Trump is not entirely wrong. Is Amazon too big? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43606088 <comment><USER3> This is an incredibly stupid headline. Trump didn't criticize Amazon because it was a monopoly, he criticized it because he thinks that Amazon owns the Washington Post and he's mad at the Washington Post.

<comment><USER4> And anti-trumpers don't defend Amazon because they don't believe it's a monopoly, they defend it because Trump criticizes it.

The point is that the motivation doesn't matter too much if the end result is the same. Amazon IS too big and we need to do something about it. We can all have differing motivations but still want the same thing.

<comment><USER3> If I say "the claim that Amazon costs the USPS money has no basis in fact"- or point out any of the other factual innacuracies in the president's months-long tantrum about Amazon and the Washington Post- that isn't defending Amazon. If there's a case to be made against Amazon then it should be made without making things up.

<comment><USER4> Why does Amazon use USPS so heavily? It's because they charge them _much_ lower rates than their competitors. USPS should (and not discussing regulations _could_ ) charge Amazon more.

I think it's pretty tasteless that Amazon takes advantage of regulations and the dismal financials of USPS to get cheap delivery. In the long term who wins and loses here? Amazon wins and makes some more billions and the postal workers lose as all their pensions get gutted.

<comment><USER3> You've moved the goalposts from "the USPS is losing money" to "the USPS is not making as much money as possible"- and still not actually provided any real numbers or facts.

Wouldn't a better solution to the problem you claim exists be to try to change the postal rate? Instead, Trump (and, apparently, you) attacks Amazon for being so "tasteless" as to... pay the bill for services rendered.

Trump famously doesn't pay his bills so maybe he just doesn't understand how this kind of thing works?

Elsewhere in this thread you argue that the ends justify the means because Amazon needs to be regulated. This ignores the possibility that if Trump is lying about his motivation, then he's also lying about the "ends" he's after: If he's trying to hit Amazon as a way to hurt the Washington Post, then you have to factor that in to your calculations. It's no longer "Amazon is too big", it's "Amazon's too big _and_ the Free Press is too free".

<comment><USER4> I actually didn't move a single goal post. I never stated that I believe that the USPS is "losing money" in the strictest sense on each of the transactions. You're projecting Trumps tweets onto me personally.

I don't care if Trump famously doesnt pay his bills because that has nothing to do with how I view Amazon. If you ask me directly I'd say it's tasteless how Trump treats his contractors and fucks them around when he can definitely afford to pay them.

And maybe he is lying about the ends he's after, that's the risk with allying with people who do have different motivations than you. However that's a risk you have to take in a society that's trying to organize many different people with many different opinions. It's almost like we need to debate and come as close to a solution as possible that meets each person's expectations/motivations without crossing the lines in the sand we each draw for acceptable behavior.

So let's discuss all the issues so you can maybe have a real discussion with me and not just argue with me because you think I'm some Trump shill.

Trump 1.) He treats women like garbage 2.) He plays games with subcontractors and employees to fuck them out of as much money as possible or not pay them at all. 3.) He plays all the tax loopholes to pay the minimum possible tax that he can. etc etc.

Amazon 1.) Utilizes the USPS's precarious financial situation and their massive buying power to get lower rates that screw over the USPS in the long term. 2.) They don't care about the fact that when they have drones doing deliveries and drop USPS that all of the USPS workers who need their pensions paid will be SOL.

Free Press 1.) I don't think that the press is too free when it's basically all sock puppeting for rich people whether that be Fox News or Washington Post. At the same time I would definitely oppose any kind of legislation that curtails the ability of the free press to be.. free. I don't have to support gutting the Washington Post to talk about putting some regulations on Amazon.

<comment><USER4> 1.) [http://fortune.com/2017/12/29/trump-amazon-post- office/](http://fortune.com/2017/12/29/trump-amazon-post-office/) 2.) [http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal- service/](http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/) 3.) [http://www.govexec.com/management/2017/09/usps-defaults- bill...](http://www.govexec.com/management/2017/09/usps-defaults-billions- mandatory-payments-despite-scheduled-relief/141404/)

\- "He estimated at the time that Amazon pays the USPS $2 per package, which is about half what it would pay United Parcel Service (UPS, +1.95%) and Fedex" [1]

\- "The Postal Service reported a net loss of $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2017, and has $15 billion in outstanding debt. The service has lost $62 billion over the last decade." [1]

\- "USPS's chief financial officer, Joseph Corbett, wrote in a post for PostalReporter.com in August that the service is required by law to charge retailers at least enough to cover its delivery costs. ... He said Congress should pass provisions of legislation introduced last year by former Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, that would allow the postal service to raise some rates and discontinue direct delivery to business customers' doors." [1]

\- "The Postal Service, writes Shapiro, "can borrow from the U.S. Treasury through the Federal Financing Bank, at highly-subsidized interest rates." It currently borrows the legal limit of $15.2 billion at a rate of 1.2%. Without this access, it would be paying somewhere between $415 million and $490 million per year more in interest." [2]

\- "The worst of it came in 2012, when the USPS lost a whopping $15.9 billion dollars, followed by $4.8 billion and $5.3 billion in 2013 and 2014, respectively." [2]

\- "From 2012 through 2016, the agency failed to deliver nearly $34 billion toward its pool for retirees' health care." [3]

\- ""Given that the Postal Service is now unable to pay money it owes to the federal retirement system and to the retiree health care system," Cummings said, "it is more urgent than ever that Congress take action to ensure that the Postal Service continues to be able to serve the American people."" [3]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The story itself is reasonable but the headline added by OP substantially misrepresents the content. The story title itself is "Donald Trump steps up attacks on Amazon." OP headline for HN is "Trump is not entirely wrong. Is Amazon too big?" That is not an accurate description of the story at all.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article title is "Donald Trump steps up attacks on Amazon" and the article offers no evidence for the current post's title of "Trump is not entirely wrong. Is Amazon too big?".

In fact the article states that USPS profits off of Amazon, exactly the opposite of the accusation.

In keeping with tradition here, the answer to the post's question is "no".

<comment><USER4> This is a much better article with more info than the OP: [http://fortune.com/2017/12/29/trump-amazon-post- office/](http://fortune.com/2017/12/29/trump-amazon-post-office/)

<comment><USER6> I forgot that I have the [http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/](http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/) extension installed, which apparently works on embedded tweets as well. Just open up the page and there's the tweet in crayon in the middle of the article...

[https://i.imgur.com/poq2tYw.png](https://i.imgur.com/poq2tYw.png)

<comment><USER4> lmao, my girlfriend uses the one that replaces pictures of trump with cats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He could make this a win for both consumers and himself if he goes after Amazon where it really fails badly: counterfeit goods.

<comment><USER8> Arguably might be a win for Amazon too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is straight forward: Amazon is clearly not too big today. Their retail sales are a bit over a third that of Walmart (and that's only if we count the marketplace sellers in Amazon's retail total). They have plenty of competition in cloud services, Azure and Google will likely gradually continue to take market share there.

It will be too big in retail, tomorrow - maybe. Given all that can go wrong, that's a big maybe. Pre-emptively punishing them for what they may or may not become ten years from now, is an obnoxious perversion of justice. It's a massively positive for consumers today that Amazon exists, that they have the scale that they do, and that they're as friendly toward consumers as they are.

It'll still take another ten years of torrid growth just for Amazon to catch up to Walmart's retail scale.

<comment><USER10> Wal-Mart engages in anti-competitive practices and also might be too big, so I'm not sure it's a good reference point.

<comment><USER9> It's a great reference point because we're dealing with things as they actually are, not a theorized ideal scenario. Walmart made it through the era of peak Walmart-fear, they're not going to get broken up at this point. There is no scenario where that happens now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Answer: no. Amazon benefits the vast majority of people, and acting as if a company can get "too big" is a bit silly. It's hysteria like this that ended in the Bell split, something that undeniably harmed everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER12> I suspect at some point t we might see Amazon regulated like a utility. For example in Australia/UK phone networks must give reasonably priced access for virtual phone network companies to use their infrastructure and compete.

I'd love to see something like this with companies like Walmart. Imagine that got broken up into 6,000 invividual stores. It would be a jobs boom with every store now needing an accountant, marketing help etc. Then we have 6,000 stores all looking back into each others markets wondering if the can open a competing store and how they can improve. I really think breaking g up large companies will be a boom for economies.

<comment><USER9> We had that decentralized system. It was terrible for everyone. That's why Walmart stomped them.

It was bad for consumers - selection would implode, individual stores can't handle inventory as well or bargain properly, their pricing power is low. It was bad for employees - very poor wages, _zero_ benefits, no dependability that the business would be there tomorrow. It was bad for competition - <USER2> constantly went under.

Walmart benefits from a national system of standards, of training, inventory, pricing & buying, shipping, storage, quality control, etc and so on for dozens of other major issues.

Walmart also benefits from being able to offset weaker stores with stronger stores. You can yield a small profit over here, and make up for it with a better profit over there. Without that, the store simply goes under given the hyper thin margins, when things slip (inevitable).

<comment><USER12> I dont think it would be as bad as you feel. Things like pricing can be overcome as we have better information flow these days so the opportunity to order from a variety of suppliers is much easier than ever to create competition. And wages...well I dont think the centralised system is showing much benefit there to debate the counter point.

The key is seeing the problem as a flow rather than 2 options. Yes large centralised systems are more efficient. So over time stores would re- centralise with the benefit being 'as they centralise'. When you break up a large player you now have many opportunities for improvement/innovation rather than someone entrenched who can win via their scale alone. The best stores will grow and spread, become entrenched and then we rinse and repeat.

I feel people forget a core component of governments role in healthy capitalism is ensuring a level playing field. This allows competition and innovation. I agree that centralisation has benefits for business but these seem to entrench and stagnate the business while they hold out competition through their scale rather than theses qualities. Some business you can legislate for this level playing field, others it best to break-up and let the market sort itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mods & Readers, Please Flag.

<comment><USER4> Is it because the article/headline are bad or because you don't like the idea?</comment></comment>


Making Containers More Isolated: An Overview of Sandboxed Container Technologies - <AUTHOR> https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/making-containers-more-isolated-an-overview-of-sandboxed-container-technologies/ <comment><USER2> Whilst it's always good to see articles discussing the relative merits of various container runtimes for isolation, there seems to be a tendency to underplay the security benefits of standard Linux containerization (As used by LXC/LXD and Docker)

In the case of this article, in the Docker section there's no mention of the Apparmor/SELinux policy that gets applied to containers and no mention of the seccomp policy that's used by default to constrain some syscalls from a running container.

My general take on it is that Docker/LXC provide quite flexible security models, which can be modified to suit a user's process (e.g. by dropping unneeded capabilities from the default set or adding a custom seccomp profile)

gvisor provides a higher level of security due to additional layers being in place and once the Google team move to regular releases with a support lifecycle, I think it'll be quite a good option where it works to provide additional isolation for production workloads (for some production environments, the idea of picking a nightly build to use might not fit too well)

One tradeoff to consider for things like gVisor/kata/firecracker is that they don't have the same composable security model used in standard linux containers, so it's not always possible to remove a single part of the isolation (e.g. running with host networking) whilst leaving the rest of it in place

<comment><USER3> Everything I've read about Docker has given me the impression that they started seriously worrying about security only after they had already laid out the foundations, and that that meant they could never truly make it secure, resulting in lots of security holes that are found on an ongoing basis. Meaning I shouldn't rely on it when security is at stake. Is this wrong?

<comment><USER4> It would be fairer to say they weren't initially trying to provide a security layer. More like an alternative packaging system that was distro independent.

The idea was that such a packaged system should be doing all the security things you'd do if running on the bare operating system. So getting root inside a container would be expected to be as devastating as if the host had been compromised. Admittedly many developers didn't get this memo in the beginning.

<comment><USER5> Root in a container is not unsecure, the user mapping is different between what runs the container and what's running inside.

<comment><USER4> Again, I was talking about Docker's initial security considerations. I think it wasn't until about 1.10(?) that it got user namespacing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They seem to have missed one key container isolation technology; Microsoft's Hyper-V isolation as used on Azure: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/windowsconta...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/windowscontainers/manage-containers/hyperv-container)

</comment><comment><USER7> I had assumed this article would have a Palo Alto sales slant to it, but it doesn't seem to - I'm very pleasantly surprised with the quality of the content, and found it very interesting.

And in contrast with another commenter here, I'm glad this was a to-the-point, no nonsense article - no stupid GIFs or too many cringey attempts at humour.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here are all the container runtimes that CNCF is tracking: [https://landscape.cncf.io/category=container- runtime&format=...](https://landscape.cncf.io/category=container- runtime&format=card-mode&grouping=category)

</comment><comment> New-user-123 Does anyone else find this article super dry and boring. I maybe read 5 sentences before I decided I just can't read this.

</comment><comment><USER9> In case anyone was wondering, the Netflix cyber crime show "Unit 42" is quite good.</comment>


EC2 Update – T2.Nano Instances Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-update-t2-nano-instances-now-available/ <comment><USER2> Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow AWS, which is not necessary true with DO.

<comment><USER3> Only if you're not actually using that instance!

You can't even log into the instance at all for that price. You also have to pay for bandwidth (very expensive) and EBS (not bad, unless you want it to be as fast as DO's local SSD).

Setting aside that the DO droplets are far more bang for the buck in terms of consistent CPU usage, and also (to be fair) that AWS offers far more scalability options, bandwidth alone is shockingly expensive at AWS.

At 9 cents per GB, you'd be looking at $90/mo for bandwidth alone for what DO gives you included in the $5/mo.

The $80/mo Digital Ocean server w/ 5TB of transfer would cost $450 at EC2 _JUST IN BANDWIDTH ALONE!!_

And, at DO, if you exceed that bandwidth allocation that's included for free, it's $20/TB vs $90/TB at EC2 (both charge outgoing only).

These are costs that most people don't consider but really amount to poorly explained fine print costs. (Others include Glacier restore pricing, intra- region bandwidth, etc.)

(disclaimer: I'm an AWS certified SA and my SSH key manager startup, Userify[1], is an AWS partner, but even so we are still forced to use DO for a large part of our infrastructure -- especially where bandwidth is concerned.)

1\. [https://userify.com](https://userify.com) (cloud ssh key management)

<comment><USER4> And to use 5TB in a month you have to sustain over 15 megabit/sec 24 hours a day. DO is betting on you not doing that (and in aggregate nobody does), because in any other context sustaining 15 megabit is about as expensive as Amazon. Quote a 100 megabit drop some time if you don't believe me.

If every VPS on Digital Ocean and Linode actually used their quota, they wouldn't have uplink capacity to support it and the network would fail. That's overselling. Numbers that high are _extensive_ overselling. Linode has 40 Gbit links (at least they used to), and give 2 TB (6 Mbps) to each small Linode, meaning about 7,000 Linodes actually using the quota would saturate the link. They have a few more than that. Do the math.

The bandwidth quotas are sales stuff so that you will say exactly this in threads like these, and it's amazing how well it works.

<comment><USER5> To answer your question, 100mbit isn't much these days. This article says you can get transit at $0.63/mbit. [http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet- Transit-Pricing-H...](http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit- Pricing-Historical-And-Projected.php)

Explain why despite wholesale internet prices collapsing, AWS continues to charge the same with virtually no yoy decline? Azure et al also do this fwiw. It's just gouging.

<comment><USER6> What? They decrease prices all the time... There have been something like 3 price decreases just this year.

<comment><USER7> AWS has not decreased bandwidth pricing in a long time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does Amazon implement instances like t2.nano? If there are 40 t2.nano instances on a quad core physical machine, what happens when all the users want 100% CPU, even if it's only for 10 minutes? Are instances automatically migrated to a different physical machine if this happens?

<comment><USER9> EC2 can't do migration, that's one of the things Google Compute has over EC2.

<comment><USER10> Why not, I wonder? Xen has supported migration for close to a decade now. I assume they don't use a compatible storage layer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've tweeted to you twice and asked your customer support about this too but I have never gotten a reply to it. So I'm asking you here.. When are you gonna allow reserved instances for Indian customers?

Right now I cannot purchase reserved instances and so my bills are much much more than what others are paying.

P.S. Here is the screenshot when I try to purchase. There has been no update for 1 year now.

[http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg)

<comment><USER12> In all honesty I don't think it's in Jeff Barr's authority to release roadmap plans or definitive answers to questions like this. My experience in the past has been he has always been helpful in connecting you to individuals who may be able to answer these sorts of questions. So I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask.

Just don't get your hopes up :)

<comment><USER11> Whom should I contact then? Their customer support just replies with a canned reply :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This would be excellent if you could accrue more than the 72 minutes worth' of CPU credits. At least my use case is 'low traffic, with the occasional link from a high-traffic site'. These happen every few months, not every three days. But they also last 36 hours or so, not 72 minutes. Total CPU usage is similar, but it's distributed differently.

<comment><USER14> There's a trade-off between how much they allow you to spike and how long they allow you to spike for. They could have 20 t2.nano instances packed onto one CPU; the longer you can spike for, the more likely it is that another instance is going to end up spiking at the same time as you. I'm sure Amazon has looked at the CPU-usage behaviour of millions of EC2 instances -- quite likely across hundreds of billions of data points -- and picked this as a reasonable tradeoff.

For your use case, I think autoscaling is probably the answer. Keep one t2.nano running continuously but tell EC2 to spin up a new t2.large if you get a burst of traffic.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, they obviously put more thought into this than I ever will. Although they offer instances with 40 (v)CPUs so I'd assume they could technically run 800 nanos on one of those and efficiently deal with such spikes? Either way, I suspect their reasoning is more economical than technical, in that they know full well that I can afford more than 5$/mo.

(which I'm taking to linode for now, but oy vey, AWS, we'll always have Paris)

<comment><USER15> > more than 5$/mo. > (which I'm taking to linode for now,

Just curious, what does $5/mo buy you on Linode?

<comment><USER13> Check it out yourself: [https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing). As I said, "more than 5$", in this case meaning 10$, which gets me a CPU core and 24GB of ssd storage. It replaced a dedicated server that was 50€/mo. That server had probably 8 to 10 times the power but the vpn solution can scale within two minutes if needed. I was also having suspected hardware trouble with the dedicated server that the provider couldn't diagnose / wouldn't replace.

It's an incredibly boring setup that serves about 200 visitors on a normal day, 2000 during a handful of spikes /year. I know I could probably run it from a Casio watch but it generates six-figures of revenue / year so a bit of overkill is justified.

<comment><USER15> Could you explain, if possible, how do you get six figures revenue from 200 visitors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since we are talking about cloud provider, any experience with [https://www.scaleway.com/](https://www.scaleway.com/) ?

Their price is so much cheaper and give to you bare metal ARM, but I can count on them ?

<comment><USER17> I've been running a server for a few months without any issues. The CPU is really slow, but the network seems ok.

<comment><USER16> Nice, what you mean by "slow" ? Just to have an idea, what is your workload ? Serving and rendering html ?

<comment><USER17> I used one server as a Tor relay and another to server static files. The Tor node used almost 100% of one core to server about 25mbps of traffic and there wasn't enough load on the static file server to notice the CPU load, but decompressing an xz file took many times as long as an x86 VPS I had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks like the t2.nano isn't included as part of the Free Tier, seems a bit strange?

</comment><comment><USER19> For my use case, t2.nano would be great but I need better network throughput.

<comment><USER20> wow, I must be doing something wrong... I have a single c4.4xlarge running a single wordpress site at max 200 active users and still running into cpu bottleneck... 1K+/mo sheesh.... I use t2.medium for DC's for 5 users and 5 servers lol... please let me know what a nano is good for?

not to mention, I need multiple 10+TB volumes, and magnetic only go to 1TB, so I need to span, and spanning breaks after 4+ drives, so now I'm at SSD, and that's costing me 1K/mo for each copy and I need many, sigh

i miss buying my own supermicro systems at ~10k/ea, hosting a full rack at at a colo for 1k/mo and then just setup correctly and check-in once a month

now, amazon is getting 15k/mo from me, but i must say, my back thanks them for 0lbs of equipment to lift, so probably worth it for a hernia surgery.

<comment><USER21> Do you cache at all?

<comment><USER20> i think my main issue is thread-safe vs non-thread-safe php and the issues it has with IIS

<comment> jon-wood If you're using IIS one of your issues is that you're running WordPress on a Windows server, and throwing away performance.

<comment> jon-wood Less flippantly, because I sound like a dick there, try putting Cloudfront in front of the site. Assuming WordPress now properly sends cache control headers it should drastically cut down on the traffic your actual server is seeing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Always add $49/month (the basic support plan) if you want to compare AWS with DO/Linode, don't just look at the $5/month instance charge.

<comment><USER6> ? meaning DO/Linode support for a $5/month customer is good? I've not had positive experiences with either... but then again my experiences with AWS (non-business) support haven't been so positive either.

<comment><USER23> I've had pretty good support on DO's $10/month plan and I imagine their $5/month plan would be the same.

1-5 hour turn around times on initial responses and I've gotten them to enable things like the recovery partition due to an instance running out of disk space.

Sometimes it takes a few responses to get a resolution but at that price point I can't really complain because they've even helped resolve issues that were my fault.</comment></comment></comment>


Xkcd #2185: Disappearing Sunday Update - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2185/ <comment><USER2> This is clever, the disappearing nature of the message makes it feel more urgent, so more shares and more attention in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one who wanted to try all of the different access methods to see what would happen? I didn't even know there was such a thing as a gopher portal.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is no longer Sunday, but it's still there.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are late like me:

[https://i.redd.it/u2oulql87me31.png](https://i.redd.it/u2oulql87me31.png)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/cm9q8o/disappearing_s...](https://old.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/cm9q8o/disappearing_sunday_update_undisappeared/)

<comment><USER6> The image is still up at imgs.xckd.com: [https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/disappearing_sunday_update.png](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/disappearing_sunday_update.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really really want Randall to make a physics textbook based on xkcd. There's so much potential here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting this.</comment>


The unedited post by Peter Shih on Medium - <AUTHOR> http://susie-c.tumblr.com/post/58375244538/peter-shih-wrote-this-yesterday-when-everyone

<comment><USER2> Is this an attempt to shame the guy? He makes some insensitive comments, but he's no Mel Gibson. What people write on their personal blogs doesn't have to be PC all the time.

Like for example, I cycle (I don't live in SF though) -- and I totally get what he means by the last point, it happens all the time, and I've done it, and I shouldn't.</comment>


'I love you': How a badly-coded computer virus caused billions in damage - <AUTHOR> https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_d6ad34021abd0f552c6e4150b2f43680 <comment><AUTHOR> I remember this very well. Both my partner and I were working from our homes and we both got the "I love you" email sometime overnight. That morning I took a look at it and thought "that's a virus" and deleted it and went to work. My partner opened the attachment and it instantly began deleting all his photos on his PC. He was devastated. All the photos of his two young children he'd taken since they were born were gone.

By the time I looked at the news later that day that email had bit so many people it was just stunning because the truth was everyone should have known better.

Kinda feels like there's an analogy there for our current situation.</comment>


Scala macro that produces JavaScript from Scala code - <AUTHOR> http://jscala.org/

<comment><USER2> Wow! I just discovered this on the Scala mailing list and... Mind Blown!

Wondering why this hasn't been upvoted more!</comment>


Box2d Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://j15r.com/blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited <comment><USER2> I'm curious whether the performance varies if you used a C compiler from the last five years -- GCC 4.2.1 was released in July 2007. (I'm not claimed the author of the post is unfairly biasing the results, I'm just honestly curious.)

<comment><USER2> To answer my own question, I got:

      gcc 4.6.3: 3.554688 +/- 4.786550
      clang trunk: 3.593750 +/- 4.798172
      Chrome: 41.03515625 +/- 9.331709130062185

Which puts Chrome at about 11x these native compilers, consistent with the blog post.

<comment><USER3>
        gcc 4.8.0: 1.640625 +/- 3.703323
        clang 3.2: 1.718750 +/- 3.772718
        chrome   : 23.28515625 +/- 3.636932727324763

So chrome is about ~14x the native compilers.

Changing gcc to use -O2 instead of -O3 gets: 1.562500 +/- 3.630922.

<comment><USER4> What about -Ofast which enables -ffast-math?

<comment><USER3> The makefile supplied with the repo specifies -ffast-math. It uses these CFLAGS:

        CFLAGS=-s -O3 -msse -mfpmath=sse -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -IBox2D_v2.2.1 -DNDEBUG=1

Using -Ofast gets the same results as -O2.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info, I should have guessed that he enabled -ffast-math manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nezza-_- I can't zoom on this page with my phone and, due to that, can't read it at all except with the "Reader" function.

<comment><USER5> That enormous position:fixed header makes it difficult to read even on a desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting how JS still doesn't live up to AS3. Everyone always discredits Flash... but if you're trying to make a Physics-based browser game, it still seems appropriate!

<comment><USER7> Well, the asm.js version of the benchmark is JS, and it outperformed AS3. Although as cpleppert said, perhaps an alchemy version for Flash would be faster than AS3, that would be interesting to see.

But, I'm not aware of an alchemy version of Box2D for Flash that is convenient to use from normal Flash (what presumably the rest of the game is written in), while for asm.js there is such a version (that is easily usable from normal JS), here's a demo

<http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html>

So comparing currently usable versions of Box2D, the fastest JS one (the asm.js one) is faster than the fastest Flash one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please revisit your web design.

<http://imgur.com/fBZZXYY.png>

<comment><USER9> I might be able to do that more effectively if you'd point out what browser you're running.

<comment><USER8> That was the Hacker News app which uses the Android browser. I am running Android 4.2.2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that NaCl is far closer to native performance than asm.js. Can that performance gap be closed?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure I'd call that "far" different, but asm.js is certainly in early stages so it probably will get faster.

<comment><USER10>
        C (gcc 4.2.1)	2.62 +/- 0.24	1.0x
        NaCl (x86-32)	3.39 +/- 0.25	1.3x
        asm.js (Firefox Nightly)	5.12 +/- 0.59	1.9x

NaCl is 30% slower, asm.js is 90% slower.

<comment><USER12> Your conclusion doesn't follow from your data. 5.12 is not 90% slower than 2.62, it's 51% slower.

<comment><USER13> He says NaCl is 30% slower than _c++_, asm.js is 90% slower than _c++_ which is correct.

<comment><USER12> For asm.js to be 90% slower than c++, it would have to run at 10% the speed of c++, not 51% of its speed, which is what the data shows. 100% slower is not 1/2 the speed, it's no speed at all.

Take some speed x. Increasing it by 100% gives 2x. Decreasing it by 100% gives zero.

Expressed another way, 100% of x is x. Add 100% = 2x, Subtract 100% = zero. The original claim is "90% slower." Clearly the OP either meant 51% slower or 49% slower, depending on how one reads it.

a = 2.62

b = 5.19

a / b = 0.5048, or 50.48%: "b has 50.48 percent the speed of a".

EDIT: wow, once again downvoted for being right and proving it.

<comment><USER14> English conventions are inconsistent. "X is 2x slower than Y" usually means that Y runs at twice the speed of X. Since 90% = 0.9, "X is 90% slower than Y" would mean that X is actually faster than Y. Therefore it's better to state it in an unambiguous way, e.g. X took 2x as much time as Y, or just look at the numbers directly.

<comment><USER12> > English conventions are inconsistent.

Yes, and it's an argument for expressing these ideas with mathematics instead of words.

> Therefore it's better to state it in an unambiguous way, e.g. X took 2x as > much time as Y, or just look at the numbers directly.

Complete agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to see the numbers for the asm.js version running in Safari and Chrome

<comment><USER7> You can grab his repo and try it yourself, but as I commented on the blogpost, on my machine I see firefox without asm.js optimizations and chrome as being about the same speed, both of them are half the speed of firefox with asm.js optimizations. (I don't have a machine with safari to test on.)

Which means the asm.js version is faster than other JS versions, even without specific asm.js optimizations.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. I didn't do it myself because I wasn't able to find the asm.js version version, I must be blind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not too useful as does not include one of the very popular ports and an additional major platform:

<http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/>

:(

<comment><USER17> It's perfectly useful as comparison of browser-based Box2d ports, and how they perform relative to the original C library.

<comment><USER18> Farseer can run in browser using Silverlight.</comment></comment></comment>


What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic? - <AUTHOR> http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40949/13404 <comment><USER2> Metric expansion of universe breaks the conservation of energy, so we are already living in the magical world.</comment>


Windows 10 spies on your kids, sends you a dossier of their activity (opt-out) - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2015/08/10/windows-10.html

<comment><USER2> Windows 7 seems to be getting better every day.</comment>


Introduction to A* - <AUTHOR> http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarComparison.html <comment><USER2> (author here)

I wrote most of these notes in 1997 while working on a game. Little did I realize that it'd be one of my most popular web pages.

The diagrams are colorful but I don't like them ([http://simblob.blogspot.com/2013/12/diagrams-on-my- pathfindi...](http://simblob.blogspot.com/2013/12/diagrams-on-my-pathfinding- pages.html)) so I'm now making new interactive diagrams, starting with breadth first search ([http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/tower- defense/](http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/tower-defense/)). While writing that page, I realized that I need to explain graphs ([http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/grids/graphs.html](http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/grids/graphs.html)) (many game developers don't know graph theory) and suggest optimizations for grids ([http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/grids/algorithms.htm...](http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/grids/algorithms.html)) (a common use case, with interesting variants of A* like Jump Point Search).

I'm also unhappy with the overall structure and navigation so I have a rough plan for how to organize the new pages ([https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/410182845777195008/p...](https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/410182845777195008/photo/1)). I'm taking it one page at a time instead of trying to do it all at once. Feedback appreciated!

<comment><USER3> I just want to say thank you! I have that page burned in my memory. I relied on it heavily when I first encountered A* many years ago in undergrad. I _think_ you have changed the design of the page because I don't remember so much red!

<comment><USER2> You're welcome! I do change the design every few years. The earliest one on Wayback Machine is [https://web.archive.org/web/19981202094104/http://theory.sta...](https://web.archive.org/web/19981202094104/http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're trying to simulate crowds, I get the impression this is the new hotness:

[http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd- flows/](http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/)

It's currently being used in Supreme Commander 2, and in the up and coming Planetary Annihilation. Here's a livestream where the developers demonstrate an implementation in an early build of their game:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qyl7h7D1Q8&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qyl7h7D1Q8&feature=youtu.be&t=24m24s)

</comment><comment><USER5> A great walkthrough...I've read this before and still remember how the article was laid out...it's unfortunately rare for "theory" websites to have decent typography and whitespace that doesn't hinder reading.

In my comsci classes, I'm pretty sure we talked about Dijkstra's algorithm...and I'm pretty sure we talked about priority queues. But not until I recently tried implementing the algorithm on my own (just for a fun six- degrees-of-separation network graph) did I realize how important having a priority queue was...I wish the two concepts had been taught in tandem and shown how they relate to algorithm performance (though yes, I do realize, according to Wikipedia, that Dijkstra's original algorithm did not have a min- priority queue).

It'd be fun to go to a college com sci class now and see if these concepts are much better explained now that we have the ability to show them easily via interactive means (I'm sure many here have seen this wonderful site: [http://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/](http://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/))...It's not only that they can be seen and interacted with, but it's conceivably much easier for the average com sci student to attempt to build an interactive visualization to demonstrate these concepts....A bit harder when you're working with only C/C++

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing, this is perfect! I did the coursera IA, but this simulation is something really cool, I will share with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path- finding-...](https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack) is a great article on the woes of path finding even when given a good basic algorithm. Nice contrast of theory and practice.

</comment><comment><USER8> I always thought the Wikipedia progress animations illustrated the difference between A*[1] and Dijkstra's[2] nicely (and see some variations compared[3]).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astar_progress_animation....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astar_progress_animation.gif)

[2]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dijkstra...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dijkstras_progress_animation.gif)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Subh83/CommonsContrib#Ani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Subh83/CommonsContrib#Animated_GIFs_illustrating_Dijkstra.27s.2C_A.2A_and_weighted_A.2A_search_algorithms)

</comment><comment><USER9> One of my favourite algorithms....I am writing my dissertation on A* implementation in CUDA at the moment, so I've got to work with different approaches to it, it's fascinating really.

<comment><USER10> I think you'll find there are quite a few people interested in something like this - I know I certainly am.

Do you have plans to share some of your data/sections early? If you'd like, I'm even willing to help proof your dissertation. My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER11> I don't know how much help I could be with proofing, but I am also super interested in this! Just spent the last 6 months puttering around trying to squeeze out every bit of performance out of A* and related algorithms, and would sure love to see some paralleled lovelyness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's another [http://heyes-jones.com/astar.php](http://heyes- jones.com/astar.php) I'm the author. Expands a bit more on what a heuristic is, admissibility and includes source on GitHub of a cpp implementation of the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are many variants of A* that can handle changing environments/imperfect information, multiple goals, limited time, etc. A number of them are listed at:

[http://idm-lab.org/project-a.html](http://idm-lab.org/project-a.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> >If the game world is changing often, planning ahead is less valuable.

This is actually a very general insight, and you can drop the "game" from it.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article is "OK". I wish it was ordered differently. My complaint is it spends wayyy too much time on heuristics (2nd page) before it discusses the implementation (3rd page). I think it's important to get an overall idea of what the algorithm is before you focus on the minute details of a part of it. Plus, when it discusses the implementation, it doesn't spend enough time explaining it.

I found this video more helpful initially: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTx6HQ9Veas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTx6HQ9Veas)

<comment><USER2> (author here) I agree! I'm planning to reorder everything; see [https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/410182845777195008/p...](https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/410182845777195008/photo/1) for my current plan. The choice of heuristic is near the end of the new flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a really clear explanation of the algorithm. It's very powerful but at the same time reasonably simple to implement. However, a lot of the explanations of the algorithm either are extremely convoluted (Wikipedia) or they are handwavey or broken (game development 'community' sites). This is a good middle ground.

OT: As an exercise I did a 6510 Assembly implementation on the c64 a while ago on a pretty tiny grid (20x10 IIRC) and that worked wonderfully. Not sure if there would be any practical use for it, but there you go.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-034-artificial-intelligence-fall-2010/lecture- videos/lecture-5-search-optimal-branch-and-bound-a/)

AI course which goes into the details leading up to the A* algorithm (45 minutes)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you want some great notes on A* , my professor puts his slides online. He also included a video lecture on A* .

Lecture Slides: [http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures...](http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures/Lecture36-astar- heuristics.pdf)

Lecture Video: [http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures...](http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures/Lecture36-astar- heuristics/Lecture36-astar-heuristics.html)

There is a part 2 to this lecture called "The Optimality of A* ."

Lecture 2 Slides: [http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures...](http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~ringger/Winter2014-CS312/lectures/Lecture37-astar2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER18> The discussion of heuristics includes only information about admissibility and not consistency. An admissible but inconsistent heuristic can also cause A* to miss the correct solution.

<comment><USER2> There's not even much about admissibility (which is not always used in game settings). I don't have a good sense for consistency/monotonicity. Do you have an example of an inconsistent admissible heuristic?

<comment><USER18> I'll do my best to provide an example. It is hard to come up with a general idea, but I can demonstrate using a graph: [http://i.imgur.com/AwpTeRt.png](http://i.imgur.com/AwpTeRt.png)

The numbers in the nodes represent heuristic values at each node and the numbers on edges represent edge weights; we're looking to get from S to T.

Our heuristic is admissible because it never overestimates the distance to the target.

Consistency dictates that the heuristic value at any node may at most be the weight of any out-edge added to the heuristic value of the node that the edge connects to. So in our example, the heuristic at A is 3, but at B it is 0, but 3 > 1 + 0, so our heuristic is inconsistent.

The reason this causes issues is because our algorithm assumes that any visited path is the shortest path to the end vertex of that path. So when we traverse this graph, we will visit B first, because the sum of its heuristic value and the respective edge weight is less than that of A.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If anyone is interested in robotics, definitely checkout D-star, which is pretty much a dynamic A-star with changing edge weights.

Dijkstra, A-star and D-star all share a similar structure.

<comment><USER17> Can D-star be used to model problems that have some form of random change, ex: While playing 2048, can you model the new random locations as an opponent making decisions (AI driven)?

<comment><USER19> In pathological scenarios where the edge weights change near the goal, rather than near the start of the search, D-star and all its backwards-incremental- graph-search variants can be slower than regular A-star. I would only recommend the use of D-star where a) that effect is unlikely or doesn't matter, or b) you can guarantee edge cost changes to occur only near the start of the search - such as a robot with a proprioceptive sensor, which is precisely what the algorithm was designed for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't it called the Breadth-First Search algorithm (as opposed to the Depth First Search)? I never noticed this name before.

<comment><USER21> No! You are likely confusing it with best-first-search. A* is an implementation of best-first-search, not breadth-first-search.

Breadth-first-search does not prune a search space; it just sorts the search space based on depth. It also assumes the cost of every path is equal.

Example: Finding the shortest road between two cities.

With breadth-first-search, we would consider all connected cities, and then the cities they are connected to, until we reach our destination. We would end up with a route, that travels through the least amount of cities, irregardless of the lengths of the actual roads. We would get the most simple route not the shortest route nor the fastest route.

Feature: calculating using actual costs

To get the shortest route we need to be able to annotate road-length (as cost) in our graph. Using that information we can choose to expand shorter routes before we dive into the longer routes. We might expand A -> B -> C before A -> D because the cummulative road-length of A -> B -> C might be less than the direct road between A -> D. For this to happen we would constantly sort our working set, based on the calculated cost.

As soon as a completed route (to the destination) is at the top of our working set, we can stop and deliver the answer.

Optimization: Pruning

Now, this working set, gets larger with every iteration. If we were to search for the shortest route from A -> D and the answer would be 100 miles, than the working set will contain all routes from A to anywhere, that are less than a 100 miles.

This is very expensive in terms of memory and time: we need to prune the search space. Now, our working set is already sorted based on cost. So we can safely remove every route that ends in the same place as a route above it in the working set. In other words, if A -> B -> C is higher in the working set than A -> D -> C, than we remove A -> D -> C. We simply don't have to expand routes from the same origin twice.

Optimization: using a lower bound

If the costs are truly unpredictable, and we want a perfect answer, this is the best we can do. But costs are rarely unpredictable! Can we provide a lower bound? Sure! Let's use the geospatial distance between two cities. No road is shorter, than the actual distance between the cities.

In this scenario, the costs of our working-set would be calculated as the actual costs of the partial route plus the lower bound. So, the cost of A -> B -> C would be calculated as the actual road length from A upto C plus the distance from C to the destination.

Now this impacts the sorting of the working set. Which is why it is so important it is a lower bound and not an estimate. Because as soon a completed route is at the top of our working-set we call it quits, and deliver the answer.

In a nutshell: A* is a best-first-search that is capable of utilizing a lower bound to sort the search space. It's behavior is far removed from breadth- first-search.

<comment><USER20> The more you know I guess. Thanks for the explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> People so often jump straight into A* pathfinding on a grid, but in my experience that makes the algorithm really opaque. It's been far easier for me to grasp when I was pathfinding over a simple, explicit graph instead.

That being said, great tutorial!

<comment><USER23> When I was learning A*, I found the fact that it was introduced on a grid helpful because the idea of the metric on the grid is very intuitive. But, different strokes, I guess.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Questions Before Joining a Startup - <AUTHOR>

I have a lunch meeting today with a start-up founder I know, to see if there's any possibility of me joining the company.  It's a project I believe in, and the company has already seen some traction. However they are still very young, and I would be one of the first non-founding employees.  Other than that I don't know much about the company itself, and this will be the first conversation we've had about this.
Can anyone suggest questions I should ask, or things to be aware of to help make sure that this will be a good fit?  Are there things I should look out for?  Anything else you can think to say?
I'm very interested, but also very nervous about doing this.
Thanks for the help. <comment><USER2> I'm in similar situation. Met my current tech co-founder 3 weeks ago and I'm joining them as a co-founder.

See that you believe in the project and are looking for signs to tell whether it's a good fit. Here's my experience: Ask yourself if you can trust them. By trust I mean two things.

One, professionally, can you trust their judgement?

Can you work comfortably knowing that they're going to make decisions that will literally determine the growth/death of the company? You don't have to face this when you work in established companies because no one will have that impact. But in startups, a few wrong decision can turn things bad. If you don't have domain knowledge in what they're working on, you need to be sure that the team is capable in identifying the market and executing the biz.

Two, personally, can you be friended with them?

Are you comfortable to spend days and nights with them? I've only started working with the team 3 weeks ago and I'm now working with them every weekends. On weekdays, I generally work till after 9:30pm. Are they smart to spot the key, proactive to fix stuff, open to challenge, honest in telling the truth? These are all very important elements that you have to look for if you're to spend lots of time with them.

You can't get the real answer until you start working with them. Here's what I did: I worked with the team for free, without any talk of equities. Everyday I just find things that I can contribute and no one in the team can do the same. The founder is very open to me. That helps us working out together. I'd say we just "fall in partnership" without much "discussion". We observe each other in rounds of negotiations, customer meetings and internal discussions. I keep looking for evidences that the project and the people are "for long term".

Of course, it does't mean you have to do the same. But I'm suggesting that you look for opportunities to get into real work with them before jumping in, even it's a mini-project. It helps a lot in collecting crucial information. Regarding questions to ask, probably it's about their business just to start with. If even the founder couldn't explain how it works, what problem it solves and where's the market, that's the red flag.

Feel free to write to me. My blog & contact in profile. Recently I wrote 3 blog posts on deciding between startups and corporate jobs and you might like to see.

Hope it helps. :)</comment>


why is ubuntu not friendlier? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If it is for free, what do people expect? Lets use the example of tap water. It is plain and simple. Do people expect it to come with different flavors?

[ __ _Rule one of economics 101: There is no free lunch. If you want something to be conform to your standards, customizes it yourself or pay someone to do it for you._ __]

<comment><USER3> If you're asserting that people should shrug off or become indifferent about quality because something is free, I'm going to have to disagree. Undermining free software efforts, open source projects, and many web applications would be quite terrible.

To the op, what specific gripes do you have with Ubuntu's usability?

<comment><USER2> Did I undermine free software efforts? Did I say that? Read again. As I mentioned before, "There is no free lunch. If you want something to be CONFORM to your standards, CUSTOMIZES it yourself or PAY someone to do it for you. ... " Not all free software is good. Not all paid software is good too.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What keeps you off of Postgres? - <AUTHOR>

In my mind, the future of relational databases is Postgres, in the same way that Linux now dominates the server market. Or rather, I want for something like that to happen, and the only viable candidate seems to be Postgres right now.
What keeps you on <insert RDBMS here>? Is it "our developers only know X"? Is it, "the data would be too hard to migrate"? Is it, "the queries would be too hard to rewrite?" Something else entirely?
What about manpower? Would you be willing to pay a consultant to make a clean sweep through your code base and servers and just make the magic happen? <comment><USER2> Postgres is a fantastic database.

That said, I've also used Oracle quite extensively in the past when clients have needed it and it has some features that would be great to have in Postgres - as well as some features which we won't see in Postgres as they don't match the Postgres philosophy. Lack of one or more of the features below have driven the choice for various clients to use Oracle despite the cost, so having them would help grow the Postgres ecosystem.

Features in Oracle I'd like to see in Postgres :

1) Flashback. This name encompasses lots of ways to see data as it existed at a previous point in time.

If you drop a table, make a big (wrong) change etc, being able to flashback to just before it is brilliant. Or if you have a multi-terabyte sized performance test database, running a test and then a flashback to before the test is much quicker than restoring from a backup.

2) More robust partitioning - Postgres is quite lacking in comparison here.

3) Better backup options. PG really needs an in core incremental backup to start with, with something like Oracles block change tracking for backups thrown in to do quick incremental backups of a large database.

4) Replication - the lack of something like Oracles switchover which is used in a lot of architectures where you have a application and DB replicated across two sites, with one site being the active one at a point in time. When you need to take one site down for whatever reason, in Oracle you can just do a planned "switchover" to the replica DB and then switch back whenever you want without having to do anything as the DB knows it was a clean switch.

5) The diagnostic and performance monitoring built into Oracle are more extensive than those in Postgres.

The one other really useful feature Oracle has which will likely never be in Postgres is RAC (Real Application Clusters) which lets you create a multi-node active-active DB cluster quite easily.

<comment><USER3> > 3) Better backup options.

Already exist as "Continuous Archiving". Was done by third party tools in version 8, part of the core in 9. Details: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/continuous- arc...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/continuous- archiving.html)

> 4) Replication

Master - slave is in core of version 9. Allows fast switchover, but is somewhat harder to swith back.

> RAC

Logical replication is already in 9.4 . And with logica replication we might soon see full master - master replication in core postgres.

<comment><USER2> Continuous archiving (WAL) is something quite different from incremental backups.

Incremental backups involve taking a full backup once in a while and then making interim backups of the changes since the base backup. WAL ( or archive logs in Oracle terminology) are still used for point in time recovery for changes that have occurred since the last incremental backup. One advantage is that if a row is updated 100 times between the base and incremental backup, you will only essentially be backing up the last change in your incremental backup versus WAL which will have all 100 changes. For big DBs, this can be very handy.

"somewhat harder to swith back"

Thats my point exactly. In Oracle switching between primary and standby is easy and you can do it back and forth as needed with no need to worry about rebuilding the database. In Postgres this is not yet the case, but most of the infrastructure is there already so its surprising it hasn't been done.

I'm also looking forward to logical replication. RAC is different however from master-master replication. Essentially its a specialized cluster with storage thats shared between all nodes in the cluster (so there is no replication going on) with "cache fusion" to share in-memory data between nodes .

PG lets the OS do the stuff it does best versus RAC which is largely a OS cluster solution specifically tailored for a multi node DB - so its unlikely (in my opinion) that the PG developers will ever produce anything similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Breaking the question down into parts, so that Postgres is compared one-on-one with each of its potential competitors, consider Postgres-vs.-MySQL. After all, it's plausible that one of the first decisions you make is whether to use a proprietary database or an open-source database. If the former, then you're probably deciding among Oracle, Microsoft, and maybe IBM. If the latter, you're probably deciding between MySQL and Postgres. So let's concentrate on the latter for a moment.

Why do people choose MySQL over Postgres?

I don't know the answer to that, but I was TOLD by a DBA colleague of mine who believes Postgres to be technically superior that the reason companies choose MySQL is because of the commercial support. Though it's open-source, MySQL evidently is in some sense "owned" or at least "sponsored" by Oracle, and if you go to www.mysql.com you'll find that you can purchase various services (support, training, etc.) directly from Oracle. Contrast that with PostgreSQL which even today appears to be more a house divided. At www.postgresql.org, you're presented with a list of third-party consulting organizations. I'm not positive, but I would be unsurprised if that made corporate managers a little nervous. "No one was ever fired for buying IBM." as the saying goes.

Of course, this is just conjecture on my part. Perhaps someone with better intel can comment.

<comment><USER5> For me, I use MySQL over Postgres because it was easier for me to configure and set up. I know MySQL much more coming from PHP and now I use Python/Django. I spent a few hours trying to setup Postgres and it would not install properly with Vagrant and I couldn't find really any helpful articles. I said fuck it, and installed MySQL on the VM in a matter of minutes and was up and running. Again, I am familiar with MySQL and got a production database on Amazon RDS pretty quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> MySQL works for me and switching to Postgres would cost time and energy, which I like to spend on things actually making money.

That said, I have encountered some shortcomings of MySQL here and there (Constraints) and I can totally see how Postgres would be "nice to have", but I feel, that I am just not operating at a scale, where it really matters.

Edit: Typo

</comment><comment><USER7> To do a clean sweep you really need a 'order of magnitude' type of justification ... some benefit that completely justifies the risk and time of changing platforms.

Postgres does a lot of things better than Mysql, but unless you have a really unique data problem to solve (perhaps say a robust spatial database) it's hard to switch midstream.

<comment><USER8> What are postgres solutions for HA? Mysql has mmm and more recently galera... Percona backup is good for backup as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a number of use-cases Linux is technically and practically superior to Windows and OSX. For servers there is essentially no viable competition. Postgres by comparison has a hundred viable competitors and very few exclusive killer features. It's a free Oracle alternative in an age where people don't even _want_ Oracle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but that was sort of my point of the hedge in my original comment. Linux wasn't always clearly superior. It took the dedication of early adopters to improve it so that we have a thing today that is great. I think Postgres could be that for relational databases, given time.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue Linux was superior almost from the start. As of around maybe ~1996 it became a viable alternative to Solaris AND it was entirely free and open source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What keeps me off Postgres is hopefully something they just fixed today: [http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1506/](http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1506/)

Binary replications to slave had a very nasty bug that would make your replica data corrupt at random moments of time. Apparently I was one of the unlucky few that encountered this issue time after time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Postgres doesn't work out of the box with Meteor.</comment>


New Programming Language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytoreador.com/news/article_908db38e-a998-11e3-bc17-0017a43b2370.html

<comment><AUTHOR> New computer programming language "found". The title had me laugh out loud, but then got me thinking. Anybody else feel that reporting for tech news is usually done by somebody who has no clue what they are talking about?</comment>


Three Grammar Rules You Can (And Should) Break - <AUTHOR> http://www.copyblogger.com/grammar-rules-to-break/ <comment><USER2> >Come on: "to go boldly where no man has gone before" just doesn't have the same ring to it as "to boldly go." If it sounds better to split the infinitive, then take an axe to it!

It is likely that "to boldly go" has a "ring to it" because the author has watched hundreds of episodes of Star Trek where the infinitive is split.

To my mind there is nothing inherent about, for instance, the phrase "Man and Wife" that gives it a special ring. Instead it is the ingrained convention of the firstness of men that makes the phrase sound "right."

I am not saying the author is wrong about split infinitives, but the example, "if it sounds good use it," isn't a very good one.

<comment><USER3> "To boldly go" was used in Star Trek because it sounds better than "to go boldly". Familiarity may have increased that effect, but it certainly didn't create it.

<comment><USER4> And you're basing that on watching how many episodes of Star Trek?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 4\. Use "they" as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.

<comment><USER6> I've started to do this. But it can be so awkward that you have to be subtle about it.

<comment><USER7> Jane would approve.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=jane+austen+singular+they>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 5\. Putting "." before finishing quote. Like this: "fucking shit."

Should be: "fucking shit".

It is an archaism and Americanism and the reason it exists is nothing but technical limitations of printing presses. It screws up with language's goal -- to transfer information effectively.

To reach that goal, we must break any rules and evolve our language instead of religiously following whatever we were taught.

<comment><USER9> The "archaic" way feels better, though. Brain (mine at least) must parse it in a way other than the obvious way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Three Grammar Rules You Can (And Should) Break

I see what you did there (i.e. using parentheses to denote parenthetical comments rather than matching commas, an incorrect grammatical construction I prefer).

"Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature. Of particular note is the southern American author William Faulkner (see Absalom, Absalom! and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury) as well as poet E. E. Cummings. In most writing, overuse of parentheses is usually a sign of a badly structured text. A milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter. If the sentence contains commas for other purposes visual confusion may result."

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

</comment><comment><USER11> _The rule even got screen time in the movie Finding Forrester, when Sean Connery and Rob Brown have an entire conversation about it (and deliberately start their sentences with the offending words in order to make their points)._

This was the first thing that came to mind when reading that particular section. It's so true, and the points they make in that scene are good points indeed.

I think that's an underrated movie.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're a native speaker, your brain knows which sentences are allowed and which sentences aren't. Anything else is optional.

<comment><USER13> Not quite. Most parts of English fit neatly within the deep logic of natural languages our brains are wired for. The same can be said about all other natural languages including Latin, which have very different grammar but they all _compile_ the same. Pardon my bad, programming based, metaphors.

However, many languages including English have parts that don't fit. They are rules introduced by fiat. Someone at some point decided that because you can't split infinitives in Latin, you shouldn't do it in English. But our brains are not wired for that. You can just willy-nilly mix C++ and Python.

And here's where things get interesting, any native speaker will be fluent in the _natural_ part of the language, but the rules introduced by fiat are often used to distinguish class and education.

Children learn language simply by listening, but more then that our brains will auto complete! That's how pidgin languages turn into creole languages.

This auto completion feature will lead children to naturally split infinitives in English. And equally naturally never split them if they are native speakers of Latin.

Not splinting infinitives has to be learned in a separate process - school, and relies on a different part of the brain - long term memory.

That's why it's used to show of class and education.

English is not unique in mixing natural and fiat rules. Japanese for example has parts which are natural and honorific constructs introduced by fiat.

People who left Japan as young children, can be fluent in Japanese and yet completely not know the honorific forms, which makes them sound very lacking even though they _are_ fluent in Japanese.

<comment><USER14> Could you give an example of a fiat rule that isn't natural for you, personally?

<comment><USER13> Good question, my native tongue doesn't have too many rules by fiat. The one thing that always gets me is when people stick an English word in the middle of a sentence and then modify it with a native prefix or suffix. And it's a natural thing for people to do, grab a word you hear a lot and shim it into your native language.

But if you're fluent in both languages that kind of mixing just sounds soooo wrong!

<comment><USER14> Personally, the closest I could come up with was the pen/pin distinction (unless I concentrate on it, I pronounce both words the same way.) I'm pretty sure that fiat English is natural English for somebody, because any unnatural rules (like not ending a sentence with a preposition) will disappear eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> I might be wrong, but I don't think any of these 3 "rules" are formal rules of grammar. They're guidelines to be followed most of the time but broken when appropriate. The split-infinitive snobbery comes from Latin, in which infinitives are one word and _can't_ be split, but it doesn't make sense for English (although infinitives should be split rarely).

<comment><USER16> These are rules as much as many others are. You won't go to jail or be a literary outcast, so you're right, like ALL grammar rules, you can break them.

That's why the critique of S&W the other day didn't make any sense. S&W is a book on style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Most of them have a good reason for being around; after all, clarity in communication is a good thing. A virtue, even._

I think that sentence would sound nicer like this: Most of them have a good reason for being around. After all, clarity in communication is a good thing, a virtue even.

As for the rules, I think I read it in the King's English or perhaps in an essay by Bernard that rules are made to be broken, but you must know what they are so that you can break them, otherwise most likely you are wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: How to apartment search in the bay? - <AUTHOR>

I'm researching a move towards the bay area and curious what sources that people were successful with... (craigslist/padmapper)???<p>I'm a developer, is there an apartment search for hackers? <comment><USER2> Craigslist. It's still the best source if you're doing your apartment search remotely.

If you're local, another good approach is just to drive down the multi-family zoned areas in the valley (it's pretty obvious where they are if you live here, plus you can see them on satellite view in Google Maps), pop into the office, and ask if they have any vacancies coming up. Most blocks are pretty densely packed, so you can easily hit up half a dozen complexes in an hour and get a sense of what rents are like, how clean the complex is, how friendly the management is, what sort of people live there, etc. In my most recent apartment hunt I took a bike trip with my girlfriend - we just biked down a bunch of the residential neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and stopped at every apartment complex.

Another useful strategy is to take a short-term lease when you first move out, then once you're acclimatized, pick out the places you really want to live and ask if there're vacancies. You learn a lot of tacit knowledge about the area that way, eg. the California/Escuela area of Mountain View has a number of openings on Craigslist, but it also has a reputation of being kinda a bad neighborhood in MTV (nothing that'll put your personal safety at risk, but I know a couple people that were robbed while living there), and you'll only pick that up from living in the area and talking with locals there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Obligatory padmapper.com mention.

[http://www.padmapper.com](http://www.padmapper.com)</comment>


Mozilla's Raindrop: Chasing Google's Wave, or Damping Digital Noise? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/mozillas-raindrop-chasing-googles-wave-or-damping-digital-noise <comment><USER2> It looks like Google puts everything in one place. All the "waves" you subscribe to get equal billing, all dumped in an "inbox" and all users having equal access to your attention.

In contrast, Mozilla has stated their belief that different types of information are more important to you than others. Their Snowl[0] project (a kind of RSS feed reader in the browser) has multiple views for different types of messages. Raindrop has this same concept built-in, you can see in the video posted earlier [1] that, for example, emails from mailing lists are de- emphasized compared to emails from people you are having an active conversation with.

[0] <http://labs.mozilla.com/snowl/about/>

[1] <http://vimeo.com/7197666> (starting around 1:25) with discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897669></comment>


Infarm wants to put a farm in every grocery store - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/26/infarm/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> This is a terrible idea. Growing plants sustainably requires soil and sun. And good tasting produce requires both. Two minutes thought about it from a whole- systems perspective, and maybe a bit of common sense, would have told them that this was a terrible idea.

A few reasons to get things started:

* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.

* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.

* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.

* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.

<comment><USER3> > Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason > vineyards care a lot about soil.

That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it _looks_ (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.

<comment><USER4> This is why strawberries taste like fibrous nothing but look really great. Same for cherries. In fact, most fruits don't taste very good anymore. I recently found bought a bunch of 'Heirloom' oranges which actually tasted wonderful. Probably because they haven't been genetically engineered to look good and last a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This may work for a few Whole Foods customers who pay $5 for a bottle of herb infused water but I wonder if the cost is going to be reasonable enough for most people. Real estate cost alone may trump every other cost savings. Even if that "farm" can produce 10x more per square foot from vertical farming, the real estate cost of a grocery store in a city is a lot more expensive than a farmland in the middle of no where.

<comment><USER6> It's for weed. They're all for weed. Every "indoor farming" company is just trying to get capital and build a brand with a cover story for when marijuana is inevitably legalized. The only thing that it really makes positive ROI sense to grow in this kind of way in the United States is for marijuana. Everbody working in the indoor farming industry knows this, the whole "we're saving the world by growing basil" thing is said with a big smirk. (Similarly, big pharma has acres and acres of farmland just waiting to be used for this purpose.)

<comment><USER5> If marijuana is legalized, why bother growing it indoor?

<comment><USER7> I think they're hoping for a "sweet spot" of legalization, where the product is legal to produce and sell, but regulations prevent outdoor farming (or mandate additional security in such a way that makes indoor farming an appealing alternative).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This probably works only for items where there's a huge markup. It's like those little indoor trays of growing grass seen at some hipster sandwich shops. The article suggests they want to grow basil.

This was tried in LA in 2015.[1] Not sure what happened to "Green City Farms", but their last Twitter activity was in 2015 and their web site says "Error establishing a database connection".

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3044958/this-hollywood- restauran...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3044958/this-hollywood-restaurant- grows-your-food-next-to-your-table)

</comment><comment><USER9> I spent a lot of time thinking about and researching vertical farming a few months back, even going as far as to start prototyping out a system, and while I love the vision for the future, I'm wondering how this ends up being profitable for those doing it. As LED prices continue to fall it starts making more sense, but can you really compete with the Sun and industrial agriculture on price? How many of these units would you need to install to meet demand at my grocery store up the street here in Brooklyn? I think we forget that a huge amount of automation already exists in the agricultural supply chain.

I'd love to see it work since you can reduce water and pesticide requirements, which is great for the environment. I'm just skeptical that you can be more than a basil and microgreens service for yuppies.

<comment><USER10> It also reduces transportation costs, and cuts out the farmer's profit margin, and any other middlemen between them and the grocer

<comment><USER11> This is actually a huge reason that food costs as much as it does. The seeds are free, water's cheap, Sun's free, fertilizer is plentiful (and overused), and machines do all the heavy lifting. You don't need a lot of manpower, and farmers don't make a ton of money. All that money that we pay for food is going into three things:

1\. Transportation costs: when everything grows in Ohio (and/or South America), it's going to cost a lot more to get it in front of consumers in Seattle or New York. To make matters worse, there's a built in timer on the goods. 2\. Waste: something like 12% of America's food supply goes bad in transit. Then after that, some more rots on the shelf. That which doesn't is brought home, or to a restaurant and is wasted there. There's not much we can do about the last part of the equation, but having the food fresh in the store is a big step for the first two prongs. 3\. Aesthetics: This one I don't fully understand, but apparently people turn down perfectly good produce because it doesn't look normal, despite being perfectly healthy and nutritious. I've always had a taste for mutant carrots, myself. It's possible (not guaranteed) that selling this produce at reduced costs and directly from the dirt where it was grown might help that.

It'll all come down to whether or not grocers sign on - my guess is that the price point on something like this will ultimately be pretty good, but it might take 10 years for the technology to develop enough to be useful out in the wild.

<comment><USER12> I wonder what that 40% looks like if you do it by calorie.

There's no way 40% of potatoes or flour (or vegetable oil or ...) is expiring in transit.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'd bet that's mostly fresh fruits and veggies. For reference: [https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food- IP.pdf](https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf)

<comment><USER12> The largest part of the 40% in that report is consumer losses.

So food that spoils at home or is thrown away after it is served at a restaurant.

Distribution and retail losses aren't terrible.

<comment><USER11> You're correct, will edit to reflect more accurate numbers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An automated indoor herb garden would be neat, but what does the cost curve look like compared to shipping traditional potted herbs? I was offput by the article mentioning flying basil thousands of miles, but maybe that's my bias since stores in the US usually carry potted basil plants. Taking care of the hydroponic stack might be as simple as changing a cartridge now and then, but how much does that cartridge cost and where does it have to be flown in from?

Clearly stores and investors are buying into this, so I must be missing some information. Or I'm overly skeptical because I dislike the idea. But how much do these store grown herbs cost?

</comment><comment><USER14> Well..

I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.

Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.

The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.

To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.

This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.

<comment><USER15> > Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for > cannabis as well.

I suspect this is the _actual_ reasoning and target product.

Unfortunately, you can't get funding for that legally in most jurisdictions.

<comment><USER14> Well, yeah. Shrooms and Weed are the two I could think of that would easily support hydroponic grow systems. Ideally, I could see them taking off in the Southwest, given intensity of the sun and win power. The only thing that would really cost is water, and that should be closed-loop as much as possible. I'd wonder if some of the new metal-organo-frameworks could efficiently get water from the air as they were reported to do.

But republicans are still moralizing christians that wish to force their ideals upon others. Because if anything's been shown, cannabis is one hell of a tax generator and mucho underutilized commerce. But aside this illegal usage in most jurisdictions, this could suffice growing in bad environments or to people with way too much money to spend.

There could be a different segment; people who want guaranteed food supply. And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee. I could also see this as a non-profit as well, with low income and homeless getting free access.

<comment><USER16> And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee.

No it doesn't.

If a farm has a bad harvest, there are other farms a store can buy from. If the store has a bad harvest. They're competing with their own customers to buy food from the next store over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Right idea, but basil leaves is not a farm.

I think for this type of thing to really change things, they need to concentrate on calories and nutrition. Things like peanuts and potatoes.

I also think there is some room for permaculture. Such as replacing ornamental city landscaping with productive food forests.

<comment><USER12> What's your definition of "work" there?

They need to make stuff that grows fast and has a relatively high price. Potatoes and peanuts don't particularly match either of those criteria.

<comment><USER18> Right, and also stuff that doesn't keep well anyway. Seasonality or needing to ship quickly to avoid spoilage aren't problems for potatoes either; if well- climate-controlled they keep for months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is HUGE. What's much more interesting is not getting this into grocery stories but into homes. Delivery costs and spoilage represent something like 40% or so of produce costs, maybe more. So in theory it would be much more efficient if you could grow your own vegetables and fruits at home. Right now, only a few things like basil can be grown this way, but probably in time, we can via "breeding" have many other fruits and vegetables that can be grown on a smaller scale in the home.

I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.

</comment><comment><USER20> This makes zero sense. Even if you choose very specific items that can be grown in a constrained environment it's going to cost too much to run.

Grocery stores make next to no margin on their sales - by adopting this they will have to charge more than their competitors. Which means they won't get sales.

\---

EDIT On top of this, there is not the physical space to do this at the scale you need. Do you know how often shelves are restocked, especially in the UK where stores are tiny? How are you going to fit your equipment in such a constrained environment.

</comment><comment><USER21> Its actually pretty neat if somewhat expensive. 1.It saves transporation/labor costs. 2.Allows to monitor/control plants 24/7 3.Immune to all weather conditions/theft/birds I imagine it would be available to individuals too: allowing people in cities to grow personal food indoors, without any gardens. The potential of this "digital agriculture" is huge, since it allows to control 'natural environment' variables.

</comment><comment><USER22> $20 for a spring of basil plant grown in your local grocers, though sounds very expensive, there is probably almost definitely a demographic for that. And it does not go stale, you can keep it there indefinitely. What is likely to happen though is that it gets commercially farmed and then is brought to the store after it has reached a certain size. Totally destroying its purpose but there is a market for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER23> My wife buys live, potted basil plants all the time from a mainstream US grocery store. I don't think she pays more than $5 or $6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system

Why? What happens when the network drops out on your basil cabinet? Is there any reason not to just put the logic inside the thing?

Other than that, I can see this functioning pretty well for large suburban grocery joints if it's limited to herbs. In fact, I seem to remember seeing something approximating this at a Canadian grocery store, I don't remember where.

</comment><comment><USER25> I support decentralizing many things.

Energy generation

Cellphones

Social media

As farming can now be done in 3D, this may become a good idea. My main concern is city pollutants getting caught in the plants.

<comment><USER26> I think these racks were intended to be used indoors, in climate-controlled environments. I'd imagine at least token air quality management wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to add, and that's all you'd need to beat, e.g., an urban backyard garden...

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I can see this playing well with the doomsday bunker crowd.

And even before we get to that point, a distributed agricultural system would help lessen our reliance on large-scale industrial farming operations which we are frankly not using at a sustainable (1,000+ years) rate.

<comment><USER27> Keep in mind it doesn't get rid of the centralized petroleum-based fertilization, so you're still dependent on large-scale industrial petrochem for fertilizer production.

<comment><USER28> Just tap into the store's bathrooms and presto! free fertilizer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've seen supermarkets sell live basil plants for the past 20 years (probably even earlier but I wasn't paying attention) in multiple countries. Maybe they just picked the wrong example to start the article?

</comment><comment><USER30> This looks like a variation of FreightFarms [https://www.freightfarms.com/](https://www.freightfarms.com/) \- they've been doing this for 2 or 3 years now.

</comment><comment><USER31> The next decade of incremental farming improvements is mostly going to be built on the back of grow-op technologies and techniques going mainstream. Some of them will be more successful than others.

</comment><comment><USER32> Alright, there are 37,716 grocery stores in the US and 321.4 million residents. That's about 8500 people per grocery store. According to this:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much_land_does_it_take_to_support_one_human/)

The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.

<comment><USER33> > minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about > 0.17 acres

Why assume a vegetarian diet? And why assume that 100% of farming would be done at the grocery store?

Do you really need the vertical farm in the grocery store to grow the wheat to bake your bread or the silage to feed cattle?

The vast majority of farmland is dedicated to grains and animal feed, and that can remain.

But the vertical farm in the grocery store can take care of the fresh stuff, like herbs, lettuce and some veggies.

<comment><USER34> > Why assume a vegetarian diet?

It's the most efficient in terms of land use (also water, etc.). I think the person you are responding to is trying to make the best possible case for the approach, in order to be as fair as possible.

(And yes, it is not necessary to grow 100% of food in stores, as you point out, for this startup to have a viable business model; but it's still interesting to see how far it could go, that's what I took that comment to be doing.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It will be cool to see advancement in this area and any potential cross-over with tech research for Martian and space agriculture.

</comment><comment><USER36> Seems like this could be beneficial for areas with religious-based dietary restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER37> It can't get more hipster than this</comment>


Ask HN: Can there be a separate hobbyists network? - <AUTHOR> Some network not controlled by governments, for people who want computing old style, before the web became a locked down government spied on and controlled surveillance system.
Sure it will be crap, limited, probably back fence to back fence, but at least if would feel Free.
How could such a thing be done? <comment><USER2> Something like these? [https://boingboing.net/2017/04/07/bug-in-tech-for- antipreppe...](https://boingboing.net/2017/04/07/bug-in-tech-for- antipreppers.html)

or [http://guifi.net/en](http://guifi.net/en)

or [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/11/how-a...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/11/how-a-group-of-neighbors-created-their-own-internet- service/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the darknet not something like this? Onion routing type stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Start an intranet between you and your family and neighbors?

</comment><comment><USER5> Ham radio, APRS?

</comment><comment><USER6> Intranet via VPN?</comment>


No Two Digital Cameras Are the Same: Fingerprinting Via Sensor Noise - <AUTHOR> http://33bits.org/2011/09/19/digital-camera-fingerprinting/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. Also sounds like a great way to frame someone. Don't see any reason why these fingerprints can't be forged.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat blog, with a catchy tag ("The End of Anonymous Data and what to do about it").

The previous article mentioned upfront also looks interesting - Everything Has a Fingerprint: The Case of Blank Paper ([http://33bits.org/2011/09/13/everything-has-a-fingerprint- th...](http://33bits.org/2011/09/13/everything-has-a-fingerprint-the-case-of- blank-paper/)), especially the part about using run-of-the-mill scanners instead of SEM.</comment>