Ask HN: How would you growth hack a hedge fund? - <AUTHOR> I work for a small technology advanced real estate hedge fund that has been delivering great returns to middle class investors for several years. I am wondering what HN members would do to promote their values, technology and integrity to a wider audience to grow their investor base? <comment><USER2> Can you explain how you serve middle class investors?

Only accredited investors can invest in hedge funds. The requirements for becoming an accredited investor, as described by Rule 501 [1] state that an individual's net worth, excluding real estate must be over $1,000,000 or have an income of over $200,000.

I think one of the biggest struggles to "growth hacking" a hedge fund are the regulator requirements. [2]

1\. [http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi- bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967d...](http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi- bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967d69c024485029d968ee737&r=SECTION&n=17y18.104.22.168.188.8.131.52)

2\. [http://www.investmentfundlawblog.com/resources/marketing/mar...](http://www.investmentfundlawblog.com/resources/marketing/marketing- restrictions-private-funds/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The fund is a RRSP eligible investment in Canada (I think the equivalent of 401K in USA?). We are not currently serving the American market, sorry, I should have mentioned that but I think the growth management would be similar in both markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you really a hedge fund in that you actively hedge your positions or are you just an actively traded long-mostly fund that calls themselves a hedge fund because it's a trendy label? What benchmark do you compare yourselves to? Are you sure you haven't outperformed the market simply because REITs have been such a strong asset class since 2010? It's extremely unusual for any actively managed funds to consistently beat their benchmarks net of fees, and those that do, typically have no problem attracting huge amounts of capital (to the point where they lose their ability to outperform). A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel [[http://fave.co/29ZnkN6](http://fave.co/29ZnkN6)] is a fantastic book for anyone who wants to learn more about why this is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to get in a debate about what a hedge fund is, but while the term "Hedging" is the practice of reducing risk, the goal of most hedge funds is to maximize ROI. The term hedge fund comes from the historical tendency of the first "hedge funds" to hedge against the downside risk of the market by shorting the market (as where mutual funds can not usually take a short positions). In today's terms, hedge funds employee many different investment strategies so it isn't accurate to say hedge funds just hedge risk. Hedge fund managers usually make speculative investments and can sometimes carry more risk.

The funds is bench marked to Credit Suisee HF Index, Citibank Prime +5%, S&P 500. It is beating the bench mark since inception and that historical statement is verified by our auditors. Your point regarding "attracting huge amounts of capital" holds true when a fund reaches a certain size, typically greater than $120M, getting to that point is where a lot of the work happens. The point from start to autonomous growth must be managed with extreme care and diligence, it is imperative that a growing fund manages their growth to not try and grow faster than their operations can support. -- Which is what I'm asking HN, I am soliciting opinions and experiences from smart people, maybe growth hack is the wrong term.

I agree that as a fund grows it definitely gets harder to scale, and at this time, we haven't begun to scale at our full potential, so that point remains in the central view of the risk committee.

Thank you for contributing your opinions.

<comment><USER4> > I don't want to get in a debate about what a hedge fund is, but while the > term "Hedging" is the practice of reducing risk, the goal of most hedge > funds is to maximize ROI.

So you're not a hedge fund.

>The funds is bench marked to Credit Suisee HF Index, Citibank Prime +5%, S&P 500.

What a crazy combination of benchmarks.

<comment><USER2> I'm no hedge fund expert, especially ones based out of Canada, but I think it's based on the fee structure. Hedge funds typically get 2% AUM and 20% of the return. I don't see any reason to think that isn't the case.

Those funds make sense to me for a real estate focused hedge fund that is primarily used in retirement accounts.

Just my $.02

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An RRSP in and of itself is not a fund type. Similarly to a 401K it is an account which holds investment positions (e.g. Mutual funds, ETFs, single- stock positions).

As for 'growth hacking', that's really not a mindset I would recommend for any investment strategy. First, think of the asset class (real-estate), the investment strategy and the securities/investment products involved: can you scale them up and be as profitable? If you can demonstrate that you can, then growing the AuM shouldn't be too hard. 'Growth hacking' sounds like smoke and mirrors - I wouldn't recommend that terminology with investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, that growth hacking was the wrong terminology, I think I was being to aggressive with the description.

Yes, an RRSP is not a fund and like you said, a vehicle to hold an investment position. I was not trying to insinuate that an RRSP was a fund and I will edit my previous comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Caruana- as a more constructive comment, I would say your question is more one of marketing retire than investment strategy. In that sense, one advice I would give is to focus on customer education. The majority of funds, whether they are institutional funds or retail funds, do a poor job of educating clients. Especially with technology involved - a client who understands, is comfortable and truly engaged about your technology will probably stick around longer in the not-so-good times. From a sales point of view, education is a differentiating factor. My 2 cents, Canadian.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment, thank you. I love the idea of education as a differentiating factor, so my question would be, "from a customer's perspective, does the educational material have to be original content or would it be better to reference 'non biased / not affiliated' material?

<comment><USER5> It could be a combination of both, but I would suggest developing some original content along with reference to independent references perhaps. In my view, taking the time to develop original content sends the message that the company/fund cares, and is not recycling external material. Plus, you control the quality of the material. Retail investors, especially, are bombarded with infomercial fluff that has no value. Good quality material can only make you more credible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would leak stories to the press about how we have a secret internal fund that generates mind blowing returns year after year thanks to our army of math phd geniuses but is closed to the public. (Yet conveniently publishes its returns publicly.) Yea, that's what I would do.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would reach out to the MrMoneyMustache/Ramit Sethi's of the world if you can offer a compelling pitch to their target audience (24-40 years old, tech- oriented) about why I should start funneling some of my investment dollars into your fund (vs Vanguard target date).

Other options: ad targeting people that are customers/users of Vanguard, Betterment, Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, etc

</comment><comment><USER8> organize operational risk before you enter your next phase of growth using a system like [http://www.predictiveops.com](http://www.predictiveops.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> Could you go into detail about how you are technically advanced relative to your competition?

Would be curious to hear what that entails / differentiates you from other investment firms in the same space. The alternative data space taking off among hedge funds is pretty interesting, and I'd be interested to hear how a real estate fund approaches it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Make it a DAO [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_\(organization\))

</comment><comment><USER11> scraping and cold email for lead gen leading to sales calls to potential investors.</comment>


Show HN: Watch Stanford CS Lectures Together - <AUTHOR> https://www.classroomies.com/?4 <comment> babl-yc Nice work!

I almost entirely prefer pre-recorded classes to live ones, except for being able to meet classmates and study together. You can watch at your own discretion, change playback speed, etc.

I think there is a big opportunity with ideas like this to make online lectures feel less isolated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree!

For those who want to join, you can do so with the code LY9114

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Why restrict it to Stanford? Why not include MIT, Berkeley, etc? BTW these are not CS lectures (all this startup stuff is not CS, like say algorithms, os internals, database systems, ML theory, etc)

EDIT: I like the idea very much, but not in its current form.

<comment><USER3> This is strictly a content issue. I wouldn't apply demerits to the concept based on the selection of content available.

It should expand, but forced limitations on available content make sense -- it concentrates students into "rooms" while the site's traction is still light, allowing the desired levels of collaboration to come to fruition. Too much content while the site is small risks running only one or two students per room, which keeps the true purpose of the site from showing itself and may even defeat the concept before it has a chance to thrive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love this - except, where's the CS? I just see a lot of business/startup stuff, which I'm not interested in.

<comment><USER5> Judging by the description, it looks like it alternates between CS and startup lectures.

<comment><USER6> I'm simply judging from the titles but I also don't see anything that directly relates to CS. Could you mention a couple of titles that you think relate to CS?

<comment><USER5> The schedule looks to be only for a single day, none of which are CS related. However, the homepage does state:

> Watch & discuss pre-recorded Startup & CS lectures from Stanford together, > in real-time.

Schedules are updated every Monday and Thursday, so I'm guessing there will be CS lectures listed in the future given the description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like that you're building something in this vein, but the benefit is not immediately clear to me.

Has it been your experience that talking with others _during_ a lecture is helpful?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is. Going deeper into particular topics or having folks share additional resources has been incredibly valuable. The lectures serve as conversation- food and not the 'core' of the experience here. That's the premise of the experiment.

<comment><USER8> This would be kind of like watching someone play a videogame on Twitch— indeed, you could just about implement this as a Twitch channel where people turn up and watch a taped lecture together.

<comment><USER9> Twitch has this for Bob Ross painting shows

[https://m.twitch.tv/bobross/profile](https://m.twitch.tv/bobross/profile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> donkey-hotei This is awesome ! As a largely self-educated engineer I recall feeling (and still do) that most of what I was missing from taking online courses was the « lecture hall » feeling, having discussion immediately afterwards, &c. Nice work !

</comment><comment><USER10> This is cool! I think it's always useful to see how other people react to the stuff you learn. Do you plan to loop lectures perpetually?

</comment><comment><USER11> Great idea, and love how you've integrated advertising. I love that there's a schedule - following the paradox of choice, I hate choosing, and you have a good selection of videos.

<comment> gingerbread-man Voting on the schedule might be a good idea, especially if voting power was weighted based on how much each user has engaged.

<comment><USER12> Brings in a whole can of worms: how do you measure engagement? Is it gameable? What happens if someone games the system and gets by far the largest weight in the system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Use invite code: LY9114

</comment><comment><USER13> As we're watching Sam Altman on Startups, a group of 4 or 5 people (including myself) have been doing collaborative note taking on Google Docs. Its fun to do! Maybe this is something the devs can bake into their platform as a feature...

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of twitch in some ways which I feel is a good thing. The use of a schedule is a nice add in to give the appearance of a channel or live stream yet with something to look forward to or schedule appropriately.

<comment><USER15> I think you just made me realize the value a lot of people get from twitch (and even YouTube, to a certain extent). Which, as a bit of a text fascist, I've had trouble grasping / not really been interested in.

From the love (young) people have for live media/streams - and research into the negative effect of recorded vs live, in person lectures - it seems obvious that "twitch for lectures" will be huge.

Probably not something I'll like any more than unscripted TV series, but probably still huge.

Then again, I do seem to relate to chatting on irc while watching regular scheduled TV (like a buffy episode).

So I do see social/group-interactive viewing as something that'll be great.

Even see this working for stuff like video courses in 3d/game design, development - like an art class. The video is the lecturer, and you can see what 3d models/apps/.. your fellow students create (and how). And maybe even copy/"fork" in real-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is great. Reminds me of Twitch.tv, except for academia. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is very cool. Can I ask how you keep the video synced for all clients?

<comment><USER18> It looks like the page is embedding a YouTube video with a specified start time in an iframe, with that specified start time based on when the page was loaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page. I have no idea without doing a Google search what time it is in UTC. Also, is the current class title displayed somewhere?

<comment><USER20> > It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page

yes, but it IS hard to remember every little thing when launching a new service. try giving feedback with a little better tone. its beta software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice. A quick suggestion: would you allow users to select there time zones and then show the schedule based on a user's timezone?

</comment><comment><USER22> This is great!

Can you do this for youtube videos so that I can use this for conference talks?

(Or so that I can watch videos with my brother back in the US)

</comment><comment><USER23> I also created something similar. People were really interested at first. But we learned after sometime that people loose interest when learning with strangers. We could not retain people after a week of sign up. Although this is bit different so might work. Good luck to people who created this.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't part of the point be to introduce people, so they're not strangers anymore, after a while?

Encourage chat/discussion in scheduled breaks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can't scroll to the bottom of the schedule on chrome / Android. It only goes down to something about Dropbox (it's cut off.) Is this the wrong schedule entirely? Do the CS lectures come after the point where it stops scrolling?

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks really interesting. Could possible be something like facebook live or insta live where you could still have prerecorded stuff available through links as well and have live comments based on time stamps through the lecture videos.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would love something like this integrated into VRChat

</comment><comment><USER27> I love it! I've been watching some, but still haven't received an invitation and thus cannot take part in the chatroom :(

</comment><comment><USER28> Any interest in selling/licensing a whitelabel version of this that I could load my own videos into/control access to?

<comment><USER29> I'm working on something like this right now. Shoot me an email if you want to chat: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Love this! :D excited to see where it goes.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good job! Is there a way to engage with other students after the class? Would be nice to ask follow up questions.

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone else getting a 500 error?

</comment><comment><USER33> Click to unmute doesnt do anything on the ipad right now. Awesome work tho!

</comment><comment><USER34> Awesome concept, well implemented! Might use it.

</comment><comment><USER35> What's the end goal?

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice work! :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Received an early look at this through my subscription to Fairpixel's free & open-source logos newsletter: [http://logodust.com/](http://logodust.com/) ... Awesome company

btw the email stated it was for viewing "how to start a startup" lectures, not CS</comment>


Integrating systemctl --user and your Graphical Session - <AUTHOR> https://naftuli.wtf/2017/12/28/systemd-user-environment/ <comment><USER2> The problems with this are the same as with the dbus-update-activation- environment tool, which this just a reinvention of by the way.

There are a whole bunch of environment variables appropriate to a login session that are _not_ appropriate to daemon processes that are running outwith a login session. From the headlined article one can pick quite a number of variables that are at best pointless in, and often outright misleading to and wrong for, daemon programs:

        GIO_LAUNCHED_DESKTOP_FILE_PID=3930
        GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=this-is-deprecated
        LESSCLOSE=/usr/bin/lesspipe %s %s
        LESSOPEN=| /usr/bin/lesspipe %s
        LS_COLORS=rs=0:di=01;34:ln=01;36:mh=00:pi=40;33:so=01;35:do=01;35:bd=40;33;01:cd=40;33;01:or=40;31;01:mi=00:su=37;41:sg=30;43:ca=30;41:tw=30;42:ow=34;42:st=37;44:ex=01;32:*.tar=01;31:*.tgz=01;31:*.arc=01;31:*.arj=01;31:*.taz=01;31:*.lha=01;31:*.lz4=01;31:*.lzh=01;31:*.lzma=01;31:*.tlz=01;31:*.txz=01;31:*.tzo=01;31:*.t7z=01;31:*.zip=01;31:*.z=01;31:*.Z=01;31:*.dz=01;31:*.gz=01;31:*.lrz=01;31:*.lz=01;31:*.lzo=01;31:*.xz=01;31:*.bz2=01;31:*.bz=01;31:*.tbz=01;31:*.tbz2=01;31:*.tz=01;31:*.deb=01;31:*.rpm=01;31:*.jar=01;31:*.war=01;31:*.ear=01;31:*.sar=01;31:*.rar=01;31:*.alz=01;31:*.ace=01;31:*.zoo=01;31:*.cpio=01;31:*.7z=01;31:*.rz=01;31:*.cab=01;31:*.jpg=01;35:*.jpeg=01;35:*.gif=01;35:*.bmp=01;35:*.pbm=01;35:*.pgm=01;35:*.ppm=01;35:*.tga=01;35:*.xbm=01;35:*.xpm=01;35:*.tif=01;35:*.tiff=01;35:*.png=01;35:*.svg=01;35:*.svgz=01;35:*.mng=01;35:*.pcx=01;35:*.mov=01;35:*.mpg=01;35:*.mpeg=01;35:*.m2v=01;35:*.mkv=01;35:*.webm=01;35:*.ogm=01;35:*.mp4=01;35:*.m4v=01;35:*.mp4v=01;35:*.vob=01;35:*.qt=01;35:*.nuv=01;35:*.wmv=01;35:*.asf=01;35:*.rm=01;35:*.rmvb=01;35:*.flc=01;35:*.avi=01;35:*.fli=01;35:*.flv=01;35:*.gl=01;35:*.dl=01;35:*.xcf=01;35:*.xwd=01;35:*.yuv=01;35:*.cgm=01;35:*.emf=01;35:*.ogv=01;35:*.ogx=01;35:*.aac=00;36:*.au=00;36:*.flac=00;36:*.m4a=00;36:*.mid=00;36:*.midi=00;36:*.mka=00;36:*.mp3=00;36:*.mpc=00;36:*.ogg=00;36:*.ra=00;36:*.wav=00;36:*.oga=00;36:*.opus=00;36:*.spx=00;36:*.xspf=00;36:
        POWERLINE_COMMAND=powerline
        PROMPT_COMMAND=__bp_precmd_invoke_cmd; dbus-send --type=method_call --session --dest=org.pantheon.terminal /org/pantheon/terminal org.pantheon.terminal.ProcessFinished string:$PANTHEON_TERMINAL_ID string:"$(history 1 | cut -c 8-)" >/dev/null 2>&1;  __bp_interactive_mode;
        PWD=/home/naftuli
        SHLVL=2
        SSH_AGENT_PID=2095
        TERM=screen-256color
        VTE_VERSION=4205
        XDG_SEAT=seat0
        XDG_SEAT_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Seat0
        XDG_SESSION_ID=c2
        XDG_SESSION_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Session0
        XDG_VTNR=7

There are good reasons that daemons are run with known environments; and there are about four decades of system administrator horror stories of running daemons with things like the old "service" command and getting environment variables from a login session inherited into the service processes, to learn better from. Pushing the entire environment from an arbitrarily selected login session into the environments of services _is a bad idea_. At best, one should push only a carefully selected set of variables.

On Debian with the "new" per-user service management, the Desktop Bus people use dbus-update-activation-environment to push _just three_ environment variables: DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS, DISPLAY, and XAUTHORITY.

Of course, the elephant in the room is server daemons that are written to talk to arbitrary X displays that erroneously demand that they run with a DISPLAY variable already in the environment of the server daemon when it starts. A well-designed daemon arranges to have the DISPLAY information passed in to it. (In Unicode rxvt in its client-server mode, for example, the urxvtc program passes its DISPLAY environment variable in the message that it sends to the urxvtd server.)</comment>


Implementing a partial serial number verification system - <AUTHOR> http://www.brandonstaggs.com/2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/ <comment><USER2> He produces Bible Study software and still has to fight keygen hackers. Even as an atheist I find that slightly sad.

<comment><USER3> Best comment of the day :D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This really seems like a lot of hassle to go through to protect your software. Why bother really? The people who are getting cracked versions of the software aren't going to pay for it, so its not like you're losing a customer to the cracked version.

I've always thought the 'nag screen' software seemed like the best solution- let the user buy a key to turn off the prompts but leave full functionality enabled for non-paying customers. However-throw up a nag screen when commonly used functions are activated. Click the 'Save' button? Throw up a nag screen for a variable amount of time between 5-15 seconds. Long enough for the user to see it and be reminded, but not long enough to really irritate them.

<comment><USER5> >The people who are getting cracked versions of the software aren't going to pay for it, so its not like you're losing a customer to the cracked version.

This is often stated, but is actually not true. There is a really old article where a guy a shareware program such that when it was installed it would randomly choose (with equal probability) whether it should be a fully working version or it should print every 4th page with a registration form, rather than the page the user wanted to print.

His experiment proved that significantly more users paid for the program when it was crippled than when it wasn't (I think it was 100% more, but I am not entirely sure).

So no, people who would otherwise be willing to pirate your program won't do this if you make it difficult enough.

<comment><USER6> That sounds more like a test of trialware vs donationware, which I don't think is exactly the same as someone seeking out and using a cracked version.

I'm sure there are people who would buy a program if they couldn't find a cracked version, but...

1) It has to be enough lost sales to make it worth the effort of protecting the app rather than, say, adding features that would bring in new customers. And you also don't want to implement onerous DRM that would _cost_ you sales.

2) If your app is at all popular, it will get cracked anyway. I'm pretty sure most of the people cracking software are doing so for fun, not profit. And they appreciate a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not implement the keygen using public key cryptography? Wouldn't that eliminate the possibility of a reverse-engineered keygen right off?

<comment><USER8> If a "license file" is acceptable, this works great -- you can use a human- readable text file describing the license (expiration, features, etc.) and sign it inline with PGP. I've seen Citrix XenServer use this approach, for example. However, even just the signature is really too big to use as a serial number replacement. ECC might work.

<comment><USER9> If you sell the software digitally the size of the "serial number" isn't a problem.

Just put it on a web page (and in an email, for later use) and have the user copy-paste it. Or even better, do what patio11 is doing: when the user clicks "Buy software" in the app, add a magic number to the URL you send the user to and have the software poll the server to see if the user has paid yet.

Also: poll the clipboard to see if the user has copied a valid serial key, to save the user the hassle of pasting it in the correct input box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A question to those who are more experienced than me:

I know that crackers are a big problem in the case of 'consumer software' e.g. games, simple utilities. My assumption is that this is not a problem in case of software specifically created for small and medium-sized companies. So currently I think I will not build any copyright protection into the software I am creating right now. I assume that companies (at least in the 'developed countires') mostly play fair (-> behave according to the license of the software). Is my assumption right?

<comment><USER11> I think it depends on how expensive your software is, and who makes the 'decision'.

I've seen thousands of WinZip installs go unlicensed for years.

I doubt anybody pirates Oracle for business use though.

<comment><USER12> Same experience here, but consider this:

WinZip will work forever without being licensed. Oracle makes you buy a new license for every core.

Part of it might be the cost of the software, but pirating Oracle is also much harder than pirating WinZip.

<comment><USER13> Actually Corel just changed winzip to stop working after 60 days and saw a sales increase of 20%.

<comment><USER11> I always wondered how they made any money - then I did some work for the US DoD. Nearly every desktop has a licensed copy of WinZip! My new firm has WinZip licenses as well - while Windows can do zip files natively now, it still cannot (as far as I know?) encrypt them natively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't the checksum allow the cracker to check if a key is "real" even if he only can reverse engineer part of it?

Or at the very minimum the checksum reduces the number of possible keys that still work with the checked portions, so the cracker can release a series of keys and tell the user to keep trying them.

<comment><USER15> Cracker might find working key from known checksum, but that would give only one key, and if you have checksum, you probably have rest of the key too.

Cracker couldn't create keys from checksum algorithm alone, because random checksummed data would pass only first checksum check, but not additional validation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't see how automatic, silent updates are any better than "phoning home" for key validation. The partial verification system requires constant updates to be any more useful than a verification of the entire key, and if these updates are optional, the illicit users will just opt out of updating.

Presumably it's also possible to run out of new parts of the key to check, at which point anyone who has been keeping track will have enough information to build a full generator.

<comment><USER17> I think he is speaking about "silently updating" the downloadable installer that is in the web page, not about "silently updating" the installed version in the user's computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This solution seems a good compromise between the security provided and the inconvenience. The inconvenience is simply entering a license key when you install or reinstall. This is key -- more restrictive DRM solutions with phoning home and so on are a serious inconvenience.

The security is good enough that someone looking for you software probably won't be able to find a working license key or keygen.</comment>


Knowledge Navigator by Apple Computer (1987) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc <comment><USER2> Really nothing new but always fun to notice than years after years this video become even more relevant and ridiculously more accurate than most forecast of the 1980's.

</comment><comment><USER3> The predecessor of "Information at your Fingertip" vision, MS Bob, and various software agents (Siri, Watson, GoogleNow, Cortana, etc).

</comment><comment><USER4> An ancestor of Wikipedia made with HyperCard. Amazing.

<comment><USER5> Amazing is discovering how much of the web paradigms were already running at Xerox PARC workstations and how much we still miss in terms of the whole experience.</comment></comment>


Bootstrapped To $1 Mil In 1 Year By Selling Tires? - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/lou-doctor-biketiresdirect-interview/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the transcript: Lou: We basically had a group of cheapskates that were buying tires from a bike shop in the U.K. And then one day we got a box of tires that were the wrong color and when I went to the post office to send them back to England the guy wanted $50 to ship the box. I said to myself, "There's got to be a better way." So I handed the box of tires to my 12 year old son and I said, "Nate, sell these on eBay and I have $300 tied up in the box. You can keep anything you make above that." And that was almost ten years ago. He sold the box of ten, eventually, for $350, made $50, he was 12 years old at the time, and said, "Dad, next time you're ordering tires, order me ten more too." And said, "All right.'

So then 20 tires became 50, became 100, became 500, and eventually we had 18 wheelers pulling up into our driveway dropping off pallets of bicycle tires. And my two kids at the time by then were 13 and 11, they shipped 10,000 orders from the parking space in my garage, a million dollars worth of product in the first year.

Andrew: So, this sounds like such a beautiful story, I'm wondering if, well, was it just that simple or was there maybe an intention to sell this . . . well, you tell me. I see that smiling, there's some recognition in what I'm saying.

Lou: I think there was a point at which my wife and I had a conversation about my use of child labor in doing order fulfillment and she felt like maybe we should scale the growth back a bit, it was getting a bit out of control. And as an entrepreneur that was just not something I could relate to. It's like, "Hey, if people want to buy the product and we can buy it and we can sell it at a profit, we have to do more.'

So we eventually got to the point where my wife walked into the garage one morning at about 7:00 a.m. and my 11 year old was in tears. And when she asked him what was the problem he, in tears, said, "We're not going to be able to ship all the orders before we have to leave for school." And she walked into the house and said, "This has got to get out of the garage." And so we eventually moved the inventory up to Portland, Oregon. We were in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, at the time and we moved the business up to Portland, Oregon. There was no sales tax in Oregon. We reincorporated and started doing business out of Portland.</comment>


Redox is Serious - <AUTHOR> http://dictator.redox-os.org/index.php?controller=post&action=view&id_post=17 <comment><USER2> More active discussion on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3sm4oq/redox_is_serio...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3sm4oq/redox_is_serious/)</comment>


The Girl Who Turned to Bone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-mystery-of-the-second-skeleton/309305/ <comment><USER3> This is a must-read, a very interesting article about a very terrible disease. Dr. Kaplan is a professor at UPenn where I'm a Bioengineering major. He gave a lecture to one of my classes about FOP and it was so inspiring to see how much progress he has made on a disease with only a handful of cases that was supposed to be impossible to cure. Imagine trying to cure a muscular disease where you can't even biopsy the muscle of your patients! Dr. Kaplan is an amazing man I hope he kills FOP in his lifetime.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, and fascinating. To me, an article like this is better than any action novel. Found myself on the edge of my seat trying to figure out how far he'd managed to get! I think it's a perfect look at how building on other people's science is how we really get things done. What if he'd overlooked that paper that unlocked everything for him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone interested, a link to photos of Harry Eastlack's skeleton:

[http://raregeneticdisorder.blogspot.com/2012/09/fop- skeleton...](http://raregeneticdisorder.blogspot.com/2012/09/fop- skeleton.html)

Wonderful article, as expected from Carl Zimmer, who does such a great job of exploring biological mysteries like this.

<comment><USER6> Wow

This snipped sums it better: "To be displayed in human form, skeletons have to be re-articulated or pieced back together with fine wires and glue. As a result of the bridges of bone that formed from FOP flare-ups, Harry Eastlack's skeleton is almost completely fused into one piece, which proved little challenge for the articulator's craft"

<comment><USER7> How does the articulator go from body -> skeleton when preparing them for display? Is part of the job to (for example), scoop out the brain?

<comment><USER8> I think basically, the family agrees to an autopsy and there is a branch of medicine, pathology, which specializes in obtaining and preparing tissue samples, primarily for investigation into the causes, progression, and severity of disease. They are the ones that "scoop out the brain" then mount them on slides, stain, etc. With whole skeletons, I'm not sure - usually after autopsy, the "parts" are either put back into the body or otherwise interred in a container. I think maybe the family arranges something w/ the embalmer to remove the muscle and connnective tissue from the skeleton.

<comment><USER6> I think yes, the process is more or less this, really

After tissue is removed and preserved (samples), then in this case I believe the removal of soft tissue is done chemically, probably with a caustic substance.

Yes, this is as far as I go imagining this. Or maybe there are biological means as well

<comment><USER9> I saw a show where people make skeleton models and they used a type of bug to clean off the bones. Using certain chemicals would make the bones rubbery, whereas the bugs would leave a perfectly clean bone.

<comment><USER10> Dirty Jobs?

[http://www.episodeguide.us/dirty-jobs/skull- cleaner/episode/...](http://www.episodeguide.us/dirty-jobs/skull- cleaner/episode/814614/summary.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a fantastic article that is extremely well written and does an excellent job of conveying the science. I think one of the more interesting side-effects of cheap DNA sequencing tech is that we're starting to find out that while any individual rare disease is rare, in aggregate, rare diseases are actually quite common. This also means that many common diseases (especially ones whose causes have eluded researchers) may actually be a constellation of rare diseases that look the same from our 20,000 foot view.

Fortunately, cancer is one such disease and it has the advantage of a healthy funding stream plus significant public mindshare. I suspect many of the techniques we are just starting to use to discover the causes of cancer and personalize therapy will start to be applied to rare diseases. These diseases will effectively get to capitalize on all the "infrastructure" that we've been working on without having to bear the cost burden of the inevitable 10's of thousands of dead ends that come with this kind of work.

<comment><USER12> To expand on your comment "rare diseases are actually quite common", I was struck by this in the article:

        More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans

That's almost 10% of Americans! I suppose this shouldn't have been surprising given the Birthday Paradox [1], but the ~1/10 statistic puts things into perspective for me.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem>

<comment><USER13> That means most of them must be mild. Because, clearly, 10% of Americans don't have something as serious as FOP. There's probably a long tail of increasingly rare and increasingly mild diseases, so that the cutoff is arbitrary.

<comment><USER14> Mild, or self-limiting or otherwise transitory. I know (closely) three people in two different countries who have a 15/100,000 disease that is self- limiting.

<comment><USER13> It wouldn't be very surprising to learn that every single person has some kind of genetic defect -- perhaps dozens -- but usually the compensatory mechanisms are strong enough to mask them, at least while you're young and strong overall. It makes a lot of sense that health should be a spectrum or a kind of dynamic equilibrium, rather than a binary on-off condition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know someone with FOP, and this pretty much fits his experience. His is a mild case, but he carries crutches because his knee sometimes locks from one of his attacks -- muscle sprain in childhood -- and he needs its support. He's also talked about the pain going to the doctors becomes at times, because pretty much everything is handled by specialists, or with their consultation, and he just wants to get on with life.

One of the things that this article doesn't touch on, though, is the difficulty in getting treatment and effective care for comorbid diseases. Because these diseases, especially things like FOP, can manifest in odd ways, they tend to lump all of the other abnormalities together, even if the other symptoms run completely counter to what the disease does to others. So, standard diagnostic batteries for the other diseases aren't run, even if such a diagnostic would be useful in managing body issues that can and do come up. Thankfully, though, he's managed to get a decent amount of day-to-day coping skills with his other disease (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) from the internet. It still would be nice for him to get a firm diagnostic, so that interactions and symptoms could better be monitored.

<comment><USER16> The fact that the subject of the OP was diagnosed fairly quickly struck me; more often than not, as you mention, rare diseases are misdiagnosed or completely missed. I've often wondered if someone hasn't done a long term statistical analysis of the probability of seeing rare diseases. It's one thing to think you have a rare disease (and is statistically very unlikely), but if you are a doctor seeing already self-selected ill subjects, wouldn't that change the probabilities significantly? I know modern medicine is quite mentally taxing, and most doctors are trained to be conservative, but maybe just emphasizing the fact that the statistics are different for the population of people seeing doctors might go a long ways to convince doctors not to automatically lump illnesses into the most common categories.

That, and making the tests cheaper (like all of them, virtually zero cost; who wouldn't just throw every test they can think of at a problem if the tests were dirt cheap).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A fascinating, excellently written article; a prime example of high-quality, long-form writing I enjoy reading.

A very human story that includes one of the most intriguing forms of "hacking" I know of--working to understand and manipulate our complex biology to improve human life.

It is fascinating the ways in which studying rare diseases leads to discovering more information about how our bodies work under normal conditions --discovery that may not have been realized otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER18> What amazed me is that Jeanne Peeper was able to essentially do a pre-internet Kickstarter and raise funds for Kaplan to perform his research, hold a conference, and hire a geneticist.

With the power of the internet and how easy it is to set up a phpBB forum, sufferers of rare diseases don't have to live in isolation any more.

<comment><USER19> Yea - I had the same thoughts. Do you know if there are Kickstarter like nonprofits dedicated to raising money this way for rare diseases?

<comment><USER8> I think there is a scientific "kickstarter"-like startup that made the rounds here on HN a while back, though - maybe that could fit the bill? the name escapes me at the moment though.

<comment><USER20> Probably Microryza: <http://microryza.com>

<comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing. I know YC invested in Watsi (<https://watsi.org/>) but this is more of what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> See also "The Human Mannequin" about a young woman with FOP who decides to work in the fashion industry.

(<http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-human-mannequin/4od>)

([http://www.atvtoday.co.uk/9987-fibrodysplasia-ossificans- pro...](http://www.atvtoday.co.uk/9987-fibrodysplasia-ossificans-progressiva- and-fashion/))

([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/louise- wedderburn-t...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/louise-wedderburn- the-human-mannequin-raises-awareness-extremely-rare-condition_n_2058612.html))

</comment><comment><USER22> > A rare disease is defined as any condition affecting fewer than 200,000 > patients in the United States. More than 7,000 such diseases exist, > afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans.

Can that really be true? 1 in 10 Americans has a rare disease?

<comment><USER23> I haven't been able to find a good source, but here's what the NCBI says: "In part because data on many conditions are limited to case reports or special population studies, no well-supported estimate exists for the number of people collectively affected by rare diseases. A 1989 government report stated that 10 million to 20 million Americans had a rare condition (NCOD, 1989); the corresponding estimates in 2009 range from 25 million to 30 million (see, e.g., ORDR, 2009). The estimates were not accompanied by analyses or substantive citation of sources." <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56184/>

The links in the footnotes lead to 404s, but this might be what they're referring to: [http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/asp/resources/ord_brochure....](http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/asp/resources/ord_brochure.html) It doesn't cite sources though and it calls it an estimate. It also says disease or condition, so I'm guessing it includes minor stuff that most people wouldn't really consider a disease. For example, my friend and her mom both have weird ridges on their thumbnails; definitely rare but it doesn't affect their health. Things like that are probably included in the estimate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I actually find this case far more intriguing. Probably 1 of 3 in the world

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

</comment><comment><USER25> I know this is a stupid question, but the article states there are more than 7000 (but presumably less than 8000) diseases effecting 1 in 200000 or fewer, with 25-30 million suffers in the USA.

With a population of 300 000 000, * 7000 / 200 000, shouldn't that be about 10 million?

<comment><USER26> You misread it - it says a rare disease is a condition affecting _fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States._ , not _1 in 200,000 or fewer_.

<comment><USER25> I was providing the largest estimate, fewer than 200 000 means less than 10 million, which is even further from the articles 25-30 million.

<comment><USER27> You misread it - it says a rare disease is a condition affecting fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States., not 1 in 200,000 or fewer (in other words: those rare diseases aren't that rare; according to this definition, 1 in 1,500 people can suffer from a rare disease)

So, the math should be 7,000 rare diseases times at most 200,000 sufferers per rare disease = at most 1,400,000,000 sufferers for all rare diseases combined. The actual number will be way lower because many of those 7,000 will be much rarer, because some people may have more than one rare disease and because there simply aren't that many people in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From farther down in the article: "'I've seen 700 patients with FOP around the world, and it's clear that there's a lot of different ways to divide patients,' Kaplan said. One identical twin might be only mildly affected, while the other would be trapped in a wheelchair. Some patients developed a frenzy of bones as children, and then inexplicably stopped. 'I've seen it go quiet for years and years.'"

Wow. That's an important clinical clue, that discordance between identical twins. That suggests that the disease is not best described by a single-gene mutation, strong expressivity

[http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/same-genetic- mutati...](http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/same-genetic-mutation- different-genetic-disease-phenotype-938)

simple Mendelian model. And that means that there is something else going on in the clinical expression of the disease besides the gene mutation, which might provide some traction for effective treatment.

The last part of the article sums up some interesting ways that insights from rare disease research can help physicians better understand human physiology and perhaps come up with ways to treat more common diseases. A very interesting read.

<comment><USER29> It could also be difference in circumstance. Note that the bone growth occurs as a response to muscle damage, so a more active child who suffers a higher incidence of standard bumps and bruises would be more likely to have more ossification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some closeups of the condition: [http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/fibrodysplasia%20ossificans%20p...](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/fibrodysplasia%20ossificans%20progressiva)

</comment><comment><USER31> How I disable the annoying popup that prevents me from reading the article at all on a Android?

<comment><USER32> Perhaps the only permanent fix for such things might be to email the magazine's editor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me, one of the most important things to take away from this story is the possible link to osteoporosis (& a cure for it, although not directly stated). Looking into a disease that affects almost no one might help find a cure for a different one that affects one in ten people.

This is why we must also fund the study of "pure science" - of studying things purely for the sake of learning, with no idea ahead of time if we will learn anything "of value" or not.

Because there is so much that we don't understand yet, that it is impossible to study the "why" of anything that exists in the world without stumbling across something of more practical value.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh yeah. A classmate at my high school had FOP. I never thought the disease would garner this much attention from the masses.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow. See also "Tupac Shakur and the End of the World", a short story about a similar condition, caused by a latent virus and triggered by minor injuries. Everyone dies.

I hadn't realised when I read it that there was a real-world equivalent ...

[http://futurismic.com/2010/03/01/new-fiction-tupac-shakur- an...](http://futurismic.com/2010/03/01/new-fiction-tupac-shakur-and-the-end- of-the-world-by/)

by Sandra McDonald

</comment><comment><USER36> _The Mayo doctors didn't tell Peeper's parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long._

It's unclear from the article how much was known yet, but if they knew the growths could be triggered by bruises and other insults, I sure as hell would've wanted to be told.

</comment><comment><USER37> One of the most interesting articles I've ever read. Nice research too.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love Carl Zimmer. Great article, it was super interesting.

</comment><comment><USER39> No, no, no. Don't like. Don't want. Why does mother nature keeps coming with shit like this? :(

<comment><USER40> It's actually impressive, that's a single mutation which causes bruises to heal as bone instead of muscle.

<comment><USER41> Histidine to arginine. CAT becomes CGT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Found it fascinating. At the same time so upsetting that I am unable to completely read it all. Will come back to it later.

Time to Google if this is 'normal' Starts to Google. Does anyone else feel this way about this and other things?

<comment><USER42> Would be nice to know why I'm being down voted for having an opinion on an article I'm not used to reading that I deem as being quite emotionally upsetting.

Are other people devoid of emotion and enjoying reading it?

<comment><USER43> It's possible you're getting downvoted because of the way you phrased your post.

>> At the same time so upsetting that I am unable to completely read it all.

At first I interpreted this as, "[it is] so upsetting [because] I am unable to read it all". It makes it sound like you're complaining that the page didn't load all the way, or something. I had to read it a few times to understand what you meant. It could have been less ambiguous worded as, "At the same time, I am unable to completely read it all because it's so upsetting". If a reader misinterprets this sentence, the rest of the post becomes incomprehensible.

>> Time to Google if this is 'normal'

"this" is a bit vague here. What do you want to know is normal? Being upset by articles in general? Being upset by articles specifically about rare diseases? Being upset by this specific article?

>> Starts to Google.

Narration is the kind of thing I'd expect to see in a chat room, but not HN. It makes your tone much less formal, and some might see that as inappropriately flippant for a serious topic.

>> Does anyone else feel this way about this and other things?

"about this" is vague, again. The "and other things" clause makes this question so broad that it becomes tautological. "Does anyone else feel [upset] about [things that are upsetting]?"

<comment><USER42> Thank you for explaining how you read my comment.

I didn't mean anything around the page loading, just that simply was interested if people found the story of the girl's experiences heavy to read on an emotional level. Thus I was interested if I am emotionally weak dealing with this compared to others, why that is and if it's normal to be so shocked by something.

Perhaps I should just not have said anything :)

<comment><USER44> Someone is deleting random words from your posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm half sorry, but this article is great example why eugenics is wrong and why empathy and weird mutations trump it every day.

<comment><USER46> It shows the value of rare genetic disorders for biological and medical research, but I'm not sure it speaks for or against eugenics, it's a complex question...

Look at it from the point of view of an eugenics proponent: this disease is a good example of a genetic condition that you don't want spreading in future generations. Once we have treatments for the 7000 rare diseases mentioned in the article, we will have removed the evolutionary pressure that was keeping these diseases rare. Some eugenics supporters are afraid we are heading towards a society where everybody has to undergo a dozen lifelong treatments due to medicine effectively undermining the process of natural selection.

I can also imagine parents suffering from this disease, not wanting to pass it on to their children. So people affected might strongly disagree with you...

<comment><USER47> >Some eugenics supporters are afraid we are heading towards a society where everybody has to undergo a dozen lifelong treatments due to medicine effectively undermining the process of natural selection.

So if you get cancer and there is a cure for it, you won't forego treatment to help natural selection work? What type of twisted logic is that?

<comment><USER46> The eugenic view I was referring to is not saying

 _People should not be treated because it would spoil the gene pool_

but rather

 _We certainly want to treat diseases, but this will spoil the gene pool unless we prevent the spread of bad genes_

Solutions to prevent the spread of bad genes range from quite evil (forced sterilization has been used extensively before WWII but I have never heard of something as bad as denying treatment) to slightly controversial, e.g. screening of embryos [1].

By the way, I have just stumbled on the Wikipedia page on dysgenics [2], which is more specifically what this argument is about.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnos...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnosis)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics>

<comment><USER47> Thank you for your time and effort to explain this.

Well, honestly, this smells national socialism from a mile.

Which genes are bad? Is it really that genes are bad? What about their mutations?

I have (not really suffer) ehlers-danlos type 2. Which is genetic disorder. Some people with it - like me - are lucky and have it really benign. It doesn't really affect my life in any way. It doesn't affect lifespan in my case. Then there are some others - with exact same gene mutations - who suffer constant pain to the point they would like to die (literally). Not to mention constant medical emergencies.

Now, I have almost no problems because of eds. And one benefit - apparently I have lower risk of colon cancer. (there is more bile in the system which is laxative which helps preventing colon cancer, plus the colon is built differently, in my case causing "stuff" to move quicker). So, how would you know my gene mutation is good or bad?

And how do you know that if you change it, something else won't be totally messed up instead? There is always the problem of unintended consequences.

Not to mention that once you would open this pandora box, you'd also need to deal with prospect parents demanding "gene therapy" for their future kid because of a gene _they_ think is bad. Like with cosmetic surgeries. People with gene A have higher risk of being short, so please doctor, please, let's "fix" that. Our boy can't be short! Can't have red hair! Can't have 40% higher risk of being depressed or obese too.

And here we go, all blond, tall, beautiful.

Wouldn't you agree?

<comment><USER46> Totally! I think your example is a good illustration of the difficult questions we will face as genetic screening becomes more and more practical and affordable, thanks a lot for sharing. (I can't help but wonder what you would say to a doctor that tells you, "So do you want me to press this little button to make sure your children won't have the same condition?")

However, it might also be that in the long term, the quality of the gene pool objectively deteriorates. Taking it to the extreme, imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance... I guess this is also something we should consider.

<comment><USER47> >imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance

I think that way before that happens we'll have something like "virtual", "immortal" "bodies".

In other words I think that before we need all that medical care the original William Gibson's idea that we'll all end up stored somewhere in a computer memory connected to a network will happen. No body or genes really needed - <USER2> just "sit" in RAM, interact with others via network and are - immortal. Ray Kurzweil says it may even happen in our lifetimes. Heard Stephen Hawking mentioning something similar. Reaching point that we can live forever and don't really need our body for that. Or our body can be strengthened by armor, hardware of various types, to be much better and advanced than our bodies are.

This reminds me a little bit the dilema local Government in Paris had in 1890s -- what we'll do with all the horse dung if the number of horses grows at the current rate? And then cars came along and it was all irrelevant.

Seems to me it's also the same with depopulation. Who cares if there will be 20 billion of us in 50 years if we finally start colonizing other planets and the Moon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I seriously thought this article was about converting to backBONE.js</comment>


Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/30/gnip-20-launches-with-a-business-model/ <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone else here think GNIP has SERIOUS potential. The way to go for web services is real time updates. If GNIP is the central hub for that, the API producers (ie- twitter) win big time and the consumers (ie- startups who want to use twitter api) win. I'd easily pay for this.

<comment><USER2> I completely agree. The biggest hole I've found so far is they don't have a list of current providers... am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Here ya go. Its under the API link on the top of the homepage.

<http://groups.google.com/group/gnip-community/web/publishers>

<comment><USER2> Ah, cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Concepts/Frameworks/Components used at Gnip (pulled from job posting)

        * Network Attached Memory (TerraCotta)
        * Clusters
        * Load Balancers (nginx)
        * Queuing Frameworks (SQS, ActiveMQ)
        * Amazon Web Services (Ec2, S3)
        * Polling
        * Publish/Subscribe communication models

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how long will their current mainpage title stay intact... that's got to turn off some people, while I assume attract some others.

</comment><comment><USER6> Agreed with all of the above comments completely. When I first was linked to it, it flattened me with how much sense it makes. Thinking about the amount of hours saved worldwide if gnip fulfills it's potential is mind boggling.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gnip sounds like it could enable some cool things for the near future, but it's single-point-of-failure nature makes me nervous.

</comment><comment><USER3> I fraking LOVE gnip. This is the first solid new biz that I've seen really enter the market in a while. A core, solid kind of business that just fundamentally makes sense. They have made the process of getting data for web apps SO easy its just crazy. Love it, love it.</comment>


Show HN: Top forty hottest songs everyday from Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://topforty.it

<comment><USER2> Really nice work. While I know you guys are going for the top 40 songs, but it would be even more awesome if there was more selection - perhaps if I kept scrolling down, it would load even more songs ranked 41, 42 and so on.

One convenient addition could also be a big search box at the top that gives me access to "archives", so that I can still listen to the older songs even when they go out of the top 40 list.

I love the UI!

<comment><USER3> Agreed - the UI is pretty amazing!

I especially like how the video plays in the header while rest of the page selection remains the same. This way, I can go back and play my #2 choice after my #1 choice has finished without having to look for it, I already know where the #2 choice is.

Youtube is horrible at this. If you don't make a playlist, you have to click back and hope it still recommends the same videos as the last time you were on that page.

<comment><USER4> Can you add an option for scrolling through songs with the [left] & [right] arrow keys + make [Esc] to close the YouTube window, kind of like what Facebook does with the photo theater viewer

<comment><AUTHOR> the left and right buttons already work actually, and if you press space you can pause the music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you aggregate the number of times a song is shared/mentioned on Twitter each day?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using Twitter's Streaming API and go through tweets as they come in. Then we figure out the song/artist information and then aggregate that at the end of each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Now just publish it as an Android app and we are good to go.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really neat. Potentially a huge time suck. Well done.

<comment><USER7> I like it as it doesn't give you too many things to do on the site (where I find the real distraction comes from) and just does things for me and looks good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. I'm listening to it right now. But how much variation is there from day to day? Like if I go back tomorrow, will the songs all be the same? In a week?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. So far most of the top songs just shuffle between each other. New songs start appearing towards the bottom of the list. Maybe a "random" feature could help with this?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, a random feature would be nice to provide some variety. And maybe a "trending" or "movers and shakers" list for songs that aren't necessarily in the top 40 but are still getting buzz on Twitter.

<comment><USER7> I second this. The only downside to this that I see is that it would be less mainstream music. Why this is bad is mainstream music (although not always that great) targets what most people would like. This would mean that it is unlikely that there would be the odd song that would be really jarring to someone. I figure this is a bad thing as you want something for people to listen to in the background. I cannot imagine that this is really meant as a music discovery tool as it is meant to be the top 40 most mentioned things.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nothing Fails Like Success - <AUTHOR> https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/ <comment><USER2> The truly scary idea is that there's no conspiracy of capital even.

What if the advertising dollars aren't evil, what if we can't blame them?

What if the problem is that garbage and trash fires are just what people want, and the ad dollars just follow the success?

I like the idea that there's some kind of... imbalance? mis-structure to blame? That it's somebody's fault or the system is wrong somehow.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty naive to try and think that people are not the issue. They are. Advertising simply exploits the flaw.

<comment> throwaway-571 Advertising is people too. It's people all the way down.

We decided child labor was morally unacceptable, so why not advertising?

<comment><USER3> Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort perception.

<comment><USER4> I think you missed his point. What I heard him saying is that in the past, other commonly accepted practices were eventually deemed unacceptable and ended. There's no reason the currently accepted practices of the advertising industry can't follow a similar trajectory.

<comment><USER3> No, I got that. My point is that child labor is a bit too extreme for comparisons sake.

Smoking and the tobacco industry would be more inline with advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, but it probably works the opposite way. Twitter et al makes celebrities out of people who seek moral outrage. In this way they overplay their righteousness, but the effect is exactly the same as amplifying the offending message itself: more ad revenue. Interesting hack of our society's moral norms.

I'm not saying it's wrong to be offended, but if you are, somebody's probably getting paid for it.

<comment><USER6> fine display of mental gymnastics

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > ...the fact is, hate speech is profitable. It's killing our society and our > planet...

Source? Hate speech has been part of every major society since at least the time of the Egyptians. The opposite could easily be true. Hate speech might be an integral part of society. Its also not very profitable. That's why companies police their own content. No reasonable company wants their advertisement associated with the Klan. As for hate speech's effect on the planet -- I don't think the Earth cares who hates who.

<comment><USER8> By a broader definition it makes sense. People insulting and mocking each other, talking past other. Even the president.. Did we used to do that IRL in the 70's and 80's?

<comment><USER9> Humans used to resort to physical violence as well as name calling. Rome had a series of senators brutally murdered in session, even before Cesar. Andrew Jackson used to physically attack opponents. The whole Aaron Burr story.

My unsupport theory is that we've pacified to the point where anyone can say anything without getting beat up or killed, which allows people to push the envelope.

I'm not suggesting we should go back to violence, but i think the lack of direct violence in a person-to-person setting have enabled more and more wild speech.

<comment><USER10> It may not be the pain of violence that was more effective a deterrent than the pain of social ostracism, which bubbles and anonymity prevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I agree with the general sentiment of the author (and the same general message comes up quite often on HN), I have two issues with the article:

1) It seems to equate "investors" with "VCs", who need big returns or quick losses to make their overall portfolio numbers work. Angel investors don't necessarily fall into this category, nor do more traditional funding sources. Thus, I think the expressed opinion should more be that blindly chasing VC money to fund a business that can't actually turn a legitimate profit on its own is bad, rather than that taking investor money in general is bad.

2) There's an implicit challenge briefly touched on at the very end of the article. If you have a project of love that gets popular quickly, it could literally bankrupt you if you tried to keep it alive on your own. Scaled hosting services aren't free, nor are community support, requested new features, compatibility updates, API costs, etc. etc. It's entirely possible that you could start a side project and then have to shut it down when it starts getting traction because keeping it alive and not-shitty would take more time than it's worth if you're not going to turn it into a venture-funded business.

<comment><USER12> RE 2), I think the article pretty clearly implies your project of love should pay its own costs. Once your users pay more than they cost you, scaling problem disappears - in fact, economies of scale are your friend here.

<comment><USER11> I didn't read that implication at all. Many projects of love are free with no revenue model at all, or maybe some random ads to offset costs (not cover them), otherwise it's unlikely people would even start using it in the first place. Going from that to a paid/subsidized model strong enough to cover actual development, hosting, etc. is a tall order.

<comment><USER4> > Many projects of love are free with no revenue model at all

Yes. I myself have several different ongoing projects. Some of them are in no way intended to be businesses and intentionally have no revenue model at all. Those are free for everyone and will always be (at least until/unless I tire of them and pass them along to someone else).

Others are intended to generate some sort of revenue -- with a couple, I only want them to cover their own costs, with others, I want to see them make a profit. Those are not free.

There is room for both types of project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Enjoyable read.

I don't feel like anyone ever addresses the fact that the initial web was modeled after academia, and yet most people were really just looking for a place to share their identity. The (free) companies stepped in to make the web accessible to them.

We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be and yet most people I know have shuttered their accounts in the negative nether regions of the internet. Facebook is a ghost town. Twitter was one presidential election from going under. Instagram is thriving because there's little direct communication (or hate communication).

And things are starting to happen again for the decentralized web. People are blogging again on their own sites (including ditching medium). Github has been a boon for collaboration and now is starting to help open science. New social media platforms are popping up too (e.g. Mastadon).

how will it shake out? no clue... but I do think that it will shake out for the better.

<comment><USER14> _> We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be_

Most users enjoyed the web in 200X. It wasn't a broken promise. It worked. Then there was a concerted Web 2.0 campaign[1] that pushed in the direction of "harnessing the collective intelligence". Well, Twitter is what "collective intelligence" looks like in real life.

[1] Remember this? [https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is- web-20.ht...](https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This editorial makes sense: once a company takes outside investment that demands outsized returns not in 10 years, but tomorrow, founders and employees will feel pressure to take larger risks and act in ways that might not be moral or ethical. VC-backing is definitely a factor in fraud, anti-competitive tactics, and unethical behavior. But what's the alternative to VC-backing? Doesn't seem possible for everything to be bootstrapped.

<comment> vincent-toups How about we all just chill? We don't all need to be tech billionaires.

Like: just don't start a startup.

<comment><USER4> Or do a startup, but not with the intention of it making you a billionaire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like it'd be possible to quantify what % of views derive from enflaming content. A few starting points we could look at, # of people banned and reach of said content, auction price of ad inventory that is temporally or visually adjacent to inflammatory speech, etc. It wouldn't be an exact science, but curious if it's 10% or 70%.

I fundamentally agree that ad-driven revenue models have perverted many business models for content-driven sites (UGC or publishing). Many of the examples are publisher driven, are there any market examples of (perhaps small) UGC content sites that don't rely on either selling personal information, or an ad-driven model?

</comment><comment><USER14> _> "You can cloak this basic economic trade-off in fifty layers of bullshit—say you believe in freedom of speech, or that the antidote to bad speech is more speech—but the fact is, hate speech is profitable."_

May I point out that this happens to be a major talking point of some big media outlets right now? The same outlets, BTW, that mindlessly cheered on Facebook/Twitter/etc. as late as 2013.

</comment><comment><USER17> lost me at hate speech is killing our planet

<comment><USER18> How much climate denialism would you estimate is rooted in little more than a hatred for "globalists" and "the elite"? E.g., [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theory)</comment></comment>


Copy and Pasta - <AUTHOR> https://taekim.tech/blog/24K81b4LzQZMdE9ERaZw3X <comment><USER2> > Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a > fruit salad.

Knowledge is knowing repeating your self causes a maintenance burden, wisdom is repeating yourself judiciously.</comment>


Open-Source Processor Core Ready for IoT - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329327 <comment><USER3> There is a relevant comment on the article, reproducing here in case it gets edited out:

"Hi DigitalEngineer,

I am a member of the PULP group as a researcher in both University of Bologna and ETH Zurich.

You are right that the tool chain and the multi-core platform have not been released in the open yet. However, we are working hard toward releasing both of them - we never intended PULPino to be the "final" step in open-sourcing the PULP platform, but merely the first step. Eventually, our plan is to release the whole platform, save of course for IPs that depend on private agreements between ETHand/or University of Bologna and other parties.

For several reasons our RISC-V toolchain could not be open-sourced together with PULPino. I cannot give a definite date, but we should be able to solve most problems related with it relatively soon, and then it will be open- sourced immediately.

For a public release of the multi-core platform (which is one of our main objectives - hence the name PULP that stands for Parallel Ultra-Low Power Platform), there will be need of a bit more time. We want this to be well polished and ready. However, parties interested in collaborating can already contact us privately (e.g. via the contacts on our website [http://pulp- platform.org](http://pulp-platform.org)).

Hope this solves some of your doubts!"

</comment><comment><USER4> Key points

\- RISC-V implementation

"The PULP quad-core IC was subject of a tape-out in 28nm from Globalfoundries in November 2015 while the first PULPino implementation (called Imperio) taped out in January 2016 in 65nm CMOS from UMC. The PULPino platform is available for RTL simulation, for FPGA and SoC . It has full debug support on all targets and includes a port of FreeRTOS. Operating at a clock frequency of 400MHz and 1.2V the chip consumes 32.8mW."

License is this:

"SOLDERPAD HARDWARE LICENSE version 0.51

This license is based closely on the Apache License Version 2.0, but is not approved or endorsed by the Apache Foundation."

See [https://github.com/pulp-platform/pulpino](https://github.com/pulp- platform/pulpino)

Apparently it has enough features to run FreeRTOS, but I don't think it comes with an MMU to run anything beefier. It's a microcontroller. However, there's nothing stopping someone trying to build a better SoC around it..

<comment><USER5> RISC-V protected mode is still being worked out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is a slide deck that goes into greater detail on the architecture. Speaks more to design choices and PULP project goals:

[http://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wed1315-PULP- ris...](http://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wed1315-PULP- riscv3_noanim.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how far are we from being able to produce a completely open-source laptop with an open source CPU core? Quite far, it seems, judging by the facts that this is still in development, and protected mode is still being figured out. 5 years, maybe?

<comment><AUTHOR> The lowRISC team ([http://www.lowrisc.org/](http://www.lowrisc.org/)) aims to develop a Linux capable open source SoC based on RISC-V. They want to use the PULPino RI5CY for their minion cores.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The PULP team added a release plan how they proceed with open source: [http://www.pulp-platform.org/release-plan/](http://www.pulp- platform.org/release-plan/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Usable in Libreboot to get around some of the issues they've had with binary blobs?

<comment><USER9> libreboot is a BIOS/firmware replacement, and works only on x86 and ARM.

The chip in this article is a microcontroller, not a full-on application processor. Seems like libreboot would be senseless on a platform such as this.

I don't really understand the connection, please explain what you mean?

<comment><USER10> coreboot (that libreboot is built upon) also supports MIPS, RISC-V, and has ongoing development for Power8. More platforms can certainly be supported.

This is relevant in this case because the chip in question is also RISC-V based...

<comment><USER8> As I said to the parent poster, my knowledge of electronics is atrocious - <USER2> does this mean that the chip could be used as a BIOS replacement?

If not, then I guess I start to wonder what prevents someone from designing such a chip - there seems to be a demand. Almost more demand than a CPU!

<comment><USER10> The issues people find in contemporary systems are inside the CPU or chipset (and the distinction between these two is blurring more and more due to increasing levels of integration).

The "BIOS" (or rather: firmware in general; BIOS being one specification of a firmware interface) is software, just highly specific for the device in question and stored in a flash chip that is available to the CPU from the start.

For firmware, there are alternatives such as coreboot, but they're limited by what the CPU/chipset come with. If they feature a coprocessor that runs before the CPU even starts (and in fact starts the CPU), has full access to all kinds of hardware (eg. RAM), and that is only running code signed by the chip's vendor, the CPU firmware can't outsmart that.

And so the Intel Management Engine, AMD's Platform Security Processor and similar less than brilliant functions exist in contemporary hardware, and the only chance to get rid of them is to evaluate other platforms (and that means CPUs) that ship without such extras. Which is what Timothy (author of that email) is doing.

On the upside, a new architecture isn't as frightening when you're shopping for fully open source platforms, since stuff is (for the most part) just a recompile away.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cheap Cell Phone Plan With Unlimited Data: Virgin Mobile $25 w/ Android Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.mymoneyblog.com/cheap-cell-phone-plan-with-unlimited-data-virgin-mobile-25-w-android-phone.html <comment><USER2> Don't know if still the case, but last time I checked virgin and PCS their "unlimited data" was limited to site mirrors they provided. Such as some news sites and their email.

Pretty useless. Just like my att reception. Ha.</comment>


Cookie prefixes – No more insecure cookies - <AUTHOR> https://chloe.re/2016/04/27/cookieprefixes/ <comment><USER2> I'm getting "Safari cannot open the page because it could not establish a secure connection to the server" (iOS 9.3.1)</comment>


Grid Sequencers - <AUTHOR> http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/08/31/grid-sequencers-comi.html <comment><USER2> It seems fun! I want one :)

Mainly I want to try that new kind of interface, well copied from monome to a certain extent.

<comment><AUTHOR> A multi-touch screen could do the job. I look forward to such devices becoming more popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oooh, I gotta have one of these. Wonder if it will come out in the US...</comment>


Make the mustache grow. Pledge to Grow Your Own Fur - <AUTHOR> http://features.peta2.com/GrowYourOwnFur/default.aspx <comment><USER2> I recently (23 hours ago) shaved my whole face (which was previously home to a beard that had been living there for a total of 12 years, besides a six month stint 5 years ago) to grow a moustache, but not for peta. I did it for Movember ( <http://us.movember.com/> ) which is a site urging men to grow moustaches through the month of November in the hopes of raising awareness and money for men's cancers, primarily prostate cancer. I feel semi naked and everyone that has known me looks at me like a stranger, but it is for a good cause. I wrote that for this: I don't know if this is something new peta is doing but if they just launched this today or even within the last two weeks I feel like it is kind of wrong. MOvember has been doing this in some form or another for the last seven years, and they only do it in the month of November. Peta could have launched later or a few months earlier, but to launch at the same time it is probably going to far outshine this much smaller organization. Some good pr and no matter the reason, if someone sees a man with a moustache they are going to assume it is in support of peta. Of course I see the benefit in that, but if that is their intention that is a low for this organization. As a final thought on my first post here (long time lurker), a lot of this is speculation on my part, and I apologize. I have no right to assume this is peta's intention and it is a very big IF. As a final if; if peta has been doing this moustache campaign for 10 years, I am very much sorry for this whole post.</comment>


Citrix discloses security breach of internal network - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/citrix-discloses-security-breach-of-internal-network <comment><USER2> Direct link to Citrix's blogpost: [https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2019/03/08/citrix- investigating...](https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2019/03/08/citrix- investigating-unauthorized-access-to-internal-network/)</comment>


This Ridiculous Gun Was Made to Shoot 100 Birds at Once - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-ridiculous-gun-was-made-to-shoot-100-birds-at-once-1733331843 <comment><USER2> Personally, I've never been a great fan of shooting birds. I use birds for another purpose - mental delight. I love bird watching with burning passion. I've just purchased a great set of smart hd binos here [https://www.atncorp.com/smart-hd-binocular](https://www.atncorp.com/smart-hd- binocular) , so now I can enjoy birding more:)</comment>


Want to be seen as a leader? Get some muscle (UC Berkeley Study) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160224164349.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to the paper: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwt3QP5AfEGwN010dS1seERuNmM...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwt3QP5AfEGwN010dS1seERuNmM/view?usp=sharing)</comment>


McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity and Why We Don't Use It (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cqse.eu/en/blog/mccabe-cyclomatic-complexity/ <comment><USER2> Been there. Did not get the t-shirt, but I did perform a [large empirical study][1] on McCabe's. It turns out that once you account for hetero- scedasticity it gives almost no more information than lines of code. Whether that reflects more on McCabe's or the average programming style, I (still) leave as an exercise to the reader.

[1]: [http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=7...](http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=779) "Cyclomatic Complexity and Lines of Code: Empirical Evidence of a Stable Linear Relationship"

</comment><comment><USER3> CC by itself isn't all that useful but C.R.A.P index can come in pretty handing for identifying under tested code even if the occasional, and usually unnecessary, switch statement needs to be ignored.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the C.R.A.P Index. A bit of digging found the initial blog post(s) from 2007, along with java and php coverage.

Part 1: [https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=210434](https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=210434)

Part 2: [https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=210575](https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=210575)

crap4j: [https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=215899](https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=215899)

PHP: [http://jacobsantos.com/blog/2007/general/what-is-your- crap-i...](http://jacobsantos.com/blog/2007/general/what-is-your-crap-index)

PHP: [http://www.levihackwith.com/how-to-read-and-improve-the- c-r-...](http://www.levihackwith.com/how-to-read-and-improve-the-c-r-a-p- index-of-your-code/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good examples. The tools should come 2nd to humans wherever it makes sense. I push strong static analysis tools like Astree & SPARK because they find things that are hard for humans. Complexity metrics, if well-designed, might find trouble spots in the code. However, I agree with author that this sort of thing is hard enough for a computer to understand that anyone using that should let human mind decide if a change makes sense for comprehension.

Preferably, several of them that are more likely to disagree. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I started digging into McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity [1] after reading an interesting message on the DragonFlyBSD mailing list [2] regarding its questionable usefulness on complex data structures and file system (HAMMER) code. The 'pmccabe' program [3] mentioned looks interesting, but I'm still figuring out what's available and I'm still working my way through the main wikipedia article (which links to the submitted article).

I think the main problem is that complexity is a bug light for hackers; we know it will probably end badly, but the appeal is so intoxicating that we just can't help ourselves.

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

[2] [http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-January/2...](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-January/228535.html)

[3] [https://people.debian.org/~bame/pmccabe/overview.html](https://people.debian.org/~bame/pmccabe/overview.html)

<comment><USER4> "I think the main problem is that complexity is a bug light for hackers; we know it will probably end badly, but the appeal is so intoxicating that we just can't help ourselves."

That's a good metaphor. There's two ways of looking at this situation: human- centric and tool-centric. The human side is that anything too complex to understand can hide flaws in local implementation or interactions with other things. The tooling side is that things too complex for our tools to analyze can't give us the assurance level of alternatives. I think McCabe's works value is on tooling part but too often is assessed on human side. The counter- example is a good one where something is easy to verify for humans but produces a meaningless number that represents what tools would perceive.

My rule of thumb is: Can you understand everything the software might do in success or error states? Have you tested that to be sure it does? Have you expressed it simply enough to apply static or dynamic analysis tools to show its safety against common cases of error?

These things seem to be a pre-requisite for software that's correct by construction. Just one part of the process among many. Yet, a critical one. Work like McCabe's _may_ help on tooling side. Yet, we often have a better shortcut: your code doesn't pass if the analysis can't prove its safe after X amount of runtime. "Animats" said that's Microsoft's approach to certification of drivers with their amazing SLAM verification kit: run it w/ an hour max. Driver quality is higher than ever despite complexity being higher than ever. Direct result of their assurance activities.</comment></comment></comment>


New – M6g EC2 Instances, Powered by AWS Graviton2 - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-m6g-ec2-instances-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton2/ <comment><USER2> These are gamechanging. Anapurna labs is the team that Amazon acquired to design the custom silicon. They have a track record of amazing innovation, including powering EC2's 25gbps network stack, and the Nitro accelerator cards that offload critical security functionality from the CPU. Since Anapurna designed these from scratch, they've built higher levels of security into the architecture, including fully encrypted DRAM.

<comment><USER3> AMD "Rome" EPYC has RAM encryption and came out almost a year earlier BTW.

<comment><USER4> I still dont understand how AMD could have a chip announced 18 months ago, shipped nearly 12 months ago, Announced by AWS 6 months ago and is still not available.

<comment><USER3> Azure went GA with Rome in Feb and Google in April, so AWS is not that late. I wonder if supply is low. One disadvantage of AWS is that they're so large they can't GA anything in low quantities because it would run out immediately.

<comment><USER5> Also, they don't GA anything without a good reason. Introducing a new socket is not trivial - all their FCLGA3647 boxes introduced in 2017 can be updated to second generation ones introduced this year - or they can just build these machines without having to redesign the motherboards.

Introducing EPYC Rome boxes would require, besides a volume price agreement (that AMD could be reluctant to enter, as they can sell the whole capacity with better margins, at least for now) new supply chains for motherboards and PCIe 4 peripherals that can't be used with their Intel stuff yet. That's a lot of disruption.

<comment><USER6> Rome _is_ coming [1]. I'm eager to get it in the hands of customers as soon as we can. :-)

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd- powere...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered- compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/)

<comment><USER5> I'd love to play with it. Right now I'm enjoying playing with a LinuxONE z15 and it's humongous L4 cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Next up: lots of proprietary extensions to drive vendor lock-in to AWS at the binary code level, then much lower pricing for instances that use these features to herd customers into them.

It's built right into the name of the product: graviton.

Prediction: today everyone will dismiss this as paranoid nonsense, impossible, or irrelevant. In 2-3 years everyone will be whining about how hard it is to migrate off AWS due to binary lock-in and the need to re-deploy packages. In 5-7 years people locked into AWS will be whining about how they pay 2-4X as much for cloud services but are unable to move due to deeply entrenched deployments and applications specifically written to take advantage of AWS CPU extensions.

This is the same sequence that has occurred for most other "paranoid" predictions about lock-in or privacy violation over the previous 10+ years. They're always initially dismissed as absurd or paranoid and then what ends up happening is usually considerably _worse_ than what was predicted. Example: mobile and web surveillance today makes the predictions of meth-addled 1990s conspiracy freaks sound overly conservative.

<comment><USER6> Disclosure: I work for Amazon as a VP and Distinguished Engineer building our cloud infrastructure.

My professional opinion is that is a very poor strategy. Customers want to have freedom, not lock-in. When designing infrastructure services, it's good to carefully consider what abstractions are going to preserve freedom and flexibility. For example, adopting the Arm architecture, and further using the Arm developed Neoverse N1 core, provides the broadest capabilities and compatibility thanks to the investment in a common ecosystem.

The optimizations we are able to put in our silicon design, and the design of the Nitro system, let us deliver better price/performance without resorting to such customer unfriendly tactics of "lock-in".

<comment><USER8> But that's what AWS offers.

All the big products- SQS, DynamoDB, Aurora, S3, Beanstalk. Those are all AWS services you can't use outside AWS (sure, there are API compatible alternatives out there). If you design for those services, you're locked into using AWS.

There is a reason bandwidth in is free while out costs money- it needs to be easy for people to move onto AWS without being east to move out. Customers are clearly choosing vendor lock-in over freedom. And AWS encourages this. If you want to migrate to AWS, Amazon will send an army of developers to help you adopt their technology. Will they do the same if a big customer wants to migrate away down the road?

[https://e.lvme.me/kmw2hs1.jpg](https://e.lvme.me/kmw2hs1.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Aside from S3, does anybody actually use those?

Software that works with S3 tends to work with competing APIs as well; just change a config option. Even if you're interfacing with the API directly (you probably shouldn't do that—use some sort of abstraction layer instead), there are open source alternatives that support the exact same API.

SQS can be useful for getting data out of AWS without worrying about whether your callbacks are down. For example, if you're using SES, you might want to know when emails bounce; you can have all those events sent to SQS, then pull them out whenever and store them in something more generic. I don't think it's particularly common to use SQS beyond that.

DynamoDB—is that even still a thing? Isn't Cassandra basically DynamoDB 2, but open source?

Aurora is expensive and makes exporting data a pain. I have no intention of using it until it's easy to set up external replication so I can fail over to other providers (or leave). No external replication, no business, especially at that price point. Aurora was quite a disappointment.

Beanstalk is another one of those things that nobody actually uses. That being said, it doesn't really lock you into anything; it's just a way to automate some basic AWS tasks, really. But it's generally more trouble than it's worth.

<comment><USER10> > Isn't Cassandra basically DynamoDB 2, but open source?

Yet you need to deploy it somewhere and maintain it. DynamoDB just works and that's why people will happily pay extra because they can put effort on something more meaningful that maintaining a database.

<comment><USER9> That isn't relevant to the parent's question. They were complaining about the lack of open source alternatives to DynamoDB. Cassandra qualifies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whatever happened to c5a instances (Rome)? They were announced before Graviton but still aren't out.

<comment><USER6> Disclosure: I work for Amazon on cloud infrastructure

They're still in the works! Stay tuned, and thank you for your patience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We had a chance to test these with KeyDB and the performance was quite good. It's definitely a viable alternative to Intel and AMD instances.

<comment><USER13> Keep in mind the AMD instances are using chips AMD put out almost 3 years ago. They still aren't using the new generation of Rome chips that came out a year ago, which almost doubled performance.

<comment><USER6> C5a instances are coming, and I think that you'll still be pleased with the price/performance of M6g instances for a wide variety of applications. But if your app works better on AMD, or on Intel, we want to give you a broad selection so you can achieve the best result given your specific needs. Cloud makes it easy to switch.

<comment><USER9> We've been quite pleased with AWS' t3a offering and have saved quite a bit of money by switching. We did encounter some odd kernel panics early on, but they seem to have stopped.

We're excited to start evaluating AWS' ARM offerings, but until now, they would've been more expensive for our workload. We'll have to see if that's changed with Graviton2, but I suspect AMD is the sweet spot for our application; it just doesn't seem to like ARM as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They are, indeed, impressive. Keep in mind, though, that a Graviton "vCPU" is an actual core. They are making direct comparisons to an Intel "vCPU", which is basically 1/2 a core (hyperthreading). I suppose what actually matters is performance per dollar, but it still feels a bit misleading.

<comment><USER4> Not too sure it is misleading. ( Or you could argue the term vCPU has been misleading from day 1 ) It is simply G2 dont offer SMT, so their 1 thread would just happen to be 1 CPU Core.

I believe We are not too far away from getting SMT4 on mainstream Server. So I think what we should learn is vCPU = CPU Thread.

It is more problematic when other vendors like Linode stop using the term vCPU and simply refers to CPU. When it is actually still 1 thread and not 1 Core. And I have seen other vendor doing the same. Comparatively speaking, Amazon has been very consistent in vCPU naming.

<comment><USER14> Not misleading to the AWS buyer. But misleading for someone reading and thinking about the broader ARM vs Intel performance thing.

Or, in short... _" 4 Graviton cores are 40% faster than 2 Intel cores, and we are pricing them the same"_ is what's really happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In terms of raw CPU performance, these look pretty good. For stuff like SPEC CPU, they're within spitting distance of the EPYC 7571 for single-core performance[1]. Multi-core is not as good though. Hopefully we can see them matched against the Rome EPYC instances soon.

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon- grav...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon- graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/6)</comment>