Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'? - <AUTHOR>

Please see http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html and feel free to add your own.<p>1. Spotify (for the music element) 2. Chrome 3. Twitter/BBC News 4. service-now.com 5. 37 signals 6. ?? 7. ?? 8. Match/Plentyoffish 9. Facebook 10. eBay 11. Google Docs/ Zoho 12. Adwords/Adsense 13. University of Phoenix 14. ??
15. ?? 16. Bing 17. Paypal 18. ChromeOS 19. AWS/Rackspace 20. Thefind 21. Mint/Quickbooks 22. Google Docs/Zoho 23. ?? 24. ?? 25. Gumtree/Facebook 26. ?? 27. ?? 28. Gmail with filtering 29. Too many to list 30. ?? <comment><USER2> 10\. Auctions: <http://gunbroker.com/>, which was started immediately after eBay wimped out on auctions having anything to do with firearms. I've bought stuff on both and sold stuff on GunBroker.com and the latter is much better and has several ideas worth using on most any online auction site.

One thing that might be hard to replicate: firearms, ammo, etc. are serious things, e.g. you can't transfer a firearm across state lines without going through a licensed dealer and getting a background check. In the cultural sense reputation on GunBroker.com is treated very seriously; I'm not sure how this could be replicated in other areas, including ones where prices of items are lower.

</comment><comment><USER3> 8\. OkCupid

I have several friends who have gotten an endless series of dates from there. I've only met one person from OkCupid, but she was pretty amazing.

All the other sites I've tried (otakubooty, aff, cl, some other ones that have already died) have been completely useless, except for some niche bdsm ones ^-^.

<comment><USER4> In my opinion CrazyBlindDate, which is run by OkCupid, is much better than the main site. But only if you live in a major US City.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An editable google doc for this: [http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Af5maeCRtjlnZGhndGt3bXZfMm...](http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Af5maeCRtjlnZGhndGt3bXZfMmN2MzJyY2Nm&hl=en)

<comment><USER6> Very good -- the HN format is terribly suited to such a project.

<comment><USER7> Actually, Google Docs is not too suitable for it either: you can add to the list, but where do you leave comments for entries you disagree with, etc etc? Would become a strange hybrid discussion split between HN and the Google Doc...

This is one of those cases where I see real use for Google Wave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> #3: New news

I'm a news hound. And, I started <http://Newsley.com> to try and find a solution to the new news problem that I had. I picked financial and economic news because it's an interest of mine that will hold my attention. Besides, advertising rates are much better for financial and economic keywords than they are for funny videos or cute cat pictures.

My hypothesis, social news sites have done a pretty good job of finding and highlighting interesting and new content (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter, etc..) But, I don't think that anyone has really done a good job of offering great news recommendations yet. The solutions we've seen so far are generally human editor (newspapers), moderators (slashdot), or collaborative filtering (reddit, digg, HN).

My goal is to build a community of people interested in great financial and economic news and analysis, and then try to build a great personalized news recommendation engine for them.

There are other sites working on the news recommendation systems. Twitter sort of fills that bill, MeHive has been trying a heavy indexing/algorithmic approach, but I haven't really been happy with what the recommendations they've been able to offer me yet.

Also, if any body else is doing news recommendations, ping me. I'd be really interested in talking.

<comment><USER9> You sure those sites do collaborative filtering? AFAIK, the 'front page' is the same for all, and real CF would show you a personalised page depending on your tastes. Like movielens does for movies.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering>

<comment><USER8> Collective Intelligence. My bad. I got a little algorithmically dyslexic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over the last couple of months, I became involved with a nonprofit which is taking a whack at #13, Online Learning. It is not technically the "current best solution", since it is upcoming: <http://www.innovativeineducation.org>. The website is admittedly rough, but this organization is initiating free online accredited college courses. This spring semester will be for no credit (Calc I and Organic Chem I), as it will be a trial for the technology. For- credit courses are scheduled to be offered starting in the summer/fall, back- dooring through community colleges until its own accreditation is achieved. The idea is to start with Gen Ed type classes which can be taught online and transferred to just about any school, and to offer more courses as the program grows.

Since the endeavor is structured around corporate sponsorships, Innovative in Education can afford to pay professors and graduate students appropriately to create high quality content and instruct live online. No complicated login process to access the live content; users can just tune into the classroom page at class time, and view the embedded livestream. (Of course, content will be archived as well, a la OCW).

Actually, on that note: there seem to be good streaming solutions for live action video (high FPS, high compression) and for slides (low FPS, low compression for detail clarity), but I have not found a solution that allows the broadcaster to selectively switch between the two optimizations. If anyone knows of such a streaming solution, please share. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER8> 16\. A form of search that depends on design.

The Android app, Google Goggles is really worth checking out. It really is a phenomenal idea. I hope they work hard at refining it.

</comment><comment><USER11> 28\. Unblab (<http://www.unblab.com>)

They seem promising (I know one of the founders personally) but things are going slower than the impression I originally got. One of their products (Gtriage) is already out though. Basically they're doing data mining on people's inboxen.

</comment><comment><USER12> Clickable: <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> 17\. I think Square (<http://www.squareup.com>) qualifies. 19\. Heroku counts 23\. Powerset 30\. Builditwith.me (<http://www.builditwith.me>)

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what problem Powerset is trying to solve. It seems to me that they don't bring any extra functionality to searching Wikipedia with Google. Maybe I have misunderstood their project...?

<comment><USER15> you need to type in a whole sentence and then look at the results above the traditional search results.

for example, for "what did andrew cooke do?" - [http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/what-did-andrew-cooke- do%...](http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/what-did-andrew-cooke-do%3F) \- the third response is "designed an algorithm" (which is what i was looking for).

it's not wonderful, by any means, but that does illustrate the semantic-ness of what they are doing (imho).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1) Rhapsody (yeah, I know hackers are supposed to hate DRM, Windows, and Real Networks, but I really like being able to pay $10 a month and listen to any song, ever made, instantly).

3) news.ycombinator.com The comment section is almost invariably better than 95% of articles in the NYTimes.

4) Google Apps

5) Salesforce

6) HelpSpot?

7) An app that could automatically convert a web site created in Dreamweaver or some custom solution into a wordpress blog.

13) wikipedia

20) google search, site:news.ycombinator.com best laptop (etc)

22) DabbleDB

</comment><comment><USER17> While I'm probably a bit biased since I work for one of their competitors (shopwiki), I'm not sure if TheFind counts as an answer to 20. As far as I can tell they don't have any shopping guides, or at the very least not ones which are being made obvious to a user who is trying to find out what they want. I'm not going to remove them since I have a conflict of interest, but I'm going to add Kaboodle which seems to be doing the most interesting work in the shopping space.

</comment><comment><USER18> 1\. Avatar, or other movies that can't be fully experienced without 3D or other tech that is only available in theaters. For music additional offerings like I Am T-Pain.

<comment><USER19> You mean a $5 pair of red and green glasses? 3D movies for home consumption have been available for a while [http://www.amazon.com/Coraline-Blu-ray-Combo- Digital-Copy/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Coraline-Blu-ray-Combo-Digital- Copy/dp/B00288KNJU) and 3D HDTV is expected to start in late 2010.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that "6. More variants of CRM" hasn't had much attention.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fixes to these problems needn't be startups. Part of the fix for problem 1 is the international Pirate Party movement.

<comment><USER21> Hardly. Part of public awareness around the issues, sure.

<comment><USER14> It isn't just public awareness, it's about getting the law changed. The Swedish Pirate Party got 7% of the vote last June. If this can be replicated throughout the world (particularly in Europe, where the Pirate movement is strongest), there will be 2 effects:

1\. in some countries, PP may hold the balance of power in parliament, and will thus be able to join whichever coalition offers the best concessions to their points of view. This may well be the outcome of the next general election in Sweden.

2\. other parties, seeing how many votes PP is getting, and they are potentially losing, will tend to move their policies to what PP endorses. A historical example of this sort of process working is after the 1989 European election in the UK, where the Green Party got 15% of the vote; the main parties immediately started copying their polices, or at least giving lip service to them. When Pirate Parties start doing well in elections, we are likely to see the same effect.

<comment><USER21> Sure, except that "green" is something many people are interested in, whereas copyright law is a narrow issue that only artists, distributers and nerds care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yourgrounds.com is in beta right now, and should be a better way to use classifieds than craigslist.

</comment><comment><USER23> 21\. xero.com

</comment><comment><USER24> I think aol is positioned well for #3.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/one-vision-for-the- new-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/one-vision-for-the-new-aol- redefine-online-content-as-print-magazines-fail/)

<comment><USER25> They are very well positioned and have the funds. Somehow though they will need to connect all these 'Toyota' brands. I don't think they have as yet managed to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 13\. MIT Open Courseware

</comment><comment><USER27> 30\. CustomerFind.com

Disclaimer: Owned and operated by me.</comment>


Ask HN: Best/worst stories re. startups communicating with users - <AUTHOR>

Managing user expectations can be tricky as a startup grows from, say, 20 users to product-market fit.  What startups (I'm most interested in web startups, but any will do) have done this well?  Poorly? Why and how? <comment><USER2> Here's one bit of bad communication I'll throw in, and unrelated to the current brouhaha.

Some time ago, I signed up to FogBugz. A few weeks later, I got an email from... omg! Joel Spolsky!

I thought that was pretty awesome, that he got in touch with all his users to see how they were getting on. Great way to build strong customer relationships. Of course the initial email was probably automated, but the intention was there.

I took a good 20 minutes or so to write a fairly detailed but concise, 4-5 paragraph email listing some of the things I thought could be improved about Fogbugz from a start-up point of view.

I got a reply the next day, from some intern who basically explained how they wouldn't do each of the 4 points I'd raised. Not even "we'll look into it" or "it's on the plans, but I can't tell you when it'll come out". Just no, no, no, no. Basically, an email that not only had nothing to do with Joel Spolsky, but clearly had been delegated to someone who didn't yet have basic customer service sense.

With that, Spolsky lost all the credit he got in that first initial email, and then some.

Since then, I've copied the Spolsky approach. All our users get an email from me, two weeks after they join, asking how they're doing. But _I_ am the one receiving and responding to that email.

<comment><USER3> That's a great way of doing it.

I take all of our customer support 'problem' cases, that's where you can make the difference and where you get to hear what's up with your service so you can make it better.

This usually amounts to maybe one or two such cases per week so work-wise it's small fry but it really helps keeping your head close to what the users are experiencing.

And the problem cases are the ones where you learn fastest.

The other day there was a 'support is sales' post here that was really good.

<comment><USER2> Actually, I do get several responses a day, but most of them are, thankfully, positive.

Here's an example received today:

 _I wasn't sure how to access the plans, but once I figured that out I have had no trouble since._

I think about 10-15% of the people who sign up and confirm their account end up replying to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you thinking ahead to when there are too many new signups for you to continue? I don't mean that accusatively. There are good reasons _not_ to think that far ahead.

<comment><USER2> When I can't handle it anymore, there's a number of things I can do.

1) Make the emails more random - if I only send half the emails, it stands to reason that I'll only get half the responses!

2) Stop sending them! There are other ways to gather feedback that may work better later.

I haven't spent too long worrying about this, though. It'll be a good problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think posterous are really good at communicating with users. A few times I wanted to switch to wordpress due to some missing feature or the other, but then when I said my complaint on twitter I'd get a message with some time line and it would keep me happy...for a while.

WakeMate are pretty bad at communicating and if I were them I'd hire someone whose job was really only to communicate.

Apple are pretty good at communicating nowadays and if you are doing well on their platform.

Microsoft is really good at communicating with developers. All their dev team are on twitter and blogging and you can reach them by email, and there are docs about everything, etc.

Google is terrible at communicating. Do they even communicate? They just never reply.

Facebook has the same problem. Don't reply. Probably too many users.

</comment><comment><USER5> I co-founded a startup called NetWinner. It was a casino style online game that allowed users to win prizes. Everything was absolutely free and users never paid. They just watched ads while they played the game and they could instantly win gift cards and cash prizes.

When the economy started to tank our ad revenues tanked and the model as it was could no longer be supported. So we changed it so that users won raffle tickets for prizes instead of winning prizes directly.

We did not message this to our users well and the BBB got over 250 complaints about the change we made. It was covered on local TV in charlotte, NC and lots of other bad stuff happened. They could never take legal action because they never paid but they still tried. They posted stuff all over the web about how we cheated and scammed them out of the prizes they won (which we did). I was just the technical co-founder and did not have a vote in financial decisions but since I owned the domain people thought I was the head guy and came after me. Good thing it was always free to play.

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you do to get the message to users, and what more would you do knowing what you know now?

<comment><USER5> We sent them an email after we pushed the change live. If I could do it over again I would send them an email a week in advance and funnel all the complaints to our support team. The biggest mistake was having nowhere for them to complain because then they took to fb, twitter etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This comes to mind as a particularly shoddy episode:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358446>

There is an answer embedded in there:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358624>

It's a pity that the company actually took the opportunity to communicate with their users and that because of killing the story the response will not be seen by many.

Their customers should probably read that second link.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the second comment you link to is by the Wakemates.

<comment><USER3> Possible. The only way to rule that out is to have wakemate post something on their blog, it seems they're due for an update anyway. Maybe you could ask them ? And they could post that update on HN, I think it would do a world of good, whatever the news. Leaving your customers hanging is not a good thing.

<comment><USER6> Actually the easiest way to rule it out is to call them, which I just did. That comment was not posted by anyone from Wakemate.

<comment><USER3> So are they going to do any kind of end-user communication in the near future?

Their credibility is at stake here, and your squelching of the discussion does not help matters imho.

edit: And the only reason people get to play pretending they're wakemate is because wakemate does not communicate regularly in the first place.

edit2: wakemate really sets themselves up for trouble, this part of their blog especially is troublesome:

"In the coming weeks, we're going to be more active on the blog, publishing photos, screenshots, and videos of what we've been working on. Hopefully this will help assuage some fears that the product is "vaporware" and get our pre- order customers as excited for the next wave of shipments as we are."

And that was on the 26th of April, total radiosilence since then. If you promise activity in 'the coming weeks' then you should show some. I'm really not surprised by the posting that was originally done, and in fact I think that person should be commended for their restraint rather than to see their post deleted.

<comment><USER7> Man, I like a lot of your comments, but sometimes it seems to me that you cross the line into being a busybody.

I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't is that I'm spending all my energy working on the product. These things are hard. We are finite.

Wakemate don't owe anybody anything who hasn't given them money, and if anyone who has is unhappy, I'd be shocked if Wakemate wouldn't be eager to give them their money back. Sometimes it seems like what people are really buying with their 5 bucks or 50 or whatever is the feeling that they have the right to kick up a stink.

<comment><USER3> > Man, I like a lot of your comments

Thanks! It's mutual by the way.

> but sometimes it seems to me that you cross the line into being a busybody

Possibly. But I'm not going to fall over and roll on my back just because it is PG that does something.

Wakemate has a great chance to manage their image here and PG has essentially thrown that away.

> I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't > is that I'm spending all my energy working on the product.

I've worked for enough start-ups to know that you need to do _everything_ right, not just work on your product. If you spend all your energy on that - and you've signed up customers for pre-order - I suggest you do something about it before you copy wakemates mistakes. It's really a pity, I've seen them go from having a ton of goodwill to essentially being damaged goods.

That's wasteful.

And to see PG squelch discussion about a YC company when he's fine with us discussing everything else under the sun is for want of a better description less than elegant, especially if HN has been used as a venue to get initial customers. Another reason why it is bad to do so is because we can all learn from each others mistakes and to see bad stuff discussed in public is a learning experience for all, not just for the company involved.

You simply can't launch off HN and rely on us to do our bit with passing word of mouth to friends if there is an interesting new YC start-up _and_ hit the mute button if there is a legitimate concern by a HN member regarding non- performance by said company. That's what causes the stink.

People that put their $5 or $50 down have a reasonably expectation of in order:

      - a product

      - failing that to be kept in the loop

      - if all else fails their money back or an explanation

Less simply won't do, and even if it was free you'd still be morally obliged to keep people informed. Stonewalling is the dumbest thing you could possibly do.

The OP wasn't trying to kick up a stink, he was simply a concerned customer. And given the way PG handled it now he probably went from 'disappointed' to something a few steps lower than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Disqus on my personal blog for comments. On one of my more popular posts (I got just over 100 comments the first day, so nothing crazy), the comments would disappear after a few hours. If I logged into Disqus, I could still see every comment and they all said they were "approved" and posted. But you'd load the blog post and nothing older than 3 hours would show up.

Wouldn't you know, that post ended up experiencing the Reddit effect, and more comments came pouring in. I tried to contact Disqus, but all I got was a ticket number. Meanwhile, the Reddit users had already started having a field day with, "Steve censors his readers and and deletes comments! We don't like his blog anymore."

Disqus was very slow and unhelpful in resolving the bug, even as I frantically updated the ticket with more and more debugging info and speculation as to what the problem could possibly be. In fact, to this day they've still never fixed the bug or closed out the ticket. Technically, they closed the tickets, but never resolved them (I guess that means, "we got this guy to stop bugging us about this issue... CASE CLOSED").

I ended up having to log into my disqus.com account, copy and paste the comments into an HTML file, then upload the file to my blog and link to it at the bottom of the post.

I understand they're providing a free service and thus have little to no accountability. But when you create a service that asks users to entrust their readers' voices and reputations to you, you should make an honest effort to live up to that responsibility.

[EDIT: Disqus is now helping me to resolve the problem. Better late than never! :-) ]

<comment><USER9> Hey Steve,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with our support. What was your ticket number? I'd be more than happy to help you figure this out, shoot me an email here: firstname.lastname@example.com

-Giannii

<comment><USER8> Thanks Giannii. Just so everyone knows, it looks like Giannii and I have gotten this close to solved over IRC now. +1 for Disqus's new support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good communication: Daniel Ha of Disqus. Why? Not sugarcoating, e.g. "Importing is possible, though admittedly harder than it should be.". How? Twitter and Disqus mostly. I bet he's using backtype and google alerts.

(Warning, slow page) <http://friendfeed.com/search?q=from%3Adanielha+help>

</comment><comment><USER2> I can think of a startup that recently screwed this up quite badly, though this second time it's not really their fault I think (I don't know the whole story, just seen that someone's been covering up the discussion, which is generally not a great starting point).

I wrote about the first time they screwed up, as a kind of "Learning" post, on my blog. It did quite well here (to show that not all negative posts get killed).

</comment><comment><USER10> Reading between the lines, I guess you are alluding to the specific example jacquesm & swombat refer to - but as a straight answer to the question, I'd say twitter's 'fail whale' was a fun way to take the edge off their frequent early downtime.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was disappointed that the wakemate posts got killed because they touch upon this question, so yes, that is what inspired this post. It turns out that the wakemate thread is the least interesting one here. I'm overall very pleased with the comments.

You're very right about the fail whale. Although not 100% successful in changing the emotion associated with downtime from frustration to amusement, it went an amazingly long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really, really like how www.lollyphile.com is communicating. Not very start- uppy, but very honest, up-front and providing lots and lots of value to customers. Just last week, they sent their entire mailing list an email with a 25% off code: becauseitsmondaysowhynot. Their writing is incredibly entertaining as well.

Another is www.influads.com who have been _extremely_ open in their finances and process and at least with me, have gathered a lot of respect.

Poorly? Well, had I known posting that Wakemate post would give this much trouble, I wouldn't have done it. This doesn't excuse Wakemate themselves, though.</comment>


Body count rises as Philippines president calls for drug addicts to be killed - <AUTHOR> https://asiancorrespondent.com/2016/07/philippines-duterte-drug-addicts/ <comment><USER2> DISCLAIMER: I am a Filipino and I live in the Philippines

When an international media writes something without much knowledge on what's really going on it blows out of proportion. Now let me give you an idea of our situation here before the Duterte presidency.

HISTORY

</comment><comment></comment><comment>==

The Marcoses and Aquinos and their cronies, have brought the Philippines to its knees for decades (50 years). These families are what we called the "elites" and they are actually the ones who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. They own the local media and the news that you can watch/read were all filtered. Guess what happens when an international media make our local news as the source of their publication?

DRUGS

</comment><comment></comment><comment>==

We are almost in a narco-state before the Duterte presidency. Just a few days ago 5 police generals were mentioned that they are the protectors of the DRUG TRIAD here in the Philippines. It was also mentioned that 23 mayors are also linked to the triad and this is just in the 2nd week of Duterte's presidency. It is also rumored that people linked to drugs goes way up the ranks -- senators, justice, congressmen, etc. President Duterte had a list of people involved and the same list were given to the former President Aquino but he did nothing.

Today, a few thousands drug addicts/pushers surrendered. Drug addicts who turn themselves in are given rehabilitation and jail time for pushers. Hundred were taken out by the police because they fought back. One even thrown a grenade!

President Durterte emphasized a lot of times that everybody should follow the law. Police should operate within the bounds of the law but I guess this wasn't mentioned every time a foreigner write about him.

KILLING IS WRONG! But, we live in a different and a more challenging world than the rest of you. What is white for you may be gray for us.

WATCH THIS:

</comment><comment></comment><comment>==

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUVA6GDinvM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUVA6GDinvM&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER3> Mexico could do with a President like that.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, fighting the cartels directly has worked like a charm so far. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War#Casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War#Casualties)

<comment><USER5> By many accounts, the Mexican Drug War has involved very little of the Government fighting on one side and "the Cartels" on the other, and very much of elements of the government (including the military, _especially_ units of the Army) selling exclusive rights to particular regions to particular cartels, and fighting against that cartel's rivals in the region.

Which is not to say that actually fighting against the cartels would actually produce good results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As usual, mostly western commentators sitting on their high horses pointing and pontificating with no idea of local context or understanding.

First of all, Duterte was elected overwhelmingly with a clear mandate of using brute violence to clear out drug dealers. He was clear about it and he is delivering on that mandate. I have to accept, he has made a PR error by not calling them terrorists. At which point, he will be sold drones that can also wipe out families in addition to the druggies.

The fact is, you do not get radical progress pandering to western styled hypocritical democracy or "human rights". It's the reality. A harsh one. Of course, I will not be so "logical" if I happen to be at the receiving end of such needed reform. But hey.. it's what life is.

At least, no set of drug dealers are at greater risk because of the colour of their skin.

PS: I am speaking like a man living in a country where some not so nice things will be needed to be done if we are going to ever progress.

<comment><USER7> Hitler was also democratically elected. What will happen in the Philippines now is that anyone who any grudge with anyone will just kill that person and label him a drug dealer.

<comment><USER8> Labeling him a drug dealer won't be easy because its difficult to prove that he dealt drugs. The logical thing to do would be to label your victim a drug user instead. Far easier to simply plant some drugs in their house, kill them and collect your medal for saving society.

<comment><USER9> > Far easier to simply plant some drugs in their house

Isn't the normal procedure to just sprinkle some crack over their body?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, think about it. On one side we have Elon Musk, who wants to build a city on Mars, make interplanetary travels quick and cheap and he's doing it, there are people who want to kill you for your skin or hair colour. There is PM of Portugal who decriminalised drugs (saying: "drugs break families and relations, and so is facebook. We're not going to ban facebook") and there is a president who kills drug addicts, people in US, UK waste 1/3 of their bought food, Venezuela doesn't have water supplies in hospitals. Truly brave new world.

<comment><USER11> can you explain how a city on Mars is meant to contrast with racism or...hair colorism(?).

<comment><USER12> >You have made tremendous strides in the area of scientific and technological development. But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances

-Dr. King, 1956

[http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...](http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_pauls_letter_to_american_christians.1.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Philippines is a corrupt mess at all levels of society. The electorate is desperate and has opted for a ruthless strongman after decades of disappointments. They say Mussolini made the trains run on time.

<comment><USER14> My college history professor used to postfix that saying with "...because if they weren't, they'd shoot the conductors." Never figured out if he was joking or not, actually.

It's a great example of "be careful what you wish for". Trains on time, then 30 million people die in a war you helped forge, then your country becomes destroyed. I'll happily live with the late trains.

RE this crazy drug policy: very, very bad things happen when rule of law breaks down and we go into vigilante justice. Moral arguments aside, how many innocent people have died because of this already? It's an absolutely horrible idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The link cites a vice article that cites a guardian article: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/philippines- pr...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/philippines-president- rodrigo-duterte-urges-people-to-kill-drug-addicts)

<comment><USER16> [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

<comment><USER17> [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon- became-...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became-an- aardvark)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This extreme policy also comes with an amnesty program if you surrender to police, with rehab, work and welfare. It's how he cleaned up Davao by disappearing gangsters and offering the ones left this olive branch program.

China and Indonesia dissappear thousands of addicts and criminals every year too the only difference is it's not advertised in the media as a killing free for all. This guy also gave Indonesia the green light to go after Abu Sayyaf kidnappers basically inviting them to invade those autonomous islands.

<comment><USER19> Oh, China and Indonesia are doing it, and he's offering an amnesty program??

Well you've sold me! Line 'em up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this a joke? Surely something so utterly stupid can't be real.

This man just gave the public free rein to murder and get away with it.

Jesus this planet is insane.

<comment><USER21> Seems crazy but people of the Philippines knew what they were voting for. This is exactly what he did when he was mayor of Davao: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte#Davao_City_may...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte#Davao_City_mayor)

To play devil's advocate: Drugs and the criminal networks supported by drugs are a massive problem in the Philippines. Police are too weak and too corrupt to deal with it, but this is a solution that works, even if it does offend our first world sensibilities.

<comment><USER22> > Police are too weak and too corrupt to deal with it

Yes, so let's go kill a bunch of people, instead of reforming the police force.

<comment><USER23> So can we kill corrupt cops as well then? I mean if we are going to go full circle, lets just kill everyone we dont agree with. That will solve all our issues! /s

<comment><USER24> Of course, the people with guns will kill the people who doesn't have guns. Since drug dealers and drug users never have guns, it's easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown, > with so many dead bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish there would grow fat > from feeding on them.

This isn't a joke. This is real. What a sick bastard.

<comment><USER26> Tell that to those who are tired of not being safe in their own homes because of the drug lords. Of course it's easy to say he's sick when you live in a civilised place with police protection.

<comment><USER27> I'm sure if the entire country was heavily armed and bullets were handed out like sweets the situation would calm right down very quickly. The US arms industry would be happy to provide them with a nice bulk discount.

<comment><USER28> You seem very sure and I can't think of why you imagine this would work.

Give everyone a license to kill, give everyone a gun, and after that you think everything would just sort itself out? Do you believe that only the right people will survive and then everything will be fine?

Absolutely no risk of a violent degradation into chaos, looting, riots?

<comment><USER27> I've never liked using /sarcasm tags, but I have to concede they are sometimes necessary. Unbelievable as I find it, some people really do think that way.

<comment><USER28> Ah bummer, you are right, I missed the sarcasm. It's definitely a sentiment I have come across before though, and it always strikes me as an odd world view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, I can kill anyone and claim they were an addict? Who is going to prove me otherwise?

It's dissapointing that people see this as something to do with drugs, while in reality it's just a green light for a killing frenzy.

<comment><USER30> That was my first thought as well, but then I realized normal people aren't just waiting with stow away guns waiting for the day they can go on a killing frenzy. The type who are like that are possibly connected to drug as wells (as either addicts or part of the criminal machine) which means they are more likely to go into hiding lest they be killed themselves.

Yes, maybe some murderers will slip under the radar, but the numbers so far look good. Only 30 deaths over the country (that's no killing frenzy) and 952 people have surrendered to the authorities. I'd say it's working

<comment><USER31> _" then I realized normal people aren't just waiting with stow away guns waiting for the day they can go on a killing frenzy"_

No, it seems that unknowingly, the "normal people" were waiting for the people with guns, and all of them together were waiting the right time, which is now!

 _" Only 30 deaths over the country (that's no killing frenzy) and 952 people have surrendered to the authorities. I'd say it's working"_

Who gives you the figures? As I understand, the president's opposing figures, including journalists, were targets for some time already! ...for being drug dealers or addicts, allegedly. It's safe to assume that the ones that left to live have to really impress the president with their reporting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of a conversation of I had with a Cameroonian recently. He said: "I don't understand how these drug dealers and criminals can get away with so much in your country [I'm from South Africa]. Where I'm from the soldiers will take you to the bush and execute you. That's how they brought peace to my country. The military kidnapped all the criminals and drug dealers and killed them".

I don't have any way to verify this, but he seemed pretty happy about it and hoped they would do it in other countries too.

edit: Wait... did I just read correctly? He gave _the public_ permission to kill drug addicts? That's the WTF of the year.

<comment><USER31> _" Where I'm from the soldiers will take you to the bush and execute you. That's how they brought peace to my country. The military kidnapped all the criminals and drug dealers and killed them"_

So, an armed faction took out another factions or group of factions out of the picture in the most simple and grotesque way, by kidnapping (instead of public apprehension) and summary execution (instead of prosecution with a trial that gives the culprits the chance to defend themselves). This armed faction has been called "the military"? And the murderous cleansing - "peace"? And after all this someone actually seriously considers them and their deeds as an example worth following? I find this kind of thinking comparable to any of the doctrines promoting mass murdering in the name of solving something and the individuals advocating such methods to be a danger to the general public!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Finally a politician who keeps his election promises.

</comment><comment><USER22> What an idiot. The highest government official calling for extra-judicial killing of citizens should lead to a single indictment. What's really disturbing is that this guy got voted in.

30 people in _4_ days.

<comment><USER34> well you're right, but as a side note multiple US presidents have authorized target killings in an undeclared war in countrys that are not part of this "war" with civil casualties .... and both got reelected ....

I'm from germany, we're helping because our government does nothing in stopping the use of Rammstein Airbase as drone satellite uplink. So we are also partly responsible. :(

food for thought

<comment><USER22> That's true but besides the point. Imagine Obama, Bush or Clinton calling on national TV for the killing of all drug addicts and pushers.

> I'm from germany, we're helping because our government does nothing in > stopping the use of Rammstein Airbase as drone satellite uplink. So we are > also partly responsible. :(

> food for thought

Definitely, but totally OT.

<comment><USER35> I don't want to be euphemistically. But i've seen several public interviews of all of them where they justified killing people they claimed to be terrorists. While numbers showed that a majority are actually civil victims.

You can not really compare that, but i honestly think thats even worse. At least officially the philippines only kill THEIR PEOPLE people that damage THEIR society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A major problem is that since many of the police are involved in the drug trade it becomes open season on their adversaries. Same thing happened in Thailand when Thaksin first because prime minister and declared open war on drug dealers. There were 2,500 extra-judicial killings, many of which were retaliation for drug deals gone bad and some just revenge killings of people who weren't even involved in the drug trade. There's bound to be a lot of the same thing in the Philippines.

</comment><comment><USER37> Even more frightening is how widely supported Duterte and his death squads are in the Philippines. He has strong ties to the Davao Death Squad which operated whilst he was mayor of Davao City, and the Philippino public largely supports the executions.

<comment><USER38> I think that's the most concerning part of this (and other concerning but slightly less insane potential leaders around the world) - that the public can be so easily convinced that this is a reasonable choice.

Is it that the craziest plans standout against the two regular options? Or that the regular options hedge their bets and don't appear to adequately address issues concerning the masses?

<comment><USER5> Very often, the "conventional" options in a democratic republic end up representing competing visions of how to address the issues that matter most to elites (not necessarily the upper class alone, but the upper and middle classes -- which together are still usually a minority of the population -- and maybe the upper end of the working class), who in normal times are often the vast majority of participation in the political system. They often have less contact with the bulk of the working class (including the nonworking poor) and their concerns, which when things get _especially_ intolerable for that class, and their immediate interests get most divergent from the elites, opens up a big opportunity for unconventional populist alternatives (often including exploitive totalitarian demagogues, though positive reform-oriented uplifting populism also happens at times, sometimes competing with the other kind.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Truly, we live in a world gone mad... Where will this end? In a few years, shooting jay walkers will be the norm...

<comment><USER40> [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)

<comment><USER39> I am reassured.... carry on world...

(You do notice that most of the graphs lower down the page have a sharp uptick towards the far right ?!? especially "Violent Victimisation at School", "Prevalence of Mass Killings", "Rate of Death in Genocides and Other Killings", "Wars > 1000 Deaths/Year" whilst things like "Rape and Sexual Assault", "Physical Abuse", "Sexual Abuse" show a small uptrend)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Meanwhile on reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4sj7q2/body_coun...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4sj7q2/body_count_rises_as_new_philippines_president/)

</comment><comment><USER42> This is probably a relatively gentle precursor to what we're going to see happen over the next few weeks or months in the south of the country as the same 'wild west' approach is applied to the Abu Sayyaf problem.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hypocrites in powerful positions are more dangerous than even incompetent leaders. There is no way this guy does not have a history of drug use.

<comment><USER31> The more I think about, the more I get inclined to believe that this guy has indeed to be on some drugs himself in order to do what he just did. Or that others need drugs to get in a state of thought in which this president happens to persist naturally due to madness!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do we know Duterte isn't working with the Cartels like so many others in his position? If true, this would be a great plan to consolidate the supply chain by efficiently/extrajudicially killing off the competition while increasing profits.

Economics 101: increased risk = increased reward

Reminiscent of the 1986 drug laws[1] in the US increasing punishments by 100 fold while at the same time US officials were helping import billions of dollars of cocaine[2] to help fund Nicaraguan death squads[3].

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986)

[2][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross)

[3][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North)

</comment><comment><USER43> Let's not forget Thailand killed over 2,500 people suspected of drug use or dealing, and one investigation found no connection with drugs in _half_ of these deaths. [1]

1\. [http://nationmultimedia.com/breakingnews/read.php?newsid=300...](http://nationmultimedia.com/breakingnews/read.php?newsid=30057578)

</comment><comment><USER44> I had this T-shirt a friend of mine gave me years ago, it simply had a silk screen on it that said "legalize murder". It was meant to be an _ironic_ liberally extreme idea of granting freedom to do whatever you wanted.

It was meant to be over the top. I can't believe I just read that it is quite literally happening.

</comment><comment><USER45> So both kill demand as well as supply to eradicate the market? If they were looking for an extreme response why not have the government take a monopoly supplier position, nationalise the army to take over the production?

</comment><comment><USER46> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg)

</comment><comment><USER47> Add this to the mix for this new crazy president: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/world/asia/south-china- sea...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/world/asia/south-china-sea-hague- ruling-philippines.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER48> It's concerning that the reddit conversation seems more measured than HN on this issue (5 hour mark, 12:00 UTC)

What up HN?

Why does someone saying I live there get them upvotes without logical remarks?

<comment><USER49> Missing the link to said reasoning or said reasoning from you.

The top comment reflects the heart of the issue. Being logical about it, reasoning your will on others, etc. - won't change the world - that's unreasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just call them Isis inspired terrorists and the USA will give you free drones and shiny new guns to kill them with.

</comment><comment><USER51> Oh hey, a discussion that can't be nullified by Godwin's law. Good job, Philippines.

</comment><comment><USER52> I believe the article headline should be "drug dealers" not "drug addicts".

<comment><USER49> >> FROM THE STORY: Speaking to a crowd of 500 in a Manila slum, Duterte said: "If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful."

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> How long until Trump says something like, "He's a bad guy -- really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed drug dealers. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were pushers. Over."

<comment><USER54> Are we making the leap that Trump supports killing drug addicts? We could invoke Hillary if we want with her famous statement, "What difference does it make?"

This has nothing to do with Trump or American politics. Not a single candidate in the US has called for the extra-judicial execution of drug dealers or users. Trying to draw an equivalence to Trump is absurd.

<comment><USER55> As a non-American I find the Trump/Hillary rhetoric extremely weird. Many "liberals" seem to think Trump is Adolf Hitler reincarnate (which is absurd -- he's just a populist). Many "conservatives" seem to think Hillary is an "SJW" (which is equally absurd -- it's evident a lot of her more progressive stances are window dressing rather than deeply held convictions).

Trump is an opportunistic buffoon, Hillary is cold and calculating. But both really just want power at any cost. The differences are not even remotely as significant as voters seem to believe. Sure, they hold opposing views, but neither of them is a saint and neither of them is going to openly do stupid drastic things like telling civilians to murder other people in the streets.

<comment><USER56> I agree with everything you say, apart from a part at the end.

> ... and neither of them is going to openly do stupid drastic things like > telling civilians to murder other people in the streets.

Sure, that's valid. But while I'm no fan of Hillary, she is, as you said, cold and calculating, which I posit as the major difference between the two. Trump is hotheaded and impulsive, and while we'll never see him (knock on wood) condone senseless killing in the street, he HAS expressed a plethora of outlandish statements (later retracted), so little out of his mouth surprises me.

This does not oppose your description of the two, other than Trump can say ~anything, Hillary won't.

<comment><USER55> To be quite honest, yes, I could see him _say_ that. But only because he seems to have little inhibition to say whatever comes to his mind without thinking of how people will react to it. But I couldn't see him enacting such _policies_. That's the important differentiator IMO. Let's also not forget being a president is slightly more involved than just saying things to make them happen.

<comment><USER56> Absolutely. Thank god for bureaucracy ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Addicts in Asia are not the same as in west. They are worst. They will do anything to get drug. They will get into your house, put knife on your throat and take your money and jewelry. Police can't do anything because they are lazy and corrupt, unless there's a body.

<comment><USER58> So the solution is to allow people to kill random strangers and then claim that they killed an addict?

Or even better, they will kill competitors/people they don't like and then claim that they killed an addict.

<comment><USER57> Why you say they will kill random stranger? They kill an addict. Prisons don't have space anymore because gov don't have budget. You are welcome to go to my country and get mug by them. Your view will change.

<comment><USER55> Addicts are humans, too. We're not talking about killing an addict in self- defense. We're talking about being explicitly told to seek out and murder addicts.

Do you not see any moral problem with that?

<comment><USER57> Addicts create more problem to our society here. They killed innocent people just to buy stupid drug.

You can choose to kill bad people or let it slide. The latter will cause more problem to society. Prison will do nothing. This is not scandinavian country.

<comment><USER59> Might fight the causes for the addiction instead of the symptoms? Sounds like an idea? But hey, your approach worked great in Cambodia that time in the 70s..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> One year's pay he has a overly stocked medicine cabinet himself, all prescription of course.

</comment><comment><USER61> This sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. I guess we're living in a world that's a mix between Idiocracy and Brave New World now.

</comment><comment><USER62> An attempt to kill a whole subset of the population, this is genocide, isn't it?

It might be appropriate to refer this lovely gentleman to the International Criminal Court.

<comment><USER63> No, it's not. Genocide has a clearly defined meaning[1]:

 _" Genocide is the intentional action to systematically eliminate an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group"_

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide)

<comment><USER64> The "geno" literally means a race or lineage of people. If the definition can be expanded to include national and religious affiliation, then it might as well be expanded to include other social groups. It's the act that's atrocious, regardless of semantic technicalities.</comment></comment></comment>


Lean Management: How to be 50% faster with 80% higher quality - <AUTHOR> http://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/ <comment><AUTHOR> Many of the strategies being used by successful web 2.0 companies were pioneered decades ago by Toyota, now called Lean Management (and Lean Consumption).

Key Principles for Success (50% less effort, 80% higher quality): (From www.lean.org)

+Focus on Customer Value

+Eliminate Waste: Identify all the steps in the value stream eliminating every step and every action and every practice that does not create value.

+Process Flow: Make the remaining value-creating steps occur in a tight and integrated sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.

+Customer Pull: As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity

+Pursue Perfection: As these steps lead to greater transparency, enabling managers and teams to eliminate further waste, pursue perfection through continuous improvement.</comment>


Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Cuts Stake in Company by More Than 90% - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-co-founder-travis-kalanick-cuts-stake-in-company-by-more-than-90-11576964824 <comment><USER2> If we're going to speculate, perhaps Travis wants to stop worrying about what will happen with Uber, and this is an important step in him letting go of it emotionally?

[edit: As opposed to reading the more typical response: "This is unusual from a major stock-holder, is the stock overpriced and this is a _financial_ signal?"]

<comment><USER3> The circumstances of his departure were more akin to a break-up than a passing of the baton. No point in holding onto to the stock and mentally tying yourself to an organization that shunned you. Steve Jobs did the same thing if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21803639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21803639)

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be weird if he didn't imo.</comment>


Watchface Generator for Pebble Smartwatch - <AUTHOR> http://www.watchface-generator.de

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. I generated the "iWatch": [http://www.wf-g.de/wf/20141230/iwatch/](http://www.wf-g.de/wf/20141230/iwatch/)</comment>


How do you monetise your own site? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.phuaxueyong.com <comment><AUTHOR> Do you all have any idea to monetise your own site? I've heard of affiliate marketing but I don't want to sell whatever i do not believe in, or do not really use. Do let me know what are your thoughts?

I also wonder if you all know how I can go about monetising my blog in particular as well? I mainly posts about technology and learnings.

</comment><comment><USER2> What purchases does your website lead to? If the answer is "none", you will not make affiliate income.

If you provide really valuable information, you can put it behind a paywall.

Otherwise, you must either rely on display ads or donations, neither of which are terribly lucrative.

If you want to make money, you have to create value. You have to provide something that is valuable enough to pay for, or bring someone else valuable business leads. This is not the case with your website.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone still use Netbeans? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Our school uses Netbeans for Java. Everyone hates it, but the professor doesn't want to learn anything new (they're still teaching BufferedReaders)

</comment><comment><USER3> I do, mostly just for PHP, everything else I use Sublime.</comment>


Why Swearing Makes You Stronger - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-swearing-makes-you-stronger <comment><USER2> My wife cares for an Alzheimer's patient who can't speak very well but can swear like a sailor when she's mad.</comment>


Polish Prime Minister calls for EU leaders to reject ACTA - <AUTHOR> http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,114884,11170954,Tusk_apeluje_do_europejskich_przywodcow__Odrzucic.html%3Flokale%3Dwarszawa&usg=ALkJrhitXAZJGpHIkOhfPNE9nqnIHA_amg

<comment><USER2> A major politician admits he was wrong. This doesn't happen often, and in spite of Tusk's many flaws should be recognized. He deserves respect for being able to admit he was wrong.

<comment><USER3> That's one way to look at the situation. Another is that the politician "changes" his mind to gain popularity.

<comment><USER4> which is, in fact, fine with me. if we're enough people that are convinced and the politicians act like we want them to, then that's called democracy.

<comment><USER5> It isn't fine with me. a politician doing simply what the protesters or people in general want is a populist. Indirect democracy is all about choosing people we believe will make the right decision, even if then have to piss some people off.

Tusk said he's not doing this because of the protests, but because the arguments presented to him made sense. That is what I'm expecting of a good politician.

<comment><USER6> So majority making decisions once every 4 years - that's democracy, but majority making decisions on every issue - it's populism?

I wonder how that magic that makes people wise enough once every 4 years works.

One possible way is that politicians are better than regular people, and they have to lie before elections to ponder to stupid voters. After the election wise and benevolent politicians do what is Right, no matter their stupid voters opinion.

Is THAT why indirect democracy is better? Because it depends heavily on the fact, that the most wise and benevolent politicians have to tell the best lies to the stupid voters. And it's not obvious to me, that this will be always true.

<comment><USER5> This is the same way corporations run. Shareholders/the board of directors choose one person to run the whole enterprise and take the decision. The person runs the show and makes the decisions, even if shareholders don't like some of them. The shareholders don't get to vote on every single decision, but if too many bad decisions are made, CEO gets a boot.

This is also a similar way the pirate ships were being run.

The reason for this is that person(s) at helm have the better perspective. Not because they are superhumans or sth, but because they spend 15 hours a day involved in the manner.

In other words - yes, the politicians are better to make decisions regarding the country. Not because they were born better, but because that's their job.

It doesn't mean that they won't make mistakes, or be misinformed (as in case of ACTA) - that's why they should listen to people, consult society. But by "listening to people", I mean "hearing their arguments and reasoning", not "doing what people want". The former is called "being wise", the latter "being populist".

btw. majority making decisions on every issue is not a populism. It's a direct democracy. I'd argue that it is as bad as populism.

Because of this distinction I was against ACTA, but at the same time against a referendum against ACTA :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this is actually quite big. I'd say, more significant than the previous decision by Poland (and then other EU counties) to suspend ACTA ratification. Suspension meant merely that they needed to think more about this. Now Poland comes out openly _against_ ACTA, and that's a _first_ among the participants and signatories of the treaty.

Congrats to the participants of the anti-ACTA protests in Poland (possibly the biggest ACTA opposition in the world), who brought about this change.

<comment><USER8> thanks to #anonymous for making a scene that led to recognizing this issue in our media.

<comment><USER5> yeah, as much as I sometimes hate their juvenilish behaviour, this time it actually helped...

<comment><USER9> Well, despite all the "juvenile behavior", Anonymous is a force to be reckoned with. They mean it when they say "Expect us.".

I also think the fact that they don't care how you perceive them (by acting juvenile or otherwise immature) is one of their greatest strengths. Believe it or not, but it frees you from a lot of burdens if you don't have to be polite and politically correct, and makes it a whole lot easier to actually _do_ something (whether or not that something is good and/or justified is certainly debatable).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DailyBooth (YC S09) Closes $6 Million Venture Round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/08/dailybooth-so-excited-about-ipad-2-camera-that-they-close-a-6-million-venture-round/

<comment><USER2> We're hiring iOS, android, web frontend and backend engineers. Shoot me an email (ryan @dailybooth) if interested.

It's probably also worth mentioning that we currently only have 2 engineers. So if you have interest in working on the full stack and having your code pushed to production where you can actually see users get excited over what you build, then make sure you get in touch. The thing that will hold us back the most is engineering resources (which we're actively attempting to fix).

<comment><USER3> I've been lucky enough to hang out with the DailyBooth crew a few times, and they're all awesome. If you're looking for an amazing place to work, definitely apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are revenues like over there?

<comment><USER5> Curious why so many people upvoted this comment.

Is it because you are interested in hearing the answer? It's a social media company focused on attracting users and eyeballs (at the moment). The revenue is nil, same as it was for fb and google in the early days (not saying that dailybooth will be the next facebook and google, just that there are examples of companies that were once focused on users and eyeballs that are now focused on revenue).

Or is it because people enjoy the snark? Screw that company that just raised $6M!! I'm not jealous, I'm just...Bubble, bubble, stupid VCs, no revenue, no business model, pictures, bubble!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations on closing the round! What's the stack that you folks run over there? Any plans towards expanding the user demographic profile? Either way: Nice execution and killer product!

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Our complete stack is quite complicated, but a quick run down of what we're using: mysql, memcached, mongodb, gearman, nodejs, redis and puppet. (Node and redis are not in production currently.) The main language we use is php. I know, ugh, from all of you ruby and python guys, but good clean php is as good as any of the other language.

Yes, we have plans to expand the user demographic. Our product roadmap should help with this. We're just too constrained right now with engineering resources.

<comment><USER7> Wow, mysql, mongo, and redis all in the same stack sounds a little bit like you guys have fallen into the trap of chasing too many shiny new technologies :) (happens to me too)

<comment><USER2> MySQL is what we started with, as time has gone by, we've migrated more and more data to other data stores.

Redis and mongo solve two different problems for us. Redis is great for the social graph, which is how we've started experimenting with it, whereas mongo is best for just about everything else that doesn't hold the data in MySQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not do a version just for people's pets?

Maybe try and surface potential models?

Otherwise, why would I go there?

</comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations Jon and Ryan!</comment>


Satoshi Nakamoto owns MtGox? - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=235289

<comment><USER2> Is this based on anything but 'well he sounds Japanese and he's done some stuff vaguely like Bitcoin'?

Just once - once! - I would like someone to try estimating how many east Asians or people of east Asian descent there are who might fit such vague criterion, and think about what that implies about any particular bit of speculation...

</comment><comment><USER3> I doubt it. Bitcoin is very well-thought from the point of view of security, while MtGox has had all kinds of problems, including SQL injection.

<comment><AUTHOR> That just means that Mark Karpeles needs to hire better programmers.</comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos and Root Cause Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cause-analysis-cause-and-effect-ishikawa-lean-thinking-six-sigma <comment><USER2> Bezos spoke at Startup School last year, and I think a lot of people were struck by how aware he was about very technical details at Amazon (Web Services, specifically). What impressed me most, however, was that when one of his employees gave a waffly non-answer to a question from the audience, he called him on it (subtly and politely), and made the guy commit to a real answer to the question...and made him personally responsible for it (with a comment along the lines of, "You can email him for that information and he'll get it to you.").

It was interesting to see, and it struck me as one of the things about Bezos that can explain how he has been so successful with a "bookstore on the web" when so many other "X on the web" concepts failed. You can't control every customer interaction in a company that size, but in that moment he established a precedent for that particular group of employees (probably folks who don't deal with customers a lot, since they were tech folks from AWS).

What I'm saying is that Bezos has certainly drunk some kind of obsessively customer-focused Kool-Aid, and I think I would take any opportunity I could to learn from him.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. The thing that stuck with me from that talk was when he was asked about Google App Engine. His answer was that Amazon has had a policy for years of not talking about competitors, not because they want to be evasive but because they don't want to take their focus off customers. Attention paid to what competitors are doing is attention not paid to what customers need next. I was deeply impressed by that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why did the associate damage his thumb? Because his thumb got caught in the conveyor.

Why did his thumb get caught in the conveyor? Because he was chasing his bag, which was on a running conveyor.

Why did he chase his bag? Because he placed his bag on the conveyor, but it then turned-on by surprise

Why didn't he hit the off button on the conveyor instead of chasing it? Because he wans't near the off button?

Why don't we have multiple off buttons so you're never far from one? That's expensive, let's buy some tables instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great talk by Bezos on how the internet is more like electricity than the gold rush: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_we...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation.html)

This is similar to his Startup School talk (<http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos>), but perhaps offers a bit more perspective.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's only four why's, and it doesn't address why the employee suddenly needed a table.

Which means it may not be the "root cause", either, and the offered "more tables" solution may not help.

<comment><USER7> I commented about this on the linked site and it was deleted.

Adding a table strikes me distinctly as ignoring the root of the problem, which probably has more to do with safety standards and training. There has to be a more robust way to prevent accidents than luring people away from them.

So, ironically, this seems to be an example of asking too many questions, and we're not even at 5 yet.

<comment><USER8> Actually, "luring" people away from accidents is often a better way than strict training. "Don't jay-walk across the freeway" will only work when a viable (and safe) crossing is close by. Otherwise your users will simply ignore your training to make their lives easier.

<comment><USER7> True, and I'm all for that kind of thinking _in addition to_ common sense precautions. Maybe that was the case and there were huge signs and training manuals and off buttons all over the place but coderr's scenario sounds more likely.

My larger point is that failure analysis is complicated and full of red herrings. Simplifying it to "five whys" (or four, or six) only creates false security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has everyone forgotten this? [http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...](http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5337770.ece)

Seems like Jeff could do with getting down to the distribution floor again!

<comment><USER3> I hadn't seen that. Amazon is a puzzle to me. They do so many things right, yet I keep hearing that it is not a good place to work.

<comment><USER10> Probably because they do the software stuff right, but a huge number of their employees are schlepping boxes in warehouses, or doing customer service?

Anyway, it's not an especially big deal to me that they would fire someone for taking too many sick days right before Christmas. If they disclose this to employees beforehand, they're likely to weed out people who tend to take sick days, whether for legitimate reasons or not.

<comment><USER3> I've also heard from software people that it isn't a good place to work. In fact, I've only heard it from software people. I haven't talked to or read blog posts from anyone who's worked in their warehouses.

<comment><USER8> Depends on where you are. "Front-facing" teams (e.g. site front-end and whatnot) tend to have a lot of sleepless nights when things blow up and a fix is immediately needed.

Software guys in the "back" tend to not live such a stressful existence, since there's far more time leeway for fixing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kind of off-topic, but does Yahoo (or is it the publisher?) really think that interjecting ads in the middle of a narrative actually makes people want to click on the link? Do they really not know the least about human psychology? Most people who get to that point in the article have an inertial interest in finishing, and also a bias towards skimming over any contextual discontinuity. There are contrast effects that pull you towards them, and those that are obstacles people are happy to ignore. This is the second kind.

And, I should add, what works on television (ads in the middle) doesn't work in the same way for text. There is a natural ebb and flow of attention in a TV narrative,

<comment><USER12> I would guess they pay more attention to what works and what doesn't than to psychological theory or conjecture. It's easy for anyone to monitor what kind of ads perform better than others, and since ads are much of Yahoo's bread and butter, you can be sure they are paying attention.

<comment><USER11> I agree. So I should rephrase my question. Do these ads really perform better than footnote ads? I wouldn't be surprised if the higher clickthroughs are accidental (which, I am sure they measure for).</comment></comment></comment>


Is The Speed of Light Everywhere the Same? - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html <comment><USER2> > A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity [Einstein > means speed here] of propagation of light varies with position.

Einstein does not mean "speed" when he uses the word "velocity" here or anywhere. He means "a vector quantity consisting of a speed and direction".

</comment><comment><USER3> Modern definition of distance is derived from speed of light. So by definition speed of light is CONSTANT.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Timeline_of_definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Timeline_of_definition)

<comment><USER4> It's been defined as a constant to make calculations/measurements via physics/maths easier/possible, but that doesn't mean defining it as a constant is correct, or necessarily a good idea.

I could define Pi as 3 and it would be CONSTANT. We'd then argue over what shape a circle looked like, but my maths would certainly be easier than yours due to lack of irrationality.

<comment><USER5> "We'd then argue over what shape a circle looked like, but my maths would certainly be easier than yours due to lack of irrationality."

Actually that argument was had and ended a long time ago; you can set pi to 3 and you get a thing called a spherical geometry. See, for instance, [http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55021.html](http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55021.html) . Between the word "spherical geometry" and what you find in that link you'll have the keywords to continue digging if you want to.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link. Perhaps the higher order sequel to flatland is looking for an author?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > the speed of light is only guaranteed to have a value of 299,792,458 m/s > when measured by an inertial observer in a vacuum.

This is the average speed of photons in vacuum, right? Because according to the quantum field theory, photons should have a probability of hitting virtual particles that popped into existence, which would slow it down a little.

<comment><USER7> Ward-Takahashi identities prevent, in some sense, the virtual particles from screwing up the speed of light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know why refraction occurs when light doesn't have mass/weight?

<comment><USER9> It actually does. Kind of. (But it doesn't have anything to do with why it can be refracted.)

Light has no _rest_ mass. But, light can never _be_ at rest.

Light does however, have _momentum_. And when it is reflected/refracted, it will transfer some of that momentum to whatever it hit.

Also remember that forces act on _pairs_ of things. Light can be deflected by gravity (which will change it's momentum); therefore it must produce a gravitational field (which will in return change the momentum of whatever deflected it). And of course gravity is proportional to mass.

Light which is moving towards and object will gain momentum, like a falling rock would. Only instead of moving faster (since it's at a fixed speed), it shifts towards higher frequencies. If you look at the equations slightly differently, you get gravitational time dilation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is possible that the speed of light is anisotropic, thus leads to a theory formulated by frank tangherlini

<comment><USER11> And also creationist nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I heard this said on NPR this afternoon. I thought I misheard the guest. I guess I didnt! Interesting

</comment><comment><USER13> Surely the only answer possible to this is we don't know because we've not been everywhere?

</comment><comment><USER14> Surprised no one has mentioned Vernor Vinge's wonderful, awesome, mind exploding _Zones of Thought_ novels[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Zones_of_Thought_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Zones_of_Thought_series)

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr: No.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Does the speed of light change in air or water?

> Yes. Light is slowed down in transparent media such as air, water and glass.

[...]

> Special Relativity

> [...]

> The speed of light does not vary with time or place.

These two different ways of talking about speed of light caused megabytes of meta bickering on the Wikipedia page for speed of light, and a case for Arbitration, with topic bans and warnings. (Also the suggestion that you can _measure_ the speed of light in SI units, because after 1983 the SI units use light to define them.)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Speed_of_light)

The SoL page shows some of the problems of WP. Articles should have a simplistic lead (with caveats), a general introduction, and then higher level discussion of the oddities as currently understood. The WP page ignores all that, and leaps in at the deep end which means the article isn't much good for anyone.

<comment><USER17> I hope this clarifies the appartent contradiction. Light can't help but move at any other speed than c = 2.997 x 10^8 m/s. It can't go faster, nor slower. So how does the speed of light appear to slow down in certain circumstances? In a vacuum, the speed of light is always c. There is nothing to interfere with the propogation of the individual photons (little atoms of light) as they move through the vacuum. However, in a material such as glass the individual photons of light are absorbed and reemitted many trillions of times by the molecules making up the glass. The photons do a "stop over" and don't move at all, the velocity of these photons is zero (actually the photons temporarily don't exist except as energy absorbed by the atoms in the glass). Between lattice points or individual atoms the photons travel at velocity c. The combination of stop overs (absorbtion and reemission events) and free propogation gives the appearance light is travelling at a slower overall velocity than c.

<comment><USER18> Why do the molecules reemitt the light in the same direction as they absorbed it?

<comment><USER19> They don't. A photon absorbed by an atom/molecule can be re-emitted in any direction. Imagine a thick piece of glass being traversed by a light beam: most of the photons will traverse it undisturbed (and thus maintain their original direction), but a few will be scattered all around (and that's the light you can see if you watch "inside" the glass from one of its sides). On the other hand, depending on the light frequency and the crystalline structure of the material, photons can be scattered by the whole lattice itself, rather than by the single atoms/molecules. In this case, the direction follows the "rule of the mirror", which is dictated by quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER20> Problem with that:

When you shine light through glass the maximum propagation speed, the speed at which you start getting photons out the other side, is about 2/3 the speed of light. This implies that the overwhelming majority of photons are adsorbed and re-emitted. So this explanation cannot be correct, as I can look through a pane of glass, but you're saying any photon adsorbed is re-emitted in any direction, and the overwhelming majority of photons must be adsorbed and re- emitted.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, my fault! We were talking about "absortion"/"stop over" as a way to describe in layman's term the interaction of photons with the glass atomic structure. In this sense, as others pointed out, we are talking about _scattering_ and the final direction is indeed related to the original one. Anyway, light scattering is a quantum process and there is no way of observing the "moment" between "absorption" and "re-emission".

In my comment, I talked about actual _absorption_ , which means that there is a finite time interval when the photon does not exist and the atom/molecule who absorbed it can be observed in a different state than usual (electron in a higher orbital for an atom, different vibrational modes for a molecule). Later, the atom/molecule will go back to its normal state emitting a photon with the same energy as the first one, or several lower energy photons. This actual _re-emission_ will not have a favourite direction. Depending on the typical time scale of the re-emission, you may call this process fluorescence or phosphorescence ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence)).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Laws of Programming - <AUTHOR> 1)  It will take longer. 2)  No it really isn't the very last bug. 3)  The user isn't as smart as you. 4)  Your manager isn't as smart as the user. 5)  The user and your manager think you are stupid. 6)  All three of you being right is not logically excluded. <comment><USER2> lol</comment>


Somali Pirates Practice Inventory Management - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/03/16/somali-pirates-practice-inventory-management/

<comment><USER2> Now if they could be employed and old occupations like fishing, farming, trading, and manufacturing were an option, may be many of them would also switch to them. After all, isn't risk calculations and average depreciation (through violence) just one step ahead of inventory management?</comment>


Riak 2.0.0 RC1 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.basho.com/pipermail/riak-users_lists.basho.com/2014-July/015556.html

<comment><USER2> I have a hard time keeping up with all the NoSQL engines out there. What can I do about it? I could easily evaluate, say, CouchDB in a side-project, but that's a) not necessarily going to tell me a lot about its characteristics at scale, and b) I can't do this even for the big NoSQL engines out there.

Is there a good overview? I realize that this is sort of an oxymoron -- a high level overview is doomed to fail because you can't compress the complex characteristics down to a few bulletpoints. Antirez put it this way [0]: _That said I think that picking the good database is something you can do only with a lot of work. Picking good technologies for your project is hard work, so there is to try one, and another and so forth, and even reconsidering after a few years (or months?) the state of the things again, given the evolution speed of the DB panorama in the recent years._

That was a comment to a pretty good overview[1], which despite being 3 years old is still useful. Apart from the purely technical characteristics, social characteristics such as rate of updates, adoption (and by whom?), openness are also interesting. You just "know" these things for the fields you're working in, but they're very hard to tell from outside and rarely discussed.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053594) [1] [http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs- redis](http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis)

<comment><USER3> You can find lot of good articles about CAP characteristics of various NoSQL products here: [http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen](http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ooo, theres some support for CRDTs in here:

[https://github.com/basho/riak/blob/2.0/RELEASE- NOTES.md#conv...](https://github.com/basho/riak/blob/2.0/RELEASE- NOTES.md#convergent-data-types)

<comment><USER5> That's great, but isn't the whole point of CRDTs that you _don 't_ actually need any special support as long as you get "access" to conflicting writes and can resolve them at the application level? It seems that they would be trivial to implement atop Riak-1.x, unless I'm missing something.

Don't get me wrong: Built-in support is fine and all, but it's hardly going to save the world.

EDIT: Just to add something other than skepticism, I found this video with Mark Shapiro quite interesting (and on-topic!)

[http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/153540/dl/153540.mp4](http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/153540/dl/153540.mp4)

<comment><USER6> managing the # of actors, safely dealing with tombstones and reducing space complexity are just a few reasons why one might want CRDTs on the server side.

<comment><USER5> Can you add (or link to) something with more details?

"Managing the # of actors" doesn't make much sense to me without further context. I know that Erlang is actor-based, but that shouldn't matter if I'm e.g. a client of the system? Also, I'm not sure what "safely dealing with tombstones" would mean -- what additional safety is added by "server-side" CRTDs which cannot be achieved with client-side code (and how so?). (Etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I'm a current employee of Basho Technologies.

Other than some supporting work [1] [2] introduced into 2.0 to provide advanced causality tracking, you're correct in assuming we could have introduced more [3] CRDTs as part of the Riak 1.x series. We could have also implemented all of the CRDTs we provide in the client as well, which is similar to what the SwiftCloud CRDT reference platform does.

There's a couple important things to note here, however:

* When talking about merging conflicting writes, we are specifically referring to state-based CRDTs, not operation-based, which is what we have implemented in Riak.

* Retrieving conflicting writes from the client, or siblings as we call them in Riak, requires bringing all of the siblings to the client, performing the merge operation, and shipping the updated state back. Given this, the number of siblings an object can have on disk, assuming all merge operations happen at the client, is potentially unbounded if you never ever read, and only ever write. When implemented on the server, we can ensure that we perform this merge operation during both the read and write cycle, keeping the sibling count down to one and reducing the amount of state we need to ship to the client.

* In addition, we use the coordinating node (really, a combination of virtual node and partition index) of the write as the "participant" or "actor" for the operation. This is not to be confused with actor model based languages. This allows us to have better control over actor growth; when dealing with clients all writing to CRDTs, every single particpant needs to have a unique actor id. Recall, that most of the CRDTs track actor counts, for instance the G-Counter which is structurally equivalent to a vector clock, although semantically different. This introduces a problem of garbage collection. Interval tree clocks, is one such solution for addressing the problem, but can not be used as the basis for some CRDTs. [4]

* Finally, there is work underway in making state-based CRDTs more efficient through "delta-CRDTs" [5], which allow for a more efficient optimistic and anti-entropy repair mechanism.

While the most notable resource for exploring CRDTs continues to be the comprehensive report by Shapiro, et al, [6] in practice many of the data structures outlined here have unbounded growth in garbage (specifically referring to items such as the OR set, which tracks an object for every operation performed). Therefore, we rely on some of the more optimized representations which don't accumulate garbage. [7] In addition, the conflict- free, composable, replicated map structure, which is provided by Riak 2.0 was specifically invented by Basho, and it is the first of its kind. [8] It took many hours and iterations on QuickCheck models to ensure that, given somewhat arbitrary composition, that merge operations happened correctly. This is why there has been interest in exploring alternative ways of checking or building these models. [9]

By storing these CRDTs at the server-side, we also are able to provide a operation-based interface for interacting with these objects from all of our clients, and leave the complexity of implementing the CRDTs out of the client. This additionally allows for our search offering, Yokozuna, to be able to index these data types and provide query over their values.

[1] [https://github.com/basho/riak_kv/pull/746](https://github.com/basho/riak_kv/pull/746)

[2] [https://github.com/basho/riak_core/pull/463](https://github.com/basho/riak_core/pull/463)

[3] [http://basho.com/counters-in-riak-1-4/](http://basho.com/counters-in- riak-1-4/)

[4] [http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/members/cbm/ps/itc2008.pdf](http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/members/cbm/ps/itc2008.pdf)

[5] [https://twitter.com/xmal/status/467331615535149059](https://twitter.com/xmal/status/467331615535149059)

[6] [http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00555588](http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00555588)

[7] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3368](http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3368)

[8] [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2596633](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2596633)

[9] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4291](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4291)

* Edited to fix citation formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, I'm putting up a more permanent resource with information, links to papers, etc., on my blog:

[http://christophermeiklejohn.com/crdt/2014/07/22/readings- in...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/crdt/2014/07/22/readings-in- crdts.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks really nice. The lack of automatic merging was really the last hurdle preventing me from wanting to use Riak.

One issue: I'm surprised that the merge algorithm seems to generally pick the last write as the winner. For example about registers, the docs say: "The most chronologically recent value wins, based on timestamps". But that's not always correct: For example, if client A reads version 10 and writes version 11, and then some client B has version 9 and writes version 12, you have a conflict where node A's version should win even though it's older, since it's history is more correct.

Or is the documentation just ambiguously worded? It says the algorithm is _weighted_ towards last-write-wins, but also that it takes history into consideration.

<comment><USER8> Only last-write-wins registers use last-write-wins to resolve conflicts. Maps and Sets and Flags use an Add-Wins/Observed-Remove semantic based on fine grained causality tracking methods borrowed from dotted version vectors, counters are vectors of actor->count pairs. None of these types use temporal time at all.

For something like a single string register inside a Map (which is the register you refer to) a simple LWW seemed adequate. Maybe in future we can add some more complex type here, maybe with causal history + timestamp arbitration (like Riak's allow_mult=false.)

<comment><USER7> So a register in a map will resolve correctly vis-a-vis my example above?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a RoR developer primarily, Jose Valim's new language, Elixir, which looks ruby-esque but runs on the Erlang VM, has piqued my interest in learning more about Erlang.

Erlang has always been on the outskirts of my awareness as something that might be worth looking into, but I can't quite determine what it's best used for. I know it's behind a lot of telecom stuff, and that it powers WhatsApp, but when you're not dealing with massive scale where you need distributed computing and fault tolerance, are there still benefits?

Does Erlang make sense for a side-project web app? Or is it mostly for enterprise-level applications?

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting.

Riak is one of the core components in the new Spine2 data messaging and handling hub being built for the NHS here in the UK.

The NHS is one of the largest producers and consumers of data in Europe and the new hub is being evolved using FOSS software and agile methods.

More details: [http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/ehi/8534/spine2-built-in-house- on-...](http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/ehi/8534/spine2-built-in-house-on-open- source)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm most excited about the embedded Solr search engine in this release (Yokozuna), always felt that architecturally search and data should sit in the same place.

<comment><USER12> is that actually solr or is it just lucene-based? I.e. do you use the same clients, schema, extension modules you'd use with normal solr?

<comment><USER11> It's Solr:

"Yokozuna comes pre-bundled with Solr 4.0.0 running in the Jetty container." (they now bundle 4.1.0).

Source: [https://github.com/rzezeski/yokozuna/blob/v0.3.0/docs/RELEAS...](https://github.com/rzezeski/yokozuna/blob/v0.3.0/docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md)

<comment><USER13> The Solr version in the Release Candidate is actually 4.7.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats Basho!</comment>