The misunderstood consequences of electroconvulsive therapy - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/the-misunderstood-consequences-of-electroconvulsive-therapy/ <comment><USER2> In England a patient who is detained under the act can be given medical treatment against their will, but the Mental Health Act includes an exemption for ECT that makes it much harder for doctors to provide ECT against a patient's wishes.

That information can be found in the Code of Practice to the Mental Health Act. The code isn't law, but it describes the various acts, statutes, and case law and so a health care practitioner would have to ahve good reason to deviate from it.

[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/435512/MHA_Code_of_Practice.PDF)

If you want to make it even harder for them to give you ECT against your wishes you can make an advance directive. Go see a lawyer that deals with mental capacity stuff and get one drawn up. Be clear and specific.

But, please do take note of what this woman has said:

> Despite the discomfort and the temporary memory loss it caused, I would have > ECT again without hesitation. People voluntarily undergo much more invasive > and damaging medical interventions to save or to prolong their > lives—chemotherapy, radiation, open-heart surgery, blood transfusions, bone > marrow transplants—and speak freely about those experiences, but continue to > think about cancer and heart disease differently from mood disorders that > can be equally deadly. In telling my own less than ideal story 30 years > after the fact, I don't want to discourage anyone from having this > potentially life-saving treatment. What was difficult in my experience would > now be unusual because the treatment protocol has improved over the years to > greatly reduce the side effects. And my situation was extreme not only > because of the perilous condition of my mind, but because my body was > already hypersensitive and aggravated by drug allergies.

I know a few people who've had ECT and a couple of them hated it and are still angry it was done to them, but most of them are glad they had it done and would do it again.

It's hard to work out how much harm it causes because it's only used in people with the most severe depression, and that causes similar harms itself.

<comment><USER3> It's the same in Denmark.

They can force various antipsychotics down your throat like Olanzapine ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine)) or Quetiapine([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetiapine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetiapine)), with serious side effects, but ECT which has very little known side effects, and has been studied quite intensely, cannot be forced.

My wife suffered a psychotic manic episode ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpartum_psychosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpartum_psychosis)) after the birth of our first child, the opposite of post partum depression, which happens in 1/1000 births.

I witnessed her on antipsycotics for a week while attempting to persuade her to accept ECT. The effects of ECT were astonishing. She had the ECT treatment at 9:00 in the morning, and by noon she was back to normal. She had a few more treatments after that to make sure she didn't relapse, and that was the last we saw of it.

She's still without relapses 10 years later, and according to her, should it happen again she would accept ECT much sooner.

Edit: I should probably elaborate on the side effects she experienced. She suffered short term memory loss, which is a known side effect. When she went to the ECT treatment she recognized the driver, and they established where they knew each other from. It was surreal to witness the same conversation unfold with the driver that just unfolded 20 minutes ago before ECT. She had absolutely no recollection of having seen or talked to the guy before on that day.

She feels (now) that she has lost more memory, but as the conventional treatment for manic episodes is basically locking them up in a room with a bed, a table a chair, and some sheets of paper, and keeping them confined there for 2+ weeks, i bet most of us would be unable to keep track of time. Add the various drugs being administered to the equation, in doses that makes you lean against the wall and drool.

She has no memory problems today. The only "blank spots" are in the time surrounding her hospitalization, specifically the days her ECT treatment was administered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you haven't watched this beautiful first person account, by Sherwin B. Nuland, who believes his life was saved by ECT, it's very much worth watching: [https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_the...](https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_therapy/up- next?language=en)

<comment><USER5> Dr. Nuland saved my aunt's life in the '80s. He has contributed a great deal to humanity and I am grateful that ECT saved his life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is _almost_ too obvious to be said but... The brain is _REALLY_ _REALLY_ freaking complicated.

I'm sure ECT can be misused by jerks on power trips, incompetent quacks, and grifters out to make a buck. I also appreciate that some people have suffered from awful side effects from ECT—and other treatments. I don't want to trivialize that at all.

Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that the _vast_ majority of clinicians and researchers are doing the best they can. Depression can be very debilitating and the tools we have for dealing with it are not great. ECT is one of them. It works well for some people but not others, much like many of the drugs and behavioral therapies, and no one really understands why. We would _love_ to have better options, and a lot of very smart, very hardworking people (and me!) have bene working hard to figure out how the brain works, how it can go wrong, and how to restore function when they do.

</comment><comment><USER7> ECT has been shown numerous times to improve cognition in the short-term with little to no long-term decline from baseline.

Much like the effects of having a seizure in those with epilepsy.

itt: people who don't know what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the most readable webpage I have seen for a while. The combination of background colour, black font, font face and line height make for an extremely readable page. Far better than the popular but varyingly unreadable white background and gray text.

That ECT is still around after all this time, speaks to its effectiveness, despite some of the vehement comments on this page.

<comment><USER9> It's effective just like taking a hammer to your computer is when there is a bug in your code. You can't have a bug if you don't have a working computer.

<comment><USER6> Obviously, you're being sarcastic, but....

One of more credible theories about depression is that it occurs when the brain gets stuck in a "bad" state or cycle (like a local minimum or attracting state). If this model is correct, a treatment that nudges brain activity away from the depressed state and towards a less pathological one would help.

It's more akin to rebooting the computer than smashing it, if you will.

<comment><USER9> The other credible theory is that by damaging your brain cells, they can no longer fire in ways that regulate your mood towards depression.

<comment><USER6> Got some references for that?

I ask because ECT seems to _upregulate_ trophic factors, rather than downregulating them. Some sort of hippocampal injury does seem like it could explain memory-related side effects, but it apparently doesn't actually happen (e.g., [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/481657))

<comment><USER9> Nature, for one:

"ECT damage is easy to find if you look for it" [https://www.nature.com/articles/35002188](https://www.nature.com/articles/35002188)

<comment><USER6> That's an unreviewed letter to the editor, not an actual research report.

Look, I'm not arguing that ECT is the best thing ever. The side effects are awful for some people, no one understands the mechanism, and so on. However, it sometimes works when other treatments—-which aren't great either—-fail. Clearly, better therapies are needed all around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As long as it stays voluntary...

</comment><comment><USER11> The most dangerous placebo. Please never allow yourself, or your loved ones to be subject to this. You have power within yourself.

<comment><USER12> Your comment is dangerous and irresponsible. This is not the 40's, ECT is not used lightly; it is the treatment of last resort for severe depression when lifestyle changes, medication and therapy have all failed. The side effects are well-understood and patients who choose ECT do so because the alternative is unbearable.

What you are saying cashes out to the claim that depression can be overcome with sheer positivity and willpower, which is a view I really thought society had gotten over. Please post more responsibly.

<comment><USER13> Sorry but there are dozens of studies and hundreds of reports of people basically losing memories of entire portions of their life and the ability to do simple things like tie their shoelaces or do simple math after just one round of ECT. How this is still not banned by the FDA is beyond me.

Not to mention the number of people who get heart complications from it or outright die during the procedure.

How can you say that "the alternative is unbearable"is beyond me, unless you're saying it's better to become mentally disabled than suffer from depression?

The argument that "this is not the same ECT" is also bogus. The difference is now they paralyze you so you don't convulse and break your bones while doing it. They also use a higher voltage (more damaging to brain cells) and higher frequencies with shorter, repeated bursts (also causes more brain damage and hemorrhaging). But it's "better" because the patient doesn't thrash around so much anymore. Give me a break.

Summary of the issues with ECT and associated studies: [https://truthaboutect.org/ect-causes-brain-damage-a- review-o...](https://truthaboutect.org/ect-causes-brain-damage-a-review-of- the-literature/)

[http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT- Citi...](http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT-Citizen- Petition.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Have you ever had someone close to you commit suicide? If so, is that truly a better outcome than undergoing ECT?

If not, then I want you to understand this: ECT is used to treat a lethal illness.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry but that's the equivalent of saying "This person is about to kill themselves, so let's take a bat and hit them over the head with it so they can't do that now. See, now they're doing fine, they're not killing themselves."

Would you take someone who is about to kill themselves and take a pair of live electric wires to their head to try to "cure" them? Because that's essentially what ECT is, despite all the supposed "new and improved" spiel which is marketing speak, that and they sedate you while doing it.

Inducing brain damage is not treatment.

Saying that is not denying the problems that some people are suicidal and need help. That's a very real issue.

But ECT is very real scientific fraud, often done without fully informed consent on the parts of the patients and family members, often done against and over the wishes of the person receiving ECT, and billed for thousands of dollars to insurance companies over and over again, with results that go away once treatment stops and side effects that remain for a lifetime.

<comment><USER15> There is a both a large and strong evidence base for the usage of ECT in cases of severe, treatment resistant depression. Many aspects of modern medicine can be made to sound barbaric with the right framing; those who disparage ECT are not so quick to characterise chemotherapy as "poison by any other name" or dialysis a "vampiric ball and chain".

By the time ECT is on the table, every other option is exhausted and the sufferer has been through multiple acute hospitalisations for suicidal ideation, if not unsuccessful attempts.

It is certainly fair to say the effect is not always permanent, that maintenance courses are a burden, and that their long-term efficacy does not justify the risks of the procedure itself or the anaesthesia it requires. Nonetheless, for someone who has been depressed for many years, plagued by crippling ennui and a nihilistic view of existence not even Schopenhauer's grimmest passages can match, any respite is welcome. To deny them that option, with full knowledge of the risks, is to deny them agency.

<comment><USER16> And yet from the article ...

"But he acquiesced when told that if he resisted, the hospital would seek a court order to overrule him."

Are you claiming they would do this, yet have the deeply depressed patient's honest agreement ?

I don't buy that. This was forced, under threat of force. To protect the hospital against having a successful suicide attempt on their record.

Symptoms return. Normal cognitive function does not. That tells you more than enough. This person is now (hopefully lightly) mentally handicapped, and this has been done to her under threat.

You might as well shoot the person. That has the same demonstrated effect. Seriously. Shooting someone with mental problems can fix those mental problems, many documented cases of that happening.

(edit: corrected language)

<comment><USER17> _> You might as well shoot the person. That has the same demonstrated effect._

This is ludicrous hyperbole. The majority of people who receive ECT are successfully treated and go on to live fulfilling lives. ECT is an evidence- based treatment for a life-threatening medical condition.

<comment><USER16> If it truly was, then why was that person threatened into doing it ? If what you're saying is true, then what possible motivation could the doctor have to threaten his patient into accepting this treatment ? (I get that someone else had to say "yes", but that doesn't change the situation)

Second, I resent psychologists using "evidence based" as a term. This, one might think, implies that they have proof. Well no, no proof. It doesn't mean that.

Ok, but surely it means that they have double blind statistical studies ? I mean, that makes "evidence" very misleading, but ... Yes, but those studies say there is no effect beyond placebo (in fact there are valid studies that say that _all_ of psychiatry does not survive a double blind study). So statistical analyses actually says this does _not_ work.

Ok, so what _does_ "evidence based" mean ? Well, it means they have a few anecdotes of mostly temporary improvement ( _and_ lots of anecdotes of disastrous outcomes, conveniently left out). Which certainly exist for shooting depressive patients as well. Also they exist for not doing anything.

So why _did_ the doctor force this treatment on her ? Well, to get her out of his clinic. You see, the way you get fired in a psychiatric department is to have a few patients commit suicide in the department. And observation and isolation only helps for so long. In practice, given 4-12 weeks of trying people successfully commit suicide, even under 24 hour observation with no tools in an isolation cell. This patient had gotten really close to doing that, as mentioned in the article (which, incidentally, would be the conditions this patient was held in prior to her getting asked if she'd agree to this treatment. Which of course also means she is mostly happy with the treatment because it got her out of an isolation cell, and still lives under threat of returning to those conditions. Reality of psychiatric patients).

So this is fact: this doctor forced permanent brain trauma on a patient because he was calculating that this trauma would temporarily prevent the patient from committing suicide, long enough so that she'd be out of his department before she actually succeeds.

So reality is simply that this patient was forced to get ineffective treatment that introduced permanent brain trauma against her wishes, with the decision made under extreme stress (introduced by this doctor), and under threat. That she got lucky and seems to be happy with it does not change that. PLUS she might merely be happy that it got her out of the isolation cell she was forced into for weeks/months before.

So let's go through your statement: > The majority of people who receive ECT are successfully treated If you don't count the permanent cognitive impairment, and the fact that most would have recovered without any help, then sure "successfully".

> and go on to live fulfilling lives.

Nope, most relapse. Unless you count redoing suicide attempts after ~4 months a sign of a fullfilling life. But of course, that's long enough to get them out of the hospital and let the doctor/hospital "not be responsible".

> ECT is an evidence-based

Nope. I know this term "evidence-based" is used in psychiatric literature, but that doesn't change the fact that it's bullshit, as explained.

> treatment for a

Nope. This is not a treatment by medical standards. For that to be the case there would need to be validation. This wouldn't even satisfy the standards for "experimental treatment", as that would require case-by-case review of an ethics board, which hasn't happened here.

> life-threatening

Nope. The vast majority of patients recover from this without any help. So it was not life threatening. Or at least, not any more

> medical

Nope, psychiatry is still not considered part of medicine by doctors.

> condition.

Well this is the only word in your sentence that was actually correct.

<comment><USER17> _> Nope, psychiatry is still not considered part of medicine by doctors._

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Psychiatrists are medical doctors. Psychiatric disorders are recognised as diseases by the World Health Organisation in the International Classification of Diseases. The Merriam- Webster dictionary defines psychiatry as "a branch of medicine that deals with mental, emotional, or behavioural disorders". Psychiatrists are eligible for full membership of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and every other medical association I am aware of, because they are medical doctors.

The rest of your comment is just as wrong as this sentence and just as readily debunked. Due to the length of your comment and the sheer density of falsehoods, I am not inclined to debunk it point-by-point; I would suggest that anyone with an interest in the topic should consult the National Institute for Clinical Excellence's Technology Appraisal on ECT.

[https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ta59](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ta59)

<comment><USER16> Psychiatrists are medical doctors because they need to responsibly prescribe medication. That's all.

That doesn't mean it is considered medicine.

You still haven't explained why the threat of force (and thus force) was used against this patient ... to enforce an elective treatment that results in permanent cognitive damage. I am very curious how you'll explain that one.

(I would like to point out that any treatment that does not prevent death or long-term injury is one that's considered elective)

<comment><USER6> "Force" is a mischaracterisation.

Medicine generally relies on "informed consent": you have the right and responsibility to know and understand the treatments you are receiving and their possible effects.

Mental illness is tricky because the condition itself impairs patients' ability to provide this consent. Maybe you've got extreme lassitude and refuse everything, for example, even contradictory options. Maybe you clearly do not understand the options presented to you.

Nevertheless, we also don't want doctors making decisions unilaterally, so the next best thing is to involve a third party. If the patient has a guardian, it's their call. If you don't, a court can act as one temporarily, with the idea being that they'll get you to a state where you can take over. Obviously, this isn't ideal, but it's not clear what would be a better approach.

<comment><USER16> This article VERY clearly states that the patient REFUSED, and then was forced to let it happen under threat of force:

The actual quote: "her husband was alarmed when the doctor suggested ECT. But he acquiesced when told that if he resisted, the hospital would seek a court order to overrule him." (note: author is talking about herself in the third person)

So I really do not "feel" force is mischaracterized. The threat was explicitly made AFTER the patient "was alarmed" (which means refused, let's get real). And threats are use of force, of course. (if I threatened to shoot you unless you did X, you would certainly call that force regardless of whether I actually shoot you, not even if I say "please". You would strongly disagree with me calling that "informed consent", rightly so)

And it's not just force. This is forcing a treatment that does permanent cognitive damage to the patient against their will. This was done knowing full well that given enough time, odds are pretty high it will disappear by itself (most suicidal patients "recover", very few actually commit suicide. I did a quick Google search and we're talking 4% apparently. Unfortunately, public opinion REALLY punishes any hospital where it happens. But that doesn't change that there was a 96% chance this patient would get cured without any action, never mind permanently crippling them)

Let's not pretend this is a moral grey area. It's not. This is _far_ over the line.

How do you even know that this article isn't positive because the patient fears being readmitted (again with force) into the psychiatric facility and/or resumption of convulsive "therapy" ? (where she would be locked up in dismal conditions).

<comment><USER6> When I was an infant, I (apparently) struggled valiantly to avoid getting shots or having blood drawn. It hurt and the benefits of (e.g.) vaccines don't really make sense to a kid who has just learned to string a few words together. Nevertheless, my parents forced me to get them, and, as an adult who does _not_ have several debilitating diseases, I'm glad for it. The idea is pretty similar here: the patient herself can be in a state where she's (not) making decisions that their unaffected self would. I'm a little surprised at the lack of deference to her husband, but 'alarmed' can cover a lot from "NO, NEVER" to "My God, is it really that bad?"

As I wrote above, I don't think ECT is _great_ , but the evidence indicates it is one of the better options for drug-resistant depression. The side effects, especially for older approaches, can be pretty bad, but so is depression (and newer approaches seem to have weaker effects on memory).

I think you pretty much have to take her at her word here that she eventually appreciated the treatment. There's no way in hell someone is getting recommitted due to an article, especially not 30-40 years later.

<comment><USER16> Would you feel even remotely the same if the treatment was not vaccination, but let's say you already had the measles. A bad case.

The odds would be 99%+ that you would get better on your own (essentially nobody _stays_ depressed, after all), BUT the process of getting better would involve 2 weeks nausea, painful pimples all over, and of course generally feeling very bad. You would need to be locked up during that time to prevent spread of the disease. In < 1% of cases it would feed back onto itself, and those weeks would repeat, progressively getting worse.

The treatment is amputation, say of a foot (because ECT does permanent cognitive damage). And, even though they can give you something to prevent you from remembering the pain or the process afterwards, they can't actually sedate you. This has a decent chance of making you better in a shorter time "without" (visible) pain/issues. They may need to redo it several times, taking off some more every time. Let's say they start with a few toes, but progressively they'll take off more, and you can reasonably expect to lose at least all your toes, with your entire foot being a possibility. Of course, there's also odds you'll lose your foot, but remain ill. (there is widespread disagreement on what those odds are, so let's leave it at "not zero, and not very small either, so >10%, but not 90% like some claim either"). And there's a tiny chance you die.

Would you still feel as positive about the treatment ? What if your parents got threatened while making this decision with having you taken away by social services and having this imposed on you ? (with some small odds of you never getting returned to them, ever)

The ethical issue is more complex than you present it. You conveniently leave out that it mutilates the patient, just not visibly. You leave out that there's extreme pain involved, and they can't sedate you (that would defeat the treatment, because the point is that the brain learns to associate absolutely extreme pain and stress with "the problem"), but they can give you the date rape drug (yes, really). You won't remember. You'll still be mutilated though. Cognitive impairment. You won't remember how it happened. Usually you won't, that is. There may be some lingering trauma, and PTSD. So there's a 10% chance (it's pretty high for ECT) that you'll have extreme (fear or violent) reactions to things you associate with the treatment room.

> I'm a little surprised at the lack of deference to her husband.

Really ? What do you think about the "doctor thinking of his career" explanation ? Can you at least agree it's pretty consistent, that _some_ doctors might think like that ?

As in, can you at least agree that giving psychiatrists that option at all presents a "moral hazard" ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My opinion is suicide being the better outcome than electroconvulsive therapy.

People are so irrational in fearing the unknown "death" that they'll do something barbaric to themselves and where the outcome is creating a disabled version of their former self.

Humanity is really disgusting. First, we label people with "depression" a word denoting human expression built upon a pseudo practice named psychiatry and where the majority of people being depressed just suffered poor life events. Financial problems, divorce, child abuse, social & behavioural development problems, the list goes on and the professionals receiving funding "for these victims" will just try to numb the victim's brain; to medicate the problem away.

<comment><USER13> We used to offer support and accept that sadness and sorrow were a part of life and that sometimes people needed to grieve, or people went through rough patches, and eventually got themselves out of it with the help of others.

Now we say sadness and depression are diseases that must be medicated with drugs whose side effects (WRITTEN ON THE LABEL) include suicidal ideation and depression, and we wonder why the suicide rates are up?

The worst thing this country did was vote to allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise drugs on TV and in other media. Once that pandora's box was open, there was no going back. It's sad that we're only now waking up to the fact that things like the opioid crisis were actually fueled and manufactured by pharmaceutical companies to increase their profit margins... :/

<comment><USER6> Ugh.

Depression is different from sadness. If your father died/girlfriend left you/job laid you off, you _should_ be sad about events like those, and frankly, it would be concerning if you weren't.

The patients who are candidates for ECT aren't just upset. Some are actively trying to kill themselves. Others have such lassitude that they can't work up the energy[0] to eat, drink, or bathe, let alone live a normal life.

I take your point that the US tends to 'medicalize' conditions, and we might be better off with fewer drugs and a more caring society, but these patients aren't going to be helped by a box of tissues and a soft shoulder to cry on. It is an _illness_

[0] The suicide bit is not as contradictory as it sounds. Depression is associated with very decreased activity levels. Some depressed people make plans to self-harm, but lack the energy to actually go through with it. As they recover, the energy often comes back first, so they get into a regime where they are still considering self-harm but have also recovered enough to actually go through with it. As an analogy, think about the 'danger zone' in food preparation. Frozen or cooked food is relatively safe from bacteria, but during thawing, food is warm enough for bacteria to thrive, but not hot enough to eliminate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The ECT industry is on par with the Purdue Pharmas of the world, they've lied about the terrible side effects of ECT, neglected to report to the FDA the side effects patients have experienced, and generally engaged in fraud and cover ups for the fact that ECT's purported "effectiveness" goes away once the treatments stop, while the very terrible side effects can be permanent, including amnesia, loss of motor function, etc...

The lawsuits are starting to come in and are of course beings settled out of court, because the manufacturers know they would lose in actual trial given the evidence against them is so blatant.

More details here [https://breggin.com/huge-breakthrough-in-lawsuits-against- el...](https://breggin.com/huge-breakthrough-in-lawsuits-against- electroconvulsive-therapy-ect-manufacturers/) and here [http://www.dk4law.com/blog/dk-law-group-news/other/ect- shock...](http://www.dk4law.com/blog/dk-law-group-news/other/ect-shock- treatment-class-action-case-update-april-2018/)

<comment><USER19> Is this a Scientology account?

<comment><USER13> Why is that even relevant to the discussion? Sounds like you're trying to distract from the actual issues at hand.

<comment><USER5> What issues? Lawsuits != research. Most clinical research suggests ECT has high efficacy with fewer side effects than many pharmacological interventions. Your baseless claim is mental illness shaming and treatment shaming.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Coding School Wants Graduates to Share Their Income - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/this-coding-school-wants-graduates-to-share-their-income <comment><USER2> Wow, as if student loans weren't burden enough. This seems like an even worse sort of indentured servitude.</comment>


MySQL on Mesos: today's database meets tomorrow's datacenter – Mesosphere - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/04/17/mysql-on-mesos-todays-database-meets-tomorrows-datacenter/ <comment><AUTHOR> I work at a young startup based in Brussels, Belgium and we're looking at a good scaling solution. Our current services rely on MySQL quite heavily and Mesosphere DCOS on AWS seemed like a great option – although I was quite surprised to hear that running a persistent data-storage like MySQL on Mesos was a bit of a soup.

It turns out that the issue is on its way to be solved, but that doesn't solve our problem – we've currently hit high system usage and we're looking to migrate onto a more scalable architecture within the next month.

What I'd really like to discuss is: – Mesos has native support for Cassandra. Is it advisable to migrate from MySQL to Cassandra? What are the costs for such a migration. – By when is Mysos expected to arrive? – Is there another way to run MySQL on Mesos? What are the most secure and scalable strategies?

Thanks.

<comment><USER2> So Mesos 0.23 (current stable) supports the FrameworkInfo for dynamic reservations and persistent resources ([https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-1554](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-1554)). This allows for a framework to request that a chunk of disk space is persistent and if the process is killed, it gets restarted on the same mesos slave (assuming that slave is still online).

Now if I remember the talk from MesosCon this year correctly, 0.24 will have the quota integration with the persistent resources, and 0.25 will have the administrative api additions. With 0.25 admin tools can be written to manage the persistent resources manually.

Like Mysos does currently, your best bet is streaming replication and persist snapshots to a shared filesystem such as HDFS. Unfortunately, until all of the persistent resource bits are fleshed out a bit more, that is your only option.</comment></comment>


What really went wrong with Target Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketingmag.ca/?p=166300&preview=true <comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting points about how manual the data-entry in SAP was:

" _The investigative team estimated information in the system was accurate about 30% of the time. In the U.S., it's between 98% and 99%....

Thus, "data week" was held in the fall of 2012. Merchandisers essentially had to confirm every data point for every product with their vendors. A buyer might have 1,500 products and 50 to 80 fields to check for each one. The more experienced employees had the foresight to keep records of verified information (dubbed "sources of truth"), which made the task a little easier. Others weren't so lucky. Complicating matters was the dummy information entered into the system when SAP was set up. That dummy data was still there, confusing the system, and it had to be expunged. "We actually sat there and went through every line of data manually," says a former employee...

There was an entirely different process to ensure the correct data actually made it into SAP. The employees in Mississauga couldn't do so directly. Instead, the information was sent to a Target office in India, where staff would load it into SAP. Extra contractors had to be hired in India, too. "Sometimes even when we had the data correct, it got mixed up by the contractors in Target India," says a former employee. (Another former employee disputes this: "Sometimes the quality of their work wasn't so great, but for the most part they did a good job.")_"</comment>


Show HN: OneTool.app – One Tool to rule them all - <AUTHOR> https://onetool.app <comment><AUTHOR> Please try out/take a look the app that I've created: [https://onetool.app/](https://onetool.app/)

The idea is to have a business tool that has all the most common tools included in one package.

Current features:

\- Team communication: social networking, group chats

\- Tasks (and a calendar for them)

\- Document editing (with multiuser collaboration)

\- Helpdesk/customer support

\- Files (encrypted)

\- Commenting (threads) throughout the whole app

\- Notifications (and @mentions) throughout the whole app

\- Tagging throughout the whole app

More features will be added. Next in line would be spreadsheet/database-kind- of-feature and slides. Maybe a CMS too. And I can think of a few others I would like to have.

The app is in beta and has been for a while. When it's proven enough the plan is to make it non-free, but the price should be affordable (I'm thinking about something like $1/month/active user). A free plan for one user may or may not happen, haven't decided yet.

The app is secure in a way that even we[1] can't access your data[2]. It's encrypted with the user's key[3]. The encryption happens on the server though, so it's not _as_ secure as a client side encryption would be. But it's still much more secure than not encrypting at all.

Technical details may interest: it runs on Node.js. The framework is a fork of Derby.js (so there is ShareDB involved also). Shortcomings: no offline support at the moment. I've started to look for a framework that would allow offline support. It probably involves a from OT to CRDT.

More technical details: it runs on 3 servers for fault tolerancy reasons. The database used is ArangoDB.

Note that I haven't looked that much at similar apps, so I can't comment on them. Comparisons are welcome though.

This may seem like a big task for one person, and it is, but it's doable. I started on social networking and it grew from there. At some point the name OneTool came naturally to mind, so I changed the name and the domain. Originally the name was Project5 (for project management) [4].

If someone asks me: "why?", I would tell that "because it's there" \-- like a mountain climber would answer. I need to climb this mountain, after having coded all kinds of little things in my life. It also teaches a lot of the "design" part of software making.

Feedback would be very welcome - here (obviously) or on Twitter too: @onetoolapp.

Thank you, Ilkka

[1] It would require some hacking of the codebase (outside of my knowledge) and "stealing" the data before it's encrypted. In a normal operation this should not be possible.

[2] There are some exceptions: for example customer support tickets are not encrypted, because they come from other sources than the team members themselves, so they can't be encypted with the team's key.

[3] The key is the same for the whole team, but it's encrypted for each (team member) user separately with the user's password.

[4] At some point I noticed that there already a project management software named Project5, so the name change had to be done anyway.</comment>


Cars are getting weird - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/16/06/cars-are-getting-weird <comment><USER2> I don't think it's "cars" are getting weird, it's just this one weird Tesla and their business model... The article says:

"Cars are big computers, and have been for a while"

Doesn't mean we need to treat them like software development platforms. Most of the challenges are still at OSI layer 1 and most of the problems to deal with are mechanical: Tire still wear out, disc brakes still function much as they did 10 or 15 years ago (and wear out), wheel bearings, hydraulic systems for power steering, etc.

Given that cars have much longer lifespans than typical consumer electronics, the _last_ thing I want is a car with a built in 10" touchscreen running some ancient version of Android. I'd rather have some sort of standardized modular system where I can put my own tablet-sized computer in an appropriate place and have it get power, audio sync with the car's speakers. Look at the crap infotainment systems built into 2015 and 2016 model Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans and compare it with a good $400 Android 6.x tablet. Do you really want that same un-updated OS and software for ten years?

The idea of the "double DIN" size car stereo mounting location was a good one, but we need something bigger than this, and with standardized cable connectors:

[http://www.autodvdgps.com/ebay/ZC620/ebay-3.jpg](http://www.autodvdgps.com/ebay/ZC620/ebay-3.jpg)

Carmakers, please find a way to separate the 'infotainment' part of the car's computer from the embedded computer that's actually required for the car to run (engine timing/valves, fuel injectors, mixture, emissions monitoring, intake oxygen sensor, etc).

<comment><USER3> I would really like a 100% mechanical automobile, with no computers involved, designed such that when something breaks and you're fifty miles away from anything, you can actually crawl underneath and fix it. Analog radio, crank windows, keyhole locks on every door, real guages. I'll concede the electric starter and the windshield wipers, since I'm not _that_ nostalgic for the days of the Model T.

Completely off-topic, but if I saw a new truck with the old-style floor- mounted stomp pedal for the dimmer switch, it'd almost be a shut-up-and-take- my-money situation. I cannot comprehend why automakers keep piling more stuff into the steering wheel. Some of the little sedans have handles and buttons coming off them every which way.

<comment><USER4> I've found computer-controlled electronic fuel injection much more reliable than carburetors. And OBDII is very handy for diagnosing mechanical problems, even with the manufacturer idiosyncrasies.

<comment> nommm-nommm I sense some rose colored glasses.

Cars are so much more reliable than they were even 25 years ago. Reliable and longer lasting. My first car broke down if you looked at it wrong. My current car does not have that problem even though it is just as old/has just as many miles on it than my first car did at the time. Breaking down on the side of the road used to be a common part of my life, now it hasn't happened to me in the last 8 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only poor man here? Am I the only one who expects their car to last fifteen, twenty years, even longer with good maintenance? I see people talking of cars depreciating into worthlessness faster than I go through laptops. A toyota or BMW bought today will probably still be on the road come 2035. That's what makes them good cars. Nothing changes overnight in this field. No matter which fancy autodrive scheme you think is or isn't the second coming, these are massive blocks of moving parts. Throwing them away every five or ten years is ridiculous.

Tesla may be all cool and willing to update software, but it's very easy to be that when your fleet is all shiny. Come back when someone finds a security flaw in the 25 year-old model that is now in the hands a highschool kid as his first car. Come back when the 4g antenna in the dashboard can no longer communicate over the now-standard 67gxrr mobile network. That's why there are warehouses stacked full of parts all over the country. That's the car biz.

<comment><USER6> Man, my newest car is 25 years old and I do all the maintenance on all of them (25 years, 30 years, and 32 years old) myself, aside from safety inspections and alignments. I recently had one fail safety for two small things and the shop quoted me $1k to fix it--$250 parts, $750 labor. That $250 is going to be more like $50 for me since I know what parts need replacing and I know how to make a bushing for my steering rack rather than replacing the whole rack.

If I didn't have that know-how (or a friend or family member who could help me out), I'd be SOL. And this is hardly a one-off thing, and hardly specific to me. Plenty of people are only able to afford cars if they can fix them themselves.

Moreover, I hope to keep these cars running 10 or 20 years further down the road. The only reason I can hope to do this is because of aftermarket manufacturers and no technical restrictions on what I can replace, upgrade, or re-make on my cars.

A friend of mine has had weird problems on his relatively modern car because of what's probably a cold solder in the fuse box on his car. That fuse box costs $700 to replace PLUS whatever the dealer is going to charge you to reprogram the computer in it. Why does a fuse box need a computer in it? Hell if I know. How do you fix this once the dealer no longer keeps around the cables and software to reprogram that computer? Either replace every single computer in the car with computers from a car with a working fuse box, or reverse-engineer the proprietary protocol the fuse box talks and re-engineer a replacement.

Oh, except that latter choice is legally questionable, thanks to the DMCA.

I expect a lot more cars from this era to end up as fancy bricks.

That's a damn shame; there's no reason to discard a nearly-functional pile of parts just because some auto manufacturer is too stingy to help you fix, or not hinder you from fixing, the thing they built and sold you. I recall a study that showed that keeping an old car functioning was just as efficient pollution-wise than building a whole new car to replace it with.

I guess the upside here is that there's going to be a decent amount of demand for folks like me who have both mechanical and electrical chops in the car repair scene in a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of the $50 upgrade to fully unlock your Pentium G6951 CPU: [https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to- charge-50...](https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-to- unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d/)

This is the sort of thing economies of scale bring. It's evidenced by CPU and GPU binning, whereby it's cheaper for the manufacturer to make one part and segment the market with simple switches to disable functionality (in some cases, disabling parts of the chip with flaws which render it otherwise unsellable).

Car makers have been doing this for ages with simpler features, such as including air conditioning or intermittent wipers but requiring the user to pay exorbitant amounts for the switch on the dash to activate them.

<comment><USER7> This is the sort of thing that economies of scale bring when paired with a lack of effective competition. If there's effective competition, then some company can and will cut into all the other companies' sales by selling a fully-unlocked version of their hardware at close to the price of the locked version.

<comment><USER8> Economies of scale by themselves cause lack of effective competition, because the biggest company automatically wins by taking advantage of the economies of scale and the rest go out of business. That's why an industry with significant economies of scale is called a "natural monopoly".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you look at this as a $6000 or so discount on a new Tesla, it actually seems like a pretty good deal.

A 75kWh battery pack that is limited to 60kWh is better than having a real 60kWh pack.

The extra over-capacity means that it won't be charging to it's true 100% capacity, and not discharging to 0%. That puts less wear on the cells, and means faster charging. (The sweet spot for charging is in the middle of the battery's capacity - charging speed is slower if the battery is near 0% or near 100%.)

<comment><USER10> This means a 2016 S60 will still have 208 miles of EPA rated range when it's off-lease or up for resale in 2019, whereas a 2013 S60 most likely has a smaller range than when it was new.

Tesla cars will depreciate more slowly, with resale prices closer to original MSRP. That's all good news for their leasing program, their resale value guarantee program, and their certified pre-owned program.

There are a lot of upsides to reducing battery wear. Battery wear is a big reason my 2012 Nissan Leaf is worth less than 1/3rd of its original MSRP.

<comment><USER11> Most 2012 cars are not worth more than a third of the original MSRP, especially if you're looking at typical trade-in value.

If I were in the market for a car right now I'd be looking for about a 2008 model year. All the significant depreciation has already been realized and you can find some real values in good condition with a lot of life left if you shop around a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The user interface for automatic driving is still in flux. The user interface for semi-automatic driving needs to be standardized. There was that episode a few weeks ago where someone in a Tesla rear-ended another car because they didn't know that in firmware revision 6.22 and later, a tap on the brakes disables automatic braking. This needs to be standardized before such cars start appearing in airport rental lots.

<comment><USER13> You should not rely on emergency auto-brake systems anyway!

These are systems designed to prevent accidents in case the driver misses something, but NOT for daily use!

<comment><USER14> > You should not rely on emergency auto-brake systems anyway! > > These are > systems designed to prevent accidents in case the driver misses something, > but NOT for daily use!

But you know people _will_. That's what happens with affordances. Design. It changes how people interact with things, and not always in the intended way. It's _very_ important to consider when you're talking about the operation of machines that can kill.

Indeed, the presence of emergency brakes could very well reduce the number of accidents, while at the same time making people rather lazy and eventually _causing_ some. Like taking bigger risks on your bicycle when you're wearing a helmet.

<comment><USER15> _> Indeed, the presence of emergency brakes could very well reduce the number of accidents, while at the same time making people rather lazy and eventually _causing_ some._

Is there a psychological term for this thought process?

The thought process: People killing people is _" okay"_ but people killing (overall) fewer people because they are relying on "emergency auto-brake systems" is _" not okay"_.

For me, it is a no brainer to reduce human casualties as much as possible. But it seems others disagree with that if some automated system is responsible for deaths instead of a human. Is it because blame is harder to place?

<comment><USER16> Static risk tolerance + altered risk perception.

People are only as careful as they think they need to be, because they're lazy.

This causes your behavior baseline to change as a result of new safety measures, perhaps too far in the wrong direction.

Found this - procedural drift (aviation): [http://www.cognitivesystemsdesign.net/Papers/Johnston%20(200...](http://www.cognitivesystemsdesign.net/Papers/Johnston%20\(2003\).pdf)

<comment><USER15> Not quite what I was thinking of, so I'll make up a scenario and numbers.

Take any technology that automates a task. Say it has a 0.00005% failure rate which results in death of a random passerby at the time it occurs. Then take any human being in charge of that same task. Say the risk is 0.05% human error which results in death of a random passerby at the time it occurs.

There are people who will argue that the 0.05% is acceptable and will vehemently disagree with and prevent any attempt to switch to the 0.00005% failure rate because the machine killing someone is _unacceptable_ while a human killing 1,000-fold more people is somehow _acceptable_. Even if human laziness of an _assisted_ (not completely automated) version of the same task had a 0.005% risk it would still be unacceptable when compared with the 100% human-error rate.

Morally, I can't wrap my head around the reasoning. More deaths seems to be acceptable as long as _some person can be "at fault"_. The moment the death is "blameless" it cannot be allowed.

In other words: 10,000 "someone can be blamed" deaths is _better_ than 10 "who is to blame?" deaths.

<comment><USER16> Empathy with the human, fear of change, fear of the unknown, a need to have somebody to blame...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The cheaper car ($66K base price) has a software block on its battery which > limits its range to 208 miles on a full charge

Is that really true? Are the batteries otherwise identical and you can get stranded with plenty of reserve power?

<comment><USER18> it probably limits how much it charges, not the output of the battery.

<comment><USER17> Which would have the effect of increasing the longevity of the "smaller" battery. If what the article says is true, then this could be the motivation.

<comment><USER19> But if you pay 9 grand to bypass this limit, it becomes the regular car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I felt like the second half of the post took on a totally different theme from the first half. Maybe I'm missing the point of the article.

But as for the second half.. I feel that cars are going to adapt to us, rather than us adapting to cars. It's already happening, as the Volvo steering wheel example describes.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think there is going to be a huge market for used 2005-2010 vehicles without the big brother tracking and obnoxious touch screens everywhere.

Take a few hundred thousand, buy a collection of low mileage pickup trucks and Honda Accords and store them for 10 years. I bet you'd 10x your investment.

</comment><comment><USER22> There is a cost diff for Tesla, between these two scenarios. But it is subtle. In the cheaper variant of the two he cited, that battery is going to have (possibly) more charge buffer remaining when it's ostensibly "empty". AFAICT. Whereas that more expensive variant will not. Again, assuming otherwise identical. So in theory that more expensive variant is more likely to have more customers who reach empty, get stuck, need towing, complain, etc. Again this is just AFAICT based on info at hand. In this theory, Tesla is saying, "Fine if you truly want to squeeze out more miles, we'll let you, but to compensate us for risk of more complaints, we'd like a little more money."

again, just a theory. may be more complex than this.

</comment><comment><USER23> I want a analog car with full mechanical linkage.

<comment><USER24> >full mechanical linkage.

Not even hydraulics?

<comment><USER25> I drove a car with a manual transmission and no power steering in the early 1990s, a Honda Civic of some kind. Primitive, but it was also a bit of a delight. A very physical and mechanical thing. The lack of power automation was rarely a problem. However, it asked more of the driver them I amused to nowadays, and would be extremely unpopular if they even still made such a thing.

<comment><USER2> You have just described a car like a Suzuki Mehran (manufactured today in Karachi, Pakistan) and similar small cars manufactured in India. They're immensely popular in the developing world because such cars are frequently the first proper enclosed, 4-seat vehicle a newly middle class family can afford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > "Cars are big computers, and have been for a while"

IIRC, it's been said by Cory Doctorow that a pacemaker is a computer I put into my body, and a car is a computer I put my body into.

</comment><comment><USER27> This kind of engineered inefficiency for market segmentation purposes irritates me to no end.

</comment><comment><USER28> This happened long ago with the turn signal solenoid. That clicky sound when you flip your trafficator? That used to be a real physical switch opening and closing with electromagnets. Now most people have forgotten what it really sounded like and they're satisfied with a gentle, fake click-click recording.

</comment><comment><USER29> It remind a lot of AMD disabling some of it CPU cores on some models.

<comment><USER30> As well as Intel 486DX/SX saga. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486SX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486SX)

<comment><USER31> Ha, I was wondering if I was the only one here old enough to remember it! I couldn't imagine a tech writer not leaping for this analogy.</comment></comment></comment>


How we pay royalties: an overview - <AUTHOR> http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-royalties-overview <comment><USER2>
      2. Artist's Spotify streams divided by total Spotify streams

      This calculates an artist's popularity on the service, their
      "market share." Dividing an artist's streams by the total
      streams on Spotify determines the percentage of our total
      pay-outs that should be paid for that artist's rights.

This sucks bigtime. Why should artists that I never listen to receive any of my monthly subscription? This portion of the calculation should be done on a per subscription basis.

<comment><USER3> I don't see why you're upset. Think globally. Millions of users are paying for the bands you like that _they 'll_ never listen to.

<comment><USER2> Let me give an example:

Say I pay $10/month and only listen to 2 artists, each with .001% market share. IMO, each one should get $3.50 from my pool of subscription money. Using their current scheme, each would get $0.00007 while Lady GaGa would get $0.30 when I didn't even listen to Poker Face.

<comment><USER4> I see your point, but I think your reasoning is flawed. If each one got 3.50$ from you then they would get nothing from the other subscribers, whereas, as it currently is they receive .00007 from everyone... Even if Spotify followed your subscription model the end result would be the same small amount of money.

Your method would only increase complexity for Spotify and serve no real purpose in terms of getting your favorite artists more money.

<comment><USER5> If tweens listen to 10 hrs/day of Justin Bieber on repeat using free accounts, Bieber shouldn't get money from adults who listen a few hours a day to anything but him using premium accounts.

I think it's quite reasonable to assume that differences in listening and paying habits between users would NOT average out, and a per user split would be fairer.

<comment><USER6> I agree that a per person split would be might be better (for how I think royalties _should_ be distributed) -- but one would also take into account the ad revenue those tweens (and other "free" users) generate.

I don't know how Spotify is doing financially, but hopefully they make money off free users as well as paid users (but I'd not be surprised if they end up a bit like Opera did -- making money from paid users and licensing/bundling deals -- and just using the commercial breaks/ads as stick to guide users towards the paid service).

Either way I'd much prefer being able to pay for lossless records that I get to keep -- I gave up on Spotify quite early as it ended up a little like youtube -- come back to a playlist after a few months and half the songs were gone. I know they're better now, but that experience just underlined the idea that paying for licensing content in a way that leaves you vulnerable to that content disappearing is a very bad deal for me as a listener/consumer.

<comment><USER7> Its interesting that you mention their ad breaks. For 6 months, I had no idea that spotify operated a premium service whatsoever, until they imposed the 2.5hr limit per week on my account and hit me with more ads. I subscribed immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From an artist's perspective, the decision to sign up for Spotify basically comes down to one question:

Does the benefit in music discovery make up for the cost of losing album/download sales?

I did the calculations once and I forget the details, but the gist is that without factoring in music discovery benefit, an indie artist probably only hopes someone chooses to stream instead of download if the listener is going to stream the song around 1,000 times or more. Otherwise, you get more financial upside if they buy the download.

So the question is if any discovery benefit will shrink that number enough. This would include the people who stream and don't buy but would never have bought in the first place, as well as the people who stream and then buy.

The answer is difficult to prove because you get into weird counterfactual questions, and there really aren't any good studies out there from unbiased experimenters. But it's pretty reasonable for a rational musician to decide that any discovery benefit will not make up for the cost in losing album or download sales.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think that the real value to artists with spotify is that they show upcoming touring dates for the artist inline with the artist profile[0]. I think that spotify has a lot more that they can do to facilitate direct artist interaction with the fans though.

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/MyMlCvB.png](http://i.imgur.com/MyMlCvB.png)

<comment><USER10> I love that feature _but_ just listing concerts in my country isn't very useful in the US. I regularly get shown that someone is playing in Portland or Austin and I live nowhere near either of those places. Given it hooks into Songkick (awesome site btw) which knows locations of all these events, maybe they could find a way to track where you are and give more relevant suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see a comparison of royalty models between streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, iTunes Match/Radio) as well as how it compares to buying a physical CD.

<comment><USER8> There are a ton of comparison charts out there... one thing to keep in mind is that a service like Pandora is completely different than a service like Spotify. Different royalty rates, different implications. It comes down to the fact that on Pandora, you can't request particular songs.

For that reason, artists don't tend to mind Pandora too much, since any royalty income they get from Pandora is basically gravy. It doesn't really rob album sales. You _could_ argue that it robs radio play (since radio is less popular now), leading to lower royalties that way, but it's a different beast than Spotify. For Spotify, a person can request a certain artist/song and listen to the stream, without buying the track/album. It robs album/download sales, and it's debatable (to put it charitably) whether the "music discovery" benefit makes up for that loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my favorite things about the Spotify service is music discovery. In my experience I've found that they do a pretty decent job of helping to show me new bands based on my current preferences and listening habits, as well as those of my friends. If that continues to improve, I think they will also be able to do a much better job of helping smaller bands get additional exposure and therefore royalties.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like the system can be gamed by an artist than listens to his 4 min track 24/7\. If it pays about $0.007 per stream, listening to a 4 min song would pay out $75 - $10 of the subscription fee = $65/month/subscription. That wouldn't happen if the royalties redistribution was done on a per subscription basis.

<comment><USER14> Minus the cost of a dedicated server. Minus the risk of getting caught. Minus the probability spotify has a trivial cap in their software to prevent it. Gets you pretty close to $0.

<comment><USER15> Youtube was gamed for years. It might still be possible on spotify. Not just for the money, but also to get higher in their rankings and get more exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't have much personal investment in the story, I'm a significant consumer of music but haven't user Spotify (despite being in Canada I was only vaguely aware the service isn't available here).

They've taken some flak in the past for their payments to artists and while I'm not following the discussions closely enough to suggest those criticisms are unjustified it does seem that they're not the chief culprit. 30% retained doesn't on the face of it seem unreasonably high, does anyone know how this compares to equivalent services?

Ultimately I don't think disclosure is ever a bad thing and hope maybe this is one more small step advancing the general 'royalty model' conversation.

<comment><USER16> 70% royalty share was imposed by the majors to Spotify. Just because this was the model used by physical stores and it's how the industry works. They didn't change the revenue split model.

One of the problems here is that there are many middlemen involved between the artist and Spotify. The label, the manager, the aggregator. Everyone gets his piece.

Also, there is problem regarding how much it takes for an artist to get the same from Spotify than they used to get from a song sold from a service like iTunes. Some artists claim that a song has to be listened up to 60 times in a streaming service in order to the same as a song sold in a digital music store. And here there comes the big issue. Have you ever listened 60 times to a song you buy in iTunes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > 2\. Artist's Spotify streams divided by total Spotify streams

this is quite surprising. does this mean that hypothetically, if there is only 1 band in the spotify universe, it will receive half the revenues it once did if another band joins the service?

<comment><USER18> Only if the listeners started listening to the new band as often as the existing band. Number of "streams" == number of plays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Confirmed in their section 'Wait, I thought Spotify paid per stream?' as "Every time somebody listens to a song on Spotify it generates payments".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "if we could build a service which was better than piracy, then we could convince people to stop illegal file-sharing, and start consuming music legally again"

this is exactly the right attitude. i've been 'selling' this for years as my reason for piracy - its just easier. spotify absolutely killed that for me. it really is more convenient...

i do wish existing businesses in that area would look and learn instead of lobbying and abusing legislation to try and keep hold of a business model that died years ago... (or publishers trying to convince their artists that Spotify is ripping them off rather than /them/)

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure it is better than piracy.

In both cases, there's no further incentive for a consumer to pay out to get better access to the music. AFAICT at current royalty rates, artists get about the same amount of money they get from piracy.

Except with piracy, people _know_ the way they obtained the music is questionable/unsustainable, so in some people it probably creates a drive towards future patronage of some kind.

Meanwhile, Spotify gives the illusion that you're involved in a legitimate transaction and have more or less done your duty, while what's basically happening behind the scenes is we have a "disruptor" whose main innovation so far appears to be replacing recording revenues with the fractional broadcast revenue.

Better experience for the consumer, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you read all the way to the bottom you can find the main reason why I support Spotify, "Spotify's impact on piracy"

>Spotify has been successful in convincing this younger generation to abandon piracy and begin using and paying for a legal service. In fact, over 50% of Spotify's paying subscribers are under the age of 29.

This is the reason that I love Spotify and its ilk.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can this system be gamed for profit?

1\. Setup a short track on one of the linked providers. 2\. Setup a bot to play the track over and over.

Do they pay out equally for tracks from paid vs. unpaid spotify accounts? If so, you could setup a bunch of anonymous accounts to increase stream plays.

<comment><USER23> Sure,

I missed this talk at Ruxcon this year [http://ruxcon.org.au/speakers/#Peter](http://ruxcon.org.au/speakers/#Peter) Fillmore

But if you can find a write up of it or a video he goes in to how he actually went about gaming the charts etc... of online music services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Spotify relative to other services

This section is highly misleading. US terrestrial radio mainly pays song writers not "artists", and it pays them decently well. This section should be regarded as a solid lie.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does ayone know if any of the other music services focusing on concerts and/or merch or similar?

<comment><USER16> At KiteBit we recently pivoted to the music market. Selling music, concert tickets & merch.

Music artists obviously have the pain of not getting enough from streaming service. Also physical and regular digital downloads are falling... So there is a cash flow problem in the bands not being in relations with the very opaque majors.

So now KiteBit offers a service for artists/bands who already have a loyal fan base who is willing to pay for the contents they produce. Not just for the sake of the contents put on sale but appealing to the emotional relationship they have with the artists, and using pricing models like the "pay what you want" that improves revenues by 12% goo.gl/N0oOeD

All in all, KiteBit it's like a bandcamp for Pros that can be used to sell music, concert tickets, or link their merch to digital downloads to retain customer loyalty. The trick is that the service wants to be transparent to the audience so that there's no feeling of any middlemen in the buying experience. that's why you won't see any marketplace in the KiteBit's site.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of this company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> spotifyforartists.com

</comment><comment><USER27> I love Spotify. It actually revived my joy in doing anything really. I've kind of grown bored of life, of coding, of anything. Music is the one thing that I am and will always remain passionate about.

I'm Canadian, so getting Spotify running on all my mobile devices and my mac was tricky, especially with Premium, but I got it done.

The ability to support artists, while discovering new ones, and not acquiring the material illegally is crazy awesome. I am discovering new artists day in and day out and it keeps life very exciting for me personally. I even got back into coding.

<comment><USER28> It's great to listen legally, but keep in mind that the support artists receive is very small (all but the most popular musicians receive less than 40 hours of minimum wage from Spotify). If you like a few groups consider buying merchandise or making a donation.

<comment><USER29> Wait, are you saying that artists rely just on Spotify for income? That would be foolhardy. I would think that Spotify would be just one small chunk in a wide portfolio of distribution channels.

Also, artists have generally never been very richly paid on music sales. Touring and merch are where the money's always been.

<comment><USER20> > Wait, are you saying that artists rely just on Spotify for income? That > would be foolhardy.

Well, yes. Since the entire premise of Spotify seems to be that we should pay broadcast royalty rates for a service that replaces recordings entirely, it would indeed be pretty foolish to rely on that.

And in fact, some artists think it's so foolish they've realized its to their advantage not to participate.

> I would think that Spotify would be just one small chunk in a wide portfolio > of distribution channels.

The problem being that once something's available on Spotify (or something like it), the structure of the service eliminates any access-incentive to look for it anywhere else.

> Also, artists have generally never been very richly paid on music sales. > Touring and merch are where the money's always been.

This is pretty different from the history I'm familiar with -- touring supported/drove album sales for a long time, except for certain acts (huge like the Stones, jam-oriented like the Dead or Phish, or nostalgia focused). And people made a _ton_ of money from recordings (though it wasn't always the artists because of gatekeepers).

The reverse is often true now mostly because we entered a transition to a new format with the uptake getting waaay out ahead of the vendors and legit recording sales collapsed (and then, right as we started to see vendors come on board, we had the biggest economic contraction since the great depression).

This isn't an inevitable trend, and revenue from recording sales this year is increasing again this year based largely digital sales increasing faster than physical sales are falling. And _total revenue_ from recordings sales, while much smaller than what it was at its peak around 2000, is actually 50% more than it was at the beginning of the 1990s.

We could yet see another golden age of recorded music. This time better in that digital albums are cheaper _and_ , with a shorter distribution chain, people who make the music are often keeping more.

At least, that's the potential. Unless we decide to go with buffet-streaming services that remove incentives to buy it.

But maybe that's the next step for our culture: if art can't be supported by t-shirts and tchotchkes, it's not art that we should be economically encouraging, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Twist. Rights holders are actually the owners of spotify in 90% of the cases.

<comment><USER31> Can you expand on that?

<comment><USER32> [http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/this-is-quite-possibly- the-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/this-is-quite-possibly-the-spotify- cap-table/) (2009)

If Spotify is worth $4B, that means the labels have made an "extra" ~$600M in addition to the 70% royalty. Over its lifetime so far Spotify has paid out around $1B in royalties, so an extra $600M is pretty significant.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a good C++ unit test framework for a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Don't have a ton of code or test cases yet - just three months into a startup with four developers.
Looking for something relatively lightweight, with a small learning curve, that can keep us honest for the next year or two.  I've used CppUnit in the past.  Didn't hate it.  Wondering if there's something better.
Do you have opinions on this?  Looking for your war stories, whether good, bad, or plain ugly. <comment><USER2> I don't know what special needs a startup has. I've used Catch and been happy with it. I haven't used CppUnit, so I can't compare.

[https://github.com/philsquared/Catch](https://github.com/philsquared/Catch)

Previous HN discussion (with some other suggestions):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8220352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8220352)

and a relevant StackOverflow thread:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/87794/c-unit-testing- fra...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/87794/c-unit-testing-framework)

<comment><USER3> +1 catch.

There is also lest:

[https://github.com/martinmoene/lest](https://github.com/martinmoene/lest)

bandit:

[https://github.com/joakimkarlsson/bandit](https://github.com/joakimkarlsson/bandit)

cpputest:

[https://github.com/cpputest/cpputest](https://github.com/cpputest/cpputest)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoy CppUTest. It was written by James Grenning who is one brilliant engineer if you ask me. He also wrote the fantastic book "Test Driven Development for Embedded C" which I would highly recommend to anyone, even non-embedded developers.

I used CppUTest on a c++ project to test algorithms for image and video manipulation. It worked fantastically, very easy to learn, and it helped test drive and optimize the algorithms. Highly recommended.

Edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> What about gtest? [https://code.google.com/p/googletest/](https://code.google.com/p/googletest/)

<comment><USER6> +1 for gtest, with google mock along side it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am a heavy user of gtest. I like to integrate it with CMake and CTest, then use ctest --verbose in the build and release process, with lib_gtest.a linked against test commands specified for CTest.</comment>


A Postgres Perspective on MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://bonesmoses.org/2016/07/15/pg-phriday-a-postgres-persepctive-on-mongodb/ <comment><USER2> I think the NoSQL trend is something similar to what is going on with programming language trends (in industry, not in academia). Many commonly used languages were strictly typed and static, such as C, C++, and Java. Then, dynamically typed languages became popular because they are easy to use, although they give up a lot of the safety and static analysis capability of the older languages. Let's call that the second phase, and it is exemplified by Ruby and Python. Now, newer languages with type inference are coming out that combine the safety of the older languages with the ease of use of the dynamic languages -- Scala, Go, etc. Let's call that the third phase.

In the database world, we are still in the second phase, which is exemplified by databases such as Mongo, which have started from scratch and thrown out many of the good ideas embodied in older databases. I suppose that the new JSON capabilities of Postgres are an attempt to move database design into the third phase, which combines the ease of use of NoSQL with the many superior qualities of traditional relational databases.

<comment><USER3> My pet theory is that the rise of automated testing was/is a big factor in the rise of dynamic languages.

Test suites guard against most things type safety does, so if you have a test suite anyway, the type safety becomes a net burden.

<comment><USER4> I don't remember much automated testing being done in those early days of PHP, and I don't see how your theory would explain the current trend back towards typed languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > MongoDB is basically a native JavaScript filesystem

That is probably the most apt description of MongoDB I've ever read.

<comment><USER6> Filesystems don't intrisincally support searching the contents of the files to satisfy predicates. And that is the most important part of a database.

I think I understand what the author means by the statement. But technically it doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, technically you could bring grep to your fs instead of having it as a userspace tool, but 90% of the work is on the fs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish the OP had also drawn a comparison between Postgres and Cassandra (which he mentions early on).

Based on the schema he writes at the beginning, it looks as though he works mostly with time-series. My understanding is that Cassandra is particularly well-suited for these types of workloads (definitely more so than MongoDB?). If the write throughput is such that a single server can handle it, how would Postgres compare with Cassandra? What are the distinctions in read-latencies? Storage space?

Perhaps for the next article..?

<comment><USER9> So true, I often see people choose a database without considering pros and cons, they often considering only what they want as a developer to work with or to try and don't consider the nature of the data. Time series data fits the best in Cassandra and some other column-oriented DBs but definitely not in MongoDB.

<comment><USER6> Time series data is actually a great fit for MongoDB.

You create a collection for each measurement, JSON document for each day and then preallocate the fields for each hour/minute/second. With batching you can update 100K documents a second pretty easily off one node. For example: [https://blog.serverdensity.com/using-mongodb-as-a-time- serie...](https://blog.serverdensity.com/using-mongodb-as-a-time-series- database/)

<comment><USER10> I don't like MongoDB as much as the next guy, but can people explain why this comment is downvoted?

<comment><USER11> Because haters gonna hate

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From my experience building and deploying production systems with mongodb the primary benefit is not needing a migration or ORM framework.

\- Deployments get much simpler when migrations for additive changes are unnecessary. Hundreds of deployments a week!

\- JSON queries easy to pass around and decorate in application code. Hydration from a dictionary is straightforward. Combined, an ORM isn't really necessary.

<comment><USER13> >primary benefit is not needing a migration or ORM framework

You don't need an ORM, but they are handy. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be an issue to load rows from a RDBMS, using a language like Python, as a dictionary, and just decorate the snot out of that dictionary, to make it look like an object.

Anyway, regarding migrations, I sort of agree. Migrations can be terrifying and slow things, but at least you're allow to make certain assumptions about your data afterwards. Assumptions like "this field will always be there".

With MongoDB, and any other NoSQL database I've used, you need to handle your "migrations" in the application code. So now you have block of code that checks if a given attribute exists in your JSON document.

It's not necessarily a problem, but it is something you need to consider. Personally I much prefer RDBMS, because I actually like SQL and the ability to make ad hoc queries easily. If JavaScript is advertised as the query language for a database I'm not terribly interested, unless the pay off is extremely high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is NoSQL really all that much different than relational? At the end of the day isn't a collection pretty much like a table? And you have to tie two collections together with a common ID (ie, join)?

NoSQL is less rigid but your code pretty much has to be as rigid, right?

<comment><USER15> My experience says that the issue is not differences, but bad architectural decisions. Most applications out there are glorified CRUDs. They are perfectly serviced by SQL databases. NoSQL fits a smaller set of systems whose scope is mostly passing data around. PostgreSQL now supports JSON as a datatype and allows querying it. Works beautifully. No need for MongoDb at all.

<comment><USER16> My understanding, which is admittedly minimal, is that MongoDB provides some conveniences around partitioning and distributing your dataset that Postgres does not without additional work. Simply supporting JSON accommodates MongoDB's approach to schemas (not having them; er, pushing constraints to application code), but doesn't address the distribution concern.

How well does MongoDB support this need, and how hard is it to achieve equivalent results with Postgres? What are the drawbacks?

<comment><USER17> Side note: you can have constraints, `check`s, indexes and triggers on `json` and `jsonb` columns in Postgres. In fact, you can have everything other data types have. So "no schema" or "moving schema to app level" doesn't have to be the case, when using PG.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. With Postgres, you can add CHECK constraints to enforce specific keys, with any level of nesting desired. So an INSERT could reject a document for having missing fields, fields of improper type, etc. It all depends on how strict you want to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > While it's in our best interests to keep similar documents restricted to > certain collections, there's no kind of constraint that enforces this.

However, if you need such a thing, there's always things such as Mongoose[1] that can do this trivially for you.

[1] [https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose](https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose)

<comment><USER17> But you still can insert non-consitent data into the database with CLI, or otherwise. And `default` values defined inside Mongoose is no good when filtering or searching documents.

There are plenty more problems with emulating schema in app code (Mongoose or anything else), so it's not that trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm building a Node.js app where I was thinking of using MongoDB but I'm reconsidering it after reading the comments here.

The database's only job is to keep persistence between server restarts. On server start I fetch the a collection from the database and populate a variable with it, which I use for any direct access.

When a user updates something it will update the variable as well as updating the collection in the database.

Something like this:

        var foo = readFromDB();

        socket.on('connection', function() {
            this.emit(foo);
        });

        socket.on('update', function(data) {
            foo[data.id] = data.val;

            updateDB(data.id, data.val);
        });

(In my real application each collection has sub-arrays etc and not just key- value like in the example.)

What should I use instead of MongoDB for this? Or is my approach fundamentally flawed?

<comment><USER21> What's wrong with using a plain file?

<comment><USER20> It would probably work but in my real application it's a bit more complicated since I only want to update a sub-array of the document, like this: _collection[ 'some_identifier']['items'][3] = 123_.

I guess using a plain file would mean I have to overwrite everything on each write which seems wasteful.

<comment><USER21> Sure, it depends on your use case though. For infrequent updates I don't think it's wasteful to just overwrite the file, it seems less wasteful to me than running a whole database. But it all depends on your setup :)

Also I think updating a sub array in a collection triggers a whole write to that collection in mongodb. In any case I would avoid mongodb if you can, it seems redis might be a better fit for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good to see an article with a fair comparison and not just "anything is worse than PostgreSQL" mentality

<comment><USER17> Article is more an introduction of Mongo to Postgres users, rather than comparison.

And yeah, anything's better than Mongo :)

<comment><USER22> I note the smillie but could you actually expand on that comment for someone who is only really familiar with relational databases?

I've recently become interested in using PouchDB (a CounchDB implementation) for syncing offline content between a user's browser and server where the content is based on a set of fixed documents. I believe that MongoDB can provide similar replication tricks. Once on the server I would expect to extract the data from the documents into a relational warehouse database (probably PostgreSQL as it's one of the databases I know best).

A document store _seems_ like the right tool for the job but could expand on why something like Mongo or Couch is a bad idea for situations where you're just storing/syncing documents?

<comment><USER17> > why something like Mongo or Couch is a bad idea

Couch is fine, other NoSQL is fine. It's just Mongo I don't like:

\- weak, if any, guarantees on data consistency and safety;

\- poor API. If you need anything more complicated than `findOne`, there are at least 3 unrelated syntaxes with major differences that are not compatible;

\- performance is not what marketing team says it is. Even at home JSON turf, Postgres is pretty comparable.

If you have data and queries that will benefit from document store, go for it. But don't choose only based on marketing.

There are many more rant on the web, I like this one:

[http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should- ne...](http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever- ever-use-mongodb/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One missing point Is the scalability. Postgres is awesome until you need to setup a db cluster.

<comment><USER24> Very few organizations in the world truly need to scale out their database. Their problem is usually that of a bad design. For those that need to scale out, NoSQL is not a magic solution either. The scaling out solution pretty much these days for SQL database is replication, sharding and partitioning tables. Postgres does these very well.

<comment><USER6> You might want to learn a bit about "big data".

Almost every major organisation will have a big data analytics program doing feature extraction, modelling, machine learning etc. Usually this starts with Hadoop/Spark with data in HDFS but then a point comes when you want this in a database.

PostgreSQL is awful at this which is why almost no uses it in this space. Apart from the lack of native drivers it is simply too difficult to do basic clustering. And the fact that it isn't built into the product doesn't give you a lot of confidence that it is (a) going to work and (b) is going to be supported.

And yes for those that scale out NoSQL is a magic solution. That's why they are so popular. I can deploy a 40 node Cassandra cluster in 30 mins and guarantee it works. Likewise MongoDB replica sets are ridiculously easy.

<comment><USER25> Maybe you could just design your data a bit better with smaller data types, and keep it all one one machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why does it take 110ms for Postgres to count the rows in a table? That seems like an insanely long time.

<comment><USER27> I would guess two issues:

1\. In many cases, there is a ~30ms floor on operations if a server is non- local. That's true of virtually all services on AWS -- whether SQS, SNS, SES, RDS (MySQL/PostgreSQL), etc.

2\. In many cases, rows are missing. A table has a million rows. Ten are deleted. It's not compacted. So it's not a simple size lookup. A lot of this depends on how the data is stored/indexed. That's something which is naively pretty slow, but easily optimized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I tried to scale Postgres few months ago but I found that it is quite tedious.

<comment><USER29> > I tried to scale Postgres few months ago but I found that it is quite > tedious.

If your application is big enough that you really need to scale postgres, I assure you, you will have a whole _lot_ of tedious problems - not just sharding.</comment></comment>