Designing better user interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/Wolfr/designing-better-user-interfaces <comment><USER2> There's some cosmic irony in putting a presentation about good UI on Slideshare. When a slide doesn't load - which happened to me at least five times already - do they try again? Nope, tells you to reload the page, and hope you memorized the page number or you'll have to go by trial and error.

EDIT: Not the mention the excellent kerning: <http://i.imgur.com/1yEya.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I put the same slides on SpeakerDeck. They will be available shortly here: <http://speakerdeck.com/u/wolfr> . Alternatively you can download the presentation in PDF format from SlideShare too.

I re-saved some of the slides to display a static JPG, the parsing of the PDF seems to cause some problems. I just tested it and could go through the 120 slides without problems now.

It's a bit of a pain, yeah.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. The presentation was great, but Slideshare annoys me immensely. And I couldn't download the PDF; for some reason, the grey overlay appeared but nothing else happened. This may be related to NoScript, though, despite having allowed their domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> GOD U _#(@ &$#!_) I HATE slideshows on the internet. I hate hate hate hate them. This was great information packed in a terrible format.

Which leads me to this: Who actually loves slideshows in real life? So why would we like slideshows on the web? It's the same exact problem, the same annoyances. A linear, one by one, hard to scan through, 1 sentence per slide, time consuming, experience.

I'd take a blog with 120 consequent images over a 120 slide slideshow any day. I'm so sorry for my bitching but we need to do something about slides on the web. Can we kill them? We're killing flash and look how much nicer the place is. The web without linear slideshows will be like a park without dog shit.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about this approach: <http://koenatclaes.com/> ? (currently on the frontpage there is a slideshow)

I'm thinking of doing my next one like this, it makes more sense from a UI perspective.

<comment><USER4> Ever tried doing a video as you go through screens/examples and talk at the same time? Almost like in a tutorial format but from a 'lecture' perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wanted to share my favourite part, when the author was talking about custom UI elements, so I copied the text to share it with you:

> > Customishard,andtomecustomisreallysayingthatyouhavemoretimetothinkaboutthebehaviorofaselectboxthanApple'sinteractiondesignteam.Andthatyouhavethedevpowertofixit. > Oneveryplatformoutthere.Sosometimesyoujusthavetobepragmaticifyou'rebuildingaproduct

PS: slideshare sucks at exactly this kind of UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something went wrong with your formatting here:

"Custom is hard, and to me custom is really saying that you have more time to think about the behavior of a select box than Apple's interaction design team.

And that you have the dev power to fix it. On every platform out there. So sometimes you just have to be pragmatic if you're building a product."

<comment><USER6> Thanks for clearing the quote up—but that was exactly the parent post's point—

> _SlideShare sucks at exactly this kind of UI_

You can't copy and paste its text!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you scroll down there's a transcript which you can c/p from, but I agree that it's not ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a presentation about UI design I gave this week, here's the short description:

"Designing better user interfaces sets out to teach interface design by talking through concrete examples: what works, what doesn't work. A good interface consists of a thousand details done right. This presentation is all about those details."

</comment><comment><USER7> I was really surprised that G+ was mentioned as a good implementation of photos. Having an onclick event on a bare thumbnail image open the detail view in a lightbox is a horrible abomination of web design. I generally always want to open detail views in other tabs, especially if I'm skimming through a feed.

I feel like G+ has one of the worst implementations of a photo gallery anywhere as a result of this.

</comment><comment><USER8> This got me thinking on the topic of custom UI elements. The problem with those elements is that the programmer ends up rewriting the component, hoping that every little detail matches. I'm not sure about JS, but in some other languages you can make a new element inherit from the UI element class, and then modify its graphics - which effectively solves this problem. With all its flaws, if I recall correctly Flash let you do this - is there a way to do the same thing with JS?

<comment><USER9> Good point, I don't think there is. I'd expect custom UI tools to be built around the canvas element someday; we might look forward to UI objects then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wolfr - This is really good, really appreciate spending the time to document this in a presentation. It's amazing how some of the smallest things get overlooked.

Here is another goodie but specific to mobile UI design:

[http://www.slideshare.net/mringlein/designing-for- mobile-678...](http://www.slideshare.net/mringlein/designing-for- mobile-6780442)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. nclud is really good. Looking forward to their upcoming redesign ( <http://nclud.com/> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The lightbox recommendations from slide 90 are implemented by Photoswipe. I integrated it into OurDoings as you can see here: <http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2011-07>

(I assume "clever progressive loading" refers to prefetching.)

</comment><comment><USER12> As a side note, from slide 49 on he talks about Google Maps embeds, and says if the designer removes the direct link from below the map you need to get the address, copy it, go to maps.google, paste it, search, find the right one, etc.

You do not need to do this. On the embedded Google Map you can just click the Google logo in the bottom left corner and be taken directly to a new maps.google page with the viewpoint centered exactly where the embedded map was. I even verified that it works on the map he was using.

TL;DR: Click the Google logo on an embedded map to view larger.

<comment><USER13> True, and it's even somewhat consistent behavior among embedded stuff (youtube, vimeo, etc.), but in my experience most "normal" people don't know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure about always having a likely option selected by default in a select list. The user may gloss/skim over it without verifying the default value is their desired value. And, with a valid value selected, no validation warning or error is raised. On a very terse form with few inputs, this might be ok, but the example he gave had many inputs and involved money transfers. Seems like a bad idea in that context, especially for users new to that form.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good point on the use of maps on mobile. The Maps scrollbar of death™ is evil, and it's a very good practice to have it replaced by a clickable static map.

<comment><USER16> I actually hated the static images, as I always tried to drag them. He convinced me it's a good aproach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Finally somebody who talks about what it's all about instead of just showing meaningless fancy designed websites that die silently because nobody knows how to use them

</comment><comment><USER18> Before I even finished going through this I used a tip to increase readability on a blog by putting more space between paragraphs and the next header (slides 106-108).

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone can't view slide 102 ? Come On SlideShare! <http://i.imm.io/gIwR.png>

</comment><comment><USER20> Recommendation on Slide 64:

"The map above is just an image that links to google maps"

I believe that violates Google's TOS.

<comment><USER21> <http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, good point. I'll fix it and remove the recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for a great presentation!

It's all in the details :)

</comment><comment><USER23> A presentation on UI that uses px for examples CSS units... shame!

<comment><USER21> All modern browsers zoom the document rather than scale the text, so pixels are now the best way go.

<comment><USER24> I've seen it persuasively argued that rems and ems with a pixel fallback is the best way to go.

[http://csswizardry.com/2011/12/measuring-and-sizing- uis-2011...](http://csswizardry.com/2011/12/measuring-and-sizing- uis-2011-style/)</comment></comment></comment>


Can you see the difference with a 4K monitor? - <AUTHOR> https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Can-you-see-the-difference-with-a-4K-monitor-729/ <comment><USER2> Yes I can.

Going back to a 1080P screen is painful.

From the article: For desktop monitors, the answer is very clear: yes! Even a person with just 20/20 vision should be able to see the difference on any monitor larger than just 20 inches in size and the difference becomes greater and greater for larger monitors.</comment>


Why Didn't I Like "The Social Network?" - <AUTHOR> http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/02/07/why-didn-t-i-like-the-social-network.aspx <comment><USER2> Steve,

You are admittedly a programmer. That is why you didn't like it. You are not the target audience. They wanted to appeal to a range so they threw out some CS references, but like I said, you aren't the audience. They sculpted this one for the average facebook user. I doubt you are him/her. Good perspective analysis though.

<comment><USER3> +1. It wasn't a documentary about Facebook. It was, at the end of the day, a hollywood movie. And with that in mind, I think it did a very good job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Message of the movie to me is that $1B is the new $1million, and you can build a $1B company without being a genius.</comment>


Draw a shape to get a matching unicode-symbol - <AUTHOR> http://shapecatcher.com/ <comment><USER2> Great idea but basically it figured out what I drew by showing me dozens of possibilities and it was all the way down.

If it is going to do it that poorly, best show a mini legend of just the symbols at the top and hyperlink them to the description down below.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like that. Tried it with a few Greek letters with accents. Works nicely, in particular on a touch screen.

Just getting a GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA was maybe too ambiguous. :-) A filter for the subset of characters (e.g. Greek only) would be helpful here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whaaaaa...that's cool. Sorry, that's just neato. I don't care what anybody says.</comment>


Gitlab Is Down - j-b https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus <comment><AUTHOR> Not mine. Still selfhosting anybody nowadays?

Maybe you could try to resurrect a cached repo in your clouded CI-provider to reown your repo today.

External repo hosting would be the last thing on my mind and enterprise. I just realised that, when reading.</comment>


The Mastermind Behind Chase's Sapphire Reserve Card Sets Her Sights on Banking - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-02/the-mastermind-behind-chase-s-industry-changing-sapphire-reserve-card-sets-her-sights-on-banking <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if it's just the people I work with, or if chase has a problem because credit card ownership has changed. I don't use credit cards in the same way as parents where I'd have 1 card then make all of my charges on it.

For example: instead of making the csr my only card, I have the amazon card for 5% back on a.com. I have the csr for 3% on restaurants/travel which covers lunch/dinner + traveling and the 2.5% usaa card for everything else. Online bill payment and auto debit has really made it less annoying to have multiple cards.

The bad part right now for these cards is that if they slash their rewards, they'll just lose all of their customers because we have no real loyalty to them.

<comment><USER3> With mobile wallets this will get even easier. I keep my brand specific cards in Apple Pay and don't even carry it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was an interesting story going around the desk December 2016. The head trader was laughing and shaking his head about [1], JP's $200MM write down on the card. He then turned to the younger (millenial-aged) traders to ask if they had it. They all did.

Perhaps JP is taking a calculated risk? Perhaps they created a $200 buck giveaway? I don't know much about consumer lending, but it seems like somebody convinced a management comittee that it's a money maker.

What's the play? Gradually reduce benefits and hope that switching friction leaves enough people on the card to make it up in fees? Is it just a straight forward transfer from merchant fees to card holders? Is it driven by wealth disparity: the higher income people likely to be enticed by the card are such a large proportion of the money flow (and therefore fees) that they are a critical target? Is it millennial hysteria?

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/dimon- say...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/dimon-says-new- card-cuts-profit-by-up-to-300-million-in-quarter)

<comment><USER5> I think it's a lot of these things. The other thing not mentioned is "Status". When you hand over that metal card you feel special, sometimes the person receiving the card comments on its weight or its thickness. If not consciously, at least subconsciously this is a card that rewards your pleasure centers when you use it. There's no doubt I use it more than any of my other cards. My guess is they're crushing it on fees and giving ~40% of those earned fees back to the cardholder as benefits.

<comment><USER6> How often do you get people commenting on the weight of the card and where do you live? I have the Amex platinum and the CSR and honestly I was concerned that they'd draw too much attention.

They haven't, and I'm happy about that. I suspect it's because I'm in the bay area and both of those cards are common out here.

<comment><USER5> I live in one of the wealthiest parts of LA and I get comments on it a few times a month. But this area is old money so a lot of the rich people here don't have the latest thing (unless it's a car) -- in the bay area I'm not surprised it's common. I also have the Amex Platinum and it gets about the same number of comments. When I travel, especially outside the US, I get comments on it about 30% of time I use it! lol. Metal cards are extremely rare, if non-existant, outside the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Something that offered flexible rewards for the categories they cared about: > dining and travel.

So, the article's posit is that millennials care about these two things hence the card sold well. Were there no cards which covered this category? Was it only traveling and fueling which earned reward points?

</comment><comment><USER8> It may be that I am too old for this, but when I go to the bank I do not want a 'high touch' experience. I'm reasonably certain about that. No matter how 'interactive' it is. I'd really prefer a 'no touch' experience. One where I settle for old school 'talking to the guy at the bank.'

<comment><USER9> High touch means talking to people.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I get that. But she couldn't just say that, could she? She had to have some dumbass business jargon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So she's a marketing genius for selling $2300 of rewards for $450?

(100k points at around $0.02 per point [0] plus $300 of travel credit)

Also, you had to go on a "listening tour" to discover that wealthy young professionals enjoy traveling and eating at restaurants?

[0]: [https://thepointsguy.com/2015/03/redeeming-chase-ultimate- re...](https://thepointsguy.com/2015/03/redeeming-chase-ultimate-rewards- points-for-maximum-value/)

<comment><USER11> This sort of shallow, hasty dismissal of someone else's work is just the kind of comment we're hoping to convince people to pause before posting here—and then not post. Would you please not do this in the future? It's easy to convert this kind of bad comment into a good one: instead of acting like you know someone's work better than they do, post your points as respectful questions.

The odds are that a hasty internet dismissal is missing something, and even if it isn't, it damages the conversation culture to snark this way. The kind of comment we want on HN comes from reflection, not reflex.

<comment><USER10> (I'm only responding because Dan getting involved in the conversation is equivalent to the bouncer at the bar putting his hand on your shoulder).

My target was inappropriate. The snark should have been directed at the author of the submarine PR advertisement, not the marketing executive. I believe articles like this, which are barely more than corporate press releases, are more damaging to the community than the loose language I employed.

The real problem with this piece is that it doesn't say anything interesting about the successful CSR marketing campaign, and instead positions it as:

1) Chase REALLY listens to its customers! Isn't that great? Especially you millennials!

2) Look at these CRAZY deals! What a bargain! You're nuts not to get in on this!

This piece is thus uninteresting, and deserves the snark. The exec mentioned within it does not. (At least not yet — let's see what happens with churn over the next 5 years).

<comment><USER11> Since Scott already replied, now you've got two bouncers.

The trouble with what you've said here is that even if you're right about the article, it's easy to make your points without doing damage to HN. It simply takes a will to do it and a willingness to wait a little, to make it past the reflexive phase where the snark enzymes kick in.

That aside, there's another problem with your argument: if it's right, it's too right, because the same observation applies to nearly all media pieces. This sucks, but it is a cost of doing business on the internet (probably literally). If we focus on these annoyances, we only deprive ourselves of curious discussion. I'd say the guideline to apply here is the following one, translated to the article level:

 _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize._

In other words, please respond to the most interesting things in an article, not less interesting things that are easier to criticize. If there are no interesting things, that's different, but then you should flag the submission.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a fluff piece. Strong sign ups driven by 100,000 bonus points doesn't prove anything much regarding the card's ability to retain its users. They gloss over the actual outcomes of the bank's efforts to reduce attrition, then provide very little in the way of what they're actual going to do differently with their retail banking division.

<comment><USER13> Especially since, last I heard, they are still trying to figure out how to make money from the Sapphire Reserve.

[http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/28/sapphire- rese...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/28/sapphire-reserve- cards-arent-very-rewarding-for-j-p-morgan.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Mastermind" \- giving away a ton of points for a card that is doing it's best to be an Amex Platinum?

I don't see how "copy the most successful prestige card" and "Give a huge point bonus higher in value to the consumer than the cost of the card to the consumer" is a mastermind strategy.

<comment><USER15> It's anecdotal but Chase Sapphire Reserve is easily the best card I own and I have an Amex Platinum.

<comment><USER16> How so?

<comment><USER15> There's endless articles comparing the two online but to give my personal input I find quite a few of the perks Amex Platinum offers really don't matter to me, and the reward points and travel credit for Chase Sapphire Reserve are just way better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is "Ask HN" broken? - <AUTHOR>

I thought item ranking was based on a combination of votes (both up & down) and time. A quick look at the "Ask HN" page shows that this can't be the case. I keep seeing posts from months ago show up. This doesn't appear to be happening on the main page. Does anyone know what is going on? <comment><USER2> I think it is broken, yes. Sunday, I submitted a weekend project, and despite having 6 votes and 8 comments, its weighted super low and comparing it to similar submissions, I see no correlation.

It got those first points quickly when it was top of the new queue, and once it fell off the first page of new, it disappeared into a black hole. Not a _big_ deal, I would've just loved to get more feedback/ideas/comments.

edit: I went ahead and checked. Its showing up as #519 right now for me in the ask queue, behind things like 1 point submissions from 30+ days ago, and other stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't forget that the invisible flags affect the rankings. People seem to have become more aggressive lately about flagging things they think don't belong, and some have - to mind mind - rather odd views in that regard. A few flags from a minority of zealots with a misplaced enthusiasm and an item will sink like a stone, never to be seen again. I've generally found that that explains most of the otherwise apparently odd behavior, but I don't usually watch the "Ask" page.

Can you point out anything on the "Ask" page that you consider odd?

<comment><AUTHOR> [edit: actual explaination and not just an example]The following is an example of what doesn't make sense to me. Although, I realize that this could be explained by flags that I'm not aware of.

47\. Ask HN: Does anyone use Opera browser? 3pts/54days

56\. Ask HN: Media Temple 3pts/796days

60\. Ask HN: What is your impression about new friend list feature in Facebook? 5pts/2days

<comment><USER3> OK, I have no idea why the "Media Temple" item is ranked so high.

Fer reference, reports of unexpected behavior are best received when they contain really, really specific examples, rather than just generic "I don't understand this" type comments.

I now leave you to people who might actually know how the system works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, that one is particularly bazaar. It's probably gone now. They just crop up and vanish randomly from what I can tell.

Duly noted on the best practices advice. I should have initiated with an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's definitely something strange going on. I often see really old posts with few points show up. Sometimes it's nice to see an old post, but it's at the cost of pushing out new posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I commonly refresh the page and get a nearly brand new list of items. Most of which I read weeks ago. I'm just wondering if it isn't some sort of feature meant to give a second (third, fourth, nth?) chance to items which may have been pushed down prematurely. I think this because the front page works fine and I imagine they use the same sorting algorithm if not the exact same code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeh, it sometimes breaks and shows you posts from years ago. Normally fixes itself after a while though.</comment>


Rust Ghost, Signing Off - <AUTHOR> https://quietmisdreavus.net/self/2020/02/17/rust-ghost-signing-off/ <comment><USER2> I have a theory without data.

Is there a difference in burnout-rate between the new school of Open Sourcers and the old school of Free Software people?

I feel like the stories of people quitting, either due to the insane workload or because of the abusive "community", are mostly people who publicly hack on stuff that is on GitHub.

The old folks who quietly drop their code in an SVN repo only the distributors know how to find seem fine.

Obviously, I have no data on that, but to me it seems the whole "social coding" thing on GitHub ... sucks for the people who do the actual work.

<comment><USER3> There is also the expectation these days that when your project grows big enough, the unicorns are supposed to step in with funding. Considering MSFT is evaluating and using Rust now, paying a couple maintainers would hardly unreasonable for them, the community dropped the ball here. Mozilla and the Rust community need to step up their fund-raising game, losing product managers left and right is simply terrible for the ecosystem. Just a fortnight ago we lost the lead developer of one of the fastest web frameworks in existence over ideological conflicts. For good or for bad, libraries don't code themselves, every effort needs to be celebrated and applauded.

<comment><USER4> There is no Rust foundation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some random energy ideas:

\- Walk the Camino de Santiago on the cheap

\- Get in crazy good shape

\- Train for a half marathon for a start

\- Drive a supercar on the Autobahn

\- Take up electric paragliding (PPG)

\- Get an apprenticeship to learn the art of making Himitsubako / Karakuri (Japanese puzzle/trick boxes)

\- Volunteer

\- Donate blood

\- Try to talk to that quiet, old homeless guy who's always around

\- Vote (as applicable)

\- Take good stand-up comedy classes and find the most brutal venues

\- Say and mean "hello" to more people

\- Go go-carting

\- Learn botany or geology - shout-out to _Crime Pays But Botany Doesn 't_

\- Learn Mandarin and move to Shenzhen (yes, the current issue will be over soon)

\- Get a VW bus, sell almost everything and wander around Pennsylvania, Ontario and Maine

\- Use a sensory-deprivation chamber or semi-meditate somewhere quiet doing and thinking nothing until your brain starts generating ideas and they just pour out

\- Get some friends or random cool folks and experiment with quality psychedelics

\- Become a farmer.. you'll always be busy and get to practice skills including: welding, machining, maintenance, electrical wiring, industrial hydraulic maintenance, MacGuyvering, construction, botany, geology, civil engineering, chemistry, risk management, accounting, negotiating, marketing, sales, human resources, management, private aviation, meteorology, engineering, plumbing and heavy equipment operation. I probably missed some like having to feed and care for a fence-making rig. [https://youtu.be/HG4gplitWSs](https://youtu.be/HG4gplitWSs)

<comment><USER2> > \- Drive a supercar on the Autobahn

Please don't. Take it to the Nürburgring, but don't abuse the Autobahn as a race track. People die.

<comment><USER6> German here: this, so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grief, I've done a small amount of open source work and got thoroughly burnt out on it. I can't imagine the level of commitment involved in doing the amount of work she's done. It's okay to take a break. And it's okay to stop.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you very much for your hard work and great contributions. I hope you overcome the burnout and find joy in coding again.

</comment><comment><USER9> Alex Crichton last week and now this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306002)

Hmm.

<comment><USER10> Not to mention the actix web founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is ultimately about time, energy, priorities, and all of that.

One of the things many open source maintainers (and especially leads) run into is time constraints.

More mentoring and empowering of others while not trying to do everything ourselves is important for our health.

</comment><comment><USER12> The more you do the more they will rely on you. But this is on contributors too.

They start out hanging out in their clubhouse, working on their hobby, and people join in. Then a few years pass and you realize your chat is now a support channel for people who do not care and don't wish to care. Tough luck. Maybe it was never about building software after all, and more about learning, socializing, being valued, and pride.

That said, this part:

>the offer of the fellowship stipend for being a trans person in tech

It sounds like this person has made ample contributions, but they get a fellowship because they're queer. And they're happy with that? Okay. Personally I'd feel insulted.

</comment><comment><USER4> Misdreavus has done a ton for Rust. Sad to see her go, but at the same time, it's a well deserved rest for sure :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Lately we've been hearing many stories like this one, and I got motivated to write up a few guidelines on how people should conduct themselves when talking to others in the FOSS ecosystem. I was going to put it up on [https://www.osscoc.com/](https://www.osscoc.com/), but I got writer's block shortly after.

If people could detail their issues here, so I could write something up, that would help. The plan is to have a text that basically says "remember, everyone here is a volunteer, be nice to each other, nobody is obliged to work for you, etc" so it can easily be linked from discussions to remind people to be civil.

<comment><USER14> I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your initiative, or that it wouldn't generally help, but I don't see where people's conduct or communication had a part to play in this particular story. Did I miss something?

<comment><USER13> No, that's why I commented, the author wasn't very particular about the burnout, so I wanted to know if it had something to do with the previous stories we heard.

<comment><USER14> Ahh I follow you now. It read like "here" was here on this HN comment page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> Unfortunately, it turned out that i wasn't just dissatisfied with my job - i was burned out from living and working in two lives._

This struggle is very real to me. There's always the tension between the day job, Just Plain Life (tm), and various passion projects. Sometimes I have the energy to just push on all fronts, but I've learned that's a limited resource. Pacing that in a sustainable way took a long time to learn, and sometimes means that I just need to aggressively back-burner things before burnout hits.

Best wishes to the author for a good period of rest!

</comment><comment><USER16> How can we build a society that supports volunteer work in open source? Should governments step in and provide open source grants for important projects just like it does for research work? So much of the world now depends on open source software. This problem needs to be solved soon.

<comment><USER17> Lack of financial support is not the whole story (there is a lot of blog posts declaring burnout written by very well-paid developers) but I agree that it is an important part.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_\(economics\)) ). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free- rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding ([https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html)). Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem) instead of just theorizing.</comment></comment>


Windows Vienna / 7 - Microsoft's own response to Vista - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowsvienna.com/

<comment><USER3> You don't want to know how _this_ sausage is made.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check the footnotes: "We are not affiliated to Microsoft Corporation."

That is not M$'s response.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose that's about Geekpedia, the team itself is part of MS obviously - <USER2> otherwise how could they possibly use Microsoft's trademarks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are they just taking that domain so MS is forced to buy it from them?

I don't understand how this is related to Microsoft officially.

<comment><USER6> It isn't related to Microsoft officially -- at best, it seems to be a news site for information about the next Windows release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice find, hadn't heard about this.</comment>


Show HN: Eirify – Creative Marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://eirify.com/ <comment><USER2> Anytime i hear about marketplace i think of trust issues. How can a consumer deal with a merchant confidently?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi AbatPay. Do you mean in terms of where the funds are held between the transaction? Or more generally like trusting that merchants product?</comment></comment>


Quitting Blockchain Space - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hrdwrknvrstps/status/1174297520551419906 <comment><USER2> "I was never interested in blockchain, I was interested in the idea of something which would give people better lives."

"But check out my new app"</comment>


Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles - <AUTHOR> I would ask that the unknown mysterious moderators of this site stop changing post titles long after they hit the front page.
The guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html state: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it." but this should not apply just because the title submitted does not match the article.  When the actual article's title makes no sense or provides no context, it should be allowed to stay changed.
A story is currently on the front page with a title of "Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots" which was just changed from its previously edited title of something about visualization.
"Where the Heat and Thunder Hit Their Shots", while actually the title of the article, says absolutely nothing about the content of the article.  Is this an article about weather?  Photography?  Nope, it's about basketball.  Why is it on Hacker News?  Oh, the submitter liked the visualizations, which is exactly what the previously edited title said before it was changed.
Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857 was a story about Light Table and the title was edited to reflect that until it had at least 100 points.  Then a moderator changed it to the story's actual title of "On concepts and realities" which said absolutely nothing about it and probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else.
Moderators, please stop doing this. <comment><USER2> Completely agree. It bit me once: I submitted a link to a free epub book (hosted on GitHub), titled

        Backbone.js Fundamentals [free ebook, epub]

(here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831954>)

it surprisingly made it to the front page (250 votes), but soon a mod changed the title to

        Backbone.js Fundamentals

So, a lot of unsuspecting visitors _(my guess is about 25000 - my personal experience tells me most front page links get 100x visits more than their votes)_ clicked on this link, expecting to see a web page but end up downloading a random epub. Very soon the poor guy's GitHub account was suspended temporarily due to excessive bandwidth usage.

I felt very bad and angry at the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> My most upvoted comment (85 points) in my second most upvoted submission (554 points) is a complaint about exactly this. In my case they changed the title from:

"Lights -- impressive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs"

to:

"Lights"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107946>

<comment><USER2> I remember this one. I deliberately didn't click on that story or upvote it, because I though it was a linkbaity article - what was the f'ing submitter thinking? I have to _click_ on that link to see if it's something even remotely interesting (and presumably profit such a nasty submitter by more ad- views)? No, thank you.

After a day, I thought maybe it's something really cool that's got so much upvotes and then clicked on it and was _literally_ blown away.

<comment><USER4> >and was _literally_ blown away

Where did you end up? Did you land on something soft?

<comment><USER5> Literally is literally an auto-antonym used to emphasise a figurative expression. But you win the Grandma Nazi of the Thread award. (!!)

<comment><USER2> Actually, I always chuckle when I see people use literally when they mean _almost_ , so I intentionally misuse it to make others chuckle (though, admittedly I think it frustrates more people than it chuckles!) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This happened to a story[1] I submitted yesterday. The title that I submitted was something essentially:

 _Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame (Alexander Sotirov's Summercon Slides)_

I thought it was useful/informative to include Sotirov's name in order to lend credibility to the analysis. I did not link directly to the pdf, however in the spirit of the submission guidelines I thought it would be appropriate to include that the main body of the link were slides from Summercon. It was changed to:

 _Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame_

It is not apparent to me why the title was changed. In my opinion the changed title was less informative to the reader and the original title did not include any spin/hyperbole/offensive material. Mainly I am just curious as to why the title was changed. I think it would be helpful if the moderators would post a comment when a title was changed. This would help inform the community about when a title is changed and educate us about what is and what is not proper. In the long run I think this would help make the moderators job easier...

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4098713>

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, yes, 1000x yes. Changing titles to remove gratuitous editorial spin is one thing... changing titles just for the sake of changing them is silly and counter-productive.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can give an example of a title change AWAY from the original article title. I was quite puzzled by that when it happened, and I've never heard an explanation of why it happened. I heard about an article from a researcher on human genetics who was writing to other human genetics researchers on an email list. I meet many of those researchers in person in a local "journal club." The researcher was asking for responses from his colleagues about the article, and I thought the article was interesting enough to bring up here on Hacker News. My submission of the article here

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270>

was under the original article title, namely "23andMe disproves its own business model." The ensuing Hacker News discussion had several commenters (who apparently had paid their hard-earned money for the services of the 23andMe company) complaining about the title, which I didn't editorialize or spin in any way. I agree that the article was controversial, but a legitimate researcher in the field thought that it was a worthwhile read, which is the only reason I submitted the article to HN. After I no longer had my edit window for the submission title, some anonymous person with title-editing power changed the title to "23andMe finds Parkinsons only 24% heritable" (which is a title that reveals considerable ignorance about human genetics, and doesn't fairly represent the content of the submitted article). As I post this, the original article is not showing up to me by following the original link, but Google's cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme- disproves-its-own-business-model/)

confirms the original article title.

I can bear with curators here changing article titles to original article titles (or to titles that condense original article titles to less than 90 characters, which is the hard-coded length limit here), but I sure would like an explanation of what a user is to do if it's possible to submit an article with EXACTLY the original article title (my usual practice) and then have the title changed to a stupid-looking title that is still under my screen name. If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign their edits to take accountability for them. (That is the usual practice in another online forum where I have editing powers on other people's posts, where I use this same screen name I use here. If I edit someone's submission title, an edit trail identifies that I did that.)

<comment><USER5> > _If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign > their edits to take accountability for them._ //

Yes, it's very rude to alter someone else's text without claiming 'credit' for doing so or referring the edits back to be accepted by the attributed author.

FWIW it's also an infringement of the moral rights enshrined within copyright law. You can't modify someone else's work without a license to do so (generally); I couldn't find any reference to such a license term in the YC site details. Without such a license a posted story that the moderators dislike [is it just pg?] should just be deleted, the site clearly has no duty to carry the story (by which I mean title and strap linking to the original article) but it also appears to lack any license to amend said submissions.

<comment><USER9> While it is true that comment submissions to HN give an implied license for HN to post the content, with copyright being held by the submitter, you can't copyright names, titles, or short phrases (see, e.g., the 6th entry down in this FAQ section from the Copyright Office - <http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html>). Because of this, there is no license needed to amend a title to an article as no one owns rights to it legally.

That said, I once had a legal submission amended to a title that was really _wrong_ legally and therefore sympathize with the sentiments expressed by tokenadult. It is one thing to clarify or to trim fluff from a title but it is another to guess at what a better title might be for a technical area that is beyond the expertise of a moderator. Hence, caution ought to be used. On balance, though, I have found the moderators to be thoughtful when they do make such changes and so I am sure this is just one of the hazards of trying to monitor a site that can include complex materials from varying sources.

<comment><USER8> _That said, I once had a legal submission amended to a title that was really wrong legally_

Because I always appreciate your posts, and I would hate to be misled by any title that was put on them by someone else, I'd love to see the link to the example you have in mind.

Thanks for your comments on the legal background to the issue at hand. Certainly my claim is not that HN cannot do whatever HN's leaders like. I am simply suggesting that I would like to be on notice, as one user among thousands, about what best behavior here is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else._

Many times have I been looking for an article I read previously and cannot find it. It's a combination of headline editing, a really poor search engine, and the way things fall off the front page mix with things that haven't hit the front page yet.

</comment><comment><USER11> On occasion, I have experienced my submitted headlines being reverted back to the original source's obscure headline. More often than not these obscure headlines were made for a print newspaper or magazine where the lede (which HN readers can't see unless they click through) explains the story.

In addition, the 80-character limit sometimes makes it difficult to include the original headline for some of the more wordy publications. This forces rewriting.

I remember HN submissions used to allow headlines that were 90 or even 100 characters long. Why not bring back these limits?

<comment><USER6> I wish the title field was exactly eighty characters so that you would know where your title needed to be cropped, instead of bruteforcing it or piping it to wc or cut.

      -<input type="text" name="t" size="50">
      +<input type="text" name="t" size="80">

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think, basically, the OP's request is to start distinguishing between "spins" of titles for polemical and other questionable purposes (which should be reverted), and titles that are honestly modified in order to call attention to aspects that are interesting to HN readers, but might be marginal in the original context of the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, it's aggravating. In an ideal world there would be a comment and explanation, but since this would often end up derailing the subject of the pos into a discussion about moderation, I suggest mods just abstain from doing it or else send a note to the poster. When I rewrite the title of an article I do so with a view to making it more accessible to HN readers.

<comment><USER14> Upvoted cause you're apparently the only mod that saw it worth their time to give a reply.

Mods should obviously, as a rule, own up to whatever they moderate. I've seen many a forum go down in flames because of "invisible modding". You almost can't blame them, it's human nature that great power wielded anonymously will end up being abused.

So, the obvious solution is to fix the software to display _"edited by ..."_ whenever someone edits something. I say "fix", because it's almost a bug. All popular forum software has this feature, and there are almost no good reasons not to enable it.

Failing that, mods can easily start taking this matter in their own hands by simply adopting the habit of appending a short tag to whatever got edited, for instance {ani} in your case (or soemthing like that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kinda funny how no moderators have responded... makes me uncomfortable that this community seems to be arbitrarily moderated by invisible people.

<comment><USER16> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102598> (posted a little later than your comment) -- though I'm not sure anigbrowl is a regular moderator, he just mentions that he sometimes does change titles.

That's all I see, though -- and I agree, I was expecting to see a conversation that doesn't seem to be happening.

Well, hopefully the mods are listening and will be more cautious in their future edits....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Definitely agree. I have been following light table religiously and missed the <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857> story because I probably saw it after the change. If a submission gets up-votes it is a sort of validation for the submitted title. Tailoring a post title to the HN community is an excellent way to bring attention to articles the community most definitely enjoys, but would otherwise miss.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would prefer that the alternative of posting _either_ a link _or_ explanatory text be changed to allow _both_.

Often a title, original or otherwise, simply doesn't provide sufficient context to clearly explain a link. A few well-chosen words of prose could help here (more so if the text could be editied / modified while the post was sitting in queue). Gameable? Perhaps, but we can vote down / flag in that instance.

"Heat & Thunder" was pretty non-obvious to me, and until I read the comment here about the data visualization, struck me as particularly non-interesting.

<comment><USER19> I agree; that's one thing that I think has really gotten worse from the Slashdot model to the Digg/Reddit/HN model. The Slashdot blurbs weren't great, but a bare list of links even more emphasizes linkbait and what you might call "easy" content (articles with one clear point that can be summarized in 5 words). In that ecosystem, anything that takes even three sentences to explain the appeal of tends not to go anywhere.

I end up not submitting most of the long-form or academic things I think HN readers might find interesting as a result, since just from the headline probably nobody will know why it was submitted or why they should care. Sometimes if I think something is _really_ good I'll make an exception and submit, followed by posting a comment explaining why I thought the submission was interesting. That occasionally works, but I think most people don't click through to comments on the New page.

I'm not really blaming the readers, because I find the same problem browsing the New page myself: in this list of cryptic headlines, the only thing that stands out are controversy-type headlines ("Why you should never X"), and the rest is hard to skim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another title change example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698>

I submitted a link with the title: 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which was changed to: 'Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds'

My original title was much more accurate (especially since I linked to a specific part of the video).

</comment><comment><USER21> At the very least, a comment should be automatically added logging "Title was changed from X to Y".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love it if a moderator would post something when they change a title so it's clear what happened and who did it, but it would probably generate a lot of useless meta threads debating the change (and of course, it would actually reveal who the moderators are).

<comment><USER21> That can be solved by all mods posting as "mod" and not having a 'reply' link to that comment. (I am not advocating removing 'reply' link though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree whole-heartedly. Moderators frequently changing titles is an annoying practice. The article's links are not descriptive (they're just id numbers), so the article titles are how I mentally keep track of which submissions I want to, or don't want to, read. Changing the the title makes me have to guess if it is a new submission to hit the front page or just an old one with new clothes, so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also couldn't agree more. It's very frustrating when this happens. Sure my browser show's the link as "Visited" but when I don't recognize the title (or more specifically it doesn't seem to be in reference to anything I've read that day) I end up opening it again. As stated sometimes the reason the article is up here is not the primary focus of the article itself.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant An example of mine: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794>

The article was originally called _Better disagreement_. I chose to call my submission _'How to Disagree' on Steroids: DH7_. Someone later changed it back to the article's title.

You could say my title had an editorial spin (I'm looking at 'Steroids'), but I resent the edit for not even keeping the explicit reference to DH7 and PG's article.

I have chosen this title because I assumed most of HN knows about PG's article. This submission is essentially a rehash, and therefore _not_ interesting HN material (better link to PG's article). Except for the DH7 part, which was original. By changing the title, I hoped to tell readers about that, so they don't lose time, nor stop reading before even reaching DH7.

I also hoped a karma boost from this submission, but the title edit (which I think was responsible for the lack of upvotes) quickly squashed that hope. Which is the _real_ reason I was pissed off, I must admit. Plus, the moderators cannot take the time to ponder every fishy title. I stand by the rationalization above however: the best HN title possible certainly was not _Better disagreement_. That title was meant for LessWrong, not HN.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had posted the recent one and after it hit the top of the first page, I received an email to not editorialize titles in HN posts, and it was changed.

On reflection, it was quite clearly a spin and I could have made that title much better. The mods are generally looking out for the community and trying to keep titles as representative of the as possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wish they just took care of this elegantly with the already in place voting system. Let multiple links be submitted with different titles and let people vote up the one with the good title. Why let some mod with personal opinions and not enough time to know every subject and article dictate things? Let the community decide.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there any hard and fast rule on who gets mod privileges? Is it a karma thing or a trust thing?

<comment><USER27> I think it's mostly some YC staff/partners/alumni who are mods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with this, your examples should not have been changed. I would like to see the converse -- if the title is the same as an article's but the article's title is linkbait or sensationalized I would like it to be changed to something that tells me what it's really about.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't want them to _stop_ but just stop doing it on _titles that are already fine_. Sure, get rid of "gratuitous editorial spin" but not helpful titles that have context!

Pretty sad this post itself has been made dead actually.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've had this problem too. They are way too overzealous about this.

</comment><comment><USER31> slightly OT: I recently been killed by HN and writing an article on it: it wasn't easy to get resurrected as well as actually realized I've been dead!

</comment><comment><USER32> Truth be told, you moderators are obsolete. I know that changing titles makes you feel like you are important. But the only thing you are really needed for is stopping spam. Stop ruining peoples post titles with your false fear of "gratuitous editorial spin".

You should only change titles if the title doesn't even remotely match up with the content. e.g. Title: Heat win championship / Content: Thunder win championship

</comment><comment><USER33> Upvoted this submission, since it's important and we should talk about it.

At the same time, I think the title-editing as actually practiced is great. I'm pleased with the results whenever I notice the changes. (Which is usually after someone gives good reason for the changes).

This is perfect and in line with the reason we're allowed to edit our own submissions for a while. It's basic tweaking to make things fair and accurate, instead of link-baity and sensational.

I can give one personal example.

In hindsight (past few weeks' performance) the original title was right and I was wrong, but I complained about the title here or another story: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3993657>

Basically, I complained that it used the word "barely above its opening price" (or another, similar word like "barely"), which I thought unfair, since 23 cents of gains in a day is perfectly normal and if sustained would be a good trend forever.

The title was changed. (In hindsight, the negative title was justified, and my complaint was out of place.)

This is a place where we are a tight community that can do things like accuse each other of stabbing one another in the back, or stealing each others' text or ideas, or whatever. People upvote. THe story comes out. Responses are written. Soon enough we know if the original, sensational title is justified or needs to be toned down either a little or quite a bit.

On the whole I think the moderators do an excellent job on the titles and it serves a really important purpose. I'm not sure how to fix the other complaints mentioned here. (Maybe put a history in there for search engines or if people want to know how it was submitted).

I know I much prefer this to the broken titles that slashdot users had to put up with (even after complaints) back when that site still had a readership... proactive is much better here.

</comment><comment><USER34> Or at least an explanation of what was changed and why. it would give a little more transparency to the site. And the same goes for link deletion, etc. It would be nice to know why such and such comment or submission was shelved (though some are guessable, others are not as much).

</comment><comment><USER35> The people taking this action are in charge of how the content should be presented here. You can always vote with your feet.</comment>


Waymo self-driving car crashed when driver fell asleep and triggered manual mode - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1410928/waymos-self-driving-car-crashed-because-its-human-driver-fell-asleep/ <comment><USER2> That tester detected a serious bug in the whole concept, inadvertently risking his life during testing. He should've been promoted.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

The statement is the "Driver no longer works for waymo" not that "they were fired for the incident.".

That feels somewhat deliberate choice of words to me.

<comment><USER4> clearly picked up by a competing firm for presumably a large salary increase

<comment><USER5> Headhunted by Casper Mattresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On 26 Sep. 1982 in 'Knight of the Phoenix' when Michael falls asleep KITT automatically takes over.

Google should have a camera pointing at the driver and use machine learning to detect someone that is asleep or medically impaired and automatically take over if the car starts to leave its lane.

Perhaps the driver could configure where it wants the car to go in such a case (if asleep: continue to final destination; if medical issue: drive to nearest hospital and call "Parent" or "Spouse" on cell phone and explain the situation; if smart watch can detect alcohol in your sweat therefore unconsciousness likely due to intoxication: drive to a trusted friend and call ahead, etc.).

At the very least, if the person appears to be asleep it could ask "Are you sure you want to return to manual control?". It should be able to tell the difference between someone sleeping and someone alert wanting control back.

It's been some decades since fiction inspired us, but we're getting close!

<comment><USER7> Maybe later, but there are an awful lot of fuzzy heroic heuristics in there. For now, I'd say the only safe thing to do when the driver falls asleep is come to a safe stop.

<comment><USER8> A safe stop on the highway?

<comment><USER7> Under the circumstances, I'd accept just slowly rolling to a stop with the hazard lights on. People behind the car will hate it, but probably no one will die.

<comment><USER9> Sadly, I can still imagine someone crashing into a static car on the highway. I can imagine normal-speed continuation, mid-lane stopping, and attempting to navigate to the side of the road all seem to have some pretty heavy risks. I do wonder if a low-speed continuation would be in any way suitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And this is why engineers have invented the dead man's switch a long time ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch)

The basic idea is that the switch can only be maintained in a non-braking state by an alert, not-incapacitated person. If you press too hard, it brakes; if you don't press hard enough, it brakes. You have to apply just enough force, and that's something only an alert person can do.

Clearly, using the gas pedal to turn off auto-pilot is not good enough.

By the way, we now have a pilot program in Hong Kong where cameras are installed in buses and use computer vision to detect if a bus driver is dozing off. The system then automatically makes the driver's seat vibrate and sound an alarm to wake the driver up.

<comment><USER11> How do you expect a driver to maintain a dead man's switch the entire time they are driving in manual mode?

Or conversely, suppose the switch must be maintained while the car is in autonomous mode, should the car pull over and stop on the side of the freeway? In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the destination. The commenter discussing the use of sensors to detect the state of the driver and act accordingly makes more sense.

<comment><USER12> > In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the > destination.

For a production car, sure. But these are test drivers in test cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like an old man shaking my first at the slow march of inevitable progress - but - this is exactly why 'drive assist' or any other flavor of automated driving that is not 100% automation is not useful to me. If I have to pay attention and babysit piloting the vehicle, I might as well be driving (assuming I'm of sound enough mind and body to actually drive).

<comment><USER14> Waymo agrees with you, that's why their custom prototype car (the Firefly) didn't even have a steering wheel.

<comment><USER15> The Firefly was a joke. They had to install steering wheels shortly after getting them. The vehicles saw very little use.

<comment><USER14> I disagree it was a "joke"; I'd say it was a concept car - their vision of the future. They need steering wheels because they're still testing them, but the Firefly is the goal.

<comment><USER15> they made a few then had to install wheels after it was pointed out it was illegal in CA to drive without them- IE, lack of basic due diligence. And they've reverted to conventional cars as a platform because that makes more economic sense. Fine to have a goal but if you never get there and make basic bungles on the way, it's a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love this understated line:

"He regained alertness once the car crashed..."

Yeah I bet he did.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's tricky. So you need to be able to take control of the car quickly in an emergency, but at the same time you want the human pseudodriver to be free to be distracted or drowsy, and so in a state where they could accidentally hit this button.

<comment><USER18> That would be classified as "Level 3" autonomous, aka "Driver must be available to take over controls". Waymo has publicly stated that it feels that Level 3 autonomous is unsafe and that it's goal is Level 4 "Driver not expected to take control".

Waymo currently has Level 3 cars, which is why they employ safety drivers and haven't made their cars publicly available.

<comment><USER19> I thought they also had some l4 cars without steering wheels and stuff. Those must not have manual mode (right?! Or what? How?).

I have no idea how to know exactly though. Waymo is pretty tight lipped about this. I work at Google and I don't know for sure.

<comment><USER20> They had the little bubble cars running around for a while that didn't appear to have a steering wheel but I believe they were controllable via a joystick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> At a company meeting to discuss the incident, one attendee reportedly asked whether safety drivers were on the road too long, and was told that drivers can take a break whenever they need to.

I hope they also have reasonable mandatory breaks. It would seem that there is pressure to stay on the road as long as your peers. Which could lead to drivers not taking breaks when they should.

<comment><USER22> "whenever they need to" for breaks usually translates to, "whenever they need to find another job". HR/PR might say it, and they might even believe it, but the company will incentivized management for output. Those managers are going to be pushing their employees to do as much as possible with as little breaks as possible.

Unless they set up a completely separate chain of command that is in charge of validating if an employee is legitimately being fired, then it's always going to end up following their incentive structure

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _The dozing driver didn't respond to any of the vehicle's warnings, including a bell signaling the car was in manual mode and another audio alert_

Even if he did respond, there's still the problem of whether he can respond _in time_. Driving normally requires sub-second reaction times.

</comment><comment><USER24> While no serious injuries here make it easier to be objective about it, I think it's actually good to see one of the suspicions about self-driving cars actually borne out in real life testing: that this is an area where progression/safety isn't a smooth linear progression but more of a step function or something with a valley before rising. That means that Waymo's approach is in fact the best one: either stick to level 1, maybe a bit of level 2, or bite the bullet and go directly to 5 and figure out how to bring statistical rates there combined with the positive utility function to a point where they're flat out superior to human drivers, and _then_ sell that. This is actually kind of unusual for a lot of the history of tech I think, where the (not unwarranted) common wisdom tends to be more that gradual improvement and live testing and maturing over years is more effective then aiming for big leaps all at once. But there are exceptions that prove rules and this seems to be one of them: that overall safety is a combined function of human driver quality to car AI quality, but they're non-linearly inversely linked in that the more the AI takes over the more the human loses ability to stay focus and practiced, and furthermore has to deal with context shifts which are inherently slow and would inherently be required exactly when it's most serious. So it's a lot more all or nothing.

None of that should take away from the value of pursuing it however. Humans are in fact bad drivers, and have large numbers of failure modes like getting inebriated or sleepy or angry that a system can simply avoid entirely. But arguably even _more_ important then safety, which is what tends to come up most, is _utility_ (after all we put up with vastly less safe cars and driver practices for decades and decades before the present time already). Personal arbitrary-point-to-point mechanized transportation is effectively required for full participation in much of the modern world, it's just the danger and expense that makes it a quasi-right rather then a full one. The young and elderly being unable to take advantage is already a suboptimal state of affairs, and it's frankly a waste of everyone's valuable and limited human brain time that they're required to act as uncreative biocomputers in that role. It's all been worth it anyway because it's just that valuable, but removing a human having a required role is really just fulfilling what the tech should have been like from the beginning if our synthetic mechanical development didn't far outstrip our synthetic information collection and processing development. A certain amount of ongoing casualties and damage is entirely acceptable to achieve a societal improvement of that level of value, even if it wasn't much safer at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm starting to think it might be cheaper to lay down more rail lines or something like Japan. I don't mind driving the last few miles or biking.

<comment><USER14> You might not mind, but someone who can't drive or bike does.

<comment><AUTHOR> ... as does the person whose house gets knocked down to make room for the new rail line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> apropos, Tim Harford is an economist and an author of multiple exceptional books on economics targeted to the general public, not a reporter. He manages to show how deeply fascinating economics is and that economic phenomena are part of the fabric of not just our societies, but the very natural world. I highly recommend his "Undercover Economist" and other books.

<comment><USER27> He also does a rather good podcast on the BBC. More or less: Behind the stats at [https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss](https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This instantly evokes ideas about distinct technologies from different sources coming together to form a greater whole:

Things like the Apple Watch monitoring your awareness and activity level, and sending it to the car which uses that information to influence how it drives, or when it vibrates the seats to keep you awake or wake you up, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER29> Given that this was a crash with no injuries, I think Waymo's severity- weighted crashs per mile is better than a typical human's. Anyone know the numbers on this?

</comment><comment><USER30> No surprise there. Some people e.g me will feel sleepy when on passenger seat.

</comment><comment><USER31> doh!

There's a lot more 'understand humans' to add to these systems before they're really ready.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's so sad how these companies are spending billions on developing this technology and then still cheap out on the test drivers by having them drive solo and for too long hours (and presumably at minimum wage)

<comment><USER33> Waymo's vehicle operators make $20 bucks an hour. The driver was about an hour into his shift when he dozed off.

<comment><USER34> The lack of requirement for driver input is what causes the operator to drift off or fall asleep. The same reason they put test/dummy positive weapon images that aren't physically present in the xray image stream at security checkpoints; to keep the operator alert.

If you have a human overseer in the seat, you want to find ways to continue to keep them engaged even if it isn't necessary for the vehicle's autonomy.

<comment><USER33> Well the driver did provide input, he touched the gas pedal, which disengaged the autonomous system and put the vehicle in manual mode, and that's presumably what you want to have happen.

When it's time to disengage the vehicle you don't want to be fighting for control with the computer, manual override needs to be on a hair trigger in case the computer makes a sudden error. Unfortunately so long as there's a human in the loop, the propensity for human error is going to be there. I honestly don't know what Waymo could do to prevent this, multiple bells and whistles went off.

Waymo takes this stuff very seriously, they absolutely do not want to have to face the music should one of their vehicles get into an at-fault accident or suffer some other kind of catastrophic failure.

I just did a Google News search for "asleep at the wheel", and in the last week a few people have been killed, a few more hospitalized, and the more minor incidents don't even get reported. Waymo sincerely wants to solve this, but there's an awkward no-mans land between no autonomy and fully autonomous where Vigilance Decrement[1] is an issue.

Fortunately this was a minor accident. Waymo's test fleet reportedly covers 25,000 miles a day, and in regular day to day driving minor accidents happen about once every 160,000 miles. So if incidents like this are happening once a week for Waymo, that's about par for the course.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilance_(psychology)#Vigilan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilance_\(psychology\)#Vigilance_decrement)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Poor UX, poor safety controls.

At this stage in the game, these prototype vehicles should absolutely detect whether or not their operators are paying attention, since they're part of the safety system of the vehicle.

Also, did they not learn from Uber's fatal crash? A sole operator in these vehicles is a _terrible_ idea. One person to monitor road conditions and one person to operate any computer equipment should be the standard until we hit level IV or V autonomy.

<comment><USER35> What's the point if you have to pay attention?

I'm being serious when I ask. I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes where they're supposed to not interact ... but pay close attention at the same time.

I think it is going to have to be full autonomy, or not at all.

<comment><USER36> _I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes_

Of course they can't. Watch people who've been looking at their phone while the light's red. Watch how they drive after it turns green. Some of them drive away like they're drunk, lurching and weaving, like they're reorienting themselves to the driving task. On the rare occasions I get even slightly engaged with the phone at a light, it's almost like I have to "reboot" back to driving mode when the light goes green.

The part of the "throwing it in the human's lap at the last second" that bothers me is that a lot of context gets missed when it's time to grab the wheel. At least for me, I get context a little bit at a time. That guy in the left lane is looking at his phone more than the road...<a few seconds later>...big truck's going to want in this lane when his ends, leave room...<more seconds>...I see taillights 12 cars ahead, what's going? And Level 3 is going to just hand me the wheel without me knowing any of that? Yeah, I see why Waymo is shooting for Level 4.

<comment><USER35> Indeed.

You also miss the interaction between humans. If another driver and I look at each other, we're at least aware of our existence together and I know what is up.

If a driver doesn't look at me ... does he know? does his car know? If he is suddenly given the wheel ... I don't think humans can handle that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most development bang for our buck w/o another full time hire? - <AUTHOR>

So, we have a number of projects/tasks in the pipeline and we'd like to increase the pace at which we can knock them out. At the moment, however, we only have 50-75% of what a full-time, salaried developer would cost per month.
So, what's the best way to put that money to work? Try and find someone who will work part-time and salaried? Try to find a contract person? Try to find a small development shop to assist us?
My main fear is that I'll work with someone and then they'll be gone in 3 months.
Has anyone else faced this scenario? <comment><USER2> Perhaps you don't need another developer at this time. I find that operating at n-1 developers forces a team to really consider what the most important features are. As a developer, it's really easy for me to start thinking of really cool features, and if only I had another programmer or two on my team, I could do those features. But those are usually the superfluous features.

Joel Spolsky makes the same point in one of his posts on Joel on Software, although he uses a schedule as the limiting factor instead of number of programmers. (Skip to item 13: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html>).

I'm saying this because based on the first sentence of your post, it sounds like these projects in the pipeline aren't mission-critical. Of course I could be wrong. You know your business better than I do.</comment>


Sparkey – Key/value storage by Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/spotify/sparkey Sparkey is a simple constant key/value storage library. It is mostly suited for read heavy systems with infrequent large bulk inserts. <comment><USER2> I remember my interview at Spotify where we discussed how to implement thumbnail display service in the most effective way. What we actually came to is something along the lines of this library.

I always like it when a company focus on their real problems in job interviews and manage to avoid the brain teaser trap. That way you can have a feeling about the job that you are going to work on there, and see if you really like both work and people.

<comment><USER3> Thanks :-) That is a go-to interview question for us and we actually all do it slightly differently and take it in different directions depending on your expertise or specialization.

It is really closely aligned to what our core service is (distributing and streaming files) and is a great chance to talk with the interviewee and figure out where their strengths are.

Totally encourage other people to interview this way. It's what I've done at the past few companies I've been at and really worked excellently — just think of a problem you're working or have worked on, and distill it into an interview problem.

<comment><USER4> I also like this style, but you have to be very mindful of the fact that you've been thinking about the problem 1000x more than the candidate. The Curse of Knowledge[1] haunts the interview process. I haven't tried it much, but maybe it would be better to always use a fresh problem in each interview that not even you had seen. Maybe selected from StackOverflow.

1\. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another cool project is bam[1], a constant key/value server built on similar principles. A single input file (in this case, a TSV file instead of the SPL log file) and an index file. The cool thing about bam is that it uses the CMPH[2] library to generate a minimal perfect hash function over the keys in the input file before putting them in the index file.

[1]: [https://github.com/StefanKarpinski/bam](https://github.com/StefanKarpinski/bam) [2]: [http://cmph.sourceforge.net/](http://cmph.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER6> Wow, didn't expect this to make a mention on the front page of HN today. I never did convince Etsy to let me deploy bam in production, but it's _so_ simple that it should be doable without much fuss. I mainly built it as a proof-of-concept to show that serving static data does not have to be difficult – and that loading large static data sets into a relational database is a truly wasteful, terrible approach. Are you actually using bam "in anger"?

<comment><USER7> Bam looks really interesting, definitely a lot simpler than Sparkey, and the basic principle is the same. I have been hesitant to use perfect hashing for Sparkey since I wasn't sure how well it holds up for really large data sets (close to a billion keys). Impressive to write it in less than 300 lines of clean code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a bunch of comments related to performance data - the code is available so nothing is stopping anyone from making an unbiased comparison. :)

That said, I intend to publish some sort of performance comparison code / results. The downside with me doing it is that: 1) I know the sparkey code much better than I know level-db or any other solution, so the tuning parameters will probably be suboptimal for the other solutions. 2) I will only focus on our specific usecase (write large bulks, do lots of random reads), which may seem a bit unfair to the most general solutions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here are some preliminary performance benchmarks from my regular workstation (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 8 GB RAM): [http://pastebin.com/7buZVgdu](http://pastebin.com/7buZVgdu)

The sparkey usage is fairly optimized, but I just randomly put something together for the level-db, so consider the results extremely biased.

<comment><USER8> Where's the source code for your bench? How large are the records you're loading? How large are the keys? What's the insert order?

How does your test compare to [http://symas.com/mdb/microbench/](http://symas.com/mdb/microbench/) ? If you're going to try to talk about numbers, talk about them in a meaningful context. Right now you're just handwaving.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this post was handwaving, and I tried to make that clear ("preliminary", "extremely biased").

On monday I added some slightly more proper benchmark code, you can find it on [https://github.com/spotify/sparkey/blob/master/src/bench.c](https://github.com/spotify/sparkey/blob/master/src/bench.c)

I didn't add the level-db code to this benchmark however, since I 1) didn't want to manage that dependency 2) didn't know how to write optimized code for usage of it.

I'm using very small records, a couple of bytes of key and value. The insert order is strictly increasing (key_0, key_1, ...), though that doesn't really matter for sparkey since it uses a hash for lookup instead of ordered lists or trees.

As for the symas mdb microbench, I only looked at it briefly but it seems like it's not actually reading the value it's fetching, only doing the lookup of where it actually is, is that correct?

"MDB's zero-memcpy reads mean its read rate is essentially independent of the size of the data items being fetched; it is only affected by the total number of keys in the database."

Doing a lookup and not using the values seems like a very unrealistic usecase.

Here's the part of the benchmark I'm referring to: for (int i = 0; i < reads_; i++) { const int k = rand_.Next() % reads_; key.mv_size = snprintf(ckey, sizeof(ckey), "%016d", k); mdb_cursor_get(cursor, &key, &data, MDB_SET); FinishedSingleOp(); }

<comment><USER8> It's a valid measurement of how long the DB takes to access a record. You can assume that the time required for an app to use the values will be the same across all DBs therefore it's omitted. All of the microbench code behaves the same on this point.

[http://symas.com/mdb/memcache/](http://symas.com/mdb/memcache/) and [http://symas.com/mdb/hyperdex/](http://symas.com/mdb/hyperdex/) give results where the records are transmitted across the network.

<comment><USER7> Well, some DB's "load" the value in some way before giving it to the user, so that time is implicitly measured for those types of DB's but not for others, so I don't think it's a particularly fair comparison. I think Tokyo Cabinet gives you a pointer to newly allocated memory, at least for compressed data (but I am not completely sure about this). Like LMDB, Sparkey also does no processing of the value for uncompressed data, but for compressed data some decompression needs to take place in the iterator buffer (I guess that's equivalent to your cursor object). Even worse, if this is done lazily upon value retrieval, the cost is completely hidden in the benchmark.

In any case, I think the easiest way to get a fair benchmark is to at least iterate over the value, possibly also compare it. If that time turns out to be significant (perhaps even dominant) compared to the actual lookup time, then further optimization of the actual storage layer is pretty meaningless.

<comment><USER8> Have a look [https://github.com/hyc/sparkey/tree/master/src](https://github.com/hyc/sparkey/tree/master/src) bench.c, bench_mdb.c bench.out, bench_mdb.out

This was run on my Dell M4400 laptop, Intel Q9300 2.53GHz quadcore CPU, 8GB RAM. The maximum DB size is around 4GB so this is a purely in-memory test. Your hash lookup is faster than the B+tree, but with compression you lose the advantage.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that's interesting data!

I am not sure why you changed the key format to "key_%09d" \- is that an optimization for lmdb, to make sure the insertion order is the same as the internal tree ordering? If so, why is that needed for the benchmark?

I noticed that the wall time and cpu time for the sparkey 100M benchmarks were a bit disjoint, it would seem that your OS was evicting many pages or was stalling on disk writes. The Sparkey files were slightly larger than 4 GB while lmdb was slightly smaller, but I am not sure that really explains it on an 8 GB machine.

I am not sure I agree about the non-linear creation time difference, the benchmarks indicate that both sparkey and lmdb are non-linear. The sparkey creation throughput went from 1206357.25 to 1109604.25 (-8.0%) while lmdb's went from 2137678.50 to 2033329.88 (-4.8%)

Regarding the lookup performance "dropping off a cliff", I think that is related to the large difference in wall time vs cpu time, which indicates a lot of page cache misses.

lmdb seems really interesting for large data sets, but I think it's optimized for different use cases. I'd be curious to see how it behaves with more randomized keys and insertion order. I didn't think of doing that in the benchmark since sparkey isn't really affected by it, but it makes sense for when benchmarking a b-tree implementation.

Sparkey is optimized for our use case where we mlock the entire index file to guarantee cache hits, and possibly also mlock the log file, depending on how large it is.

The way you append stuff to sparkey (first fill up a log, then build a hash table as a finalization) is really useful when you need to use lots of memory while building and can't affort random seek file operations, and in the end when most of the work is done and your memory is free again, finalize the database. Of course, you could do the same thing with lmdb, first writing a log and then converting that into a lmdb file.

Thanks for taking the time to adapt the benchmark code to lmdb, it's been very interesting.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I changed the key format to allow using the MDB_APPEND option for bulk loading. (That's only usable in LMDB for sequential inserts.) Otherwise, for random inserts, things will be much slower. (Again, refer to the microbench to see the huge difference this makes.) If you don't have your data ordered in advance then this comparison is invalid, and we'd have to just refer to the much slower random insert results.

Still don't understand what happened to sparkey at 100M. The same thing happens using snappy, and the compressed filesize is much smaller than LMDB's, so it can't be pagecache exhaustion.

Also suspicious of the actual time measurements. Both of these programs are single-threaded so there's no way the CPU time measurement should be greater than the wall-clock time. I may take a run at using getrusage and gettimeofday instead, these clock_gettime results look flaky.

<comment><USER7> Could be due to a bug related to reading uninitialized data on the stack. That could lead to using the wrong number of bits for the hash, causing an unnecessarily high number of hash collisions, which makes it more expensive due to false positives that needs to be verified. I think it's fixed in the latest master, and the benchmark code now prints the number of collisions per test case, which could be useful debug data.

Also, I think it would be more interesting to see a comparison with lmdb using random writes instead of sequential.

As for the cpu time measurement, the wallclock is very inprecise, so it could be some small quantum larger than cpu time, but it should never be more than the system specific wall clock quantum.

<comment><USER8> re: random insert order - if we just revert to the original key format you'll get this: [http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap- devel/200711/msg00002...](http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap- devel/200711/msg00002.html) It becomes a worst-case insert order. If you want to do an actual random order, with a shuffled list so there are no repeats, you'll get something like the September 2012 LMDB microbench results. If you just use rand() and don't account for duplicates you'll get something like the July 2012 LMDB microbench results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was surprised to see LevelDB ([https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/](https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/)) was missing from the list of storage solutions you tried, because it seems optimal for your use-case. Were you aware of it?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure about the optimal use-case match. Sparkey is for "mostly static" datasets where on disk structures are generated by a batch process and pushed to servers providing read only access to the data to consumers.

leveldb on the other hand, supports concurrent writes and provides features to handle data consistency and cheap gradual reindexing.

<comment><USER11> Also Sparkey seems to work well with bittorrent/rsync distribution. I recall spotify use bittorrent to distribute files to their servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish more projects would follow this kind of readme format, at least somewhat. There are so many new things that popup on HN but have very little information about all the whats and whys I should care

What problem are you solving?

If existing solutions existed what hurdles did you face with them and how did you overcome them with your custom solution?

How do you compare from a performance view? (granted they still need to do this, but at least put in a section about it)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a cdb variation that moves index to a separate file and therefore allows changing the database (to a degree) without requiring a rebuild.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdb_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdb_%28software%29)

<comment><USER14> Indeed, from the README: _We used to rely a lot on CDB (which is a really great piece of software). It performed blazingly quick and produces compact files. We only stopped using it when our data started growing close to the 4 GB limit_

<comment><USER15> A 64-bit port of cdb isn't too hard: [https://github.com/pcarrier/cdb64](https://github.com/pcarrier/cdb64)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Similar also to DiscoDB, which does support compression, and uses perfect hashing for constant time-lookup with minimal disk access.

Not only that but it provides lightning-fast conjunctive normal form queries, a.k.a logical combinations of primitive keys. Plus it has Python / Erlang bindings.

[http://discodb.rtfd.org](http://discodb.rtfd.org)

[https://github.com/jflatow/discodb](https://github.com/jflatow/discodb)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, my first two thoughts were discodb and bitcask [http://basho.com/hello- bitcask/](http://basho.com/hello-bitcask/) too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm baffled by the choice of using the GNU autofools chain just to include a Doxygen target in the Makefile. The whole thing is essentially straight up C with just 1 library dependency.

The command line argument processing is also quite haphazardly done, it's not like it using getopt or whatever that poses compatibility issues. Is writing and packaging with a Makefile that difficult?

<comment><USER19> They wrote a database to solve an operational need. From experience I can tell you that's an endeavour you should strife to spend as little time on as possible.

I think it's a miracle they produced something they feel comfortable sharing with the world. If you write a database in house, and the tool chain and the argument processing are the only things done haphazardly, then hats off to you :)

<comment><USER18> Whoa I sense passive-aggressiveness :) I'm still waiting for those benchmarks. The code is very clean and simple I was just picking bones. The use case seems to be overly specific tho. Is there any other example use cases where this library could be useful?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is LMDB ([http://symas.com/mdb/](http://symas.com/mdb/)) storage solution for read heavy workloads. Alternative to LevelDB or CDB.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks interesting. Can be used for deduplication by keeping this hash table on disk for large amount of data

I wrote something like this to optimize disk seeks heavily by returning a reference of 8 byte and keeping a hashtable in memory. A mostly-append only records store that allowing mutations of same key and by rounding size of blobs by power of 2. Written to optimize storage layer for Membase.

[https://github.com/t3rm1n4l/lightkv](https://github.com/t3rm1n4l/lightkv)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have now created a very simple benchmark suite to give you some rough performance numbers, and updated the README to include some sample numbers for one specific machine.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm struggling to find something that it does that a webserver pointed at the filesystem doesn't do (with hash-ids for file names). I'm wondering if that's all it is, with a bit of logic to write the files in the correct structure.

<comment><USER23> From the description: _Sparkey is an extremely simple persistent key-value store. You could think of it as a read-only hashtable on disk and you wouldn 't be far off._

<comment><USER22> Good point, I missed that. Read the feature list which lists stuff the filesystem does itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This goes to prove that simple is fast.</comment>