are able to store and retrieve things "in the cloud". The equivalent of a local FTP server (or NAS) does not a cloud make.

I appreciated the writeup nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just buy a Synology NAS and be done with it.

<comment><USER42> That was my first thought. For storage, a Synology would wipe the floor with his setup. He's using it as a compute node, though, and even the newest DS415+ wouldn't hold a candle to this server project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> As a geek hobbyist, I have always liked the 1U form factor, but the noise out of those things can be crazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> The CS24-CS isn't so bad.

Sounds like a hair drier on low, as others have reported.

It's only super loud if you load it (I calculated Pi to 5 billion digits). It would spin up fans, be loud for 30 seconds, and spin down for a few minutes and repeat as it computed.

<comment> micro-ram Don't let the sound bother you. Put it down in the basement or somewhere where you can't hear it and use the DRAC to power it on and off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely. We leave it in a more unused space, and the BMC is useful in remotely powering up and checking on it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How long it took to complete the Memtest ? just curious.</comment>


Significant Pattern Mining for Time Series - <AUTHOR> https://christian.bock.ml/posts/significant_shapelets/ <comment> bra-ket related: Matrix Profiles for time series [https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/MatrixProfile.html](https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/MatrixProfile.html)

<comment><USER2> See Stumpy for a handy library to get this working quickly (written in Python): [https://github.com/TDAmeritrade/stumpy](https://github.com/TDAmeritrade/stumpy)

<comment><USER3> Hi all, I am the creator of STUMPY and wanted to thank you for your interest. Please feel free to post questions on our Github issues and we'll try to assist where we can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget: "Clustering of Time Series Subsequences is Meaningless" : [https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/meaningless.pdf](https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/meaningless.pdf)

<comment><USER5> But this is not about clustering. It's about figuring out to what extent a certain subclass of features, namely the 'shapelets', are statistically significantly associated with a pre-defined binary outcome.

The paper you mentioned is interesting, though, because it shows an issue that many algorithms are privy to: if the number of samples/features gets too large, at some point, you are only comparing _means_.

(We are working on a paper to show the issues of this when it comes to time series classification.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where to store time series data for further analysis? It is possible to use Prometheus for this - see [https://medium.com/@valyala/analyzing-prometheus- data-with-e...](https://medium.com/@valyala/analyzing-prometheus-data-with- external-tools-5f3e5e147639)

</comment><comment><USER7> Their math in their description of their data is in error: They need to state that the T_i (T with a subscript i), for i = 0, 1, 2, ..., n are distinct.

More standard would be a function d: {0, 1, ..., n} --> R^{1 x m} x {0, 1}.

<comment><USER5> Seems to be standard terminology for time series classification to me, to be honest. I think the approach would also work if there are duplicates in the data. Although the estimate would be overly optimistic, right?

<comment><USER7> With their notation they have not specified that the T's are unique. So, a first fix up would be just to state that the T's were distinct. And it would help to be explicit that i from 0, 1, 2, ... corresponded to increasing time. Moreover, is the data equally spaced in time? Likely, yes, and in that case, clearly say so.

<comment><USER8> No, i indexes the patient, not time. (T_0, y_0) is one patients entire time series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sure reads and looks like technical analysis indicators for time series data.

It's useful though - example: 5 day MA of disk errors rises over the 15 day == likely failure</comment>


Re: Startups - I wish someone would have told me - <AUTHOR> http://www.drawar.com/posts/Re--Startups---I-wish-someone-would-have-told-me-

<comment><USER2> This would have been better asked on Quora, imo, so the best answers rise to the top. Sorting comments by date is a very old way of thinking, and really doesn't organize the information in any meaningful way at all.

With that rant aside, it is an interesting question and I look forward to reading them, despite how much I don't feel like sifting through them.</comment>


Ask HN: What is going on during a macOS/iOS update? - <AUTHOR> Updating a Linux based OS is just a matter of downloading a few packages. If a kernel update is involved, you just restart afterwards. All done within a minute or two. Similarly with Windows, it takes a bit longer and the update is finalized during a restart cycle but again it's finished within a few minutes.
On the other hand, updates on macOS (and iOS) take several gigabytes to download (Security Update 2020-002 for Mojave is over 1.6GB, Catalina 10.15.4 update is over 3.3GB) and take 10+ minutes to install. Not only that, the machine is restarted several times during the update, the screen often goes black, the progress bar is all over the place, sometimes it looks like the machine dies with fans being instantly cut off just to wake up again.
Is there anybody who has any insight into what is going on? Why are the updates so freaking large? Do they essentially replace entire parts of the OS instead of updating? Why does it take so long to install them given how fast the SSDs and CPUs are? And why is the machine restarted several times? Are the updates applied in stages? <comment><USER2> Could be running multiple staged, interdependent data migrations or upgrading critical sub-systems that have dependencies on other updates or a whole host of other possible reasons.

Hard to tell without having inside knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the multiple restarts may be caused by firmware updates, but I have also wondered about the rest.</comment>


Moving from Rails to Go - <AUTHOR> https://finotto.org/post/moving-from-rails-to-go/ <comment><USER2> > Mainly it was Crystal, Elixir or Go [as an alternative to Ruby].

You explain why you liked Go; did you try writing a microservice in all three languages and compare and contrast the process of writing, debugging, and supporting? I realize that's a tad unrealistic though I suspect _someone_ has done it. I'm personally looking at Elixir (coming from a .NET background) and am very aware of Go... perhaps I'll do the "one service, three languages" and give my thoughts on .NET Core, Go, and Elixir. Unless this has already been done... if so, someone drop a link pls!</comment>


Time Lines: a challenging iOS tiny game - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-lines-a-challenging-tiny-game/id1266265002?mt=8 <comment><USER2> I'm gonna kill this developer for the hours I'm gonna lose on his game I guess :|</comment>


Why Trying New Things Is So Hard to Do - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/business/why-trying-new-things-is-so-hard.html? <comment><USER3> I can't say I've ever had a problem trying something so easy as a new soda. In fact, I've switched sodas a lot for various reasons including taste, often trying new ones when they come out.

I thought this article would be about learning new skills like art or programming, which I actually _do_ find hard to get into.

For those, I know why it's so hard: I'm so good at the things I do daily that new things are quite painful to see how much I fail at them. I end up just going back to the stuff I'm good at instead.

<comment><USER4> What about things that you've never tried, and that you might not even know that you like? You've already climbed the difficulty curve of programming in X, so you don't want to put so much effort in getting to the same level with Y. You're putting in a lot of effort to reach the same spot.

The author (as an economist, I suspect) equates new experience with consumption, but there is a huge range of new experience available if you do away with the frustration of trying to find something better than you currently do. Say, experimenting a range of sports (rock climbing, hiking, weight lifting, skateboarding) as act of knowledge rather than attaching to the results it gives.

It seems rational that there is more benefit in new experience, good or bad than repeating pleasant experience. Going to a new travel destination will give you more memories and anecdotes than going to your favorite vacation spot. And yet we're all a little bit coward and tend to stay in our comfort zone.

<comment><USER3> That's a good question. I find them especially taxing because I tend to be a thorough person, so I tend to look for tutorials and watch them first. If it's something that doesn't really lend itself to a technical explanation (art!) then it really just mystifies me and I have trouble even starting.

For example, my wife and her sister went to one of those wine-and-painting things and produced what I think are actually pretty good paintings with no real practice beforehand.

It horrifies me because I know I'll want it to be better than it is. (And my wife felt that way about hers, despite how I felt about hers.) So I haven't done it.

I did, however, buy a book and art supplies and do 3 of the 50 projects before wandering off to something else. I really do intend to go back to it, but haven't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Like most people, I conduct relatively few experiments in my personal life, in both small and big things."

...

"Habits are powerful. We persist with many of them because we tend to give undue emphasis to the present. Trying something new can be painful: I might not like what I get and must forgo something I already enjoy."

I'm drawn to a quote written by Sir Terry Pratchett every time I read this sort of article. So tl;dr,

>"They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today."

<comment><USER6> _They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today._

These two statements are not contradictory, of course; the primary reason we have government is to avoid unpleasant surprises, whether they be crime, fraud, war, unemployment, sickness or natural disaster. If things go on as normal with tomorrow like today, government is working well enough - <USER2> today is unendurable, in which case it's broken.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I think the point is that it's a characteristic which makes it very easy for bad actors to manipulate concepts of governance and justice.

People might balk at negative changes at first, even very sharp and sudden ones, but they probably won't continue to fight them over the scale of years or decades as the 'new normal' sets in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My feeling: The author does not understand the human psyche well enough. People don't buy coke because of the taste only. They buy coke because the way they feel, whenever they drink coke. A branded coke gives a whole different feeling than a generic one, which depends on several factors like brand image, price, peers, etc. Works even with pain drugs.

See "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely for several examples of this effect.

<comment><USER8> > People don't buy coke because of the taste only.

Despite agreeing with you, I never get why people do this. I'm a big diet coke addict. But my local store has a generic clone which tastes exactly the same. I always buy the clone.

<comment><USER7> Because it's a lie people tell themselves to get a good feeling, at least 2-3x a day (the author 6x).

You are immune to the lie :-) you gotta have a different lie to feel good.

BTW: I didn't come up with the stuff. A splendid book about that topic is "All marketers are liars" by Seth Godin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love trying new things, it's the easiest thing to do. The hardest part is developing the habit to continuously do that thing.

<comment><USER10> It's easier when the new thing is more enjoyable than the old thing. Then you naturally gravitate toward it.

It's harder when the new thing is less enjoyable but will eventually pay off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Yet I'm clearly making an error, one that reveals a deeper decision-making > bias whose cumulative cost is sizable: Like most people, I conduct > relatively few experiments in my personal life, in both small and big > things.

I think this is related to learning. Once you've learned a particular task (say, writing a unit test) you don't "relearn" it every time you want to execute the task again. Instead you "reenact" it - it's more automatic and can be done more quickly and with less focus and concentration. Each unit test is unique - but the tooling and concepts that surround it are already there.

Reenacting vs. learning may be one reason behind brand loyalty and habit. It simply takes more mental effort to re-evaluate and re-learn than to coast off a previous decision. It's more work, even if it's something minor like trying a different brand of soda. We can only "spend" so much attention and care during our waking hours.

The value of a habit is that you make a decision once and project it into the future as an automatic response. The notion that these automatic responses are somehow flawed or need to be optimized away, or optimized to produce some economic advantage, is suspect.

What _is_ valuable is understanding that these automatic responses are as much a part of human cognition as our deliberative attention. We should be re- evaluate them periodically and try to understand the effect they have on the trajectory of our lives.

</comment><comment><USER12> To try new things and experience success in new areas, here is step 1:

MAKE IT SAFE TO FAIL

That's right. Spend time and energy thinking about opportunities to practice and fail over and over while minimizing the fallout.

For example, are you afraid to launch that app on the store until you've done all your beta testing and your metrics show high engagement?

Don't be afraid. Launch it and simply DON'T PUBLICIZE IT. Who knows, Apple might approve it and you may get 5-10 organic new beta testers a day. You lose nothing for trying.

That's the mindset that will get you far :)

<comment><USER13> The "MAKE IT SAFE TO FAIL" was contradicted by the article.

"This is a pity because experimentation can produce outsize rewards. For example, I wouldn't be risking much by trying a generic soda, and if I liked it enough to switch, the payout could be big: All my future sodas would be cheaper."

You don't get much safer to fail than trying one soda.

The article was about trying new behaviors different from habits, rather than trying big new things, and was disappointing overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet another clickbait headline. From a Harvard professor, no less, assuming the title is the author's.

The article explores the consequences of our reluctance to break from habit, rather than explaining _why_ we find this hard to do.

More accurately, it explores why we so rarely do it. If we were discussing it being truly 'hard to do', we'd need to first establish that we consciously want to break from habit, but then fail to follow through with action. The article doesn't take this route.

The closest it gets to delivering on the title is _Yet the fact that many people needed a strike to force them to experiment reveals the deep roots of a common reluctance to experiment._ This is not then expanded upon.

<comment><USER15> > From a Harvard professor, no less, assuming the title is the author's.

The probability that the author got to choose the title is very slim

<comment><USER16> Also newsflash. Headlines have been clickbait to a greater or lesser degree since before there were clicks. Yes, they exist in part to tell you what the article is about but their main function is to intrigue you about the contents.

<comment><USER14> So I should be ok with being lied to to get clicks?

This journalistic blight may indeed have been happening for a long time, but it still discredits the source and should disqualify it from HN.

Some titles are actually honest. Who would've thunk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like how the article starts off with:

"I make bad life choices, now listen to be for advice on...."

</comment><comment><USER18> Trying is easy.. Sticking to something new is what's really hard.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've never really done it but I've always thought that adding some randomness to my choices would make my life much more balanced. In a way, also experiments can be biased.

</comment><comment><USER7> I cannot access the article. Has anybody an alternative link? Or a summary? Thx

<comment><USER20> [https://outline.com/L2ESsK](https://outline.com/L2ESsK)</comment></comment>


Viaweb's Last Press Release - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/tlbphd.html <comment><AUTHOR> Found this while reading this old gem - <http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> _Its flagship product, the Harvard University PhD degree, is the scholarship industry's leading enterprise-wide scalable information management solution._

Hilarious.

(Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised to see something just like this in some university's promotional literature.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Best. Ever.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup – Credo360, a measure of personal credibility - <AUTHOR> What it is:
Credo360 is an open reputation system. It is like a crowed-sourced credit score, where the score is based on ratings and reviews you get from people you deal with. It works very similarly to reputation systems on eBay or Airbnb – but Credo reputation is not tied to a marketplace. Instead, it belongs to you as a person. You can use Credo whenever you need to deal with someone you don't know. This will help you keep your privacy and avoid scams.
The platform is currently up and running here: https://www.credo360.com
Why we are doing this:
We want to incentivize honest behavior between people. In one-off P2P transactions, there is perverse incentive for people to try to cheat each other. For example, there is a strong incentive for me to sell my flawed iPhone to someone on Craigslist because I know that after I get the money, you won't find me and you won't be able to affect my reputation.
This perverse incentive could be removed if there is a "reputation trail" that follows people through all their transactions (regardless of the platform or medium). And that's exactly what we want to achieve with Credo. Basically, we want to incentivize people to behave honestly, even with strangers, and we think this would lead to a more honest and efficient society.
What we are looking for:
Any feedback is appreciated, but we are specifically interested in the following: 1.	Feedback on the idea itself 2.	Feedback on UI/UX 3.	Any suggestions on how to grow the platform
The last one would be especially appreciated as the value of platform grows with the number of people on it. We've already got to about 1,200 users by working with some buy/sell/trade communities on Reddit, but hoping to accelerate the growth. <comment><USER2> 1\. how do you handle disputes?

2\. shouldn't I own my reputation and not you?

3\. what if someone steals my identity?

4\. How do you verify identity. how easy would it be to steal pictures and pretend to be others?

5\. What happens when you get really big and kick me out of the system and all I get is form emails telling me I'm out of luck?

6\. what if I suck in one category but I'm really good at something else. should someone that sucks at dating be denied a home loan or job?

<comment><USER3> Hey - one of the founders here. To answer your questions:

1\. An important thing to point out is that people can't review each other unless there is a confirmed financial transaction between them (so, dating example from a different question won't apply). But if you and I had a transaction that resulted in a dispute, we'd both write reviews for each other. Then, someone looking at my profile would have access to both reviews (the one I wrote for you, and the one you wrote for me), and would be able to see both sides of the story.

2\. Yes - our long-term solution is to move this to a blockchain-type backend. For now, it is a centralized database to get to market faster.

3 & 4\. We use a number of things to verify identity - social media profiles, banking info, and knowledge-based-authentication (more info on this is here: [https://www.credo360.com/help#verifications](https://www.credo360.com/help#verifications) ). In fact, your "identity" is a big part of your overall score. So, you won't be able to get to a very good score without having established Facebook/LinkedIn profiles, or doing a KBA. Pretending to be others would be pretty difficult. You can of course create a "fake" profile with someone else's picture, but unless you can verify this profile with established social media accounts with the same name, and pass through KBA, this fake account won't get a high score. Also, if someone discovers that the account is fake, we'd immediately suspend it.

5\. Once we move to a blockchain-type backend, that shouldn't be an issue

6\. The primary metric we are trying to measure with our score is whether you are an honest person, and I think it carries over from one category to another. It is not about whether you are good at something, it is more about whether you keep your word.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my website project ClickForTheWin.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickforthewin.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I have put together a site that allows people to submit, check out and vote on match ups.

There is a scenario presented and two options, users can vote on their preferred option and leave comments justifying why their choice is best.

It can be used for pure fun / escapism eg. "You get a supercar for the weekend, do you take the Ferrari or the lamborghini".

But it could also grow into a place where substantive issues are discussed.

Obviously if it does actually grow into a community there will be work to be done to make sure it doesn't turn into a flame war heaven.

I'd be interested in your feedback.

Cheers Sam H</comment>