Total lunar eclipse to meet 'supermoon' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34352504 <comment><USER2> Is there anyone besides me who deeply dislikes the term 'supermoon'?

It has no meaning other than near perigee, it's not like the difference in the apparent moon size is all that noticeable, and we don't say that ISS is a 'superstation' or a satellite in a Molniya orbit is a 'supersatellite' when near perigee.

<comment><USER3> Maybe not a useful term for science but what's wrong with a fun celebratory event? The general population isn't interested enough to tolerate news stories about every full moon but they aren't so uninterested as to want zero coverage. If people want to be reminded to go out and look up every once in a while and have a minor social event on the Internet where people are looking at and sharing photos and articles with friends and strangers from all over the world, supermoons and lunar eclipses happen at a frequency that's pretty good for that, and why not have a fun name as well?

<comment><USER2> There's a quote attributed to Rutherford that "In science there is only physics; everything else is stamp collecting." (See [http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26219.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26219.html) for a citation.)

When I was in school we had to learn the organs of the body, the parts of a cell, and other seemingly arbitrary terms. This comes from an old tradition where "science" was roughly equivalent to "knowing names."

I also grew up in an area where evolution was a contentious topic. The teacher only covered it for one day. But it's _evolution_ which tied together the individual fields of 'botany' and 'anatomy' and 'bacteriology' into 'biology.' Evolution is what makes Rutherford's views wrong.

Words like "supermoon" and also "blue moon" fall into that category of meaningless terms that sound scientific but are little more than numerology, and not backed by any deeper meaning.

I have no problems getting together for a 'fun celebratory event'. I celebrate on New Year's eve like many others. I've been at fun celebratory events for meteor showers, and for other eclipses.

What I have problems with is justifying it with essentially an arbitrary and meaningless definition. Why is a "supermoon" at the 90% size threshold? Why not 95% Or 99%? By comparison, the New Year is also arbitrary, but not meaningless, as the history of the calendar shows.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand your last comment. I agree that the New Year is arbitrary, but years themselves are quite meaningful and useful. But I don't think the New Year celebration has anything to do with celebrating the concept and understanding of a year. We have added extra non-scientific meaning to it by using it as cultural event of reflection on the past and planning for the future. I think that's in the same category as choosing to look at the moon together and feel a sense of awe.

<comment><USER2> I'll try again. I'm not concerned about the arbitrariness of the term 'supermoon'. I dislike the meaningless of it. A good term has meaning behind it. The choice of the new year is arbitrary, and has changed over the centuries. We can examine why there is a calendar system, and compare sun- based to moon-based calendar systems. We can understand that the turnover point of the Gregorian or Mayan calendar is arbitrary, and for the more recent calendar systems we know some of the reasons for why they exist.

Similarly, there's an intrinsic difference between a 'nova' and a 'supernova'.

But if you look at 'supermoon', all you get is a number pulled out of a hat.

> I think that's in the same category as choosing to look at the moon together > and feel a sense of awe.

Does the awe really come from someone telling you the moon is near perigee? Or from other aspects?

It's a temporal coincidence that the perigee moon now is near the full moon. In another decade, the perigee moon will be around the new moon. Will we be having the same coverage of the topic then? I doubt it.

Perhaps an analogy might help. People choose to believe in a 'Saturn return'. But 'Saturn return' for arbitrary reasons includes the time +/\- a couple of Earth years around a full Saturn year. I can still express my dislike for the term and concept even if you are in awe to know that you are one, or two, or even three Saturn years old.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I understand what you mean about the term itself not conveying information now.

> Does the awe really come from someone telling you the moon is near perigee? > Or from other aspects?

Oh, not from that information, no. It comes from going out and looking at the moon, taking pictures, and looking at all the pictures that populate my facebook feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have the full date for the UTC time table in the article? Without the UTC date that table is basically useless.

<comment><USER5> Wikipedia page has it...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2015_lunar_eclipse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2015_lunar_eclipse)</comment></comment>


ASUS is considering Android-based Eee PCs - <AUTHOR> http://eeepc.itrunsonlinux.com/the-news/1-latest-news/271-asus-is-considering-android-based-eee-pcs

<comment><AUTHOR> Very little to the article, but an interesting idea.

<comment><USER2> This link is from the original article, describing how to build Android (Cupcake) for the Eee PC 701 <http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajdmx8kfg357_81cmpr56f6>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have an old Asus-8G. Windows XP runs really slow on it. I installed XP for VPN/work access. It constantly sits there and the disk I/O goes. I've been considering wiping it and going back to the default Linux install.

I really hope that they would allow previous generations to change to Android.

<comment><USER4> How has XP gotten so much slower over the past few years? The machines out on its release were Pentium IIIs and very early (crap) Pentium 4s, and yet it struggles to run on modern netbook hardware.

<comment><USER3> Early netbooks lagged in performance and battery life. For example, my Asus EEE 8G performed about the same as my 4+ year old, battery-doesn't-work Dell Inspiron (same or close 900mhz Celeron CPU).

The newer Atom CPUs apparently are _slower_ than the Celeron CPU but they have better performance/watt (better battery life characteristics).

[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom- efficiency,20...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom- efficiency,2069-2.html)

[http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/08/intel-atom- initial-...](http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/08/intel-atom-initial- benchmarking-data-vs-pentium-and-celeron-m-processors-before-official- release/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm...I am writing this on a XP-powered EEE - which problem will Android solve for me? And, which office suite can I use?

<comment><USER6> I'd like it because I want an ARM netbook, I'm pretty excited by nVidia's moves towards that too.

It's kind of a hard question because you've only told us you're using XP, not really for what (besides office). I'd be nice if Android apps got more interesting because of this, but that's kind of speculative. It'll have some nifty touchscreen support so we might eventually get a tablet that doesn't cost way too much.

I haven't really used Android much, though. Is the web browser tolerable? It might be nice to have a browser that had a good zooming interface when using it on a smaller netbook screen.

<comment><USER7> The web browser is outstanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tiny pale gray text. My eyes, my eyes!</comment>


A gentlemen's agreement - <AUTHOR> http://wildbit.com/blog/2013/03/22/a-gentlemans-agreement/ <comment><USER2> I won't be signing up for this.

Having an operations team that can keep things going through adversity is a competitive advantage that doesn't come cheap.

Redundancy and ops talent cost money. If your competitor made a cost/benefit decision that let them down, I say tough luck.

<comment><USER3> _Having an operations team that can keep things going through adversity is a competitive advantage that doesn't come cheap._

True, but I don't think you can afford to have 100% uptime. Basically nobody can do that. Even in the heyday of the Bell system, Ma Bell couldn't quite guarantee 100% uptime. 99.9999999%, maybe, but do you have any idea how much engineering effort and work went into achieving that?

 _I won't be signing up for this._

What, acknowledging reality? Look, I don't think the OP was saying that you shouldn't compete on reliability and uptime and other quality guarantees. But if something extraordinary happens to a competitor - which _could just as easily happen to you_ \- then it's silly to launch a specific, targeted effort to try and steal away that competitor's customers in reaction that specific event.

There's a difference between a demonstrated pattern of better uptime/reliability, woven into a consistent marketing message over time, and a predatory attack reacting to a moment of weakness.

<comment><USER2> My reference to "signing up" means that I won't be entering in to a gentleman's agreement. I'm on good terms with reality.

<comment><USER4> You could just agree not to be a jerk...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who don't know, it was Dyn. I personally liked the email. While sendgrid was down we were running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find a replacement. We started setting up postmark but didn't get it up before sendgrid came back up.

We've been using DynECT for DNS for a long time and it's been perfect. Having them remind us they do email (at a time when it was critically needed) was actually great. At this point I'm planning on signing up for it and using them as a failover for sendgrid.

<comment><USER6> Why do you feel it was dyn? I got that email and didn't remember it referring to anything in particular. I just took another look and here is the copy:

 _"In today's demand-driven marketing world, getting email into the inbox and sending that email is as crucial as turning on the lights in the morning. Social media is awesome, but when it comes to the most trusted form of communication with customers, prospects and fans, email wins hands down.

See that graphic above? That's a screenshot from about an hour ago, a visual representation of where emails sent through our servers are being read at that instant around the world. At a billion+ messages sent a month, there's no better time to move your email delivery services to Dyn.

We've relaunched our packages, introducing an entry-level option for just $3 per month -- roughly the amount of a large coffee. Isn't your transactional email program worth more than that?

It's time to deliver through Dyn. Sign up now. Send today. Be successful tomorrow."_

Explain why you feel that a) dyn sent this in reaction to the "situation" and b) even if they did how this was a bad thing.

By the way here is the dyn.com blog post I'm not seeing anything there that dovetails and makes them the company the OP is referring to:

[http://dyn.com/blog/email-delivery-dynect-deliverability- sca...](http://dyn.com/blog/email-delivery-dynect-deliverability-scalability- iaas-no-downtime/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand. Sure, this may be a special case related to the PyCon stuff (which should be more clearly referenced in the OP imho) but I don't see how it's a general point.

What if you really do believe that you have a better service than that competitor? What if you _can_ demonstrate better uptime/benefits/customer- service/whatever? Do you just sit around and wait until customers fall into your lap?

While I appreciate the sentiment for _the current circumstances_ , I don't think it holds generally. It almost feels like the opposite of hustle.

<comment><USER8> It's an implicit form of negative advertising, which is rarely noble or "gentlemanly". I think most people would be disgusted if a politician started running ads about how healthy he is when his opponent is in the hospital. This situation is similar: while the sites are touting themselves, it's the obvious contrast they are creating that makes it negative.

<comment><USER9> Politicians would wish their opponent a speedy recovery after their morning jog[1], like a website might say it won't take advantage of another's situation by writing a blog post with a link to the competitors problems[2] and pointing out some other competitor is acting poorly.

1) or tennis on The West Wing

2) I do believe their post is in good faith, but I spent a chunk of my life dealing with politicians and I think seeing the gears makes one a bit cynical

<comment><USER10> I want to give your brain a hug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many of the comments here are missing the point a little. To summarize:

"If your customer experiences a freak event that no one can really plan for trying to turn that into a win for yourself is inappropriate" - We should argue on the merits of that. Don't confuse this with a service that perhaps experiences ongoing issues. Those are material points that a buyer should know and are fair game to raise in marketing.

</comment><comment><USER12> The real reason not to do this is that it makes you look like a scumbag. It's not in your interest to make that association in your customer's minds. For instance, I run a small datacenter on the east coast. We had no downtime due to Sandy, but the level of MSP/CoLo/Managed hosting company cold calls I got in the two weeks after trying to use their uptime during the storm as a sales pitch was unbelievable. every single one of them went in my "scumbucket vendor" file.

</comment><comment><USER13> Getting 6 nines uptime costs money, if you make that investment in infrastructure/staff then you deserve to make it a selling point.

OTOH I can certainly see an exception when it comes to what is effectively digital terrorism.

There seems to be at least some belief that Adria was let go at least partly to stop the fallout from the DDOS attack.

You can't let 4channers get the idea that they can set policy decisions that affect others and ultimately have nothing to do with them.

<comment><USER3> _Getting 6 nines uptime costs money, if you make that investment in infrastructure/staff then you deserve to make it a selling point._

Certainly, and I don't see the OP arguing against that. The OP just seems to be saying something that's analogous to the old schoolyard ethic of "don't kick someone when they're down".

<comment><USER13> Well, that depends.

If I can win customers by pointing out that company X is having problems and you wouldn't have those problems with my company (or at least would be less likely to) because we have superior infrastructure etc then I think it's perfectly fair to point that out.

If OTOH they are suffering as a consequence of some retard-spasm of the internetz that could just as easily have happened to us and more crucially is more _likely_ to happen to us if 4chan get their way this time around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know - I think I'm a bit darwinistic here.

Having suffered through some products with bi-weekly downtime, I tend to think competitors should be allowed tout whatever their strengths are including uptime if that's one of them. And it doesn't reflect poorly on them (in my eyes). When suffering I like to see solutions offered…

Of course most companies with horrible re-occuring downtime, have no serious competition… So there's that.

<comment><USER15> OP is talking about kicking someone when they are down as the result of a random catastrophe. You won't gain many customers doing this, and the ones you do gain won't be very loyal.

<comment><USER14> So perhaps what I'm saying is that at some point you have to kick when down, at least if a vendor is always down. Every marketing campaign I've ever been involved in ran for longer than 2 weeks. And in my example I was not joking - we were paying for a service that had roughly bi-weekly, unplanned downtime of multiple hours, for many many months. A marketing campaign would have inevitably run concurrent with a downtime.

I agree - running attack ads after 1 random catastrophic event is in poor taste. But at some point - 3 in a year?, 3 in a month? - it becomes reasonable, and tasteful, to tout uptime as an advantage.

<comment><USER16> I don't think anyone's really disagreeing with this. If you can make a real case that you can offer a better service, that's fine.

As another example: say a meteorite takes out your competitor's data centre. If you are running from independent data centres with capacity to handle a sudden failure of one, feel free to highlight that. If you're running from one data centre, you should probably just count yourself lucky that it happened to them and not you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Being a customer of Postmark's, I'm happy that they took this sort of stance. Their service has had it's share of issues, and they always have responded quickly and professionally. Not surprising that they responded in this manor.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't agree with this - because in all honesty, SendGrid probably should have had some sort of contingency plan setup to handle extremely high amounts of traffic. Sure, the public facing website may have gone down, but the API & other servers should have been able to scale up or down depending on load.

When your service is as relied upon as an email provider, it needs to have near perfect uptime in order to keep trust. People were tweeting @SendGrid wondering why it was down for hours, and were looking for other providers to pick up anyway.

</comment><comment><USER19> By writing this post, you're actively working to benefit from someone else's outage. A bit hypocritical, no? Hitting the front page of HN with a post talking about how great you are? Yeah, okay, you're not trying to benefit off this outage at all.

<comment><USER11> You do realize the logic of your argument results in "You can't comment on this because any exposure you receive based on your comment makes you a hypocrite based your comments"

<comment><USER20> I disagree. I don't know Wildbit or who their competitors are. All it took for me to figure out the "shitstorm" that was referenced was to hover over the link.

The same message could have been made with no reference to SendGrid but they chose not to. Whether that was a conscious decision is unknown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The company I work for was disrupted by SendGrid's downtime, so this very question was something I was actually thinking about. I'm on the fence about this.

One of my former bosses told me that you never take advantage of a competitor's bad press, because who knows when it will be you that get's the bad press. It makes sense, because you don't want to look opportunistic on someone else's bad luck.

But if you're a startup, and you need to get some traction against a competitor, it might be a good way to get some new customers. You better be able to live up to your claims though otherwise your entire credibility is in question.

</comment><comment><USER22> This gentleman's agreement.. What crap it is.

I have a story: a few years ago, the US had a nasty hurricane called Katrina. This hurricane directly hit New Orleans, and other cities. After this time, all insurance companies pulled all operations out... With exception of one. This company, once called Government Employee Insurance Company, realized that they could raise rates by 400% and be the only one willing to sell.

The company is Geico, run by Berkshire Hathaway.

<comment><USER23> Interesting story, but I fail to see what on earth the comparison is with this piece of tech news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I disagree. I mean, you put the line at a wrong place.

So you say we shouldn't benefit from competitor's outages, but we can benefit from their failures of different types? Because every time you claim that you do something better than competition, it's simply you trying to benefit from their failure to do this thing right.

I think the line should be a bit further than you say. Benefiting from someone's downtime or any other kind of failure is perfectly fine, unless that downtime/failure wasn't easily avoidable. If the downtime/failure is because the company lack of professionalism then you should go and benefit from it. If their downtime is because they are hosting servers in their own office, under CTO's desk, and cleaning lady disconnected the cable, shame on them.

That said, this wasn't the case. DDoS isn't something anyone can easily protect from and because of that you shouldn't try to benefit from it. If you do, you basically lie to your customers by making impression that you could avoid such outage.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah but. I somehow doubt that people leave a service over a single explainable outage. From my personal experience, I move when the outage is the straw that broke the camel's back - when I have been unhappy with the service but have lacked the time and urgency to do something about it, and then they are down and I'm thinking "Well, time I moved off here anyway".

So in that respect, I think I am fair game to a "Switch to our service!" email and I don't see how that is unethical - happy customers don't move just because they get an email during an untypical service interruption. Dropbox could go down for the rest of the day, and I could get all the competitor emails they want to send me, and I am not going to switch. I did switch registrars during an outage, but that is because I had been less than ecstatic about them and just needed a kick.

<comment><USER26> It depends on the outage. But any service provider can tell you there's always an increase of cancellations around any outage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I disagree strongly with the ultimate basis of this: it is a dog eat dog world. There is a finite pool of customers. I don't mean to say you should do what the other company did (email bashing while others are down) but you shouldn't be afraid to talk about your other strengths.

<comment><USER28> I wonder if the modern customer is more nuanced than that though? We've all been fucked over by capitalism, it's refreshing to see companies not be douches about it.

I'm really happy with Sendgrid, but this really gave me a good feeling about who Wildbit is, and now I'm inclined to give them my business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "We shake hands with guys at conferences"

Only the guys? _ducks_

<comment><USER30> See also "A Gentlemen's Agreement".

Personally I think the language police can go and do something gender- appropriate and painful to themselves, but after the nature of that particular shitstorm, it does seem a touch out of place!

<comment><USER4> The definition of the phrase ("An arrangement or understanding which is based upon the trust of both or all parties, rather than being legally binding") doesn't specify a particular gender, though a word in the phrase can. Taking the phrase in the spirit it's intended would lead one not to consider it sexist, though if you take the position that any mention of sex (or any reference to old-world patriarchy) in speech is inherently wrong we'd be here all day.

<comment><USER30> That's why I said I have no time for the language police!

I find it an interesting phrase to have chosen for an article title in light of what the recent furore is all about, but not an offensive one. Then again I'm rather hard to offend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This isn't a clear cut line not to be crossed. It's a matter of personal ethics. There are times when you do something differently _precisely_ because you think it's a better way and gives your company and your customers an advantage. When that advantage becomes clear for all to see there's no reason to deny it, hide it, pretend that it's just blind misfortune that could have happened to you just as easily, when you have taken active steps to make sure it didn't. You don't need to tear down your competitors, but you shouldn't avoid pointing out why you are good/better.

</comment><comment><USER32> This will do nothing, as it's not their decision to make. I'm occasionally in the position to be buying services from commodity providers. If your service goes down and I start shopping around, the question is not "Will I ditch you for someone who can deliver?", it's "Which one will I move to?".

You might as well try to be in the running with some well-timed advertising. I'm sure you're emotionally invested in being a nice guy to the folks in the booth next to you, but as your customer I can assure you I'd rather see you fight.

</comment><comment><USER33> So you thought it is loable to not exploit your opponents weaknesses?

And it is loable to leave potential customers stranded with a subpar service that has failed their expectations by not being available?

It think you should read Sirlin's definition of a scrub[0], and decide if you want to continue being one, but you have no moral high ground, you are just limited by your own made up rules.

[0]:<http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html>

<comment><USER3> _So you thought it is loable to not exploit your opponents weaknesses?_

There's a big difference between exploiting a weakness in general, and taking advantage of an extraordinary circumstance that harms your competitor. To me, this comes down to sportsmanship.

To use a bit of an analogy... I wrestled in high-school. We trained to identify weaknesses in the game of our opponents, so I might well enter into a match with a guy thinking "I know he's susceptible to upper body takedowns like a lateral drop or an armspin, so I'm going to pointedly attack that way". That's trying to exploit a weakness, and it's totally reasonable, expected and fair. But if I'm wrestling a guy and he slips on a wet spot on the mat and tears a groin muscle and is laying on the mat writhing in pain, should I jump on him and try to score a quick pin? No, of course not. Good sportsmanship dictates stand back, let the ref step in, give the guy his medical timeout, and then see what happens. If he can't continue, then you either "win" via forfeit or the match is vacated completely (I forget exactly which would have happened in that case when I was in HS).

Same in the business world... if my competitor has a known, exploitable weakness, like a less mature infrastructure and problems with uptime, and I market and sell based on an overall better quality of service, that's one thing. But if the competitor experiences a "black swan" event, should I "jump on and go for the quick pin"? I say "no", that doing that would be just as unethical as in the wrestling example.

<comment><USER34> I like the general sentiment, and I generally act the same way, but I can't help but think, "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." Another analogy: I played tennis in high school and in every match I've played in my life, there are no refs and the players call balls in or out on their own. Some people cheat on that and, all else equal, they tend to win more points. If I had millions of dollars at stake on these matches, I'd be a hell of a lot more likely to cheat than I did. As it was, I'd try to call things fair unless my opponent was cheating; then I'd blatantly call balls out to, um, "persuade" my opponent to knock it off. None of your opponents choked you in high school? No hard to see punches?

The analogy somewhat falls apart because reputation matters more in business: the OP is to some degree PR.

<comment><USER35> If you play for points, of course it makes sense to cheat.

If you play to be a better human being, and better at tennis, you are just fucking yourself in the ear if you cheat.

When you cheat, you know you can't win in a fair fight. You may win -- but you know you don't "deserve" it. You can tell yourself you "deserve" it because you were smart enough to take advantage, but some part of you will know you're a liar, and you couldn't hack it in a fair fight.

This is also why lying to people is a waste of time, because it creates a layer between you and the rest of the world. Chronic liars often find themselves facing depression because "nobody knows the real me." And cheats, when in a position where cheating won't help them, lack confidence.

<comment><USER34> Yours is far from a universal opinion. Plenty of people who cheat could probably win a fair fight, but cheating makes it easier. Watch any sport at any level and you'll see "cheaters" win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Doing this has the same advantages and disadvantages, for both businesses and customers, as price-fixing or forming a cartel.

I'm not saying it's the same as forming a cartel, maybe a cartel _lite_. Think about it: from the point of view of the customer of a downed service, competitors doing some opportunistic PR is only beneficial.

So competitors _not_ doing opportunistic PR is depriving customers of a benefit, while helping the industry itself.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm curious as to where she got that notion. Do things like this happen often enough among her market segment to where a reasonable person could form such an expectation? I mean, I can see having a personal conviction to not stoop to such levels, but expecting my competitors to share it? That sounds rather illogical, and could lead to getting caught flat-footed in such an event.

</comment><comment><USER38> I agree with most of this, but they should have waited weeks to post this, so it didn't seem like they were trying to use reverse psychology to engage in the exact behavior that they're railing against. Also "gentlemen's agreement" was a poor choice of words because it isn't a gender neutral term.

<comment><USER39> I'm pretty sure the title was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, it's a definable, historical legal term. Better than titling it "An informal agreement between two or more parties simply understood as part of an unspoken agreement by convention or through mutually beneficial etiquette." (Apologies to Wikipedia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I strongly disagree. That is not how capitalism works. You should take advantage of every opportunity you can to get people to try your product. If you have a superior product they'll stay, if you don't they won't.

<comment><USER3> _That is not how capitalism works. You should take advantage of every opportunity you can to get people to try your product._

What a load of bunk. Nothing about capitalism per-se prohibits a firm from having a sense of ethics, or from having principles. Promoting this way of thinking is the reason so many lefties find so much ammunition to attack capitalism.

Firms (especially privately held ones) certainly can choose to withhold from certain kinds of behaviour while competing fiercely, and succeeding, in the market.

<comment><USER40> You don't have to do anything unethical to take advantage of your competitors' struggles. Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA?

All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

<comment><USER3> _Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA?_

No, but that wasn't a "black swan" event that GoDaddy could not control. They _chose_ to support SOPA. In my mind, that's a pretty different scenario.

 _All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed._

I basically agree with that; I just think the OP's post is pointing out a very specific edge case where a certain sort of behaviour is indicated.

<comment><USER40> In my mind it's a harmless crime. If you are doing something unethical then you risk turning off customers with your scummy behavior. If you have the superior product, then you are doing the customers a favor. If you have an inferior product, then the customer will simply switch products again.

I don't think a 'gentlemen's agreement' is needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> >>When someone you compete against is suffering, especially as a result of any kind of infrastructure issues, shut up and keep your head down.

Why? Seriously Why? Companies that are not attacked by their competitors become lazy. I think is fair game. They are not doing anything illegal and frankly I don't think the situation is scummy at all. This guy sounds like a kid yelling "is not fair" and "you are a big meanie". Where the fuck does he think he is?

<comment><USER39> "She," actually. And she is the owner of a company that benefitted from SendGrid's unfortunate circumstances. Being the owner of such a service, what she saw other competition doing disturbed her. So she wrote about it.

Although Postmark did receive an uptick of signups, they didn't take the opportunity to market against SendGrid as an unreliable service, because they know there is no 100% reliable service, anywhere, ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sad to see the discussion is more about "what'll get you customers" instead of "what does it mean to do business ethically."

Capitalism, fine. Competitiveness, fine. Postmark is not a company afraid of customers or competition. But they believe in competing in a classy, ethical way. Most importantly, their competitive advantages are based on _facts_ , things they can control, things their competitors could control but don't.

How can anyone disagree with that?

But sure, let's look at it from a ruthless, ethics-free standpoint:

What if you do run attack ads, what if you do kick the competitor when they have a _freak event_ that they _did not cause_ and _could not have prevented_ \-- an enormous DDoSing campaign by an organized group -- and which could happen to you, too?

What if you lure customers away with these attack ads?

What will those customers do when _you_ have a freak event?

No service has perfect uptime. DDoSing can happen to anyone.

So even if you have the ethics of a rutabaga, all you get for your efforts are _customers which do not tolerate the occasional freak event_. What do you think they're going to do when _you_ have something you have no control over?

Your marketing will have created the results that you deserve.

Business doesn't exist in a vacuum. You do not "win customers for life." Customers are not all equal (far from it). This is a long game. Being classy, being honest, is the best way to create a business you -- and your customers -- can live with for a long time.

<comment><USER42> Their is a long time debate between the ideals of communitarism and the ideals of cosmopolitanism, but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism.

When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?

Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.

<comment><USER35> "but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism."

And another term for this sentence is a strawman argument. Nobody at all said there was a gentleman's agreement _not to compete_. Please read the article.

<comment><USER42> You might argue that it is a slippery slope argument, which is not a problem in itself, especially since there is a loose definition for what constitutes cronyism, but it is not a straw man argument.

The post calls for not drawing attention to when a competitor experiences a failure. That sort of chumminess does not encourage more robust infrastructure, it makes it difficult for new entrants to compete based on better reliability, and ultimately does not benefit customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PostgreSQL Magic - <AUTHOR> http://goto.project-a.com/postgresql-magic/ <comment><USER2> As a fellow Postgres amateur wizard, love the positive attention that postgres seems to be getting more and more, and some half databases less and less (unless you actually need map-reduce, ofcourse. You probably don't. /trollface)

What I miss though in this article, and where I think postgres shines majorly compared to other rel dbs, are window functions.

It allows you to apply a partition to a set. You can do some great wizardly magic with this, like 'give me each row matching this and that, which matches the last occurence of given column'.

Edit: WITH clauses (CTE) are great for avoiding a lot of nesting with subqueries and/or reusing subqueries throughout the main query. They have added functionality for recursion, but I suppose that unless you do some kind of tree traversal on big data sets, benefits of that are soso, readabillity and all that.

Edit2: I had to double check this, I never use custom types, using UNNEST() ARRAY[] on a custom type is superfluous. Just use ROW().

<comment><USER3> Window functions are not a Postgres thing, but part of the SQL standard with (varying, of course) support across most of the major RDBMS's.

I've seen comments like this several times that seem to imply that Postgres is exceptional either due to having window functions, or like in this one where the tone sounds as if Postgres does them particularly better.

I'm curious, as I do almost 100% of my production work in MS SQL Server, where I am able to do everything that comes up when "Postgres window functions" are mentioned, whether there is extra functionality in Postgres compared to other RDBMS's window function implementations?

Is there a reason that Postgres seems to get special attention for window functions?

Thanks.

<comment><USER4> I think it's largely a question of community.

Many users of MS SQL or Oracle learned advanced SQL or platform-specific features which they take for granted. They work at companies that spend lots of money for DBs and hire people who use them very well.

Postgres also has a core community of very knowledgeable folks. But most of its user base, and especially those new to using it, would otherwise use MySQL. They only know small bits of SQL, have only a basic understanding of why any company would need a DBA, and only learn things like this when they absolutely need them for a task. And, for that group of people, MS and Oracle probably aren't serious choices, so the fact that a free database has these cool features seems exciting to them.

(Note that I don't say this with distain. I'm a former-mysql user who now uses postgres on Heroku and am constantly learning things like this. I wouldn't even have understood your perspective until I started working with people who knew Oracle and MS SQL so thoroughly.)

<comment><USER5> > so the fact that a free database has these cool features seems exciting to > them

It IS exciting to them. And to anybody who can't afford Oracle or other expensive enterprise solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quibble: the "now()" function doesn't return the time of _statement_ start; it returns the time of _transaction_ start.

      $ psql -q
      rosser=# begin;
      rosser=# select now();
                    now
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
       2015-09-11 02:28:54.262142-07
      (1 row)

      rosser=# select now();
                    now
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
       2015-09-11 02:28:54.262142-07
      (1 row)

<comment><USER7> That's also not completely acurate:

      postgres=> SELECT now(), now(), clock_timestamp(), clock_timestamp();
                  now              |              now              |        clock_timestamp        |       clock_timestamp

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

      2015-09-11 09:57:00.414422+00 | 2015-09-11 09:57:00.414422+00 | 2015-09-11 09:57:00.419087+00 | 2015-09-11 09:57:00.41909+00

Now() stays the same for the entire statement as well. clock_timestamp() doesn't.

<comment><USER8> If you ever manage to have multiple transactions in one statement please email me.

<comment><USER9> Easy. Just use dblink or foreign table to execute part of the statement inside other transaction. dblink to the same server/db is often used as way to create an "AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So many amazing features that are incredibly relevant to modern web development. I've switched over a personal project from MySQL to PG recently and this time I'm not looking back.

On 9.4 I have the HSTORE and JSONB types as well as range types which are incredibly useful. If you have a solid language library wrapper for PG you can spend far less time mangling data from one format to the next and just get to work. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have seen magic done with custom types and aggregates. For example, I know of projects with run-length-encoded bitsets and custom aggregates for doing set operations and counts, sort of like Redis' bitset commands but built into PG. This is a massive space optimization, because otherwise you'd just have a join table with zillions of tiny rows.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have to admit that I'm still not quite sure about arrays in relational databases. Don't get me wrong, I use them all the time, but it kinda feels like when you've got tables that you just _know_ could be normalized more thoroughly.

Also: If someone has a good version-control wrapper for stored procedures, that would be swell. And while I'm doing the wishful thinking shtick, maybe a Coffeescript-like preprocessor and a good linter?

<comment><USER13> > I have to admit that I'm still not quite sure about arrays in relational > databases. Don't get me wrong, I use them all the time, but it kinda feels > like when you've got tables that you just know could be normalized more > thoroughly.

Why is that? There are many use cases for data (like vector data) which really needs an array. And it would be unwise to store it as columns. Think of, for example, matrix data or a practically unbounded number of double values coming from a sensor. Plus, PostgreSQL has a limit in the number of columns (1600) of a table, of which you could run out soon if representing this kind of data as regular columns rather than array values.

<comment><USER14> Why wouldnt an unbounded set of values related to a sensor just fit in a one to many model of data? (Instead of a constantly updating row, simply inserting more rows)

It seems like you would be trading one fat row for something the database does well (unless you always want all of the sensor data every time)

<comment><USER13> An array is basically a set of homogeneous fields indexed by number, which are probably accessed in constant-time. A relational table is a completely different beast. Even after disregarding performance (which might be an abysmal difference in many use cases) it's not obvious how to access by index without "hacks". And if you consider multidimensional data, things get tougher without arrays...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What tool do you use for visualizing table relationships (foreign key constraints f.x.) in PostgreSQL?

<comment><USER16> [http://www.pgadmin.org/](http://www.pgadmin.org/) ?? but I am also new to postgresql. There are also some commercial tools available.

<comment><USER15> how?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The best part of this for me was the batch updates. I am a little confused at the need for a user defined type that is a copy of the schema of the table. Wouldn't it be better to do use:

::table_name%ROWTYPE;

That way you wouldn't need to maintain a table and a type with the exact same schema, no?</comment>


Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who's looking - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-maps-political-borders/ <comment><USER2> While this sounds bad, this is quite normal and expected by any multi-national corporation using a map service. Companies don't get to choose the favored boundaries when doing business in Russia or China, given having the wrong lines can result in legal issues or even expulsion from the market.

Is this good for a freer world? Perhaps not. Is this better for everyone's bottom lines? Most definitely.

Source: I run a map company. (For now, we default to the boundaries as defined in OSM and include the data regarding disputed boundaries, which can by styled our customers as they wish.)

Addendum: Google _is_ one of those multi-national companies. If they choose to only display the lines as the UN would draw them, they would not have a market in many countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Pakistani, I thought this was common knowledge. When Google Maps hosted localized maps on country-specific domains, Pakistanis found the Indian version on the .co.in domain and it was a whole thing [1]. Pakistan's even complained to the World Bank for a map of the country that excluded Gilgit- Baltistan and Kashmir during a (literally one) book launch. Some Governments, especially my own, feel slighted at the smallest of things—you don't want to get on their bad side if you're trying to do business with them.

By the way, if you want the official map of Pakistan, it's released by the Survey of Pakistan here[2].

Edit: I want to point out that Pakistan literally bans any website arbitrarily. YouTube was banned for three years in Pakistan[3], and social media websites have been banned many times in the past including (ostensibly) to chill coverage of protests[4]. It isn't too far-fetched to imagine a Pakistan without Google Maps if Google doesn't play nice.

[0]: [https://tribune.com.pk/story/1163447/google-maps-shows- azad-...](https://tribune.com.pk/story/1163447/google-maps-shows-azad-kashmir- indian-territory-latest-gaffe/)

[1]: [https://tribune.com.pk/story/1262447/pakistan-protest- world-...](https://tribune.com.pk/story/1262447/pakistan-protest-world-banks- incorrect-map/)

[2]: [http://www.surveyofpakistan.gov.pk/images/downloads/pak3m.pd...](http://www.surveyofpakistan.gov.pk/images/downloads/pak3m.pdf)

[3]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan- youtube/pakistan...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan- youtube/pakistan-lifts-ban-on-youtube-after-launch-of-local-version- idUSKCN0UW1ER)

[4]: [https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/press-release-drf-and- net...](https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/press-release-drf-and-netblocks- find-blanket-and-nation-wide-ban-on-social-media-in-pakistan-and-demand-it-to- be-lifted-immediately/)

<comment><USER4> It is common knowledge. Here's a video that goes into more detail: [https://youtu.be/P_UVPTdjxC0](https://youtu.be/P_UVPTdjxC0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I do work for Google, this is just standard practice for any map maker since they are required to follow local laws. I find this article to be incendiary singling out a single company and acting as if they are doing this with bad intent which is not the case here.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if this is accurate, but the article implies that printed maps don't do this kind stuff, or at least less so (e.g. "We try to show as much information as we can, when we can, to help people understand what's going on in a part of the world").

I don't know how Google maps compares to other online maps.

> as if they are doing this with bad intent

I didn't really read any implications of "bad intent" here, but rather indifference or callousness regarding these issues.

<comment><USER7> Printed maps are printed _somewhere_, and have to follow that where's laws. Naturally, a (for example) US-printed map can draw foreign disputed borders as disputed or either side's.

Now, if that same map was to be distributed in one of the disputing countries, that's another story, and even representing disputedness can be illegal.

Since Google wants to distribute their maps globally, they can either show the "correct" maps, or block access from people in countries with disputed borders. Their business model being what it is, they chose to redraw maps when necessary.

<comment><USER8> I've seen printed maps of Greece which had an actual label with the word "FYROM" layered on top of the neighboring country if Macedonia. The map was obviously printed outside of Greece

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Imagine if google _didn 't_ do this... How much outrage would there be when google made a decision over where to draw the border?

I can't think of any circumstance where i want a multinational corporation to be making decisions about where disputed borders are drawn.

</comment><comment><USER10> Once we are done talking about country borders, let's talk about flags.

Red Hat/Fedora "no flags" policy: [https://lwn.net/Articles/333623/](https://lwn.net/Articles/333623/)

Resignation of an important Debian kernel maintainer because a flag of Taiwan is included in a Debian package: [https://lwn.net/Articles/86925/](https://lwn.net/Articles/86925/) [https://lwn.net/Articles/86923/](https://lwn.net/Articles/86923/)

<comment><USER11> That resignation is hilarious. GPL extremism is tolerable but a Taiwanese flag was "too much". Good riddance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This happens with all american books with maps in India too - it isn't a Google problem. It's a government problem.

I don't think this article has good reporting, because it suggests that the company has some hidden agenda, when really all it's doing is complying with local laws.

<comment><USER13> It's neither a Google not a governmental problem. It is fundamentally a _people_ problem, and unlikely to change as long as anyone draws breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is /very/ old news. Maybe not even news. It's the norm since maps depicting administrative areas of some sort exist.

And there is no difference even. In the past you could take a paper map drawn by A and showing a disputed border between A & B to B and show them.

Nowadays you can spoof your GPS and/or IP to purport you are at A (although your are at B) and see the map people at A are commonly shown.

</comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648633)

</comment><comment><USER16> Microsoft chooses to display a border as disputed, which I guess is more honest here than selling different borders to both sides.

<comment> the-rc Bing, too, follows local laws that could otherwise get people arrested. At some point they didn't even show the Kashmir border as disputed: [https://splinternews.com/how-airbnb-google-and-microsoft- vie...](https://splinternews.com/how-airbnb-google-and-microsoft-view- disputed-territo-1793854681)

The whole situation, managing border depictions worldwide, is a rathole. You just can't win.

<comment><USER2> > You just can't win.

This, in a nutshell. Some border disputes are straightforward, and choosing one depiction over the other could be considered ethically better than choosing the other depiction. Other disputes are intractable without just displaying based on the worldview of the viewer.

By picking a side, you can't do _any_ business in a country, often. By showing the worldview (or legally mandated worldview) of the viewer, you abide by local law and don't have to worry about your employees being arrested.

Pick your fights and your venues wisely. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you show a Greek map of Cyprus to Turks, you'll get pissed off customers. If you show a Turkish map of Cyprus to Greeks you'll get pissed off customers.

I know this because I've been in a team dealing with exactly this set of issues.

As much as anything Google's map borders are about good customer service.

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't this what traditional printed map makers would do? Or were maps of the pre Google maps era mostly produced by local entities?

<comment><USER2> Yes, and yes. By nature of it, they were produced for a certain language, at least, which in most cases implies a certain worldview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Makes sense.. borders aren't some universal truth, they're relative to the observer. Especially when you get down into the weeds, every country has border disputes.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is how you survive as a company in the world we are in today. We all know public gets knee jerk reaction towards those issues, and why drive fire towards yourself.

</comment><comment><USER21> This sort of journalism feels capricious. Is this supposed to be surprising? The way it's presented makes it seem like something should really be questioned here and that readers should walk away with some kind of unnecessary ideological reaction about the evils that be in Big Tech. What is the point of this?

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what is shown when you're living inside one of those 'disputed' locations.

</comment><comment><USER23> No surprise, because there are laws in many countries that tell you how a map must look like.

</comment><comment><USER24> Related West Wing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k9IlR3-_-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k9IlR3-_-A)

</comment><comment><USER25> Borders should be drawn based on the states that control them. So oddities like Transnistria would be shown, even opposing sides in civil wars.

</comment><comment><USER26> Aren't they required to in many countries?

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://archive.md/byuYt](https://archive.md/byuYt)

</comment><comment><USER28> Could they use this to troll the ego's of world leaders? i.e. show Putin he owns all of Ukraine, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really hate the whole non-determinism in sites. First we have A/B testing, then we have google search showing different results depending on what computer/account/country of the ip address you are using, youtube showing different recommended videos (rather than basing it on the current video), etc.

It would be great if instead they had a deterministic way of looking at it. For example give an easy way to anyone to select a different "perception" for the map borders.

<comment><USER30> How is that non deterministic?

<comment><USER31> My guess is non-deterministic is not the correct word. More like determined by factors not disclosed to the user. Social media does this as a feature.

There must be a line though. I certainly wouldn't want laws in my country to force Wikipedia to alter facts based on my location. I suppose it's possible that's already happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is sort of like if snapchat altered the faces of the people who look into its camera to make them more attractive to match what they look like in their own heads. The correct way is to not fuel delusions about the individual and get everyone to reach a consensus about the real world that we all live in. But if snapchat presented reality they probably wouldn't have a market either.

<comment><USER2> > get everyone to reach a consensus about the real world that we all live in.

I think that's the point. This is impossible. The only way the entire world agrees on every single boundary is, barring world peace another way, a single world government.

That's simply not the world we live in or do business in.

Also, this isn't, shall we say, dressing up the pig. It's two, potentially legitimate, competing claims to the same piece of ground. There is, in many cases, not a single "this is the valid claim." And perhaps the fact we're fighting over how the lines are drawn is an indication things are better than they used to be? (Because those competitors aren't all at war over those lines and we aren't drawing them all as war zones.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> You're a company. You have the power to influence the opinions of millions, those millions can - by vote or brute force - hold their government accountable. Do you take an independent choice based on your morals and the information you've seen, or do you take the road to the biggest pile of cash?

<comment><USER34> It's not that simple. The Indian government literally bans maps that depict the national boundaries as different. It's even a question on their customs forms [0]. Taking a position like you suggest is always a debate and is rarely black and white. Draw the maps differently and suddenly Google stops working. Now what? Not only do you lose business, but any other value you could provide to people in the country has now been nullified.

[0] [http://www.cbic.gov.in/resources//htdocs- cbec/customs/forms_...](http://www.cbic.gov.in/resources//htdocs- cbec/customs/forms_pdf/cs-bgge-declare- form1-ason19feb2014.pdf;jsessionid=38149A235D3D72B8BAF51B91DAA404AF)

<comment><USER3> I concur, and it's the same on the Pakistani side[1]. If you don't play by the rules online, you're blocked in the country.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22337891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22337891)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Essays on the Security vs. Privacy Dichotomy? - <AUTHOR> Recently, privacy has become a big deal. So much so that I find it being used synonymously with security. I believe attention to both is overall good for our digital culture, but I am wary of a conflated understanding working its way into fundamental internet systems and general software and ultimately limiting the potential to achieve either. Security is about identifying things and building trust relationships while privacy is about concealing your identity amongst untrustworthy adversaries. I feel compelled to write about the topic because I find it interesting and also because I happen to work in an area of software that would benefit from progressing the dialog.
Is there any existing literature on the topic? I'd love to review and contribute rather than start cold. <comment><USER2> I recommend the book "Governance of Privacy" by Colin J. Bennett and Charles D. Raab.

You should be able to get it through inter-library loan.</comment>


Every Second on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://onesecond.designly.com

<comment><USER2> Very effective visualization. It'd be great to compare other services such as LinkedIn, Bing, Amazon.</comment>


The decline in U.S. life expectancy is unlike anything we've seen in a century - <AUTHOR> https://www.popsci.com/life-expectancy-declining <comment><USER2> This thread by Atul Gawande, a doctor, analyzes recent death data from Massachusetts. Several interesting notes, especially this: "The starkest differences in death rates are not by race or gender, but by level of education. People with only a high school degree or less have a _350%_ higher annual rate of death than others. That's not a typo."

[https://www.twitter.com/atul_gawande/status/1078646188344336...](https://www.twitter.com/atul_gawande/status/1078646188344336384)

<comment><USER3> Damn. I have to think it's because the higher level of education required by a rising percentage of jobs is boxing less educated people into more demanding, less engaging, and higher stress jobs that are disappearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a developed country in the late 20th century which suffered a huge decline in life expectancy: Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116380/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116380/) Life expectancy falls to 58: ""What we are arguing," said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report's contributors, "is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mfr15/why_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mfr15/why_did_russian_life_expectancy_drop_massively_in/) : Reddit thread with sources

While the situation is not nearly on the same scale, perhaps there are some lessons to be drawn in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ironically, can't a lot of the mortality increase be attributed to the tightening of prescription opiate supply? A well intentioned measure seems to be resulting in a fair amount of people dying. Maybe the lesser evil is to just let people dope themselves up with pharmaceutical-grade controls on purity/dosage?

<comment><USER6> > ...can't a lot of the mortality increase be attributed to the tightening of > prescription opiate supply?

How do you figure that?

To the contrary, this article lists drug overdoses as one of the three main causes for the decrease in life expectancy. Wouldn't increasing the availability of opioids increase overdoses?

<comment><USER7> Prescription drugs on the black market are typically more expensive than the cheaper but deadlier alternative, heroin.

When people can't afford/obtain the oxycontin anymore many will go to heroin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _A new report from the Centers for Disease Control shows that a small decrease in life expectancy, from 78.7 to 78.6 years, is part of a continuing trend. Even as we make progress treating cancer, heart disease, and stroke—three of the biggest killers—we're losing ground on other fronts and have been since 2014. That makes this continuous decline unlike anything we 've seen since World War I and the Spanish influenza, which both happened between 1915 and 1918._

Had to re-read 3x times to make sure I was not misreading. Just .1 year? Isn't that within the margin of error or just an expected fluctuation within a much longer trend / hardly anything to lose sleep over, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER9> Suicide, drug overdose, and liver disease. It seems like an ounce of prevention can help stem those.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...The decline was 0.1 of a year.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this has happened in Canada too. We certainly have a big opioid problem.

<comment><USER12> Yes, this was reported here as well.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/life-expectancy-canada- decrea...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/life-expectancy-canada-decrease- opioid-crisis-1.4874651)</comment></comment>


Show HN: pyretry - separate retry logic from business logic - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/bobbyrenwick/pyretry We've all written and rewritten code that catches exceptions and then retries to do the same procedure again. Here's a python library to help you eliminate this code from your business logic, keeping your code cleaner and your fingers more energetic. <comment><USER2> Ground breaking stuff!</comment>


Six Apart (Movable Type, TypePad) allegedly being acquired by VideoEgg - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/video-egg-will-acquire-six-apart-and-rename-itself-say-media/

<comment><USER2> Six Apart sure did mess up the opportunity they had. They went from IPO track to forced merger in the space of a few years.

See this answer on Quora: "How Did Six Apart Screw Up (the complete story)":

[http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up-The- Complete...](http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up-The-Complete- Story)

<comment><USER3> is it possible that this is another case of lifestyle entrepreneurs who enjoyed the product but never really wanted to get caught up in the SV/ VC model? and without them there to carry on the vision, and thereby no real product strategy, creating this mismatch of four synergistic products, it was always to struggle?

<comment><USER2> I think this is definitley the case. The company started when Ben Trott developed a web publishing engine for his wife, Mena, who wanted to use it to update her sewing group. Similar to eBay, except unlike eBay Six Apart didn't bring in big-gun management until later on (and they weren't as good as say, Meg Whitman).

Most of the poor decisions were made at that time, Wordpress took the lead and then didn't look back from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes you meet someone and you have a pleasant conversation with them, so you think they are nice enough, so you invite them to a party. Then at the party it is clear they are out of their depth, they are too shy or too aggressive, or both, with some odd mix of insecurity and uncertainty over how to behave. And then you wish you hadn't invited them to the party.

That is my perception of Ben and Mena Trott, in so far as their personas on the web go (which is the only way that I, and most people, know them). It is astonishing that they were such early participants in blogging, yet they failed to ever find the right tone.

I remember that my first impression of MoveableType was favorable. This was in either 2000 or 2001. I had the impression that it was the best blogging platform around. At that time, the world of PHP only had stuff like PHPNuke, which was unbelievably bad.

Once TypePad got going, my impression of Ben and Mena Trott changed for the worse. There was the incident where Mena called out someone for being an "asshole" at SXSW, and then her awkward attempt at an apology:

<http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2005/12/words-you-shoul.html>

Is appropriate to use this language when you are talking to your customers? Even if this is your honest opinion, is this the best way to express yourself?

If the goal was to alienate their user base, they went about it with scientific precision.

I recall at one point Mena wrote a post where she talked about how her and Ben were trying to learn how to enjoy wine, rather than always drinking soda. To me, the post had a quality of "Everyone says blogging is suppose to be personal and we are suppose to be pioneers in this field, so I will now try a post on a personal topic." Possibly others enjoyed her attempt at being transparent, but to me the tone was forced and awkward.

My overall sense then, and still now, was they were lucky to be early into blogging since if overlapped with their personal interests (Mena wanted to better organize her sewing circle by posting announcements online, so she asked her husband Ben to create some software that would make it easy for her to do so - this was the beginning of MoveableType). Once they realized they had something valuable, they wanted to commercialize (which is understandable). But after that they seemed to be in over their heads. They never seemed able to establish real rapport with their user base.

<comment><USER5> _Once TypePad got going, my impression of Ben and Mena Trott changed for the worse. There was the incident where Mena called out someone for being an "asshole" at SXSW_

Lol, I'm kinda surprised people still remember that, it was me she called out. It was at Le Blogs (which was her own conference, surprisingly).

For me SixApart failed because the founders lacked vision as they were not entrepreneurial types (your outline is spot on) and their success was all very accidental (and somewhat opportunistic by the folks that put money in to the company).

The best thing Ben and Mena had going for them was was that they were normal folks who represented the community, just like Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress. But the money people sidelined them rather than letting them find their own voice.

Switching Movable Type from open source to proprietary and then ultimately back to open source killed the project and in many ways is what made me move over to WordPress.

Finally, the company was awkward at business. You are right, I was a customer at the time of the incident (I was responsible for a large UK broadcaster's purchase of Movable Type) but the product (when MT was proprietary) had a crazy price point of $3000 (roughly, I think) - too cheap for enterprise and too expensive for small bloggers.

It's a shame and I feel sorry for those concerned despite what happened 5 years ago.</comment></comment>


Startups, Not Bailouts Create New Jobs? Wait, So the Emperor Has No Clothes?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidblerner.com/david_b_lerner/2010/04/startups-not-bailouts-create-new-jobs-wait-so-the-emperor-has-no-clothes.html People in the start-up and investment community understand from first-hand experience that when it comes to job creation- start-ups are where it's at. It's also great to have organizations like the Kauffman Foundation, (that actually study, support and promote entrepreneurship), around to back this up with some hard stats. Below, for example, is the staggering reality about new job creation in this country: <comment><USER2> Yes, but if you allow a banking system collapse of the 1930s style to happen because you're unwilling to bail out "greedy", "evil", [fill in the blank], startups aren't going to save you.</comment>


Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hcoyG-Ck3-VwZB7fqpUFXbffoObg

<comment><USER2> It seems his argument is that information inundation lets stupid ideas live longer than they might otherwise, which is actually pretty wise. It's not necessary to pin it on iPods and XBoxes, but the idea that we need to learn healthy ways to survive information bombardment is neither new nor unwieldy.

The historical comparisons are interesting, but I suppose it's one of those questions where technology is available but human nature and morality are lagging.

<comment><USER3> _It seems his argument is that information inundation lets stupid ideas live longer than they might otherwise, which is actually pretty wise_

I'm not convinced that Obama can distinguish between "stupid ideas" and "ideas which are contrary to the Obama agenda" though. Of course he's hardly unique among politicians for this, but I do think he's less likely than, say, President Bush, to acknowledge the existence of informed and principled opposition to his policies.

It's interesting that the internet has allowed the political right to get organised in a way that it never really has before. The left-wing political protests of the 1960s had universities as their organizational focus, whereas the right never really had any similar way of getting a protest movement off the ground until the internet.

There's only a few quotes from the actual speech given but bits like this:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter"

sound a little to me like a man bitter that the internet is being used to spread arguments disagreeing with his own.

<comment><USER4> The birther stuff, in particular, is a great example of nonsense that perpetuates. On a policy level, we were hijacked by the death panel nonsense. Debate the public option and minimum coverage requirements and subsidies - sure - but the death panel stuff is just nonsense designed purely to distort the debate.

If you don't get how having to deal with stuff like that at the expense of substantive debate harms our nation, I don't know what to tell you.

Why their communications team (and remember his chief speechwriter since 2007 is a guy born in 1981[1]) keeps linking this with video games and iPods (which he certainly does know how to use; it's a bizarre line) has to be some sort of polling data. Cause, on its face, it's asinine.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Favreau_(speechwriter)>

<comment><USER3> Actually I kinda think stupid ideas like birtherism are deliberately given air by the Obama operation. I don't mean that in a "conspiracy theory" sense, I just mean that politicians would rather engage loudly with the silliest of their opponents rather than the most sensible. By focusing attention on the few loonies who oppose Obama, Obama attempts to associate opposition to Obama with looniness. If birthers didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

As evidence, witness how quickly and reflexively this thread jumped into a discussion of birtherism.

Anyway, I guess my point is that would be hypocritical for Obama (or, in all fairness, pretty much any politician out there) to complain about the infantilization of political rhetoric. This, after all, is the man whose favourite rhetorical device is the "There are those who say [something that nobody actually says]" strawman.

<comment><USER5> The birthers are only the easiest example. Look at the health care debate. I am sympathetic to a capitalist-based reform, but the fundamental problem is that even the moderately informed had difficulties following the real issues because the media failed to actually tell people what the public option was!

I've heard multiple anecdotes (I know, not a representative sample) where someone "came up with" the public option but didn't explain it with those words, and their friends thought it was a good idea, but the "public option" was "government intervention and death panels."

The problem isn't the competing ideas -- the problem is the level of the debate.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand it's not like the Democrats were going out of their way to explain what was in the bill either. Instead, they spent most of their time talking about how "reform" is "necessary" (without acknowledging that many types of reform are possible) and even more time demonizing any opposition as either ignorant hicks or shills paid by the insurance industry.

You won't find any disagreement from me if you say that the level of political discourse is too low. You will find disagreement if you try to claim that Barack Obama has a genuine desire for it to be higher.

<comment><USER6> well, the president had what i think was at least a couple dozen speeches on why it was important, and in many of them he was quite detailed. and the kind of reform that republicans were proposing was in the opposite direction... towards deregulation

but as i said elsewhere, when you have one side poisoning the well and otherwise completely pulling shit out of their ass, the other side doesn't have many easy options. the negativity drowned out the actual info

also keep in mind Fox is a propaganda network that many people take seriously

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is the text of his speech: [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/obama_at_hampton_education_is.html)

Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it.

(It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)

<comment><USER8> I'm especially surprised at where the discussion of this speech is focused. It seems that people aren't focusing on the context or the core message.

He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are graduating college to be wary of a lot of the distractions these days such as xbox and twitter is a bad thing.

I could go on for a bit about why, but Obama lays out the statistics for you...

 _American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country._

I would say that Obama is inspiring a generation of African Americans to work harder and strive for more because inequality is still pervasive throughout American society and education is the key to overcoming this. Why is it so hard to miss this message?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obama's arguments here remind me of Noam Chomsky's thoughts on sports:

 _Sports keeps people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in sports [as opposed to political and social issues]._

So much chatter to distract us from the important issues of the day.

<comment><USER3> For Noam Chomsky, like other radical leftists, the idea that the working class is deceived and distracted is part of an anti-cognitive-dissonance package to explain why the supposedly-oppressed masses fail to share his political opinions.

Obama isn't nearly as extreme as Chomsky politically, but come from the same sort of intellectual heritage.

<comment><USER10> Thus the corollary: when the Revolution comes, the workers will need to be lead by those who are intellectually capable of leading them, and academic Marxists will take their rightful place in the cosmos as rulers of all they surv... first among equals.

This has basically been the totalitarian promise for a couple of centuries now.

<comment><USER11> Except that the promise is also a lie, for the academic Marxists get slaughtered when a real gangster like Stalin uses the instrumentality they've created against them.

A fitting end, too bad so many innocents have to die or suffer in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This makes me sad.

Despite my political opposition to Obama, I thought that he understood the culture of the "IPod, XBox era." In fact, he leveraged these tools of 'diversion' in his campaign (and did so very effectively).

This seems to be the knee-jerk technophobic speech that politicians would have given in the latter half of the 20th Century. Instead of being afraid and resistant to technology (which, as we have seen, is unstoppable anyway), politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use. See: David Cameron's TED talk (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ELnyoso6vI>).

He highlights a significant point in his speech, as tel says. Being able to deal with all of the information is something that we need to cope with. However, placing the blame on the tools is not the way to go.

<comment><USER7> I'm unsurprised that the readers here latched right on to the tools mentioned in the article, and entirely missed the point of his statements:

> _...politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological > advances to good use._

This is _exactly_ his point. He used a few devices to hi-lite the difference between information-as-entertainment, and information-as-a-tool. This in no way makes him hypocritical for being constantly connected to a Blackberry; he's using the device in exactly the way that he's urging young graduates to use going forward. (It may make him a little hypocritical for his campaign machine, though.)

I think he's right. I think he's being proven right all the time by sites like Reddit, which were supposed to democratize the news, except that instead they repeatedly become a megaphone for internet tough guy squads and get hyped over issues where they don't have all the facts. Or like HackerNews, where daring to mention some high-tech devices causes everyone to completely miss the actual point of an argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This speech should not be taken seriously - not because Obama (a) has no idea how to play X Box, or (b) spends all day on his Blackberry, but because his administration has thrown its full weight behind the most toxic aspects of ACTA. Even the name of the treaty is a fraud. So why is he supporting it so aggressively?

In this speech, Obama says the world is experiencing a moment of "breathtaking change", and goes on to say "we can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them."

How? By exporting laws that call for $1.92 million fines in response to 24 privately downloaded .mp3s? By allowing the USTA to bully Canada over 'laxity' when the IP laws in question are stricter than our own? (<http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4997/125/>). By threatening Indonesia with the same kind of psychotic economic violence in 'retaliation' for their government's formal support of Open Source? ([http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/opensource- intellectual-property)).

If this is "adaptation", what was the Opium War? A humanitarian relief mission?

I promise you, iPads and X-Boxes are not the problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> Excellent; that's some of the most intelligent argument in this area I've seen for a while.

And it is so true. Look st how much time people spend propogating meme's on facebook. Ok so there is always room for us to enjoy banal stuff - but I feel like it is starting to enroach on our lives.

It's like the sivers post from the other day; if only we shared an interesting wikipedia rather than one of those chain emails, conspiracy theories or "questionaires"...

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure I agree with the implication that said devices are to blame for this sort of thing. A lot of this problem is just as, or if not even more prevalent in old media. One could argue that more convenient Internet access helps solving the problem by allowing people to do fact-checking for themselves. I know I look up points of contention on wikipedia via my phone in a way that just wasn't possible a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> While I support most of the man's political stances, Obama's take on the iPad and console culture is perhaps a smidge hypocritical, given that he is, after all, a known Blackberry addict.

<comment><USER17> Wait...you're saying that it's not possible to believe that "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," while still using such devices?

If I warn that hammers can smash thumbs, may I still use one without being assailed by charges of hypocrisy?

<comment><USER16> No, but decrying the harms of cigarettes whilst puffing a mouthful's worth at once would certainly garner grounds for such an accusation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The reaction thus far to the President's comments seem to prove his point. Instead of focusing on any of the more challenging assertions many people latch onto the one easily consumable statement about iPads and Xboxs and ignore the bigger points. Imagine if people devoted the mental resources they use on debating minor details of technology, sports, entertainment, etc to real world issues? Imagine if they ran for office? It would change the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> Quite Huxleyan of him. This paragraph by Neil Postman is worth cross- referencing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_Nineteen_Eighty- Four)

</comment><comment><USER20> That is a pretty dishonest headline you're using to summarize this article.

<comment><USER2> It's the headline the article uses as well.

<comment><USER21> Indeed. I wonder if the title is intentionally misleading, or if the writers had a different idea in mind when they wrote it?

Indeed, the strong controversy this articles headline will stir up proves Obama's (actual) point quite well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work..."

What the hell? This sounds like Bush.

What happened to the guy who was in love with his blackberry?

<comment><USER23> A blackberry isn't a toy. I have at least three of the items mentioned on the list (which are toys), and I use none of them for actual productive work. Though I do have a telnet terminal app on the iPod. Still all of the devices he mentions were not designed for productive enterprises, but for diversions. And diversions have a way of being big time wasters if you're not balanced. Not today Halo 3!

<comment><USER24> What's the distinction between productive work and play? between a toy and a tool? Even if you think the distinction isn't purely subjective, you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy, that a lot of tools are way more fun to play with than (what gets marketed as) toys, that playing can be extremely productive and that being productive can be really entertaining.

<comment><USER25> _you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy_

Band saw. Pesticide. Tractor. Hunting rifle. Jackhammer.

By any meaningful definition of "toy" and "starts out", not every tool starts out as a toy. Alternatively, if you are using definitions of "toy" and "starts out" that are ridiculously overbroad: at a high enough level of abstraction, _everything_ looks exactly the same as everything else. A worldview that is useful is preferable to one that is elegant.

<comment><USER24> I don't know the histories of the items you mention, but I imagine at some point in time somebody was screwing around (i.e., playing) with a predecessor technology when they "should" have been doing "productive work". I remember the days when microprocessors and personal computers were derided as toys. UNIX and Linux were once "toy" operating systems. RC planes and flight sims were the toys of hyper-nerdy outcasts in my high school; but nobody laughs at a predator drone strike.

Pesticides might not be toys, but I bet the chemists and biologists who develop them have spent a good deal of time screwing around with the underlying constituents. I recently rented a rotary hammer to perform a particular task, but spent a good amount of time afterward playing with it to see what I could jackhammer into oblivion. At what point did it stop being a tool and become a toy? I learned a good deal about the operation of the hammer and improved my technique, does that mean I wasn't playing but was getting educated? Maybe our preconceptions about work, play, and education aren't really clear or useful?

What's the useful distinction between "toy" and "tool"? Is there a bright line between toolness and toyness? Or a continuum that depends on attitude, context, and use? I'd argue the latter is a more useful and meaningful perspective for those of us who do not directly depend on our "tools" for day- to-day survival. I'd guess that most hunters are not subsistence hunters and employ their hunting rifles recreationally, during leisure time, doesn't this make them more "toy-like" than "tool-like"? Recreational ornamental horticulturalists produce nothing of "value" (in the narrow sense of receiving remuneration); does this make their use of pesticides toy-like? Is a Schrebergarten a toy garden in the same way a Tonka is a toy truck? If you eat vegetables from the Schrebergarten or use the Tonka to dolly a load, are they still toys?

The original commenter distinguished between toys (e.g., iPad) and non-toys (e.g., Blackberry). I don't see that as a useful distinction: one man's tool is another man's toy (even tractors: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhKfTFdtmCk>). The President claims a distinction between information as distraction, diversion, or entertainment vs. empowerment. I don't see that clear line: one man's marathon Tecmo Super Bowl session is another's all nighter studying B.F. Skinner. Who is to say which is a distraction which is a better use of that time? Were people who watched hundreds of hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer distracted, diverted or empowered? If they got tenure from it does that change the answer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> HN would be so much more enjoyable without all of the politics. At least on reddit it can be filtered out.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you build if you were thrown in 2006? - <AUTHOR>

The title explains it. How would you monetize your knowledge of the last five years by building software? <comment><USER2> Clearly I would build a time machine to go back to 1996 and invent Google.</comment>


BMW's Hybrid Trike Gets 120 MPG - <AUTHOR> http://gas2.org/2009/10/10/bmws-hybrid-trike-gets-120-mpg/ <comment><USER2> That's a pretty nice concept, pity that they will not take it in to production. That's probably a pretty expensive rig they have there, with active hydraulics to change the angle of the vehicle.

It is really clever how they got rid of one of the most annoying details of this configuration by making the tilt automatic.

A 'rigid' trike has a tendency to roll over in a tight curve.

Most trikes are in 'tadpole ' configuration for that reason, two front wheels, one in the rear. There used to be a little car called the Robin Reliant, famous for roll-overs:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8SvdSzs7c>

And here is some diesel-electric competition, claiming 125 MPG:

<http://www.zoomilife.com/tag/xr3/></comment>


Onion for sale on Groupon India (sold out) - <AUTHOR> http://www.groupon.co.in/deals/bangalore/Groupon-India-Onion/408478?nlp&CID=IN_CRM_1_0_0_249&a=15

<comment><USER2> Is Microsoft in talks for a Groupon takeover? Seems like a Ballmeresque quirk.

</comment><comment><USER3> are onions a luxury in India? this seems really bizarre to me

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very common but became really expensive recently. More on this: [http://qz.com/121726/groupons-brilliant-marketing- campaign-i...](http://qz.com/121726/groupons-brilliant-marketing-campaign-in- india-20000-worth-of-onions/)</comment></comment>


Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html <comment><USER2> This, one thousand times. I majored in biological sciences thinking the work would be interesting and the money would be good. During a summer internship doing research I realized how boring most of the lab work was, and after learning how poorly you were paid even with a masters or a Phd I decided it was not the career for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also worth reading, on related matters: Philip Greenspun's "Women in Science:" [http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in- science](http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=story&query=don%27t...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=story&query=don%27t%20become%20a%20scientist%20points>30)

</comment><comment><USER5> This should say "1999" in the title, as this rant has been around for a long time.</comment>


High performance PHP framework - <AUTHOR> http://phalconphp.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks really awesome. I did not see a comparison on the front webpage to Yii...Does everyone think that project is dead?

also, is anyone actively using it?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's fast because it's written in C, which means you have to load it as a PHP extension (which means compiling PHP again on *nix).

Comparing its speed to other frameworks just seems... pointless. They're completely different animals.</comment>


Show HN: Google Play Books Desktop – A Desktop Client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TheLox95/Google-Play-Books-Desktop <comment><USER2> Back when I was selling stuff on ebay, the first thing I learned was 'no photo : no sale'.

I really think you should provide a few screenshots of your app (and provide an installer).

IMO you're pushing the concept of an MVP too far ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and you are right xD!I just wanted to post it and did not think much when I dit it but I will write a better README</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to focus, user acquisition vs. more demo functions? - <AUTHOR>

We've developed an online test prep service (www.cuve.me) We want to get on one of the major accelerators this year. And the question we have now is whether to focus on user acquisition or develop more demo functions.
If we focus on user acquisition, we will try to enhance user experience and add more admin functions.
If we focus on more demo functions, we will develop tutor-focused functions (like questions creation and curation), which can be the real differentiator for us. However, we don't think we have enough bandwidth to develop full-fledged, marketable functions. They'll only be demo functions to show where we're going.
Thanks in advance for the comments. (also, if you could provide any feedbacks on the site, that'll be great as well.) <comment><USER2> [Disclaimer: I'm absolutely not your target audience, and am not familiar with US testing]

My immediate feedback would be that nothing on your website makes sense to me. I don't understand the concept of a cube. I don't understand why in your difficulty/concept/process diagram, Q2 of 6 appears to be the most difficult? I don't understand how your users are inventing knowledge. I also don't understand what I'd get if I signed up - you'd give me test questions that vary in difficulty, concept and process (whatever the latter 2 mean)? I don't know what cuves are, although I did find some cube shaped things on Google images.

Okay, I clicked try for free and was surprised I got a working demo. My feedback feels harsh now, and the product seems great, so I guess the most actionable feedback would be to make it clearer you're offering an instant demo. I suspect if I knew what CUVES is (your target audience do?) it'd make more sense, so take that all with a pinch of salt - but I hope there's something useful in there. :)

Also sorry I don't have the experience to answer your original question!

</comment><comment><USER3> Focus on getting more users and stop adding more demo functions. Since you want to join accelerators it would be preferable to have a fully ready minimum viable product with real evidence of traction, than having a feature full website without good usage stats and numbers.

</comment><comment><USER4> focus on getting enough users to get them using the product and get lots of feedback. I don't really understand what your talking about either. Sounds like your going to help me on my SAT. great say that. next why because ... every time you interact with our system little pieces of artificial intelligence called Cuves help you learn faster. (or whatever it is they do...) Wanna know more? click here. Then, focus on what they get for the free trial. if you've got a separate use case for another test build another landing page and focus that page on them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> well...your feedback is actually quite interesting. The intros in the front page are supposed to outline our approach in analyzing standard tests. We just wanted to deliver a sense that we are analytical in our approach to test prepping. But based on your comments, it sounds like it is confusing and might be better to jump straight to the questions page. We'll give it some thoughts and play with it. Thanks!!!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable [http://www.cuve.me/](http://www.cuve.me/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Lots of happy users is the ultimate VC aphrodisiac.</comment>


India to build world's largest solar plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/india-to-build-world-s-largest-solar-plant-1.14647/ <comment><USER2> 77 square kilometres of land

From the picture 75% of it is occupied by solar cells.

54 square kilometres of solar panels that need cleaning maybe once a month.

So 1.8 square kilometre for solar panels cleaning per day.

That's a square 1.34 km on each side.

The panels look 2m by 1m.

So that's 670 x 1340 panels = 897,800 panels that need cleaning every day.

At least India has enough cheap labour atm. to just throw people at it.</comment>


Ask HN: Multi-Tenancy GPU Solution with GPU Quota - <AUTHOR> Several teams from different startups want to share the three GPU nodes for deep learning tasks (each with 8 GPUs), which we have locally available here.
What are the best open source tools to achieve this?
If possible, the solution should allow:
(1) Access only own data (2) GPU Quotas per team (3) Stats about GPU Usage (4) Shared volume access for multiple container of one user (to share datasets) (5) Secure, e.g. not be able to escape container through local volume mounts
We looked into Rancher 2.0 (Kubernetes, no GPU Quota support), Mesosphere (no GPU Quota support). Do you  have any ideas how to achieve this with the least effort? <comment><USER2> So kubernetes and mesos (mesosphere is a company, not a product. Mesos is the software) use control groups and linux namespaces colloquially known as "containers" to manage things. In the upstream linux kernel, there is no real concept of a "container", it is just used really for marketing.

There is currently no support in the nvidia kernel module or in upstream linux for cgroup support of GPUs although nvidia is working upstream with Mesosphere on just this. The way a lot of HPC firms do this is using a normal job scheduler (Torque/Maui, SLURM, Univa Grid Engine, etc) with a GPU resource. Then the users use said GPU resource on an honor system more or less and it works provided you don't have malicious users.

Nvidia is working on making this less of a hack, but currently it is very much a hack:

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-container- runtime](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-container-runtime)

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker)

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/libnvidia- container](https://github.com/NVIDIA/libnvidia-container)

good luck!</comment>