Ask HN: Best way to rearrange elements in an existing RSS feed? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> How vague........ I don't think you've gotten any responses b/c people don't know what you're asking. That question could mean several different things. It might be best to re-formulate and re-post.</comment>


Ask HN: Raspberry Pi or Parallela Clusters use cases for normal people? - <AUTHOR>

I've been having an itch to scratch on building a Raspberry Pi or Parallela cluster. I can't however figure out a use case to achieve.
Perhaps I could:
- use it to scale images to various sizes
- use it to encode movies to various formats for HTML5 compatibility (mp4, webm, ogv, etc)
For normal people (I am a c++ developer though) what are some other things that I could accomplish? OpenCL tasks? Ideas? <comment><USER2> Face recognition using OpenCV.

On a single RPi, it's a hog, requiring all kinds of pipeline optimizations to get results in reasonable time. Combining concepts like SIFT with face recognition is impossibly slow. A cluster sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would help.

Since the examples you've given are already related to image/video processing and since OpenCV is C++, you may find it a good fit. Put a camera on your doorstep, install your cluster, let it recognize your family members, and charm them with a welcome :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! I could put a large display in my window and as they show up display custom info for them :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was really hoping to see BOINC projects that would take advantage of the Parallella's Epiphany coprocessor, but that hasn't materialized yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems interesting.</comment></comment>


Decidim – Free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations - <AUTHOR> https://omastadi.hel.fi/?locale=en <comment><AUTHOR> OmaStadi (linked here) is a web service in which the City of Helsinki's participatory budgeting is carried out. The service has been built using the Decidim[0] open source software. The development work on Decidim is led by the City of Barcelona, but Helsinki is also actively participating in it.

\- [0] [https://decidim.org/](https://decidim.org/)</comment>


Cargo ships that sink when their cargo suddenly liquefies - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/mystery-of-the-cargo-ships-that-sink-when-their-cargo-suddenly-liquefies-101158 <comment><USER2> If you want a quick primer on buoyancy physics and ship design, Marine Insight has a good writeup:

[https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/intact- stab...](https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/intact-stability-of- surface-ships/)

As the article mentioned, wave action will cause the center of gravity (CG) of the liquid to shift, and with it the overall ship's CG. This puts the ship in a new stable equilibrium heeled over to that side. If the compartment isn't dewatered, this process can repeat until the 'stable' equilibrium includes upper decks taking on sea water. CG shifts up, righting arm becomes flipping arm, hull experiences stress beyond tolerances, breaches kill remaining buoyancy, and down she goes.

By the way, the easiest way to tell if a ship is in danger of hitting critical (aka neutral aka very very bad) stablility, watch how long it takes to rock from side to side. A ship that has an excessively long roll period and appears to be hanging to one or both sides can in serious danger.

<comment><USER3> Segmenting the cargo hold? Not necessarily all the way to the bottom, just enough of disrupt superficial sloshing?

<comment><USER4> I wonder if sheets of a cloth-like material could be used in loading similar to Mechanically Stabilized Earth

Practical Engineering has a great video on this simple but pervasive technology. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0olpSN6_TCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0olpSN6_TCc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very old problem and solutions and knowledge has been available for over 20 years.

But I think the main problem is cost: not waiting for the rain to clear, not making time to install temporary bulk heads, and so on.

Edit. for example this article from 1998: [http://www.gard.no/web/updates/content/52980/shifting- solid-...](http://www.gard.no/web/updates/content/52980/shifting-solid-bulk- cargoes)

<comment><USER6> That was my first thought too. Shipping liquids is a solved problem. You baffle containers to limit shifting and slapping. Doing the same for dry bulk seems like a no-brainer? There must be a consideration I'm entirely missing.

<comment><USER7> Normalcy bias. Its the oldest killer in the world.

Dry goods are supposed to be dry... soak wheat in fresh or salt water for a couple weeks you may as well dump it in the ocean, its rotted (its brewing, technically). The problem is SOME dry goods (bauxite, etc) are not the driest to begin with and of course the usual leaks and accidents.

The crew knows exactly what to do if there's a storm or the engine stops or a fire breaks out, but dry goods are supposed to be dry, so when they aren't, the blind spot kills the crew. You could give up training for storms or fires to run liquefaction drills, but that'll kill more people on long term average, because storms are more common than weird cargo issues. Even if labor money is no object, brains can only hold so much at one time.

<comment><USER8> > You could give up training for storms or fires to run liquefaction drills,

Why do you have to do one or the other? ¿Por que no los dos?

<comment><USER9> Time. Training time is limited, nonfungible, and rivalrous. Adding material at one end sacrifices it at another, ssomething has to give: other parts of the curriculum, or prodctive time.

There's a similar problem, at scale, for civilisation as a whole. Given a lifespan of 85 years, and working span of 65, we spend 18 years on basic education. The managing/professional class need another 4-6 for undergraduate education, plus 2 for professional degrees, 6-12 for engineering and some medical specialties. We're drawing people into the workforce in their late 20s, early 30s, and hope to get 30-40 years contribution.

At the same time, technology, or practices, or standards, obsolete much that information in 10-15 years.

How many times do you, and can you, effectively retrain someone before their prior knowledge is an inescapable impediment, and there's no useful retraining benefit regardless. Confound further with the distiction between explicit (book-learned) and taxit (experiential) knowwledge. The first can be effectvely taught through technical reproduction: lectures, books, A/V, computer-distributed or aaided materials. The latter requires small-ratio master-student raatios for transmission. Skills lacking sufficient masters (or those effective at training) die out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it sad that the article speaks of "new technology" and proposes lots of complex (thus error-prone and not cheap) solutions, when the very simple solution has been known for a very very long time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect#Mitigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect#Mitigation)

Keep the cargo in containers which are always full or nearly so. If it doesn't have room to slosh around or shift, it won't.

The added bonus is that it costs less per volume to ship, if the vessel is always full.

<comment><USER11> And/or load less of the stuff onto a ship. I'm surprised that wasn't suggested either.

<comment><USER12> I believe it was mentioned, albeit somewhat indirectly:

> Commercial agendas also play a role. For example, pressure to load vessels > quickly leads to more hard loading even though it risks raising the water > pressure in the cargoes. And pressure to deliver the same tonnage of cargo > as was loaded may discourage the crew of the vessel draining cargoes during > the voyage.

If crews don't want to dump some cargo to restore balance, they surely don't plan to to ship less cargo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So ship shakes. The aluminum ore, bauxite, turns to liquid due to pressure increasing (or friction decreasing). Ore moves to one side of the ship. Pressure drops as shaking subsides. Ship becomes side heavy and lists and sinks. This is as weird as things can get with reality.

<comment><USER14> They refer to "the relatively new solid bulk cargo bauxite". Surely bauxite shipping is as old as the advent of electrolysis (Hall–Héroult + Bayer processes)?

<comment><USER15> I think you guys are parsing that sentence as "relatively new cargo, bauxite". At the top of the article they define "solid bulk cargo" as a shipping jargon term, for a fine granulated material. This seems like a dangerous misnomer to me...

I'm assuming that means that historically, the refiner owner the pulverizing equipment and shipped in bauxite rock or gravel as raw material. When you hear of liquefaction in terms of earthquake damage, they are always talking about saturation of fine materials. Saturated gravel doesn't behave as badly as saturated sand or clay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is called free surface effect with liquids and as has been mentioned by other posts is a common and known problem with liquids. Free surface effect is a core component of vessel stability and is part of maritime stability education.

</comment><comment><USER17> So here is a random observation for some enterprising grad student or postdoc; is electric charge responsible for liquefaction on packaged solids?

Triboelectric charging is not well understood yet, it happens in dust storms and volcanic eruptions where charge is transferred to particulates from the air. As charge increases this results in "dry lightning" or other discharges.

If you wanted a research topic, I think you could look into the hypothesis of whether or not a powdered material could be charged to exhibit liquid properties.

Note that the way these bulk solids are loaded on to ships it typically by conveyor belt where they then drop through the air (charging opportunity) and then dropped into a conductive container (the hull of a steel ship).

If someone has looked into this already I'd love to read the paper on it.

<comment><USER18> Liquefaction has nothing to do with triboelectricity.

The article has a pretty good description of how liquefaction proceeds: higher pressure -> water present in material reduces contact between solid particles -> material friction reduced -> material behaves like a fluid. If you want more, find a book on basic rheology. I'm certain there are civil engineering textbooks that contain the material.

Further, it does not stand to reason that charged materials would suddenly acquire fluid properties. Solid materials are quite capable of sustaining charge without changing their bulk properties. Prior to significant change, local voltages would exceed the breakdown voltage and the charge would be neutralized.

<comment><USER17> You are offering to do the experiment? The physics is pretty straight forward, particles which share the same charge will repel each other, this will hold them apart and allow them to 'slide past' each other just as diamagnetic material float along a magnetic field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, this is kind of similar to the whole corn-starch-and-water non-newtonian solid kind of problem, right? A little different, because this isn't entirely about mixtures, aqueous solutions or colloidal suspensions, but more about the fundamental behavior of large quantities of particulate solid mass.

The title could differentiate between being a total loss at sea, versus sinking while docked in a harbor, at least in terms of statistics and death. Also, how is there not one picture of a listing ship in this article?

</comment><comment><USER20> Totally fascinating read. What's amazing to me is what the insurance costs and payouts happening must be. I imagine the losses are staggering.

<comment><USER21> The losses are most prevalent on ULBCs, resulting in the biggest ships of all capsizing.

Insurers work with ship regulators and ship owners to prevent this, as not only does it mean they've lost the ship and cargo, but picking up a new ULBC is not a quick process.

<comment><USER22> What's a ULBC?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_carrier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_carrier)

(Which uses this as it's source: [https://web.archive.org/web/20070408154846/http://www.nautin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070408154846/http://www.nautinst.org/info/acrnm_abbrev.htm))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating read!

Can this situation can be avoided if the loading bay has a cover/lid on top of the material?

As long as the loading bay is 'full' (or the top is movable to fit the cargo) the material won't be able to slosh around, thus preventing the situation described in the article.

<comment><USER25> The usual solution, as with petrol tanks in cars and elsewhere, is to use baffles. It effectively turns one large tank into several smaller ones and stops the liquid from freely sloshing from one side to another. The sloshing causes problems non-linearly with size of tank, so reducing one tank into 4 or 8 has a huge impact on the risks of sloshing. The partitions/baffles are always vertical (although I expect aerospace baffles are a bit more fancy).

<comment><USER26> Yeah, but the original state of the material was solid. You can't compartmentalize a solid unless you break it.

<comment><USER19> It's not a true liquid, but rather solid dust mixed with trace amounts of water. Drier than mud, but powder and rock that can shift in a fluid-like way.

It's like an avalanche or rock slide.

<comment><USER27> The article mentions moisture several times, as well as draining moisture during the trip. It also explains liquefaction in terms of water acting on the solid, whereas I always thought it was just about granularity.

From the article, it doesn't sound like it's about trace amounts of water at all. It sounds like water is somehow involved in the loading process...?

<comment><USER28> The liquid is simply acting as a lubricant. So, it takes a very small amount to make a large difference. Really it's less soggy than simply damp.

<comment><USER27> So why do they mention draining?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why don't they treat this cargo under the assumption that it is a liquid and transport it accordingly (e.g. in large barrels)? I mean this question genuinely as someone with little knowledge of logistics.

<comment><USER21> Try putting 200,000 tons of coal into barrels, transport it, and then unbarrel it at the other end. The extra cost and time would be massive.

<comment><USER30> What about just compartmentalizing the ship's cargo space?

<comment><USER21> They are also compartmentalised. Bulkers tend to have four or five large tanks to hold stuff in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 10 ships a year + 10 years = 100. Wow.

I'm guessing insurance going to be even more expensive now unless 10 ships a year out of however many ships out there is minimal.

<comment><USER21> This has been a problem for decades and is already priced into the insurance. It's also not a big part of the world fleet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If I recall, this problem was used in "The Martian" by Andy Weir, when one of the rockets carrying supplies failed. At high pressures, some of the cargo liquified and the rocket exploded due to shifting weight distribution. It may have been another book...

<comment><USER33> Yep (spoilers), that was what happened to the rocket that was supposed to bring supplies to Watney so that he could survive until the next scheduled mission (prompting the crew currently returning to earth to "turn around")

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me of the meme that goes "when I was a kid, I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it is."

</comment><comment><USER35> Pardon my ignorance, but what would happen if you just divided the hold into smaller compartments? That way sloshing would only move things slightly to one side.

<comment><USER36> It's already divided into smaller compartments, through the containers themselves.

Think of a ship transporting prisoners in their own little cells. Then think of all the prisoners working together to throw their weight against the walls of the cells at just the right moment in an effort to sink the ship.

The prisoners would only have enough of an effect to make the guards a little nervous. The ore sloshing around in the containers weighs tons and tons, though, enough to actually sink the ship.

<comment><USER37> but the article suggests that permanent accumulation in one side, rather than transient force, is the cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's a very similar phenomenon as a plot point in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, involving waves in medieval Japan

<comment><USER39> I have read The Baroque Cycle, but it is _huge_ and my memory is imperfect. Mind reminding me of the details of this plot point, so I don't searching through the whole un-indexed stack of bricks on my bookcase? :)

<comment><USER40> When they are leaving Japan after trading the damascus steel ingots for quicksilver, the Japanese fill all the quicksilver bottles to a level that will cause it to slosh along with the same frequency, causing harmonic resonance to sink the ship. Before leaving they open all of the bottles and transfer the quicksilver so that they are filled to the top and can't slosh. This is from memory and may not be completely accurate.

<comment><USER41> Not only tuned to a common frequency but tuned to match a predominant wave pattern in the mouth of the harbor they were departing.

I had a hard time reading this part, as the puzzle placement seemed so forced and nonsensical to the plot. What did the Japanese gain from this stunt if it worked? A sunken ship in their harbor leaking mercury from hundreds of smashed jars...?

<comment><USER42> I think the idea was to sink the ship by capsizing it, then bring up the intact bottles with free divers. Any mercury leaks would immediately sink, and would probably stay inside the hold of the ship long enough to recover it. If it escaped, it would run into the nearest local minimum on the harbor bottom. If rock bottom, just scoop it up into fresh bottles. If sandy bottom, scoop up the sand with it and separate it on the surface.

So they keep the wootz payment, they recover the cargo, and they don't lose reputation by just murdering the crew of a merchant vessel outright. If the merchants capsize instead, that's a shame, and a result of poor seamanship, and they'll just go ahead and pretend to be sad during the salvage operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The loading and pseudo-solidification can cause residual internal stresses that change the dynamic response so that a small signal input gets a big change as a result.

I'd imagine that the exact values are not monitored, so that what is written as "in the hold" and what is actually there are subject to natural variation, which can be asymmetric, and thus theory and practice are not the same thing.

If seawater gets into the mix, it will have more water.

There are thermal phase changes in the liquefication. It can behave very differently at 10 deg C warmer than one expects from 0 deg C warmer.

Over a relatively long trip, with agitation, the mean particle size is going to change. Big particles are going to break into smaller particles. This is going to change the liquefication physics.

</comment><comment><USER44> Awesome. My boy and I were talking about liquefaction and phase solids last night when he was showing me how the sea salt behaves as a solid in the shaker (humid here) until he bangs on thr glass.

<comment><USER45> Check out the physics of ketchup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs)

YouTube science educator Mark Rober's "Liquid Sand Hot Tub - Fluidized air bed"

</comment><comment><USER47> They mention that solids are stored in a sort of liquid suspension. Why is that? I feel like a solid, airtight box (like a shipping ocntainer) 100% full of sand wouldn't doo too much.

<comment><USER48> Ever moved a large pile of sand that's been stored outside? Once you get a foot or so into it, there's going to be some moisture. It's not going to be much by weight, but it's there. Of course, it's going to vary depending upon environmental factors (humidity, temperature how recently it rained, etc). That contributes partially to the liquefaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Interesting read. I thought all along that materials change state due to temperature changes. Time to track down my teachers and show them this article.

You learn something new everyday

</comment><comment> nappy-doo Although unlikely that liquefaction caused this wreck, my mind went first to the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.

<comment><USER50> There appear to be many factors that went into that sinking: huge storm, 30-35 ft waves, possible rogue waves even larger; improperly secured hatch covers, no water-tight bulkheads(!!); regulations that allowed overloading and decreased freeboard, etc, etc.[0]

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald#Theories_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald#Theories_on_the_cause_of_sinking)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't understand the point of "two-phase" materials. Why would you add water to ore?

<comment><USER52> First up, we're not talking about a soup here, this isn't like it's a litre of water for every kilo of ore, it's just that it's enough to allow the solids to move without the friction they'd incur if entirely dry.

Ore starts out as rock buried in the ground. So, you're going to need to get that out of there. While you could do that with a bloke and a pickaxe I'm sure lots of the processes actually involved add water, even if not terribly much.

Also, this stuff isn't expensive, it's basically just slightly valuable dirt, so if it's stored somewhere they're not going to be keeping it in water-tight containers, it'll be in an open truck, or an open freight car somewhere, getting rained on.

Now, shipping dirty water across the ocean is pointless and costs money, so it's not as though they're going to add more water just for fun, but if the contracts involved don't specify that it has to be less than so-and-so much water in the cargo, then it's nobody's job to ensure it isn't damp.

<comment><USER51> Ah! Thanks. I imagined an intentional mix for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I was expecting a Sperm whale's reference somewhere ;-)</comment>


RIM records all employee calls - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-275216.html

<comment><USER2> I work in a regulated industry, and all our calls are recorded as a matter of course (the company is perfectly upfront about doing this, and everyone understands the reasons behind it). The tapes are only meant to be used in the case of an investigation by the regulators, but some bright spark decided to that, after a major incident, the recordings of the conf call should be analyzed to capture action points, lessons learned, etc. So we all piled into a boardroom and they started the recording... Which turned out to be several hours of people bitching and swearing, often about completely unrelated things to the incident, with pretty much no useful content (all of which had been sent by the actual engineers via IM). So we stopped doing that.

The moral of this story: recording internal calls isn't unusual and it's unlikely that anyone really cares.</comment>


My gf started this tumblr b/c of someone I know... - <AUTHOR> http://lifeofastartupgf.com

<comment><USER2> Anyone that decides rides the emotional rollercoaster of starting a company, has surely dated. Here's some insight to their perspective. Not bad Startup GF, not bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Feels about as legitimate as "start-up" skill endorsements on LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wait, so your girlfriend started this because of you?</comment>


IBM research scientists go their own way - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/30/BUT21EKMSF.DTL <comment><USER2> Although this article reads like a paid ad for IBM (journalists, like everyone else, have to eat) I did a summer internship in Almaden in 2000 and the place was awesome, albeit not as quite open-minded as described here perhaps.

The important thing many companies don't realize is that having 20% (or "wild duck") projects is only the first tiny step in the right direction. Many tech companies have these and it means nothing by itself. It needs to be coupled with a healthy way of percolating these ideas upwards in a combined peer- manager controlled way. Doing this is hard.

When I read comments from their managers I get the feeling that they are just doing it for the looks/fun/PR, i.e. they're not taking it as a serious source of their future revenue. Well, with this approach, it will never become such a source.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really can't stress how important these types of pure R&D incubators are for future tech. Almost every major piece of technology we use today came out of one of these types of labs.</comment>


Free food and $100 prizes: Alaskans rally to get challenged classics to students - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/30/free-food-and-100-prizes-alaskans-rally-to-get-challenged-classics-to-students <comment><USER2> Huh.

I was a voracious reader as a child, though I somewhat fell out of the habit once I reached adulthood - other pursuits, chiefly tech, took precedence for me once I was able to afford them on my own. I still read far more than the average; apparently around one in four Americans haven't picked up a book in any form in the past year[0]!

I've read all of these books except "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". I have a vague memory of feeling like the Maya Angelou's poetry was somewhat forced on me in school, and as a result wasn't particularly interested in any of her works. This article lead me to do a bit of reading about who she was and the experiences in her life that were included in her "Caged Bird."

I had no idea she spent much of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. That's especially surprising to me because I grew up and went to school in Arkansas - K-1 in Plainview (in central AR) and 2-12 in Lead Hill (in northern AR). I don't know that I've ever been to Stamps but I do know that several of my ancestors lived in that area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is the second time I've felt that the government schools that I attended have done me a significant disservice w/r/t literature: the first was when I discovered "Summer of My German Soldier[1]," another book centered around significant historical events in my home state.

I just bought "Caged Bird" on Kobo, and plan to read it in the next couple of weeks. Afterward, I'll likely add it to my list of books I'd like my daughters to read.

0: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/26/who- doesnt-...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/26/who-doesnt-read- books-in-america/)

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

<comment><USER2> I have some more thinking to do on this subject, but I'm struck by how much my impression of a great deal of literature (and likely other subjects) was colored by how it was presented to me in school.

I wasn't interested in Angelou because I sensed that it was included in the curriculum by "the authorities" to advance a specific agenda. The lesson wasn't about her works; it was about what the people who set up the lesson wanted me to take away from it. The works themselves were merely a means to that end.

This is obviously only my opinion, but I think literature should be approached with an open mind, filtered through the biases and experiences of the reader, and perhaps discussed with others. There is the perspective the author wanted to convey, sure - but there is no "correct" interpretation of a work, and to base classwork around a single interpretation seems equivalent to judging the effectiveness of a scientific experiment by whether it confirms the desired hypothesis.

None of the above is really revelatory for me. I'm the father of two unschooled daughters, and the approach that my wife and I share toward education is one of motivation and encouragement instead of the imposed structure and conformance that we experienced. It just feels good to examine the bases of my beliefs and to share them with others. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > A school board in Alaska has got more than it bargained for after pulling > classics including The Great Gatsby and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from > the school curriculum, with members of the local community offering > incentives to students to read the books anyway – including $100 (£80) > prizes and free mac'n'cheese.

[snip]

> The books remain in school libraries, but will no longer be taught.

> According to a flier from the district's Office of Instruction, Angelou's > memoir had been challenged over its "sexually explicit material, such as the > sexual abuse the author suffered as a child, and its 'anti-white' > messaging", while Fitzgerald's classic novel was pulled for "language and > sexual references". Invisible Man was marked for containing "language, rape > and incest", while Catch-22 was included for its violence, "a handful of > racial slurs" and the fact the characters "speak with typical 'military men' > misogyny and racist attitudes of the time".

Here's the full flier as a PDF:

[https://go.boarddocs.com/ak/matsu/Board.nsf/files/BNQSWL743B...](https://go.boarddocs.com/ak/matsu/Board.nsf/files/BNQSWL743B16/$file/English%20Electives%20Round%201%20Controversial%20Book%20Descriptions.pdf)

<comment><USER2> The justification for removing "The Things They Carried" seems particularly weak: "Profanity and sexual references"

Removing "profanity and sexual references" from high school curricula does not eliminate them; it only ensures that they will be learned through interactions within the prevailing culture - and likely never examined in detail by most.

Placing context around things that are "socially unacceptable" is one of the most important parts of the transition between childhood and adulthood. Why would anyone think it's a good thing to allow that to happen incidentally?

<comment><USER3> > Placing context around things that are "socially unacceptable" is one of the > most important parts of the transition between childhood and adulthood. Why > would anyone think it's a good thing to allow that to happen incidentally?

Because if you ask children to think about misogyny, homophobia, and racism in their fiction, they might apply those lessons to their parents, and We Can't Have That.

<comment><USER2> Of course. It would be uncomfortable. What's more, it would be the sort of "forced lesson" that I referenced elsewhere.

That's exactly the problem that I've identified with my education: the goal shouldn't be "show children that their parents have flaws," but "expose children to material where people challenge the views of authority." The former caused me to approach things in terms of defending my own view of the world, while the latter would have had me examining it.

Framing the conversation is important. If you go too far with it, you breed resistance to learning. If you don't go far enough, all you're really risking is that someone might take the "wrong" lesson away from it.

Personally, I'd rather have someone who has more fully absorbed the material take away the wrong lesson than someone say the right things about it while never truly examining the work. In that case, at least they will have a broader base of knowledge and experiences to draw from later in life if and when their worldview changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://bannedbooksweek.org/](https://bannedbooksweek.org/)</comment>


Show HN: Thirty One Circles, an animated GLSL fragment shader - <AUTHOR> http://www.appsketch.xyz/d/calligraphy <comment><AUTHOR> I've been playing around with WebGL recently and built this inspired by drawing parametric curves on the screen.

I also wrote a post about this [http://www.appsketch.xyz/p/2](http://www.appsketch.xyz/p/2)</comment>


Decentralization Dilemma - <AUTHOR> https://www.molus.org/blog/decentralization-dilemma/ <comment><USER2> An important extra dimension is whether, within a certain system, the natural tendency towards centralization-for-convenience also generates centralization lock-in.

If there's a dependence on canonical global registries or fixed network locations in the manner of addressing people/content, that becomes the case. Centralization occurs via a one-way ratchet – sought for ease but then practically irreversible due to high switching costs. "Federated" systems usually still have this centralization problem.

Systems based on cryptographically-derived names (for content or identities) offer a potential escape route. While you might choose certain centralized/dominant providers for a quick-and-easy start, retaining one's own stable crypto identity ensures absolute portability and location/provider indifference.

Such an architecturally-enforced right-of-exit can also make higher levels of centralization tolerable, before centralized power becomes a problem. The _potential_ for choosing other arrangements, rapidly and with minimum disruption, deters abusive acts by larger proprietors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given what I just posted about Mastodon a couple hours ago, I definitely recognize the challenge of recentralization tendencies: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765156)

I think the biggest issue is our home connections. I'd rather have a box in my house, but the need for the connection to not suck means I can't, which means there's added hosting costs, I have to trust someone to manage it, etc. If we had good symmetrical-speed Internet, I'd say a box with some reasonable defaults you plug in at home would be the way to go, and it wouldn't make sense to recentralize, because you aren't just switching hosts, you're leaving your house.

<comment><USER4> > I'd rather have a box in my house, but the need for the connection to not > suck means I can't

I agree with you to some extent, but I also think it's far more feasible than most people realize. I run a bunch of services (mail, website, repos, etc...) out of my house, and it's super rare that I have any problems with it. I know it wouldn't work for everyone, I'm just lucky enough to live in a city that has decent internet, but I think it is entirely doable for a lot more people than we realize.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't email have a lot of problems with residential IPs? Either they're blacklisted out the wazoo or the provider blocks SMTP? It's not just about having "decent Internet".

<comment><USER4> Not that I've ever experienced.

The provider may block it, but IME that's as easy as sending them an email to open the port (which I would consider under the umbrella of "decent internet").

I can't say I've ever had my IP blacklisted that I know of, and I've never had delivery problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMHO there is a simple solution that will likely lead to mass adoption of decentralized services: create a wi-fi router that lets home users install server apps on the router. Make it easy for users to install server apps and create an open marketplace for server apps.

Historically, decentralized services don't get mass adoption because computers or mobile devices are off or unavailable most of the time. They are also behind NAT.

The wireless router is in a unique position. It's always on, it's a first- class citizen on the Internet, it's not very expensive, its ownership is clear and simple, and it often has significant unused computing power. It looks like a major, unexploited opportunity to me.

I'm waiting for some company to take advantage of this opportunity. Think of what this could do for decentralized social networking, file storage, currency exchange, etc. It's quite easy to think of possible server apps; just think of any centralized service and consider how valuable it would be to decentralize it.

I would do it myself if I weren't already involved in trying to build a possibly huge business or two. :-)

<comment><USER7> I used to think so, too. Over the winter, though, someone here on HN pointed me towards Beaker Browser and Dat. (For a completely unrelated problem. Turns out, it works pretty well as a solution to this problem, too.)

It seems likelier that a P2P web based on Dat (or something like it) will gain adoption in the large before getting embedded devices manufacturers (a) to willingly take on the role required here, and (b) to get it right, which are each big asks on their own. There's also the hidden third problem (c): getting the masses to actually go out and upgrade a piece of hardware that would actually support this kind of thing. It's a lot easier to just download a new browser (or an update for their current browser) and sign up for a service that will act as an always-on peer on your behalf—for exactly the same reason that the centralization of the Web happened in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the pointer! Dat looks very powerful. I will study more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great great point. The higher the derivative of the learning curve, the higher the adoption rate. It's as if the product sweeps into the population and the magnitude of the derivative acts as a friction or an accelerant. It could also be noted that beyond this piece of the puzzle is also the incentive structure that surrounds the entire network, like an invisible fluid that you only notice when you take a step back. If demand is high and the market is ready for the idea, it'll flow as easily as through water. But if no demand is there to push it like a carrot in front of a horse, then the learning rate won't matter one iota, because the incentive structure is as dense as jello. Decentralized social networks are an example where this is the case. They're easy enough to learn, but without a demand for it, it won't propogate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe the key to improving incentive is to bind the acts of participating in and supporting a decentralized service so that simply using it helps construct the network itself, i.e. every client is itself a federated server. The tradeoff is that the service has to be robust enough to support a certain percentage of clients being offline at any moment, and it certainly takes more effort to construct a client that includes what would normally be delegated to a server.

(I'm sure someone's already thought of/worked with this idea before, though.)

<comment><USER10> I remember hearing in a podcast that openbazaar.org tried this approach but because of unreliable clients parts of the network would be completely unaccessible. They then went with a partially decentralized solution with a few main nodes always supporting the system. I'm not sure what has changed in the design since that podcast episode though.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure which podcast that was. Currently content is served by others that have viewed that content, but new content gets pushed to a few configurable nodes to store that content before anybody has viewed it. This allows vendors to make changes and shutdown the software immediately instead of needing to wait until somebody has viewed their change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, this why federated systems (Mastodon, Matrix), etc. will just repeat history like with email centralizing into gmail.

However, IPFS, Scuttlebutt, GUN (full disclosure: mine -> [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ), Beaker, etc. don't have this problem. Most of these, though, are tools for building decentralized apps, not necessarily the apps themselves - so there is plenty of love that we all need to have for enticing designers to build easy and beautiful apps.

ZeroNet seemed pretty easy though and well designed, so I'm not sure about the author's grievances against that one. Although it is more of an app (or app store) than a library/tool.

<comment><USER13> Have you seen people setting up GUN instances?

<comment><USER12> Yupe! It is super easy (like, 1 click deploy buttons) and lots of people in the community run one. Most people use them for their own project though, not necessarily as a collective network. Several people have said we should switch it to automatically connect to other peers, so that we can create a decentralized network, which I think is a good idea to try. I just originally didn't want to put random outbound network calls in the code because that seemed malware/"call home"/suspicious. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree 101% with the author but I fail to understand how this case is different from anything else in the world. From pizza to operating systems, from orgasms to entertainment, people tend to be lazy and opt for the simpler, low stress alternative - no?

<comment><USER15> When the usability of a the service (device, whatever) depends on, or is proportional to the number of other people using it, then adoption rate becomes very important not only for the success of the service, but it's usefulness too.

i.e: There can be a sewing kit that has a high learning curve, but would result in faster production / better products. While this may result in the the kit not being (economically) successful, it would still be just as useful to each individual who bought it, and learned to use it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Depends on how centralization is framed. Common CPU company (e.g. Intel)? Common cloud company (e.g. AWS)? Common website company(e.g. Facebook)? If we can separate these terms, I think people are asking to not have a common DB store maintained by a common website company. Framed in that way, we should strive to allow people to store things on their desktop computers and treat them as home servers. For nomadic or not-always-on desktop type, a monetization approach for these decentralized networks would be to resell/affiliate with hosting providers (where the user owns and has the AWS account, not you) and do one-click provisions and what not.

People might re-centralize for discovery, but shouldn't need to for storage or other conveniences. And centralized discovery is not that bad of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a Law, what's it called?

The virality of a signal is related to the simplest pipe it will pass through.

Dang it, I hate when I can't remember names like this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not the most in depth HN comment, but my user ID - tCfD - stands for The Center For Decentralization, an intentional oxymoron which I sometimes use in casual conversation to call attention to the fundamentally paradoxical (and the closer you get, the more they confound) premises of this subject.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most people outside the "tech bubble" don't care about decentralization or open source software. These ideals are not enough to convince them to use a new platform.

At this stage, I don't see how a new decentralized social network could realistically compete against the big guys.

</comment><comment><USER20> What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization? The list of problems I can think of and for which the best solution is decentralization, is a rather short list. End in the realm of mass market consumer products it gets even shorter and could very well be empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization?

If you are following the rise of "dapps" or blockchain applications (circa 2017) then I would answer your question with "almost anything Internet- related".

Some examples:

* Decentralized Storage (IPFS)

* Decentralized Computation (Golem)

* Decentralized Professional Networking (Indorse)

There are many other examples, but a lot of them are vaporware and not worth mentioning.

<comment><USER20> That are solutions, what are the problems they tried to solve? What is wrong with storing your files on Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3? What is the advantage of IPFS?

<comment><USER21> [https://ipfs.io/#uses](https://ipfs.io/#uses)

<comment><USER20> Those points are neither specific to IPFS nor to a decentralized solution and they do not really highlight any advantage of IPFS over something like Dropbox to begin with. The best point is probably saving bandwidth due to its peer-to- peer nature. There are certainly more traditional solutions where you can save bandwidth if you can convince other people to provide it for you, for example classical FTP mirrors, but this is certainly a valid use case for a distributed solution. It however is more to the benefit of the service provider and not the user and it really hinges on the popularity of that data you want distribute, if it is not really popular just using a file server will most likely provide a better user experience as compared to depending on a few potentially low bandwidth peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good article, but I think the adoption rate/learning curve graph is a bit too generous. By the time you've hit 10 on the learning curve, adoption's probably already down to 10%. People are exceptionally lazy.

</comment><comment><USER23> You brought up good points for discussion.

 _> 1\. The relative difficulty of running your own as an absolute beginner_

The ease-of-use is brought up several times as a barrier to decentralization but I don't think this is really the fundamental issue. Yes, it _appears_ to be the problem but it really isn't. If hackers invent a super simple UI, or hypothetical set-and-forget "IPFS/Sandstorm appliance", or an auto-configuring node... it still won't help widespread adoption for decentralization.

I was an expert for installing SMTP email servers but I don't bother with running a "decentralized" home email server anymore. Many sysadmin experts have abandoned the idea of running home email servers. If decentralization is the ideal, why do hackers like us not follow it? We're certainly not waiting for beginner-friendly email server software. (My previous comment about this.[1])

Also, any attempt to bake the "ease-of-use" into an idiot-proof software package or hardware appliance becomes its own vector for an attack on the unwitting homeowner. (Previous comment.[2])

 _> 2\. The eventual centralization on top of the most well-run versions (like Matrix)_

Yes, this is the most unsolved problem by far: _costs_. One can write or decree that a _protocol specification_ to be distributed but it doesn't change the fact that the _real-world implementation_ of that protocol always costs real money and the _money spent is not distributed_. That leads to centralization. (Previous comments.[3][4])

I've been studying the decentralization space for years and have read every whitepaper about Diaspora, IPFS, Filecoin, Sandstorm, Mastodon, bitcoin, etc and nobody has figured this out. (Suggestion to HN readers... every time you see a proposal for a new decentralized protocol, do a Ctrl+F for "costs" and "money". It's a very under discussed topic.)

Real _costs of hardware_ such as cpu+disk+bandwidth and _costs of human labor_ such as trust+maintenance are inescapable and it is the #1 puzzle to decentralization.

E.g. Mastodon was recently suggested in various HN threads about "alternative to Facebook". Hmmmm.... if cpu+disk are not free... who's paying for the mastodon servers?!? Well, I see that several volunteers run Patreon crowdfunding to keep the lights on.[5] That's very noble but that funding model is also not scalable. That recreates how many BBS (bulletin board systems) were run in the 1980s with dial up modems. Only a small group of enthusiasts were users on each server.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526089)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861683)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125730)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15878668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15878668)

[5] [https://www.google.com/search?q=mastadon+patreon](https://www.google.com/search?q=mastadon+patreon)

<comment><USER24> Yeah, ease of use really isn't a problem at all. Bitcoin and bittorrent are the prime examples of that.

But it's not exactly about the costs either, but rather about incentives. Right incentives can drive funding into adoption of the technology. I mean people being able to profit from other people using the technology is what can bring funding, promotion of the technology and adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't see centralization of a federated solution as a problem. If the popular service becomes for whatever reason unappealing, the solution allows for another provider to step in.

<comment><USER26> You can maybe ratchet your way out of this POV, like so:

Would there ever be a centralized provider without there being an incentive for it? Would such an incentive ever exist without an accompanying incentive to leverage your dominance to keep competing providers out?

<comment><USER25> As in the case of Google Talk/Meet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The answer is for the server to be your phone.

<comment><USER3> What happens when you lose your phone? Something you take out and about and that someone can easily steal or can easily be damaged or lost is not a good server.

<comment><USER28> Yes, but you should have a backup anyway. The bigger problem will be connectivity and bandwidth costs in case one of your posts gets hit by a site like HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think one of the fundamental problems with even federated systems is that your identity is tied to your server. If I decide to leave mstdn.io in favor of some other Mastadon server, as far as I know, I lose all of my followers.

Even email has this problem. It's virtually impossible to change email providers unless you happen to own your own domain that you use for email instead of "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com" like most people do. Having your own domain works, but then you have the burden of dealing with the server that responds to that domain.

Strangely, one system _has_ solved this, and they solved it decades after initial deployment: phones. Used to be, if you moved or switched phone provider, you had to get a new phone number. These days, you can "keep your phone number" when you switch providers.

The technology behind that is called Local Number Portability and is managed by the Number Portability Administration Center [1]. That's a private organization, but I think has some federabal obligations for fairness [2]. That sounds a little similar to how domain name registration and ISBN numbers are managed [3].

There's probably a lesson here. Maybe part of the solution for federation and privacy is a single authoritative registrar for root identifiers (i.e. the "@blah" part of your identity). And then all of the federated systems sit on top of that. The individual user owns that identifier instead of the server.

I think you need _some_ kind of level of indirection like these, so that a user's identity isn't directly bound to the federated server they happen to be using today. Basically a mutable map that users control where they can map a logical identity to the current server they are using. So, if your, say, Mastodon ID was "munificent@muni_root", Mastodon would ask muni_root, "What's the current Mastodon server ID for user munificent". If I move from one Mastodon server to another, I just update that one record and everything keeps working.

We could, I suppose, use domain names for this. But in practice (1) that space is already getting used up and (2) the usability is low and the overhead and costs high because that's not what it was designed for.

[1]: [https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp- works](https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp-works) [2]: [https://www.npac.com/the-npac/about/neutrality](https://www.npac.com/the- npac/about/neutrality) [3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number#How_ISBNs_are_issued)</comment>


Twitter engagement rates (2.7% good?) - <AUTHOR> https://pasteboard.co/HoRZUI1.png <comment><AUTHOR> I am new to social media marketing. From what I have read online, 2.7% is very good, but I don't think the few blogs I read are authoritative sources on this.</comment>


TheSkimm founders are coming to Disrupt NY 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/13/theskimm-founders-are-coming-to-disrupt-ny-2016/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_772581478402580868 <comment><AUTHOR> The iOS app requires iOS 9, but there's no JailBreak for iOS 9 yet. Wouldn't it be better to not require your iOS app to use a version of iOS that cannot be JailBroken?</comment>


Ask HN: SendGrid Transactional Templates, or no? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone here used SendGrid's Transactional Templates feature before, and what are you thoughts on it? And in comparison to building your email templates in your application directly?
It seems the Pro is that the template work can be offloaded to designers/marketers and developers only need to reference the right template in their code, they don't have to write the template code themselves. The Con is that the templates live in SendGrid, making it difficult to move to another email provider in the future if there was a reason to, as you'd have to redo the templates in the next provider, or reimplement it in your application.
Thoughts?
SendGrid Transactional Templates: https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/Transactional_Templates/index.html <comment><USER2> I wouldn't recommend it. You'll likely want to move away from SendGrid for transactional email in the future (I wrote a whole article about it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15329869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15329869)). If you are going to get locked-in to a provider, just save yourself the trouble and put your transactional stuff on Postmark.

There are other services for abstracting away your templates and transactional logic. For example SendWithUs.com. Also check out Litmus.com. Or wait for my product!</comment>


Three Mobile-Software Rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/10/30/Three-Android-Software-Rules <comment><USER2> > I started wondering why all software, without exception, isn't written this > way by default.

This is a very interesting question. I'm pretty sure it's pure "technical debt"; we're still so conditioned by extremely slow storage devices (the floppy is still the canonical "save" icon, remember?) that nobody questioned this sad state of affairs.

It became suddenly obvious that all and every application should continuously save its state, so that you would need to name your files only to better find them. A whole new paradigm waiting to be implemented, fully orthogonal persistence ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_%28computer_science...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_%28computer_science%29#Orthogonal_or_transparent_persistence) ).

<comment><USER3> OS X Lion will probably push this first as they apply what they learned on iPad to OS X.

<comment><USER4> Snow Leopard made the very first step toward it: when your app is in a consistent, everything-persisted-that-needs-to-be state, it can set a bit that tells the OS that it can just kill -9 it at will.

Edit: here's an article on it. It's called "sudden termination". [http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/03/mac-10-6-comes-with- license-t...](http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/03/mac-10-6-comes-with-license-to- kill/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Take "Crash-Only" one step further and you get apps that back themselves up automatically. Re-install the app on your new device and it restores all of your data.

</comment><comment><USER6> _The fact that on the mobile screen there's just not room for that stuff makes me increasingly wonder how much we really need it._

So true. It's so bad on the (normal) web these days that I often visit the mobile version even from my computer's browser.

Also:

 _Gosh, this notion of tying everything together loosely with addresses, data types, and a few simple verbs seems to have legs._

Sarcasm is necessary here as it's so obvious where all of this is going. We've already seen it on PCs; the web wins for 99% of all needs.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Crash-Only" is a great approach. So, why do Android phones take a long time to power down?

<comment><USER8> No idea, but it isn't instant on my single-tasking iPhone 3G either.

<comment><USER9> I wonder why is that? I've got a 3GS and most times it takes seconds to power down and other times it can take up yo 20 seconds or so.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Flexible E-mail server solutions - <AUTHOR> I have got a project idea and I think the best way to implement it quickly is to use a mail server and be able to write content to a MAILDIR that is then picked up by SMTP server to send out. Then parse replies coming in.
What are my options? There is Postfix and Sendmail and qmail and dovecot and and and. It is confusing.
Basic needs, run on Ubuntu. Maybe extensible if I want to write my own plugins for the mail server in the future. <comment><USER2> Having set up a mail server myself (as a newb), all I can tell you is that you've got a long road ahead of you if you go this route.

Of the many things that can go wrong, here are just two: 1\. You can get a recycled IP address from your hosting provider that has already been added to various spam blacklists. 2\. You can get the mail server program up and running, but be rejected by all the major (and some minor) email providers for not supplying the right email headers, and/or, not having the right DNS entries that they want you to have.

>>I think the best way to implement it quickly is to use a mail server

Unless your idea absolutely requires a mail server to function, I would recommend searching for another means of implementation, if only to save yourself the time and learning-curve of _modern_ email systems.

On the other hand, I'm actually very glad that I took the time and energy to set up my own mail server, since it was an interesting, but frustrating, learning experience. But on the other other hand, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence when I have to call a client and give them a different address because my mail server is borked.

Long story short, go with exim and dovecot. And be prepared for it to take you 4x-10x longer than you think it will.</comment>


YC: There should be a way to prevent reposts - <AUTHOR>

Recently, I've noticed a lot of articles that are reposts of the same thing.  They should all be consolidated to one thread.  Just my opinion. <comment><USER2> There could simply be a "report duplicate" link (where you specify which article it's a repost of) next to a new post for the first 1 hour after it's posted. If enough people say it's a duplicate of a particular article, then it goes off, and the comment threads are merged.

<comment><USER3> Instead of dropping or merging the article, put a list (or link to a list) of "previous postings" somewhere very prominently on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed.

As for different sources reporting on the same thing, that's a bit harder.

<comment><USER5> _"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed. ..."_

There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article. A site may publish:

\- <http://foo.com/date/bar/some-inane-tech-article>

\- <http://foo.com/date/some-inane-tech-article>

Both urls point to the same article, both are unique but point to the same document. A quick example might be an article and the same article printed.

<comment><USER5> _"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed ... There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article ..._ "

Here is an live example I just spotted:

original ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html> ~ post ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133430>

dupe ~ <http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html> ~ post ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134775>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can something be written that strips the url of arbirary variables?

<http://foo.com/bar?aritrary-var=arbitrary-val>

to just

<http://foo.com/bar>

that would help because a lot of people end up posting links with ?source=newsletter or &sessionid=asdf1234ilikepie or etc

<comment><USER7> Those variables are occasionally meaningful. Stripping them all off indiscriminantly would break some links.

<comment><USER8> So don't strip them indiscriminately, have the HN site compare submitted pages it gets by dropping them one by one to the original link, only maintain those that actually affect the resulting page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree. I've also noticed that the same story as reported by two different news sources will get posted, which is essentially the same thing.

Google does some pretty cool probability stuff (at least, I think that's how they do it) to figure out what articles are the same for news.google.com. Something like that would be really cool on new.yc.

I know, the source is open.... but I'm clearly busy ;)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've wondered, how exactly does Google do that?? Anyway, in the short term, a manual system would probably be more accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There should be a _better_ way to prevent reposts</comment>


Google investing $120M into China's e-sports - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/05/google-investing-120-million-into-chushou-chinas-e-sports-market.html <comment><USER2> Massive. Direct Link to Chousou TV (rough translation equals "tentacle")

[https://chushou.tv/](https://chushou.tv/)

Combined with opening of AI China Center and push for TensorFlow adoption Google looks to be making inroads into Chinese consumer internet.

[https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai- china-c...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai-china- center/)

Two more potential US IPOs for China to watch in 2018 include YY's live game streaming service. And iQIYI which recently partnered with Netflix.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-04/yy-s- chin...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-04/yy-s-chinese-game- streaming-service-is-said-to-seek-u-s-ipo)</comment>


Ask HN: What physical books do you have? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Too many =P But seriously, there are certain volumes I would never part with. For example: The Pragmatic Programmer, SICP, Design Patterns, The C Programming Language. Tomes which are definitive and timeless.

I also have a few for purely nostalgic value, representative of key moments in my past. Notably: the OpenGL Red Book and C++ The Complete Reference.

<comment><USER3> Is SICP worth reading? I keep hearing about it, but it seems like it's mostly a resource for learning lisp. Is that not the case?

<comment><USER4> I haven't read SICP, but I've heard it's like Let Over Lambda which I have read. Ostensibly, LOL is about how LISPs work, but in reality it's a much more fundamental look into how execution and scoping do what they do, why, the semantics, etc. I mostly write Python now, but I have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of object orientation from reading LOL. You may find the same with SICP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I only have two tech-realted books on paper:

\- Microwave Transistor Amplifiers by Guillermo Gonzalez, which is a fantastic introduction and reference about high frequency circuit design

\- The O'Reilly Linux Pocket guide, which has a cowboy on the cover and usually gets loaned to coworkers

Aside from that I've got a ton of sci-fi and high fantasy, but I'm slowly moving to a digital collection.

</comment><comment><USER5> At the moment, very few. I used to read a whole bunch of philosophy books, as well as a few help books on software engineering topics.

Then over time I just realised I could get pretty much anything non fiction related online, and stopped buying any more.

Might consider reading more novels in future though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a handful due to people gifting them but will eventually give them away. I've moved to digital more than a decade ago and simply don't want to own physical books anymore when it can be helped.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a lot, but my favorites are the Time-Life Enchanted World series. I don't think I have the whole set, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> More that thirty. I can never read online as well as I can with a paper book. Even just printing out a two-page article.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have a lot of books. I like to read books. I also have books with blank striped paper for writing my own notes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just found "Land of Lisp" in a local mini library. Am excited and quite surprised.</comment>


How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1

<comment><USER2> Excellent write up.

</comment><comment><USER3> great story</comment>


UW Lamborghini lab in top gear, Aventador next - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2014356169_uw_lamborghini_lab_in_top_gear.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "On Tuesday at a car show in Geneva, Lamborghini is taking the wraps off the first production car to come fully through the lab, through its entire gestation process.

Called the Aventador, it's a $370,000 Batmobile that goes from zero to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds.

The Aventador's bare body -- before the V-12 motor and other parts are added -- weighs just 504.9 pounds."</comment>


Obama vs. Trump – Who's the Better Speaker? - <AUTHOR> https://www.speakscore.net/blog/trump-vs-obama-inaugural-speech-analysis-comparison.html <comment><USER2> Very brave of you to publish this as it is bound to violently contradict the intuition of most people. An alternative conclusion is that your analysis is meaningless :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not surprised. You forget. Trump has the best words.

</comment><comment><USER4> The results are surprising. The analysis is very interesting and useful.</comment>


Do Pro-Women Groups on Campus Discriminate Against Men? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-pro-women-groups-on-campus-discriminate-against-men-1527067800 <comment><USER3> > a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.

I was in one of those in college. Literally the only benefit that group provided was that all members could share 3 floors of a dorm and those floors were reserved for WISE. Campus housing was already largely segregated by sex, but some of the floors not in use by WISE were for men. This wasn't a particularly nice dorm building either (in fact many argued it was one of the worst). But the WISE program did give us a good benefit by making it easier for us to find people we could study with without having to venture out to the library or random people's dorms all the time. I see no reason that a male equivalent of this program shouldn't exist though.

Most "womens" groups I avoided like the plague though. I didn't like the implication that I needed special support or something. It's the same reason I've turned down requests for me to speak to "women in tech" groups and the like. There's a pipeline problem, but it was started well before college for most folks, so these groups are really not very helpful for bringing people in anyhow.

<comment><USER4> _I didn 't like the implication that I needed special support or something._

I go back-and-forth with this in the case of my wife, who works at a large tech company. On the one hand, she's quite capable of doing the job without special treatment. But on the other hand, if the odds really _are_ stacked against her...

She's a big girl and can make her own decisions, I just wonder what I'd do were I in the same boat. Probably the same thing she (and from the way it sounds, you) would do: mostly avoid the drama that such groups can bring.

<comment><USER5> The fact that you just referred to your wife as a "big girl" speaks volumes in regards to this issue...

<comment><USER4> Now I know what it is people are complaining about when they use the acronym "SJW": pointless tilting at windmills whilst the real issues are ignored. But at least you're doing _something_ , eh?

I'm sure that making sure to refer to my wife as "adult woman" in the future will cure the problem of management being packed with men of the same ethnicity as the group manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a recently graduated computer science student with deep experience working with startups, notedly with highly experienced women developers and staff within those startups, I find groups like this deeply troubling.

I believe what these groups advocate for on paper and what they knowingly actually advocate for are very different. IMO these groups foster division and group-think that makes learning harder for all involved and if anything promotes the portrayal of toxic culture as a purely gendered issue along with wrapping everything under a poorly though-out victim mentality.

Some of the best female developers I've come to know both as co-workers and mentors (although I'm a man) avoid these groups and find them counter- productive. Some have even been banned for just speaking on the issue of these groups, regarding their "real" benefit. I acknowledge there are problems with tech culture, but pro advocacy and labeling of any groups involved will never be a productive way to solve these problems.

<comment><USER6> Genderism can be exclusionary, especially when the mindset of the "wider" group they belong to is truly not one of inclusivity. Genderism also takes voices away from visible minorities who are often excluded by these groups as well.

We talk a lot of about diversity, and this word has been in many ways, commandeered by genderism. Diversity is not only gender diversity. But it seems to be the diversity we can hear most about at times.

Diversity for me is ensuring anyone with the potential can develop the talents to execute from any diverse background. (Happy to improve this defintion).

If using pro-women groups as an example, the issue is not the women. It's men. Existing decision making powers and structures need to change behaviour.

Focusing on Humanism may be another approach. Everyone is a citizen in humanity, and adjusting the structures and powers within that context might set bars and standards for behaviour can be set within it.

<comment><USER5> I strongly identify with humanism in this regard. I also agree there are problems with existing structures, but I think unanimously working against these structures fares better for "oppressed" groups than just labeling the opposing group as "evil".

For instance, I have worked in circumstances where women use similar rhetoric created in these groups to foster a toxic culture that affects everyone negatively. Again, I cannot stress enough, toxic culture affects everyone.

If we don't start developing new approaches that are less reminiscent of methods used to remedy elementary school playground scuffles, we'll just keep seeing more articles / threads titled "Why Networking is only hard for <women / insert some group here>".

Furthermore, an un-intended side-effect of these kinds of gendered / tribalist approaches is that they empower companies / organizations to use them for profit. For example, the number of coding bootcamps that target and exploit women under the guise of "fighting for equality" is disgusting and nauseating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested, legally, when is this okay and when is it not? Can you have "one sex only clubs"? Scholarships? Can you have VC firms that only let one sex founders? Where is the line here?

By looking at it in reverse it is very discriminatory in any sense:

\- Men's only VC firm

\- Outstanding Male Award

\- White Male Study Room

I completely understand equity and trying to actively support women and minorities, however I'd just like to know the current law and where the line is drawn.

<comment><USER8> I wondered the same thing a while ago and my understanding is that these are all covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1][2]. The gist is there's not so much a line you can't cross, but rather that what is illegal is explicitly enumerated.

The act defines what specifically is a protected class (sex, race, religion, and so on) and a number of specific situations where it is not permitted to discriminate against members of those classes (e.g. employment, schools, access to public spaces like restaurants and theatres, etc.)

So in your examples I believe the answer is yes, single-sex clubs are permitted so long as they're private clubs. A scholarship that only members of a single sex are eligible for is also allowed since that's not one of the things the act covers. I think a VC firm that only backs founders of a particular sex is also legal since that's investment rather than employment.

An Outstanding Male Award would be legal (and I can't really think of any ethical reason that'd be a problem.)

A White Male Study Room would probably _not_ be legal presuming we're talking about a public facility, however to expand on that concept a bit, I _think_ a private school for white males _might_ be legal. Title IV appears to be the relevant portion, which doesn't as far as I can tell apply to private schools so long as they don't receive any sort of public funding for research or other purposes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964) [2] [https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97&page=...](https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97&page=transcript)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Political threads do appear on Hacker News. I regularly see threads about universal basic income. I wonder why this thread, which I started, was flagged. Political bias?

</comment><comment><USER9> Answer: Yes, but people are on the fence on whether it's a bad thing.

<comment><USER10> Socially? Agreed. Legally it's pretty black and white though. They are choosing one sex over the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Keep in mind that these groups operate in a context that is overwhelmingly anti Women, just rarely explicitly so.

<comment><USER12> "anti Women"? In the west? On a campus? Are you kidding?

</comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 There's a common point of view that any member of a privileged class is implicitly responsible for the state of things as they stand, regardless of whether their individual actions align with the conditions perpetuated by the privileged class, as a sort of societal original sin.

The spread of this view is unfortunate, because for any particular privileged member, it makes the support of social causes a lose-lose proposition.

While in some people this manifests as outwardly displayed resentment, most people in this situation just avoid engaging the topic entirely, as the default option in this trolley problem. This is also an outcome that activists decry, but ironically people in this situation are afforded by their privilege to withdraw from the conversation.

Seeing threads like this appear and then get flagged shows that enough people anticipate no productive discussion on the matter, which seems to validate the efficacy of the strategy of silence.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sure, they advance the interests of over-represented groups at the expense of underrepresented groups. This includes transexual students, presumably.

<comment><USER14> Depends on if they are by sex, gender, or both. Gender is a social construct as opposed to sex although they have been strongly linked usually - <USER2> not without exceptions even in the west. Albanian sworn virgins for one were considered male in gender.

Surprisingly some womens' colleges accept FtM students, some accept MtF students, and others accept both or neither.

The first seems odd but is actually pretty historically justifiable in the number of women known to make history by disguising as men. Whether they did so for sake of opportunity or gender identity and how much the two overlapped in the context of the time ("I am a doctor above all else but women cannot be doctors...") is an interesting concept to explore. Doing so couls be said to honor their legacy.

The second is of course justifiable as supporting the gender.</comment></comment>


This list is company of interested to hire foreigners in Osaka Japan - <AUTHOR> http://www.osakan-space.com/blog/6690

<comment><USER2> the other company in Kyoto [http://blog.gyazo.com/2015/03/now-hiring-full- stack-software...](http://blog.gyazo.com/2015/03/now-hiring-full-stack- software-engineer.html)</comment>


Clever (YC S12) Gives Schools a Way to Manage Data Flow to Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/technology/personaltech/clever-a-software-service-gives-schools-a-way-to-manage-data-flow-to-apps.html#hn=2 <comment><USER2> Full list of apps is here, there wasn't a good link in the article: [https://clever.com/schools/partners](https://clever.com/schools/partners)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's against the rules to delete and repost the same article. Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).</comment>


Judge Says Auto Dealer Group Can Challenge Tesla Dealership - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/virginia/articles/2017-06-28/judge-says-auto-dealer-group-can-challenge-tesla-dealership <comment><USER2> A classic example of how broken our system is when interest groups can control competition.</comment>


Medium for Publishers - <AUTHOR> https://publishers.medium.com/ <comment><USER2> Medium is really gaining traction. I like the split between views and actual reads.</comment>


Debunking Misleading Benchmarks Of Redshift vs BigQuery - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/fact-or-fiction-google-big-query-outperforms-amazon-redshift-as-an-enterprise-data-warehouse/ <comment><USER2> "...8-node DC1.8XL Amazon Redshift cluster for the tests."

Well, yeah. That's 28,108.80 a month if you're running queries on demand and don't want a delay/coordination in Amazon instance creation/destruction.

BQ may or may not be as fast, but it's truly a managed service; I give it our data and it just works. I don't have to worry about instances, boot up time, maintenance, hourly costs, etc. It's silly to focus just on query speed when there's a whole layer of management and cost that comes with it.

<comment><USER3> > _28,108.80 a month_

maybe i'm completely out of touch, but i'm really wondering who can afford this kind of stuff without $20M series A money in the bank. and i'm also wondering what they're going to do when they run out of that money and have zero database expertise in-house because they outsourced everything to amazon.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I'm jaded, but 330k a year or so for the very backbone of your entire real time query analytics infrastructure just doesn't seem unreasonable? This is highly specialized software, tuned and architected for the purpose of running relatively complex analytics queries and aggregates fast enough to allow interactive real time exploratory analysis.

I dont think it's insane to believe that a profitable mature data informed business should be expected to spend 1/3 of a million a year for the ability to have all that data live and available without deep latency.

I can also agree that this is quite a bit for a startup, but if the unit economics of the startup require that this kind of data be available for interactive exploring, there's going to be a deep challenge down the road in scaling it I think?

To your point, if a startup runs through 20 million and their biggest problem is paying AWS bills, then they are probably a failed startup and folks should move on towards whatever next exciting thing is on the horizon.

<comment><USER5> With 10TB of data, you could also do it a hell of a lot cheaper and faster on premise.

<comment><USER6> One engineer/DBA to deal with your cluster is those 330k/year.

<comment><USER7> Don't those computers cost a lot? Like $10k per blade? Granted it's probably amortized but still...

On the other hand the Redshift cluster doesn't run itself, despite what Amazon says. You still need at least a part time DBA guy.

<comment><USER8> Last time I worked with physical servers the rule was to avoid blades and run rackmount until space or termal was an issue.

And as long as you were not into GPUs you could get some really decent HP servers at somewhere around $2000 - $7000 depending on your storage needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Before this thread turns into a vim-v-emacs-esque flame war.

I really think it's a good thing that AWS and GCP are punching each other in the cloud data warehousing market. It means that the market is maturing, and we are all benefiting from their arms race against each other.

I am of the opinion that Redshift and BigQuery are philosophically different enough that performance differences, while important, shouldn't be the deciding factor. I've written about this in a blog post awhile back, and it might be relevant for folks weighing their options

[https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2016/06/09/redshift- bigqu...](https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2016/06/09/redshift-bigquery- similarities-differences-and-serverless-future/)

Disclosures:

1\. I don't work at either.

2\. My employer, however, partners with both.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that they were both created with different problem domains. I mainly take issue with the fact that they selected a single query in a large benchmarking suite and used that to claim that BigQuery was categorically better than redshift. Hell, I actually really like BigQuery! I do find the pricing for queries a tad opaque and difficult to estimate... and the variability in performance is fine for my pet projects but I imagine a larger enterprise would prefer something more predictable. I agree with your statement that they are two very very different products. I enjoyed reading your post.

Disclosures: I wrote the parent article.

<comment><USER10> > I do find the pricing for queries a tad opaque and difficult to estimate

BigQuery just introduced flat-rate pricing for this exact reason: [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#flat_rate_pricing](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#flat_rate_pricing)

Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud

<comment><AUTHOR> You're still dealing with query slots though -- which remains difficult to estimate. As far as I know the only way to figure that out is to actually run the query and then check how many slots it used. Am I wrong? I'm certainly not a BigQuery expert.

If you're downvoting do you mind leaving a comment on why I'm wrong? I'm interested in knowing more. The documentation for BigQuery doesn't really explain how slots are allocated and what they're capable of.

<comment><USER11> Best part is that what you get for a slot can and does change over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We use BigQuery after trying all other options including running our own VMs with database software, 3rd party data vendors and the big managed cloud services.

BigQuery's no-ops model makes a huge difference. It saves a lot of effort when all you have to do is just load up your data and run queries, no other cluster starting, sizing, tweaking or maintenance necessary.

It has real-time streaming input, nested/repeated records, powerful RegEx support and UDFs so you can run some really complex queries that you can't do with traditional SQL. It also has the cheapest storage at $0.01/gb after 90 days. They even have DML statements in beta now to support update/delete statements.

If you have lots of data to store (TBs to PBs), which can archived by time or other dimension as it gets older, but also needs to be available at any time, and have a decent amount of queries or but also need to run massive scans, and don't need sub-second response times, and want really complex query logic, BQ wins.

</comment><comment><USER13> My team uses AWS for all of our servers, CDN, SQL and cache boxes but use BQ for all of our telemetry data - about 20 billion metrics a month.

Not having to manage a redshift cluster and just let BQ do all the work for us is worth the query time; even then, most of our complex queries run sub 30 seconds over hundreds of GB. If your data can be queried using a date-range then use date-partitioned tables. There is a 1000 table query limit so there are some pit-falls but BQ makes it easy for you to aggregate data into weekly and monthly tables to query against.

Disclosures:

1\. I don't work at either.

2\. My employer, however, partners with both.

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be great if AWS would publish the code necessary to reproduce this benchmark. They mentioned applying sort and dist keys; it matters A LOT how these are chosen. For example, if you know in advance how you're going to join, you can distribute both tables on the foreign key column so the join is a local operation. This isn't always an option in real data warehouses, where you do lots of different joins on the same tables. So it represents an opportunity to "cheat" the benchmark. It's also important whether they used BigQuery partitioned tables, which are the equivalent of SORTKEY in some ways.

Having said all this, my company is a fully-managed data pipeline that supports both data warehouses, and we find they both work extremely well for our customers real datasets.

<comment><USER15> George - fan of Fivetran. What, in your opinion, are common cases where customers choose BQ over Redshift? Or is it really a function of which cloud you're on?

<comment><USER14> If you are already familiar with one, that is actually a really good reason to use it. If you store a lot of data but rarely query it, BQ will be WAY cheaper because you pay for compute and storage separately. On the other hand, you will never see sub-second queries in BQ.

Another option absolutely worth checking out is Snowflake, which compromises between the approach of BQ and Redshift in a very interesting way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > You can't just cherry-pick the one query where a given product is the > fastest. The workloads in the database domain have broad requirements

Well you can if that test matches the use-case of the database. Big Data databases are not like transnational databases, tend to perform column oriented analytics and tend to not join very well (they may lack indexes altogether).

I find this post to be more misleading than Google - he seems to be conceitedly ignoring the fact that many specialised databases exist that do certain things really well - and selecting tests that match their use-case is entirely appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm __primarily __trying to point out that google 's repeated claims that their performance on TPC-H #22 means that BQ is categorically better than Amazon Redshift are misleading.

Also I think you meant transactional not transnational

<comment><USER17> I'm not the parent poster, but I agree with his/her sentiment.

I understand what your purpose was, but the blog entry would have felt more balanced if you'd said something like:

 _It 's true that for a small subset of queries, BigQuery out-performed RedShift. If your workload is similar to those queries then BigQuery may be a good match for you, but our testing shows that for general purpose datawarehousing / analytics workloads, RedShift is the better performing database and would be more suitable for most customers._

<comment><USER18> +10! That would have been much classier. Also the language dripped of contempt for Google. It really comes off as ugly.

<comment><USER19> Google attempted to mislead its audience. The contempt is understandable.

<comment><USER20> ... of which we have no proof, just his word. Do you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Performance aside, we've found BigQuery to be far cheaper than Redshift.

With BQ you pay for the amount of data that flows through the system, as opposed to how many instances are running with Redshift.

We also don't really need Redshift running all the time so something like BQ or Azure SQL Datawarehouse where you can pause and scale up/down fits our usage patterns and budget much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just FYI you can pause and scale with Redshift as well... but if you query very infrequently (or low volume) cost structure of BQ might be on your side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yeah, this didn't debunk much of anything (to me) and the "caveats" at the end were laughably minor. I'm not sure why they listed them other than to say "but they aren't ANSI SQL compatible!" as FUD.

<comment><USER23> +1. They'd have a much stronger case if they didn't drag in silly complaints such as "[Google BQ] does not support the ANSI SQL syntax of 'substring'. Need to change to 'substr'".

<comment><USER24> It might seem petty, but I can't see how it hurt their case. If you're migrating hundreds of queries or reports from a local SQL environment to the cloud, being 100% query compatible is nice.

<comment><USER25> +1

<comment><USER25> Kinda funny that a +1 with no verbiage is still rated.

I will note I am enjoying reading these comments especially the ones that have real data points, real implementations and considerations of database structures/architectures on both of the products vs. gripes of the brands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We use reserved Redshift instances for close to 3 years now. There were a few moments that we were slightly screwed by new features and bugs in Redshift, but most of the time, we don't need to deal with any maintenance, and because we are fully on AWS, Redshift works way better with other systems we build or use (we have a few use cases of bigquery). We do have lots of regular queries running every hour, and we did lots of optimizations on Redshift. Overall, we are happy with Redshift.

I think in term of EDW solutions, it is really not a one size fits all situation. I am happy for the people (especially small companies who can't afford running Redshift 24/7) who went with BigQuery, but I am also happy that we chose Redshift and so far, it has been great.

</comment><comment><USER27> No link to the original comparison by Google? It was only presented on a private event?

Well, it's impossible to know the context in which this comparison was made. BigQuery is very different from the rest of the data warehouse solutions, I wouldn't think a standard benchmark suite would be appropriate for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> We use Amazon Redshift a lot. The biggest pain point is its lack of elasticity and strong coupling between compute and storage. You can see this pattern emerging in warehouses from Azure and Snowflake. I fear that Redshift will never get there because it's based on old Paraccel tech that was never really designed for the cloud to begin with.

Is Redshift worth it? Yes, it's a powerful EDW system. That said, it's going to cost you more than BQ because of always-on nodes.

Is it better than BQ? It really depends on your analytics workload.

</comment><comment><USER28> Google is pretty transparent about the underlying technologies such as Dremel X, ColumnIO, Capacitor, etc. Even if there is no source code, there is quite a bit in the form of papers, talks, peer OSS projects (e.g. Apache Drill), etc.

But I can't say the same about RedShift, it's a complete black box. (Other than that it's a mod of an ancient version of Postgres)

<comment><USER29> redshift uses paraccel

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> While their raw benchmark data may be ok, the summary chart makes no sense. They calculated the average and median runtime of all the queries, without first normalizing the results, despite the fact that there is a very huge runtime variance between these queries. Therefore the final number comes mostly from a few most costly queries and almost totally ignores the others.

</comment><comment><USER31> Database researcher here: TPC-H sucks. TPC-DS is the thing to use but sadly practically nobody does it.

See point 9

[http://www.exasol.com/en/newsroom/blog/10-questions-the- tpc-...](http://www.exasol.com/en/newsroom/blog/10-questions-the-tpc-h- benchmark/)

Note: Exasol has been dominating TPC-H for a while but it's kind of werid they don't publish much about what's under the hood (unlike Actian Vectorwise, for example, who has a huge library of amazing papers)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why we ran TPC-DS as well.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, and all queries. Good stuff. It'd be nice to have some kind of instructions to reproduce, though. And some explanation on the technology behind it. For example, do you guys scale indexed search or is it just partitioned without indexing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mind shooting me an email (in profile) with questions you would like to see answered? I'll try to do that in a followup post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Would have been much nicer to read if it wasn't written in such tactless way. Could have stayed classy, but they chose not to, and it came off as petty. For me at least.

</comment><comment><USER33> Present the numbers. Show the trade-offs involved. Any good engineer will then be able to make up their own mind. The narrative was somewhat defensive for benchmarking analysis.

I don't have a pony in this race since either one at large enough scale will cost an arm and a leg and both seem to be within same order of magnitude with a constant factor here and there.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else find it interesting that AWS is so concerned about GCP?

</comment><comment><USER35> I would recommend checking out SnowFlake who by the way just announced a big price cut.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/will-snowflake-spark-a-cloud- da...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/will-snowflake-spark-a-cloud-data- warehouse-price-war/)

</comment><comment><USER36> So, genuinely curious, how much did the author spend to run the benchmarks on each service?

<comment><USER29> the pricing models for bigquery and redshift are different enough that it is hard to compare on price. redshift is fixed cost (hourly per node like ec2) while on bigquery you pay proportional to data scanned during queries

if you do only occaisonal queries on mostly static data bigquery is probably fine but redshift is a fraction of the cost for more frequent use

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> >It's not surprising to see old guard companies (like Oracle) doing this, but we were kind of surprised to see Google take this approach, too.

Indeed it is, I wonder if that benchmark claim is being taken out of context of that private talk.</comment>


Italy's Troubling Earthquake Convictions - <AUTHOR> http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/italys-troubling-earthquake-convictions/

<comment><USER2> Hacker News front page discussion of BBC reporting on this same trial result:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4683657></comment>


The first-impressions game for web 2.0 startups (turn web site reviews into a fun activity) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not build a first-impressions games for web 2.0 startups?

See for example <http://listengame.org> and <http://espgame.org> for ideas on how this could be done.

</comment><comment><USER2> New restaurants need anonymous and confidential reviews more than web 2.0 startups do. Aren't 1000's of blogs already writing about the latest web startup?</comment>


Engineers Without Borders are the future of your company - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/engineers-without-borders-future-your-company-eduardo-varela/?published=t <comment><USER2> Or alternatively, perhaps companies and governments owe something more to customers/citizens than hammering local labour with cheaper imported labour? And perhaps companies should develop local workers' skills rather than take the easy way out? And perhaps the countries these top engineers leave in fact desperately need talented people to stay if the country is to improve? And perhaps having a different skin colour or sex in truth matter less than other aspects of an engineer's capability (I've yet to see the mantra that diversity equals success backed up by any hard evidence)?</comment>


Google Voice is now supported on OBi VoIP devices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.obihai.com/2014/09/google-voice-and-obihai-update.html

<comment><USER2> This is actually not too new. I have owned one of their devices for quite a while (a couple of years?) and found this recent press release somewhat surprising.

I originally bought the device because of its advertised Google Voice support. It is the only service I have used with the device. Earlier this year they announced that Google would discontinue XMPP support on May 15 and Google Voice would stop working. Almost 4 months later there has been no interruption in service and they are now re-announcing support. Strange...

No complaints from me though!

<comment><USER3> Hmm... that happened to me as well. I went ahead and switched to Phone Power (Obihai recommended) which was around $40 a year.

Turns out this is one of those times procrastination would have been a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this confirms that "Google Voice is not dead" as many people have suspected.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can I use GV on my softphone yet? Has anyone figured out how this is being done?

<comment><USER6> You can use it on your Android phone with [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.hangoutsdialer) \- and I think FreeSWITCH has unofficial/hacky support for it (haven't tried) which would allow you to use it on like SIP supporting things</comment></comment>