After WikiLeaks Revelation, Greece Asks I.M.F. To Clarify Bailout Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/business/after-wikileaks-revelation-greece-asks-imf-to-clarify-bailout-plan.html <comment><USER2> If you're interested in Greece and how they've been screwed b the ECB, I recommend a video[1] I posted[2] a few days ago. It's a discussion from about a month ago with Mark Blyth (prof econ at Brown) and the former Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis. They discuss "negotiating" with the ECB, brexit, and the "least worst" ways to save the EU.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMk6aVsl8Rs#t=66](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMk6aVsl8Rs#t=66)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398625)

(If you think Greece's economic situation is anything other than a bailout for the major banks of the EU, then you haven't been paying attention)

<comment><USER3> This is a common leftist propaganda we see here in EU - that others are guilty for Greece's situation, and that poor Greece is a victim of shady capitalists (banks). The reality is somewhat different: they have put themselves in that situation by overspending since mid-70s. Not only that - they have been systematically lying to the world about their financial situation: fist when they were entering the EU and then in 2010 when they "discovered" that they are in a much worst situation than previously reported to the creditors (read the part about Eurostat trying since 2004 to improve reliability of Greece- provided financial figures).

You should read the facts by yourself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government- debt_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis)

Also to debunk the biggest lie, the one where Greece's economic situation is basically bailout for EU banks, let me state this facts:

1\. In 2011 there was about €46bn in Greece debt held by EU banks (excluding Greece internal banks), of which €9.4bn was held by French and €7.9bn by German banks. By 2015, Germany, France and Italy held roughly €130bn of total €323bn debt. So EU state members lend Greece about 5x the money that their banks had been exposed to in bad Greece debts. Hardly an EU-bank bailout. 2\. Also, in 2011 EU states required commercial lenders (including their own commercial banks) to accept a 50% write-off, before they started using taxpayer money to start refinancing and extending loans to Greece.

What really pisses me off is that Greece expects other EU-countries to provide free money to them (by writing off debts or providing well-below-market debt refinancing), while at the same time they only collect half of their tax revenues due. If they only collected the same level of tax revenues as other EU-member states, they would be in no trouble.

<comment><USER4> > What really pisses me off is that Greece expects other EU-countries to > provide free money to them

This is how every functioning federal system works today. Surpluses are recycled from the higher output regions into the lower output regions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://wikileaks.org/imf-internal-20160319/](https://wikileaks.org/imf- internal-20160319/)

</comment><comment><USER6> tldr: International organizations refuse to take responsibility for the failure of the measures they imposed, but in the fear of BREXIT in June postpone GREXIT after July. In the mean time every party blames the others, leaking information to the press.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tsipras' response to the leak:

[https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716400800499679232](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716400800499679232)

Mostly the Greeks take offense to the IMF, per Bloomberg [1], "considering a plan to cause a credit event in Greece and destabilize Europe."

Also: "Acc to #IMF leak, conf call was held March 19, when Velculescu was still in Athens, Hilton Hotel. Makes you wonder if Hilton is bugged." [2]

[1][http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-02/imf- discus...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-02/imf-discussed- pressuring-germany-on-greek-debt-wikileaks-says)

[2] [https://twitter.com/YanniKouts/status/716226465910665216](https://twitter.com/YanniKouts/status/716226465910665216)

</comment><comment><USER7> I really wonder what would have happened if Yannis Varoufakis had had his way and a Greek default had happened last year.

Like I have literally no clue, but some part of me wonders if it would have been better than the drawn out mess that was sure to ensue once bailout was agreed upon.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the bigger question to be raised is whether or not spying on all parties involved in diplomatic or fiscal "negotiations" is an activity that the free world should be partaking in

<comment><USER9> 'free world' might imply that such negotiations are in public interest since they affect lots of people and therefore have to be made available to the public, so they are not to be held in secrecy to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Greece actually wants the IMF to leave, but i'm pretty sure that's not a good idea. Not sure if this "leak" is of any big surprise to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone explain to me why it is in the IMF's interest to see Greece, and as a result the EU, collapse? They spread to want to bankrupt Greece, but truly don't understand the logic.

<comment><USER12> The IMF want to get the countries they work with on a "sustainable" path. This typically involves burning bondholders, writing down loads of debt, and privatizing everything that isn't nailed down.

Because what has happened in the EU is a mish-mash of the euro area governments, the ECB and the IMF, they have not done things the usual way.

Hence, they see that Greece's current debt is unsustainable and want to write down loads of it to allow the economy to grow again.

The Germans fear that doing this would cost them lots of money, and encourage prolifigate behaviour in other states (like Italy and Spain).

Hence, the memo and these fights (which have been going on since before the last bailout).

<comment><USER13> The IMF does not want to write down Greeces's loans in the least bit. The IMF is normally the first creditor to be repaid and Greece is the only first world nation to miss a payment.

>Meanwhile, missing the IMF payment will cut Greece off from new loans from the organization. [http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2015/06/greece_become...](http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2015/06/greece_becomes_1st_developed_c.html)

According to the leaked conversation the IMF understands the Greek's will not be able to repay their debt with the current agreement and lack of economic growth. Unfortunately for the IMF the Greeks do not seem likely to accept futher concessions, without an 'ominous event'...

>THOMSEN: But that is not an event. That is not going to cause them to... That discussion can go onfor a long time. And they are just leading them down the road... why are they leading them down the road? Because they are not close to the event, whatever it is.

VELKOULESKOU: I agree that we need an event, but I don't know what that will be. But I think Dijsselbloem is trying not to generate an event, but to jump start this discussion somehow on debt, that essentially is about us being on board or not at the end of the day.

THOMSEN: Yeah, but you know, that discussion of the measures and the discussion of the debt can go on forever, until some high up.. until they hit the July payment or until the leaders decide that we need to come to an agreement. But there is nothing in there that otherwise is going to force a compromise. Right? It is going to go on forever...

VELKOULESKOU: They are not getting close. What is interesting though is that they did give in...they did give a little bit on both the income tax reform and on the.... both on the tax credit and the supplementary pensions. They are doing something but it is very small...

[https://wikileaks.org/imf- internal-20160319/transcript/page-...](https://wikileaks.org/imf- internal-20160319/transcript/page-7.html)

The IMF is scared of setting a precedent to loan out more bad money when other countries in Europe are soon to face the dilemmas of Greece.

Members of the EU itself have begun to question the IMF's role in the Troika governing the EU, made up of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF.

The Banks are not your friend

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i have to say. i actually have some respect for the greek people putting up with the shinanigans tsipras, that clown, is pulling off.

</comment><comment><USER15> Greece is right, it should follow the steps of Ecuador or Iceland since the debt does not seem to be legit.</comment>


Illegal numbers: Can you break the law with math? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/155805-illegal-numbers-can-you-break-the-law-with-math

<comment><USER2> Essentially every program is a big number written in binary. DRM blocks number sharing while some OS numbers require activation before running. The world is doomed.</comment>


Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html <comment><USER2> Why would I care?

I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance.

But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short- lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but story editors, 2D/3D artists, composers, voice artists etc that create experience, not a tool or platform. Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? Or may be you want to get your hands on petabytes of data that went into production of Avatar so that you could fix a couple of landscapes?

<comment><USER3> > Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could > improve upon them?

We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it.

Games _are_ entertainment.

Games _are_ culture.

I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current technology.

There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and copyright holders can't stop them being made available.

I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of Congress, because I value software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm."

Did rms just admit that proprietary software can theoretically have benefits? What's this world coming to lol

<comment><USER5> Programmers have to eat, and free software needs a supporting paradigm to be sustainable. With Firefox it's the search engine, with Apache it's support, only smaller projects can be made from pure passion. Any large company porting software to a platform will be good, as more people (and thus support) will come to Linux.

>Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users

I get the feeling he lives in a fantasy world. Unethical is hitting a baby in the face, not allowing people to see how you wrote a computer programme.

<comment><USER6> Just because you are not doing something directly and obviously "evil" like hitting a baby does not mean something cannot be unethical.

As more of our world is software and we rely on it to do things like store our personal information and trust it to respect our privacy etc, how is the availability and ability to understand and inspect that software not a potentially very ethical issue?

<comment><USER5> Yes you're right. I was trying to frame ethics in its popular definition. I personally love and support open source projects, as they are better from a moral standpoint.

Proprietary software isn't a _really_ bad thing, comparing it to say murder or thievery. If you had to choose between doing the wrong thing (which isn't that bad) and not eating, most people would do the wrong thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having these games on your computer."

I feel like restricting the definition of freedom fairly narrowly goes against the very definition of freedom itself... but then again he's free to do that too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just to be clear, when he says "nonfree" he means free as in speech, not free as in beer, right?

<comment><USER6> yes, you can basically always assume that with stallman

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's important to add that regardless of whether proprietary games are _wrong_ , he points to two initiatives (Liberated Pixel Cup and the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective) that are promoting and developing free games. Those are worthy of support even by people who many not be convinced that all games should be free. Personally, I think they should be -- games can have backdoors and antifeatures like any other program. They can be used to control the user. Game code is also re-usable in contexts that aren't games, and it has educational value. It has all the problems that locking away knowledge usually does. Game companies have also been some of the most aggressive when it comes to trying to control users.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the closest I've seen them come to recognizing that the importance of free software may vary by where it sits in the stack. Think about it... the full stack of applications is a tree, right? A free root node is much more important than a free leaf node.

</comment><comment><USER11> Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?

<comment><USER12> No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating. There are dozens of parallel projects that demonstrate this; perhaps the most obvious is Bitcoin. There are breakins with Bitcoin, but the threshold is very high, and it's pretty clear that only the most intelligent and savvy attackers make off with cash.

In general, people sometimes ask this question about FOSS and security. Isn't FOSS bad for security, they say, since attackers can look at your code and find the holes so they can break in? What this assumes is that the holes are inevitable and obvious, and all anyone needs to break in is find them. It turns out that this isn't true, as many security-sensitive open source projects from OpenBSD to Mozilla Firefox have demonstrated. Security holes shouldn't exist; help from the community to prevent this is key. The hope that code will be more secure if we only keep it secret - otherwise known as "security through obscurity" - is a pipe dream.

<comment><USER11> _No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating._

How would that work? If I have the source code of Starcraft, I can turn on the "Make the whole map visible" variable, and there's nothing whatsoever that encryption can do to prevent that. With closed-source, as far as I know, Blizzard's constant patching makes cheating relatively uncommon on their own servers.

<comment><USER13> Your Starcraft example is flawed, because Starcraft is NON OSS. Therefore, they chose other means of cheating prevention. You might argue that it is security by obscurity but it is working more or less to a certain extend.

I have an example of OSS software with yet no cheater. Check out xonotic (www.xonotic.org), a heavily modified quake based shooter. They partly implement anti-cheat functionality by more or less shifting tasks from the client side to the server side, making e.g. wallhacks impossible. Also they use encryption for certain packages to prevent them from being tapered with. Aimbots are another thing, but I have yet to see one. I didn't really dig into the security features though, that is just what I picked up by casually browsing the forums...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell food?

<comment><USER15> Free as in speech, not free as in beer, etc. It's not particularly ethical to sell food and refuse to tell anyone what's in the food, which is why we have various laws regarding that. Nor does it seem particularly reasonable to sell someone food under the condition that if they eat it in particular ways, you'll sue them.

<comment><USER16> While I understand this concept, is it not another consideration that people should receive compensation for their work? In most areas these two goals don't seem to conflict with one another, but in software they seem to, at least a bit, and I don't think I've ever seen something from rms or the fsf addressing this notion. Even if RMS's position is "Freedom is _absolutely_ uncompromisable in any form whatsoever, and the need for freedom takes complete precedence over the ability for people to receive payment for software", I'd like to hear him say that (unless he has and I've never come across it).

I don't think Valve is being unethical in protecting their games. They're not controlling their products because "fuck you consumers, we are evil and wish to suppress your rights", they're doing it (at least I presume) because if they didn't, no one would buy their games and they wouldn't be able to operate. A food vendor can't make a similar claim (well, at least not in as strong a way -- though I guess there are things like secret recipes) to justify hiding things from consumers.

<comment><USER6> Whenever rms has been asked this question he has 2 answers.

1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work) and 2) Crowdsourcing

The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client) would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the actual end users will not get freedom with the software it will really just be senior management.

<comment><USER16> Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.

<comment><USER17> Games are the last vestige of the Windows platform that still chain my students to the platform. If they could game (with the latest and greatest games) on *nix, then, the battle is mostly won, no more dual booting, no more worrying about crappy Windows dev tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nonfree? Okay.

DRM? Groan.

But really, who cares, let the user decide. Why does the freeness of the OS have to predicate the distribution, license or otherwise of the software used on it?

<comment><USER19> The FSF _does not_ dictate what you can and cannot install on your system! They really do "let the user decide".

However, just because you are free to do something does not mean you _should_. All the FSF is doing is presenting a clear, well-argued and rather balanced argument about whether you _should_ support non-free games on Linux or not.

This is a complex issue and it is treated as a complex issue; all they do is provide their views on what would further free software most.

As to who cares: anybody who supports freedom of software cares. And, while such people are in the minority here (going off the OS poll I saw a while back), they still make up a significant percentage of the audience.

<comment><USER20> Well it is a bit strange that they do not for example endorse Debian, which is really principled on free software but lets the user decide what to install.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This post is open source.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's up to the end user - if the GNU movement is somehow planning on restricting the ability of the user to use DRM'd software on their own systems, then they've gone completely off the rails.

<comment><USER23> Where in that did you see him advocating preventing the user from installing Steam? He's just saying that installing proprietary, DRM'd software reduces your freedom; so if you want to promote freedom, you shouldn't install that software on your computer.

One thing to keep in mind is that most of the time, he doesn't want to force anyone to do anything (other than make sure that code free if it was written under the GPL, even when modifications are made). He just suggests that people who value freedom do or don't do certain things.</comment></comment>


Improved Techniques for Training GANs – OpenAI's first paper - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03498 <comment><USER2> So this is pretty interesting.

One of the great hopes of the current deep learning boom is that somehow we will develop unsupervised or at least semi-supervised techniques which can perform close to the great results that are being seen with supervised learning.

Adversarial Networks is one of the more likely routes to semi-supervised. There is also a lot of interesting work in combining Bayesian optimization techniques with Deep Networks to develop one-shot learning[1][2]. Some of this was (very broadly) in response to the the one-shot learning paper coming out of (I've forgotten!!) where the authors are famously doubtful about the utility of Deep Learning, and showed somewhat competitive results on MNIST. (I can't remember who it was - there have been HN discussions about the group. Sorry!!)

Both OpenAI and DeepMind are following roughly similar paths here (no surprise really), and the results are looking really good.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05106](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05106)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04080](http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04080)

<comment> T-A > the one-shot learning paper coming out of (I've forgotten!!) where the > authors are famously doubtful about the utility of Deep Learning

This? [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544376/this-ai- algorithm-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544376/this-ai-algorithm- learns-simple-tasks-as-fast-as-we-do/)

[http://cims.nyu.edu/~brenden/LakeEtAl2015Science.pdf](http://cims.nyu.edu/~brenden/LakeEtAl2015Science.pdf)

<comment><USER2> That was it, although I see I've conflated the views of Gary Marcus (who I think it is fair to characterize as anti-Deep Learning[1]) and Lake, Salakhutdinov, and Tenenbaum who wrote the paper.

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544606/can-this-man- make-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544606/can-this-man-make-aimore- human/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The paper presents improved techniques for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Code is published here: [https://github.com/openai/improved- gan](https://github.com/openai/improved-gan) (uses TensorFlow, Theano, Lasgne)

Nice work team!

</comment><comment><USER4> When they find the visual turing test results important enough to put in the abstract, it's a shame they only include tiny images in the paper :(

<comment><USER2> They are the full size images. CIFAR-10 is 32x32 colour images: [https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html)

<comment><USER5> If they used another dataset with images of larger dimensions could they generate larger and less blurry images?

<comment><USER6> A DCGAN as usually implemented (eg Soumith's Torch DCGAN implementation) can produce arbitrarily large images by upscaling. The quality won't be good, though, unsurprisingly, because it was only trained on 32px or less images. This also means that it's hard to evaluate DCGAN improvements because you're stuck squinting at 32px thumbnails trying to guess whether one blur looks more semantically meaningful than another blur.

One nice thing about this paper is that, as I've been suggested for a while, they up the input to 128px for the Imagenet thumbnails, and if you look at those, it immediately pops out that while the DCGAN has in fact successfully learned to construct vaguely dog-like images, the global structure has issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the license for the paper? I can see it's licensed for Arxiv to distribute, but I cannot see any open access/distribution besides that.

Basically, can I redistribute this paper in my website? if so, under what license?

PS, great job

<comment><USER8> It would be nice if there was an explicit CC license, but ArXiv has a perpetual license to distribute it, and you can link to ArXiv. Why would you host the paper yourself?

Edit: The code has been published as well, under the MIT license. [https://github.com/openai/improved-gan](https://github.com/openai/improved- gan)

<comment><USER7> Why? There could be many reasons, but mine is because I'm doing a small Arxiv alternative. Unfortunately no license means closed with copyright... which I expected OpenAI to know and handle</comment></comment></comment>


OECD Says 14% of Jobs Will Disappear in Next 10 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mocc2P6wMYQ <comment><USER3> It wouldn't surprise me if 14% of existing jobs disappear every 10 years. Pick any 10 year window and the jobs at the beginning will be different than the jobs at the end, and most of the the jobs that remain will have different requirements.

<comment><USER4> Ill bite. What jobs have disappeared in the last ten, twenty and thirty years?

<comment><USER5> not OP, but off the top of my head:

* mainframe administrators

* cobol developers

* punchcard operators

* manufacturing (in the united states)

* car mechanics (huge decline as car quality has gone up)

* mining (in the united states)

* farmer

that's without thinking too deeply about it ... i could think of more if you want. note that a lot of these are declines, as opposed to eliminations.

<comment><USER6> Manufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near gone. So i'm not sure that really counts as a valid answer.

Same with mechanics. These jobs are not _gone_ but possibly shrunk in total # of jobs. Quality may have gone up but so has complexity of repairs.

Now, farmers. Again, these jobs may have shrunk but the jobs are still there. I could count on both hands of families I know living in proximity to me that run family farms for business. You can drive 30 miles from me and go through three towns that are maintained because of farm land.

edit: on mobile so didn't see your decline != elimination note at first

<comment><USER5> > Manufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near > gone. So i'm not sure that really counts as a valid answer.

so, a large shrinkage of jobs isn't a decline? if the definition of jobs disappearing is the whole profession being eliminated then you'll never have any jobs "disappear" ... there will always be artisans in any field: look at blacksmiths for instance. so i'm not sure how these wouldn't be valid.

same goes for mechanics, and farmers. the number of jobs have shrunk - <USER2> jobs have disappeared. for farmers it's due to an increase in factory farms and labor saving devices, sure there are still farmers (and quite a few where i live, where locally grown food is sought after), but for the most part those jobs have disappeared.

unless we're operating on a different definition of "disappear"? if 100 people have a job that is now being done by 25 people due to either decline of need or mechanization, then those 75 jobs have disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We have also to consider how many currently nonexistent jobs will appear.

<comment><USER8> Serious question, but silly premise: Are kids playing with AR/VR (unintentionally) preparing for future jobs?

<comment><USER9> Yes. Absolutely. Not only that, but just living in accordance with their own preferences prepares them for future jobs, since future jobs are second-order effects of changing cultural preferences.

I didn't set out to work in software. I just did stuff that seemed fun on the computer and the rest of the world agreed that this was a thing we wanted to keep doing.

I'm a designer, and the rise of mobile devices as a replacement for the computer is illustrative of these changes. There are roles in a modern design team where "I don't know a damn thing about how desktops used to work – my default way of thinking is how this would work on an iPhone" is a cognitive feature as much as it's a shortcoming.

I expect this will be true of many things, AR/VR being one, mmorpg/highly- online-third-space being another. I feel old for only caring about offline singleplayer campaign. The next generation of game designers will mentally default to fortnight's group interaction model. In this way, deeply understanding fortnight etc is absolutely preparing kids for the future of not only gaming, but document authoring, telepresence, and who the hell knows what else.

<comment><USER10> The unfortunate part about this is when a child isn't allowed to follow their inclinations, in effort to keep up with today's preferences. Happens so often and it's super sad. But yeah, fortnite, it's pretty much team activities in the 21st century. People who've never had to perform complex tasks over the internet just won't get it.

<comment><USER11> My son (11) is inclined to play Fortnite over essentially all other activities that occur indoors. Outdoors is still a world filled with unstructured fun, but indoors if he's left to his own inclinations then he's playing Fortnite (and to lesser degree Scrap Mechanic). We've decided to limit his gaming to alternate weeks and then limit on-weeks to 2 hours per day, except weekends which are unlimited. I have no idea if this is a good approach. As a parent who doesn't game and cares about balance, this is quite a hard problem.

<comment><USER10> I definitely played too much when I was in high school. It was a symptom of a bigger problem though. I'd also crunch a lot of numbers trying to optimize my characters' stats, and that inclination definitely stuck with me - it's basically my job now to write code to crunch numbers for people.

Best of luck, friend; you're right, it's a hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Demand for Talent Converges on Critical Roles in the U.S., U.K. [https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/demand-for- talent...](https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/demand-for-talent- converges-on-critical-roles-in-the-u-s-u-k/)

\- 49% of all job postings by S&P 100 companies in 2018 were for just 39 roles. The remaining 51% were for 872 other roles.

\- 41% of all job postings by FTSE 100 companies in 2018 were for just 20 roles. The remaining 59% were for 641 other roles.

\- The most competitive roles are in critical functions across IT, research and development, marketing, sales and customer service.

<comment><USER13> It's easy to postulate that advertised vacancies largely belong to two macro groups: scarcity-driven (IT, R&D) and churn-driven (sales, marketing, customer services).

Many (most?) jobs are never advertised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is the baseline? Don't a lot of jobs disappear in an average decade since the industrial revolution?

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, another recession will come in next 10 years (as always, it's a pattern), and 14% of people will be laid off. These are hardly an insight.

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't this argue against a large amount of immigration by the unskilled, into those countries which are already at high levels of youth unemployment?</comment>


Pressure mounts on Facebook and Google to stop anti-vax conspiracy theories - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18225439/facebook-google-anti-vax-conspiracy-theories-pressure <comment><USER2> Is this even beneficial? I was exposed to the "conspiracy theory" known as phrenology as a teenager. Yeah, it was kind of embarrassing to have a teacher point out that the whole thing was bullshit. But it also pretty much inoculated for a lifetime against this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know how big the anti-vax problem actually is in the US, but it feels a bit like "hey, here's a group we can all agree has stupid ideas, let's all shit on them and come together".

Using Google & FB to actively manipulate (parts of) the population and censor content seems like a door we don't want to open. Next up: smokers. People who think taxation is theft. Whoever my political opponent is.</comment>


Silicon Valley's Regulatory Exceptionalism Comes to an End - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawfareblog.com/silicon-valleys-regulatory-exceptionalism-comes-end <comment><USER2> A few things happened that made this possible.

1)Silicon Valley surrendered the high ground in terms of free speech. In the past, Silicon Valley at least used to preach a near absolute commitment to free speech. Now, they don't anymore.

2) Consolidation of content. Before, the internet was very distributed. Number of nights a 1000 poeple might regularly visit could be in the thousands. Now, a significant number of people just visit Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or one of a maybe a dozen top sites. This makes enforcing regulations much easier.

3) Silicon Valley managed to pull off the near impossible feat of angering both sides of the political spectrum at the same time. The left was angered by the perception that the tech companies', especially Facebook's lackluster enforcement of policies allowed Donald Trump to be selected President. The right was angered by the apparent enforcement of political correctness at the expense of free speech. In addition, it became clear with this election that many in silicon valley despised the Right. Thus, Silicon Valley was left with few defenders.

4) Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures. Things like the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump's election would have been much more difficult without the Internet and social media in partiy. The powerful across the gloves in China, Russia, EU, and now the United States have realized that an uncontrolled Internet can be a huge danger to their ongoing status.

Put all these together and it is very likely that this is just the first wave of further regulation of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER3> This comment is almost a parody of Hacker News comments:

"The evil statists are only bringing down the hammer because the glorious technologists DARED to threaten their power!"

The reality is that what's driving this is the end of the honeymoon phase with tech. There used to be a general sense of trust in the big tech companies. People could take Google's "Don't Be Evil" stance seriously. This very comment has this view as its unspoken premise, that the tech companies are good and glorious and it's outside forces that are harmful and want to suppress them. As a result, they were treated with a special hands-off approach in most areas.

It was the tech companies themselves that eroded that trust over the last decade + through their behavior and interaction with people. As a result, there's no longer that store of goodwill and a willingness to extend them special treatment, so now they get treated like every other company.

Because, of course, whatever they tried to sell the world, they WERE just like any other company the whole time. They just had a shinier surface.

<comment><USER4> You say parody, I say honest representation voted to the top of the page, on article that was knocked off the front page by flagging or mods. Part of the problem is that quite a few people here are representative of the broader industry which is full of young people who think the last decade and half are just how the world works. These are the people who look at all progress as though it must conform to Moore's Law, and think the unregulated free-for-all of their industry so far is just how it is.

Reality is slow to catch up to new things, but it is utterly inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now that these centralized companies are in positions of power, regulation is actually a favorable position for them in a lot of cases since they will have the leverage to influence the regulations in their favor. This could lead to regulations that cement them as condoned monopolies or institute regulatory burdens that effectively cut off the ability for new entrants to even emerge in the first place.

Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. If anything the introduction of regulation will accelerate this -- it's certainly easy to imagine a decentralized Facebook and Twitter that is immune to any form of government control beyond shutting down access to the Internet itself. Hopefully the idea of regulating online discussion and sharing on social media will soon be as absurd a proposition as trying to regulate the web as a whole.

<comment><USER6> > Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize > a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today.

Having the tools has never been the problem, getting people to use them is. You don't know the meaning of the words "total, utter disinterest" until you've tried to convince a non-technical person to use a federated alternative to Facebook.

<comment><USER5> By "the tools" I mean in part "a way for there to be strong economic incentives and funding mechanisms" which I think is a relatively new phenomenon.

Good design costs money because most people won't do it for free (as they would do other things as evidenced by OSS out there today.) The fact someone can run an ICO to fund the development of a well designed decentralized Facebook that once launched is effectively self-sustaining is encouraging.

<comment><USER7> Or even a Patreon to maintain a Mastodon instance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Including Apple's encryption in the list of reasons SV is going to be regulated is a strange decision. I certainly hope people don't look forward to regulation that leads to LESS encryption.

<comment><USER9> I think its a great one to include, and absolutely belongs in this article. Of course very few well-informed readers here will agree with the stance, but there's no escaping that politically this has been an enormous issue in the US and other countries like the UK. This really rose to the fore in the heated exchange between the FBI and Apple over access to the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone.

If the FBI hadn't found an alternate route to the contents of that phone, it's very possible Apple would have been forced into a high stakes legal battle with the FBI, and subsequently could have triggered a draconian legislative response. The seriousness with which Tim Cook took the issue and his highly public responses at the time is testament to how badly (for encryption advocates) that could have turned out. The FBI are still very publicly criticizing Apple's stance recently too.

There are no shortage of politicians out there who see things like mandated back doors for law enforcement as a great idea, and all it will take is the next San Bernadino style stand-off to throw this thing back into the public consciousness. I strongly believe proposals to regulate encryption on consumer devices will absolutely rear their ugly head again in the future. Encryption technology had a long history of legal regulation too, wasn't really until the Clinton administration that much of this was rolled back.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We should be more broad about it. The tech industry regulatory exceptionalism ended with Microsoft in 2000.

Or did it end with Intel? They spent the entire 1990s holding a regulatory & anti-trust settlement party. [1]

Or did it end with the 12 years of anti-trust pursuit of IBM?

There's actually nothing new going on here. The new titans, the same as the old titans, running up against cultural and political fears of unchecked power.

[1] [https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data- center/int...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/intel- and-antitrust--a-brief-history.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear that the company has finally accepted responsibility for making sure that the platform isn't used to undermine political processes around the world"

I recall that during the "Arab Spring" Facebook was heralded as a force for good precisely because it _did_ undermine political processes (if those processes were considered to be authoritarian/tyrannical by the US government).

<comment><USER12> Completely agree and this is one of my primary reasons to believe that the social media will be regulated globally with each country following some flavour of the China route.

At the status quo, any politician is at risk of being killed by an angry mob just like Gaddafi if they fail to outbid their opponents. CA showed us that by profiling users it's possible to skew the perception of the public on issues in dramatic ways that are not necessarily in line with the truth at all.

Unlike mass media propaganda, the validity of these messages are not discussed because everyone gets a different message. Even if you try to outbid your opponent, it may not help without reverse engineering their propaganda algorithm.

Even if the Arab spring was an organic outcome, there's no reason why you can't achieve the same effect with bots, data and a creative team of copywriters and graphic artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMHO: What happened since John Perry Barlow's statement is that the Internet shifted from a technological and social experiment[0] to an extremely high value asset that attracts powerful actors.

In the former state, ethics and good faith suffice. John Postel could hand out IP addresses, and people followed his lead to 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept'. Forums like Usenet were a small group of geeks - read the Etiquette FAQ, and just don't be an a __hole. 'Assume good faith' is a guideline somewhere (I forget where). But when there is a high value asset to be had, the economics of money and power take over. There are bad people who will ignore all ethics and public good and take every advantage they can, driving their competition to do the same in order to survive.

When Facebook was a bunch of college friends sharing stories and pictures, those people didn't care. When it's a way to exert unprecedented influence on the public, that gets intense attention from government propaganda operations and their corporate counterparts. It was predictable that it would happen.

In the latter environment, 'don't be an a __hole ' doesn't work any more; I don't think Putin read the Usenet Etiquette FAQ (and his people read the HN guidelines only to find a way to use them to their advantage). Regulations become necessary to protect the weak and all of society from bad actors.

[0] There's probably a better way to conceptualize it, but I can't think of it right this moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> Silicon Valley, and software engineering in general needs regulation, but it also needs to regulate itself. The whole Libertarian wet dream is fine when you're in college, less so when you're building self-driving cars or surveillance networks. The lack of enforced ethical standards has always been problematic, but now it's getting dangerous.

Once you're involved in everything from healthcare, and automobiles, to drone strikes, you're sll grown up and the training wheels need to die. The alternative is that this pressure continues to build and the public demands extreme regulation without understanding what they're regulsting.

Tl;dr grow up, or they'll come for the good (encryption) along with the bad (carelessness with human lives a la Uber).</comment>


Does other IDE's (other than VS2015) enables something like this feature? - <AUTHOR> https://www.incredibuild.com/cross-platform.html?utm_expid=17141494-0.T8Uk87QYRe2mGhbqBoYZNA.0

<comment><USER2> Which specific feature are you referring to?

The Eclipse IDE is I guess one of the few that can.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant distributing builds for (cross-platform projects) over remote cpu's

<comment><USER2> Eclipse and other IDE's have support for plugins.

And there are platforms/tools which can be used with Eclipse/IDE's which can do the building for you outside of the IDE.</comment></comment></comment>


Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/07/21/pirate-bay-jstor/ <comment><USER2> "Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay"

Is it any surprise that the fed is attacking torrent sites? Even a tech news site puts incorrect titles on its news articles.

He didn't upload papers to the Pirate Bay, he uploaded a 165kb torrent file to the Pirate Bay.

It may sound like semantics but it has real legal repercussions.

<comment><USER3> " a .torrent file pointing to thousands of scientific papers has just been uploaded to the pirate bay" doesnt really fit into a headline

<comment><USER4> "Thousands of scientific papers were shared via The Pirate Bay"

<comment><USER5> This is still pretty misleading. TPB only hosts the .torrent file, they don't have _any_ of the contents of the files being shared. They don't even run a tracker anymore! Any method of distributing a small file to a large number of people would have worked in the _exact_ same way. The only thing TPB has that (e.g.) Google Docs doesn't is mindshare.

<comment><USER6> They don't run a tracker anymore?! Are they using other people's trackers or just the DHT feature?

<comment><USER5> The .torrent file can list multiple trackers. If it includes TPB's old trackers, connections will fail but the DHT and other trackers usually manage just fine. In fact, TPB said that trackers are obsolete ("not up-to-date") and that everyone should just use DHT and peer exchange (PEX) instead of relying on centralized trackers from now on. Some people still use trackers, but it's not really necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't conflate the pay walls with public domain, these journal articles are clearly in the public domain. And they should not be behind a pay wall.

Locking in of the worlds historical knowledge is even worse, I think, than locking in current research. The economic return to the holders of the keys to the garden have no moral or legal right to assert control over the this knowledge, when their articles of incorporation most likely expose the oposite of their actions. These organizations are greedy wholesale hypocrites.

<comment><USER8> I'm no legal expert, but I'd guess it's illegal to sell what is in the public domain. Why hasn't anybody done anything?

<comment><USER9> We sell water don't we?

<comment><USER10> Exactly, you can charge for providing access to anything, as long as you are not obstructing public property to do so.

Even if the works are in the public domain, the copies that you maintain are yours and you can charge for access to those copies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Taking things on face value I congratulate him. There's been a few times when I've tried to access an interesting academic paper only to find that it's only available behind some pay- wall.

Why should we have to pay for a scientific paper if it was produced by a public funded institution?

What's the long term effect on the spread and advancement of knowledge if access is restricted and "gamed" for profit?

If he's sued (against assuming I properly understand the issues here) I'll probably contribute to his defence because he's acting in everyone's interest.

<comment><USER12> once you start taking a closer look at academic publishing practices quite a lot of it ranges from "silly" to "morally questionable".

and not just in publishing.

there's particularly one practice that I find particularly distasteful, and that is the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publicaion on papers. either to market the paper itself ("ooh, look, I have a famous professor's name next to mine!") or to boost the publication list of some tenured has-been.

a few years ago there was a scandal here in Norway. a doctor got caught fabricating research results. as the shitstorm hit the media his "co-authors" (none of which seemed to have done any of the work or the writing, and some of which denied even knowing about the paper) ran for cover. oh and how they ran.

I must say that I found it somewhat questionable that they didn't get thrown out of academia for having put their name on a piece of fraudulent bullshit. if the paper was good enough to put their name on it should be good enough to stand by.

it ought to be a mandatory practice to mark these frauds in publication lists and databases as such: frauds.

most I have talked to who are still in academia defend the practice. and when they run out of sensible arguments in its favor, which they inevitably do, they go with the old "well, it is how it is done. so we shouldn't rock the boat".

quite a few of these people have a change of heart after leaving academia. or after having a re-think about ethics and honesty and why it really, really matters if you are to call what you are doing "science".

<comment> loup-vaillant […] I find particularly distasteful […] the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publication on papers.

I heard an argument that I find difficult to take down: even though you may write a paper alone, the research it is based on probably wasn't done alone. Even if you did your research alone, it likely stands on the research done by your lab mates. Even if it doesn't, you don't _really_ work alone. You talk to people, most notably your advisor, or your research director (depending on your position). Whether you know it or not, those conversations gives your insights that shouldn't go un-thanked.

The bottom line is, it's a team, and the signature should reflect that (non-)reality.

<comment><USER13> I don't buy that argument. A person who is responsible for nothing more than the research research ought not to be an "author" of the paper. Research is nothing but data; the choice of what research to use, and the conclusions drawn from that data, are what make the paper.

The argument you cite does not support listing all those folks as authors. For example, one could have papers "Authored by X, featuring original research by J, K, and L".

<comment> loup-vaillant Oh, I don't buy that argument either. But I have heard it in more subtle forms. I just didn't know how to convince the very people that use it of its invalidity.

For that matter, your suggestion to classify the various authors by the nature of their contribution should shatter my argument to pieces. Adding something like "supervised by C" should blow those pieces to smithereens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _... Scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete._

Another reason they are so expensive might be that the reprints are almost always expenses against research grants, so there is little in the way of "market forces" working to keep the price commensurate with the true value.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to note that the person who created this torrent, Greg Maxwell, is not trying to remain anonymous, he put his name and email into the torrent description.

<comment><USER16> ...and a bitcoin address

<comment><USER17> Definitely in the event that he needs help paying legal fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Scientific publications/journals are highly ineffective, but what is the alternative? The current system is so entrenched in the politics of science - you need publications in respectable journals to advance your career or to get grants.

It's going to be very difficult to break.

<comment><USER19> I've got an idea about this in the concept phase. Think OSS meets science.

<comment><USER20> Don't think this will work out as well. Not only can you get paid to do OSS, but we (programmers) also have the option of obtaining very high paying jobs while working on OSS projects on the side. Not only this, but lots of research requires quite a bit more expensive equipment than writing software. I mean I would love to see something like this work but I have my doubts :)

<comment><USER19> I'm not looking to profit from this so I'll give you a brief summary of the concept.

Essentially, the idea is to remove, or at the least, decrease, political influence over science. The problem right now is that very few scientists can research things which actually interest them. Often, they are working for a company which is attempting to make more money, or the military, which is attempting to kill more people, or academia, where the idea is to get the most prestige. All of those things directly decrease the quality of research and have no place in science.

As a scientist, I could go onto this site, write up a hypothesis and outline the experiment that needs to be performed to test it. Then, people who have an interest in the particular piece of research could provide funding, loan equipment or even directly contribute by becoming part of the team. After the experiment has been completed, the results are released in the public domain (this also helps to break up the monopoly that scientific publication have). Crowd sourcing is then utilised to verify the findings and discuss their implications.

To put it another way, science should be something that everyone can do, given enough free time and determination, yet, as things are, only a select few get to do this and often have to deal with mountains of politics to get to that stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> original posted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709>

</comment><comment> ac-slater Interesting. This appears to be Greg Maxwell (gmaxwell) from Xiph.

Xiph is an organization that respects software patents. (As opposed to various other multimedia efforts like VideoLAN and libav that ignore them).

</comment><comment><USER21> so where's the torrent?

<comment><USER22> [http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro)

<comment><USER23> I'm gonna seed the fuck out of this. There's always place for knowledge on my HDDs, and there will always be bandwidth I can sacrifice for spreading that knowledge.

I dare to say: For science!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Get Funded Locally or Not - <AUTHOR> TL:DR - We live outside of the valley (in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to be exact). We have a capital intensive idea that is proving successful. Should we travel to the Valley, or NY for funding? Or should we try our hand in Toronto?
We're at a quagmire. Our idea is three weeks in, and we're at an annual run rate of 500k gross merchandise moved with a non-optimized process.
Our business is heavily capital intensive (vehicles, and buildings, automation are required for growth and profitability) to grow and in a business that has slow penetration which incidentally also means that when they do switch, they are with you forever.
The downsides:It's seasonal (75% of revenues occur in six months).
The upside: We're seeing on a doubling of business week over week but there's only two of us, and we need drivers, and vehicles to keep up the growth.
We estimate we'll need at a minimum 1m to continue growth and improve the process, if that matters.
Would Toronto be fine for raising money? Or would it be worthwhile to spend a week in the valley to raise funds? (We're two people doing this so a week out would affect our growth rate.)
Appreciate any feedback, thank you for reading! <comment><USER2> Sounds like things are going very well, good work! 1 m is not very much for something that is demonstrably successful, if it can scale. There should be people that can pony up the money in Toronto, they are just fewer of them.

Having said that, why not just hire some people to help you run things while you take a week to put together some pitch materials and start making calls? Or just run it for a bit more, then put it on hold while raising funds? Capital raising will take much more than a week in total, but again, why not just hire people? Surely you can get enough money together to pay for a few interns, overseen by you?

In any case, if you managed to launch it so quickly, you probably don't need to worry about pausing it for a few weeks. Just make sure to gather enough data so you can make a convincing pitch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response Grustaf.

Hiring has crossed our minds, in the past we've had less than stellar results with our previous endeavors and while we've learned much from them, we feel we will still have problems hiring the 'right people'.

Also as of current, because our process is not optimized, anyone else doing the job at market value is a money losing operation (drivers). There are still many wrinkles to be worked out which would be smoothed with additional capital.

I figure the takeaway would be to let it ride for the moment as both hiring and funding will be long processes (say 2 month for funding, 2-3 weeks for each hire?).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my webapp virusvsvirus - <AUTHOR>

I've created a webapp indexing malware using VirusTotal, to provide a searchable malware database.<p>http://www.virusvsvirus.com <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable URL <http://www.virusvsvirus.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> You need to provide what is the purpose of the site.

1.Virus is scary, the most hated thing,

2\. Your site scare what is your indention while I share the virus file

3\. By chance, the other user downloads the known virus from your site, you will be liable for lawsuits.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm providing access to malware for reverse engineering, it's my belief by studying such programs you can better defend against them.

<comment><USER2> Do you have technology that can detect the impact of the virus?

How about having/naming like a viruspedia which users could edit the nature of the virus, side effects, causes and loses and impacts.</comment></comment></comment>


AMD, Nvidia ramp up Linux driver support after Valve's SteamOS announcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-linux-driver-support-after-valves-steamos-announcement.html

<comment><USER2> Amazing. Thank you Valve! You single-handedly did what hasn't been possible for at least a decade - get chip makers to really care about delivering very optimized drivers for Linux.

Valve will probably succeed in making Linux more mainstream than Canonical ever could, too.</comment>


Gen X Was Right: Reality Really Does Bite - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-10/millennials-think-they-have-it-bad-generation-x-has-it-worse

<comment><USER2> This is maybe the 5th or 6th GenX vs Boomers vs Millenials, entitlement/economy/future/past/politics thread that I've seen today.

It's a little weird how the same story is being pushed by several publishers on the same date by different authors. It's almost as if they are trying to form a media narrative or something. But I can't see the bigger picture to see what purpose this would serve.

On a side note:

Does it make me a GenX'er if I'm fed up with the widespread problem of stereotyping an entire generation? If I'm not fitting the stereotype is there something wrong with me? Should I be worrying if I don't fit in with my generation? Oh god, I should be shouldn't I? ;)</comment>


Always having problems with the developer building your startup? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/starting-your-first-tech-startup-prepare-contract-before-hamilton?published=t <comment><USER2> I would argue that breaking out the "spec" part from the rest of development and testing will make it easier to get more accurate bids for the rest. Also, If you have change requests pay extra that way your bids can be lower because less risk. Also, break into must have and nice to have. build all the must have first then stabilize and add the rest.</comment>


Dockerizing MySQL at Uber Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/dockerizing-mysql/ <comment><USER2> This article shows so little understanding of the software they are using that it frankly makes me a bit mad. Based on my experience as a MySQL DBA, I feel I can safely say that this method of running databases does not scale, and Uber will need to do even more engineering here before too long. Of course, that might be mitigated by the extreme amount of data sharding Uber is doing, but their data will only grow, and this approach will quickly start coming apart at the seams.

1) MySQL requires one file to configure it: my.cnf. This is not exactly a huge amount of configuration which needs to occur. Installs via puppet, Chef or Ansible tend to consist of two commands - one to install the package, and one to write the my.cnf (templates are good so you can use the same command on any sized server). You can add one more command to set up the initial users, should you so desire.

2) Multiple MySQL processes on the same host wastes that host's resources. A single MySQL instance is perfectly capable of running multiple databases, and will respond faster because it will properly allocate the boxes memory according to each DB's usage. Multiple processes will each chomp up the configured bit of memory, not allowing individual databases to use the resources they need. It's always faster to serve data from memory than from disk (even if that disk is an SSD). Worse, under-utilized DB instances will be swapped off to disk, causing even more load and delay as they are swapped back in.

3) Transferring data from one host to another when you need to bring up a stateful process does not scale. Above a few gigs, the transfer process creates significant load on both the source and destination host, and will easily saturate the link between the two. Neither will respond to requests with any alacrity, meaning you typically want to take both hosts out of the active DB pool.

4) The DB restoration process from copying over the raw files can take 10+ minutes, depending on how many dirty pages existed on the source. The restoration process will go faster with logical dumps, but logical dumps will take longer to generate, transfer, and load.

To reiterate, this are problems for those companies running at scale, with terabytes of data and dozens (or more) DB servers. When you're running a few GB of data, a DB container is probably going to work fine. Just don't believe for a second that you can scale it the same way you do your web frontend services.

It pays to hire experts. How much time and money has Uber sunk into working around their DB, instead of with it?

<comment><USER3> 5) configuration and version drift is guaranteed since you have to restart databases to make any changes

5a) ignores MySQL's ability to make _many_ runtime config changes without a restart

6) hard-codes master/slave relationships into the boot process (at least if I'm understanding the config json)

7) adds additional risk (noted as docker crashes) and client issues (noted as "userland proxy" comment)

8) requires additional ops overhead (noted as special care needed for masters)

\---

But if you already run _everything_ in docker and really want to get rid of puppet, then why not?

\---

this article links to ansible but not puppet and is the only blog post tagged with either one; I think this really boils down to puppet vs $x

<comment><USER4> I find it ironic that one of Uber's original impetus for migrating off Postgres (which I still have serious doubts about) was not being able to _" trust"_ the system [1].

Given my limited failed experience with playing with docker + postgres (and various volume stores including flocker) I have continued doubts about Uber's choices.

I suppose they are having success but I wonder at what cost.

Specifically the quote on [1]:

 _Finally, our decision ultimately came down to operational trust in the system we'd use, as it contains mission-critical trip data. Alternative solutions may be able to run reliably in theory, but whether we would have the operational knowledge to immediately execute their fullest capabilities factored in greatly to our decision to develop our own solution to our Uber use case. This is not only dependent on the technology we use, but also the experience with it that we had on the team._

[1]: [https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part- one/](https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe this will help dispel some of the myth that Docker is useless for any scenario where you need persistent state. There are still many advantages to wrapping your database in a container, and this post by Uber explains really well how and when to use this technique.

We have been running our databases using this same methodology for almost two years now, including automatic initialization for new clusters, auto- configuration of master-slave and federation setup, and automatic failover/recovery. It doesn't solve all the problems, and we still need to manually solve issues (mostly because we use MongoDB and ran into several bugs and 'features' over the years), but for standard operational work it saves a ton of work. Expanding our cluster by adding a new replicated shard is no more than 2 minutes of work in changing the master config, everything else is fully automated.

<comment><USER6> > Maybe this will help dispel some of the myth that Docker is useless for any > scenario where you need persistent state.

Docker is useless for what is not stateless.

You can run database in Docker... until the assumptions of Docker will come back to bite you.

> There are still many advantages to wrapping your database in a container, > and this post by Uber explains really well how and when to use this > technique.

Well. Run databases in Docker if you've got 3000 clusters and your only concern [that you created yourself] is to run multiple of them on the same hosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Database servers, whether MySQL or PostgreSQL or NoSQL ones like CouchDB should never be dockerized. This is a use case where it is inappropriate to use Docker at all. This is a case where the db server should use the entire resources of a single server and for managing that server (and its replicas or other cluster members) you use a tool like Ansible or Chef or Puppet. And you need to learn that management tool well, because you will be pushing the limits of server automation with a database server.

If you think that a database server is where you put your "application's database" then I question why you have a db server at all. That is the use case SQLITE is for. Database servers are for the use case of storing the business's mission critical data so that all the applications of the business can access needed data.

I love Docker and use it a lot, but not for everything.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't go so far as to say they should "never be containerized," but doing so doesn't solve any of your problems other than a packaging problem, and it arguably creates problems you might not have had before.

It's my experience that most of the impetus behind Docker is driven by developers who need it on their Mac/Windows workstations to run Linux processes, and who (for good reason) want to ensure that their development environment is as similar to the production environment as possible. In other words, the developers are driving the production environment, instead of the production engineers driving the development environment. This leads to friction when the production environment has its own unique set of constraints and needs that Docker and containers aren't quite yet a match for.

<comment><USER7> I also develop on OSX or Windows systems, targeting Linux as the deployment system. And I also want to test the code in an environment as close to production as possible. That is why I install Virtualbox and set up virtual Linux servers using the exact same server management scripts (in my case Ansible) as are used to configure production servers. It works great with no Docker. But I do use Docker as well for servers that are more cookie cutter than a db. For instance a JVM app server that has two Docker images, one with 3 layers culminating in the JVM app, and one with 2 layers culminating in an NGINX SSL proxy.

And I don't run Docker on OSX at all because it is just a wrapper for running Virtualbox with a Linux server inside. It is simplicity to just set up Virtualbox directly and just use Linux virtual servers directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love these posts for several reasons.

1\. People think of companies like Uber primarily as providers of a regular service to customers (similarly to how Airbnb or Netflix is perceived), but it's interesting to see the engineering chops needed to maintain this operation. 2\. Given the relative youth of the company, the stack employed is quite modern and often uses cutting edge technologies in production and with real impact on custormers. Everyday users of these technologies usually only get 'textbook' explanations, but blog posts like these allow them to actually find out how these can be used in production, what the caveats are, how they interplay with other parts of the stack etc. 3\. Some people complain that when a startup gets bought or implodes, their technology virtually disappears instead of benefitting the wider developer community for learning purposes (I'm not here to argue what the best practice should be, just stating an observation of a common complaint). By continually describing their engineering practices (similarly to Airbnb in their engineering blog) and open sourcing their non-business technology (e.g. go-torch), their experience lives on beyond the life of the company.

Last but not least, it build a positive ethos about this company in the developer community.

<comment><USER10> _but it 's interesting to see the engineering chops needed to maintain this operation_

No. Uber has clearly hired too many engineers and has too little for them to do, leaving them free to come up with Rube Goldberg contraptions like this one. This is not anything any company that isn't swimming in money should even contemplate (and neither is slapping a layer on MySQL and claiming to have invented a "new datastore"). The kids are incharge of the nursery over at Uber and they are in desperate need of a good, adult CTO...

<comment><USER11> > The kids are incharge of the nursery over at Uber and they are in desperate > need of a good, adult CTO...

That's a proper description of most startups I've had contact with recently, namely (well) funded startups.

It's a consequence of having inexperienced (and, sometimes, untalented) people running functions at a company.

It also applies to other areas like sales ("my inside sales script is killer, even though I haven't done professional sales anywhere before and just found out what inside sales is") or hiring ("I'll just hire my equally inexperienced buddies from college, they were great there").

But when it comes to kids building technology with "college playground" quality, it's too evident not to notice. The product ran fine when their buddies were testing, but it's unstable, unmaintainable and in need of a complete redesign when real world traffic comes along. All things that could have been prevented with a little bit of competence and experience.

It's a kind of mantra for people that take VC blogs as gospel and engineering blogs as the 10 commandments. Don't go to college, don't get any real world experience: start a company and, if it actually survives more than a couple of years, someone will inherit your technical debt.

This investor speak will quickly change when you get funded and have to attend board meetings to tell investors that your product is still not working, or you need twice the team that would be required for your goals, or you need months to produce basic business data...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Running containerized processes makes it easier to run multiple MySQL > processes on the same host in different versions and configurations.

You're doing it wrong. One doesn't simply run multiple DB servers on the same iron.

<comment><USER13> Why is that? Each process is using a separate disk on the machine, and if that's the case, where would you get potential problems?

<comment><USER14> And what gives you Docker what cgroups would not?

I mean they write:

        Initially, all our clusters were managed by Puppet

Of course docker won't actually replace such systems. Uber has the worst enginnering practices i've ever seen.

They replaced Puppet with a handcrafted tool that uses docker and call that Dockerizing MySQL, just wow. I wonder when they are at zero money. (and the best thing is probably that they run at AWS and could just use a AMI, but since that isn't written in the article I would not create such assumptions).

<comment><USER15> > I would not create such assumptions

But you assume they have the worst engineering practices based on a few blog posts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of what they are describing in the first half sounds like kubernetes. I wonder if they could do it again would they adopt it...?

<comment><USER17> agreed. The newer "Pet Set" construct in k8s might simplify this quite a bit:

[http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/petset/](http://kubernetes.io/docs/user- guide/petset/)

<comment><USER16> Or as it's been renamed last month to: "StatefulSet" [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/35534](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/35534)

Mostly what I was commenting on was how they are building some type of declarative infrastructure where they define the topology they want and then system will build it. This was screaming k8s to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most of the assumptions in the comments boil down to its a bad idea if you're resource constrained because you'll get much better performance when everythings on one big server with shared ram.

However, possibly, their engineering goal was detecting and isolating hotspots and minimizing debug/downtime effort. And possibly they have an infinite pile of cash or at least they're not resource constrained. In that case it might make sense to fragment massively.

For example, lets say database #235 is using 75% of a shared server. Then at least in the very short term migrate the numerous other databases at the container (or image) level to other servers so the overloaded database doesn't flood out every other business system you support.

Now the argument is if you ran mysql bare metal then you'd have more memory and maybe only use 25% of that shared server, but sooner or later you'll get a big enough flood of traffic that you'll want to segment off and your operations team understands docker at 2am but not mysql DBA stuff quite as much. Sometimes its nice to have everything use the same standard and everything lives in docker might work.

This also has fascinating forensic and QoS implications where you can do interesting snapshot and cloning tricks affecting precisely and exactly one DB at a time.

<comment><USER19> It's almost 2017. The scaling choices are not limited to Docker vs. bare metal.

With their budget, you should be able to clone and scale metal servers within minutes if you wanted to.

This is like Tumblr spending $50,000 grand a month on their developer AWS instances while not making any money. Cool but not very practical.

<comment><USER18> Bare metal is operationally very expensive because someone has to monitor it, back it up, patch it, test it, fix the software when it breaks at 2am, fix the hardware when it breaks at 2am, explain to security that its either full of confidential stuff or not, decommission it years later, and none of that is as standardized as virtualized or containerized stuff.

Also "in the olden days" we had prod servers but shared dev and test servers. Now a days you just spin up resources assuming your ops is flexible enough. I'll spin up a test image to eliminate one bug and then destroy it, no sweat. In theory you can do that with metal but the accounting must be weird. You could make a pool of bare metal test boxes for people to use as they please, I guess...

I also like spinning up new images for software upgrades. Oh, a new version of the database, here's a new image, test it out.

Some of it is organizational hacking. After a few legendary disasters procedures will be formulated where standing up new iron takes interdepartmental meetings and signing off with the network and security and ops teams and the data center guy has to sign off on the thermal and electrical loads and power points all over the place. In comparison, you wouldn't make someone changing a cell in a spreadsheet go thru all that, right? So you deploying a virtual image is just clicking a harmless little button, as long as you operate under a blanket agreement with ops, infosec, networking, etc... At least until enough legendary disasters inevitably happen that clicking "create" on a virtual image requires weeks of time and at least 4 signatures and 3 departmental meetings of micromanagement. Hopefully we'll invent something new by then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The MySQL data directory is mounted from the host file system, which means > that Docker introduces no write overhead

If I understand correctly, Docker doesn't introduce any write overhead, mounted from host or not. This is the main difference from VMs - syscalls are just being "forwarded" to kernel. Or am I missing something?

Still, I am only arguing with the stated reason. Of course you don't want to save state inside an (ephemeral) container.

<comment><USER8> There's not even a forwarding process. Containers are simply processes running in a set of one or more different "namespaces." A mount point in a container is just an ordinary mount point from the kernel's perspective. In this case, the mount point is relative to the container's root filesystem set via chroot(2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It does not say so in the article but I guess they have a database cluster for each city or something like that which makes sense since a user do not care about Uber cars in a different city. Do they use GPS to put the Uber car in the right cluster? The users move around more but they are more static so they are centralized somehow?

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: I have never used Uber.

What if user orders Uber from one city to another? If driver is then in another city, wouldn't be nice to give him some rides in that city or when someone wants to go back to original city? What about cities that are near the border? If user would like to go shopping to another country? (Not uncommon in Europe. Long time ago I used to take local bus from Poland to Germany, do some shopping and go back)

<comment><USER23> Sounds fairly simple (which is not to say easy to implement); you keep the car tied to the database of origin for the duration of the ride (other users don't need to know about it while it's occupied), then you can migrate the car to the other DB when it's idle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It sounds like Uber has a database cluster for roughly every employee?!! Uber has a single product that largely centers around 1 app. How can this be necessary?

I have a feeling... That they're dumping realtime GPS data into a bunch of these when they should be using something like Cassandra...

<comment><USER25> "Single product" which consists of more than X thousands of micro-services.

<comment><USER24> >The entire trip store, which receives millions of trips every day, now runs on Dockerized MySQL databases together with other stores

It really does sound like this is part of the issue. Millions of trips is billions of db row per day. A document store is much more amenable to that kind of workload than MySQL

<comment><USER26> Uber essentually built their own custom document store on top of MySQL. They explain their design and reasons (and why they didn't use Cassandra etc) in this post: [https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part- one/](https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/)

<comment><USER24> Okay thanks, that explains the why but doesn't make it sound less terrible. They essentially built a nosql database on top of MySQL. Forgivable years ago but this was in 2014...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess we should train the new generation better so they don't end up as Uber so... tip for any company who gets incredibly successfull:

The first thing one has to do is to drop SQL databases as the main data source.

The usual choice is to move to Cassandra. It does have build-in sharding AND backup AND multi-master replication AND multi datacenter support AND performances scale linearly with the number of servers.

The [only] other option is ElasticSearch (which has slightly different properties regarding data format and data consistence).

You don't need to craft complex custom sharded distributed WTF software to abstract hundreds of cluster of hundreds of databases. Use the right tool for the job, that has that build in.

<comment><USER27> Dropping the RDBM and replacing it with something like Cassandra is fashionable, but sounds like bad advice to me.

A quick google gives these stats for Uber[1]:

\- 8 million users

\- 160 thousand drivers

\- 1 million daily rides

\- 2 billion rides so far

The biggest data, as stated in [2], is the trip info. They are storing the trip info as a 20kB JSON blob. If you add a custom data type [3] for a trip to PostgreSQL and encode it efficiently (binary, using deltas), you should be able to do much better than the ~3kB they get by using messagepack and zlib, say 1kB.

All that data should easily fit into 4TB. At one million rides per day, one reasonably beefy RDBM server should be able to easily handle that. You can partition the trips table and move the trips that are older than say, 1 month, to a slower disk to save money on disks. That helps with schema migration too: new data uses the new schema, and you use a view on the old data to adapt to the new schema.

I very much doubt you need anything much fancier than that. It would help if people really learned their tools (in this case PostgreSQL) instead of jumping to a different technology at the first problem they run into.

[1] [http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber- statistics/](http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/)

[2] [https://eng.uber.com/trip-data-squeeze/](https://eng.uber.com/trip-data- squeeze/)

[3] [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xtypes.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xtypes.html)

<comment><USER6> As a rule of thumbs, putting 5TB of data -that are growing exponentially- in a single box is always a terrible idea.

You're gonna hit all kind of limits with the RDBMS software and the special hardware that will be required.

Cassandra will handle the sharding automatically, it will have multiple instances with always one available for your applications, it will handle replications across datacenters all around the world, it will have dependable performances that can scale linearly with the specs you give it, it will allow you to do maintenance while online, it will let you add remove and refresh nodes.

A bigger RDBMS has none of these qualities. It's a one trick pony that will die when either the hardware or the software will reach a limit, then your whole site will be down. Even if you know what needs to be done to avoid the disaster, you can't do it because the RDBMS is a SPOF and every maintenance you perform is called "downtime".

Short term = Postgre/MySQL because it's easier and it gets the job done. Long term = Cassandra because it's dependable.

<comment><USER27> > As a rule of thumbs, putting 5TB of data -that are growing exponentially- in > a single box is always a terrible idea.

Storage capacity is _also_ growing exponentially: Samsung is shipping a 15TB SSD (albeit at $10000), Seagate has previewed a 60TB SSD.

> You're gonna hit all kind of limits with the RDBMS software and the special > hardware that will be required.

The limits of RDBMs are well understood. You don't need any fancy hardware for this use case. A couple of Xeons, as much RAM as you can afford and a RAID of SSDs (or possible spinning disks, it doesn't look like Uber is doing anything too fancy).

SPOF: you have slave replicas running that can take over if something goes wrong with the master.

You don't have to take down an RDBM to do maintenance. DDL statements are transactional in PostgreSQL.

The automatic sharding of Cassandra is nice, when you need it. Of course, Uber's use case seems like it lends itself to easy geographic sharding when you're using an RDBM, if needed.

In the end, I'd rather deal with a mature well-understood technology like an RDBM compared to a 5 year old technology like Cassandra (release 1.0 in 2011). You obviously prefer the opposite. To each its own.

<comment><USER6> If you can't get the hardware neither on AWS nor Google nor SoftLayer. I'd consider that exotic enough.

Don't get me wrong. I know vertical scaling and I've done it before. I'd take an old school DBA who understands Oracle over a random junior speaking only NoSQL to everything.

For the majority of use cases (including where I am now), it's easier to pick the right technology (Cassandra) even if we have to learn and later teach it around, than it is to find someone who can really do 10TB PostgreSQL and spreads the knowledge.

Of course, if you have extensive experience with PostgreSQL, that may skew the choice heavily to the other direction ;)

<comment><USER27> > Of course, if you have extensive experience with PostgreSQL, that may skew > the choice heavily to the other direction ;)

I have more experience with PostgreSQL than Cassandra, for sure. And I've had negative experiences with people trying to push Cassandra where it was totally not appropriate (small problem and no need for high availability). They had no experience with Cassandra themselves beyond watching a video and doing some tutorials and couldn't answer basic questions about the underlying technology. That might be skewing my perception too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is this somewhat similar to the containerizerd MySQL used at YouTube that was open sourced by Google? Vitesse ([http://vitess.io/overview/](http://vitess.io/overview/))

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the back story here is that they are running MySQL as sharded key- value storage.

And at 2300 instances, it makes sense that there would be a few of them dying at any given time.

With this setup, using MySQL is pretty much arbitrary, any databases could fill in the role as well. E.g. It got me thinking that Redis+Sentinel could do the job too (if they don't need super durable transactions)

</comment><comment><USER30> _Screenshot from our management console._

This looks like an amazing tool.</comment>


HBO Asks Google to Take Down "Infringing" VLC Media Player - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/hbo-asks-google-to-take-down-infringing-vlc-media-player-130715/

<comment><USER2> I wish these companies were punished for their "mistakes" in censoring legitimate content. Someone should take one to Court over something like this already.</comment>


What books should be in a "Personal CS Degree" Reading List? - <AUTHOR> http://ask.metafilter.com/50269/What-books-should-be-on-my-personal-CS-degree-reading-list

<comment><USER2> I'm gonna come right out and throw a vote in for two of the canonical works: Computers and Intractability by Garey and Johnson and Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

The first one is a great, if occasionally thick, crash course in Theory of Computation and the second is a fantastic series on, well, damn near everything.

Huge chunks of The Art of Computer Programming are way beyond me and I've still learned tons from it.</comment>


An Observation about News.YC - <AUTHOR>

In too many threads on news.yc someone points out a pattern only to have someone else refute it based on perosnal experiences.
I just want to point out that this is flawed logic!
It's not quite as simple as "don't make generalizations" (although many would do well to remember that). Danah boyd really crystallized this in one of her blog posts by pointing out that
patterns are just that, patterns. There will always be exceptions (and maybe you are one of them), but exceptions and patterns are not mutually exclusive. Duh, right?
If it's so obvious, why do so many people craft their arguments this way? Just check out the comments in the post about how to find a co-founder for non-techies.
Maybe they just want to foster discussion, but it seems to me that we would get a lot more out of the forum if people qualified/quantified their comments. <comment><USER2> Not all threads here seek answers. Some seek _data_.

Counterexamples don't refute a pattern, but they often elaborate on it. After all, the original pattern is often derived from a series of examples itself. For people that are looking to draw their own conclusions (which is most of us, right? I'd hate to think that my or anyone else's contributions here are taken as gospel truth), this is invaluable. "Quit your day job" hides a lot of complexity. "I had this crazy idea for a suborbital flight startup while I was getting drunk with my chimney-sweeper, and we quit our day jobs, took on $100K of debt, then failed miserably when nobody would buy our flying broomstick" is a lot more useful, because then you can judge whether your situation is like the unfortunate chimney-sweep and decide accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on my personal experience, I have to say you are completely wrong :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think given personalities, different solution sets are viable. A charismatic person might bet more heavily on their charisma and ability to sell something, while a technical person might assume a "build it and they will come" strategy.

Both are viable and both can be write just a bit; but what if a charismatic person could also build something, or a hacker could actually sell something?

I love seeing all of the different opinions on YC.NEWS.

</comment><comment><USER5> If each of us was aware of all the personal experiences of other people here on the site, then maybe we could make more qualified statements. I for one, don't know any of the rest of you in person, so all I can offer are my experiences.

If enough people offer personal experiences, the reader should be able to extract his own pattern from them (that is, after all, what we humans are good at). Just because we are offering raw data (in the form of personal experience) instead of analyzed data (in the form of qualified statements), doesn't make the data any less true (but probably a bit less insightful).

I agree that one person's experience doesn't disprove another persons research about the overall pattern, but nor is the experience completely useless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Typically when someone points out a "pattern" on yc, it's also just mainly based on their own personal experience... instead of say research that spans companies or even regions.

Ofcourse it's possible someone could prove me wrong with several examples...

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe there are several problems with the premise of your question:

1) It assumes that the poster has described the entire problem. Due to the nature of printed material, things like background, emotions, personality, etc many times are not conveyed completely. Most questions are woefully under- detailed. Most times you are answering what you _think_ the person really asked.

2) It assumes that there is a generalization or rule that the question falls under. Things like "Do I like ice cream?" don't have any kind of generalization to have exceptions from. Not everything is quantitative.

3) It assumes that only one set of patterns can be determined from the same initial data. Many times, multiple patterns apply to the same data.

4) It's not the way people communicate. People are not logicians.When you are a kid and touch a hot stove, your mom didn't give you the formulae for thermodynamics. She probably said something like "Don't do that!" As you got older and our problems got more complicated, the stories got more elaborate. But they were always stories. This is because people naturally communicate by anecdote, something anthropologists have been observing for decades. An anecdote is always true -- but more specific theories and generalizations suffer from 1-3 above.

I admire your quest for certainty. I was that way myself back when I was younger, that is, until I realized -- -yikes! I'm doing it! See what I mean? It's everywhere.</comment>


CSS3 Transitions  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/css-transitions/

<comment><USER2> Discussion from 6 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003631>

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post by Alex! Some cool bits there for sure!</comment>


New logging addon for Heroku - <AUTHOR> https://coralogix.com/heroku-logging-coralogix/ <comment><AUTHOR> How different clouds enable Logging best practices, and how Coralogix uses Heroku's LogDrains to provide a 3rd generation Logging experience</comment>


Https://example.com has expired certificate - <AUTHOR> https://example.com/ <comment><USER2> Funny, my mobile browser (Brave) assumes that my system click is ahead and demand I correct the time rather than considering the certificate might be expired.</comment>


Facebook is testing Snapchat-like disappearing messages in France - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/12/9724182/facebook-test-disappearing-messages-france-snapchat <comment><AUTHOR> Thoughts? What's the difference between FB's Poke project and this?</comment>


Bitcoin Mining Unprofitability Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://calc.randomcrypto.org <comment><USER2> So, since I'm pretty much totally uninvolved with Bitcoin, let's see if I understand this. The graphic is meant to suggest that, with current trends, energy costs, etc., bitcoin mining will become unprofitable in the first half of 2019? Or am I misunderstanding what I'm seeing?

<comment><USER3> This calculator is a little confusing, but it looks like it shows that mining is currently unprofitable (revenue is lower than costs) and will never be profitable. Bitcoin mining with retail hardware and retail electricity has almost never been profitable since ASICs came out.</comment></comment>


PeaCoq, a UI for Coq - <AUTHOR> http://goto.ucsd.edu/~vrobert/coq-en-stock/blog/2015/06/03/introducing-peacoq/ <comment><USER2> I can't think of a more perfect name for a UI library for the Coq programming language. I'll show myself out now.

<comment><USER3> I've always wondered why people building vim support for Coq did not name it Coq-au-vim...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see that it uses the 'traditional' stepping forwards/backwards like ProofGeneral and CoqIDE.

Improvements have been made in Coq 1.5 which make this unnecessary: using the PIDE system (originally from Isabelle) you can now throw the whole file at Coq, then send it diffs as the user makes edits. No need to rewind, go-to, etc.

I've used this in jEdit ( [http://coqpide.bitbucket.org/](http://coqpide.bitbucket.org/) ) but there's also an Eclipse system built on it too ( [https://coqoon.github.io/cav2015/](https://coqoon.github.io/cav2015/) )

<comment><USER4> Of course I meant 8.5, not 1.5!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, this is very interesting and I'd love to switch to 8.5.

I might wait a little for my benchmarks to be 8.5 ready though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For hardcore users I don't think this tactic suggestion thing is a good idea, for example, how does it deal with custom ltac tactics (cf Chlipala's bedrock)? To prove me wrong one could test the idea on, say, compcert's development and compute how often the next tactic is among the suggested ones.

On the other hand, One common problem in large proofs is having too many hypothesis in stock, one super nice extension would be to quantify the relevance of each and color/display them accordingly, leaving the option to move the 'tolerance' threshold for display. This relevance metric would have to be aware if lemmas available (of A -> B is proved by a lemma, and B is the goal, A is relevant).

My 2 cts.

<comment><USER3> Indeed trying tactics in general can be unsatisfactory if you 1) don't let users enrich the set of tactics tried 2) don't let users prevent some things from being tried.

For your other issue, I am thinking about ways to hide hypotheses in the editor, without having to clear them in the actual code. This way they are still here if you need them, but they don't eat some of your precious brain space while they are irrelevant (huh) to your current work.

Thanks for your 2 cts! Maybe I'll think about this threshold idea now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use proof general(which also supports Isabelle), but I'm aware that there are in fact some people in the world who have not seen the light of St. Ignucius, and for those I'm sure this is plenty cool.

Good job. :)</comment>