Show HN: FaunaDB, a strongly consistent, globally distributed cloud database - <AUTHOR> https://fauna.com/blog/faunadb-serverless-cloud-launch-day <comment><USER2> I feel like I need to note the pricing. $0.01 per 1,000 queries. That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Let's say you make 1,000/sec. $0.01 * 60 seconds in a minute * 60 minutes in an hour * 24 hours in a day * 30 days in a month = $25,920.

Is that a lot? I think it is. Google Cloud Spanner costs $0.90/hour per node or around $650/mo. Each Cloud Spanner node can do around 10,000 queries per second[1]. So, $650 to Google gets you 10x the queries that $25,920 to Fauna gets you. I mean, for $25,920, you could get a Spanner cluster with 40 servers. Each of those servers would only have to handle 25 queries per second to get you 1,000 queries per second.

I'm sure that people are going to question whether FaunaDB can actually do what it claims. At this pricing, I can't imagine someone actually seeing if they can live up to their claims. They have a graph showing linear scaling to 2M reads per second. Based on their pricing, that would be $630M per year. For comparison, Snapchat committed to spending $400M per year on Google Cloud and another $100M on AWS (and people thought the spend was outrageous even for a company valued at tens of billions of dollars). This is more money for the database alone.

Heck, it looks like one can get 5-20k queries per second out of Google's Cloud SQL MySQL on a highmem-16 costing $1k/mo[2]. That would cost $130k-$500k on FaunaDB. It seems like the pricing of FaunaDB is off by a couple orders of magnitude.

Ultimately, Spanner is something built by people that published a notable research paper and used by Google. Reading the paper, you can understand how Spanner works and be saddened that you don't have TrueTime servers powered by GPS and atomic clocks. FaunaDB has some marketing speak about how I'll never have to worry about things ever again - without telling me how it will achieve that.

It's also implemented in Scala. This isn't a dig on Scala or the JVM, but I use three datastores on the JVM and only one isn't sad for it is Kafka. But Kafka does very little in the JVM - it basically just leans on sendfile to handle stuff which means you don't get bad GC cycles or lots of allocations and copying.

FaunaDB is a datastore without much information other than "it's great for everything and scales perfectly". Well, at their pricing, they might be able to make it happen. I mean, most customers would simply move to something cheaper as they got beyond small amounts of traffic due to the pricing. 60,000 queries per second? That'll be $18M per year from FaunaDB or $50k per year from Google. It's not even in the same ballpark. If you really need to scale to 2M reads per second, $630M seems like a lot more than $1.6M for Spanner.

Maybe it's an easy way to get some money off people that "need a web scale database", but are actually going to be serving like 10 queries per second and are willing to spend $260/mo to serve that. If they hit it big, it shouldn't be insane to scale it to 10,000 queries per second and milk $260k out of them each month for a workload that can be handled by a single machine. That money also pays for decent ops people to run a big box and consult with the customer if they're going towards 100k queries per second with a $2.6M monthly payment.

EDIT: looking over Fauna's blog and some of their comments here, they seem to understand more than their marketing lets on. Daniel Abadi is one of those people whose name carries weight in the databases world (having been involved with C-Store/Vertica, H-Store/VoltDB, and others). While I haven't read the Calvin paper, it looks like a good read. I can see that they are using logical clocks and I can't find it right now, but I thought I saw that they're not allowing one to keep transaction sessions checked out - that all the operations must be specified. So, it seems like there's some decent stuff in there that's currently being obscured by marketing-speak. Still, the pricing seems really curious.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance- configuration](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance-configuration)

[2] [https://www.pythian.com/blog/benchmarking-google-cloud- sql-i...](https://www.pythian.com/blog/benchmarking-google-cloud-sql- instances/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Huge scale is what FaunaDB On-Premises is for; the pricing model is different. That's what NVIDIA uses for example. Nevertheless, we will have volume discounts and reserved capacity in Cloud too.

I see where you're coming from. People make the same argument against using cloud services at all when you can buy hardware yourself and operate it. The lack of flexibility is the hidden cost.

Our cloud pricing is competitive with other vendors, most of which require you to massively over-provision in order to get high availability, especially global availability, as well as predictable performance. In traditional cloud databases, you have to provision for peak load. Usually this is an order of magnitude difference from average load. An order of magnitude difference happens to matches your Spanner example exactly; however with Spanner, you still have to manage your capacity "by hand".

Architecture docs are on the way.

<comment><USER2> You're right that it's was a bit unfair to compare a flexible FaunaDB to Spanner which you'd need to provision for peak traffic. But even if it's an order of magnitude more, $16M vs $630M is still quite a gap. It really doesn't match the Spanner example. And if you're able to handle incredibly spiky loads, information on how is kinda important. If I go from a steady state of 100 QPS to 15,000 QPS for a 20 minute period, will that just be pain?

You've said that Spanner makes you manage capacity by hand, but the marketing copy says, "FaunaDB is adaptive, because it lets you change your infrastructure footprint on the fly. Dynamically shift resources to critical applications, elastically add capacity during peak events, and replicate data around the world—all in a unified data fabric." So, if I'm expecting a burst of traffic, do I have to "change my infrastructure footprint" manually? How quickly can one "elastically add capacity"? I mean, I've seen plenty of systems that one can add capacity to that, well, get humbled when copying data to new nodes. Like, you had 10 nodes and now you want 15 because you're being hammered. And wonderful, it's trying to copy data to the new nodes while it was already having capacity issues and only making response times worse and errors go up. I'm not saying that will happen to you, but there's no information to make me think that problem is addressed.

Honestly, people involved in FaunaDB seem to know enough about databases that I'd just expect more real information on the website. When Kudu came out, they published a paper that basically read like, "well, we created a column store kinda like one would if you'd read the C-Store paper and these are the trade- offs and we seem to have done reasonably" and I came away from reading it thinking, "ok, these people know the score. It may or may not be executed well enough, but there's an understanding." They led with a paper that might not have been revolutionary, but really showed that they understood the space and explained how it was designed such that someone with databases knowledge could see that it was reasonable.

Introducing your database with so much, well, non-information doesn't help you (in my opinion). Without digging, it looks like another DB vendor that promises everything will be perfect and that it's great for any workload.

The whole "About FaunaDB" page doesn't tell me much. Like, there's a comment in here that tells me you're using logical clocks, I can see from Daniel's Twitter that you're using some of his research, etc. I mean, you actually have cool technical details to highlight - details that make your DB seem a lot more real. But the page makes it feel like you don't have cool technical details - that you're trying to hide information because it's not good. I mean, adding in some details about how things are achieved make a product seem a lot more real. I know what logical clocks are. Calvin is a research paper I can read. I mean, finding that makes FaunaDB seem way more real - there's something substantive. Like, I can read Calvin tomorrow and some of the ways you're achieving things will come to light and I might be impressed.

But right now, it's really hard to find the information that would impress technical readers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm with you. That level of detail is coming soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think Fauna is not very good at docs and communication yet, at least judging by confusion from some of the comments and by reading their docs. But launching will probably make them a lot better at it. Here are my notes which may add clarity for some:

similar to a RethinkDB/MongoDB:

* Designed to be great for storing application data. Fields can be dynamically added (schemaless) and their values can be arrays so it is easy to maintain data locality according to your application use patterns.

* Uses a non-SQL query language

* Probably not great for ad-hoc reporting (arguably SQL is a requirement for that)

Unlike MongoDB: supports joins

Unlike RethinkDB: great support for transactions, just not SQL transactions with an open session (which are unnecessary for an application)

Unlike most databases

* cloud-hosted and pay-for-use (on-premise is on their roadmap)

* claims support for graph data by storing arrays of references

* QoS built-in so you could run a slow analytics query without disrupting your application

Cons

* Unfortunately just like MongoDB/RethinkDB they have no real database-level integrity of schema and foreign keys, but at least foreign keys are on their roadmap.

I am a huge fan of the cloud-hosted pay for use aspect: I wonder why anyone would design a DB today without this in mind. You can transfer your data from a pay-for-use application DB (FaunaDB or Google DataStore) to a data warehouse (Snowflake or Google BigQuery) which is also pay for use and gives you SQL reporting abilities.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, we realize the docs still have a long ways to go and are working to improve them as fast as we can. This is a good summary.

We're definitely aware that the lack schema definition is a problem for certain use-cases, and solving this is on our roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might consider removing the badge on the home page that says "Global Latency 2.8 ms". Unless you really can give me latency across the globe of 2.8 ms, in which case your solution to the speed-of-light problem is quite impressive :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Reads do not require global coordination because of the way the transaction log advances within each datacenter, but I take your point.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if you did take the point intended. You would need a datacentre in every city in the world to get that "global latency".

<comment><USER5> Yes. Light travels 839 km or 521 miles in 2.8 ms. If you need a round-trip to send a query and get a response, then you would have to be within a few hundred miles of the datacenter, assuming perfect efficiency.

<comment><USER7> Could you point us toward the amazing switches and routers that have 0 processing latency we would love to buy them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like one of the big issues with the marketing copy here is some of the word tricks being played:

Any first-read of "The first serverless database" has the implication that the database is serverless. Comments from FaunaDB folks in this comment page clearly indicate that they _mean_ is that it's the first database _for_ serverless, which is a pretty bold claim, given Google and AWS and any number of other providers offer databases that are accessible from serverless things, so it essentially boils down to "The first database that's marketed specifically to serverless use cases", which is maybe true but also kindof not a useful trophy to put on the mantle?

This is further muddled by the blog post linked to from the launch announcement ([https://fauna.com/blog/escape-the-cloud-database-trap- with-s...](https://fauna.com/blog/escape-the-cloud-database-trap-with- serverless)), which includes "FaunaDB Serverless Cloud is an adaptive, serverless database". Nobody is reading that and thinking "ah, an adaptive database _for_ serverless apps".

To describe it as "The first active-active multi-cloud database", is possibly true if you mean "the first time a single company has sold a publicly- available database-as-a-service running on multiple cloud providers". But the text says "database" where "public database-as-a-service" would be the accurate term, leaving the reader with the impression that no existing databases can be set up on multiple cloud providers in an active-active HA config, which is absurd. Fixing the copy here should be pretty easy, and they're already headed in the right direction with the next bullet point, although it as well refers to "database" where it means "database-as-a- service".

It feels like somebody on marketing really wanted to have a list of firsts, so they toyed with definitions of words until they thought they could flex these into being technically accurate. I get the same feel from the closing argument in the linked blog post: "The query language, data model (including graphs and change feeds), security features, strong consistency, scalability and performance are best in class. There is no downside.". I don't think I want to trust a database if the folks designing it couldn't think of any downsides.

<comment><USER9> I'm not aware of any other services which offer pricing that isn't based on number and size of database servers.

Edit: Thanks to all the commenters who corrected me :)

<comment><USER10> It's entertaining that one can make an innocent HN comment about something esoteric like cloud databases and be quickly corrected by three different Google engineers.

To provide a non-Google example, AWS DynamoDB's pricing is based on throughput (similar to Google Cloud Datastore).

<comment><USER11> Heh. :)

One technicality: DynamoDB's pricing is based on throughput, as you know, but it's _provisioned_ throughput. (You manage your capacity unit allocations yourself, at least that was the case a little while ago.) You're charged money for how much you provision regardless of whether or not you actually consume the capacity units. Our pricing model (like Fauna's) only takes ops and storage into consideration.

<comment><USER12> Ah, so just like SDB. I wonder why AWS moved on from that model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody, today we launched FaunaDB Serverless Cloud, 4 years in the making. FaunaDB is a strongly consistent, globally distributed operational database. It's relational, but not SQL.

We're excited to open our doors and explain more of our design decisions. Our team is from Twitter, and that experience has deeply informed our interface and architecture. Try it out and let us know what you think.

An on-premises release is coming later this year.

<comment><USER13> 4 years seems a very long time for development.

I'd be interested to hear why, and what you would do differently if you were to start from scratch.

<comment><USER14> I don't think 4 years is long at all for developing an advanced, distributed database solution.

It is a long time to go without real world use and user feedback, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The beta has been in production with cloud and on-premises customers for two years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (Disclosure: I work on Google's Cloud Datastore.)

This looks super neat, and I can't wait to learn more about it, but just for the record: I'm pretty sure this isn't the first serverless cloud database. Both Firebase's Realtime Database and Cloud Datastore (which powers Snapchat and Pokemon Go) are serverless; you pay only for your ops and storage. They've been publicly available for several years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough; I think it depends where you draw the line between key/value store and database.

Both of those depend on other distributed storage systems under the hood, as far as I am aware? Or is Datastore an end to end system? I know Firebase was backed by MongoDB.

<comment><USER11> Datastore runs on top of Megastore [1]. You can find out more about our data model here [2], but it's definitely not limited to key-value data.

Our end users don't have to think much about our storage system, though, if we're doing our jobs right. :)

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/articles/balancing-s...](https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/articles/balancing- strong-and-eventual-consistency-with-google-cloud-datastore/) [2] [https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/entities](https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/entities)

<comment><USER15> An interesting observation that I can't seem to "un-observe" is that Megastore is actually a lot more like MongoDB than one would expect.

Both ostensibly work best when the application fits a hierarchical data model (entity groups vs. documents), and provide out-of-the-box strongly-consistent transactions for a single entity group. MongoDB feels like schemaless Megastore.

<comment><USER11> :)

Here's a paper with which you might already be familiar, but it's one of the citations for the Megastore paper: [http://adrianmarriott.net/logosroot/papers/LifeBeyondTxns.pd...](http://adrianmarriott.net/logosroot/papers/LifeBeyondTxns.pdf). You'll probably enjoy it (if you haven't already!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Efrim-Lipkin Hi guys. Can I ask a simple question?

I understand that we are talking about a globally distributed, serverless and yet consistent relational database.

My question is about latency. How long does it take for transactional atomicity to become a consistent read on a globally distributed database? (1) And what are the measures taken between entry nodes to prevent clients from recieving inconsistent data? (2)

As I ponder this, I am struck by not the consistency problem, as that is solvable. But I am struck by the latency problem of assuring that all global queries are consistent for some (any) time quanta. What sort of latency should be expected?

both questions (1) and (2) are interesting, but (1) is critical while (2) is academic.

Thanks, and very interesting work guys.

EL

<comment><USER4> FaunaDB has a per-database replicated transaction log. Once a transaction has been globally committed to the log, it is applied to each local partition that covers part of the transaction. By this point, the transaction's order with respect to others in a database and results are determined. While writes require global coordination to commit, reads across partitions are coordinated via a snapshot time per query, which guarantees correctness.

In short, writes require a global round-trip through the transaction pipeline; reads are local and low latency.

<comment> Efrim-Lipkin This is a very good answer. So if I understand you correctly (please correct if I do not), atomicity is handled on a per connection basis (writes cannot be distrubted). And there may be high latency in distributing a transaction, but read consistency is guaranteed by timestamp (equivalent to versioning).

Is this correct?

EL

<comment><USER4> One thing that makes this easier is that FaunaDB does not support session transactions, rather you must express your transaction logic as a single Fauna query, which is executed atomically. Transactions can still involve arbitrary keys, however.

And yes, for reads, by default the coordinating node chooses a timestamp and uses that to query all involved data partitions. Each partition will respond with the requested data as of at that timestamp, or will delay responding until it has caught up.

One nice thing about this approach is that any chosen timestamp is enough to provide a consistent snapshot view of the dataset at that time. This ends up being useful for bulk or incremental reads, where a longer running process needs a stable view of the dataset.

<comment><USER16> Without session transaction, how does the application performs transactional read modify write?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think they missed Google's launch of Spanner their distributed strongly consistent DB.

<comment><AUTHOR> Spanner is great, but it's not pay as you go, or multi-region (yet), or multi- cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> $0.01 per simple operation sounds very expensive to me. This would add up very quickly.

Edit: I misread it. Perhaps instead of inventing your own point system that you have to explain and hope silly people (like me) don't mix up you could take a lesson from Google Cloud and just lay out the pricing in a table. If you ever add another service you'll have to integrate it also into your made up points system.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's $0.01 per thousand, not each.

<comment><USER6> You're right. I realised that and came to correct it. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That pricing model and serverless model is why I've always chosen CouchDB/Cloudant. If I'm doing the MB/hour to GB/month conversion correctly, Fauna cloud is significantly cheaper.

I see Fauna has temporal queries, but receiving events is strictly pull, there is no push or single feed?

<comment><USER19> Event push / feeds are on the roadmap. Currently we have everything implemented at the data model level to do live query feeds, you just have to do polling until we ship the feature.

I'm working on a follow up example to this CRUD one, that implements a multi- user TodoMVC, and will use event queries to keep the UI updated between tabs and users. You can see the basic Serverless CRUD starter example here: [https://fauna.com/blog/serverless-cloud- database](https://fauna.com/blog/serverless-cloud-database)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a related technical blog post [1] and discussion [2]. Also I've got a companion blog post on the Serverless.com blog at [3]

[1] [https://fauna.com/blog/escape-the-cloud-database-trap- with-s...](https://fauna.com/blog/escape-the-cloud-database-trap-with- serverless)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877223)

[3] [https://serverless.com/blog/faunadb-serverless- authenticatio...](https://serverless.com/blog/faunadb-serverless- authentication/)

<comment><USER20> What's the biggest deployment so far?

<comment><USER19> We have a bunch of customers listed in the press release. [0] Our managed cloud installation is about the size of our large customers. NVIDIA launched their latest world-scale user facing service on top of FaunaDB.

Personally I'm more interested in helping people writing fresh apps use FaunaDB, because while we can solve enterprise problems at scale, it's the greenfield apps that will be able to best use our advanced features.

[0] [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fauna-launches-faunadb- serverl...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fauna-launches-faunadb-serverless- cloud-131200188.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Serverless Database, Global Latency 2.8 ms, Relational but no SQL (whatever sense that makes) BULLSHIT BINGO at its very best.

<comment><USER13> You could put this more nicely - they have spent alot of time working on it. I'm sure no-one intends "BULLSHIT".

One way to handle it when something strikes you as not correct is to politely ask for clarification.

<comment><USER21> Well no. A Global latency of 2.8 ms is just bullshit. As others pointed out, they did not beat the speed of light. I hate stuff like this. If you really have a worthy product just point out what it _really_ can do, not what in a lab environment worked once.

<comment><USER22> I agree with the buzzword bingo complaint, but they really do have a claim that is defensible here.

Their claim is that you can run an application distributed in a cloud around the world with data in their database, and read queries to their database will get results in an average of 2.8 ms.

This puts a lot of caveats on that 2.8 ms claim, and makes it something that is both good and believable. Which makes the claim very much not bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You should explain how it works. It's not like I'm going to steal your ideas and spend five years implementing them ... or maybe I will if it's good ;)

<comment><USER19> The node that receives the query figures out which nodes it needs to talk to for an answer, and then it adds the operations to the next batch for those nodes. The batch dispatches, the nodes do their work, the batch commits, and the client receives the response.

It's not really a full answer, but maybe hints at the architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have been a fan of Evan going way back to the early Rails days. Congrats on the launch.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious about the relational-ness of FaunaDB. e.g. How do you efficiently maintain integrity of foreign key constraints across the entire system? How fast and consistent are secondary indexes?

</comment><comment><USER25> So... where does the data go? Maybe a simpleton question but I couldn't easily find an answer in the about section. If it's all function-based, where does the data actually get persisted?

<comment><USER19> This is a database FOR serverless style applications. It runs on servers like most databases, it's not made out of lambdas. But it's built so you don't have to worry about the details. When a traffic spike hits your app we'll keep up. And when your app is quiet, you don't pay for unused capacity.

<comment><USER25> Ooooooooooh, that makes sense now. I thought it was a database _implemented as_ as whole series of individual lambdas and I was having a hard time figuring out how you guys pulled that one off.

Data stored "on the wire"? :D

<comment><USER26> Pretty sure this is how reality works: all matter is information, all information is functional, hence all perception is the lazy evaluation of a functional universe.

It merely remains to turn this into a startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If my calculations are correct, that's about $87+ million USD to store 1 PB of data for one year?

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't seem right. Will investigate.

<comment><USER14> 1 [mb hour] * 24 [hours] * 365 [days] * 10^9 [mb] / 1000 [points] * 0.01 [$] = 87.6 million

So unless you have some quantity discounts, that would seem to be the price for storing 1 PB , without any querying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's our mistake. It's actually gigabyte-hour.

<comment><USER28> So in the OP's example, the cost is $87,000 per petabyte-year of storage?

EDIT: I see mentioned in another post this a per-replica cost. So it would be roughly $87,000 times the number of replicas, ignoring the initial queries that inserted the data in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so but we are going to run the cost regressions again and make sure it's in line with market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How are you running this serverless? Is it a thin application in front of AWS or Google BigQuery?

<comment><USER19> No, this is not made OF serverless, it's made FOR serverless. We run on big nodes in the same cloud as your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cool. My team has been looking for something like this.

<comment><USER19> You can jump directly into the developer dashboard with only an email address here, and start playing with queries: [https://fauna.com/serverless-cloud- sign-up](https://fauna.com/serverless-cloud-sign-up)

<comment><USER30> My team wants to understand this in context of other databases. Are there any architecture docs available?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a white paper coming soon...if you email us at email@example.com we can give you a preview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This sounds a lot like google spanner. I'm no expert though. What's the difference?

<comment><USER19> The big difference is that we use a logical clock and batches of operations so that we aren't dependent on atomic clocks. We also have a different API style, and plan to run on all the major cloud providers. You'll be able to do consistent operations visible to application code running in different providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> can't wait to learn more

<comment><AUTHOR> The docs are now public...so you can.

We have a blog post by Daniel Abadi coming as well about the consistency model.

<comment><USER22> Have you talked to Aphyr yet about testing it and having it become an entry in [https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)?

I've learned to not believe that distributed software will work in practice in the way that its authors claim it will. The stronger the claims, the more important it is to have an independent test validating it before I even think of trusting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally understandable. We have been talking to Kyle. We have internal verification systems and will be publishing more later this year to that effect.

For what it's worth, we have built high-performance distributed systems before....so it's not just wishful thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Do you support a hard limit on money spent? I would like to be able to say 30 bucks a month max or something

</comment><comment><USER34> If your database is not Open Source then your marketing lingo needs to be more open or else you'll have the same mistake as FoundationDB (which looked like vapor-ware).

As a proprietary service, you are now competing against Cloud Spanner which (while people love the underdog) means your toast because they have Eric Brewer to hand wave away their marketing lingo.

On the flip side, you are competing against Cockroach, but they are Open Source so that puts you in a rock and a hard place. From previous comments of mine, you may know I don't think Cockroach has much of a future either because Globally Consistent databases aren't going to cater to the necessary P2P future of the web (5B+ new people coming online, 100B+ IoT devices, graph enabled social web, Machine Learning, etc. which is what we, [http://gun.js.org/](http://gun.js.org/) , caters to and we just successfully ran load tests on low end hardware doing 1.7K table inserts/sec across a federated system, we plan on getting this up to 10K inserts/second on cheap [if not free] hardware).

Why are these systems going to fail to pick up the market? Because the best of the best, both in engineering and as an Open Source community, RethinkDB (which I praise highly) couldn't. At the end of the day, the few companies that need globally consistent transactions will trust (for better or for worse) Cloud Spanner, and the others who want to roll their own infrastructure will try Cockroach but ultimately switch to RethinkDB in the end.

So on that note, as others have noted, don't use your /fantastic/ marketing opportunities (top of HN) to make false claims about being "industry first", it won't help you gather a developer community. Use this time to win developers over like Firebase did (which itself now has their community scared of when/if Google will shut them down, those developers are now flooding to RethinkDB and ours, despite Firebase being one of the best - high praise for them as well, like Rethink).

<comment><USER15> > Globally Consistent databases aren't going to cater to the necessary P2P > future of the web

Well, that's an interesting assertion. Why do you think that?

<comment><USER34> Because even a "3ms latency" (which was a problem, with respect to "global", that other people have commented out) can absolutely kill the performance for IoT data that may be emitting thousands of updates a second.

Those systems are largely highly localized, and so /strong eventual consistency/ is more important than globally consistent blocking operations.

Also, again with 5B+ people coming online, Master-Slave systems (even distributed ones) still have a huge bottleneck already in the present day. P2P systems (master-master) will scale better in these settings.

<comment><USER15> I was more curious about the "necessary P2P future of the web" part.

I think there's an assumption here that _most_ of the responsibility for storing the source of truth will move out to things like IoT devices (i.e. fog computing).

And sure, there will probably be a need for that. But regarding the assumption that most web services will go away, I don't there's sufficient evidence to bet on it happening anytime reasonably soon. Data centers and public clouds will probably still be there in the next decade or two.

<comment><USER34> Twitter is spending over $15M/month on server costs alone to support 333M active monthly users.

Now compare to Pokemon Go's huge explosion of 20M daily users from a while ago.

This problem is only going to get worse with another 5B+ people coming online into the 2020s.

In order to scale, using (what you call) "fog computing" will be absolutely necessary. Cloud services will still be used, of course, but they will be built as P2P systems to take advantage of the "fog".

Cloud infrastructure will always be around, but how apps are built will be a fundamentally different architecture. But when S3 goes out, like it did the other week, we can't suffer worldwide downtime - that will be unacceptable.

Rethink's unfortunate failure to capitalize in this market is a signal that Master-Slave databases (even the best of the best) will have a very small role with respect to the total amount of data flowing through the internet.

My thoughts here: [https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and- par...](https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse- shutdowns-c076460058f7)

As well as my the Changelog podcast interview: [https://changelog.com/podcast/236](https://changelog.com/podcast/236)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Capturing heat wasted in solar panels for use in distilling clean drinking water - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-capturing-solar-panels-distilling.html <comment><USER2> Cooling the cells helps with efficiency too. A win-win-win all around if the salt doesn't corrode or clog.

<comment><AUTHOR> The amount of water distilled sounds quite good too. I think 1.5 litres/m2/hr. I guess you could have separate solar and water things but maybe it's cheaper to put them together.

<comment><USER3> Without the cost analysis of the split system, I also question the study. Sure it's cool technically, but dollars drive everything.

<comment><USER4> Of course cost is going to determine whether this is practical to deploy, but products don't spring forth form Zeus' head fully formed. We should expect they'll need time to iterate on BOM cost and performance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L - <AUTHOR> http://anandtech.com/show/8231/a-closer-look-at-android-runtime-art-in-android-l <comment><USER3> It's kind of funny to hear AOT compilation being heralded as the next step after JIT that will bring better performance because you only have to compile once, since we spend so much time hearing exactly the opposite, especially in the context of Javascript.

(Notwithstanding that, as other comments have pointed out, JIT vs AOT is at best a gross oversimplification of the difference between Dalvik and ART.)

<comment><USER4> Apps and web pages are different use cases. An app you expect to spend a moment "installing" and are likely to use regularly, so AOT compiling is useful. Web pages on the other hand are often visited briefly and a few seconds delay can make a huge difference difference, and often contain lots of script executed only once or not at all - so AOT compilation would actually hurt performance.

<comment><USER5> Not really true with all the HTML5 apps based on Phonegap and WebView.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if it would make sense to rewrite some native components of Android in Java now. Presumably, whole-program optimization means that the ART compiler is more effective if more of the code is in Java (or technically, Dex bytecode) rather than having opaque native parts with JNI overhead.

<comment><USER7> That is already the case. When you look at the NDK, you can only have access to game related API (audio, graphics and sensors) almost everything else involves JNI.

<comment><USER8> Actually quite a bit of the view code is native still - start reading the source for View etc and you hit a level where it's mostly calls out to native libraries. e.g [https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/blob/mas...](https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/blob/master/core/java/android/view/GLES20Canvas.java)

<comment><USER7> Well, graphics code eventually needs to speak to the graphics card.

I imagine outside graphics, audio and hardware integration APIs, there is very little done at C level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "This also means that Android is finally able to compete with iOS in terms of application fluidity and performance, a big win for the consumer."

Does anyone actually have any real comparisons between Android and iOS? Was there an acknowledged 2x performance benefit for iOS on the same hardware? For games and Ui, for example, wouldn't the GPU be more important?

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that the new on-device output is a Linux ELF binary. I suppose this opens the door for a more flexible cross-compiler system that could in the future better support languages that are less Java-like. E.g. - <USER2> like Swift that doesn't use a GC at all, for example. Or at least an option to develop in Go?

It will be interesting to see what sort of extensions Google adds to the dex format in the next few years. Hopefully, there will be some efficient lower level language bindings for the UI calls, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER11> This architecture is insane from an overall system point of view.

Why ship DEX proprietary bytecode to be compiled by the same compiler in the same way on hundreds of millions of devices to produce the same output?

It would seem far more logical to compile all the versions needed, one for each device architecture, just once. As other aspects of the apk need to be customised for each device class already, there is not really new overhead.

Going native is a great idea, doing it this way is plain bonkers.

<comment><USER12> It took less time to recompile 200+ apps on my phone when I switched from dalvik to ART than it does to download 2 or 3 more new apps. CPUs are fast, even on mobile.

<comment><USER13> Also the largest part of the packages are probably not code, but assets which presumably don't get compiled further ;-)

<comment><USER14> That's a great point. It would be interesting to see a list of largest mobile apps by code size instead of just code + resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems familiar:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738223)

</comment><comment><USER16> ART is a good news for Android users, but it's really optimize the performance? I watched someone use Android L to run some popular social app(like WeChat), you can't open it normally. Some big bug sure be fixed.

<comment><USER17> I am testing the L build on a Nexus 5. Our app has a feed full of very rich views. We already implement a lot of optimizations (not all of those that are possible though, namely flat custom views, simply because we don't have the engineering ressources to do it right now) but it scrolling is not perfectly smooth on 4.4. We lose a couple of frames each second when scrolling rapidly (interestingly, in addition to its native code, iOS also limits scrolling speed in order to deliver a smooth experience). This is no longer the case with Android L. Without changing anything in our code, this feed is now smooth as hell.

About the app you mentioned, L is right now a preview build, there are indeed a lot of bugs everywhere. It is not really surprising since we are months away from the release. It does not have anything to do with perfs though.

<comment><USER16> I think you are right. I'm not a pure Android developer, just do some works with Android. Your test give us a good news, we happy to see Android more smooth.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Needs New Leadership - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2015/twitter-needs-new-leadership/ <comment><USER3> Twitter's website has so many annoyances it is no more a pleasure for me to check it. For example:

\- Photos are very badly cropped and clicking on the tweet does not diplay them full size anymore. We have to click a second time on the photo.

\- Photos are now displayed above the text which somehow makes the bad cropping even worse.

\- People who want to post photos have all moved to Instagram anyway. Twitter is an actor, not a victim, of this move. They seem to consider photos as a feature for advertisers, not for users.

\- Embedded tweets (retweets with a comment) don't have functionnal links. Clicking them opens the tweet's page in a way that ruins the auto-scrolling of the main stream. The trick against that is to right-click on the embedding tweet's time and open the link in a new tab. WTF, designers?

\- If one wants to post a longer text, Twitter leads them to create an account elsewhere. Twitter could easily just display the title and hide the longer text behind a click. WTF, strategists?

Twitter definitely needs a new leadership.

<comment> at-fates-hands Your post is interesting.

Your first three points are about photos, and then the third point says anybody who wants to post photos is already on Instagram. This is ironic considering most of the people I follow post their Instagram photos - <USER2> Twitter.

I do agree however on the embedded tweets. In a world where apps go to great lengths to minimize the amount of clicks people have to make to get to their content, it seems Twitter is incredibly behind the times in this regard.

As for longer tweets, I've read several interviews with the founders and they said they will steadfastly defend a limit on the amount of characters for posts. They say this is what separates Twitter from other social media platforms. As a user, if I have something I need to write about, I never do it on Twitter, there are an abundant other options to do this.

I do agree they need new leadership. As other social media platforms have morphed to keep pace with the changes their users want, Twitter has effectively done nothing to help make their platform any better than when I joined almost five years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The bigger problem with Twitter is how damn hard it is to use the service well. Twitter's value increases or decreases along with one's ability to curate his or her feed.

It seriously took me years of careful tweaking to get my feed (and lists) where I want them. Now Twitter is absolutely incredible; Twitter lets you be in a room with anybody in the world you want to. That's really, really cool. For me, that's startup legends and tech geniuses. I not only get to see what they're saying, but often what they're reading and thinking about. Because of that I wanted to see the feeds of some of the top tech investors look like, so I created them in lists. They're fascinating to watch (lists are here [http://theireyes.austenallred.com/pages/viewlist](http://theireyes.austenallred.com/pages/viewlist))

But I look at so many of my friends who don't use it, or who have an account and don't log in, and it's almost always because they haven't taken the time to follow the right people. That's hard to do. Facebook is easy - my grandma knows me so she'll accept my friend request. Twitter, by its nature, forces _you_ to be proactive in creating and culling that list. That's an action that most people don't take.

So Twitter is trying something new - what if we put together lists of what people want and had those available as the logged-out homepage, letting people quickly get involved? It's an admirable effort, but look at the categories available: It recommends I search for stuff like #NationalDayOfPrayer or #BadBloodMusicVideo. The top categories right now are literally politicians, high-end fashion designers, nascar drivers, and hotels/travel agents. I get that they're trying to show you variety, but talk about shots in the dark.

I don't know what the solution is. But I think Twitter's biggest problem is that it simply takes too much work before anyone gains value from Twitter. There are a lot of people on this planet who will never put that much work in before expecting something of value back out of a service.

<comment><USER5> It boggles my mind that Twitter _still_ does not provide a built-in way to follow a hashtag.

<comment><USER6> The day they implement that is the day that hashtags stop being useful.

"JOIN OUR SWEEPSTAKES TWEET US FOR A FREE IPHONE #apple #gameofthrones #facebook #mylittlepony #android #sex"

That already happens now when the only incentive is to hit some random searcher. When you're guaranteed millions of eyeballs instantly? Twitter's spam-detection services are not up to the task, and that's not even counting the non-spam but over-eager users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Three things about Twitter's advertising:

F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen explains data mining and Twitter's ad targeting at re:publica 2015: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbF0sVdOjRw&t=12m42s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbF0sVdOjRw&t=12m42s)

Here are two recent ads ("promoted tweets") on Twitter:

weev tells white people they need to stand up and defend yada yada. White supremacy is apparently a-ok with Twitter:

[https://twitter.com/ReginaSmall/status/595211478648651776](https://twitter.com/ReginaSmall/status/595211478648651776)

Apple has an ad in Swedish. It's gibberish. Here is my best shot at translating it (if it makes no sense, my translation is good):

"the good news is for the inhabitants of Sweden now can get iphone 6 set price at 10 kr, beatings not until late"

[https://twitter.com/ehsanfadakar/status/596304927724548098](https://twitter.com/ehsanfadakar/status/596304927724548098)

Let me just say I'm not surprised if it doesn't work out for Twitter financially, 'cause if they have all that data Mikko is talking about, and they can't do better than spreading nazism and basically 419 scams, they deserve bankruptcy, so as to make room for someone who can do it right. That's how, I understand it, capitalism is supposed to work.

<comment><USER8> You realise that's not a real Apple ad don't you.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, yeah, it's obvious _to you and me_. That's part of the problem, of course. Why do they take money for actual spam? They're dragging both Apple's and their own brand in the dirt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At some point I think people will start to realize that there is no "investment" in social media. It's too fad-driven. And internet speed has greatly accelerated the pace at which fads rise and fade. Nearly by the time something appears to be getting popular, the new users are already looking at the next thing.

Twitter is slowing because it's just not "the thing" anymore. Facebook also, though both services have millions of users, they're not attracting the younger users anymore. They've already moved on. I predict that in less than 10 years, both services will be seated at the "MySpace" table in internet history.

There's only so many ways you can create interest in a proprietary package around "sending notes and pictures to friends" which is all these services really offer the average user as a value proposition. As soon as it becomes too heavy, too bloated, too ad-infested, or "what my parents use" then the next batch of users moves on.

The "value of the graph" which is what these services claim is the true value, is meaningless to the average user. They don't give a shit about the graph, beyond their own little piece of it. And if the users go elsewhere, the graph ceases to have any value beyond academic.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why Facebook has bought Instagram and Whatsapp, and tried to buy Snapchat - to make sure they're riding the wave. What has Twitter bought? Vine and Periscope are good, but seem like features to their existing network. Will they bring in a new audience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would bet that in 20 years time many other social networks will not be standing yet Twitter will.

Maybe it makes less money and grows slowly, but I check Twitter every day and can't see myself stopping. On the other hand, Facebook is a ghost town. Many social networks explode into the scene but most burn out quickly.

It's nice to find a way to make a quick buck, but I think they should be thinking of the long-term, too.

<comment><USER11> I assure you, Facebook absolutely isn't a ghost town. It is transitioning into something very different than it used to be, though. Back in the college days it was a cool service that people were passionate about. These days it's practically a utility - some social glue that helps to hold your life together. That's no bad thing - I certainly don't expect Facebook to go anywhere anytime soon.

Aside from anything else, I value the past content I have on Facebook - photos, mainly. By contrast, Twitter content is almost all ephemeral.

<comment><USER12> I think at this point everyone has already heard the "social utility" description and it dire straits add much to the conversation, particularly because phone books were a social utility too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reading this, I can't help but think how much of Twitter's job has shifted from doing the work to tap-dancing about the work. So much of this is about failure to meet "expectations", failure to meet possibly-arbitrary comparisons to possibly-relevant things.

I also hate, hate, hate the cult-of-the-CEO viewpoint here. It could be that Twitter's CEO role is so central that a) all the issues trace back to its current occupant,and b) all problems can be solved by installing a new occupant. But if that's really the case, then I'd call that a very badly designed system. In what software would replacing 1/4000th of the code solve all the performance and user interface problems? It seems like the model is less, "creative, involved, self-directed workforce" and more "3rd-world cult- of-personality banana republic".

<comment><USER4> I think you're underestimating the power of leadership. Of course, replacing one person in a large organization isn't going to make a huge difference statistically, but it makes an enormous difference if that person is directing all of the other people. If there are 4,000 people towing a ship, a change in the captain could change which way they're rowing.

<comment><USER14> Or, to use a real-world example, does it matter who is President of the United States? The federal government employs 4 million people, and the President has far less control over them than a CEO has over their employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone explain the value of Twitter to me? I certainly can see its value for advertisers, or even to get breaking news, but I have a Twitter account and don't use it at all.

What do you guys use it for? What's the target market for this exactly? I certainly don't expect people to follow me, some random guy on the internet, so there's no incentive for me to tweet myself. Besides news articles, what interesting things do you read from tweets?

<comment><USER4> Imagine if you could be a fly on the wall at a party. You could invite anyone in the world to that party, and they'd come. Your heroes, the smartest people in the world, the best people in your field, your friends, the funniest people you know, etc. You get them all in a room and get to listen to everything they're saying, thinking about, reading, etc.

That's Twitter.

<comment><USER15> Ah I think I am just not the target market as most(all?) of the people I admire don't use it.

Thanks for the explanation though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the flip side of all of this, I think its important to recognize that Twitter has - of most of the large social media platforms - been the best with regard to resistance to censorship and propaganda initiatives. Twitter will take down specific accounts, but as far as I can tell this is the state of the art for them - they do not have automated reasoning that 'accidentally' prevents spreading unwelcome news articles and leaked documents, etc. This of course makes Twitter a viable target for propaganda efforts by AQAP, ISIL, Russia, Israel, the US and others - but it also frees the service from being controlled by any particular group (I suppose either is bad).

It is likely that with a change in leadership these policies will also change and Twitter will become another Facebook/Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER17> Twitter's principal prob is information overload that users experience inevitably on as they dedicate or spend more time on the platform due to the reality of its non filtered laissez-faire stream of tweets[0].

The second most nagging prob for Twitter is the blurring line between its FB page-like accounts and real/personal ones. Both unfortunatey stand on an equal footing in the platform unlike the situation on Facebook where everything is distinct and clear and the line is drawn quite obviously between groups, pages, personal accounts ...etc

([0]: I like that it way as I am not in favor of FB's authoritarian policy of curating/dictating what content should I consume. I'm very OK with rationing and having full control of my TW time the way I see fit)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have decided to make a small list of posts out that talk about Twitter in recent times. Some are more cogent and authoritative than others.

\- [http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters- multi-b...](http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi- billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/)

\- [http://john.do/twitter-quit/](http://john.do/twitter-quit/)

\- [http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters- dilemma](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma)

\- [https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes- away/](https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/)

\- [http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters- engage...](http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engagement- has-fallen)

\- [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulogy- for-twitter/361339/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd love if there was a universal way for me to pay a central distributor e.g. 10€ a month and then distributes the money to the websites I visit, with the same financial result for the website operators.

Like an optout for ads, because let's face it I won't be buying a Porsche because of an Instagram photo or a tweet. Ads are just fucking annoying, and it sorta works for pay tv.

<comment><USER20> Something like this: [https://www.google.com/contributor](https://www.google.com/contributor) ?

<comment><USER19> I hope that this takes off but unfortunately it'll only be for Google ads which aren't obtrusive like layerads or youtube video ads...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> the ad-based business model is as toxic for quality as being a public company dependend on quarterly results. if you have no other fallback revenue, you get pushed in a very specific, user-hostile direction.

google search as case in point, banner ads, etc., all broken promises.

why not do what linkedin does? offer paid premium accounts. the 'verified' badge is already much coveted, so mark affluent users. re-sell short, unused twitter handles. cap the number of followers at say 500, above needs to be premium. want to persist your tweets longer than x months? premium. want to connect an official 3rd party app? premium. remove fucking ads? guess...

and i am not talking about making this expensive, it does not need to be. earn enough money to keep the lights on with premium users.

twitter has the best content on the net, so they're like HBO - but trying to make money like network TV.

tl,dr: build a premium and 3rd party connector paid system, a mix of LinkedIn and Slack's models.

don't like my idea? discuss.

<comment><USER13> I generally agree with you on the issues of advertising. The value of an eyeball or a click has been dropping for 20 years. The point of most advertising is to distract, which puts it in direct opposition to the point of most content.

But I think search-related ads are a different thing. When people are actively looking for something, telling them about relevant somethings can create value instead of destroying it. So I'm fine with Google search, but less fine with Twitter's in-stream ads.

I think premium accounts could be great, but it's a tricky thing to get right. Part of the value of Twitter is audience, so anything that might reduce the audience is dangerous. You list several premium features that might have worked from the beginning, but now would be perceived as a loss by non-premium users, surely driving some from the platform and creating a wave of negative comment.

<comment><USER22> > When people are actively looking for something, telling them about relevant > somethings can create value instead of destroying it. So I'm fine with > Google search, but less fine with Twitter's in-stream ads.

Can you explain how twitter's in-stream ads are any different? You can apply any number of arguments that are identical to your Google one. "If I'm following News Outlet XYZ, telling me about News Outlet PQR can create value as they might have another take on this particular story". "If I'm following Pop artist M, telling me about similar Pop artists Q might be useful". You can also apply the other argument - "I know what I'm looking for just feed me the data and get out of the way" to both scenarios.

You can break the activities down to - 1) Are you 'exploring' or 2) Are you just wanting to 'go to a particular data source X'. If you're exploring, of course you're going to be more open to other inputs, and in that scenario, ads - well not ads - but recommendations, are useful.

<comment><USER13> Sure. Search is me actively looking for something. E.g., I want to buy a replacement keyboard for my computer. My goal is to find something that somebody is selling. There, ads may be relevant to my direct intent.

If I am reading a newspaper, I am actively trying to follow the writing on a topic. Somebody trying to sell me something is a distraction from that goal.

Scanning newspaper headlines is in theory in between, in that I am searching for something interesting to read. But in practice, I am scanning a particular set of headlines chosen by particular editors who have an understanding of relevancy and story quality that is similar to mine. Paid advertising bypasses that judgment. So again, it works against my goal and for the goal of the advertisers.

Twitter's in-stream ads are similar to that last case. I have carefully curated list of people whose words I want to read. If I am interested in some brand, I can just follow them. If I might be interested in something not in my feed, I can search for that something or ask people who follow me for help. Ads specifically bypass my meta-editorial judgment in hopes of manipulating my purchasing behaviors.

I understand the theory that ads are providing new, relevant information, but I think it's mainly false in practice. We live in an age of effectively infinite free information with everybody able to publish, edit, and meta-edit. I've already selected a group of people who are telling me what I think I need to hear.

Twitter is inserting the ads not because people are saying, "Hey, I need more relevant stuff." They're getting it whether they want it or not. If ads were really all that valuable, there would be sites where you could just get lots of ads, an online equivalent of the coupon circular. But ads instead mainly intrude on the content that you actually want, and there's no way to get rid of them, because places like Twitter realize that people don't actually want them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 2¢;

Twitter needs to learn how to let me, as a small company advertise at affordable prices. Facebook learned this, even though we all know bots click on "Boosted" posts. Give us, millions of small companies lots of amazing tools and charge for it. (Start with multi user support for the corporate handle, buy Buffer and get back to respecting developers)

<comment><USER24> Have you tried their advertising products?

[https://ads.twitter.com/login?ref=gl-tw-tw-twitter- advertise](https://ads.twitter.com/login?ref=gl-tw-tw-twitter-advertise)

I have on a very small scale so I can't speak to the effectivene4ss, but it's (advertising options) been available for quite some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some of these advertising-related problems seem to be related to Twitter's ad delivering mechanism offering too much transparency into the effectiveness of the advertising, while other networks profit from opacity. In other words, by letting advertisers be more efficient, Twitter should have a better handle (and perhaps later, collect a premium) for the value inherent in better matchmaking and conversions.

Is there a path for an efficient social network that has the right buyers and sellers on it transacting in highly efficient ways, but which isn't beholden to conquer-the-world MAU metrics that have it scrambling to attract the masses at the lower end of the Facebook curve (e.g., old high school acquaintances who find it the perfect outlet to display their self-betraying views on conspiracies, politics and race?)

</comment><comment><USER26> Facebook has millions of real people on it -- for sure also bots, while twitter has a much smaller hardcore fraction of people, next to too many bots. Advertising performs better on FB.

</comment><comment><USER27> Twitter just has way too small of a scope to be useful for most people. I imagine most of their growth was hype-train growth, not really true usage growth.

Not only that, but I'm quickly realizing that having a public record of short little quips I've made is actually a really bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER28> Twitter needs to create a better platform for international social media. That will save it's bottom line and place itself into a completely new market for enterprise accounts.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wait, there is no mention of Periscope or Meerkat in this post. Have I been moved to a parallel dimension?

<comment><USER30> [http://stratechery.com/2015/twitter- might/](http://stratechery.com/2015/twitter-might/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Twitter should adopt deep-linking in app install ads.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes. And a redesign. And a paid premium (200 chars) account. And a enterprise (500chars + in-tweet-auto-playing-video) option.

There is clearly not enough advertisement on twitter, no wonder the users are running away.</comment>


Peteris Krumins: How I went to Silicon Valley and raised $55,000 for Browserling - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-i-raised-money-for-browserling/

<comment><USER2> Check out their startup: <http://browserling.com/>

It allows you to not just get a screenshot of the site you are working on in a variety of browsers, but you can actually navigate the site, click on links, enter text, etc. Impressive!

For designers/developers who need big coverage on browsers, I suspect they are going to do strong business.

I think the $20 pricing might be a bit high, but the 5 minutes free should help a bunch of folks.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the browsers run on Windowses and we stream the desktop to the browser!

$20 also gets you tunnels, so you can tunnel localhost or local network to Browserling. Not available in the free plans!

<comment><USER2> OOh. That's sweet. You need, need, need to make that clear. Being able to local dev and then share that with clients or customers is pretty huge.

Keep testing your pricing model. Don't get locked in this early. I suspect that $15 might be the price point where it's a no-brainer for a certain group of dev/designers.

<comment><USER3> Will do that. I'll redesign the pricing page altogether and make it obvious what's what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I knew of each of you separately and have long thought you are brilliant. (How YC passed on you I'll never know.)

I'm really happy to hear you're funded and going. Best of luck!

<comment><USER5> Miss for YC, big win for the Hackers and Founders incubator. Browserling was the start up I was most excited about on Not-a-Demo Day, in part because all of their business cards were hand drawn and ripped from sheets of paper and their browser logo cutouts were made from cereal boxes.

<comment><USER3> <3 Jonathan and Laura

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These guys were literally the perfect example of the mythical "starving entrepreneurs" who walk into your office with a brilliant idea. I had to make sure they could eat! :)

<comment> daniel-cussen The treehouse in the bg is a nice touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats! Adam Rifkin can really make things happen. Definitely worth meeting and knowing him.

<comment><USER3> <3 Adam Rifkin

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats... nice to see some real hackers get a leg up!

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sorry I was unable to recruit you to Splunk back in the day, but good luck with Browserling!

<comment><USER3> Thanks. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I had money, I'd invest in you guys. Congrats on the funding!

<comment><USER3> You better save some up for when we raise the next round! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Success, I was known in the Silicon Valley!"

Good read. You can feel the passion jumping out of the post.

<comment><USER3> Awww yeah!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congrats Peteris! Prieks, ka kādam izdodas! Veiksmes! :)

<comment><USER3> Paldies! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you a US citizen, or did you have to sort out work visas to make it happen?

<comment><USER3> Went on a B1 visa "to raise investment for StackVM", which took 15 minutes to get.

<comment><USER14> As a fellow EU citizen, I'm interested in this. Could you elaborate? Are you able to found or work at a start up in the U.S. with only a temporary visa?

<comment><USER15> You're allowed to found a company in the US - just not work for it nor be paid by it. The B1 is a 3-6 month visa, most people just use the visa waiver program.

<comment><USER16> Surely you can get paid by your own company? Do you mean you can't become an employee for it?

<comment><USER15> You cannot work for an American company

<comment><USER16> I just did five minutes ago, and the invoice was paid two minutes ago, so you clearly can. Perhaps you mean you can't become an employee of one?

<comment><USER17> Do you live in the US?

<comment><USER16> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Browserling is some seriously impressive work. Congrats and thank you for all the Node.JS open-source work too!

<comment><USER3> You're welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see tunnels as a key feature, but you know this - I've been talking about tunnels on browserling for _ages_ :) Glad you raised money and very happy that the H&F family made it happen for you.

Looking forward to you being back in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> I'll announce tunnels in my next blog post! They are already live (the ssh icon on the right, when you use Browserling) but I haven't announced them anywhere, so almost no one knows about them!

See you soon in the Bay Area!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really love your service, however, I'm not a fan of the design (seems cartoonish). Was this just the design aspect you were going for or are you seeking a redesign in the near future?

<comment><USER3> We like the design! We're not looking for a redesign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice work! A "check on the spot" definitely helps validate the idea.

<comment><USER3> It sure does!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great story and best of luck to you guys going forward. This is a very useful tool. I find myself using it more and more lately when I need a quick test spin in the explorers.

<comment><USER3> Awesome that you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congrats Peteris and James! I've had a lot of fun watching the progress of Browserling through interacting with it. And congrats to Jonathan and Laura too!

<comment><USER3> Jonathan and Laura took us to dinners when we were almost out of money and hungry! They are truly the kindest people I have ever met.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good job guys, and remember, if you're ever hungry, come back to Treehouse for a meal. -Katy

</comment><comment><USER25> His co-founder is SubStack, the same guy from yesterdays Browserify article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805195>

<comment><USER3> SubStack is the best hacker I know.

<comment><USER26> his reach is beyond imagination.. dnode, hook.io, nowjs.

testling is going to take browserling to the next level!</comment></comment></comment>


Colombia's Plan to Welcome Millions of Venezuelan Migrants - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/01/colombia-welcomes-millions-venezuelans-maduro-guaido/581647/ <comment><USER2> I applaud Colombia for this. I really hope international pressure does its job and gets Venezuela back on track. I understand Russian and China wanting to secure their investments in the country, but the cost is taking its toll. I dont know how someone like Maduro can really live with himself and his lifestyle when so many are suffering.I also have read that U.S. sanctions are to blame, i dont know if this is true or just government corruption.

I wish the US would do a fast track for Venezuelan migrants, or at least i hope we provide aide to Colombia to help with expenses.

And if Argentina is helping too they get massive kudos as well.

<comment><USER3> > _I applaud Columbia for this […]_

> _[…] i hope we provide aide to Columbia to help with expenses_

Just so you know, the English spelling is "Colombia" _(O instead of U)_ [1].

If you say "Columbia" _(U instead of O)_ you are talking about the historical female personification of the United States of America, and a poetic name for the Americas [2]. I don't know why people make this mistake so many times, even looking at this list [3] I cannot find any reference to "Columbia" as the name for the country.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(name)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_\(name\))

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

<comment><USER2> Point taken, I have updated my post with the correct spelling.

I am use to typing it that way for the District of Columbia. That is not an excuse, but that is why it is probably misspelled a lot.

<comment><USER4> Same here. As someone who lives in British Columbia, I always conflate the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The US has worked from day one do destabilize any kind of government in Venezuela, having openly supported coups and now a blockade that is disrupting oil production, which is the main trading of that country. To say at this point that the economic and social situation of Venezuela is just the fault of Venezuelan leaders (whatever their problems might be) is baffling and a plain lie. The current US government is openly supporting an intervention to control Venezuelan's oil, so for me it is not a surprise that the people and the army forces of Venezuela are backing their government, the same way that I see no surprise that the Iran government receives popular support despite all its problems. The US and American people should do a mea culpa and stop what they are doing to destabilize the world.

<comment><USER6> Venezuelan oil production dipped dramatically before any serious US sanctions were introduced.

The nationalization of the oil industry and replacing professionals with incompetent cronies was the cause of Venezuela's current crisis, not something the US orchestrated.

See [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/05/07/how- venezuel...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/05/07/how-venezuela- ruined-its-oil-industry/#5477693e7399)

From a couple years ago. I saw a more recent graph somewhere and the problems have grown even more acute.

<comment><USER7> OPEC (which Venezuela is a member of) opted to open the taps in 2014 to counter rising competition from US fracking[1]. The drop in oil price was at least in part of their own creation!

Additionally, the Venezuelan policy choices since Chavez have significantly reduced economic diversity and increased reliance on Oil, and the population's reliance on the state oil companies.[2]

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/07/opec- plan-k...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/07/opec-plan-kill-us- shale-oil-price-down-seven-year-low) 2: (warning pdf) [https://web.archive.org/web/20131021050303/http://larc.ucalg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131021050303/http://larc.ucalgary.ca/sites/larc.ucalgary.ca/files/dr._stephen_randall_the_chavez_legacy_march_2013.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Describing this as 'radical' (in the actual title of the article!), 'impressive', etc. says more about the current worldview of western democracies on basic humanitarian solidarity than it says about Colombia.

<comment><USER9> Isn't free travel within the EU just as 'radical'? And haven't western democracies already accepted many millions of migrants? The US alone accepts one million immigrants _per year_.

<comment><USER8> 1\. Refugees are not migrants. 2. A few thousands refugees almost broke Europe (excluding Germany and Sweden). Extreme right on the rise pretty much everywhere (including Germany and Sweden). And we're talking about the richest countries in the World. Compare that with Colombia, Jordan, Lebanon to name but 3 countries.

> The US alone accepts one million immigrants per year.

"of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S". However, it's not about immigration.

How many Syrian/Libyan/Afghan/Venezuelan/Iraqi _refugees_ did the US take in the last 5 years? (You've probably noticed that the examples I cited are not random).

<comment><USER9> 'A few thousand refugees' is an interesting way of putting it. "From July 2015 to May 2016, more than 1 million people applied for asylum in Europe.": [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/immigrant- sh...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/immigrant-share-of- population-jumps-in-some-european-countries/)

This is all on top of an already significant immigrant population - in Germany alone there are 19.3 million people with immigrant background: [https://www.dw.com/en/german-population-with-immigrant- backg...](https://www.dw.com/en/german-population-with-immigrant-background- reaches-new-peak-in-2017/a-44906046)

<comment><USER8> The vast majority of the refugees in Europe are in 2 countries: Germany and Sweden. Read my comment above. The rest of European countries, including France and central Europe, essentially reacted by voting for populists (borderline fascists in some countries).

Your second comment on Germany is totally irrelevant.

And 1 million people for Europe is nothing considering the total population and wealth of the union. As I write in the comment you ignored: some of the poorest and smallest countries in the world took in more than a million refugees and without help.

<comment><USER9> How is the number of foreigners already in a country irrelevant, when deciding whether to admit more? From the perspective of the host country, migrants or refugees makes no difference.

And it's 1 million in one year, but 5 million since 2008. Unlike with Colombia, almost none are from neighboring countries. That's counting only refugees, not total immigrants: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis#Asylum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis#Asylum_applications)

Given these numbers, is there _any_ amount of immigrants the EU/US would have to accept, to be considered sufficient?

<comment><USER8> It's a pity but you keep using words like immigrants and foreigners and mixing concepts and numbers.

There's no point in continuing this exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> the government of Argentina has also been very welcoming and expedient with Venezuelan migrants, turning around documentation for the ability to work in as quickly as 2 weeks.

here's a decent presentation (english): [https://robuenosaires.iom.int/sites/default/files/Informes/N...](https://robuenosaires.iom.int/sites/default/files/Informes/National_Migration_Trends_Venezuela_in_the_Americas.pdf)

<comment><USER11> That's interesting. I looked at the link and didn't see reference to 'ability work as quickly as 2 weeks'. Did I miss it, or do you have another reference? Thanks.

<comment><USER10> that part was from friends who have immigrated here, so personal reference, ha. you may be able to find something if you speak Spanish but i have not looked. as the other reply said, it may fluctuate somewhat.

<comment><USER11> Thank you very much.

<comment><USER10> of course! if i can help in any other way, let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is absolutely AWESOME! Kudos to Colombia; and any other country that opens their borders like this!

One of the coolest things that could happen long-term, is that these Venezuelan migrants start businesses, stay in Colombia, and contribute positively to the overall economy of Colombia...ultimately making their lives better, the lives of Colombians better, and showing the xenophobic parts of the world, that, yes, immigrants into one's country is a good thing!

<comment><USER8> Agreed, though " [...] showing the xenophobic parts of the world, that, yes, immigrants into one's country is a good thing!"

We actually don't need a colombian experiment to know this. It's all over the history books.</comment></comment>


The first real step to achieve complete telepresence experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.project-remote.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Be anywhere. With anyone. At anytime.

Project Remote is the first real step to achieve complete telepresence experience. It allows you to pass beyond the borders and experience new places and events, by using 3D and panoramic visuals.

Our technology is composed of a camera that captures 360°x360° panoramic, 3D video and sound; and a headset to allow you to watch them.</comment>


Recovering telemetry data from Venera-13 and 14 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1234658195668267010 <comment><USER2> Maybe interesting to others, he's the Mitchell in the popular Mitchell- Netravali image resampling filters. Wikipedia only has an article in German and Japanese it seems: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Netravali- Filter](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Netravali-Filter)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seeing the Venus surface images taken by the Venera 9 et al still blows me away.

The US has a fantastic track record regarding Mars landings but the successful Russion Venus landings are equally awe inspiring pieces of human engineering.

</comment><comment><USER4> Venera missions just blow my mind, more so, even, than the Moon landings. Not only did they land onto an incredibly inhospitable surface (and sent _digital_ pictures from there before digital cameras were invented), they also did multi-stage missions where they'd first fly to Venus, and from there do a Halley comet approach. Even today this would be pretty nuts to pull off, for anyone.

<comment><USER5> And for some reason they didn't succeed with Mars which has way softer conditions.

<comment><USER6> I've heard that Mars is tough because the gravity is high enough that you need a lot of braking to land, but it's not quite high enough to maintain a thick atmosphere, so you can't use drag (e.g parachutes) to help reduce work/weight. Venus has a thick atmosphere and the Venera probes were able to use parachutes to help land.

<comment><USER7> Well, you _can_ use parachutes, and indeed every lander mission to Mars has done so, but they are not enough, necessitating complex EDL (entry/descent/landing) sequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Exceptionally cool. Here's a similar data recovery project from the Viking Lander tapes: [https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1](https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1)

<comment><USER9> It still feels surreal to look at pictures from another planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any more information on this than a single message on Twitter?

Just like m0zg, the Venera missions are among my favourite ones, and I really want to read more about this as well as seeing high res images.

<comment><USER11> There's plenty of articles and forum discussions in Russian, if you want to use Translate I guess.

[http://galspace.spb.ru/index114.html](http://galspace.spb.ru/index114.html)

[https://habr.com/en/post/184444/](https://habr.com/en/post/184444/)

[https://www.roscosmos.ru/23286/](https://www.roscosmos.ru/23286/) (strangely I can't access the website... I hope it's just down, not blocked)

<comment><USER12> In the habr article there's this link to Don Mitchell's site: [http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm](http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm)

<comment><USER11> I'll be honest, I didn't read it D:

But wow, that is one awesome site! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's also another Twitter thread that has the final, cleaned up panoramas: [https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/12345820835126190...](https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1234582083512619008)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wikipedia link to the space program, this was from the 1981 and 1982:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera?oldformat=true#Venera_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera?oldformat=true#Venera_13_and_14)

</comment><comment><USER15> Question: why has the US not attempted to land on Venus?

Another question: how long could a lander made with the best modern technology survive on Venus?

Edit: oops! I just learned about Pioneer-Venus. Looks like the US has actually landed on Venus. Guess I should do more research before posting.

<comment><USER16> Not a lander but NASA has 2 potential Venus missions in their proposed Discovery missions! [0]

In regards to why not a lander: I would guess it's because it's not really necessary? Orbiters (like the proposed ones above) can gather all of the science that's really necessary to study a planet like Venus. Landers are useful to study more micro-scale science to, for example, search for life (see the Mars rovers/landers and the proposed Europa lander). And orbiters are significantly cheaper and easier to make. Landing on Mars is really really really hard! I can assume it would only be harder on Venus.

[0] [https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four- possibl...](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-possible- missions-to-study-the-secrets-of-the-solar-system)

<comment><USER17> Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that even with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably slow velocity. The hard part is keeping it cool enough to function; all the Soviet landers used a phase-change material to cool them, which worked for a little while until it had all changed phase at which point they rapidly overheated. Keeping a lander operating for more than a couple hours is a very difficult engineering challenge for that reason.

<comment><USER18> > Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that > even with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably > slow velocity.

Doesn't the thick atmosphere also mean a lot more mass to slam into at orbital speed when starting to enter it? Seems like it's a double edged sword.

<comment><USER19> The upper layer of the atmosphere are not denser than the upper layer of the earth atmosphere, so it does not make aerocapture more difficult. It's just that the atmosphere is "deeper": going down, it starts thin, and then gradually densifies until reaching earth conditions at around 50km, then you keep going down in thicker and thicker atmosphere, which means you don't need big parachutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Should be put somewhere on archive.org I guess, along with many other similar tapes.

<comment><USER21> Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe

<comment><USER22> Ah yes, the famous LOCKSS principle. Quite true. Probably contacting Jason Scott[0] could set it on motion.

[0] @textfiles on twitter

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tweet thread: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234658195668267010.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234658195668267010.html)

And followup, with full panoramas: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234582083512619008.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234582083512619008.html)

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately the threadreader version does not load the images (at least in Firefox), which makes it useless for an image-heavy tweet thread like this.

<comment><USER24> I had the same issue until I've disabled my adblocker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I still think a Venus colony would be super cool and maybe more viable than mars given the available energy and gravity... this just seems so cool [https://youtu.be/bcHkWKp9e4Y](https://youtu.be/bcHkWKp9e4Y)

A cloud city

<comment><USER26> 5 vehicles, 4 (5?) crew transfers? Not to mention some "interesting" environmental conditions. Yeah, it's definitely cool, but _wow_ would it be a complicated mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fantastical job has done! Maybe there are other non-digitized materials from any past missions, which could be digitized?</comment>