Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes? - <AUTHOR> So has anyone around here hacked their homes? I'm talking about any sort of thing like controlling all lights, air conditioners and other devices wirelessly from a central console ? Or just setting up your own custom anti-theft system.
Any hacks would be awesome to hear about. <comment><USER2> I hacked my lights and some power outlets. I can turn them on by flipping a simple switch. I also hacked a lock onto my door and hacked some layers of paint on the ceiling. Then I paid some people to install a temperature control hack so that air conditioning can be controlled based on a heat sensor. And some other people came in and hacked some wires to different ports near the floor. They put a box in the alcove where you can turn off power to entire sections of the house. These people were all Mexicans, so I guess they must have some leet hacking schools where they come from.

<comment><USER3> love this joke (just like I loved your post at <http://shrughes.com/p/how-to- vote-on-hacker-news/>) and I agree the word "hack" has become tarnished as of late on HN. I think hardik988 was genuinely asking about how to hack together some sort of smart local grid application to control all the equipments around his home though. That's one of my fantasies too and I just haven't had time to do it but one day...

In the meantime, here is a couple of great places for tips on that: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeex...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4408479/4408480/04408494.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4408494&authDecision=-203) <http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/toaster/>

if you want to control the utility down the road too ;-) [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=power- hacke...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=power- hackers&ref=nf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yes I was genuinely seeking inspiration for my home in the future. Thanks for the links, will be sure to check them out.

EDIT : Posted reply above to shrughes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My entire apartment is Z-Wave and I have a custom written iPad app that lets me control most everything.

I've been considering putting some of those cheap 7" android tablets into my walls, but I don't own the place, so I guess I'll have to wait.

X10 is a horrible joke, don't go there. Z-Wave is fantastic though.

Here are some zwave links:

<http://www.z-wave.com/modules/Products/>

<http://www.smarthomeusa.com/search.php?q=z-wave>

<https://www.zwaveproducts.com/>

<comment><USER5> Can you remark on how much these things cost you, all said and done?

<comment><USER4> I've probably spent ~1K usd for 5 rooms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't hacked my own, but this guy has: <http://www.bwired.nl/>

He's the most extreme example that I've come across and he even describes how he did it/what tech he uses. If you are looking for inspiration on what to hack, you can't go far wrong using his house as a start!

<comment><AUTHOR> You guessed it right. I was looking for inspiration when I started this thread. Thanks for the pointer.

<comment><USER7> someone said X10 "is horrible" but this guy uses it, anyone can give a (link to) comparison with z-wave?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My weekend hacking on IP cameras turned into a startup: Dropcam (<http://www.dropcam.com>). Dropcams can push alert your iPhone on motion or sound and they store up to 30 days of video.

When I was a kid, I had the Firecracker serial-to-wireless-to-X10 gadget hooked up to a PC running Microsoft Agent/batch scripts. I could voice control my ceiling fan, lights, etc like Star Trek (at least, if the Enterprise had ceiling fans). It was a big hit with the ladies.

I like everything about renting except for how much of a hassle it is to change wiring and put gadgets in the walls.

<comment><USER9> Wow, I'm so going to buy this. We've got another baby on the way and I was looking for something like this to use as a baby monitor. Nothing out there has really caught my fancy yet, but this looks pretty darn awesome.

BTW, I might not represent your potential customer base perfectly, but I would ideally like to see a few more screenshots of the web interface on your website.

<comment><USER8> Congratulations! We hear a lot of fun stuff from our baby monitoring customers. One of our users called it "Baby TiVo" ... you can export clips to send to the family, so it's lots of fun.

As for screenshots, did you check out <http://www.dropcam.com/demo>? You get there by clicking "See it live" on the homepage. We should probably add links to it from the learn more/product pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes. I've been involved in home automation for many many years. Our house has pretty much all the primary lights and outlets controlled by Insteon devices. A Mac Mini runs a software called Indigo that handles all the logic and macros, the same Mini has our primary audio library on it, and some other media.

Every plasma TV in the house also has a Mac Mini at a minimum, some also have Tivos and Apple TVs.

Intelligent video cameras around the house can detect people or vehicles approaching up the driveway or around other perimeter areas and send me email alerts, video clips and/activate other things via the Indigo/Insteon system.

We have a dual-zone heating/cooling setup. The thermostats are Venstars with an Insteon RF interface. Setpoints are selected based on time of day, outdoor temps, and occupancy (sensed via motion detectors and/or our presence at our other house (eg: if there is activity at house X, we can keep house Y from initiating common events)).

I have a Redeye wifi to IR iPod base station thing for controlling the TV and AV gear we spend most time around. This is mostly accessed through an I* app, but can also be controlled via an http interface.

From a web interface, my iPhone or my iPad I can turn any light on or off, change temperature setpoints, read status of various sensors, or control iTunes, all through the Indigo app. Through a separate web interface I've written, I can see recent events from the security cameras and access control systems, see live video, lock/unlock certain doors and so forth.

There is a Russound multi-zone amp and zone selector in the basement ( though we mostly just use the amp now). A combination of airport expresses and rogue amoeba apps allows me to route audio from pretty much any device/point in the house to any other device or room. There are in-ceiling speakers in the bedroom and master bath, speakers in the garage, and on the back deck, all on separate zones.

I've run about 2 miles of cable (cat5 and rg6) throughout the house to create a communications backbone.

I'm probably missing a few things, but the summary of it is that the houses mostly adapt around us for things like lights and hvac. We can listen to music anyplace we happen to be ( there is almost always music playing at our house).

The current incarnation of the system is the result of hacking around with HA for about a dozen years now trying different things to see what works. When I first started doing this my wife was basically like 'NFW' and now she wouldn't want to live without it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I used a combination of Arduino boards (Atmega controllers), Velleman dimmers and a Velleman relay board to control all the lights in my home, with pushbutton switches that have feedback LEDs. Then I wrote an application on top of that (running off an AT91SAM9 dev board) that implements mood combinations, also exposing a protocolbuffers/http based API (events are IP multicast) that I use to control everything with my Android phone. I also use it to configure the Arduino's (and upgrade them remotely using avrdude). It's still not completely finished, but so far it's been working quite well for me. The central application runs in an OSGi container, and exposes every light and mood as a service, so I would like to plug some light sensors into it so I can let it control some lights automatically (for example the one at the front door). I was lucky enough that I knew what I was going to need so all the wires were in place when I needed them. For future additions I think I'm going to have a look at Z-Wave or Zigbee.

<comment><USER12> what brand of pushbutton switches with feedback LEDs did you use?

<comment><USER11> I used switches from CJC systems (a small Belgian company, a friend of mine designs prints for them, so I was able to get my hands on a few of them for the sake of my "experiment").

[http://www.cjcsystems.com/index.php?page=Products&catid=...](http://www.cjcsystems.com/index.php?page=Products&catid=14&pl=1&id=133)

<comment><USER12> cool thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock the door. See my blog post here: <http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I live in a house with 4 other computer science students, which should answer your question pretty well.

About a year ago we designed a system/protocol called 'SHET' (<https://github.com/18sg/SHET>) which consists of a central server that links many clients together. Each client can present many properties (get/set), actions (like methods, that can be called), and events (that other clients can listen for). This was implemented by me in python/twisted and makes controlling/monitoring computers around the house really easy.

About a month ago, someone wrote a system called SHETSource (<https://github.com/18sg/SHETSource>) which allows us to easily connect arduinos onto SHET. Since we don't all leave our computers on all the time, we have one arduino connected to the 'server' (old macbook) near the switch, which arduinos in our rooms connect to via the spare wires in the ethernet (if you only want 100Mbps, two of the wires are spare).

In my room at least, I have a pir, 3 hacked light controllers, a servo and two switches connected via SHETSource, which allows me to write all the logic in python.

Basically, we've written a hacking framework.

</comment><comment><USER15> I played around with X10 networking (device control using the in-house power wiring as a message bus) years ago, for home automation. Fun stuff, and usable even today.

Recently, I've started working on an Arduino-driven thermostat replacement using XBees to get around the problem of running wiring in a house without any conduits (and not wanting to run plenum-rated cabling in the heating ducts). It's actually pretty simple stuff, with off-the-shelf ICs (and I'm no hardware guy) and a little programming. The biggest challenge was figuring out the existing thermostat and HVAC wiring; I knew practically nothing about this stuff previously.

Some folks have gone quite far with this kind of thing: <http://diy- zoning.sourceforge.net/Advanced/faq.html>

(I particularly like the idea of using R/C servos to provide rudimentary zone control.)

<comment><USER16> _I played around with X10 networking (device control using the in-house power wiring as a message bus) years ago, for home automation_

I had lots of fun with X10 back in college, tricking out my apartment to have voice control over the lights and drapes. The X10 computer interface combined with Homeseer allowed me to create pretty complex "scenes" such as the always popular "seduce" command which would close the drapes, gradually dim the lights to 15% in 1% increments over a 1 hour interval, and start playing a playlist of mp3s that sadly started with Sarah Mclachlan and ended with Barry White.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got a TED (www.theenergydetective.com) and took 3 years to get from a $250 electric bill to a $40. Later I did a similar thing for heat efficiency. Though I suppose that's not what you were asking about.

<comment><USER18> Awesome improvement! Wattvision began as a hack -- getting data from my electric meter without altering or affecting it in any way, and making consumer install super simple. You can get the TED -> wattvision uploader from our site, too. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just bought a house (chronicled it at <http://blackrimglasses.com>). My last townhouse was also automated. Here's the general setup:

We use Insteon for the automation system, hooked into a MacMini running Indigo from Perceptive Automation.

I have the system setup so it has "states" that the house is in, ie: home, baby in bed, etc. The "actions" you can do are contingent on conditions. So if my wife and I are closing up the house, but the baby is asleep, it will keep the light near his room from going on.

For whole home audio we have a Sonos, with five zones, including our patio. The Mac Mini system serves the audio. It also has AirVideo transcoding on it for our iPads. We use iphones and ipads to control everything (two of each).

When we bought the house, we put Cat-6 in every room, so most everything runs off hard line Ethernet. We have three dual band Airport Extreme's in the house for wireless.

The thermostat and sprinklers run off the insteon device and are controlled by the MacMini. Our stereo (Denon 3808CI) has a web and socket interface, so that is controlled remotely fairly often.

Our DirectTV's have the "whole home DVR" thing, which uses a MOCA coax adapter on each box to create its own network. We have two DVR's and two regular recievers.

I haven't yet done cameras and such, or motion detectors but we plan on it. Currently for occupancy sensing, I use a hack to get the locations of our iPhones from MobileMe.

</comment><comment><USER20> My first usage of twitter was for sending DM's to my window air conditioner. At the time I didn't have a smart phone, so using twitter via SMS was my means of communication.

Soldered the air conditioner remote to a relay connected to the parallel port on my computer. Whenever the script pulled down new DM's from my username with special commands, it would briefly flip the relay turning the ac on or off. Also set up a scheduler to turn it on 30 minutes before i woke up.

</comment><comment><USER21> I moved the kitchen and removed some walls.

</comment><comment><USER22> In a previous rented place I had a Misterhouse rig hooked up to some X10, Ethernet throughout the house and several MythTV servers so people could watch TV in different rooms. Then some people moved out, non-geeky people moved in who would routinely break stuff and I ended up with just me and my flatmate having hackery stuff going on in our rooms and some in the living room.

As the lock on my room was a bit crappy I had an SGI Indy with an Indycam pointed at the door taking photos every few seconds, and a script on a FreeBSD box that would check for differences, notify me of any changes (this was before I knew about ZoneAlarm) and string the differing ones into a gif with a timestamp. I caught a flatmate going into my room a few times to 'borrow' some things without telling me.

In my current house we've had the mythtv setup going but have moved to a Mac Mini downstairs with EyeTV. The house is a bit too small to justify X10 everywhere, and I have too many other DIY tasks I'm trying to avoid to be able to get away with putting it in :)

I do have a wireless electricty usage meter though, haven't quite figured out how to log the stats yet.

</comment><comment><USER23> You should check out Andy Stanford Clark from IBM - afaik he uses MQ technologies hooked up to various sensors to control and monitor much of his 16th century house on the Isle of Wight (UK)- [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/things_that_tw...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/things_that_tweet.html)

<comment><USER24> +1, I went to to a talk by him a few years ago and from memory some of the quirkier things he had hooked up were automated mousetrap notifcations and an ambient orb that lets you know how much energy your house is using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had X10 all over the place when I was living in the US. It's quite cheap and not too bad of an investment, especially if you are just renting the place.

Now I am back in Europe and I left all that equipment behind in Wisconsin? Is anybody interested? I was planning to sell it on craigslist but maybe a fellow HNer will have a better use.

<comment><USER26> Totally interested, yes. My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER25> email sent.

<comment><USER5> Would it be possible to half and half? :D

I actually happen to live in Wisconsin (Milwaukee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Haven't done my whole apartment (yet), but I built an RFID & HTTP lock for the front door. I can use my Octopus card or iPhone app to unlock. See my blog post here: <http://www.f-77.com/2010/11/05/octopus-card-door-lock/>

</comment><comment><USER27> I did our home lighting, using Insteon w. a few random x10s still around, using Indigo on a Mini, which is connected to our home ent. system. Hacking is at another level when you need to make sure you don't electrocute yourself or burn the house down!

The best hack, imo, is a simple one - running a HD projector and 72" screen. It's only for movies and sporting events, b/c it's too weird to watch anything non-cinematic on a big screen.

Finally, it's not a hack, but i'll throw in a plug for the Logitech Harmony remote - it's the best we've found for set up and control of our HT system. I can't really comment on it directly, though, because my wife is in charge of setting it up;)

</comment><comment><USER28> Does managing to keep your mum outta your room for a month counts? It's a big deal, I tell you. Especially if you are a messy teens. Tricks like make it smell with your shoes work well.

<comment><USER29> As a teen, I did quite a bit of work to keep my family out of my room. I come from a very large family, and I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there (defeating the purpose of my clean, quiet space.)

I arranged the furniture such that anyone entering the room would have to walk through a narrow space between a dresser and wall, then walk all the way around my bed through another narrow space, before they could get to the open part of my room. I furthermore made sure there were no good places to sit except for my computer chair (by raising the bed to an uncomfortable height, and leaving piles of school papers stacked on my other chair, which I could easily move if I wanted company but nobody else would've moved.)

The best part was, I didn't have to make my room messy, smelly, or uncomfortable for me. I just made it uncomfortable for other people to spend time in the room without my intentionally creating space for them.

<comment><USER30> "I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there"

How true! My home office was also my workshop/server room. I got tired of the heat, noise and technorubble, so I gave away the desk, moved the servers to the (much cooler) basement, and stripped the whole room down to just a sofa and mostly empty bookshelf. Now it's in high demand, and I only use it when I'm home alone. But at the same time, I got rid of all our towers and switched everyone to wireless laptops, so it's not too hard to find a quiet corner anywhere else in the house to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Jon Oxer (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonoxer>) has and was working on a TV show about it (<http://www.superhouse.tv/>).

He's documented some of it on his blog: <http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/category/DIY>

(I thought he had documented more but I can't find it. :) )

</comment><comment><USER32> Where are the <http://www.gridspy.co.nz/> guys, this is right up their alley...

</comment><comment><USER33> How much time do you have? :)

Great resources:

<http://www.cocoontech.com> (forum dedicated to exactly your question)

<http://www.charmedquark.com> (the software package I chose to buy, though there are many others)

There's also some coverage on AVScience, but cocoontech has largely taken over, IMO.</comment>


The flyak - interesting kayak concept - <AUTHOR> http://www.pddnet.com/scripts/ShowPR.asp?RID=22072&CommonCount=0 <comment><USER2> Since this is HN, let's add more technology. Keep the foil retracted until a sensor detects you're at an appropriate speed then extend the foil at a rate that maximizes velocity through the water. The weight added should be minimal.

<comment><USER3> Even better might be multiple foils along the hull at different depths. When the speed is low, you get lots of extra lift to help pull the hull out of the water. As you pick up speed, the extra foils come out of the water and don't create extra drag.

<comment><USER2> This is why I love this site :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool concept. Would it be possible to build a K2 or K4 like this to try and get even more speed?</comment>


Deep Learning and Renormalization Group Thery - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831 <comment><AUTHOR> A very inspiring paper and idea definitely deserves your full attention for whoever is interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence!</comment>


Breakthrough in delivering drugs to the brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12776222 <comment><USER2> For once the word 'breakthrough' seems entirely appropriate - both for context and for significance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha good point :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this is related to this article in The Economist re: a method to treat "mad cow" disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease): <http://www.economist.com/node/18276254></comment>


Unicode 6.1.0 released today - <AUTHOR> http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see some charts: how many of the possible characters are already mapped to unicode characters, as well as the popularity of the sets of characters that aren't.</comment>


The most important thing [for a startup founder] - <AUTHOR> http://joshanthony.org/the-most-important-thing/

<comment><USER2> The top tip "email to create an ice-breaker on the cold call" is very important.

I spent a lot of my professional life fundraising for startups. For 4 years my target was wealthy individuals, capable of donating at least $50k. Last year I founded my startup on the restaurants market and I continue to do a lot of cold calling. So I developed this process (start in (i) if you don't know the name of the decision maker, start in (iii) if you do):

(i) Call to the general contact number and ask for the <job title> of the company. In my case, the keyword is "responsible for the marketing", as restaurants have diverse structure, this could the owner, a manager, the cousin of the owner... Be sure to get the name, even if you can't get the person on the phone.

(ii) Call again with the name. Now you have more chance to get him on the phone. Keep calling until you get. Pitch briefly what you are selling (in one sentence) and what he is gaining with it (in ~five sentences). Ask for a meeting. The most important is _ask for a meeting_.

(iii) Often you will get a meeting. The same number of times you get a clear "no". But most of times he will ask to send an email. So send an email giving new information about how he can get value from what you are selling. Keep it brief, it is better to give _new_ information, than a deeper explanation about what you said on the phone. The deeper explanation will be on your website, if he is willing to learn more. If you have the decision maker name (and hopefully his email), you can start with this email. As the "ice-breaker" mentioned on OP. Be sure to mention that you are asking for a meeting on the email too.

(iv) Call him in no more than two days after you sent the email. Ask if he got the email and ask for a meeting. Again. By now, if he is still refusing a presential meeting, you probably will never get one. Be prepared to quit on a prospect with no remorse.

This is the basic routine. But in any of these steps you might generate a real conversation (even if you never get to the meeting). And that is when you will learn about your customer, your market, your substitutes, etc.

Also regarding learning, my top tip: write down any _Tough Questions_ you are asked. With time (and a lot of try and error) you will learn the best answers. Then you write your Sales FAQ. A very important document to read and refresh the memory before any sales call or meeting.

<comment><USER3> When the client accepts the meeting, usually, how much percent of the times you close the deal?

<comment><USER2> I must say I think I am better in doing right than doing good. In the restaurants startup, it is kind of new. So I got about 50 meetings and closed 3 deals. I really think if I was better, in retrospect, I should be able to close about 10 deals (a good natural salesperson would).

But then again, I trust that I am better NOW. And my from my next 50 meetings I will close 10 of it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It may seems obvious, but it is extremely hard to accomplish. It is easy to convince yourself that you are so busy building other things (product, company culture, brand, marketing strategy, vision, etc.) and you forget to talk with the customers.

Being busy with day-to-day activities is a major reason why large companies fail to innovate.

Always good to get a reminder to talk with the customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really agree with what you said about convincing yourself there are other things to do. Certainly we were guilty of this. A great company culture is fantastic but wont mean anything if you don't have any revenue :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gary Vaynerchuk did a cool video demonstrating this principle of picking up the phone a couple of years back: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgvjT6W31hM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgvjT6W31hM)

</comment><comment><USER6> This advice also applies to business development, fundraising, and generally closing deals. It's easy to stew and agonize over an email draft for days and even easier for the recipient to ignore or blow past your key message once you've sent it. Just pick up the damn phone and close the deal.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is just a re-hash of "get out of the building." Good advice, but still, nothing new...

</comment><comment><USER8> Great idea. Pls keep the posts coming. Sometimes certain things need to be restated once in a while.</comment>


Faktory, a new background job system - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikeperham.com/2017/10/24/introducing-faktory/ <comment><USER2> It seems nuts to me to introduce a stateful queue system like this where the persistence story is "data's out there on a single node in some kind of disk format, hope it doesn't go missing!"

I guess this style significantly reduces setup friction, but it's almost an irresponsible design in a universe where the average cloud provider is telling you, "your compute instances may vanish at any time." If this used Kafka, Redis, MySQL, or another well-known stand-alone data store, I know my data is replicated, and I can recover my enqueued jobs if Somethimg Bad happens.

I like the nice UI and the simple API, but there's no way this will replace Resque or any Kafka-based-job-whatever at my place of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It supports backup and restore today but RocksDB doesn't have a replication story at the moment.

Side note: Resque will lose jobs if it crashes, it doesn't use RPOPLPUSH. I hope you'll take another look at Faktory in a few months, maybe we'll have addressed your issues.

<comment><USER3> Using RPOPLPUSH there's no guarantee you won't lose the job if the Redis server crashes prior to publishing it. Even with persistence enabled (AOF) there's still a small window of time between receiving the message and the next AOF fsync. The sender would think the message is queued as it got an OK response back but the message will be lost.

There are three common solutions to this:

First is to pretend it doesn't exist (quite common!).

Second is to understand that losing messages is a possibility and only use it for message types that the loss of a message wouldn't be critical (which covers quite a bit).

The third solution, which actually addresses the problem, separates the persistence of message details to transactional store from the event notification of a new message. A "sweeper" type task can thing check the persisted message list for messages that haven't been processed and re-publish them.

( _Disclaimer: I 'm a huge fan of Redis and think it's the bee's knees of data structure servers._)

<comment><USER4> You mean RDB? I thought AOF can be configured to fsync at every write.

<comment><USER3> The default is to fsync once per second so the failure window is small but it's not zero.

It's possible to fsync on every write[1] but it may be too slow as the single threaded nature of Redis means you've serialized every write operation. Plus that'd apply to all usage of that Redis server, not just the queue.

[1]: [https://redis.io/topics/persistence#how-durable-is-the- appen...](https://redis.io/topics/persistence#how-durable-is-the-append-only- file)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can just use Redis, Kafka, or better yet use Google's Cloud Pub/Sub or Azure Service Bus for an extremely cheap and highly-reliable system that already has all of these features included.

What exactly is the use-case for an entirely new and separate system that looks like it's single-node only?

<comment><USER6> I had a similar question, given that I'm happily processing jobs in Elixir that are enqueued by a Ruby app via Sidekiq. After taking a look at the README's, it looks like what this gets you is dumb clients, with the logic around retries, etc built into the server, rather than forcing the client to handle these details. That's great for polyglot systems—the dumber the client the better, in my book. As another commenter posted, I'll be interested to see more about what tradeoffs it makes in distribution.

If your current system is already something like SNS/SQS or an actual message queue with acks, then this probably isn't aimed at you.

<comment><USER5> Why run something extra when you can use a single database table which is already universally accessible by any dumb client?

Push, fetch, ack = insert, select, delete. A few lines of SQL or a stored procedure gets it done. Postgres basically made _skip locked_ for queues.

<comment><USER6> Its a valid way to go, but does skip locked handle retries for you? There's more to a queue than just the message.

Also worth noting, postgres is also another piece of infrastructure to run, and not all applications use it.

<comment><USER5> The whole point is that Faktory is another piece of infrastructure, with arguably little value when you already have all of the features within Redis or a SQL database which you're probably running anyway. Sidekiq itself requires Redis.

For postgres, _SKIP LOCKED_ is the easiest way to queue because the row only gets deleted if the transaction commits, which is when the job finishes. Otherwise if there's an error than don't commit or just crash and the row remains in the queue and another worker process tries it again.

<comment><USER6> With redis you're back to the original problem of needing to code things like retries back into your client. Postgres may have some limited abilities to use it as a message queue but you're still going to be missing some of the other features that will end up in faktory like periodic jobs.

If pg works for your situation, that's great, but i don't know why you'd assume that none of these objections have come up before and been responded to.

<comment><USER5> If you want the client-side retry logic too then that requires language- specific libraries, and it seems that's what Faktory requires anyway so this whole thing becomes unnecessary.

They couldve just ported the sidekiq library to several languages or use a single C library with language wrappers and gotten the same result with less work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you peel back a layer or two from the background job onion you land smack dab in the land of message queues. I'll be curious to see what trade offs this library makes around classic message queue problems such as delivery semantics, visibility windows, sharding or replication for multi node, etc.

There's definitely a lot of message queues out there these days and things like Kafka which turn into message queues. That said, a lot of them are a pain to operate so there's room for one that is easy to deploy and operate.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _It uses Facebook 's high-performance RocksDB embedded datastore internally > to persist all job data, queues, error state, etc_

This breaks the devops story for me. The difference in featureset between Rocksdb and redis is not that big.. However redis is hugely supported on the cloud and in high-availability fully-managed mode.

Its so convenient to use sidekiq on heroku or aws. I really hope you build this on redis rather than a new persistence server.

<comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong, but RocksDB is embedded withink faktory, so this would actually be one less service to manage than using an external redis server. Isn't that a good thing?

From my experience, when running high throughput, quickly executing sidekiq workers on heroku, the expense often doesn't come from dynos, but the redis instance as the limiting scale factor usually comes down to connections. That won't be a problem with Faktory and an embedded datastore.

<comment><USER10> It depends on how comfortable you are developing a monitoring and failover system for something stateful. Right now AWS handles failover of our redis instances. With Faktory, I'm not sure what that looks like yet.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. It will be interesting to see how it handles fail over in the case of an outage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When Mike released Sidekiq for Crystal-lang, I thought this might be in the works. From the readme:

> The Ruby and Crystal versions of Sidekiq must remain data compatible in > Redis. Both versions should be able to create and process jobs from each > other. Their APIs are not and should not be identical but rather idiomatic > to their respective languages.

It makes sense to unify the protocol for background job processing, making them language agnostic. Some languages tackle different problems better than others, so this will be a really useful tool.

Great work, Mike. Keep the hits rolling.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mike makes some amazing software in this space. I have some mostly pragmatic concerns about building out a framework that requires some specialized server to handle state for workers, though.

Maybe for something like RabbitMQ or SQS, this would be a satisfactory replacement, since these seem to be relatively monotasked persistence servers. So for your traditional Celery+RabbitMQ deployment, for instance, this could be a good replacement.

But let's we consider cases like Redis, Memcached, or Kafka, where the persistence store we're using is often also being utilized as a cache or linear log in other aspects of the same product. This would make Faktory troublesome, because it introduces additional maintenance costs compared to a service that we already need. Furthermore, if I can use an off-the-shelf, hosted storage solution for enqueued job definitions, like we do with Elasticache, I reduce my operational costs even more.

So it's not a question of whether or not Faktory works, but whether it's worth the cost of building, deploying, and maintaining a specialized monotasker server instance on top of the worker pool I already need to build and maintain. I'd be interested in understanding where the long-term value add would be in most large-scale practical SOAs, and how folks excited about this project anticipate implementing it might go.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those of you pointing out flaws, remember you are picking apart a pre-1.0, just launched project. We're all hackers and startup people right? Think MVP, no one can ship a perfect system completely finished.

<comment><USER5> The only _flaw_ here seems to be a lack of use-case... why not just add an HTTP API to Sidekiq instead, if it doesn't already have it? That way the value of the queue logic and semantics can be offered to any external client.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sidekiq is not a server, it's a Ruby worker process. Redis is the server and I can't build a fast, easy to use embedded queue system on top of Redis.

<comment><USER5> Can't Sidekiq just run as a standalone process? It can take a connection string to use existing Redis/RDBMS with option to use embedded server maybe. You can just package it with Redis in a container too.

Although to be honest, the basics of a work queue are well covered now with the evolution of cloud services and other databases and message systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sidekiq is Ruby only. That won't support one of my key goals with Faktory: polyglot. Background jobs can benefit applications written in many languages.

There's many different tools and many different users. No one choice is appropriate for all. I hope some people find Faktory useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used Sidekiq for years. Great project. Looking forward to giving this a swing.

I really respect what Mike's done being able to monetize his work on cool open source projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks nice, but I'm also confused by why anyone would build a single-node data store in 2017. I can't find any information about whether replication and HA/failover is planned. Writing a queue on top of RocksDB is arguably trivial; it's the other stuff that is difficult.

The other thing about job systems that a lot of people seem to ignore is client-side scaling. We run our apps on Kubernetes, where you'd naturally want to tune worker scheduling dynamically to accomodate queue size. Feeding custom queue metrics into the horizontal pod autoscaler is one way to do this.

<comment><USER14> Many web applications are so low traffic that a single node is enough to handle everything: application server, database, queue system, static content, etc. It's up to the business deciding if they want to spend the money to buy high availability. In my experience almost everybody don't and have lived years with only occasional downtimes that didn't harm their business.

<comment><USER15> yes but downtime is different than data loss

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a related matter, how does job queue differ from message queue?

What can a job queue do that Kafka or RabbitMQ cannot do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Background jobs are specialized messages. You can build a decent job system on top of a message queue but you'll lose the specifics. For instance, Rabbit and Kafka won't give you the built in retry system with error tracking and UI. Faktory enforces a specialized message format (the job payload) and can do many things with that data; message queues that treat messages as a simple byte array can't do that.

[https://github.com/contribsys/faktory/wiki/The-Job- Payload](https://github.com/contribsys/faktory/wiki/The-Job-Payload)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the key features I love beanstalkd for, is a support for assigning different priorities for the jobs in the same queue, so the jobs with larger priority assigned will be processed first. Looks like this feature is missing from Faktory.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/contribsys/faktory/issues/new](https://github.com/contribsys/faktory/issues/new)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does this compare to [https://github.com/antirez/disque](https://github.com/antirez/disque)?

<comment><USER5> Disque was never officially released and is considered deprecated now. Redis already does well as a queue, v4.0 came with modules which add even more functionality, and future releases will include a new _streams_ datatype, similar to Kafka.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing this - I've obviously missed these developments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks very similar to beanstalkd, the only difference I can see is that Faktory comes with a bundled GUI. Is there anything else I'm missing?

<comment><USER20> From the FAK:

> Faktory aims to be more feature-rich and better supported. Many of Faktory's > OSS competitors are "dead" and no longer supported. I am fortunate enough to > have both expertise in background jobs and a business model to support > Faktory long-term.

<comment><USER21> Background job systems rarely need extensive support (or, for that matter, a constant stream of features) I've used Gearman for years, to great success.

Not saying that Gearman is a better solution, just saying that "better supported" for such a relatively simple tool is not always necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would be great as a layer on top of SQS and/or GCE PubSub. And I'd host Faktory in a Lambda or CloudFunction.</comment>


Pirate Bay Tricks Anti-Pirates with Fake Peers - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-pirates-with-fake-peers-081020/ <comment><USER2> I love the PirateBay. Always one step ahead.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it's possible to run enough controlled peers on a tracker to be able to statistically separate legitimate users from anti-piracy bots.

</comment><comment><USER4> That is rather rude. This would be like getting the DEA to bust your 80-year- old neighbor to prove that the drug war is dumb -- you may be right, but it sure sucks to be whichever random bystander you picked.

<comment><USER5> The DEA would probably happily bust down the door of your 80 year old neighbor regardless.

<comment> daniel-cussen The DEA has busted down the door of 80+ year old neighbors.

From wikipedia:

"Kathryn Johnston (c1914-2006) was an elderly Atlanta, Georgia woman shot by three undercover police in her home on November 21, 2006 after she fired one shot at the ceiling, assuming her home was being invaded. While the officers were wounded by friendly fire, none of the officers received life threatening injuries, but Johnston was killed by their gunfire."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually this article was more about how there is no real way to fight the MPAA and RIAA when they invade your privacy by looking at what you are downloading. It is sort of scary - they have this long list of things they can get you for and all you wanted was to watch a movie.... Sort of like the guy in that long french novel who steals a loaf of bread and then 20 years later he gets out of jail and steals some silverware. it just does not make sense...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So all those peers to whom I am trying to seed are not actually real, hence my ratio is not 1:1.</comment>


10 services web developers should know - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@julienvallini/10-services-to-ship-at-light-speed-%EF%B8%8F-154b576eb4f <comment><USER2> I would add sentry.io error logging to this list. Very happy customer. We use them heavily and it's been really helpful identifying production issues that miss testing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't quite see the point of this?

"Crisp chat" \- there's tonnes of these things, what makes this one the one to know? Where's Let's Encrypt, which i'd argue is more important than the lot?

"10 web services I use and like" would be a better title imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I realized many developers ignore these services. That's why I find it useful to share.

<comment><USER3> Developers ignore Stripe?!

Again it would be more useful if you explained why they better to use than the ones we've heard of. The title should be "10 services I use".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure comparisons would be very interesting to list as well, maybe for a next post! This one is more beginner-oriented and I think it already brings value to some readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish there would be a comprehensive list of timesavers like this somewhere!

<comment><USER5> Does this count?

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


Skipping meals may increase belly fat, study finds – CBS News - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/skipping-meals-may-increase-belly-fat-study-finds/ <comment><AUTHOR> Can anyone help me make sense of this? I thought intermittent fasting was considered good. I thought there were other mice studies that show the opposite of this??

<comment><USER2> _Those on the restricted eating plan initially lost weight, but gained it back when more calories were restored to their diets -- a pattern that many humans dieters will find all too familiar._

If you say at some point, "I'm finished with the diet, I can gorge now", obviously you will gain your weight back plus some more. Or if you are skipping meals, and then "rewarding" yourself with a bigger meal at the end of the day, which brings your calorie balance in the positive, same result.

If you are following the intermittent fasting protocol though, not just randomly going from skipping meals to binging, then you get good results.</comment></comment>


Perspective - 2D/3D puzzle platformer - <AUTHOR> http://www.seewithperspective.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks very similar to "Shadow Physics". If you have not seen the game, it was shown off at GDC 2009 (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5DjyoDObA>). It got a lot of attention and then 3 years later was canceled. Here is a video of the Failure Workshop from GDC 2012 describing what went wrong (click on -> What Happend With Shadow Physics Intro): <http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015751/The-Failure>

I hope the developers can get past the initial "Wow" factor and actually make the game fun to play.

<comment><USER3> that Shadow Physics demo looks much more impressive than Perspective.

<comment><USER4> I dunno. Shadow physics had much more visual and gameplay polish when demoed, but Perspective has a simple idea that, without any additional gameplay mechanics, makes for many interesting puzzle mechanics. To me, at least, that is very impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being more free than Fez ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fez_(video_game)> ) to rotate the world to line up traveling lines is somewhat neat. But I suspect this makes level design a Real Challenge. It'll be nice to see that they managed to create nice challenging levels that don't devolve into boringly simple solutions after the for dozen or so puzzles.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is too "analogue" to be fun and has too many degrees of freedom. I found that the more "discrete" and clear a puzzler is, the more I enjoy it. Is there a proper word for what I'm trying to say? Think a chess board with clearly defined squares and moves, vs. a WarHammer-style world where you can freely move anywhere within 5cm. Fez is the former, this is the latter.

<comment><USER7> I strongly agree with this and mentioned it in my Shadow Physics failure workshop talk (even though it might not have come across as strongly as I wanted it to). It was, I think, one of the strongest shortcomings of the game, and if I was to revisit it I'd make everything (projection, lighting, physics), far more discreet so player's can predict the consequences of their actions instead of guessing through trial and error.

<comment><USER8> > so player's can predict the consequences of their actions instead of > guessing through trial and error.

Is this really what people want? Serious question. I am surprised to see it, because personally I always prefer more freedom and "trial and error" to discreet options and predictability. I hate when there's only "one right way" to do things, enforced by design. But right now I feel like minority.

<comment><USER6> I think that Angry Birds and World of Goo only work because of their freedom. Chess, Tetris and DROD work because they are beautifully simple and discrete. Minecraft took a "mathy" world to the extreme while AAA games seem to explode in organic freedom. Cut the Rope uses a physics engine but enforces "one right way" through its level design.

Maybe it's not so black and white, but rather designers make parts of a game discrete until it becomes simple enough to be fun. Whatever it is, the complexity of this game concept feels overwhelming to me. It's a bit like this physics-based Tetris, I would try it for fun but only for free and for five minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't actually look _fun_ to play, but it looks _interesting_. It's a toy, that could maybe have a game built around it.

Stuff that might make it interesting off the top of my head:

\- moving things for the 2D guy to avoid/collect \- moving things for the 3D viewpoint to avoid/collect \- switches for 2D to throw that remove obstructions for 3D, and vice-versa \- sometimes you having to move 2D and 3D at the same time

The biggest thing for me that I can't think of a workaround for offhand is the constant breaking of flow. The video shows you doing like 3 seconds of platforming followed by a context shift into 3 seconds of FPSing.

Hopefully the students behind this have thought of all of these things and many more. Because the idea of "running around imagining Megaman doing his thing across the walls" is a nice adaptation of a thing a lot of people probably did growing up.

<comment><USER10> "This doesn't actually look fun to play, but it looks interesting. It's a toy, that could maybe have a game built around it."

I agree. Of course, Narbacular Drop wasn't that fun to play either and with Valve's involvement that became Portal. So this could have some potential.

OTOH, what is up with the screenshots link being a zip file you download? What a terrible web page.

<comment><USER9> Hah, both comments on mine mention Portal. I never played ND but Portal was a blast; we'll see if someone picks this team up and help them make this a full game the way Valve did with ND/Portal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is almost a clone of a game called Crush on the PSP: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_(video_game)>. Crush was a lot of fun to play, but they've evolved this a little bit more by making it an FPS. I agree with a lot of posts here that say this degree of freedom might actually make the levels boring and predictable.

</comment><comment><USER12> So someone blatantly ripped off Mega Man down to the actual look of the character during the jumping animation and decided to stuff their rip-off into the game Echochrome, minus the artistic sensibilities.

<comment><USER13> They refaced the exact mega-man sprites. The "borrowing" of the mega man sprite animations so blatant that, as the authors, I'd be worried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of Fez, Echochrome, & Super Paper Mario. The zoom in/out to shrink/grow mechanic seems interesting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Everything is a mashup; Perspective was taken from Percepto:

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/percepto/id419502225?mt=8>

It's a fun little puzzle game that operates on rotating the perspective 90° (my kids have been playing it for over a year and seem to keep enjoying it, though I got tired of it after a few levels).

</comment><comment><USER16> I really regret not going to DigiPen, rather than Full Sail. I met a few great people at FS, but wow at the games that come out of DP.

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently watched the documentary 'Indie Game: the Movie.' While it was great to see small teams make games that sold tens of thousands of copies, some of the devs seemed to have an unwarranted superiority complex about their games vs. mainstream productions. Sure, the big companies often churn out sequels based on the same formulas, but most of these indie games were just riding the coat-tails of 90s platformers. Slapping an edgy theme on a basic platformer and throwing in a couple new gimmicks doesn't make something a transcendent work of art, or competitive with large scale productions. The only game they talked about that seemed genuinely groundbreaking was Minecraft (no pun intended).

<comment><USER18> How many of these games have you actually played? It sounds like you don't know what you are talking about.

<comment><USER17> I played Fez for a bit. And Braid. None of others. Care to explain what makes them so special?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Definitely takes some getting used to it, and maybe too many degrees of freedom? What excites me though is to see how the medium "Computer Game" starts to break out of the familiar concepts and stops emulating what has existed before.

The medium emancipates itself from [what?] like photography did from painting with Henry Cartier Bresson and his "decisive moment". At that time photography stopped doing what had been done with painting before (elaborate portraits that required the models to sit still for a long time), and started doing things that painting could not do: freeze the decisive moment in time.

I'm very excited to see all the new things computer games will start doing that we can't even imagine today.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice concept. I would like to see a similar 2d projection game integrated in an augmented reality game world, probably in a mobile app. It would require the app to have a basic understanding of the 3D structure of the world, but that is not impossible.

<comment><USER21> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I'm not sure what you want to tell, but regarding monocular SLAM, I attended a thesis defense in my lab (LAAS-CNRS) in 2007 with impressive results on a mobile robot. So I think there are chances that good monocular SLAM algorithms get implemented into mobile libraries in some years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'll be impressed if this sort of freeform perspective mechanic translates into entertaining gameplay. Seems like that sort of mechanic would be too flexible in a manner that would be detrimental to gameplay.

</comment><comment><USER23> A very cool idea, but I get an 'uncomfortable' feeling from just watching the video. Going to be very hard mentally to play.

</comment><comment><USER24> Slightly related: stabyourself.net/orthorobot/

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems very awkward to play - lots of stalling.

</comment><comment><USER26> It kind of reminds me of 1-bit ninja ([http://www.whatsoniphone.com/1-bit- ninja-review-a-very-odd-g...](http://www.whatsoniphone.com/1-bit-ninja-review- a-very-odd-good-old-school-platformer/)) but with more 3D-ishness. Interesting, but... could it be fun, too?

</comment><comment><USER27> Haha, watched the video for 8 seconds, then: MEGAMAN! :D

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of Echochrome <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLJiv9Aeo2c>

</comment><comment><USER29> Clicked the headline link expecting to be uninterested, but this is an impressive student effort; I think it's quite brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "Paper Mario" as a 2D plat former with 3D perspective at times.

</comment><comment><USER31> reminds me of sky island [http://games.adultswim.com/sky-island-puzzle-online- game.htm...](http://games.adultswim.com/sky-island-puzzle-online-game.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> unrelated to the game itself: Why does "screenshots" link to a zip file with 5 reasonably small png files in it? I mean, sure it works, but that is weak.

</comment><comment><USER33> Be careful with these megaman sprites.

</comment><comment><USER34> mind tickling and attractive.</comment>


Microsoft: Yahoo! has 3 weeks to decide - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-05LetterPR.mspx <comment><USER2> From this perspective, there's no way to decide whether it's a bluff or not. Microsoft is no stranger to hardball tactics, but I seriously doubt that it would turn down a good deal 4 weeks from now just because it sent this letter.

Corporate mergers -- especially when the sides aren't best friends -- are never pretty. My only question is why does Yahoo!'s board think that a giant premium is bad for stockholders? The board's only concern should be getting the best deal possible for the owners (i.e., stockholders).

<comment><USER3> As stated in the release, if the YHOO board does not accept within 3 weeks, MSFT is going hostile and will try to take over the YHOO board. A corporation does not make such public statements if it does not intend to follow through. YHOO is in trouble.

<comment><USER4> And they threaten to lower their offer, which probably didn't go unnoticed by Yahoo! shareholders:

"If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill I am a little paranoid, but am I the only one who thinks that part of the Microsoft bid is that they can shut down Zimbra, which competes with Exchange?

<comment><USER5> Personally, I think Zimbra's an awfully small fish to be a major concern in a $45 billion deal.</comment></comment>


Mixing Node.js and OpenJDK - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plan99.net/vertical-architecture-734495f129c4 <comment><AUTHOR> "A machine with 40 cores, a terabyte of RAM and nearly a terabyte of hard disk goes for about $6k these days. The average salary for a software engineer in New York is about $132,000, so one of these machines costs a less than two weeks of that person's time ... Buy a few big boxes, run your business logic on one, a database server on another and see how far you can get."

"

<comment><USER2> Design the product for serverless and save the cost of 2-3 systems engineers. My team started with 5 developers, 1 system admin, and 1 "cloud guy". Now the developers are all comfortable in the cloud so we don't need redundancy there... And the cloud guy picked up more system admin stuff as the backup there.

In my experiences in both worlds, getting 10 apps to coexist on one server too a lot of my time. So did dealing with security using containers. No matter what you pick there is discussions to be made that will eat up 2 weeks of a software engineers time.... But I think serverless best supports devops as programmers tend to be okay with Infrastructure as code and using UI-based tools.... As opposed to managing user accounts, service accounts, NFS systems, load balancers, iptables, and other physical system tasks

<comment><AUTHOR> > ... load balancers, iptables, and other physical system tasks

I think one point of the article is that if you have a big system you don't need load-balancers or worry much about routing etc. The assumption also I think is that you have "one app" which you offer to the public.

Now on such a big system it might of course make sense to implement parts of the application as "serverless". When you have just one server (or 2, app and database) it is pretty much the same conceptually AS "serverless" since you don't need to worry about multiple servers when you don't have multiples of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> GraalVM has a ployglot feature thingy that allows you to use Python/Ruby,Js .. with Java. This is apparently faster than microservices.

About a few years back ... A non-programmer friend asked me, why don't programmers use a single language ? I honestly didn't have an answer for that question. Look at the number of $LANGS we have. Almost every language does the same thing. For someone outside programming it is quite absurd.

<comment><USER4> Realistically because while they are similar many languages are for different problems or are trying to solve different problems.</comment></comment>


The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth: Why our lack of experience is a good thing - <AUTHOR> http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/05/19/the_bayesian_advantage_of_youth.php <comment><USER2> The world is not a bag of marbles and it didn't change over night.

Making something people want involves two main constraints: the making and the people.

Human nature has remained constant for thousands of years (read some of the Latin or Greek or Chinese classics and you'll likely agree).

The art of 'making' is shifting faster but perhaps not as fast as some people try to make it seem. Lisp is a 50 year old technology and it's still viable today. The Internet is 45 year old technology and we're still only beginning to realize its potential.

If you are a smart, flexible person doing something you love "experience" will only make you more effective.

<comment><USER3> This is like the fifth Clay Shirkey article I've read over seven years or so, and they've all been rambling and uninteresting. I guess I'm too old to read any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _'... The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience (kids) ... they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts (grown-ups) make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a- lifetime change comes along, they are at risk of regarding it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice (kids) makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert (grown-up) makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that`s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge. ...'_

Interesting. You can see this direct observation with the actions of any child who randomly practice and play with things they encounter to create or do something new. Older, wiser people with years of experience are either bored and see no advantage in play so they don't. Only to realise later that they should have tried this earlier. Is this a natural adaption process that adults outgrow? Is this process a non-optomised way for chance discovery and improvement?

There is also a dark side. Experts are experts for a reason, conservative competence. You don't want your accountant or lawyer advising you on something using trial and error techniques. The lack of experience in some skill-sets will also cause startups to fail ( _#14, Poor investor management_ ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html> ). Successful entrepreneurs need to harness playfulness and hope their lack of experience doesn't cause them to fail. Serial entrepreneurs turn the playfulness on or off when required or find alternative strategies to plug areas they don't their inexperience into failure.

Maybe thats why a few grey heads are sometimes an advantage in guiding startups?

</comment><comment><USER5> This writer uses Tivo as an example of something that could not have been founded by older people. Well actually Tivo was founded by Silicon valley veterans Barton and Ramsay. Not exactly young. More like 40+ somethings. Bad example.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty skeptical too. I don't think Clay gives nearly enough credit to people's ability to learn new things and forget the past.

I asked the two nearest people (one young, one old) the VCR/PC and radio/phone questions. The old one answered telephone without hesitation, and had to think about VCR. The young one did just the opposite. And, Mike Ramsay was in his 40s when he started Tivo.

</comment><comment><USER7> If this theory is true, that the advantage of young entrepreneurs is their lack of experience and hence lack of knowledge about what could possibly go wrong, then age is actually not the issue, it's experience in the field. So for older entrepreneurs (30+) that are entering the tech startup world for the first time, they would share the ignorance benefit (assuming this is a benefit)

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose you could also say that reading news.YC makes you a worse entrepreneur! You're learning the rules that others before you have held true instead of just making up your own from scratch.

<comment><USER7> Damn, you're right. I'm outta here! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with the colored balls example is that the person drawing the balls from the bag assumes the balls are i.i.d. (independently identically distributed). Put in real world terms, according to the example entrepreneurs believe their field is unchanging. I don't think many entrepreneurs believe this. If the person drawing balls from the bag doesn't make this (wrong) assumption, then he is not at any disadvantage for having seen more draws from the bag.

<comment><USER9> The problem is this article is using scientific buzzwords to explain something that can be explained without the buzzwords. 300 years ago, "calculus", 50 years ago FFT, 15 years ago "Chaos Theory, 10 years ago, "Wavelets" and apparently now, "Bayesian statistics."

You raise a good point. I'm afraid that debating the essay on its technical merits will lead you to a fruitless discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> the article seems to be suggesting, the older you are, the less original your thinking can be. we know this is not necessarily true but is it generally true? though the "idea" is central to a start-up, older entrepreneurs can add experience if they have dealt with banks, lawyers, vc's, operations, hiring etc in the past. These less glamorous tasks can often be the difference between success and failure. don't write off older entrepreneurs just yet!

</comment><comment><USER11> This works when you want to revolutionize a field, but a lot of the web is much more incremental. Experience should be an asset. Look at Jobs.</comment>


Apple to crush carriers, become direct service provider - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/01/apple-mobile-carrier/

<comment><USER2> It's very hard to imagine Apple as a traditional MVNO where their brand would take all the hits for network quality and yet have little to no ability to impact things on the engineering side. There is a reason that there aren't premium MVNO's.

<comment><USER3> Bingo. And the probability of Apple building their own wireless network is pretty close to zero.

<comment><USER4> Especially since that isn't the sort of business they tend to get into anyway. Apple hasn't become a record label either, despite having been involved with the music industry rather longer. Ultimately, being a mobile network operator simply doesn't give Apple the opportunity to provide a superior product in the same kind of way that building hardware/software does, so I strongly doubt they'd do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Filed under, "I'll believe it when I see it."

</comment><comment><USER6> And where are they supposed to get all the towers? That's a multi-year construction project and, if they try it, they'll alienate their existing carrier partners.

Now maybe Apple thinks they can afford to do that, but it seems risky.

<comment><USER7> > And where are they supposed to get all the towers?

They aren't.

> Bluestein said while speaking at the Informa MVNO Industry Summit in > Barcelona.

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

<comment><USER8> Going MVNO would put them in the awkward position of competing with their own suppliers. Then again they're in this situation with Samsung and it hasn't been fatal yet. The one thing that makes this interesting to me is that they are now shipping handsets that will work on multiple carriers in almost every market. This would let Apple brand the service as their own but pit the carriers against each other behind the scenes to get the best deal on connectivity. A customer's phone might switch networks from hour to hour and they'd still pay the same bill and see an Apple logo in the upper left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If this were to happen I might consider getting an iPhone again. I'd miss my Nexus but the service providers available now in the US are terrible.

But yeah this doesn't seem very likely.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why didn't you include the "expert says" part when submitting the article? Especially one that has no proven track record. That changes the entire tone of this link-bait headline.

</comment><comment><USER11> _"Apple has the distribution channels, digital content portfolio and customer base to make the move, Bluestein says, and it also has more than 250 million credit cards on file for iTunes users who could be billed directly for wireless service."_

Ok, and the big missing piece, oh yeah the network. You know the thing that costs 4 - 10 billion to buy the spectrum for and another 50 - 100 billion to build out the actual network stations for. Now sure, Apple to commit its entire cash pile to becoming another AT&T or Verizon but that certainly isn't going to happen.

And the other challenge I see is that the carriers all co-operate with pairing agreements and roaming agreements because they are all in the same pool. Bring in an 800 lb gorilla which is trying to 'crush' them? Do they co-operate now? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's more likely that this rumors are a move to extract even more cash from telcos.

</comment><comment><USER13> Markets that require detailed interaction with customers are a minefield.

I can't see Apple wanting to be there.

Consumer telecoms is a brutal, low-margin business. The service providers are doing them a favour by being there, because they shield Apple branding from the nastiness of the domain.

[Edit: I removed some references to Google while I was mulling on it. Can't quite remember what it said, but I expect notatoad's feedback was in-spirit]

<comment><USER14> this article is about apple, not google. apple already has channels to directly interact with their customers. Apple stores are hugely successful, have a great reputation, and are everywhere.

and consumer telecom is hardly a low-margin business. it might not be as high margin as apple is used to, but consumer telecom companies seem to manage to pull in plenty of profit.

<comment><USER15> AT&T and Verizon stores are "everywhere". Apples stores are not. There are more and more, but they stick to upscale areas and big cities, so it's very easy to be 100 miles from the nearest Apple store if you aren't on the coast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actual quote: _[..] says Apple will soon begin to offer wireless service directly to iPhone and iPad users._

In the last years Apple focused on innovation. Moving against the carriers (voice service) doesn't look too good (going against partners, very mature business == little potential & high costs)

Going in the _wireless data service_ (internet) would however bring value: less latency, more speed, better Siri service.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, come on hacker news! Don't upvote crazy Apple rumors. Leave that stuff on Macrumors.

</comment><comment><USER18> ...according to random pundit trying to get attention at industry conference.

</comment><comment><USER19> This piece (by Jean-Louis Gassée, August 2011) is relevant:

Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!

[http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/14/steve-please-buy-us- a-c...](http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/14/steve-please-buy-us-a-carrier/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The premise is entirely US centric - strategies aimed at ATT, Verizon, and carrier subsidies don't scale globally.

And of course, begs the question of how this would help Apple sell the hardware from which it derives the bulk of it's profits.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll believe it when I see it, seems very unlikely though. BGR is on a role, this has to be the second or third horrible article I've read from them this week.

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems to be a risky move and I don't know if Apple wants to go down this path. There are huge costs tied to network operators' functions..

</comment><comment><USER23> Please come to Canada.

</comment><comment><USER24> They would probably charge even more than the carriers.

</comment><comment><USER25> How would this crush the carriers when, as an MVNO, Apple would be writing the carriers a giant check every month to use their towers?

The CLEC wars proved that you can't use a network owner's wires to compete against them.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure Apple should play that game unless they are ready to handle the extra regulatory and infrastructure management loads.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks like nothing more than a rumor, flagged.

</comment><comment><USER28> I hope now google do not do that...</comment>


Ask HN: Those of you making 200k+ what do you worry about? - <AUTHOR> I want to get answers directly from the source itself. A lot of people here make 200k or more in jobs or business. What dp you worry about most?<p>Do you feel satisfied now you make 200k or more in AGI (adjusted gross income)? <comment><USER2> I'm making a little over 200k right now. It doesn't feel much different from making 115k.

At 115k I had enough money to buy whatever I wanted and save 2-3k/month. Now the numbers in my Vanguard account rise a bit faster than before, but my overall lifestyle is exactly the same.

A 200k salary is comfortable, but it's by no means "fuck you" money. I still worry about the things everybody else worries about: Finding fulfillment, love, a place to call home, and planning out my future retirement.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my first Silicon Valley job, I thought I was making X. I never really looked carefully at my paycheck. Honest. I was 20 something and I really just didn't check. Turned out I was making 2X.

My boss got a call one day (open seating) and said, _Yes. Yes. Noooo. I 'll talk to him about about it right now._ We went into the closet (seriously) for privacy and he asked if I thought I was overpaid. I said no. He explained to me that I had been paid 2X.

1X was not that much different. I spent less. But really, I got used to it pretty quickly.

<comment><USER4> Did they take it back?

I got paid like $200 extra once in college. They took it back the next paycheck :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All the same stuff I was worrying about when I was making 50k -- "how can I make more?" mixed in with "how can I feel happier and more accomplished?"

</comment><comment><USER6> Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. As a single individual making a little over 200k you endup with 120k net. The gross income means absolutely nothing since you're giving away 80k every year.

middle class, not a place to be

<comment><USER7> I wake up every day wishing I have this problem one day.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to ruine your dream, but in order to make 200k/year, you have to give away 80k/year.

People only see the bright side...</comment></comment></comment>


MapGive - Open Mapping from the US State Dept. - <AUTHOR> http://mapgive.state.gov/the-cause/

<comment><USER2> This looks like a great project, and nice to see them supporting OSM. Google gets (rightfully) lauded for offering quite good maps[1] of much of the developing world, but I recently checked out the OSM map[2] of the city I live in (Dakar, Senegal) and it's just as good, if not better. Bing Maps[3], by comparison, thinks there are 2 roads in the entire city.

[1][https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d104828!...](https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d104828!2d-17.3959701!3d14.7291303)

[2][http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/14.7286/-17.4508](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/14.7286/-17.4508)

[3][http://binged.it/1iUjAGi](http://binged.it/1iUjAGi)

<comment><USER3> I often use [http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=-17.41738&lat=14.73861&zoo...](http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=-17.41738&lat=14.73861&zoom=12&num=3&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google- map&mt2=bing-map) when comparing between the different map providers.

<comment><USER4> Of the three initial examples, only Bing marked the Atlantic Ocean. At least they had that detail.

(though they do have a road running right through the airport... win some, lose some)

<comment><USER5> > Of the three initial examples, only Bing marked the Atlantic Ocean.

Start zooming out. At one tick out, _none_ of the maps mark the Atlantic Ocean. Because the label isn't in the viewport.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you didn't get the sarcasm. ;-)

<comment><USER5> I'll just start assuming everything people say on HN is sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a nice project. This is the kind of thing that I like to see the US government supporting. Now to find the time to learn to map something.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if there is a way to automate this using Google maps and places data...

<comment><USER8> Why so many downvotes? Can't ask legitimate questions on HN anymore?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - we really should encourage contributions to the discussions, rather than "i disagree points".

(I cannot downvote, all I see is the comment in a lighter shade of grey. If I could, would I be able to see the number of downvotes?)

<comment><USER5> > If I could, would I be able to see the number of downvotes?

The only person who can see number of upvotes/downvotes is the person who made the comment. I am pretty sure this is to prevent making leaderboards out of trolling, but I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So the problem of converting Satellite data to Maps is still not possible with algorithms ? Google is able to find all Cat photos in the youtube videos, how about finding streets ?

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I gather there is a number of algorithms that work pretty well, but only on certain datasets and for certain parts of the world. For example, one approach could be flawless to extract highways and on and off ramps in the US, but the same algorithm may struggle with French roads.

What I am excited about within the context of open data and crowdsourcing is using machines to do a rough first pass over the imagery, and get people to rate or fix the results.

A wonderful example of this is the New York Public Library's Building Inspector: [http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/](http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Quality geographic data helps empower killing drones ... I mean, organizations and communities!"

<comment><USER11> Certainly not from this. The military most def (via the NRO) has their own "classified" maps for all of these sorts of things. If you think the US military is using google maps or OSM data for this, you are sadly mistaken. I know this first hand having flown a non-weaponized drone ~12ish hours per day for a year overseas.

\- Former Shadow 200 TUAV Operator with 482 combat flight hours in Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003-2004.</comment></comment>


Germany to phase out coal by 2038 in move away from fossil fuels - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/26/germany-to-phase-out-coal-by-2038-in-move-away-from-fossil-fuels.html <comment><AUTHOR> Duplicate, see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007493)</comment>


Netflix Prize 2 Cancelled Due to a Lawsuit and FTC Inquiry - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/this-is-neil-hunt-chief-product-officer.html

<comment><USER2> Plus one to Netflix for making this the first sentence:

"This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix."

No vague hiding behind an unidentified team or blog. A person has chosen to identify himself with the decision, and the company chose to present it that way.

The general tone is also positive. This is a good way to communicate.

Contrast with Amazon's anonymous whine on their kindle blog when they gave in to MacMillan. Not signed by a person, not even "the team." And full of blame and "you'll see!"

[http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_e...](http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdMsgNo=1&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV&displayType=tagsDetail&cdMsgID=Mx5Z9849POTZ4P#Mx5Z9849POTZ4P)

<comment><USER3> Comparing Amazon's official communication with customers to Netflix I think Amazon wins.

Looking at Netflix's blog they have 3 posts for the entire year.

Looking at Amazon's discussion forums, there are a swath of official announcements, including one that informs customers how to access 2 million free books outside of Amazon.

Sure, having a name in front of the post is nice I guess, but in terms of consistent and valuable customer communication I think Amazon wins. Also here's an example of an apology from Bezos himself

[http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_...](http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx1FXQPSF67X1IU&displayType=tagsDetail)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another case of lawsuits stifling innovation.

And I agree with one of the comments on that post - why doesn't Netflix have people opt-in to have their data anonymized and used for this purpose?

Edit: replaced bureaucracy with lawsuits

<comment><USER2> I think bureaucracy had little to do with it. As I recall, the first Netflix contest did indeed expose private, and sometimes embarrassing, information.

This was a privacy issue, and something legitimate to address.

<comment><USER5> privacy issues dont necessarily need to be dealt with by lawsuits. Most lawsuits are about money.

<comment><USER2> Not to quibble, but lawsuits are also not bureaucracy.

<comment><USER4> Good point, was at a loss for the right word when I commented.

This kind of behavior by lawyers is just like patent trolling and I couldn't pinpoint a word for that. Maybe privacy trolling? The lawyers are the same ones that sued Facebook for Beacon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You mean 'inquiry'

<comment><USER7> Is not "inquiry" and "enquiry" identical in all respects except spelling?

<comment><USER8> Enquiry is asking someone else a question. Inquiry is looking into it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Netflix Prize 3: How to create a meaningful database that is impossible to de- anonymize.

<comment><USER9> Funny, yes, but I honestly think they should consider this.

<comment><USER10> It's been a while since the flurry of de-anonymizing data papers back in 07-08, but my takeaway impression was that you _can't_ truly de-anonymize large datasets without destroying its utility.

<comment><USER11> Indeed.

See this: [http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely- identifyin...](http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifying- people-by-birth.html)

I imagine gender and DoB factor in heavily to something like a recommendation engine, and I'm sure zip code would come into play when trying to get those last couple percent as is the case with the Netflix prizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does sharing the Netflix data violate privacy? With the hundreds of thousands of records it would be difficult to trace information to an individual. The US needs more engineers and fewer lawyers.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a way to identify individuals in the raw data:

<http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf> <http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html>

<comment><USER5> Interesting thanks for the link. However, seems like you need to be able to cross-correlate with another database in order to de-anonymize. If netflix made a good faith effort to protect privacy, how are they liable?

<comment><USER12> Sure we released that murderer from jail, but he needs to buy a gun to shoot someone, and we didn't sell him the gun. You can't blame us.

If they know that the information can be de-anonymized using publicly available information, have they _really_ made a good-faith effort?

<comment><USER5> >>If they know that the information can be de-anonymized using publicly available information, have they really made a good-faith effort?

If your premise that Netflix knew the db could be de-anonymized is correct, then its not "good faith". Otherwise, Netflix could argue it did everything it said it would do in its TOS, and didnt foresee the hackers exploit. Whether that makes them liable or not is what Im asking. Im not a lawyer.

The reason the bank robbery example is irrelevant is banks say in their TOS that your money is 100% protected up to the FDIC limit. So, Netflix TOS said it would make its db internally anonymized, which it did. Clever cross- correlating made this not enough.

<comment><USER12> True, but then the question becomes: What does Netflix do now? Once they know that their efforts are not enough, what is their reaction? IIRC, they were warned about the fact that the second prize was revealing too much information, but went forward with it anyways.

<comment><USER5> >>IIRC, they were warned about the fact that the second prize was revealing too much information, but went forward with it anyways.

I did not know that. That changes my opinion about Netflix acting in "good faith".

The argument I was making is rooted in my belief that in order to have a healthy environment for business enterprise, your legal system cannot be setup to punish innovation whenever something doesnt go as planned. There needs to be balance, i.e. for medical innovation the bar is higher than for movie ratings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dear Lawyers,

Lame

Regards

The Tech Community</comment>