Sysbench Benchmark for MongoDB – Performance Update - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokutek.com/2013/05/sysbench-benchmark-for-mongodb-v0-1-0-performance-update <comment><AUTHOR> Received an email from TokoDB about this new tech, available to play now.

Perf Blog: [http://www.tokutek.com/2013/03/sysbench-benchmark-for- mongod...](http://www.tokutek.com/2013/03/sysbench-benchmark-for-mongodb/)

Download Source: <https://github.com/Tokutek/mongo>

TokuTek say to contact them for using it.

TokuTek made TokuDB, a storage engine for MySQL that uses Fractal Indexes (as opposed to B-Tree), read more at <http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for- mysql/>

<comment><USER2> I'm curious about the fractal tree indexing referred to, but so far all the information I'm running across seems to be fairly one-sided. Performance is rarely so one-dimensional that I can accept statements like "When used in a database, they can be used in any setting where a B-tree is used, with improved performance" (from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TokuDB>) on face value. The algorithm claims to have strong insert performance, as well as higher compressability when compared to B-trees, and all the performance results play heavily on these.

What about read-heavy workloads, etc? Can someone with a bit more insight provide an objective overview?

<comment><USER3> I am an engineer at Tokutek. Just talking about TokuMX, I have only seen MongoDB beat us on single-threaded, read-only workloads on extremely small data sets (like under 8K, or one MongoDB B-tree bucket).

The statement is really pretty much true. The best B-tree indexes (InnoDB) beat Fractal Tree indexes a little bit on in-memory reads, but we're not done tuning our implementation. On out-of-memory reads though, we usually beat B-trees because we compress so much better that we simply need to read less off disk.

Benchmarking is a tricky business though. Workloads can be varied, and you can probably find some corner cases where InnoDB beats TokuDB. I think we have some outstanding issues where the MySQL optimizer doesn't plan our queries properly, and we're still working on that. I'm a little out of touch with the MySQL side these days though so that could be wrong. But algorithmically, there are no cases where a B-tree index has a significant advantage over a Fractal Tree index.

Generally though, the read performance advantage we see is that if your indexes are Fractal Tree indexes, you can afford to maintain a richer set of indexes than you could have on InnoDB or MongoDB, and these extra indexes make your queries orders of magnitude faster. I think this is the most important (non-obvious) point to understand. I gave a talk about it here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6BnG74FZMQ>

<comment><USER4> This data structure sounds as mythical as a unicorn. Are there any peer- reviewed publications about this data structure or is it a trade secret? The name seems pretty vacuous/hype-laden since any well-balanced tree is fractal.

<comment><USER3> The name is a marketing term, you're right. The structure is somewhere in the realm of buffer trees, LSM-trees, $B^\epsilon$ trees, and COLAs. It's hard to give it an academic name precisely because the implementation takes hints from many places, but we hope to publish more soon. B-trees are on the optimal tradeoff curve but there are many other points on that curve, and B-trees _heavily_ favor reads so there's plenty of room to win on the write side. I have a couple of blogs about this actually: [http://www.tokutek.com/2011/09/write-optimization-myths- comp...](http://www.tokutek.com/2011/09/write-optimization-myths-comparison- clarifications/) [http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths- comp...](http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths-comparison- clarifications-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working with PostgreSQL right now, and it supports various indices (I'm sticking with btree for everything I have for now). Just made me wonder, whether the folks behind TokuDB cannot pursue PGSQL variant of their solution?

never mind - found some good answers here - [http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/Fractal-tree- indexin...](http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/Fractal-tree-indexing- td5744987.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> So, TokuMX is web scale?

In all seriousness, this looks super cool, but I'm easily fooled by benchmarks and I don't have any projects right now that really push MongoDB that hard, so it doesn't impact me other than giving us a potentially faster Mongo, which is cool.

<comment><USER7> I work for Tokutek. In addition to performance improvements and compression, another cool thing about TokuMX: it's fully transactional. We hope this makes development of applications simpler.

<comment><USER8> could you clarify this statement. mongodb native is consistent and atomic wrt to single documents. Are you saying that tokumx does something additional wrt to transactions (which also implies client api changes)?

<comment><USER3> TokuMX offers multi-document transactional semantics without application changes (snapshot reads), as well as protocol support for multi-statement (read-modify-write style) transactions, within a single shard. We are still designing how we want to present transactions in a sharded cluster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> is to be expected: you have a data structure where half of the inserts can be done in O(1).

</comment><comment><USER10> I've signed up for this beta release - even without ACID transactions on a cluster-wide basis, the other features alone are worth it, especially the compression.

</comment><comment><USER11> From what I understand, what mongodb needs is not more speed, but better acid guarantees by default.

<comment><USER7> From Leif earlier, "TokuMX offers multi-document transactional semantics without application changes (snapshot reads), as well as protocol support for multi-statement (read-modify-write style) transactions, within a single shard. We are still designing how we want to present transactions in a sharded cluster."

<comment><USER11> All built on the rock-solid webscale foundation of Mongo?</comment></comment></comment>


Craigslist for Startups - <AUTHOR>

I built thestartupdeck.com over the weekend. It's essentially a craigslist for startups. I'm looking to improve on the MVP as I learn what features might be most helpful. <comment><USER2> Congrats !! Seems like this will go the producthunt way. Just have a feeling. Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really hope so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anonymous email forwarding would be nice. Or, at the very least, obfuscation of emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I agree - working on that. It's definitly what gets people comfortable using classified boards. Stay tuned!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: is there a site-builder for the now-typical style of web product sites?  - <AUTHOR>

Most of the new web based software-as-a-service products / companies have a site with a very similar style.  That style seems to have been pioneered originally by 37 signals.
Do you know the style I mean?  Typically one large page that is scrolled down through various sections, each section communicating a small number of marketing points/features/benefits. At the bottom there is the now-typical pricing panel. Often each panel will have a different color, sometimes an image as a background in the panel.
So two questions/requests:
1: is there a standard "site builder" anywhere that allows creation of pages that follow this seeming standard layout? Ideally something that just allows fields to be filled in and boom out comes the site.
2: if you know any examples of sites that follow this style/layout please post a link below.  It would be great to have a collection of examples of sites that are in this style. <comment><USER2> Land Book [[http://land-book.com/](http://land-book.com/)] is a gallery of the kinds of sites you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER3> bootstrap</comment>


How Scala compares with 20 other programming languages according to Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.typesafe.com/blog/how-scala-compares-20-programming-languages-reddit-analysis <comment><USER2> \</comment><comment> So there you have it. Even based on this admittedly "non-scientific" approach, Scala appears to be the only production-proven programming language to make engineers happy and alleviate their need to curse than more broadly- adopted langagues like Java, PHP and JavaScript. \</comment><comment>

That seems to be quite the leap. Without going through the entire list of languages, we're using Clojure quite successfully in production and based on [http://clojure.org/companies](http://clojure.org/companies), we seem to be in good company. Yet the author went out of their way to claim no one was using it.

It's almost like they author sells Scala consulting and libraries or something.

</comment><comment> j-pb I like the subtle clojure bashing.

"Of course there is a bias in the happiness graph because nobody uses clojure and lisp for work, but this isnt true for scala at all."

Totally doesn't feel like an advertisement for scala by the company that sells scala(services). /s

<comment><USER3> I guess it's really saying "clojure doesn't fare as well in Java shops", which I see as a feature.</comment></comment>


How to destroy your business with one email - <AUTHOR> http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york <comment><USER2> It it just me, or does the mob mentality of this scare anyone else just a little? With no real evidence and certainly no trial, a one-sided tale told on reddit led to the destruction of a small business.

<comment><USER3> I had a similar feeling about the recent Cook's Source episode. It's very likely that, in both cases, the charges against the business owner are accurate, and if so I feel fine about them losing their businesses, if that's the outcome. But how long will it be until some savvy internet user successfully riles people up against an innocent competitor or a personal enemy?

<comment><USER4> Further evidence (though the Comcast situation is obviously more complex than innocent competition):

[http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the_new_york_times_just_reported_that/)

> J-Ro is a professional political activist; he's paid to influence online > opinion (or has been, on some past issues; no idea whether he's specifically > paid on this one), and he's primarily concerned with getting people > outraged, not with accuracy in discussion; hence his entirely false claims > here.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a slight difference between an intrinsically public matter, like the Comcast issue, and a relationship between, say, a business owner and a customer. In political fights, people on all sides make their best case to the public. Sometimes that best case is deceptive or manipulative and that's a problem, but the fact of activists trying to shift public opinion just goes with the territory and long predates the Internet. We're used to it; we have filters for it.

The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome, expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's very vulnerable to abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But now we know that the more customers who post complaints (with links to your web site) the better - it boosts your Google ranking and that drags in new punters.

Bad customer service (in fact preferably rude and near insane) is good for your business growth - plus you get to keep the excess profits every time you rip someone off.

Google has inadvertently created a new business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps, but if this nut job is behaving this way purely to get more hate reviews he's played it well enough to work in Hollywood.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background story found here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a_negative_yelpcom_review_and_now_im/)

<comment><USER6> would have been good to post this as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the how he's "doing this pro se" and if the customer doesn't knuckle under he will take this case right to the _Supreme Court_. It's hard to get spittle flecks on electronic communication, but this guy seems to have managed it.

He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the causality runs the other way.

<comment><USER8> As an aside, your second sentence is an excellent one.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, and my the first one isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would also be a good way to destroy a competitor's business with one faked email.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, but I think the submission title is misleading (particularly now the page is so full of bad reviews that it's not obvious which review the submitter was referring to).

This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".

<comment><USER11> I think this is the email the poster is referring to: [http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new- york#hri...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new- york#hrid:kDSNyqHT3okOl6_de0hR3A)

If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/ _2009_

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't look like there was a business to destroy in the first place. Just a scam that was, apparently, recognised as such by all the reviewers.

<comment><USER13> except none of the reviewers even tried to do business with the company. reddit said give one star reviews, monkeys give one star reviews.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers built into yelp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell What proportion of his customers go check Yelp before using him? I'm guessing it's only a small number... I can't see this killing his business. Seems more like a minor nuisance to me...

<comment><USER15> A lot of customers these days will do a Google on a company or product name before doing any business. They look for reviews as well as other opinions. If the search turns up a thread like this, I'm sure they'll run away.

<comment> mike-cardwell I think _some_ customers do this, but they're in a minority. I don't have any figures to back this up, it's just my general observation of peoples behaviour...

<comment><USER16> I typically don't. I have zero reason to believe anything on any "review" website. I talk to people I know and get recommendations from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why are all the reviews posted yesterday?

<comment><USER18> The Internet was awaken by evildoers.

<comment><USER19> Then the Internet is never going to get back to sleep again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like the only "people" posting 5 * reviews are the owner himself via different IDs .. does Yelp ban accounts for fraudulent reviews? this surely makes up such a case...

<comment><USER21> Seems like the vast majority of "people" posting negative reviews are random redditors who read an e-mail allegedly sent by the owner of this company. Since they've never used the company's services, are those postings any less fraudulent?

<comment><USER20> Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> all he'll do is rename it and nothing will be lost.

</comment><comment><USER23> See also: [http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace- Overachie...](http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace- Overachiever/dp/1599211793)

To be fair, Cooper Laurence did a little more to enrage the Internet Justice Machine, but on the other hand she didn't threaten to sue anybody.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've seen businesses respond to comments on Yelp reviews - wonder why he didn't try to do that.

</comment><comment><USER25> maybe its just me but that looks a whole lot like one guy making lots of Yelp accounts. In particular that two entirely different "accounts" posted the same letter from the guy word for word. I think the letter itself is likely real though.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's weird that their pictures on Yelp are just HD parts.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a fundamental flaw with Yelp and similar sites, and indeed even with Amazon reviews: you don't know who to trust. "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog!"

Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of _real_ users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.

Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web- based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews _if_ it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake.

I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general.

Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.

</comment><comment><USER27> What's really interesting is that most of these reviews happened yesterday, and it appears mots of the reviewers have never actually engaged in business with the scammy vendor, or attempted to engage in business, or well ever heard of the business before this. Being the voice of reason, isn't that a violation of Yelp's terms of services? Yelp itself is known to be somewhat of a bully.

</comment><comment><USER28> Epic fail.

<comment><USER29> Normally that would get down-voted to oblivion here, but since the name of the company in question is Epic Data Recovery Labs, I gave you an upvote. (It only took you back to 0 though...)

<comment><USER28> "The company in question is Epic Data Recovery Lab"

That was sort of the point of the comment. :)

People should be less edgy...

<comment><USER30> I think his point was that this isn't reddit and the general consensus is to avoid creating punful comment threads.

Might be wrong and misinterpreting.

<comment><USER31> Ironically, it's also an interesting commentary on how quickly groupthink and follow-the-leader actions take over on social news sites.

Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what _looked like_ a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post?

As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.

<comment><USER32> I downvoted. I knew the context. I also know the community here.

On HN, I downvote that comment.

On Reddit, I leave it alone or perhaps upvote it.

On Slashdot, I probably make the joke myself if I'm the first one to get to it.

I appreciate HN's "no class clowns" tone, as I can (and do) easily get my fill of that elsewhere.

<comment><USER33> Right, it is not the site for it. It is nothing personal but the mantra for HN is serious discussion, allowing it contributes to the deterioration of the site away from it's stated goal and makes HN = !HN. That being said, I knocked it to 0, nothing personal, it just does not belong here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seabed tracks suggest new origin of animal life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081120/full/news.2008.1242.html?s=hacker_news

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed the URL to have a ?s=hacker_news

I wonder how it'll register with their tracking software.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you say to someone whose company was acquihired? - <AUTHOR> What should you say to someone who you know had a company that was recently acquihired? Saying 'congratulations' seems inappropriate ... after all while an accomplishment not exactly the desired outcome. <comment><USER2> It's like asking a returned soldier what it was like on the front, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Do you need a loan to exercise your options in order to get paid?"</comment>


How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/28/how_yelp_destroyed_the_thrill_of_exploring/

<comment><USER2> Just a nostalgia fluff piece.

"Remember the smell of white out? Don't you miss it nowadays?" "What about those carbon-copy sheets they used to have for typewriters?" "Remember the pleasure of receiving mix tapes?" etc, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like terrible stuff--I had to go to the article to be reminded what Yelp is.</comment>


Ask HN: Good ERP System for Growing Hardware Startup? - <AUTHOR> Outgrowing our Excel based workflow for managing tasks such as stock management, manufacturing monitoring and order fulfilment. Any recommendations for a lightweight ERP system aimed at small hardware startups that manufacture in house? <comment><USER2> There are two that i like.

Odoo (once openerp) has a lot of modules for all kinds of hardware/manufacturing/ stock management etc. Overall not a bad system.

[https://www.odoo.com/](https://www.odoo.com/)

ERPNext is the other one, with a cool mobile app as well, so easy to manage on the road. Its pretty light weight and easy to extend if needed.

[https://erpnext.com/](https://erpnext.com/)</comment>


Eight billionaires 'as rich as world's poorest half' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38613488 <comment><USER2> I'm richer than the poorest two billion people in the world combined, and I'm an upper-middle-class programmer with some modest savings.

Please stop adding up the wealth of the poor: [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix- salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix- salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up-the-wealth-of-the-poor/)

<comment><USER3> that's a really interesting article.. I think the more surprising fact is that 7.5% of the bottom 10% are in the US. That's 50 million US citizens. That's pretty shocking.

Edit: although since we're talking about people who have negative net worth.. perhaps it's only because they're able to borrow so much. I doubt a poor Indian or Nigerian would be able to borrow $100K for college.

<comment><USER4> It would look less shocking once one understand US poorest 5% are equal to India's richest 5%

[http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/01/americas-poor-indias- ric...](http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/01/americas-poor-indias-richest.html)

<comment><USER3> Also interesting.. but it took me a minute to figure out how to sync this info with the article... the article is for net worth, and this is for income. It is surprising how little the top 5% Indians earn.. I actually had to verify it to believe it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe there's a fundamental assumption among many that with time, life is becoming better for all. Even if this is true right now, one day it will not be true.

Once no longer true, humanity is going to have to ask itself if the massive increases of inequality were worth it. Whether it's:

1\. Global warming

2\. Nuclear war

3\. Mass unemployment

4\. Resource depletion

Or something else, I suspect the effects of the "big event" in the future, once amortized to now will be so large, that all of the supposed progress we've made now is negligible, if not counterproductive.

The relevance to this particular article is that the eight billionaires "as rich as the world's poorest half" will have contributed 99.99% to what I refer to previously (compared to the poor half they're compared to), yet they and their descendants will be completely shielded from the worst of the effects.

How dystopian.

<comment><USER6> If you've never come across Hans Rosling before, I highly recommend watching one or two of his videos on world statistics.

His overall point is that the world is doing much better than you may think. He uses a lot of data that he makes publicly available and shows which metrics are the best measure of progress and why.

Aside from that, he's also a very entertaining and engaging communicator.

Here's a relevant article: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24835822](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24835822)

<comment><USER7> Also, going in the same direction: [https://ourworldindata.org/](https://ourworldindata.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of statistic is very deceptive and borderline dishonest. If you have no debt and one dollar to your name, congratulations, your are richer than the poorer half of the United States combined.

Also, by this logic, a homeless guy with no debt and a $10 bill in his pocket is better off than the Harvard Law grad at a prestigious law firm still paying off his student loans.

<comment><USER9> really? i always assumed most were just very poor, not net in debt.

<comment><USER8> I just looked it up and it's actually something like 20% of the US that has a negative net worth. Not half, but my point stands.

<comment><USER10> I would imagine that if you factored in "home ownership" it's much higher. That is, you don't actually own your home til the mortgage is paid. So that equity is a ruse of sorts.

<comment><USER3> net worth includes assets... so only if they were underwater on their mortgage.. and with the house prices in the US, I don't imagine there are a lot of people in that situation (at least since the subprime mortgages have all/mostly been foreclosed on by this point).

<comment><USER10> Okay. Thanks. But I'm gonna have to call that a false god none the less. Wealth on paper (i.e., stock) is bad enough, but to assume (<< keyword) that some fraction of your house is worth $X and is "money in the bank" seems foolish to me.

Let's not forget that when you get a mortgage for say $500k, that's not what you end up paying (in total). The total and real cost of that loan is much high.

I digress? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like how these articles like to focus on the yacht and houses that represent at most 1% of their net worths, and don't focus on the 99% of it that is being put to use as investment capital.

Also, there's no doubt in my mind that the King of Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin have these 8 beat soundly in net worth, too.

<comment><USER11> Inequality causes society as a whole to increasingly serve the rich at the expense of the poor.

In fact, 'investment capital', unless properly allocated, is indistinguishable from frivolous spending.

If you buy a super-yacht; those hundreds of engineers and technicians who built it for you could instead have spent their time building airplanes for 'regular' people (and made international travel cheaper for everyone).

In the same way, if you invest in a crappy startup (which makes a product that nobody needs), you are taking hundreds of engineers away from building something useful and making them work on something useless.

At first glance, this doesn't seem too bad - After all, if you make a bad investment, the system will punish you by not giving you any ROI, right? So you'd lose your money and will cease to be a nuisance to society.

In reality, however; because of social factors and economies of scale (lots of money in relatively few hands), it's actually possible (and extremely common) for people to make terrible investments and still get a return on it. If you have enough people in the system who know how to talk the talk and are good at manipulating others, then eventually, the waste builds up and becomes a significant burden on all of society (especially the poor).

Soon enough, everyone in the world will be working on some useless trendy start-up to cater to the whims of a few wealthy investors - Nobody will be able to afford to work on a revolutionary HIV vaccine, world-changing education software or automated farming machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth doesn't always translate. It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the justification for this article being flagged?

<comment><USER14> Despite not being an egregious case, I think the flagging's fair.

As others pointed out [0], the article's premise is silly and just an annual refresh of Oxfam's dubious statistic. Thus, WRT HN's submission guidelines, the article's off-topic and not "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407849)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oxfam released a similar stat last year, and the BBC's More or Less team didn't think much of it. The wealth numbers they're using aren't necessarily well-behaved when they're totted up the way Oxfam has done, as there are a lot of cases where wealth as-measured isn't an intuitive measure of "richness". For example, a new graduate with tens of thousands in loan debt will still have a chance at better long-term income than someone with neither the qualification nor the loan who has higher numeric worth.

That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece. Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.

Sources: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x)

</comment><comment><USER16> If we're worried about improving inequality, it would be helpful to have some historic data. I would assume if you went back 100 years it was far worse since much of the developing world (e.g. China, India) had far more poverty.

<comment><USER17> You can see data about long-term economic inequality here:

[https://ourworldindata.org/income- inequality/](https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/)

<comment><USER16> Wow! Great link. Thanks for sharing that. I haven't seen that data before.

My only complaint is that it doesn't show the world overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even if we manage to reduce poverty by half, someone will always find a way to write "Eight billionaires 'as rich as world's poorest quarter"

</comment><comment><USER19> $425bn/3.6bn = $118 avg. Now, the $425bn are not liquid assets, so we can argue that each of the 3.6bn individuals on the bottom half are worth a lot, lot, more than $120 each (worth in the same sense as measuring the net worth of billionaires). For starters, they own thousands of labor hours. Maybe the problem is that we cannot create enough jobs and it is easier to blame Zuck and friends?

It is a very dangerous idea to seek a fairier distribution of wealth by taking it from the rich. If you doubt it go ask Venezuelans or Cubans if it worked out for them.

<comment><USER20> > _It is a very dangerous idea to seek a fairier distribution of wealth by > taking it from the rich._

Sounds like a pretty straight-forward idea to me. How else best to achieve a fairer distribution? "Trickle down"?

<comment><USER21> Historically this has been achieved with pitchforks and guillotines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ok, but unlike the title implies, them being rich isn't what's making those people poor.

<comment><USER23> Isn't trickle down economics supposed to redistribute portions of that wealth? If you agree that trickle down isn't working because the elite are capturing it for themselves, then you could conclude that them being rich _is_ a contributing factor to these people being poor. No?

<comment><USER24> As I understand it, the 'trickle' comes in the form of, for example, cheaper food. Which, as a percentage of income, is something that we can see has actually happened. The remainder can be used to capture a portion of the wealth.

The problem comes in actually using that money to capture wealth instead of increasing your expenses elsewhere. The latter of which is very easy to do.

<comment><USER23> I guess I'd prefer to see this in wages and similar. Rather than increasing wages with respect to inflation, they've stagnated, and profits for companies, shareholders, and owners are much higher.

> The problem comes in actually using that money to capture wealth instead of > increasing your expenses elsewhere. The latter of which is very easy to do.

Absolutely. I think this is where the idea of trickle down economics fails. It assumes that mo' money mo' expenses. I guess there's only so much you can buy with 80 Billion before that assumption breaks down.

<comment><USER24> _> Rather than increasing wages with respect to inflation, they've stagnated_

The data doesn't support this[1]. Wages _are_ stagnant, but only with respect to inflation. Wages are increasing at rate of inflation, more or less.

 _> Absolutely. I think this is where the idea of trickle down economics fails._

For argument's sake, let's say that the 'trickle' has lead to food being $100/month cheaper. Do you put $100/month you have gained into the stock market, with average returns of 7%, or do you go and sign up for a smartphone plan?

If, assuming you are young, you choose the former, you will have an average wealth of ~$250,000 by the time you retire, which will then provide ~$18K per year recurring income to retire on. If you choose the latter, you will have ~$0 of wealth when you retire and no income.

The choice seems fairly obvious, but something tells me that most (myself included) would choose the smartphone phone plan instead. In reality, you are taking the wealth you have gained (~$250K) and are spending it on a service that you wanted to have instead (a smartphone).

So, I agree, that doesn't work. People have shown that they are willing to spend the gains they have made. But if we found a different way to funnel $250K onto the balance sheet, would that actually stop them from spending it? Or would they still find some way to turn that $250K of wealth into a smartphone (or whatever consumable someone wants to enjoy) and be no further ahead?

[1] [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- states/wages](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages)

<comment><USER7> > Wages are stagnant, but only with respect to inflation.

True, but at the same time, productivity (value produced per working hour) in the US has more than doubled in 30 years. [1] I consider this unfair: Workers should benefit from increased productivity as much as shareholders do.

[1] [https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/819316887213449219](https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/819316887213449219)

<comment><USER24> _> Workers should benefit from increased productivity as much as shareholders do._

I mean, they do. The price of goods comes down. This is quite visible. Food, for example, went from 25% of income in the 1940s to less than 10% today as wealth concentrated among fewer and fewer farmers. If that wealth remained distributed, leaving every American still trying to run a small patch of land like they did in the 1940s, it would be highly inefficient and the price of food wouldn't have been able to decline.

But, okay, imagine (to stay with the previous comment's example) that the price of food remained the same and your income went up by $100/month instead. Your profit is still the same. Are you really any further ahead? Is having $100 clearly in your hand more apt to have you put it into the stock market, or similar, to captures wealth? Or are you still going to go out and spend that on a smartphone plan, or similar consumable, leaving no wealth to show for it?

<comment><USER21> You keep bringing up food. What of housing or healthcare? The costs there have risen dramatically at rates many times higher than inflation. Inflation adjusted the poverty line keeps rising while wages stay flat. I don't see how this is a sustainable system.

<comment><USER24> To be honest, I'm not sure we have actually seen a concentration of wealth in housing. The homeownership rate is almost at the highest point in history (it definitely was in 2008), which means that said wealth is spread thinner than ever. Further, construction of homes is still quite accessible to small business, so we haven't even seen concentration of wealth into construction to see lowering prices there.

We might even go as far as to say housing perfectly demonstrates what happens when you _don 't_ get the trickle down effect. Granted, those rising housing prices are not all bad as you can make money from the gains on the property and the construction of. This is the system you want to have everywhere, right?

But housing is also interesting because people have changed where they want to live. In the 1940s, ~50% of the population lived in the middle of nowhere. Today, ~20%. Now, people are willingly taking the $100/month they saved on food (just to stick with the example) and are applying it to the rent in the big city so that they can have the opportunity to live there. If they were happy with 1940s-style living, and opted for a home in the middle of nowhere, they would be able to retain that $100/month and capture wealth with it. Like the smartphone, this is consumer choice to give up the wealth to get more (to live in the city).

As far as healthcare goes, I'm inclined to agree that wealth has been more apt to concentrated there. But like people choosing to pay more to be in the city, people are choosing to pay more to have state of the art healthcare. Would you really want to go back to 1940s style healthcare at a lower cost? I'm not convinced I would, even if it helps my balance sheet. The gains are still there, but utilized instead of being stashed away into wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How did the Zara guy get so rich?

<comment><USER26> He didn't get diluted much through outside investment like Gates and Buffet. He still owns something like 70%+ of his company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> These people deserve a very, very special income tax.

</comment><comment><USER28> Misleading & annoying title. Those billionaires' wealth are all invested in wealth-producing assets. And the billionaries I know do plenty of philantropy. Power to the billionaires!

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you're misreading it? Is the issue wealth, or the concentration? If diversity in investment is a positive, wouldn't we all benefit from less concentration/more diversity?</comment></comment>


Android malware can steal Google Authenticator 2FA codes - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-malware-can-steal-google-authenticator-2fa-codes/ <comment><USER2> Anything having to do with your phone should not be considered a 2nd factor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somehow missed by Project Zero.</comment>


Getting Started with Grunt - <AUTHOR> http://zerosixthree.se/getting-started-with-grunt/

<comment><USER2> Great overview of some packages I haven't heard of before. Bravo.</comment>


Google Pixel XL Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Google+Pixel+XL+Teardown/71237 <comment><USER2> "The opening procedure requires prying up a thin, poorly-supported display assembly making it difficult to open the phone without damage"\-->better be careful...</comment>


Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) JSConf 2009 Presentation - <AUTHOR> http://jsconf2009.com/francisco_video.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Developer world - We have begun to post the videos from the epic JSConf 2009. Kicking off the string of 17 videos from the conference is Francisco Tolmasky talking about the origins and deep tech involved in 280 North's Objective-J and Cappuccino frameworks. Enjoy!

<comment><USER2> For us who don't enjoy videos longer than a minute, is there any way we can get a transcript, web page with highlights, blog post, anything?

Thanks from the busy developer world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even better, you can view the slides on 280 North's own slide creator - [http://280slides.com/Viewer/?user=56&name=JSConf%202009&...](http://280slides.com/Viewer/?user=56&name=JSConf%202009&fullscreen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This guy is a very smart person. He & his 3 buddies have done amazing things for the state of rich web applications. Either Google or Apple should be acquiring 280North.

<comment><USER4> It sounded like they all used to work for Apple. I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't acquired them yet (possible they turned them down I guess), seems like such a perfect acquisition to me.

<comment><USER5> Apple already acquired the sproutcore people, whose javascript api is similar to Cocoa. All of MobileMe was developed in sproutcore.

<comment><USER6> Sproutcore isn't something made by or supported by Apple, it's a project created by the individual who was later involved with the development of MobileMe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was an excellent conference, and this presentation in particular was an eye-opener.

Google I/O may be getting all the press this week, but for those of us who went to JSConf last month, we already know what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER8> the stream of tweet during this talk was pretty impressive, excited to finally start to be able watch the JSConf presentations (signed up for rss feed for notification) ...

</comment><comment><USER9> There's some cool nib2cib demos (using interface builder to make web apps) near the end</comment>


Massively Multivariable Open Online Calculus Course - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/m2o2c2### <comment><USER2> This is the 8th time you submitted the same link:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406505)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7403362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7403362)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7396918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7396918)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394313)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7390014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7390014)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7387956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7387956)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7380922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7380922)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7376184)</comment>


Launch of Boston Globe responsive redesign - - <AUTHOR> http://bostonglobe.com/

<comment><USER2> I was one of the back-end engineers on the project, if you've got any questions, ask away. I'll answer what I can.

<comment><USER3> This is a phenomenal implementation fluid layout. I've never seen it done so gracefully. Congratulations to your team.

[edit: there might be a lot more than fluid layout involved with the redesign, but that is the most striking aspect for me so far)</comment></comment>


Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/87/risk/mars-is-a-second_rate-backup-plan <comment><USER3> Seems to me this article entirely misses the point.

If we had sustainable industrial civilization on both Earth and Mars, then if one planet gets hit we can repopulate it from the other planet, i.e. to kill off humanity any disaster would have to hit _both_ planets at once, and of course the probability of unguided space rocks doing this is effectively zero.

I'm skeptical about the value of settling Mars myself, but the article's estimation of the probability of Mars being hit by civilization-killing rocks is pretty much irrelevant to the value of settling Mars.

(And it kind of bothers me that "the director of astrobiology at Columbia University" doesn't see this. It bothers me enough to wonder whether I'm the one missing something obvious.)

<comment><USER4> Earth would have to turn into a lava planet for Mars to be a better option. Antarctica is more habitable than Mars and nobody's planning to set up self- sustaining colonies there. Every technology needed to survive on Mars could be implemented far easier here no matter how bad it gets.

<comment><USER5> As long as it's on the same planet, it's still all our eggs in one basket.

<comment><USER6> What kind of failure scenario would have a Mars shelter better than any post- apocalypse Earth shelter?

<comment><USER7> Mass political unrest, another pandemic, combined with overpopulation leading to complete collapse of food systems.

<comment><USER8> All of those scenarios combined are much more manageable than Mars.

<comment><USER7> All the problems on Mars are resolved through engineering.

The problems on Earth are the result of humans thinking their egoes are more important than the life support system of the spaceship they live on.

Eventually the people problems will ruin civilisation on Mars, but that will come after the "common foe" of simply surviving on Mars has been sufficiently cowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It probably isn't with current technology, but it has the potential to become substantially less risky in the near future.

It has no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no forest fires, and so on. It has exactly two types of natural disasters - meteor strikes, and dust storms. The former are _very_ rare. The latter can be mitigated much more thoroughly than natural disasters on earth.

Humans have to live indoors, which mean that it has no shared ecosystem. We can control the spread of pathogens by isolating populations perfectly. We don't have to worry about the atmosphere at large becoming poisonous because we are already managing the local atmosphere as a distinct entity.

It has no large groups of people who do not have the technology to survive in hostile environments who can come try and steal (and in effect destroy) your technology.

<comment><USER10> It also has a type of natural disaster that we don't have: solar flares. Mars has no dynamo within its core the way Earth does. Mars therefore has a much weaker magnetic field and so is far more susceptible to charged particles from the sun.

Solar flares present a huge problem for people living on Mars unless they're underground. They destroy any technology that isn't well-shielded. They also represent a major obstacle to a project to terraform Mars because the charged particles will strip away the atmosphere you're trying to build.

<comment><USER11> How do they strip it away though

<comment><USER12> The solar wind hits molecules in the atmosphere and knocks them into space. This is how Venus lost most of its hydrogen.

[https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals- spee...](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-speed-of- solar-wind-stripping-martian-atmosphere)

<comment><USER13> A prerequisite was that Venus lost its solid and liquid water. As the temperature rose water couldn't precipitate, leaving it all exposed in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen and hydrogen would photo-dissociate and the lower mass hydrogen would get kicked out into space at a higher rate.

I don't think you need solar wind-magnitude energies for Venus to have lost it's hydrogen, it just sped up the process. Venus is pretty big, but it's also really hot. Venus' gravity to temperature ratio permit significant amounts of free hydrogen to be lost thermally without any solar wind sweeping it away. I _think_ it's possible that Venus lost most of its hydrogen to thermal escape, particularly hydrodynamic escape, though today it's no longer the predominate mechanism for what little hydrogen remains.

<comment><USER11> Are you saying thermal escape can speed up molecules to such a speed that gravity can't get them back down and they just escape into space?

<comment><USER13> Yes, not just hydrogen but even heavier atoms and molecules. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Thermal_esc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Thermal_escape_mechanisms)

The Wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_escape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_escape)) on hydrodynamic escape talks about escaping heavy molecules as if that's the principle function of the mechanism. But in much of the scientific literature on early Venus, hydrodynamic escape seems to refer primarily to the escape of free hydrogen.[1] I'm not a scientist so I don't know what to make of that, but in any event thermal mechanisms (i.e. Jeans and hydrodynamic) can absolutely cause gaseous particles to reach escape velocity.

[1] Photodissociation splits H2O, hydrogen is kicked out into space via thermal mechanisms, and much of the remaining oxygen, too heavy to escape at a significant rate under the local parameters, is sequestered by the molten core, volcanism, and surface weathering. At least, that's how I understand the literature as a layman. The modern debates and research seem to be centered around the particularities, especially the early geology, such as how long core material was exposed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The actual title (" _Mars Is a Second-Rate Backup Plan_ ") seems a lot more accurate than the current HN title (" _Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth_ ").

</comment><comment><USER15> >But the closer we look, the more it's apparent that Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth.

I thought everyone knew that.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've always felt like a moon base would be the perfect stepping stone to Mars, plus, you can sustainably mine H3!

I think going directly to Mars is going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than figuring out the quarks of space living in the Moon, even though they do not parallel 1 to 1 it would be an eye opening experience I think none the less.

Also closer to the home planet, and could serve as a sort of "to Mars" way station

<comment><USER17> What is it with the H3? The only thing you'd need it for is fusion. If you are capable of fusion you can breed it by that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's backup earth. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be _something_. Right now we have nothing.

Right now the only off-world humans are on the ISS, and that isn't capable of continuing independently.

<comment><USER19> Now tell me how expensive it's going to be to make a Mars colony that, cut off from Earth, can not only maintain all its equipment but reproduce it, so it can grow.

I highly doubt this could be done anytime soon.

<comment><USER17> Yah well, maybe, maybe not. Instead of force projection by aircraft carriers and assorted gadgets one could instead invest in people projection by other gadgets?

Anyways, PEANUTS!

[1] [https://wahre-werte-depot.de/wp- content/uploads/image41.jpeg](https://wahre-werte-depot.de/wp- content/uploads/image41.jpeg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think talking about the risk of civilization-ending meteor impacts being more likely on Mars kind of misses the point, which is that having a major meteor impact wipe out humanity on both the Earth and Mars within a narrow window of time (like, say, 100 years) is far less likely than the odds of it happening just on Earth, or just Mars.

There are some risks that would affect both planets (e.g. gamma ray bursts, something happening to the sun), but many natural risks would be contained to one.

There are also some risks that might or might not be contained, depending on how they play out and how strongly Earth and Mars civilizations are tied to each other. For example, nuclear war, a pandemic, or a severe economic collapse.

</comment><comment><USER21> Colonizing Mars is cool and I hope it happens for that reason, but it's a really expensive way to make our species more resilient. A network of hardened bunkers and people paid to live in them part-time in shifts would be cheaper. And if Earth goes through a nuclear war _and_ an fairly bad asteroid strike you'd still rather be on Earth, in a bunker, than on Mars, in a bunker. Mars is _that_ bad.

</comment><comment><USER22> The average temperature on earth is 57F and the pressure at sea level is 32 psi. The average temperature on Mars is -81F and the atmosphere is .095 psi and mostly carbon dioxide. Mars has a gravity of 0.376 g. Visiting sounds like a fine idea, but I'm not sure why anybody thinks that its likely that people can live for any length of time on Mars.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anthropogenic (human-caused) existential and catastrophic risk is way higher than risk from natural events (like asteroid strikes). It's unfortunate that the author misses this point.

Bioterrorism, nuclear war, totalitarian governments, and other anthropogenic risks would have a harder time spreading between planets than across just one.

<comment><USER24> For the forseeable future, life on Mars could plausibly be ended by one rogue computer virus in the HVAC system.

<comment><USER17> Go full Battlestar Galactica and make all controls analog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've always looked forward to the next Age of Discovery, when we set out to colonize on other planets. What I've never understood, though, is the "plan" that Mars is a good backup to Earth. Outside of some cataclysmic event - <USER2> planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars. I have little doubt we would be able to set up a small station on the moon or Mars within my lifetime, but I don't see us supporting large amounts of people on another planet anytime soon.

If we inflict something on ourselves that makes the Earth no longer hospitable for humans, I think that's when we should call it quits on humanity because we obviously aren't mature enough a species to take care of our gifts.

<comment><USER26> I've literally never heard of that plan except from people shooting it down as a straw man. Mars is a good backup in that a tape drive is a good backup. A catastrophic event on Earth will likely not impact Mars as well. It's a biology backup, not a backup for a full life lived on Earth. It's still something we as a species really need, but it's never going to be a replacement for the original thing.

<comment><USER27> So you've never heard of people espouse Mars as a "backup" for Earth...then espouse Mars as a backup for Earth? Weird.

Mars is not and at no point in the next century (likely centuries) capable of being a backup of anything for Earth. It has zero industry, difficult to exploit natural resources, and the surface and subsurface environments are completely hostile to human life. A human can only live there with significant amounts of advanced technology supporting them.

A tape drive can be a back up for a hard drive because it is only mechanically different from a hard drive. A tape drive can use the same data bus, uses the same electricity, and stores the same data as a hard drive. It's just slower and less convenient. Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive. They might be able to store data but they're fantastically fragile and trying to implement the system would be a waste of time.

<comment><USER28> > Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive.

I had already +1'd you here but literally lol'd here.

Seriously though, I have no idea why you are being downvoted; this is a pretty insightful comment. I guess your first sentence hit too close to home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> i don't see the words "correlated" or "decorrelated" in there, so they can't be addressing the fact that the risks on mars (however great!) are decorrelated from the risks of earth.

which is the point. not that mars is somehow magically safe.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not everyone is doing this, but I see a lot of smart people assuming that the people going to Mars must necessarily have the current version 1.x human body plan. Sure, at the beginning, some will. But in the timeframes we are looking at, it is highly likely that we can start the process of incrementally engineering bodies to be adaptable to Mars, not just the other way around. And Mars is just the beginning.

<comment><USER30> Mars is only the beginning? Gravity wells take a lot of fuel to escape. Doubtful we'll be bouncing around the stars without some major breakthroughs in physics.

<comment><USER9> Venus? The moon? The various moons in the outer solar system?

Agreed that interstellar travel is a ways out if ever... (though it doesn't require physics breakthroughs, just _massive_ engineering breakthroughs. There's enough hydrogen in the solar system to make fusion powered thrusters theoretically possible).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would believe we can 'colonize' mars successfully when we can set up a pilot project, as a self-sustaining colony of people at Bir Tawil, which is considerably less expensive and difficult to send cargo to on a per-kilogram basis.

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

This is what the climate and geography looks like there: [https://www.slow- journalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/B...](https://www.slow- journalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bir-Tawil-5rgb-1194x895.jpg)

<comment><USER9> There are nomads who actively use Bir Tawil, it is not uninhabited.

As soon as you put anything of value there you would suddenly discover that it is not as unclaimed as you thought, you would have to defend it from both Egypt and Sudan.

It certainly wouldn't be a technical challenge though. We know how to live in deserts.

<comment><USER31> I'm not so much referring the the political problem of inhabiting the area, as to the technical and logistical problem of having a near closed loop environmental system. Sure people can and do live in northern Mali or the southern Libyan desert but even those small towns are connected to somewhat established networks of cargo truck delivery.

Set up a colony of 50 people in bir tawil and measure how much outside water, food and other supplies they need (similar problem to biosphere 2) in kg per person per year... And that's in a place where you can extract some water from air moisture, with difficulty , and you can breathe the air outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Mar is currently the only backup we have. There is no other choice.

</comment><comment><USER33> species die off. one day humans might. if so, it was a good run. my bet is we won't get off this rock before we destroy it.

<comment><USER34> It's worse than that. 99.9% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. Human extinction is a near-certainty, unless we can colonize other planets. Right now we can't even respond to a pandemic or climate change, so even putting the huge technological problems aside we can't seem to organize as a species to deal with actual problems we already have.

Individual lifespans are too short for human beings to plan and implement large-scale projects that no one working on them will live to see finished. Hard to get motivated about a distant future that doesn't include us, even worse when fewer people have children to think about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> what a linguistically awful title

</comment><comment><USER36> When the early humans came out of Africa, the other continents were not necessarily safer overall. Better in some ways, worse in other ways. Yet there they went.

<comment><USER19> Bad analogy is bad. The difference in livability between Africa and the other continents was small. The difference between Earth and Mars is enormous.

If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be unavailable or extremely expensive. You can get that experience today in places we call "prisons".

<comment><USER36> > _If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living > quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be > unavailable or extremely expensive._

It will not always be that way. We're not going to Mars to live in prisons, in the long run. That's a very narrow perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Of course it's risky. I haven't heard people say it isn't risky. Even me, an avid Mars settlement enthusiast.

Since the article touches on BO at the end, it's worth mentioning that Bezos' changing messaging about BO has me saddened. At first I recall him emphasizing the goal of BO as the reduction of mining and heavy industry on Earth. That is admirable. Earth as a place to live and space as a place to do dirty industry. It makes sense.

But the newer espoused vision of BO is to allow humanity to grow to trillions in population so that we can discover the wonder of having '15,000' Einsteins or whatever. To me this is tone deaf to the extreme and is ignoring that we probably already have 15,000 Einsteins but they are spending their whole lives in poverty or working at Amazon warehouses to make barely enough to live (or not even) without having much time in the day to read, study, experiment, self-improve and otherwise become the kind of 'genius' that Bezos hopes to have in plenty in the future.

<comment><USER38> Exactly in order to have 15000 Einstein's from a population of 1trillion. You need 1 trillion living above poverty. We can't even get 1 billion out of poverty. Ha. To me colonize Mars seems like premature optimization.</comment></comment>


A Hacker News vote button - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/igrigorik/hackernews-button <comment><USER2> This button is great, but the button server at hnbutton.appspot.com (which queries the search API) is frequently over its quota, which means the button doesn't appear / work a lot of the time.

It's easy to set up your own (free) button server though. Here's how: [https://bountify.co/blog/host-your-own-hacker-news-button- se...](https://bountify.co/blog/host-your-own-hacker-news-button-server)

<comment><USER3> Fixed - plenty of quota now!

I honestly didn't realize how much traction it picked up over the past 6 months.. It was a (pleasant) surprise to login into my GAE console and realize that it was serving, on peak days, over 1M impressions.

Interestingly enough, the "exceeded quota" was not for CPU resources! Instead, it was all egress bandwidth. On busy days, it would reach the free 1GB egress limit sometime between 6-12PM, and hence the error. I've upgraded the app, and it should be good for terabytes a day. ;-)

P.S. I've also pushed an update to enable more aggressive HTTP caching on the assets.

<comment><USER4> So you turned on billing? ;-) Good to know it was getting so many impressions at the free tier, GAE is undervalued by the community me thinks.

<comment><USER3> Yep, flipped the billing bit. All I need is the extra bandwidth though.. The sole Go app instance is standing up like a champ!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a question ... why can't a Hacker News button be done entirely in Javascript? If only HN would incorporate CORS file. Even if it doesn't, there could be a way to approximate it by checking if you are logged into HN, and if you are, doing a cross-domain POST via a form.

"But how do you know if you're logged into HN?" Ah, that's the hack.

for example: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/02/an-interesting-way-to- dete...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/02/an-interesting-way-to-determine-if- you-are-logged-into-social-web-sites/)

more in depth: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5233560/possible-to- find-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5233560/possible-to-find-out- whether-a-user-is-logged-into-facebook-over-javascript-api)

The question -- for all the hackers here -- is, what resource can we request via Javascript on HN that will return a different status code (200 or another one) depending on login state?

For example, maybe posting a blank password to "change password" form will return a non-success status code when you aren't logged in, and be an innocuous post (since it results in an error).

Of course, the trouble with these techniques is that the site can disable them at any time.

<comment><USER6> RE: status code depending on login state - You could curl the homepage and see if the logout link exists

<comment><USER5> true, but any way to determine it using only javascript in a browser?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks beautiful but any problems with the votes being discounted? Will it still work in future or is it an exploit that would get closed?

<comment><USER3> The instructions are for the async install, so even if the widget is broken or goes down (it shouldn't), your site rendering will not be blocked, or affected in any other way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't the vote get penalized if you vote directly, instead of searching the topic on the web page?

</comment><comment><USER9> How can we do custom styles on it? Right now it's not aligned with other share buttons.

Screenshot: <http://g2f.nl/0c4ajy1.png>

Edit: You can style ".hn-share-iframe". Then the next issue: it's much wider than it needs to be when the story has already been submitted (see the screenshot, there's a lot of blank space on the right). Is there any other solution besides just positioning it on the right of the share buttons list?

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, not that I've found.. Twitter and G+ also reserve the space and run into the same problem. The root issue is the lack of automagic iframe resizing.. which is what "seamless" attribute will solve, once it arrives and is supported by the browsers.

<comment><USER9> Okay, thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So how does this work? Does hnbutton.appspot.com do some clever proxying, or something? Or does HN just have a very easily exploitable XSRF vulnerability?

<comment><USER11> I also don't understand how it works. If you could up-vote just by following a link, you could easily gain a system. For example, you could submit a story that automatically up-votes itself when visited by logged-in user, without any button press (CSRF). I believe Facebook like button (and other similar gadgets) are iframes from Facebook. So Facebook controls how the button looks like and it is not possible to submit 'Like' requests from a third party domain.

<comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902>

EDIT: This is a submission from a while ago that does, in fact, upvote itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I may be missing something, but I don't understand the point of the step 2 in the README: why not just say to add the


Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences - <AUTHOR> https://foxtype.com/sentence-tree <comment><USER2> So FoxType is just Spacy[0]? I honestly thought this might be something different until I checked out the Spacy page and saw FoxType listed as a customer. Kind of a dick move simply repackaging other people's work and passing. It off as your own. (Yes, this is literally just the "displacy" demo.)

Spacy is a pretty good system. It's fast, way faster thank NLTK and the Stanford stuff and it's pretty accurate. Also it's licensing is pretty flexible. The only knock I have against it is the lack of bindings for languages other than Python, but whatever.

[0] [https://spacy.io/](https://spacy.io/)

<comment><USER3> There's more to their product it seems than just the front end for sentence diagramming. While a shout out wouldn't hurt, I don't think it's really a dick move.

<comment><USER2> There's also more to Spacy than just dependency parsing as well, but that's a big part of it.

I would certainly hope there's more to FoxLab, but I have literally seen this demo before.

I have also been around the block enough times to know that putting some ill fitting duct tape around a bunch of other libraries that do all the work to make a quick buck in a hot space is a very common trick as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whilst an impressive demonstration, how is it an example of machine learning? It looks like lexical analysis to me.

<comment><USER5> Same thoughts as mine. Seems like ML was just thrown in the title to get more hits.

<comment><USER6> It uses machine learning to parse the sentence, all modern lexical parsers are based on machine learning.

<comment><USER7> Aren't most of them rule based?

<comment><USER2> Not for years. State of the art has moved on from Eric Brill's dissertation 25 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems to fall for a lot of easy traps. Garden path sentences ("The old man the boats" or "The horse raced past the barn fell") are parsed wrong, and it parses the two sentences/phrases "When he did that I laughed" and "When he said that I laughed" identically - by interpreting "that" as a preposition in both cases, which it isn't.

It's cool that it parses on the fly. But unless it parses _correctly_ I don't see how it actually serves a purpose other than just looking cool.

<comment><USER9> These require a system which either backtracks or recognizes it's made a mistake and corrects it. I know how to do that with a rule-based parser.

It also fails on "British left waffles on Falklands." While there are two syntactic parsers for that, one of them borders on the absurd and should be rejected. The problem is that to parse some sentences requires understanding of the words and phrases it reads, which in turn requires common sense.

<comment><USER8> Well, that is just choosing the semantically correct parse from multiple syntactically correct parses. This parser isn't even finding syntactically correct parses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't do well on the classic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

<comment><USER11> To be fair, if someone actually utters that sentence, I think most English speakers would reply with "I'm sorry?" or "Do you need help?"

<comment><USER12> See the video TED-Ed Buffalo buffalo buffalo: One-word sentences and how they work - Emma Bryce [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWbzjGIec20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWbzjGIec20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting demo. I am not being critical, but it does not do anaphora resolution (resolving pronouns to noun phrases, etc).

</comment><comment><USER14> It got "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," wrong.

<comment><USER15> I don't see how it got it wrong (and it would be surprising if it did given the sentence is not syntactically ambiguous). It does use a visual notation which, AFAIK, differs from the standard in linguistcs [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Syntax_tree_for_Colorless...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Syntax_tree_for_Colorless_Green_Ideas_sleep_furiosly.png)

<comment><USER16> This site is producing dependency parses, which have become popular in the last 10 years or so. The linked figure is a phrase structure parse, which used to be the thing everyone worked on but have since turned out to be both harder to get and less useful than dependency parses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The cat ate the farty bird"

Sorry machine, "farty" is an adjective, not a noun.

<comment><USER18> Not really..

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/arty-f...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/arty- farty?q=%22farty%22)</comment></comment>


Why can't there be an "ultimate" programming language? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2495830/why-cant-there-be-an-ultimate-programming-language

<comment><USER2> I don't know why no one offered these answers over at StackOverflow, but:

* Computer languages reflect the reality of the computers on which they run -- how you allocate resources, how you orchestrate events -- and as the computer changes, so does the language. For example, why have interrupts on a processor that doesn't support them? Why have multithreading on a processor that supports only one thread? Computer languages change along with the computers themselves.

* There is already an ultimate computer language. It's called mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because having to program a hundred DSLs in your super-language is as (or more) annoying as just learning a handful of different languages (and runtimes) in the first place.</comment>


The Humble Music Bundle - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/#humblemusicbundle

<comment><USER2> In my opinion Humble Bundle have managed to build a solid reputation and following, I hope this plays out well for them. I'm eager to see how this experiment will work out for the organizers and the artists. I have some doubts about the viability of such a drastic change in direction, time will tell if their audience will bite and make this bundle a success.</comment>


You thought you knew Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://perfectionkills.com/javascript-quiz/

<comment><AUTHOR> A well-designed quiz that exposes some subtleties of Javascript. The discussion in the comments as people try to work out what's going on in each of the questions is really interesting and valuable, I found.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best domain registrar with a solid api? - <AUTHOR> We are looking into domain registrars for our project https://cloudfleet.io.
As we expect to register many domains, we need a registrar with a solid API and reseller friendly prices.
What are your experiences? Who would you recommend? <comment><USER2> Name.com have a JSON API for resellers that you must apply to use: [https://www.name.com/reseller](https://www.name.com/reseller)

Gandi have an XML-RPC based API too (and has some decent code examples): [http://doc.rpc.gandi.net/](http://doc.rpc.gandi.net/)

<comment><USER3> Have you used Name.com, perhaps?

<comment><USER2> I haven't used their API, but I have used their domain registration and SSL services in the past.

<comment><USER3> OK, thanks. Yeah, we'll look into the Name.com API if we don't get some more prompt responses from DomainBox (with whose customer service we're chatting for the past two weeks to get even the most basic API calls working).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> NameCheap seems to have an XML-based API:

[https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro.aspx](https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro.aspx)

Not something that fills me up with joy :/ There's an unofficial Ruby wrapper that hasn't been touched in a year... [https://github.com/parasquid/namecheap](https://github.com/parasquid/namecheap)

Does anyone have any other recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi,

OpenSRS has a solid and reliable API with huge up-time and capacity, and offers a fully automated domain registration system for resellers. It's a feature rich API with a large number of tools for developers, for easy integration. We manage over 14,000,000 Domain names and offer competitive pricing. What features are you looking for in a new provider?

Send me your details, and I would gladly answer any questions you may have.

Cheers,

Fatima firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi,

OpenSRS has a solid and reliable API with huge up-time and capacity, and offers a fully automated domain registration system for resellers. Also, it is feature rich and has a large number of tools for developers, for easy integration. We manage over 14,000,000 Domain names and offer competitive pricing. What features are you looking for in a new provider?

Send me your details, and I would gladly answer any questions you may have.

Cheers,

Fatima firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


SmugBlog: Where's the Mac? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/08/08/wheres-the-mac/ <comment><USER2> The MacBookPro can feed a 30" display, and costs $2K. Businesses should be leaning towards mobility too, making the laptop a good solution.

<comment><USER3> Yet most corporations only give laptops to employees whose jobs involve travel - everyone else gets a sub-$1k Dell desktop, with a hand-me-down display. This is the segment he's suggesting Apple address.

Laptops for everyone would be awesome, but hard to justify if they'll never leave the office.

By including the display on the iMac, Apple ensures that they sell a display with each unit shipped, they maintain their volume discounts in the supply chain, etc. This is just conjecture on my part, but it wouldn't be surprising.

<comment><USER2> I don't want to get into a debate about apple, but ...

People that can use a sub $1K dell can use a mac mini. People that need multiple large displays can get a MacPro. People that need mobility get a MacBookPro.

I don't see the problem.

Also, the IT support costs alone justify getting Macs. My current company has around 5 people in IT servicing the windows desktops and servers. There are 0 people servicing the linux servers and desktops, because we do development under linux and peers solve most problems quickly. The mac folks just don't have problems beyond things like "this doesn't work with our MS exchange server"

<comment><USER3> I absolutely agree about the support costs - that alone makes the Macs worth it.

Having never used the Mac mini I don't feel qualified to compare it to a Dell. I suspect that the performance is similar, yet I also suspect that a $900 display-less iMac would blow the Dell out of the water, with the drastically lower support costs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>