A Tour Inside CloudFlare's Latest Generation Servers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-latest-generation-servers <comment><USER3> "10Gbps Ethernet doesn't run across standard Cat5/6 cable. Instead, you need what is known as an SFP."

(edit to include links)

[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/network- adapters/conv...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/network- adapters/converged-network-adapters/ethernet-x540.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-T](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-T)

<comment><USER4> My mistake. Early draft (with incorrect information) included in the article. Our network guys corrected me. Here's what it's being updated to read:

===

Finally, while 10Gbps Ethernet can run across standard Cat5/6 cable, we elected to use SFP+ connectors. We chose this to have the flexibility between optical (fiber) and copper connections. Some network card and switch vendors lock down their equipment to only support proprietary SFP+s, which they charge a significant premium for. We spent significant time testing a combination of SFP+ vendors before finding FiberStore, a SFP+ manufacturer from which we could directly source SFP+s at a reasonable price that worked in the network gear we wanted to use.

<comment><USER5> For anyone interested in copper vs fiber, take some time to read Chapter 1 of Nathan Farrington's dissertation: bnathanfarrington.com/papers/dissertation.pdf

As 10Gbps, and even 40G/100G, gain traction, you start running into cable length issues:

Attenuation and maximum length of AWG 7 copper wire:

Bit Rate (Gb/s), dB/m, Loss/m, Max length (m)

1, 0.721, 15.3%, 106

10, 2.28, 40.8%, 33.5

40, 4.56, 65.0%, 16

100, 7.21, 81.0%, 10.6

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love how a business can focus on doing one thing well, recruit some awesome talent, and end up doing some great R&D and pushing the envelope in their specific field. It's great to see companies like this succeeding.

So DDoS could be...

      1) an L3 packet you would drop, but still saturating your uplink (e.g. DNS amp)
      2) a request for some static asset (img, html, octet...)
      3) a request for a dynamic page (hitting your app farm)

CloudFlare provides something like an automatically populated CDN which includes defense against #1 and #2, and they're using distributed data centers, and servers with 10GE and SSDs to run their network. They said 23 data centers (locations), but didn't mention how many of these servers they run.

Apparently they are able to run HTTP sessions over IP ANYCAST without any issue (I read claims you could only do UDP), so that's pretty cool. BTW - <USER2> wish it was easier to setup ANYCAST on your own... it seems like a major investment at the moment.

It's interesting they don't need more CPU power -- I would have expected more CPU would be deployed, since having minimal CPU could provide an attack vector.

Another thing I'm curious about is how they are distributing load between those cute servers they built? Do they segregate specific customers/domains onto specific IPs and then route those IPs to specific boxes in each data center? Or does everything come in "equal" and then get round-robin/least-load divided up by some massive load balancers? Basically, I wonder how much of the load balancing do they try to do "client-side" or "client-based" versus how much do they do strictly on the back-end, and what devices they are using for it?

<comment><USER4> The best way to get answers to your questions:

[https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team](https://www.cloudflare.com/join- our-team)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that high-frequency trading is big and specialized enough to merit hardware vendors catering specifically to their niche shouldn't have been surprising to me, but totally was.

In general, though, Cloudflare's posts continue to be totally fascinating.

<comment><USER8> Lots and lots of investment for high frequency trading. For example, a new undersea cable to cut 6ms between London and New York [1].

1: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-cable- that-will-save-traders-milliseconds.html)

<comment><USER9> I hope I'm not the only one missing the point of HFT.

Yes, you can make a lot of money buying and selling stocks, but what is HFT actually contributing to the economy other than paying HR costs for its employees?

<comment><USER10> You might misunderstand what the purpose of HFT is - it's not about making a small margin on a huge volume of trades, it's all about order fulfillment (liquidity).

I'll try and illustrate with a contrived example. Say i want to buy 1000 shares at no more than $1 each. By using HFT, a trading firm can put together the order 'package' by combining many smaller trades at varying prices such that the average price comes out at the lowest (or target) price.

The competitive edge for a trading firm comes from being able to consistently fulfill orders, meaning they get more orders / customers.

Does that kind of explain the utility of HFT? Yes it allows a trading firm to make more money, but they way they do that is by providing a better service - not by simply exeucting a huge volume of trades and making fractions of a cent from each one.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I will take this into account, thank you.

Either way, it doesn't seem to be about actually funding companies. Maybe stock trades can help influence companies to change strategies or leaders, but I don't see the point of doing it in a forum from which the companies will never see the investment.

I don't think I understand the stock market as being anything more than a gambling game for people with a ton of money. Not sure what the IPOs of Facebook, Groupon, or Zynga did for anyone other than top execs who were already making a ton of cash per year, or the traders who bought and sold options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> we are on our fourth generation (G4) of servers. Our first generation (G1) servers were stock Dell PowerEdge servers. We deployed these in early 2010

Wow, 4 generations of servers in 3 years. Talk about iterating quickly.

Was Cloudflare bootstrapped or did they start with a huge investment? 23 datacenters full of equipment sounds like a lot to me.

<comment><USER12> I suspect they have 23 cages, not full datacenters.

<comment><USER4> More than that -- and different amounts in different locations (e.g., London has more servers than Toronto) -- but correct that no where are we filling whole buildings with gear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If CloudFlare is using Kernel version 3.3 or higher, they should look into using fq_codel as their scheduler instead of pfifo_fast to decrease latency under load. I suspect the 16MB buffer in the NIC isn't doing them any favors.

<comment><USER4> I asked one of our kernel guys. Here's his response:

"We are indeed looking at Codel. We were actually working on backporting BQL+Codel to the 2.6.x kernel but the Google guys finally got the network stack under control enough for us to deploy >3.3. The 16MB of buffers hasn't hurt us much yet, and may in the long run save us from switches that have too shallow a buffer for the high contention ratios we run on the switch." -LinuXY

<comment><USER13> Interesting, thanks for the response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Adding more cores to a CPU did help mitigate this and we tested some of the high core count AMD CPUs, but ultimately decided against going that direction."

You tested it, but you did not mention why you ultimately decided against them. Was there something specifically less good about the AMD CPU's or is Intel giving you a discount for keeping your servers all intel? (i.e. NIC's and SSD's etc)

<comment><USER15> > While top clockspeed was not our priority, our product roadmap includes more > CPU-heavy features. These include image optimization (e.g., Mirage and > Polish), high volumes of SSL/TLS connections, and extremely fast pattern > expression matching (e.g., PCRE tests for our WAF). These CPU-heavy > operations can, in most cases, take advantage of special vector processing > instruction sets on post-Westmere Intel chips. This made Intel's newest > generation Sandybridge chipset attractive.

and

> We were willing to sacrifice a bit of clockspeed and spend a bit more on > chips to save power. We tend to put our equipment in data centers that have > high network density. These facilities, however, are usually older and don't > always have the highest power capacity. We settled on our G4 servers having > two Intel Xeon 2630L CPUs (a low power chip in the Sandybridge family) > running at 2.0GHz. This gives us 12 physical cores (and 24 virtual cores > with hyperthreading) per server. The power savings per chip (60 watts vs. 95 > watts) is sufficient to allow us at least one more server per rack than we'd > be able to get if we went with the non-low power version.

So a combination of additional instructions and power savings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Specifically, we saw a 50% performance benefit addressing disks directly rather than going through the G3 hardware RAID."

Wow 50%! Is this because raid controller performance hasn't kept up with the evolution from spinning disks to SSD's, or have raid controllers always had that much overhead?

<comment><USER17> No, it's just that their workload is not very well served by any RAID levels: many small files of which it's okay to completely lose a disk's worth and are very randomly and unevenly accessed.

They actually only wanted load balancing and I'm sure that their purpose built solution does a better job of being balanced while avoiding increased risk from striping or performance loss from mirroring or parity (I'm curious what level(s) they were using). Though, cutting out the RAID layer when they didn't need it does save them a trip through the controller, which is more important these days when compared to SSD "seek" times.

<comment><USER4> Yup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I absolutely love CloudFlare! I _save_ money by paying ~$25 a month for their service, because my bandwidth has been cut by over 65% since I signed up (the lightning fast loading, caching, security features and more are just icing on the cake). Instead of having to deal with optimzing my site for speed, they do it all at the click of one button. It's the best service I have ever signed up for, and I love it!

If CloudFlare ever offered optimized hosting (with PHP + MySQL), I would sign up in a snap and move all my websites there.

<comment><USER19> Had the opposite experience - no change in loading speeds when our ~600K visitor / month site switched to CloudFlare in March of this year, but we soon started experiencing long website downtimes where our server was running fine but CloudFlare was not serving our site, despite paying $200 a month for "always online", which the site clearly was not. All IPs were whitelisted with our host and everything else CloudFlare recommended; all CloudFlare would do was examine the site after it had come back online (following hours of downtime) and say, "Everything looks fine to us!"

We finally left, after months of this, and have had no problems with downtime since. I really wanted CloudFlare to work - I was really excited about it when I signed us up. But at least for a bigger site with heavier traffic that relies on being up as much as possible, I can't say I'd recommend it until it straightens out its downtime issues (especially when paying for "always online").

<comment><USER6> I keep hearing sporadic reports like this. The big thing with CloudFlare is you are putting them as the first hop in reaching your site. So they are an additional point of failure. Of course, it's not a zero-sum game, they could also end up increasing your uptime overall, and in many cases I believe that's the case.

Particularly for relatively low volume sites which have a short burst in traffic on occasion, CloudFlare can keep those sites running during the peaks.

I think the most important thing is transparency and correct expectations. If they set clear expectations, and they are transparent about how well they are meeting them, then it just comes down to delivery.

I found their status dashboard here: [https://www.cloudflare.com/system- status](https://www.cloudflare.com/system-status). Unfortunately it doesn't show much long-term historical performance, it would be nice to see 30 days even 180 days of performance history to really evaluate them.

regal, did you find that when you had downtime on your site that it was reported in their status dashboard, and that was an accurate depiction of the service they provided? I think the worst-case scenario is getting hit with unreported downtime, because that brings up all sorts of questions.

<comment><USER19> _I think the most important thing is transparency and correct expectations. If they set clear expectations, and they are transparent about how well they are meeting them, then it just comes down to delivery._

Agreed. So long as a customer knows what he/she's signing up for, and gets that, everything's fine. I might have misread what the "99.99% uptime guarantee" was supposed to be for and gotten too excited about it / taken it too seriously when I first signed up, or maybe this is for something else that's too complicated for a part-time tech guy like me to understand.

When I'd log in when the site was down, half the time CloudFlare would have the green arrow next to the site with a "Site Online" type indicator; other times it'd have the brown dot-dot-dot "Site Offline" indicator. I'd confirm numbers on this but apparently the service doesn't save this or makes it no longer available to you on account termination. Pingdom Tools would report the site as down, and when visiting the site, it wouldn't load, or would take 10+ seconds to load. There would also frequently be a "This website is offline; no cached version is available" page from CloudFlare when trying to load the site, even on the homepage, despite the guarantee to supposedly be saving and serving cached copies of the site in the event of downtime (and despite that being what I thought we were paying for, mainly) - sometimes those cached copies would show up too; though more often, there'd just be this page:

[http://image2.romantika.name/2013/01/cloudflare-website- offl...](http://image2.romantika.name/2013/01/cloudflare-website-offline.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any reason you went with Solarflare/OpenOnload versus standard Intel NICs with DNA[1]?

1: [http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/dna/](http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/dna/)

<comment><USER21> We chose SolarFlare+Onload over Intel with pf_ring+DNA or DPDK mainly because of the fully featured TCP stack. While it may make sense for us to develop our own in the future, it does not currently. Additionally the SolarFlare cards gave us the benefit of 16MB buffers which could allow us to go with switches that have shallow buffers (cheaper.) There's also processing done on an FPGA on the card itself which allow us to drop packets on the card before they reach the machine all together, which is /really/ a boon under DDoS. SolarFlare has been a great partner in their willingness to work on our (non- standard) use case, which is something that is hard to find when dealing with larger vendors.

<comment><USER22> How often are you experiencing DDoS attacks?

(I fully understand designing for the event - but the emphasis on it in the post makes it seem that you're under constant threat. I am assuming it is your customers that are actually being DDoS'd and Cloudflare just needs to be built up to stand against DDoS in this case??)

<comment><USER4> It is usually our customers who are attacked, but that hits our network so we need to be able to mitigate it. Last week we saw 163 "significant" attacks (which is a fairly typical week). A "significant" attack is one that generally exceeds 10Gbps, 5M PPS, or finds another way to affect other customers to the point that our ops team is alerted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool writeup. Anyone recommend using the cloudflare service for commercial sites with sensitive data?

Seems like the system is robust, but I was looking for information on their policies regarding access-log retention and couldn't find much information online. Seems like they got a subpoena in the Barrett Brown case, and not sure how that all worked out.

<comment><USER24> There's a blog post on what we log: [http://blog.cloudflare.com/what- cloudflare-logs](http://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice writeup. I'm interested in seeing some pricing data, but I understand if you're trying to keep that under wraps.

<comment><USER4> Our business depends on the ability to process a byte of information as inexpensively as possible. Fighting for the lowest possible hardware pricing is part of that. While agreements keep us from disclosing pricing details, I can say that we work extremely hard to ensure we're getting the best price from the vendors we choose to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It surprises me that the SYN attacks are being mitigated on the machines themselves; I was under the impression that this is typically done with hardware firewalls that offload the TCP handshake (thus filtering out spoofed SYN packets and other connections that the remote machine doesn't intend on actually establishing).

It does seem like doing it on the target machine will reduce latency a bit, though, since the hardware TCP offloaders usually repeat the TCP handshake (this time to the actual server) after confirming that it's valid.

<comment><USER12> A high-end "hardware firewall" is now an x86 server (usually previous- generation) running some fairly expensive proprietary software. For a company like CloudFlare that has good scale and security as a core competency, I think doing it themselves makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bypassing the kernel created a curiosity for me; Why not develop the whole software under kernel space? It does provide the huge problem that any crash can cause a kernel panic, but no longer have to worry about performance related to virtual memory, page-miss, swapping, context switching, etc... And depended on the hardware, after a crash, it can reboot in less than 10 seconds.

Am I overlooking something?

<comment><USER28> Unless you literally had a single thread of execution running on each core, you would still have to worry about all those things you mentioned. Presumably, Cloudflare's software is too complex to make that feasible. So while it makes sense to bypass the kernel for the biggest bottleneck in their system, processing IP traffic, it wouldn't make sense to give up the convenience the kernel provides for things like scheduling, disk drivers, etc. Plus, security would obviously be a concern. Running complex internet-facing software in ring 0 on the bare metal all the time is like riding a motorcycle naked. Sure, you might be able to go a bit faster, but if things go wrong, there is literally no protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > "SSDs give us three advantages. First, they tend to fail gradually over time > rather than catastrophically"

Uh, I've _never_ had one fail gradually...

> "Intel reports that the 520-series drives have a mean time between failure > (MTBF) of 1,200,000 hours (about 137 years)."

Yes, but they have a maximum write cycle, you can blow through the average consumer drive in a month and a half of concerted writing.

<comment><USER4> That hasn't been our experience. While we've optimized our file system to minimize wear, we do an extremely high volume of reads and writes on our SSDs. We have many SSDs (previous generations) that have been running full steam for 3 years in production. We've been pleasantly surprised with the number of write cycles they can endure without failure.

<comment><USER30> How do you measure writes in this case? Do you use SSD write caching? Is your filesystem caching the writes? Would love to see some stats/graphs to show real-world metrics of disk resilience.

<comment><USER4> We'll do a post at some point on file system benchmarks and what we do to get the most performance and life out of our SSDs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That is some beautiful hardware porn.

16MB vs 512KB is only larger? Not gigantic or even extremely large in comparison to the extremely tiny cache? Oh dear.

<comment><USER32> This sort of scaling seems to be logarithmic. 16MB is 5 orders of magnitude greater than 512KB, however the logarithmic difference is 3.46. The same increase in 5 orders of magnitude beyond 16MB is 10.39 (at 524GB) which is considerably more impressive.

That's some fancy math and it probably is completely off, but another explanation is NIC performance doesn't follow exponential scaling for unexplained reasons.

<comment><USER33> The article suggests interrupt load is the major issue, although doesn't really say enough to inform us. A 12.5ms buffer means potentially just 80 wakeups/sec. They don't mention whether they use multiple hardware queues or if all interrupts hit a single core.

I'd also be interested to know if polling mode was tested with any of the cards, and why it didn't work out

<comment><USER4> We use multiple hardware queues. Some details in this old blog post:

[http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-cloudflare-team-got- into-...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-cloudflare-team-got-into-bondage- its)

We're continuing to experiment with polling-based network queues.

<comment><USER33> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seeing as there are CloudFlare employees monitoring this discussion, what would you say about CloudFlare's relatively poor showing on the Cedexis country reports [http://www.cedexis.com/country- reports/](http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports/) (e.g. average response time for US is 179ms vs 96ms for Cloudfront).

<comment><USER4> I'd be curious to see per-region breakdowns. There are definitely regions we need to expand into. Most notably, Latin America. Stay tuned...

<comment><USER34> Well take a look at the European countries for instance. Gives a similar granularity to looking at US states.

<comment><USER35> Nobody cares about CDNs in Australia :(. The CDN companies with PoP in/near Australia/NZ are ridiculously expensive.

<comment><USER36> There are plenty of options in AU that are priced similarly to their presence in other countries.

Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Rackspace via Akamai etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow, this was very interesting. It's rare to catch a glimpse behind the scenes, especially when it comes to HW.

<comment><USER38> Particularly cool to see hardware optimized for dealing with DDoS attacks, which is not one of the more common pain points I'm familiar with.

<comment><USER39> That's the beauty of specialisation and economies of scale. They can justify, and afford, the extra sticker price and coordination cost to set it all up. And we customers win from that improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Fascinating.

Definitely several things we can learn from here. We have to do something similar, though we're still at a much smaller scale. That said, the wall'o'scaling is looming large and we're finding that even initial steps of building our own hardware is paying dividends.

I'm quite interested in the Disk I/O lesson's you've learned, specially when dealing with large amounts of RAM. We have to store large indexed data stores (NoSQL, usually Redis) for persisten, extremely high-speed access. A lot to learn here from what you did with SSD's to back that up, especially the lack of RAID.

</comment><comment><USER41> Has G4 been actually deployed?

And it seems some Gen4 will get Ivy Bridge 8 Core Xeon E5, 256GB Ram and Intel SC3700 SSD?

And why only 10Gbps Per Server, surely you could fit one more Solarflare in?

Other then that i really hope Cloudflare could expand beyond the current PoP.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting read. You're scale and capacity concerns are a problem I'm hoping to have. We're still in an entry level stage where we're purchasing refurbished gear and slowly scaling horizontally across facilities. No need to have someone build us equipment just for us yet but your ssd selections and processor selections are pretty interesting and we'll probably build similar Supermicro boxes based on your experiences. Thanks again for the write-up. Happy CloudFlare Pro customer here.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why do people still try to DDOS CloudFlare protected websites? The Cyberbunker-Spamhaus incident showed they can survive 300 Gbit/s, I thought after that everyone would just back off.

</comment><comment><USER44> (not a hardware guy, so...) Do the riser cards in the servers cause any bottlenecks or problems? I see another connector and think "point of failure".

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't believe the 100us saving by using kernel bypass such as OpenOnLoad is truly accurate, its more like 5us.

[https://support.solarflare.com/index.php?option=com_cognidox...](https://support.solarflare.com/index.php?option=com_cognidox&file=SF-105547-CD-5_Low_Latency_Quickstart_Guide.pdf&task=download&format=raw&Itemid=11) (requires login)

</comment><comment><USER22> How much are these per node?

<comment><USER46> From comments: damoncloudflare: "We would not disclose that."

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sweet write up. I'm curious as to how CloudFlare's needs are similar/different from other companies (i.e. Facebook, Google, Twitter etc.). It seems to me that there would already be quite a lot of iteration and therefore experience/knowledge for what the best set-up would be? Though a large portion seems to be with new hardware coming out.

<comment><USER48> I work for a company building servers for Facebook. They really did try to follow the Open Compute ([http://www.opencompute.org/](http://www.opencompute.org/)) architecture but ... um, it didn't work out particularly well. They turned to us for tweaking, Quanta for server manufacturing, and us again for rack integration and large scale testing.

<edit> We are the OEM (e.g. design and build) for large scale storage arrays for Amazon & Netflix, too, but not compute servers.

<comment><USER4> To clarify the pronouns, "they" here does not refer to CloudFlare. It may refer to Facebook, but I hope not as it would certainly be a violation of a NDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> After reading the article I took a look at their website. I even watched the 4 minute cartoon they made, it was funny, but ultimately didn't really tell me what they actually do. I guess I'm not their target audience.

<comment><USER50> Cloudflare is a CDN with extra bells and whistles.

A CDN is a way to off-load the bulk of the requests to your webserver by moving the content as close as possible to your end-users, thus reducing the number of hops required to get to the content, which in return increases end- user satisfaction with your product due to a decrease in page load time.

The theory is that if a user gets a snappy service they are more willing to spend their money, and so e-commerce sites and sites that tend to monetize their users in some way find benefits in using services like these.

I hope that explains it adequately. To label cloudflare a mere CDN is a dis- service to them but for explanation purposes it might as well be, I'm sure someone from CloudFlare is able to give a much better explanation of just why their offering is not just an ordinary CDN but goes much further than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I find it nasty how some vendors provide proprietary SFP+ connectors. I wouldn't deal with such types. They should make it an official standard and end the extortion.

<comment><USER12> Realistically you can escape the shakedown by buying "vendor compatible" transceivers. If they officially supported random transceivers they'd just make up the lost profit by increasing support prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What are you using for out of band management?

</comment><comment><USER53> Is that turquoise thing sticking out of the power supply an easily-replaceable fuse?

<comment><USER54> No, that is the release you need to use to remove the PS from the chassis. You can see the two latches it moves on the right side of the case, a cm or two from the back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Do I smell (Open)Solaris?</comment>


Tech companies are helping bosses monitor everything you do at work - <AUTHOR> https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/tech-companies-bosses-monitoring-surveillance-workers-technology <comment><USER2> 15+ years ago, I was working on my first development job out of college and I noticed that there was a strange process running on my work computer that couldn't be killed.

I traced it to a specific port and host and used telnet to connect to it directly (I thought it was malware and got curious).

Little did I know that my manager was watching our every move and when I connected to the host/port (sending no data), it crashed their viewers (the software was crap).

I was brought in then next day to my manager's office and they told me they saw what I did and asked me to explain. I did and didn't get fired.

My coworker got fired that day because the whole purpose was to watch his computer. He was spending the majority of his time on online poker sites and working on his own projects on company time.

I also remember my manager casually bringing up topics that I talked about over IM with a friend over my lunch break..which was creepy (this was before I knew he was watching us and never let on the reasons he was bringing up these topics).

We were forced to sign a contract the next day that stated that the company has a right to monitor our computers and we were to only be working on company-related work on company computers.

I left that company a few months later. One reason being that I hated the idea of someone watching me 24/7.

It was a great decision because they cut 25% of the workforce shortly after I left. Almost all of my ex-coworkers were let go or left within a year.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have always mentored more junior folks to consider every key stroke on company property to be viewed in the most unfavorable light and to be subsequently "owned" by the company.

<comment><USER4> Not just that: I think it's also wise to assume that a data breach may someday make one's e-mail and Slack messages public. Or they may get subpoenaed in a suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I didn't know they had "sound sensors" at some sites like Walmart. Like the article mentioned, it can be used to stamp out workers organizing early on.</comment>


Steve Bannon Wants to Change How the Law Treats Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/steve-bannon-google-facebook/535473/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Blogspam. Original post: [https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon- wants-faceb...](https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon-wants- facebook-and-google-regulated-like-utilities/)

<comment><USER3> ... which was submitted to HN earlier in the week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14880795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14880795)</comment></comment>


This Cryptocurrency Miner Says It Solved Bitcoin's Power Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/this-cryptocurrency-miner-says-it-solved-bitcoin-s-power-problem <comment><USER2> So they're lowering the pollution generated per-bitcoin by using a cleaner kind of electricity.

But they're still wasting GOBS of electricity in the process.

The fix to the power problem would be to find a way to mine coins that uses _less_ electricity, not 'cleaner' electricity.

Of course as soon as you do that the usage won't change. If you can mine x BTC/kWH then why would accept mining the same amount of bitcoin when for the same power you were already using you could mine more BTC?

<comment><USER3> Yes, Bitcoin is fucking greedy to begin with - especially considering the climate change problem. No, they are not wasting energy per-se in this instance:

> The country has more than 2,000 small stations, many of them sitting idle > because of low wholesale power prices and an absence of state support.

That's not to mention the energy disposal problem that you have to deal with when the majority of your energy is renewable - POW is a good way to get rid of _unused_ energy. Given that Bitcoin isn't going away, much like anything else where greed is concerned, this is a fantastic development.

> find a way to mine coins that uses less electricity

Attack SHA-256. That's the only option we have now. People sure-as-hell aren't going to move away from a tech which they _believe_ is printing free money (I have some otherwise very smart friends who are mining coins with GPUs).

<comment><USER4> Attacking SHA-256 won't even do it. If you come up with a more efficient way to generate POW, then the difficulty will just increase until you reach equilibrium again.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure that's actually not what would happen. If you could attack sha-256, then you could forge all the transactions in the network and take all of the money. Then people would lose faith in the currency and do something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're reducing pollution by using cleaner electricity... and this is news?!

Hey Bloomberg, I signed up for 50% wind energy for my house, where's my article?

</comment><comment><USER6> This isn't solving a problem, it's just making it a little less worse. Proof of Work by mining is just a plain stupid and wasteful idea. Ethereum is already switching to Proof of Stake which is slightly better (but it still gives the power to the biggest holders since you have more influence with more ETH, leading to more market manipulation by mining cartels).

I think a non-blockchain, Tangle based concept like IOTA uses is a way better future, better in terms of scaling (the more users the better it gets), no transaction fees and, maybe best of all, no mining/miners.

<comment><USER5> Proof of work is better than proof of stake as proof of stake makes it easy for those with the most power to forge transactions rendering it useless to anyone who actually sought out cryptocurrency in the first place. Proof of work is just also very bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a layman: why don't things like GridCoin take off? Is it only mindshare/being late to the party/or something alike, or are there technical reasons for it?

Bitcoin seems like a waste of energy in comparison (again, as a layman). Apparently enough to be in the top 65 of global power consumption for countries. [0][1]

[0] [https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy- consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Now they just need to hook up some stirling engines to the cpus and pump the water back up to complete the cycle...

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is the word "This" in front of the title?

Wouldn't "Cryptocurrency Miner Says It Solved Bitcoin's Power Problem" be sufficient and sound more professional?

<comment><USER10> It would be sufficient, and probably generates fewer clicks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to foster hacker culture at my school (Cornell)? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe it's an unfair criticism, but my school (Cornell) seems to lack the kind of ambition/enthusiasm for startups that you hear about at a Stanford or MIT.
I've got my own ideas about why that's the case (see below), but my real question is what I/others can do to get other talented and brilliant people excited/passionate about startups, open source and the future of tech (among other things -- given that these are very broad and not always overlapping areas to begin with)?
Possible causes:
0. Location location location -- Ithaca, NY is not Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA. Cornell is pretty much the central hub of activity. But I do think the conditions are ripe for a Research Triangle, NC type of scene (Syracuse was recently named among the most affordable cities in the US, there are major research institutions like Cornell, RIT, University of Rochester, among others in the area)
1. A certain amount of group think -- CS at Cornell seems to focus a lot more on theory/research. I know this is the case at any reputable CS school but the top CS students either aim to go get their PhDs and pursue the most abstract research or go work for an IBM/Accenture (in my experience, a lot more people opt for MS over Google and I know of a handful at FB)
2. Lack of a nurturing environment -- There are some brilliant minds among the faculty (Jon Kleinberg for example) but again the focus seems to be almost solely on theory and not as "modern" languages (Cornell is for all intents and purposes now a Java school, C++/Matlab/Functional languages). Profs seem way too absorbed in their own research and much of the "teaching" falls on incompetent/inexperienced lecturers/grad students so it's hard to really motivated. Doing CS at Cornell feels more like surviving the gauntlet then doing something you're passionate about.
Part of this is that every major/school at Cornell is like its own little silo, you really have to go out of your way to "embed" yourself with the art students, stats heads, etc. That's why even though Cornell has a big emphasis on "entrepreneurship", it seems to focus on the "business co-founder types" and it's really sad how absent software/tech is missing from the scene (the entrepreneurship seems to revolve a lot of times around tech transfer and turning research into companies in materials, nanotech, etc.) <comment><USER2> You may not notice it, but you have some entrepreneurial and hacker spirit there already. Ever read about projects like TheGlobe.com or people like Robert Tappan Morris and pg? (Go Big Red!) Here is some advice, but I can't tell if you're trying to start a company, or encourage others to, so this is a bit of both.

1\. Go ask Student Agencies if they need any tech problems solved. I think they run TakeNote, those coupon books, and a bunch of other student-related services. They may have an idea for a student-related service that you can implement and run yourself or eventually sell to them. Since they're sort of a student-run organization, they would be a good way to bring together some problem-solving students and more open to eventually paying you for starting a project for them.

2\. show up to the cslug or acsu meetings and mailing lists. Ask others what they're working on, or ask them for help or advice on your ideas. Show them that you have a commercially viable project, and they'll start following your lead either by participating with you or by starting their own. Cross- pollinate these groups with the Ithaca Perl Mongers, Ithaca free software group, Ithaca linux users, and whatever other small, niche user groups are around there these days. One activist per year can completely change any of these organizations.

3\. If you can't consistently steer the meetings for one of those clubs towards the topics you would like to hear more about, start your own. Meet monthly someplace nearby off campus where they serve beer, but you don't have to be 21 to enter. Select someone at each meeting to talk for a few minutes about their idea or project at the next meeting.

4\. Find the professors who are actually doing things. Sure Tim Teitelbaum's company is pretty academic and different from the general YC startups, but at least he has a company. There are others. Ask him for advice on starting a company in Ithaca. Have a professor speak about starting and running a local company at the meetings discussed in steps 2 and 3.

5\. I don't know what the "Center for Advanced Computing" is like these days, but it used to be that hanging out by the coffee cart in the Theory Center was the best way to meet folks who were actually using computers to solve problems. Go hang out with those guys.

6\. Sit in on some classes at the Johnson School. Eventually, you'll figure out which of those MBA students actually want to start businesses. Invite them to your meetings, or join theirs. Offer your technical services to any of their pipedream projects. They need you.

I'm glad to hear you're interested in this. You can make a large difference just by consistently beating a drum. I'm serious, one dedicated person in a community like that can change a lot. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify... I'm not an alum who's back in Ithaca. I am working on my own projects but that's not really my motivation for wanting to do this. It's more encouraging others to be involved in similar types of activities. Rhodes Hall (where the Theory Center is) is mostly the realm of grad students. Thanks for the encouragement.

<comment><AUTHOR> whoops... meant to say I AM an ALUM who is back in Ithaca...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cornell produced as many founders of VC-backed internet companies as Stanford did in the first half of 2010. Of course, your push to improve/enhance hacker culture is commendable but just wanted to say that based on the data from the early part of this year, Cornell folks seem to be holding their own in the startup realm (which is probably a sibling if not synonymous with hacker culture).

Unfortunately, my alma mater (Penn) came in fourth so I suppose I should be posting something similar to see how we can catch up with Cornell, Stanford, etc. :)

The school rankings are on page 38 of this report where you'll see Cornell up top alongside Stanford.

[http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture- capit...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capital- human-capital-report-gender-and-education)

Note: Stanford is also towards the top on the grad school rankings as well on which Cornell does not show up. FYI.

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw pg give a talk a couple of weeks ago at a YC event for Cornell alumni (I'm May '10 and still on campus doing research + my own projects), and asked what he thought the reasons were that Cornell didn't have a larger startup community. The response he gave was that few VCs, if any, are ever going to go up to Cornell, which I think validates your first point. Here there's no prestige associated with starting something, and being a typical status- obsessed Ivy League, it figures that creating a startup doesn't even occur to most people. Contrast this with Stanford, which has produced many successful startups, and where not working at a startup is a conscious decision that people make (or so I've heard).

That being said, another reason for the lack is partly that the hacker culture isn't as visible at Cornell, given its many schools and diverse set of students. I've met people with interesting projects that few, if any, ever catch wind of.

I think moving forward, there is reason for hope. Firstly, Cornell has a large student population, which provides rich soil for fomenting and validating ideas. Next, the CS department is fairly highly ranked, so one hopes that there is a good amount of talent out there. Finally, there have been some startups founded by Cornellians in recent years, both while in school (e.g. Wiggio) and after (Opzi, YC funded, I think). You have to look a bit harder, but the signs are there. A friend of mine developed jitouch, a multitouch extension for the mac in his free time, and is now working on an ios game.

People are interested. Especially with the Gates building coming up in a few years and serving as a nexus for all things computer, the time is near when all the disparate threads will be woven together. The seeds are already being planted. I met a sophomore at the talk I alluded to above who's excited about bringing a startup weekend type event to campus this year. Clubs also help, and I think to be useful to hackers, you want to provide at least:

1\. Opportunities to network to find co-founders - i.e. startup weekend, demo day, meetings/weekly brunch (or other meal)

2\. Opportunities to share and develop ideas - i.e. startup weekend, demo day, hosting resources (maybe)

3\. Guidance on what comes after - speakers (though it is admittedly hard to convince people to come up to Ithaca), maybe networking with some angel investors once in a while, perhaps curate a biweekly/monthly newsletter of startup related news (for visibility).

The best is yet to be. Expect great things.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious about the YC event for Cornell alumni (link?) and meeting up/hearing about your research/projects. Check my profile for gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am at Cornell, actually I just started, There is a good grad level entrepreneurship course at the Management school, also you can enroll for software engineering course, where you work on delivering a product for a startup/other clients. Also you own the product or some share in resulting enterprise if it is a startup.

This guy <http://www.stephenpurpura.com/site/Welcome.html> is T.A for the software Engg. course is also an ex-Microsoft guy who was Product Manager for Windows XP.

<http://www.seamlessreceipts.com/about> was founded as result of the Software Engg. course and it has known to have received 225K in funding.

Also Prof. Claire Cardie has her own startup in area of sentiment detection in texts.

If you are a senior then you can still enroll in the Software Engg. course, its a 5K level course though.

Here is the link to the course: <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs5150/2010fa/>

</comment><comment><USER5>
        1. A certain amount of group think -- CS at Cornell seems to focus a lot more on theory/research. I know this is the case at any reputable CS school but the top CS students either aim to go get their PhDs and pursue the most abstract research or go work for an IBM/Accenture (in my experience, a lot more people opt for MS over Google and I know of a handful at FB)

Thats is purely beacuse MS hires more people every year. You can obtain good stats from this page: [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ugrad/cscareers/PlacementReport/in...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ugrad/cscareers/PlacementReport/index.htm) [for undergrad]

For Masters students as well as undergrads: [http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student- services/engineer...](http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student- services/engineering-coop-career-services/statistics/upload/2009-CS-PGR.pdf)

People go in all sort of companies from Zynga to Google to Microsoft to NetApp and to exotic trading companies such as Black Rock and D. E. Shaw .

</comment><comment><USER6> Princeton's the same way. Tremendous amount of engineering talent and we even benefit from relative proximity to New York, and yet the prevailing campus culture pushes students towards finance and consulting.

How can that culture change? I can't say for sure, but my hypothesis is that a hacker culture already exists at Princeton; it's just hidden and untapped. At the very least these two things could help a university with an untapped hacker culture:

1\. a hacker house, or at least some defined space to code along like-minded kids, even if that is nothing more than a dorm room.

2\. student-driven cs curriculum. Princeton's CS program like Cornell's (i'm taking your word for it) is heavily theory based. There is i believe only one course on web development. In other departments, students not infrequently campaign for new classes. I wonder what effect an iphone development class (for the sake of an example) would have on the campus culture?

</comment><comment><USER7> Culturally, Cornell has always been a place that concentrates on theory and enduring research questions. After Cornell I spent time at Caltech and the difference in values and focus is large indeed. It seems every Caltech engineering/science faculty either has co-founded a tech company (successful or not), or is involved in experimental validation of some of their ideas.

I always thought the reason for Cornell's culture is mainly your point 0 - isolation from the Real World and from Money. The hippie vibe of Ithaca might also play a part. But the reason actually does not matter.

It might be best to go along with this current for your time there. Play to its strengths. Or, as amoore notes, you can find a niche, like in the Theory Center, where applications are more in the front.

Incidentally, I don't share your feelings in your point 2. But, I was in EE (a separate silo?)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm in school in NYC, and my school's hacker culture isn't that great either. We should organize a large hackaton like NYU did last summer. Any interest?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea for sure! Maybe around Winter Break or some time when people would be free! E-mail me (check profile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> create something. start a club/group/organization and host something like a startup weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was planning on doing that, but how do you go about attracting the right crowd (or any crowd at all for that matter)?

<comment><USER9> you only need to start with a handful of people. find one or two other people interested who will commit, and you can get it started regardless of who else shows up.

make sure you don't make it necessarily very CS-specific, either. business and art people might want to get involved, too, and would be quite useful. random other people might get a good learning experience on the entire process if they walk in with "a great idea".

<comment><USER7> I think the OR&IE people are applications-friendly. The art school at Cornell is not a strength.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> sidenote: I did not know this but pg went to Cornell. I wonder what it was like for him then?

<comment> Andrew-Dufresne It would be great if pg shares it at HN or in an essay. I think it would be quite beneficial to know his opinion and experiences.</comment></comment>


Whistleblower behind the HSBC scandal was given a special phone by the French - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/falciani-was-given-secret-phone-to-talk-about-hsbc-2015-2

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds intriguing. Was he given a special phone that the NSA could not intercept? The size (credit-card sized, thin) also sounds very interesting.. is it possible to build a phone like this?</comment>


LinkedIn class action lawsuit over passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/97589713/Linkedin-Class-Action

<comment><USER2> Interesting because they are going after LinkedIn primarily based of the algorithm they used to protect passwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Which means it's time for everyone else to start considering their Web application's security. For a change.

<comment><USER3> I wonder where it's acceptable to draw the line. Can't everything be breached eventually?

<comment><USER4> Do you want your bank vault to be locked with a Masterlock padlock, or a 1-ton safe door with glass inserts and an armed guard? That's the difference between unsalted MD5 and salted SHA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am happy to see this happen. For years computer companies just skate by with no punishment for security breaches. It is time to pay up.</comment>


Microsoft courts webOS developers; 1,000 make the leap - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/08/microsoft-courts-webos-developers-over-1000-make-the-leap.ars <comment><USER2> I don't think I'd describe this as "making the leap" - I have a published TouchPad app, and I was curious about the upcoming Mango/WP7.5, so I emailed about the WebOS->Windows offer - basically, I got an email back with a list of resources to explore to build a Windows Phone app. Not sure what the followup is going to be.

There's nothing really free about it - my dev environment is OS X, so I'd have to get a copy of Windows 7 ($100 from Amazon), install it in Parallels for the Mac ($60), join Microsoft's AppHub ($99/year), all to get (maybe) a free WP7 phone.

Also, from what I can tell, there's zero overlap between WebOS and Windows Phone 7 development, so all these WebOS devs would be starting from scratch.

Frankly, I'm kind of surprised that Google's Android dev relations team didn't make a similar offer.

<comment><USER2> Oh, as a point of reference, developing and releasing apps for WebOS 3/TouchPad cost nothing, and the development environment ran on Linux, OS X, and Windows - basically, it's a collection of command line utilities, WebOS 3 running in a VirtualBox, and Google Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "leap"? I think us webOS devs just wanted free hardware to expand our apps beyond webOS, but many still remain (especially in light of all the people with webOS devices over the weekend).

<comment><USER4> I'd like to check WP7, but I am certainly not buying another phone for that - other platforms already take most of my time. Palm had to be very aggressive in getting phones in the hands of developers because most of them were already fully allocated to iOS and Android. Microsoft has more or less the same problem, with the difference WebOS was exciting and new, while WP7 feels like developing for Windows. For the same market share, I'd go for exciting and new.

I strongly advise they be much more aggressive than Palm was. Developing for Microsoft platforms is a business decision, not a privilege.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonder how many will be on WP7 in 6 months? I wonder what contract (if any) was required?

Still, if I were a WebOS dev (focused on phone not tablet stuff), and someone offered me free hardware, I'd jump.

<comment><USER6> There's a lot of costs attached to developing for a platform. Hardware is generally a small fraction of it.

<comment><USER5> True, but in this case, the platform in question (WebOS) is disintegrating... someone offers you safe sanctuary while you reconsider your options... why not?

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

<comment><USER4> > why not?

Why tie resources to develop for WP7 and not invest in iOS and Android? Most probably, Palm developers were either already investing in the two market leaders and porting to WebOS or going with WebOS just for fun (it _is_ fun to write code for WebOS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> WebOS was fun to develop for (HTML and JavaScript!), but had only 1% of the market. WP7 looks more like the two market leaders (as in "less fun") but has about 3% of the market. Looks like an improvement.

I'd say it's worth a try, but, so far, Microsoft hasn't made contact.

If you already have iOS and Android covered, WP7 is worth a shot, but I wouldn't ignore RIM as a viable third player - their phones appear to be making inroads into the low-end and that segment is huge.

<comment><USER7> The latest global figures give WP7 1.6% of the market. Even Bada has more at 1.9%, and Bada is at least rising.

Serious WebOS devs would gladly take free stuff, but likely not bet on WP7.

<comment><USER8> It's a good thing we didn't write off Android in mid 2009 when they had 2% of the market.

Note: I'm not saying WP 7 will lead the world in 2 years. I am simply pointing out that market share 2 quarters after your first device launches isn't the best measure of future success.

<comment><USER9> The 7 means version 7 not 1. Just saying...

<comment><USER10> There have not been 7 versions of Windows Phone, it's the first version. The 7 is to tie it into the current release of Windows.

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

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile>

<comment><USER10> And? Windows Phone is not Windows Mobile. Much like webOS is not Palm OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And so Microsoft learns the same lesson HP did: It's easy to get people to go to your platform when you practically give hardware away.

<comment><USER13> They are only giving the hardware away to developers who have already published an application in the store. I think its a pretty good decision by MS as they are targeting developers who have at least shipped something. I don't know if I would want to switch away from android/ios though. I don't think MS will abandon the platform but I think they will end up abandoning silverlight in the future.

<comment><USER12> The quality of published apps on WebOS is questionable (there are probably both great and very poor developers out of those 1,000). What Microsoft is telling people, in contrast to HP, is that they are not intending on abandoning their phone strategy anytime soon, and are willing to go through great lengths to woo developers over. At the same time, had this offer been extended to iOS devs, they would've had a great response rate for hardware, and it would still remain to be seen whether anyone would actually start developing for Windows Phone.

This does add another way to analyze the hardware-ecosystem tradeoff that people are considering with the Touchpad fire sale: what's the sweet spot for burning money in order to build a thriving ecosystem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would make the leap too if they would support perl or python. the dynamic languages get treated like second class citizens</comment>


8 Tips For Building An Internet Company Outside of San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/42055/8-Tips-For-Building-An-Internet-Company-Outside-of-San-Francisco.aspx

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285921></comment>


Making smallest possible test suite - <AUTHOR> https://yurichev.com/blog/min_test/ <comment><USER2> No code is smaller than no code.</comment>


Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep For a year, at least. - <AUTHOR> http://oc-co.org/?p=124 The graph of total revisions-per-month shows: the English part of the Wikipedia is saturated: no more exponential growth! <comment><USER2> There is still PLENTY of knowledge that can be included into Wikipedia, but there are too few main editors to actually refine/expand upon the articles. To imply Wikipedia is "saturated" and that it now must grow linearly (because the past year reveals this pattern) is as ridiculous to say that human knowledge is perhaps saturated and must grow linearly because we have not collectively broken out of prevailing models of perception.

I believe that this flat trend (in a larger exponential curve that has yet to reveal itself) is a lack of initiative/participation for the moment that has zero predictive value of revealing the nature of Wikipedia's future growth rate.

<comment><USER3> But isn't a large part of it the fact they are working to reproduce an encyclopedia? Shelf space, and to a lesser extent paper, are limited resources so encyclopedia must naturally draw a line somewhere.

Why on earth is Wikipedia sticking so closely to that model, when they are not limited by shelf space or paper, is anyone's guess.

<comment><USER4> I do wish wikipedia had a notion of sub-wikis so that all the fictional domain pages (the comicbook universes, Star Wars, etc) would be subsumed into one place.

<comment><USER5> That is what the whole Wikia federation is about, isn't it?

<comment><USER4> Wikia and Wikipedia are separated. Feels like there's a lot of duplication as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is hardly surprising, given the rise of the deletionists over the past few years.

<comment><USER7> This needs an actual fix. I've often thought it should be acceptable to fork articles. Thus, there's the official "Battle of the Bulge" or "History of the Atari 2600" link (or whatever), and then there are 0.. _n_ others written by different historians or amateurs who have a divergent, possibly incorrect or extreme view.

<comment><USER8> That would be a horrible idea. It would no longer be Wikipedia. It would become more like 4chan for encyclopedia articles. Stopping spammers and vandals would become exponentially harder with that, and to be honest I think that's a bigger problem than Wikipedia editors deleting some guy's webcomic article.

<comment><USER7> Well, it's sort of a variation on google's Knol. The "forked" articles would in a sense be no more significant than the text currently hidden behind the "discussion" button, but it would allow dissenting people a more formal platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me or does every Wikipedia article feel like it's written by the same person?

<comment><USER10> I had assumed this is by design.

<comment><USER11> Having multiple editors tends to bury any 1 editor's signal. The eventual style can be very easy to read once you learn to extract information from it efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wikipedia is at least as saturated as its administrators want it to be.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm starting to re-think the whole Wikipedia thing.

I've been using the site for research related to my online travel site, and I've noticed a lot of facts and figures that are either outdated, slightly off-the-mark, or just plain wrong. Without an update schedule or paid staff, some of the content goes stale very quickly. I suspect this will worsen over time.

None would be glaringly obvious to a casual reader (e.g. the number of rooms at certain Las Vegas resorts is wrong, the current ownership status of some casinos is outdated), but God forbid that people take it for truth.

I updated a couple of entries myself, but I no longer trust it on the whole.

<comment><USER10> I think it'd be nice if wikipedia made it more obvious when something had been last updated, or some sort of micro-info-graphic representing freshness. Or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well it had to peak sometime...</comment>


Ask HN: Is a free trial a bad idea for my startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm making a B2B product that I expect to cost $30/mo for eventual business users.   I want to increase adoption, so I was thinking that my product would have a 3 month free trial before requiring any payment.   Does anyone have any data or anecdotes to suggest whether this will improve or hurt my chances of getting a paid customer?  A lot of people lately are saying "charge from day one", so I'd like to hear what HN thinks. <comment><USER2> I don't think you will get an acceptable answer on here. Especially without giving details of your product.

That being said, the only way you can know for sure is to test it with real customers (your target customers). Invalidate your assumptions!

First determine what an acceptable conversion rate is. Then I would start with a comprehensive feature tour and good copy. Show the customer how you are going to make their life easier. Drive everything through that page. Track your conversion rate. Even if your conversion rate is acceptable, offer a short trial - track your conversion rate. tweak, test, track...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you need a trial, but not 3 months. How long does it take someone to realize they can't live without your product? Make that the trial length, even if it's only a day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do want to keep the trial short, however this is a user-facing product for small businesses and I want to allow for some time for the customers to become familiar with my service before the business makes a decision on buying it.

<comment><USER3> If you have a long trial period it gives the user too much time to slack off using the product, then not convert at the end of the trial. If someone is paying they are more likely to use the product and thereby making it more valuable to them.

The 1 day thing was just a bad joke, but without knowing anything about your product it's hard to imagine giving 3 months for any trial.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts or Resources on Monetizing Open Source? - <AUTHOR>

I am nearly done reading "Free as in Freedom." I am curious to hear feedback, examples or case studies and reading recommendations concerning monetizing open source software.<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> Speaking as the founder of an "OSS startup" here are a few observations & thoughts:

The ultimate case-study is probably Red Hat.[1]

My perception is that their subscription model is the best route to "selling" open-source software. Having observed RH for years, both from within and without, their model just seems to work. And, FWIW, it's the same model we're pursuing at Fogbeam Labs[2]. We can't say yet if we'll be successful with this model, but I'm confident enough in it to make it the initial plan.

The important point here, I think, is that the product being "sold" is an enterprise play... it's something companies will pay where the thing they're _actually_ buying isn't the actual raw bits (you can get 99.9% identical bits for free by downloading CentOS), but rather the _comfort_ and the risk- mitigation, and the "somebody to call at 3am" and the "somebody to sue" factor. Many managers in companies just plain want there to be a company backing any product they use - and they want an ecosystem with support, and consultants and training and what-not.

The net-net of that observation? The RH subscription model probably works fine if the OSS you're monetizing is something that will be used by big companies. Otherwise, this model may very well not apply.

I'll also expand on this by saying that RH have other revenue streams besides subscriptions... there is training, certificiations, and professional services among others. Likewise, when we get "off the ground" with our products, we expect to offer training, certifications, and services along with the actual subscriptions. And, in our case, the way our offerings work, lends itself to the possibility of having some value-added "data as a service" offerings that complement the products, that could constitute another revenue source. We'll also be looking to take our product platform(s), build certain specializations of them, and offer those as SaaS offerings. That latter plan might be a good model for others looking to monetize OSS, although I can't swear to it.

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

[2]: [http://www.fogbeam.com](http://www.fogbeam.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Fish oil compound a cure for leukemia? - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblog.com/51237/fish-oil-compound-leukemia/ <comment><USER2> Pro tip: Any news story that ends in a question mark can usually be answered with "No".

(This is not a slight against the researchers: I'm sure if you look at the source article behind this sensationalist blog post there is no actual claim that a leukemia cure has been found.)</comment>


Most Important Penetration Testing Commands Cheat Sheet for Linux Machine - <AUTHOR> https://techincidents.com/important-penetration-testing-cheat-sheet/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this just general unix-fu? What's pentesting specific here?

<comment><USER3> Yeah that was the general consensus when this was posted on Reddit, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> protip: If you need this cheatsheet, you shouldn't be doing pentesting.

<comment><USER5> The bar gets lower and lower these days...

<comment><USER6> I dunno, I've never met someone that does pen-testing for a living that wasn't extremely good at their job.

I'm sure those people exist, but this article isn't proof of anything other than that someone can make a webpage and put some words on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also: A Sysadmin's Unixersal Translator (ROSETTA STONE) OR What do they call that in this world?[0]

[0]: [http://bhami.com/rosetta.html](http://bhami.com/rosetta.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Confused as to why this is titled for pen-testing. Where's /var/log/btmp and nmap?

</comment><comment><USER9> So this is what pen-testers need to know when getting paid to pen-test foo. Do not trust anything that claims security because of being "extensively pen- tested".

</comment><comment><USER10> I see so much overlap between these commands and what's available on Unix systems in general, such as macOS, it'd be nice to see which ones are available cross-platform, and which are Linux specific.

Also, it would be a bit more useful if this article actually explained _how_ these would be useful for penetration testing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow. nmap is not listed.

<comment><USER12> Expected a bunch of nmap commands, got `echo 188.8.131.52`.</comment></comment>


Apple's U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/hon-hai-has-enough-ex-china-capacity-to-make-u-s-bound-products <comment><USER2> So this is "made", not _made_... assembled somewhere that is not China (so India), but there's no mention of where all the components they're assembling are being produced at.

The most recent estimate [1] I could quickly find valued the iPhone X at $600 in components alone (excluding assembly), so any trade war would seem to still be incredibly perilous for Apple, especially on their lower-end products.

I haven't been following any of this, so perhaps they covered it in another story, but for Bloomberg I really expected a bit more of an in-depth analysis.

1: [http://fortune.com/2017/09/18/apple-iphone-x- margins/](http://fortune.com/2017/09/18/apple-iphone-x-margins/)

<comment><USER3> Components are not made in China, at least mostly. Chips are from tsmc for example. Mainland China is responsible for the final assembly.

<comment><USER4> CTRL+F through Apple's supplier list:

[https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple- Supp...](https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier- List.pdf)

China (381) India (9) US (65) Japan (135) Korea (41)

Outsourcing to India will follow the same trend as other Chinese OEMs doing final assembly in India to circumvent 20% import tariff on phones. Most of the materials are still going to be procured from Chinese supply chains.

<comment><USER3> You need to understand the political difficulty with calling your supplier Taiwanese before reading any list like this.

Pretty sure this list would count tsmc as a Chinese company.

<comment><USER4> You should at least read the list before making assumptions. The official suppliers list clearly differentiates between PRC (381) and Taiwan (67). From cursory reading, China supplies more materials and components than all other country combined. Some of it is lower tech and can be replaced, but not all of it and certainly not in the short term.

Edit: To add, China's strength is both logistics and the ability to setup new production processes. Mature processes for old phones can be moved to India for production, but major hardware changes in new sku is still only viable in China because only China has the expertise, logistics, capacity to rapidly iterate and trouble shoot new products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note: Unlike what some people will think at first thought, these iPhones are still not likely being made in the US. They're going to invest further into their factories in India.

<comment><USER6> Sure, to the next "Huawei" stealing our secrets will come out of India. At some point we have acknowledge that cell phone can be made anywhere, and the people making them will surely create their own companies. It is the natural end game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Apple should stand by their human rights mantra and move their production out of China. It should not be a question of where they are sold, the only question a company with their supposed rights advocacy is where they are produced.

China has shown they do not value world opinion.

<comment><USER6> About 850 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty in China since the eighties. It's extraordinary. Just want to be clear the US is not exactly perfect when it comes to human rights. Sure, China had a lot they need to do better, but the improvements are incredible. In the US, look at Indian reservations, border detentions, hate groups, number of people in jail... We are not the human rights poster child.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I'd call China running over people with tanks and imprisoning millions of Muslims in concentration camps "improvements".

<comment><USER6> From the East India company and the opium wars and the unbalanced treaties, to the Chinese civil war and the invasion of Japan, it's not easy for an outsider to understand just how strongly China considers anything that would bring about the instability that they experienced in the past. Most Chinese people support preventing instability, as in the 80s they had the largest famine in human history. Sometimes they are heavy handed and I think they acknowledge this, and would even tell you that it's not right what they did, but I think the average Westerner does not really get the perspective of the reasoning behind it. Think about how many people we have imprisoned in our so-called drug war. As a percent of our population, it's a lot more than in China.

<comment><USER9> I don't find those trying to explain away China's disdain for human rights by using historical arguments to be in any way credible. Taiwan alone proves that it's possible for China to be a democracy with respect for human rights. But I suppose you're right, it's not easy for me to really get into the mind of someone like you who is comfortable with explaining away organ harvesting by referring to the need for "stability". That which does not bend, will break.

<comment><USER6> How many Iraqi civilians did US government forces kill? The US nuclear bomb drops on Japanese ciivilians? Was that fine compared with organ harvesting? My point is not that any of this is okay, but so easy to point the finger and "they" are the bad people and we are good.

<comment><USER9> It is easy to point the finger, yes, because no Western country is nearly as bad as China when it comes to human rights, and to suggest otherwise is peak contrarianism. I'm not going to suggest the West is perfect, but it's without question that China is much worse. I'd also like to restate that your claim that historical events dictate that China must abuse human rights to lift people out of poverty is nonsense because Taiwan is Chinese, democratic, developed, and doesn't abuse human rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obviously they can be made outside of China. What Wall Street would care about is whether or not the assembly cost would be raised, and how Apple would deal with that (pass the additional cost onto the customer, or take the hit and absorb a little/all of the added cost).

<comment><USER11> Would they really raise prices though? They have $800 billion. They're still the 3rd largest company on the planet. They charge $1000 for their flagship. They could probably easily eat that cost, still generate profit (although less profit) on the hardware and still spin that to make their shareholders happy.

Their phones are already at a premium and there is a diminishing return on customers if they keep hiking prices.

<comment><USER12> > although less profit

You mentioned the problem.

Maybe they could eat a few % with some spin, but I'm not sure shareholders would be okay with much more.

<comment><USER11> This is what I don't get. That's insane. You cannot have infinite growth. At some point, sales will drop. A growing number of people want to fix rather than replace and consume.

How does our society change the goal posts, where increased sales and profits are no longer an end goal? They can't be forever. There isn't room for the 4th largest company to grow larger. It'll just be perpetually switching places with Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just for everyone in world's sake / security it would seem to be a good idea to spread manufacturing out all over the world.

Hopefully we see more of that.

<comment><USER14> That's what manufacturers are already doing...moving production to places like India and Vietnam.

What's interesting to me is once the trade imbalance with Vietnam tips over to their favor what will the US do. Also it's not like Vietnam is some democratic wonderland in terms of their government.

<comment><USER15> Fascinating that business is being done for western countries in communist countries. Ideologically it's curious that there isn't more of a demand from consumers, evidently this underlines how important cost is.

<comment><USER16> They just go to where there are low labour costs and many suppliers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since the article suggest the pivot will be to India, keep in mind that India is speculated to be the next US trade war. In the last two weeks India has been removed from the preferential trade agreement and threatened with sanctions via Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act for possible Russian S400 acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER17> There would be massive global environmental benefits moving the supply chain to western countries. These devices should be more expensive, the hidden cost is in killing the next generation because humanity isn't handling industrial waste properly (because we outsourced the problem to China.)

</comment><comment><USER18> vs [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones- apple-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china- made.html) "A Tiny Screw Shows Why iPhones Won't Be 'Assembled in U.S.A.'"

<comment><USER19> Yes, the claim is "outside of China," not "in the USA."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps assembled outside of China using Chinese components.

</comment><comment><USER21> They can manufacture electronics pretty much anywhere, but they will still have to haul all parts from China.

</comment><comment><USER22> But can they make any products at all without Chinese Rare Earth materials? Production is at the end... I believe that is the Ace in the sleeve. Just jack the price of rare earth minerals 1000%, or temporarily halt production. It won't matter what country they are manufactured in if you can't get all of the parts you need, or get them economically...

<comment><USER23> Most other rare earth mines closed up because they couldn't compete with China's price (which was rumored to be HEAVILY subsidized to corner the market) if you increase the price of rare earth minerals 1000%, you will quickly see many of those mines re-activate, as they are now profitable to run.

For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_rare_earth_mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_rare_earth_mine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How about components for Desktop PCs?

Or will a trade war with China force everybody to buy Apple products?

</comment><comment><USER25> I really wish shareholder would sacrifice a little profit to allow these to be made in the states. So many US jobs.

<comment><USER14> If you thought iPhones are expensive now how much do you think they will be built with American labor? How many Americans do you think will want those jobs building iPhones almost nonstop for up to 12 hours a day?

<comment><USER26> At most about $100 more than they cost now.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all- american-i...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all-american- iphone/)

At any rate, I think at some point we need to stop looking at the economic argument and do what's best for US labor, US citizens, and human rights/health/the environment worldwide. Just how much are cheap electronics worth?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does that include rare earths?

This article says China hold 97% of rare earth's production:

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

Anyway, that's an important argument made to make durable phones, and with lightweight software so that you can do more with less. I wish there was some durability review on products so that consumers can understand what companies do to make products have a limited lifespan.--

<comment><USER28> My understanding of the rare earths issue is that the reason China controls that much of the production is because all the extraction & production elsewhere shut down due to an inability to compete with China's prices. You basically have to open pit enormous areas to get any quantity of them.

If the global rare earth prices rise enough, or if China continues to try to manipulate its exports to ensure that products using rare earths are manufactured within its borders, then mines eleswhere will open.

<comment><USER29> Mothballed facilities like the mountain pass mine are already reopening.</comment></comment></comment>


Aeron: Another messaging system - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/11/17/aeron-do-we-really-need-another-messaging-system.html

<comment><USER2> Aeron is a messaging system built standing on the shoulders of Kafka and Zeromq.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the original title better. It's interesting that you chose to un- Betteridge the headline for Hacker News. I'll take that as a compliment.

<comment><USER4> We changed it to try to make the title less baity. But let's please stay on topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read this title and thought that Aeron had come out with a massage chair.</comment>


Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/12/google-voice-actions/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo <comment><USER2> i switched to a nexus one/android recently for a few weeks. the experience made me really appreciate the importance of the intangibles involved in hardware design.

if i had to break down the iphone and nexus/android into a comparison of features the latter would have dominated for me. the native gmail search, beautiful google voice integration (i make a lot of international calls home which are super cheap on Goog Voice), turn by turn car navigation, reliable and good voice recognition, instant set up via my google account - each of those individually is a killer feature for me. these new voice actions again sound killer.

yet i still found myself yearning for my iphone and i eventually made the switch back. not because there was any one feature i desperately missed but because the overall experience of using it just felt so good. scrolling was flawless. the touchscreen always accurate. switching between apps incredibly smooth. all of these little things added up to a whole greater than sum of its parts (features).

you have to presume google spent a long time testing and developing the nexus and android yet it still lags behind the iphone on the intangibles. clearly getting these things right must be a non-trivial process and i'd come to take them for granted after becoming accustomed to the iphone. i won't make that mistake again.

<comment><USER3> I guess it all comes down to "what do you want to do?" Do you want to be able to do "stuff" with your phone -- anything?

Or do you want to look/feel good while doing some smaller subset of "stuff"?

Ultimately, when improving things, you hit the law of diminishing returns. You can spend twice as much effort making something 5% better than you did getting it to a 90% solution. It's like stereo equipment. A pretty ok system is like $200-300. One that's 10% better is $2000. 5% better than that and it's $20,000. And yeah, most people will agree that the $20,000 system sounds better, even non-audiophiles.

I don't think the Android UI will ever be as _good_ as Apple's. Nobody is. But "good enough" is a reasonable target. Google can either expend the energy polishing the hell out of minor interface quibbles, or they can expand the universe of the things they can do. A device that can do one thing, awesomely, is simply not as attractive as a device that can do 100 things at the 90% "good enough" level.

<comment><USER4> _I guess it all comes down to "what do you want to do?" Do you want to be able to do "stuff" with your phone -- anything?_

 _Or do you want to look/feel good while doing some smaller subset of "stuff"?_

 _A device that can do one thing, awesomely, is simply not as attractive as a device that can do 100 things at the 90% "good enough" level._

Are you comparing it to the iPhone here? Yes, the iPhone has some limitations but it's nowhere near your 100:1 ratio. Actually, there isn't that many limitations honestly. No you don't have turn-by-turn navigation out of the box, but it's available. MobileMe is supposed to offer some of the integration with a Google account.

Sure, you have things like plugging to iTunes, and limitations due to the App Store, but your comment sounds like "an iPhone is pretty and works very well but is very limited, while an Android phone is not as polished but the sky is the limit in terms of what can be done with it". It's simply not true.

Also, regarding "look/feel good", it sounds like you feel that the iPhone is still a status symbol. I think the iPhone is past being a fashion accessory that make people turn around.

edit: one can argue that you're trading some freedom for some polish. Basing your argument on what the various phones can do and can not do doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER3> > Are you comparing it to the iPhone here? Yes, the iPhone has some > limitations but it's nowhere near your 100:1 ratio.

Don't get too hung up on the ratio.

> Actually, there isn't that many limitations honestly.

 _Followed by a list of limitations and caveats._

Actually, I'd argue the opposite, the iPhone _can_ currently do many things that an Android can't do...things that I'd really like to do, like play Katamari Damacy (lest you think I'm trivializing, I have a serious soft spot for that game)...I think it's not hard to make a compelling case that in terms of software availability _and_ general quality, the iPhone trumps the Android hands down at present.

However, I think that it's also easy to argue a few other related points, the Android phones are simply shipping with a better out-of-the-box user experience in terms of capability. Sure one can purchase a variety of add ons and pay for some subscription services and eventually bring the two phones to parity at a cost. But that doesn't exactly disagree with that point then does it?

And while there are certainly more apps in the iPhone store at present, the Android Market really is the domain of hobbyists more so than the iPhone app store. This is good and bad, in the Android marketplace, I think it's possible to find more hobbyist style apps at $0 that provide pretty good add-on functionality for the phone for no cost whatsoever. Like the tri-corder app which really is quite cool and has no equivalent on the iPhone. The difference between market opportunity and buyer habit between the two stores is often brought up here on HN. I think the Android platform draws its strength from this in many ways.

However, it has a downside in that the equivalent apps on the iPhone, ones that you have to pay some nominal fee for, really do _tend_ to be of a higher production quality than the Android. And that's normal, professional paid software just tends to be of a higher production quality than hobbyist derived software. Perhaps in there's not much difference in functionality, but if I make money on my iPhone apps, I can afford to hire a graphic artist instead of using much maligned "developer art".

>Also, regarding "look/feel good", it sounds like you feel that the iPhone is still a status symbol.

Not at all, I'm simply saying exactly what I'm saying.

If you'll allow me to make a very labored analogy: A Honda Civic and a Mini Cooper (bear with me, I'm trying to use functionally equivalent cars) perform about the same, but you'll look better in the Mini. However, the backseats in the Mini kind of suck, so I can't really use it for four adults as well as a Civic, and because it looks nicer I probably don't want to load a bunch of mulch or yard equipment in the trunk of my Mini. And the operating costs of the Mini are higher than a Civic, it's less reliable, harder to find qualified technicians, has more specific fuel requirements, more expensive to do body work on and takes longer to find parts, whatever etc.

 _But_ (and this is a big but for all the Mini owners of the world) you'll look better while sitting in traffic and the key fob is really cool. The Mini is no more a status symbol than the Civic is in the same way an iPhone is no more a status symbol than an Android phone is. You just get what you want and that's that.

The relative capabilities of the two platforms in terms of software availability is the one area the comparison of iPhone:Android::Mac:Windows falls down. There simply is more and better software available for the iPhone, it's just that it doesn't ship on the device. The stuff that ships with an Android phone simply makes it a more capable phone from the time it's first powered on. And in some cases, there simply isn't an equivalent functionality available for the iPhone (and likely isn't going to be one due to Apple's strategic policies).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. Nobody will use it. People feel stupid talking to computers. Remember how you embarrassed you felt the last time you were forced to bark at one of those computerized phone operators in a public place? That's this, only all the time.

Would you not feel like the biggest doofus in the world whipping out your Droid 2 and performing "note to self [note]" in front of people?

<comment><USER6> You are being shortsighted and silly. Here are some excellent examples to show you that speech technology could be pretty damn amazing! The first one <strike>could</strike> _will_ save lives.

(While driving) "Should I turn left or right at this intersection?"

(While shopping, examining a carton of eggs) "Were these eggs cheaper at the corner store?"

(While coding) "Any meetings soon?"

..... Do I need to continue? The applications are endless, assuming _it actually works_. People have felt stupid in the past because the conversation would go like this: "note to self"....."I said, NOTE TO SELF not NOTICE ELF you fucking idiot machine!"

The point is...if Google can do it well, it will take off.

<comment><USER7> Shortsighted perhaps but I don't think he is silly.

The problem is about trust. Do I trust the system to give me proper feedback. What if I am yelling because I am stressed, what if it's noisy etc. What if we are two people right next to each other.

Abd then there are quite a few mental reasons why voice recognition isn't just going to be a consumer reality, even if/when the technology is there.

<comment><USER6> I clearly stated that speech technology would only take off if it works. If you don't trust it, or it can't handle you yelling, _then it doesn't work and I agree that it won't take off_.

I'm curious about the "mental reasons" you hint at. What are those reasons? Do you mean something like Uncanny Valley? Or something else entirely?

<comment><USER8> you can expect a person to ask if something is unclear. no speech recog system has done that yet.

speech recog is orders of magnitude behind humans in accuracy.

 _understanding_ is another thing entirely. i don't mean philosophy but the problem of even parsing a sentence. just look at implementations of automatic language translation to get a feeling for this problem.

speech recog has a long way to go because AI has a long way to go.

you don't get human-like machine interaction out of bare speech recog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Speech recognition has been stuck at a high but not good enough plateau for some time. 90% accuracy sounds nice, but is actually totally useless. 99% might be good enough, but no one is there. More likely, 99.9 (for some number of repeating 9s) might be necessary for people to really trust these systems.

<comment><USER3> I read someplace that human speech recognition is around 90%, I think for speech recognition to be considered "useful" it has to be super-human. I agree something like 99+% is required before it really gets accepted.

One problem lots of speech driven systems have too is the lack of discover- ability. There's no interface you can inspect to learn from unless the system gives you a long list of command choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is the voice recognition better than what google voice offers in its transcription service? Because I've found that to be horribly inaccurate.

<comment><USER11> The voice recognition better than with google voice ohh for cynics transctription service because i've found that to be a horriby inaccurate.

(Your question, spoken by a norwegian, transcribed by the new Google Voice Search)

<comment><USER12> "is the worst recognition better than google voice overs"

(Same question, spoken by a Finn)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have spent two sessions experimenting with the iPhone voice commands. Both times ended with me with tears of laughter, literally. I have never, not once, during one of these sessions gotten my iphone to do what I wanted to or call the right person. I find it genuinely hilarious though ... and adorable. "My wiiittttlle iphonie wonieee. Are you learning to talkiee walkiieeee?"

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I wont believe that it is as accurate as the video portrays until I see it with my own eyes.

<comment><USER14> if you have a british accent it doesn't work. really really doesn't work :(

<comment><USER15> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt-DWr7208A>

The Youtube auto-transcription (press the CC button to view) of Glaswegian on this BBC Scotland comedy show is hilariously bad, though I'm not sure how most non-Scottish humans would do either.

examples: "not a care in the world" is repeated twice in the audio and translated as "the attack killed a lot of them" the first time and "months of camelot of" the second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've had a G1 for about a year now... I really want to upgrade at this point.

</comment><comment><USER17> yet another reason to lament my inability to install android on my nokia. Android software + nokia hardware = best of both worlds

<comment><USER18> I think there was some progress on the n900.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's increasingly mainstream coverage of apps which are incompatible with almost every android phone out there - requiring 2.1 or even 2.2 like this does. I wonder how long it will take for manufacturers to take upgrades seriously? Some of them are still abandoning their handsets as soon as they go out the door.

I suspect many of the early adopters are now including this in their purchasing decision when they upgrade.

<comment><USER20> Not almost every Android phone.

More than 62% of Android phones are either 2.1 or 2.2.

[http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform- ve...](http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform- versions.html)

<comment><USER21> 60% is 2.1, however, and both of these new Android features are only supported in 2.2. I have an Eris that went on sale less than a year ago, and chances are my phone will never be updated to 2.2.

<comment><USER20> My guess is that most phones that are still on 1.5 or 1.6 will never be updated to 2.1 or 2.2

If the phone is 2.1 now, it will probably get 2.2 by the end of the year.

<comment><USER22> HTC started the rollout of 2.2 for the Desire last week. The Desire is selling well in Europe. I presume they're also rolling it out for the Legend, which was heavily mass-marketed for the last 3-4 months. I have the impression HTC is _the_ main Android vendor in Europe at the moment. Just this rollout will push 2.2 deployment numbers up, I think.

As far as I know this is the first mainstream upgrade of phones from 2.1 to 2.2 (apart from the Nexus which is, imo, niche). Or did I miss any?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia2Vec: Optimized Implementation for Learning Embeddings from Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06280 <comment><USER2> You can see the visualization of the embedding vector space here: [http://projector.tensorflow.org/?config=https://wikipedia2ve...](http://projector.tensorflow.org/?config=https://wikipedia2vec.github.io/projector_files/config.json)

I recommend to use T-SNE instead of PCA, which can be selected by the button at the bottom left.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this the notion of "embedding" they are discussing?

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

What is an "entity"?

<comment><USER2> Author here. More broadly, embedding is a mapping from objects (e.g., words and entities) to vectors of real numbers. And as described in the mcxlog's comment, an entity refers to an entry in Wikipedia in this paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Im a little confused, its just Word2vec pretrained on content of wikipedia.

<comment><USER2> Unlike Word2vec, this tool learns embeddings of entities (i.e., entries in Wikipedia) as well as words. And although the model implemented in this tool is based on Word2vec's skip-gram model, it is extended using two submodels (Wikipedia link graph model and anchor context model). Please refer to the documentation for details: [https://wikipedia2vec.github.io/wikipedia2vec/intro/](https://wikipedia2vec.github.io/wikipedia2vec/intro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perfect timing for me. I've been working on a project that needs multilingual vectorizing and entity recognition. I've been using dbpedia and yago queries.

Given an input text, what would be a good way to extract a list of entities? The word sequence should be usable to determine which is an entity or just a word.

Is there the possibility to do fine tuning a la Bert or Elmo?

<comment><USER2> My past paper describes an entity linking method based on Wikipedia2Vec: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01343](https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01343)

You need to extract entity names using an NER software (e.g., SpaCy, Stanford NER), and resolve the names to knowledge base entities using the entity linking method.</comment></comment>