Firefox 41 will use less memory when running AdBlock Plus - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-will-use-less-memory-when-running-adblock-plus/ <comment><USER2> This is good but do not use Adblock Plus. Use µBlock. Adblock Plus let's through some 'kosher' ads. If that's acceptable to you, all good. If you want no ads whatsoever, use µBlock.

It works out of the box and blocks everything. Uses even less resources that any other alternative.

Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en)

Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I like to support sites like reddit that vet their ads to eliminate the obnoxious ones. In an ideal world, I'd like the speed/memory usage of µBlock with the ability to enable the 'kosher' ads. When 41 goes to stable I'll re- enable ABP.

<comment><USER4> All ads are obnoxious. Abp charges for the privilege of allowing ads through.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a fan too. But I come to realize that it can be an easy way to support sites you like without having to spend one penny, just by disabling your adblocker. If there are companies willing to give money to websites I like by displaying little images that I won't even look at - so be it.

<comment><USER4> Ads work even for if not especially for those who think they don't. I'd rather support people by paying for their work directly instead of going through middle ad-men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.ht...](http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html) \- the page referenced in the article that shows extreme AdBlock overhead - Chrome just chokes on it for a long time - the tab uses 1.7GB of memory while it is still loading!

With uBlock and FF 38 - the page load completes faster and only about 850MB memory is used in total!

Chrome people should _really_ be doing something about the memory and battery usage on the desktop. It's getting ridiculous.

Also I wonder how things such as OS X's Compressed Memory feature affect this in real life. I mean without the fix, the OS will notice the duplicated, in- memory style sheets and compress them to reduce memory usage and you should not see much of an improvement due to this patch on platforms like OS X that implement memory compression.

(Looking at activity monitor with FF loading the vim color scheme test shows 0MB Compressed Mem for FF - not sure if FF opts out or if there simply isn't enough memory pressure for the OS to start compressing FF's mem.)

<comment><USER7> > Chrome just chokes on it for a long time - the tab uses 1.7GB of memory > while it is still loading!

Chrome 43.0.2357.130 m (64-bit) on Windows 8.1 here, takes 787.6 MB for me (with uBlock). If I open an Incognito window (i.e. no extensions) it takes 109 MB. Not sure where this discrepancy is coming from. Chrome's responsive the whole time.

[http://i.imgur.com/QFG2ryq.png](http://i.imgur.com/QFG2ryq.png)

<comment><USER8> The discrepancy is courtesy of the ad blocker extension.

<comment><USER6> Chrome extensions run in their own process which means the memory usage is reported separately for each tab and extension. IOW the memory usage for the tab is that of Chrome 100%.

<comment><USER7> I believe (most) ad blockers work by changing the DOM of each tab. They inject their own CSS to hide elements. The the stylesheets will be processed in the tab's process, not the extension's. This VIM page would be quite heavy on elements that need styling by CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 14 years old bug fixed. Congratulations! (I'm not sarcastic - it's always good when such bugs are fixed).

<comment><USER10> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would love to have a way to accept kosher ads with ublock origin (but not ads that have been whitelisted by paying ABP). It would be great if there was a transparent community driven ad whitelist.

I want to support content creators but I also do not want to have to deal with the more obnoxious ads (or flash ads or animated ads and so on). I currently support a few creators with patreon but that's only limited to a few.

<comment><USER12> How about non-ad ways to interact with the right communities, like a corresponding subreddit? To me that sounds more reasonable, since that way you increase the communication and your own awareness, but don't support spamming people with information they haven't requested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a convert to using "the great suspender" in chrome and the amount of memory it consumes for me has dropped dramatically. The tradeoff is waiting for a page to reload when I focus the tab, but it let's me keep dozens of tabs "open" at once, for long periods of time, without annihilating my system memory.

Combined with µBlock and click to activate plugins etc. Chrome almost behaves now.

<comment><USER14> Great Suspender + Spaces (from the same guy) makes Chrome usable again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm always shocked at the age of some really important bugs. Large optimization potentials of many public / well used / open source systems have been noted for many years.

<comment><USER16> Consider that the web has changed a lot over the past 14 years. Back when this bug was filed, it was much less common to have many tabs open, and those tabs would have contained many fewer documents on average. So even if ABP had existed back then, the optimization potential would have been much smaller.

<comment><USER17> Tabs were introduced to Phoenix/Firefox in September 2002, so 14 years ago there were no tabs :-)

Multiple windows, sure, but the win98/2000/xp style of window management wasn't conductive to having 100 open windows, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can finally go back to ABP!

Firefox used to crash a lot, and freeze a lot back when I was using ABP. ublock has never worked as well for me, I also dislike the element selector. Sometimes I want more than blocked something being displayed, like blocking a script. And ABP allowed that easier, that's something I miss.

<comment><USER19> yeah, uBlock Origin makes it a tiny little bit hard to undo what you've block, I find it easier by bookmarking the below which opens the settings page & remove the most recent lines you added / blocked

chrome://ublock0/content/dashboard.html

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As Chrome gets more and more bloated and slow, I think more and more people will switch (back) to Firefox

<comment> mike-cardwell I'd wager the majority of Chrome users are simply normal people who had it shoved in their face when using Google web properties with Internet Explorer. These people are not aware of Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone here prefer uBlock over UBlock Origin? I tried both and stuck with Origin since something like this should be relatively easy to reach "feature complete" status, thus go into pure maintenance mode. Either are a big step up from ABP.

<comment><USER22> If you compare their repo activity, it seems to suggest that the actual development happens at origin.

Origin: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors)

Nonorigin: [https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> First, I believe everyone should be using uBlock (Origin) [1] anyways. Second, I'm looking forward to seeing how Firefox's built-in tracking protection will evolve[2]. Also, should be interesting to see how Safari's new blocking framework changes the game.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

[2] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection- fir...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-firefox)

<comment><USER24> I'm also curious to see how things evolve with the countermeasures: [http://www.businessinsider.com/former-google-exec- launches-s...](http://www.businessinsider.com/former-google-exec-launches- sourcepoint-with-10-million-series-a-funding-2015-6/) (a terrible idea imho).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Safari's new approach of using a built in (natively compiled) rules engine to block content seems more and more to be the best option. But it's also the kind of option you'd only see from a vendor who doesn't make any money from ads (Apple... and possibly MS).

<comment><USER26> What doesn't prevent these vendors to advertise their own products. Or make money by letting others pay. Apple, MS and {{any_big_company}} do everything that generates revenue. Even Mozilla has started to sell data and advertising space in Firefox. I don't care where the spam is coming from. And no Mozilla, I will certainly never book my next holiday trip on booking.com.

<comment><USER27> Advertising space, not data. Nobody is tracking you through the new tab page. Mozilla just populates it with some default ads (which can be removed or replaced with your own new tab customizations)

<comment><USER28> Actually Mozilla analyzes and stores the user's surfing data to allow it's customers to direct ads to the user's preferences. I actually don't understand why so few seem to bother. I think it's a quite big deal. Same with these telefonica chat thing.

<comment><USER27> Source?

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-tiles-work- firef...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-tiles-work- firefox#w_what-data-is-being-collected-and-why)

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tiles/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/tiles/)

Regular telemetry data. Not surfing data. And certainly not sold.

Hello doesn't collect data passively either; using the video chat can of course lead to data collection though I doubt it does (but you would have to assume that can happen for any non peer-to-peer service of this kind since there will always be a server side component which you can't verify)

Stop spreading FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a Chrome or Firefox equivalent to IE's "Personalized Tracking Protection List"? In short it tracks the resources loaded by sites you visit and if they show up on more than a configurable number of sites they get blocked. Basically, it only blocks what actually could be tracking you. I would love to have that functionality in Chrome or Firefox, especially if the tracking list could survive a reinstall (IE's cannot).

<comment><USER30> AFAIK EFF's Privacy Badger uses a similar mechanism to what you described.

<comment><USER29> Perfect! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not clear to me from reading the article, if the headline is correct. From what I understand (non-native speaker) with the mentioned fix ABP uses less memory than last year without that fix. But does it make FF use less RAM in general, compared with FF with fix but without ABP? That's how I understand the headline, ABP makes you save RAM compared to using FF without ABP. But that's not how I understand the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmm, I see the ambiguity. It's meant to mean that "the combination of Firefox + AdBlock Plus will use less memory than it did previously", _not_ "Firefox + AdBlock Plus will use less memory than Firefox alone".

The fix will also reduce the memory usage of Firefox when used without AdBlock Plus, but the difference will be small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fastmail web interface users + ABP|ABE|uBlock users:

When I have any of these three blockers installed, and then use mail composition on the Fastmail tab, the page jumps around while I type. Eventually the line that I'm typing has scrolled itself down to the bottom of the window, and sometimes even jumps between below the window and just enough above the bottom.

Anyone seen that?

<comment><USER32> Fastmail user here. Firefox + ABE + EFF Privacy Badger, no problem.

Fastmail's web interface doesn't even have any blockable items once you log in.

<comment><USER31> Hrmph.

I'm only as far as noticing, uninstalling whichever, going "huh," reinstalling and going "feh."

<comment><USER32> Do you still have issues if you disable AdBlock on fastmail.com? There shouldn't be any ads on that domain anyway.

<comment><USER31> Hmm, now I can't reliably reproduce, so I don't know if disabling on fm has any effect. I'll have to wait for it to happen again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >> Firefox 41 Developer Edition is scheduled to be released in the next day or two.

</comment><comment><USER34> What about µBlock?

<comment><USER10> µBlock does not use the same technique of creating a style sheet and inserting it into all loaded documents, so the type of sharing done as part of this work does not help µBlock.

<comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure it does according to this wikipage[0]. It may not load _all_ the rules into every page, but it definitely does create a stylesheet and inject it into the page.

[0]: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cosmetic-filtering- in...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cosmetic-filtering- in-%C2%B5Block:-version-0.4.0.0-update)

<comment><USER10> I can't see where on that page it talks about using style sheets. Last week I searched the µBlock sources for use of the nsIStyleSheetService, which is Gecko's internal interface for adding style sheets without manipulating individual documents, and the only use of that interface is for adding css/legacy-toolbar-button.css, which I assume is for some UI.

<comment><USER35> So, this might be a case of me assuming too much, but I basically read every instance of _cosmetic filters_ basically as _css styles_. There are a couple CSS files in the git repository that have "filter" in their names[0], but yeah I can't actually be 100% certain at a glance that they're using CSS and not manipulating the DOM with JS.

[0]: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/src/css](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/src/css)

<comment><USER10> I just did some poking around, and it looks like uBlock does insert a couple of <style> elements into the document. I'm not sure if this is how all style- based blocking is done in uBlock, but since these are document-level style sheets, they are not shared like user agent-level sheets are. (We will in the future be investigating whether we can share more data between common document-level style sheets across multiple documents, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's good that this is fixed but why is it taking 14 years to fix bugs?

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone compared memory usage when using a hosts file to block ads?

</comment><comment><USER38> 1\. Why not start with 1 or 2 decent host files? [http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm)

2\. What is bad about ghostery?

<comment><USER39> 1\. Hosts blocking is very broad. Good tracking-/ad-blocking is granular.

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How much did ABP pay Mozilla?

<comment><USER41> Conspiracy theorist much? Mozilla knows that a significant portion of their userbase uses ad blockers and complains about the high resource usage. They added a cool feature today that would reduce that usage, resulting in a better experience for their users. But you feel someone needed to pay them?</comment></comment>


Pybind11 v2.0.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pybind/pybind11/tree/v2.0 <comment><AUTHOR> The latest release wraps up ~5 months of work and includes support for PyPy, multiple inheritance, and extensive C++ bindings for NumPy arrays.

A detailed changelog is available here: [http://pybind11.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changelog.html](http://pybind11.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changelog.html)</comment>


Erlang and High-Scale System Software   - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/17/ErlangAndHighSaleSystemSoftware.aspx

<comment><USER2> what is it with the constant talk of scalability these days? scalability isn't to do with a certain language or platform, it's just due to good efficient design.

<comment><USER3> Some languages and platforms are designed with scalability in mind. Erlang forces you to write code in terms of message passing between shared-nothing processes, which means that when you need to scale to multiple cores / machines your code is already designed to do so. Google AppEngine severely restricts the kind of operations you can perform (no File I/O, a persistence engine that doesn't even support aggregate queries) which means that you are forced to design your application in a way that scales.

<comment><USER2> I'm of the opinion that languages/platforms shouldn't force programmers to do things. It should be the other way around.

<comment><USER4> Generally, it is. Just wording / thinking of it the wrong way.

New languages and tools arise because of need. Therefore, if you feel forced or uncomfortable with your current tools & languages, use different ones.

People who feel forced and don't understand the particular programming model of Erlang shouldn't be using it. That simple. Google App Engine... that's another story...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you? - <AUTHOR> https://www.popsci.com/moderate-drinking-benefits-risks <comment><USER3> 1\. The _best evidence_ that there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption is the Mendelian randomization (MR) by Holmes et al from 2014 [1]. I believe that the more recent paper making such claims is no better than the usual observational studies. But the MR paper is convincing to me. The risks for mild drinking appear to be low enough that I don't abstain, and I am happy to tell my patients about my thought process.

2\. While we like to claim that a study randomizing people to alcohol wouldn't be ethical, pre-2014 I don't think that would have been true. I think there was enough equipoise. Post-2014, I would need to see some strong counter- evidence to make me think there is equipoise once again.

3\. The environment changes. A trial came out last week showing that ASA may be harmful for older healthy people [2]. This probably reflects that our bloodstream is no longer nicotine-filled, etc., so the heart attack risk is low enough that the bleeding risk may outweigh it. There may be something about alcohol that was helpful in the 1950s that is no longer so today, due to these environmental changes.

1 = (Free full link): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091648/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091648/)

2 = [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800722?query=fe...](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800722?query=featured_home)

<comment><USER4> Thank you very much for that first link. It seems to be severely under- publicised considering the huge amount of exposure that the topic gets.

Do you happen to know if rs1229984 is linked to any particular group that could make this result problematic? I noticed that the paper mentions that "There was also some evidence for a difference in years of education, and, while the size of the effect was small, this requires further investigation." That sounds like a decent-sized red flag.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there is almost always stratification across populations for any chosen marker. You can check out gnomAD for this SNP: [http://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/4-100239319-T-C](http://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/4-100239319-T-C)

Take a look at the population frequencies on the right. While the minor allele is infrequent in Europeans, it is extremely common in East Asians, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> another-cuppa Obviously I can't say anything about my own longevity, but over the past few years my alcohol consumption has decreased to virtually zero and I've never felt better. I was never a big drinker, but I would semi-regularly go out and drink a few pints of beer or have wine with dinner. I never intended to cut down on alcohol, but my lifestyle changed, I stopped going out so much, and the drinking went with it. I would still drink maybe once a month, but I've realised that it makes me feel bad every time, so I now completely abstain.

The interesting thing is how people react to it. For some reason you are expected to provide a reason for why you don't drink. I don't smoke either but nobody asks me why. I've noticed also that it makes people uncomfortable if you're not drinking. When I do go out now I drink diet soft drinks so that I don't get constantly asked why I don't have a drink.

I foresee a shift in cultural views towards alcohol much like the shift with respect to tobacco of last century. I wonder if the USA and UK will again lead the way with this leaving much of continental Europe behind.

<comment><USER5> Unless you were getting wasted it's quite unusual for a few drinks to make you feel bad.

Also, there is more and more a _decent_ selection of <0.5% alcohol beers - <USER2> find this the easiest way to not get strange looks when at a drinking occasion.

But then again, maybe the point of drinking together is it provides some kind of bonding effect, being a shared vice. It makes it harder to lie and shows you value others more than your own health (relatively).

<comment><USER6> How do you define quite unusual? I'm not East Asian, but I most often get symptoms similar to Alcohol Flush Reaction with even only a single drink. I often find a single beer strong. I've never been able to figure out why sometimes I'll get a headache after a single beer.

"Approximately 36% of East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) show characteristic physiological responses to drinking alcohol that includes facial flushing, nausea, headaches and a fast heart rate."

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

<comment><USER7> Diabetes, poor liver and/or kidney function, similar genetic mutation, etc. There are a host of reasons, I would bring it up with your physician, as they may have more insight than a psudoanonymous commenter.

<comment><USER8> It could be some other cause too. A couple of years ago I started noticing that one or two beers would make me almost drunk and to feel terrible the next morning. I attributed it to aging (36) but I also noticed none of my friends had the same problem.

Later, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and after daily treatment now drinking a few beers is completely ok.

I don't understand what the relationship between those two things are. I would have never imagined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "But if the same 100,000 people drank nothing at all, 914 would still have one of those same problems. That's only 4 more people per year (per 100,000) who will have a problem that's attributable to alcohol—that's tiny. But it's also not zero." ...and it's also far too little to be statistically significant.

Moreover, nutritional studies of any kind have been infamously bad at giving reliable information. The advice from one decade is almost routinely found in the next to be invalid, or even the opposite of the truth. That's for things like carbohydrates, about which there were few religious injunctions or political polarization. For a topic with as much emotional and political baggage as alcohol, I find it unlikely to be any better. Whatever your decision about alcohol, I think the reliability of the science (pro- or anti-) is just not sufficient to help you make your decision.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems?

I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but my perception as a layman is that there is some willful ignorance or absence of rigor. I realize this is perhaps too harsh a statement; I'm just trying get my point across.

<comment><USER11> >correlation without any strongly proven causality

How would one really prove causality or does it even matter. When I think of science, I try to think of it like how I think of physics, where we create a model that best describes the evidence but which doesn't have any guarantee of being how things really work.

Take Newtonian gravity. It is a pretty good model that describes a lot of basic interactions. Given a state at a given moment in time, it lets us determine things going forward or backwards (though for more complex physics, backwards stops working because of assumptions and estimates in the model). But at the same time, it is wrong. More complex physics shows there is a model that fits even more experimental data which contradicts what we thought was happening in the Newtonian model. Mass doesn't attract mass. Mass bends space time and impacts objects traveling through it in such a way that it appears mass attracts mass (though even this may end up being wrong and something else entirely is at play).

So, is it really important to describe why a ball falls to the ground when I release it, or is it good enough to have a system that describes the interactions enough that I can apply it to problems? If I solve a problem, say what angle and what speed I need to throw a ball to get over fence, does it really matter if I think the ball falls back to earth because mass attracts mass or because mass bends spacetime? Or is it just important for my equations to be accurate enough that any error is less than what is innate in applying the solution to real life (measuring the exact height of the fence, throwing at an exact angle).

What does applying a similar mind set in something dealing with vastly more complicated systems, such as in medicine, looks like?

<comment><USER12> _> So, is it really important to describe why a ball falls to the ground when I release it, or is it good enough to have a system that describes the interactions enough that I can apply it to problems?... does it really matter if I think the ball falls back to earth because mass attracts mass or because mass bends spacetime?_

I think you answer this question in your own post. The answer depends entirely on your goals.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful".

If all we ever wanted to do was shoot cannon balls over/into walls accurately, then we probably would've never bothered inventing modern physics.

But we did want to do other things, so we built better models. It's worth noting that some of those things we wanted to do were more philosophical than others, e.g., engineering ("put satellites into orbit"), explaining empirical observations that seem important ("explain how electricity really works") and philosophical ("understand the nature of reality") are all answers to the question "what are you goals?" that have inspired progress toward better models in physics.

 _> What does applying a similar mind set in something dealing with vastly more complicated systems, such as in medicine, looks like?_

It takes a certain amount of philosophical sophistication to realize that even the most perfect model is still a model and to then reason through what that entails -- epistemologically -- for less perfect models and for the entire scientific enterprise.

<comment><USER11> >what are you goals?

I'm personally a fan of the 'make a better model to have a better model and let someone else figure out the application' model, but that one is harder to get funding for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cache link: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:73LY6v...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:73LY6vG7EDcJ:https://www.popsci.com/moderate- drinking-benefits-risks+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=en)

(I am shown a consent dialog that does not work.)

<comment><USER14> For me it works only after enabling JS and disabling adblocking, but the contents is appalling:

> To continue enjoying the free content made available to you on this website, > you must indicate that you understand and accept Bonnier Corp.'s use of > cookies by selecting the "Allow all cookies" button below.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about the loss of quality of life from not drinking?

Are those things ever taken into account?

We could a nutritionally determined portion of specific foods every day, sit at home to avoid accidents outside, get out enough for the required sunlight, and exercise the optimal around.

While it's good to know whether a "glass of wine" is good or not, it bad when such research is used to cut off any bad-for-us enjoyment we get.

Besides, it's a bunch of factors which makes the whole "one glass of wine is harmful" a moot point if you can take care of the rest (and why not start with them?).

In the "blue zone" of Icaria for example, one of the places in the globe where people live the most, people regularly drink several glasses of wine per meal and have been doing so for millennia. Yet, there they are regularly at 90+ and 100+. Then again, they're stress free, sleep whenever they feel like (no really, they'll casually open their shops at 2pm or at 3am if they feel like it), and don't eat junk food.

</comment><comment><USER16> Glass of wine in the night is a very bad habit and you don't need a large scale study to prove it. If you have a watch that can track your sleep cycle, you will see that your deep sleep doesn't start until much later if you consuming alcohol before going to sleep. In other words, a glass of wine might make you feel relaxed but it robes you from your deep sleep.

<comment><USER17> _If you have a watch that can track your sleep cycle, you will see that your deep sleep doesn 't start until much later if you consuming alcohol before going to sleep._

Maybe that's good.

<comment><USER5> That seems ridiculous but indeed, we shouldn't make assumptions. We have to measure assumed negative effects, like impaired cognition. Or maybe that's good too.

<comment><USER17> Agree. It speaks to the broader point that studies in fields like this- with so many degrees of freedom, are _hard_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's why I drink what I want and I eat what I want. I stopped caring about studies changing each year. Also, I'd very much prefer to die earlier from a heart attack than live longer and die from Alzheimer's.

</comment><comment><USER19> Alcohol consumption and our attitudes towards it, is pretty much the result of marketing, movies and shows. We are literally made consumers of literal poison. Has anyone paid attention to recent WHO report that 5% of all deaths are due to alcohol, number has high as 23% in 20 somethings.

<comment><USER20> Humans have been making alcohol since prehistory. There are plenty of breweries, distilleries, and vineyards in Europe and Asia that have been continuously active for centuries.

<comment><USER19> True and it was never mass consumed and celebrated to this extent. Current situation is that despite the facts and knowledge, social pressure makes people drink. _Despite the facts_.

The facts are overwhelming and we shouldn't just keep consuming alcohol because _muah cultur_. Many alcoholics end up causing traffic accidents and require lots of state support in other ways. Just walk into ED on any Saturday/Friday night. I have done that

<comment><USER21> Alcohol was consumed en mass more than it is now. Little kids would regularly drink. Often alcohol was drank instead of water for sanitation reasons. It's been a huge part of nearly every culture for thousands of years.

<comment><USER19> In that case we need to give up on a previous era bad habit as there's overwhelming evidence that it's bad

<comment><USER22> You seem somewhat unperturbed that the entire crux of your original argument was faulty... maybe time for an update on your priors? Don't mean to sound unfriendly :)

<comment><USER19> Unperturbed because I know the endgame on this :). World without alcohol is a better world. The arguments about the past. I can list down counter arguments. But that's not the point. People often respond with emotions about alcohol consumption. Media brainwashing has done its job well.

<comment><USER21> > World without alcohol is a better world.

Not for me. I truly enjoy a good drink with or without friends. It's possible to drink in moderation and enjoy yourself.

> Media brainwashing has done its job well.

Again, _heavy_ drinking was extremely common well before mass media. I don't think you can pin this particular issue on them.

<comment><USER19> You are ignoring the fact that our lifestyles have changed completely. We don't work in the fields and at mercy of cold

<comment><USER21> How am I ignoring that? I'm saying I actually like a drink now and then. Honestly, your argument seems all over the place.

<comment><USER19> I am happy to coherently type my argument.

Alcohol consumption in the past was necessity because of cold climate and manual labor. Alcohol is made from ethanol is made from sugarcane and is extremely calories rich. 100 gm beer contains 43 calories. One can contains 154 calories

It was quite fine in the past as most of the calories were burned due to harsh living conditions.

Fast forward to 21st century. We are hardly exposed to extreme cold. We live in extremely protected environments. From temperature controlled office to car to home. But we haven't changed our drinking habits to reflect that.

Add to that mass media consumption due to profits. We have an epedicmic which can easily be prevented. 5% of all deaths are due to alcohol.

Just visit ED of any hospital on Saturday night if you want to see the ills for yourself

<comment><USER21> No doubt alcoholism is bad and shouldn't be encouraged. But there's a _huge_ difference between ending up in the ER and having a craft beer on a Friday after work (and everything in between).

You are discounting the positive psychological benefits that can be attributed to alcohol. Even if it really is bad to ever drink, _ever_ , it's not like you're going to instantly keel over and die, it's a very subtle effect if it's there at all. People will weigh that risk against the benefits they get from drinking and act accordingly.

One could say that a lot of these "soft limits" are already in place due to humanity's long relationship with alcohol. It's already not seen as a good thing to get black out drunk for instance...

<comment><USER19> Don't get me wrong. Personal choice precedes everything. I do think however that there's lack of information spread. And profit seeking encourage drinking and discount the ill effects.

Facts weigh against alcohol consumption and I hope people choose their, societal and environmental health

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This same reasoning was in Bad Science by Ben Goldacre 10 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER24> If anyone's interested, I recently built a free and open source¹ drink tracking app for iOS called Good Spirits: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/good- spirits/id1434237439?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/good- spirits/id1434237439?mt=8)

You set a weekly limit and the app tells you when you're getting too close. Features Untappd integration, HealthKit calorie syncing, and various charts and stats of your drinking over the past year. Figured I'd build it after reading numerous articles like this and deciding that 100g/week was the optimal risk/reward point for my health.

¹ [https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits](https://github.com/archagon/good- spirits)

</comment><comment><USER25> There has been a rather disturbing post-2000 neo-puritan thing going on for a while now, shaming people for purely personal choices, such as eating meat, smoking, drinking alcohol, enjoying cannabis in various forms, and generally acting in ways that are "impure".

Sure, banning smoking in restaurants makes sense, as it actively ruins the experience for other people. But this whole vegan teetotaler thing is getting extremely aggravating.

Shaming people for enjoying alcohol responsibly is just as bad as shaming people for choosing to not drink. Both groups of shamers need to cut it the hell out.

</comment><comment><USER26> That page was nearly unreadable in Chrome on my phone due to bizarre scrolling ads everywhere and eventually crashed and died. A pity, I was learning a lot.

<comment><USER27> Same on mobile Safari. On page load it immediately scrolled halfway down the article and covered up half the screen with a "trending articles" popover whose assets — including the dismiss button — failed to load.

Seriously, does anybody in publishing actually visit their own sites? I see UX like this and all I can think is, "gee, somebody got _paid_ to make this?"

Edit: I see from another comment that the scrolling was (partly) a result of the link being to an anchor tag. I stand by the rest of my point, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've often felt that there was something sketchy about meta-analysis,...

" _But as the headline-generating study in The Lancet notes, "Until recently, most meta-analyses of alcohol consumption have not controlled for the composition of the reference category," and that "subsequently, assessments of harm relying on these studies have been biased."_ "

...but overall systemic bias wasn't what I was thinking of.

</comment><comment><USER29> Because the studies that looked at it didn't control for wealth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah that's an obvious one. Having unrelated health problems is a more important confunder (i.e. people with health problems, or old, or mentally ill, are mole likely to not drink).

<comment><USER30> People with health problems or mentally ill are more likely not to drink? That seems false. Any sources? I found [1] that suggests comorbidity.

[1] [https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://...](https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/15771/1/cheers_report%255B1%255D.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj90bDmsNHdAhUFDuwKHauYBckQFjAMegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw3NxmGCkmEurvp_foYKyvq8)

<comment><USER31> People with health problems are told by their doctors to stop drinking alcohol.

From TFA:

"An analysis from 2007 by an international group of alcohol epidemiologists and addiction researchers, published in Annals of Epidemiology, notes that "as people progress into late middle and old age, their consumption of alcohol declines in tandem with ill health, frailty, dementia, and/or use of medications." That decline means that, as people become less well—even if they're not elderly—they will also tend to stop drinking."

<comment><USER30> I might have been too subtle since you TFA so nicely.

The article points to adverse health related events that cause abstainment. Clear and good the AoE-article works that out.

I however point out that it's pretty clear within the drinking categories you have effects that go in tandem with other illnesses as well (like self- medicating with alcohol for psychological issues).

So the whole argument they propose should at least be carried out to its full, working both ways. You've got illnesses moving people into abstainment and illnesses moving people into moderate or high alcohol usuage. The only way to control this is to use changes in comorbidity over time as a factor.

TBH the scientists in the underlying article write this down as an issue as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Popular science. It answers its own question in the name of the publication.

Not the best way to get your ad revenue up.

</comment><comment><USER33> Link is to page 2 of the article (in case you wonder why you ended up in the middle). Maybe someone can update it?

<comment><USER34> Updated! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> L-ornithine L-aspartate pill can flush out excess alcohol from body

<comment><USER7> They increase urea, which lowers blood ammonia. I have never heard of using LOLA for alcohol, but seems possible. Got any links, and rurthermore, how this would be useful in this context?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> because more people are becoming alcoholics and the penalties for a DWI are getting harsher. bottom line is... if you think you have a problem, you already have a problem. Get help and get help now before you hurt someone (you don't want this on your conscience... trust me). Go to AA, NA, a therapist, a doctor, rehab, a detox, doesn't matter, open up and tell someone you have a problem and get the help you need before you destroy your life or someone elses.

[https://www.aa.org/](https://www.aa.org/)

[https://www.na.org/](https://www.na.org/)

<comment><USER37> > because more people are becoming alcoholics

Do you have a source for this claim, which both does a good job of defining a measurement schema for alcoholism and also shows convincingly that it is on the incline?

Do you also have a source for the claim that this particular increase is the reason (or even a contributing factor) to the apparent decline in correlation between moderate wine consumption and positive health outcomes?

> if you think you have a problem, you already have a problem

Now this just seems like toxic thinking to me. Plenty of thoughtful, responsible people continually ask themselves whether they are experiencing various problems in life, and sometimes the answer really is "no."

> Go to AA, NA, a therapist, a doctor, rehab, a detox, doesn't matter

Really? It _doesn 't matter_?

Your links at the end of your comment are only to AA and NA. Can you explain what aspects of these programs are preferable to you?

I hope that my comment isn't minimizing the issues of drug abuse (including alcoholism) in our culture - I totally respect that these are serious issues with many grave outcomes. I just want to be sure that we're discussing them in a way that is... well, sober.

Anyway, even if you don't have answers to the above questions, your perspective is welcome IMO.

<comment><USER38> This study[1] purports that alcoholism doubled during the decade after the turn of the millenium. It also has a concrete criteria for what they consider alcoholism.

> Now this just seems like toxic thinking to me. Plenty of thoughtful, > responsible people continually ask themselves whether they are experiencing > various problems in life, and sometimes the answer really is "no."

To you it may seem like "toxic thinking", but to anyone with a problem who had the insight to ask themselves such a question, it can be a life changing moment.

If someone is at a point in their alcohol consumption career where they step back and have to ask, "Do I have a problem?", that insight usually stems from encountering a problem most people don't face.

The nature of alcoholism is to tell yourself everything is fine and normal, that there is no problem even though your life is falling apart.

To wish to portray as truly pivotal insight that an alcoholic would be _lucky_ to have as "toxic thinking" is, IMO, minimizing the issues of drug abuse in our culture.

> Really? It doesn't matter?

When you're at the point where a substance controls your life, there's no saying when you might overdose or drink too much and plow your car into innocent people.

Finding _someone_ who can direct you to help _now_ is paramount.

> Your links at the end of your comment are only to AA and NA. Can you explain > what aspects of these programs are preferable to you?

There are no months-long waitlists for AA or NA like there are for rehabs, detox clinics, therapists, psychiatrists and addiction specialists.

There is no pretense of requiring an in-network insurance provider that will cover the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars worth of treatment you might require.

As much as I disagree with some aspects of those programs, their existence is infinitely better than the alternative. Which, for most people with that problem, is the destruction of what is left of their life.

[1] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2647079)

<comment><USER39> AA and other 12 step programs can be positive to some people but they can also be very harmful to others. AA teaches a lot of falsehoods. If AA was actually honest about what it was, I wouldn't dislike it so much.

Plus "just do anything" can lead you to the abusive profit seeking sketchy "rehab" industry, and that's probably going to leave you worse off. I think the worst offenders have been shut down recently though thanks to exposés.

Most people are able to reduce alcohol consumption to less harmful levels on their own. That's not saying you shouldn't seek help if you need it, just you may not need it. Everyone is different. If you wish to reduce your alcohol consumption don't assume you are "powerless" just because AA says you are.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the- irr...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the- irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/)

>The 12 steps are so deeply ingrained in the United States that many people, including doctors and therapists, believe attending meetings, earning one's sobriety chips, and never taking another sip of alcohol is the only way to get better. Hospitals, outpatient clinics, and rehab centers use the 12 steps as the basis for treatment. But although few people seem to realize it, there are alternatives, including prescription drugs and therapies that aim to help patients learn to drink in moderation. Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, these methods are based on modern science and have been proved, in randomized, controlled studies, to work. For J.G., it took years of trying to "work the program," pulling himself back onto the wagon only to fall off again, before he finally realized that Alcoholics Anonymous was not his only, or even his best, hope for recovery. But in a sense, he was lucky: many others never make that discovery at all.

>Whereas AA teaches that alcoholism is a progressive disease that follows an inevitable trajectory, data from a federally funded survey called the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions show that nearly one- fifth of those who have had alcohol dependence go on to drink at low-risk levels with no symptoms of abuse. And a recent survey of nearly 140,000 adults by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nine out of 10 heavy drinkers are not dependent on alcohol and, with the help of a medical professional's brief intervention, can change unhealthy habits.

>AA truisms have so infiltrated our culture that many people believe heavy drinkers cannot recover before they "hit bottom." Researchers I've talked with say that's akin to offering antidepressants only to those who have attempted suicide, or prescribing insulin only after a patient has lapsed into a diabetic coma. "You might as well tell a guy who weighs 250 pounds and has untreated hypertension and cholesterol of 300, 'Don't exercise, keep eating fast food, and we'll give you a triple bypass when you have a heart attack,' " Mark Willenbring, a psychiatrist in St. Paul and a former director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me. He threw up his hands. "Absurd."

>But many in AA and the rehab industry insist the 12 steps are the only answer and frown on using the prescription drugs that have been shown to help people reduce their drinking.

>People with alcohol problems also suffer from higher-than-normal rates of mental-health issues, and research has shown that treating depression and anxiety with medication can reduce drinking. But AA is not equipped to address these issues—it is a support group whose leaders lack professional training—and some meetings are more accepting than others of the idea that members may need therapy and/or medication in addition to the group's help

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why is it that hard to do actual research? Like science? Observe what alcohol does to the body and identify risks. I know this is hard.

Lazy survey door to door salespeople posing as scientists dominate this field unfortunately.

This is not science. This is guesswork. And this causes serious problems to people who trust this crap.

Throw away your shitty biased studies and start doing actual science.

It took Newton a lot of time to observe and repeat and prove the physics of gravity. And that stood the test of time for several decades at least.

This shitty research area needs to stop. People post media coverage as somehow being the final validators of their crappy research.

<comment><USER41> Because there isn't sufficient funding to pay for non biased scientists who have the understanding of statistics and probability to perform the correct experiments and analysis. And there isn't sufficient funding for the types of large scale control groups needed for studying health effects on a complex organism such as humans, especially when mechanisms of actions can't directly be observed.

<comment><USER40> Economics should not play a role in science. I agree it is hard.

But this isnt a choice between hard science and shitty survey based science.

I am saying this is a choice between hard science and NOTHING. Do nothing. Don't do lazy work. That's my point.

<comment><USER41> Yes, I was answering why it's so hard to do legitimate research. I agree that it would be better if the garbage research didn't exist at all. No info is better than bad info.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Searched for Cement, Got LED Bulbs Instead - <AUTHOR> https://iamvishnu.com/posts/searched-for-cement-got-led-bulbs-instead <comment><USER2> Full text search in English usually splits text into whole words so this doesn't happen.

I was told that in CJK languages you can't define a clear segmentation for words and it is more common to match exact substrings. I was playing a Chinese gatcha game the other day and noticed it was efficient to search for 'k s' when looking for 'pink storm' since the last letter of one word and the first letter of the next word are more evenly distributed than two adjacent letters in a word (e.g. Searching for 'st' would be a disaster.)

<comment><AUTHOR> This root cause was `LIKE %keyword%`.</comment></comment>


There Are Now 12 Programs to Help You GET INTO a Coding Bootcamp - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursereport.com/blog/coding-bootcamp-prep-programs-the-ultimate-guide <comment><USER2> Great piece. I started First Step Coding, one of the programs listed, and the greatest benefit I see in these programs is the chance to try out coding before getting fully committed.

Some of my students find out they love coding and have an opportunity to get into a more selective bootcamp. Others get a lower risk opportunity to fail fast. I consider both of these to be great outcomes in a prep program.</comment>


Blogging Is Perfect For Independent Consultants - <AUTHOR> http://www.hunterhost.com/108/blogging-is-perfect-for-independent-consultants/ How independent consultants can build a blog using mostly material they already have.  Good read. <comment><USER2> Agree. And that's partly why I blog: <http://www.jgc.org/blog/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like I need to take a shower after reading that.</comment>


Wizard of Oz court ruling: putting parts of public domain back under copyright - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/13110415001/wizard-oz-court-ruling-suggests-moviemakers-can-reclaim-parts-public-domain-put-it-under-copyright.shtml

<comment><USER2> The headline is very misleading, in my reading.

The case here is _not_ one of taking thing from the public domain and putting them under copyright (as happened, for example, when the copyright terms were adjusted to match the rest of the non-US world), but rather, a dispute about what is in the public domain and what is copyrighted.

The crux of this case is whether the attributes added to the film adaptation of a work of literature (not present in the work of literature) have a separate copyright term running from the release of the film (and not from the original publication of the book.)

grellas, am I reading this right?

<comment><AUTHOR> This case presents a bizarre confluence of elements that have caused courts and commentators to go all over the board with it: you have a copyright on the 1909 book that has long since expired, you have a 1939 film that remains under copyright, you have publicity stills from the 1939 film that depict characters from the film and that are not under copyright, and you have an alleged infringer who crops the images from the public domain publicity stills and puts them on t-shirts along with tag lines from the copyrighted movie ("there's no place like home") and sells them for commercial gain.

The holding here states that the qualities of the characters as distinctively depicted in the 1939 movie are in themselves protected by copyright even though the original characters as depicted in the book are not.

You are correct that this, then, is the "crux of the case" and this is indeed a dispute about what is or in not in the public domain rather than one about a literal taking back of elements of the public domain. Nonetheless, the practical effect of the ruling is to make it hazardous to use public domain characters from older works of literature in new films if such characters have previously been depicted in any film that remains under copyright (which obviously limits what one can do with certain public domain materials on penalty of being sued for infringement).

<comment><USER2> Thanks, as always, grellas.

But is this really a new doctrine? I mean, clearly the character of Cinderella is in the public domain, but I assumed that the Disney representation was copyrighted by Disney, and that if I wanted to make my own (commercial) representation of Cinderella, I'd need to make sure mine doesn't resemble the Disney version too closely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the saddest part of the article comes from the fact that future adaptations of the Wizard of Oz have to ensure that they are not to similar to the 1939 version, else they might be infringing.

How can this be promoting the progress of science and useful arts?

<comment><USER4> > _the fact that future adaptations of the Wizard of Oz have to ensure that > they are not to similar to the 1939 version..._

That's not a fact, that's just one blogger's misinterpretation of one lawyer's opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the "character traits" are under copyright, and thus these shirts violate copyright, then how are the posters that the shirts are based on public domain? The posters contain the same character images, and even if they were not registered with the copyright office directly, I don't see why the claim on the shirts would not extend to the posters also?

</comment><comment><USER4> > _In case you didn't get that, if you were to create a movie Wizard of Oz > entirely based on the book, if one of the actors does pretty much anything > that suggests a similarity to the movie version, rather than the book > version, it could be infringing. At the very least, this completely rules > out any attempt to make a nod or homage towards the original film._

I don't think that is true at all, and I believe that this blogger is misinterpreting the law here. If Sam Raimi were to digitally put Judy Garland in his remake, that would be copyright infringement. But "nods and homages" should be fine, as long as the movies (music, screenplay, acting) are stylistically different. This is kind of guaranteed, since the original was made _over 70 years ago_ and the new one is being directed in Sam Raimi and will be in 3D..</comment>


Hacking HQ Trivia with Google, OCR and Firebase - <AUTHOR> http://jakemor.com/hq/ <comment><USER2> booyea</comment>


You're thinking about serverless costs all wrong - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/theburningmonk-com/you-are-thinking-about-serverless-costs-all-wrong-82eb51eec92e <comment><USER2> Real option analysis is also useful for these kinds of situations. In short, there's value in having the option to invest additional resources into a strategy after the passage of time and getting additional information about the value of the strategy.

Like, even if a cheap prototype is expensive to run at scale, it doesn't mean that you have to run that prototype in the same way if it happens to be important and successful. You can decide to pay the extra cost to use a cheaper infrastructure choice if and when it becomes necessary. Until then, you're getting a lot of value by throwing out more prototypes and figuring out what does and doesn't work in your business domain.</comment>


Ask HN: Using Odesk/Elance etc. to scale workforce - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering if anyone else has hired from Odesk/Elance/freelancer to shore up your startup's workforce temporarily.  We're way too overwhelmed with work (a lot of it is housekeeping type work), but we don't have enough business to hire more perm devs/administrators.  Please share experience/advice if you've done this before or avoided going this route. <comment><USER2> I've used Odesk in the past for basic Internet research / housekeeping stuff. I emailed 5 people with one person responding who has been fantastic. Very easy to use on e you get used to the website. The one thing to pay attention to is to provide at least 2 examples of the finished work you want as well as all intermediate steps. This helps you get to know what you want and it helps them follow instructions. I started out with a one hour task and eventually moved up to about 10/15 hours per week. Extremely helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your experience. This is very helpful info.</comment></comment>


Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML - <AUTHOR> https://easydatawarehousing.github.io/ferro/introduction/ <comment><USER2> It literally doesn't load anything without javascript enabled

<comment><USER3> Every day we stray further from hyperlinked documents.

<comment><USER4> Good. An application platform shouldn't pretend to be a hyperlinked document platform. Embrace the reality of the modern web instead of torturing us with the backwards perverted abstraction.

<comment> vertex-four Or perhaps you can build a decent application platform instead of torturing a very useful hyperlinked document platform into doing something it wasn't built for.

<comment><USER4> It's about 20 years too late for that conversation.

<comment> vertex-four It's really not. The only thing going for the web as an application platform is decent sandboxing and the fact that web browsers are installed on most computers by default - it's not actually good, hence the proliferation of native apps on mobile. So perhaps it's worth thinking about how to put a better system for distributing applications into people's hands, rather than continuing as a society to waste effort on torturing web technologies into doing it.

<comment><USER5> I could not agree more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > no more HTML/JS/CSS

But it's there, just an abstraction (or many) away. If you don't get HTML/CSS then no framework will help you that generates it. You can avoid JS, but understanding the DOM and CSS best practices is essential. Once you get it, you don't need libraries like this.

<comment><USER7> Theoretically you could write WebAssembly code that generates e.g. a bitmap, or an SVG, and have a minimal, unchanging HTML+JS "bootloader" for it.

Using browser's caching, you can save bandwidth and keep that WebAssembly code from being re-downloaded. Then you can feed it URLs serving your own content in your own compact, logical and otherwise awesome format, and have it rendered.

By that moment you will have reinvented something like Flash, only completely static.

<comment><USER6> > Theoretically you could write WebAssembly code that generates e.g. a bitmap, > or an SVG, and have a minimal, unchanging HTML+JS "bootloader" for it...

I was expecting something like that from the OP title. I don't doubt however that this technology will come, it's a question of when. I hope they will support text selection :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is possible to define an android application without defining a single XML file. There's a reason Android provides XML based definition for layout definition. The alternative is VERY tedious and bloats the code. Which is what this seems to be going towards.

This has the added disadvantage of not making it clear in one place what the structure of things is. You have to hold it in your head or on paper what the defined structure is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Flipping your comment upside down: then we just need a layout design tool on top of Ferro and we'll get a Ruby equivalent to VS or Android Studio for the web.

<comment><USER5> Do you remember swing and awt on Java? because that is what you are moving towards. This will not simplify web development, it will just produce code that is not maintainable for a project with any significant level of complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great to play around with madcap ideas like this! That's how we move towards better technology, and that path isn't always obvious.

That said, this is awful. Never, ever, ever override native scroll experience unless you're building something that isn't a page - and even then think thrice about it.

<comment><USER10> > _Never, ever, ever override native scroll experience_

I don't think it does.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, looks to just be an <article> tag with overflow:auto set

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hard to get past the wall of misinformation:

> What we don't need when using Ferro

> HTML > Javascript DOM finders (like jQuery, Zepto, ...) > Javascript > libraries/frameworks that extend html (like Ember, Angular, JSX, Vue, > Stimulus) > Shadow DOM Javascript frameworks (like React)

jQuery and Zepto are not "DOM finders", they are cross-browser compatibility layers (that include querySelector).

"Frameworks that extend HTML" definitely encompasses Ferro itself.

React uses a virtual DOM. "Shadow DOM" is unrelated and part of the web components proposal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whatever they are, they suck. Actually what sucks is not them specifically, but the reason because they exist.

Ferro makes the whole process more natural, at least.

<comment><USER12> It's easy (and meaningless) to criticise while not fully understanding what they do.

From an architecture standpoint, this is very similar to building a tree of Backbone views + a few abstractions. Writing OO code instead of a markup language (JSX/HTML) has few intrinsic benefits besides "feels familiar to me". And it goes head on against the resurgence of functional programming, reactive UI and declarative code. You need much more than "they suck" if you want to profess that your system is better.

Not to say this isn't worth exploring, but the bold and dismissive claims detract a lot from the project's idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> > if you want to profess that your system is better.

Not sure if you thought I am the project creator or if you were just generally speaking. Anyway, if you wanted to know more about the rationale behind this project, you could address author's comment here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16571142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16571142)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks pretty simple alright [https://i.imgur.com/sn69Wv0.png](https://i.imgur.com/sn69Wv0.png)

<comment><USER14> Edge 15 is an "old" browser??

<comment><USER13> I think they're probably reading user agent strings. Otherwise it's incredibly specific

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why making web development more complicated instead of easier?

</comment><comment><USER16> For those users who choose to disable Javascript or choose browsers that have no Javascript engine:

        curl https://easydatawarehousing.github.io/ferro/main_content.json \
        |exec sed '/{\"/{s/{\"/<pre>\
        \
        &/g;s/,\"/\
        &/g;s/\content\":\"/&\
        \
        <\/pre>/g;};s/\"}/&\
        \
        /g;s/\\u0026/\&/g'|exec unvis -h > 1.htm

        exec firefox file:///1.htm

</comment><comment><USER17> I am the author of the _Opal-Ferro library_ and the _website_ this thread links to. Thanks for all your comments.

Please note that the website is a technical demo of the ferro library and gives some background information about how it works. The intended target audience of the website are web- and software developers. I didn't invest a lot of time in browser compatibility since web developers tend to use newer browsers. Edge 15 is excluded because it doesn't fully support CSS grid. I'm not a very good web designer nor a CSS expert, so the website is a little bit rough around the edges. Please don't shoot the messenger/website.

Ruby's is all about programmer happiness. My intention with ferro is to increase web-developer happiness. What makes me as a web developer unhappy is front-end frameworks (regardless of the language they are written in). Using a front-end framework usually involves a mix of some server-side rendered html, a bunch of code and a templating language. The templating language looks like html but with extra syntax added to connect with the js code. In other words to be able to move application logic from the server to the web browser an even more complex version of html is used. And I need to write in 3 different languages. Very unhappy.

Ferro tries to solve this problem in a different way. By getting rid of html (and thus any links between html and code) and replacing this with code to create a memory structure that fits the application you want to build. The ferro library handles the creation of the necessary DOM elements. The web developer only needs to write in 1 language (apart from CSS). I think that this makes front-end web development much simpler. And me a lot happier.

Some folks mentioned that html is used for tasks it wasn't intended for. I agree, html was originally created as a markup language with some meta data added. Kind of what we use markdown for these days. All sorts of things were bolted on later: styling cues, document structure, semantical elements, js code. It works but it makes separation of responsibilities (structure/content/styling/logic) harder. Internally a web browser doesn't even use html, but only keeps a memory structure we all know as the DOM. Html is one way of telling the web browser what the DOM should look like. For simple web pages that is absolutely fine. For (progressive) web apps html is not ideal.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well time should better be spent working on another document language.

I'm curious what the alternative to HTML/CSS would be. If such a new language could be made more readable for humans, just like json and yaml are more readable than XML. Maybe even some stylized markdown or textile might offer a partial solution.

I guess this would not incur such a big cost, since HTTP is still fine. I mean the elephant in the room is that HTML was never designed for web applications in mind, yet you cannot deny that smartphone browsers have a hard time dealing with html web apps, for the simple reason that it's a nightmare to build and run, which is why android apps have to be made.

I guess what I'm saying makes sense, I'm not sure if I'm throwing a pave in the pond... But those things are the reasons I prefer working with languages like C++ instead of HTML.

<comment><USER19> > just like json and yaml are more readable than XML

Not sure this is true for every case. JSON and YAML often shine for cases where data is primarily lists of key-value pairs (with some of the values also being kvps).

If I'm dealing with a larger potential space that needs to allow for data that's mixed-media long-valued and arbitrarily structured, my experience is that markup often reads better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is cool to see someone experimenting with Opal, since Volt framework which was pretty cool, there were no attempts, that I know of, of using Opal well.

I think at this point, it is not quite clear where the whole thing will go and benefits would be more obvious later when there is more development.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh god, why?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560016)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is more a ruby-to-js compiler than a simplification of web development. You can do the same thing is pure javascript (generate html and css rather than specify it) - which would likely have even less ceremony.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not just a ruby to js transpiler. Opal is that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who have difficulties getting it: it's not about the browser not running JS, it's about the developer not needing to write JS and not needing to use libraries for managing the DOM. And more.

<comment><USER23> I don't see how writing Ruby and managing a Ruby abstraction of the DOM is an improvement over writing JS and managing the DOM with that.

Unless the only purpose to this is to just not write javascript.

<comment><USER24> It is. Its elevator pitch is literally "write your website in Ruby". I think it's very silly, especially considering that WebAssembly has just matured, and it's been coming for a looong time. Not to mention it's 10x better supported. If your website only runs on 90% of browsers out there, it's a terrible website. And this thing as far as I can tell only runs on last-gen Firefox and Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not, check my answer to @krapp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've never been totally comfortable with CSS, even if it's been all I've used for years. Something about thinking in tables and having to translate.

I've just begun learning CSS Grid and found it a vast improvement. It's so great to not have to translate anymore. The two negatives are no support in IE and it gets complicated once you get beyond simple forms though a fix is promised.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting concept, but the problem it intends to solve has already been solved by JavaScript frameworks. Instead of having to define DOM elements twice, in HTML and in JavaScript, Vue, Angular, React, etc. all automatically map data to DOM within the template.

Also, I have concerns about the high level of abstraction -- it's not normally a good thing, and I don't think it's justified in this situation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Viewing this on an iPad, I can see it doesn't have native scrolling. That's not exactly good for UX. One should leverage native functionality instead of working around it to achieve a controlled environment or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER28> Simplifying HTML by writing Ruby, and doesn't work in older browser?

</comment><comment><USER29> Says the website which has double scroll bars when the viewport is too short vertically? This is definitely under-baked.

</comment><comment><USER30> ASP.NET Webforms all over again.

<comment><USER4> Webforms was crap because it was all server-side and the component design API was nightmarish, as was the client-side API.

The idea of a truly-component-oriented system for the web that abstracts away the endless pain of modern html/css/js isn't a bad one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Or how to produce a website that no one (or nearly) will be able to maintain :)

</comment><comment><USER32> But why? Why should web pages that don't require javascript require it?

<comment><USER33> Why would you have JS disabled anyway?

<comment><USER14> I disable JS more and more often because of all the crap popups and email signup forms etc... I use this extension which makes it easy to toggle on a per-site basis:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick- javascript-s...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript- switcher/geddoclleiomckbhadiaipdggiiccfje)

<comment><USER33> You just make it harder for web developers to provide nice experiences.

If it's broken, don't expect us to fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> no. stahp. plz.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For a moment I forgot this is homeland of JS-at-any-cost :) so to let this go through a bit more I'll just post excerpts from the linked website:

\---

Introduction

Simplifying web-development with Ferro

\- An example

Imagine a webpage that displays a form with a checkbox and an input field. The input should only be enabled when the checkbox is checked. This kind of logic is best handled by the webbrowser, not the webserver. So we would write or generate an HTML page with the two inputs and some javascript. The javascript runs when the page is loaded, it runs a (jQuery) selector to find the checkbox and adds an eventlistener to the click event. When the checkbox is clicked the javascript event-handler function is executed. This runs a selector to find the input field and modifies its disabled attribute. Ironically we need some code to look for the elements that we know are there. We just created them in html!

If we look at this example from a functional perspective we only need two things: (1) a form with a checkbox and an input and (2) an action that should run when the checkbox value changes. Wouldn't it be nice if we could translate these functional requirements into some Ruby classes and be done. Well, and this should come as no surprise, we can!

\- Opal-Ferro gem

Let me introduce the Opal-Ferro gem. Opal is that wonderful piece of kit that allows us to run Ruby in the webbrowser. Ferro is a small Ruby library that manages the webbrowsers DOM, erradicates the need for searching for elements and introduces some handy naming conventions to simplify CSS design.

But most importantly, using Ferro the webdeveloper only needs to think about the structure of the code, not about all the things that are needed to make the code work in a webbrowser.

\- What are the advantages?

Only Ruby and CSS needed

Easy naming conventions: CSS classnames match Ruby classnames

Easy naming conventions: every DOM element has same ID as the corresponding Ruby object. Useful when attaching javascript libraries to elements

Never lookup an element in the DOM. Ferro keeps a handle to each and every element which you can access from Ruby, object oriented style

It is fast, browser javascript engines are highly optimized. The developer can control when to render components, only render what is needed when the application loads

More secure: it is easy to embed scripts into html. As long as you stay away from using the innerHtml method, XSS attacks should be impossible

Easy integration into serverside frameworks like Rails Ruby == Programmer happyness, Javascript === confusion

\- What are some disadvantages

Every solution to a problem has its pro's and con's. Ferro is no exception. Here are some of Ferro's disadvantages

SEO results may suffer if the webcrawler only looks at html. Not really an issue when creating a webapp Separate content for screenreaders and javascript disabled browsers is needed

Coding errors may disable (parts of) the webapp. A good set of (integration)tests is useful

Somewhat higher browser memory usage to store the MOM No support for older browsers

\- Is Ferro finished?

No, Ferro is not yet feature complete. Most of the basic DOM components are done. Navigation and routing are handled. AJAX calls are wrapped.

Areas that need work are:

Adding a service worker to catch all networktraffic when the browser is offline

Adding support for storing and retrieving data (Object Relational Manager)

A nice ActionCable / websockets client

A markdown parser (that does not produce html but directly adds elements to the DOM)

Localization (I18n)

Many more ready made components, for instance a table component with sorting, filtering, etcetera. Preferably in separate gems

Capture touch events and gestures

Proper documentation and testset

A utility to convert html to ferro code might be useful

\- What we don't need when using Ferro

HTML

Javascript DOM finders (like jQuery, Zepto, ...)

Javascript libraries/frameworks that extend html (like Ember, Angular, JSX, Vue, Stimulus)

Shadow DOM Javascript frameworks (like React)

\---

<comment><USER23> Please don't just copy and paste from the website... it's obnoxious. We see the link, we can read.

<comment><USER35> Not everyone can read the link. Many people are just presented with a disclaimer : " No attempts have been made to support older webbrowsers like Internet explorer and Edge 15. I recommend: Firefox ".</comment></comment></comment>


Building a ternary computer at home: a software emulator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ssloy/triador <comment><USER2> Beautiful!

I once tried using ternary to explain to a semi-retired mainframe programmer how we wanted to modify a binary field to have more than two choices. He was so mad and insisted you can't just MAKE UP MATH when explaining your project goals. This project would have made his head explode.

<comment><USER3> I do think a set/enum is a better structure than a ternary field for T/F/null. Even if you defined the elements of the set to be { TRUE, FALSE, NULL }. Because, I believe, most of us see a field containing a T/F and assume it's a binary, not ternary field. Even if someone notices that the field is null- able, they might assume it's a mistake.

Unless you've been burned by that before and remember to check those assumptions.

<comment><USER4> I prefer having a nullable version of other types so it has to be explicitly wrapped. bool vs nullable(bool)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in research, the International Symposium on Multivalued Logic has been studying this area for 50 years: [http://www.mvl.jpn.org/ISMVL2020/](http://www.mvl.jpn.org/ISMVL2020/)

As far as practical applications of non-binary circuitry, the Intel 8087 math co-processor used 4-level circuitry in its ROM. (This chip was used in the IBM PC.) Intel needed to do this to fit the large microcode ROM on the chip. The chip's logic, though, was regular binary. [http://www.righto.com/2018/09/two- bits-per-transistor-high-d...](http://www.righto.com/2018/09/two-bits-per- transistor-high-density.html)

<comment><USER6> > As far as practical applications of non-binary circuitry, the Intel 8087 > math co-processor used 4-level circuitry in its ROM. (This chip was used in > the IBM PC.) Intel needed to do this to fit the large microcode ROM on the > chip.

Also, as noted at the bottom of that article, most modern flash storage uses multi-level cell technologies that allow two, three, or four bits of data to be stored per memory cell rather than just one. This obviously significantly increases data density and allows for cheaper drives at the cost of reduced write performance, reduced endurance, and more error correction being necessary for reliable operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome, I hope it works.

How do you make ternary gates out of a DG403? (It's an analog switch that would pass ternary, but the switch control inputs are binary.)

[https://www.vishay.com/docs/70049/dg401.pdf](https://www.vishay.com/docs/70049/dg401.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the schematics:

[https://hsto.org/webt/4a/mb/ad/4ambad_bocdk6_0khdqve6grzjs.p...](https://hsto.org/webt/4a/mb/ad/4ambad_bocdk6_0khdqve6grzjs.png)

two ternary multiplexers out of two dg403 chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"It has four main registers R1-R4 and nine extra registers R5-R13"_

I found that '4' a weird choice for a ternary computer, until I read that R1 is special.

Register-to-register moves always involve R1. There are 12 such moves into R1 and 12 out of R1. That leaves 3 trit patterns in a 3-trit value for "increment R1", "decrement R1" and "NOP".

Also, this architecture doesn't allow reading data from, or writing data to memory. The memory only is there for storing. programs. So, it's almost as if this has one register, 12 words of data memory and 729 words of program memory.

Weird, but economical on the hardware, I guess, so it keeps the cost and amount of work down. Also, there's room for extension commands, so the above may change.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool project! I'm curious about the relatively small registers though. 3 trits feels pretty limiting, and though there's the 6-trit word example, it feels like it would get pretty cumbersome on the software side pretty quickly vs. something like native 6- or 9-trit registers. Perhaps something relating to complexities on the hardware side?

</comment><comment><USER10> Would logic with more than 2 states let us continue to increase computational density?

I know we are doing this for SSDs but they're simple and (mostly) homogeneous.

<comment><USER11> Adding more states to an electronic system is trading robustness and noise insensitivity for better performance.

Think about it this way: as the number of states approaches infinity, you're back to analog computing.

It's a design parameter, not something that lets us break past limits on computational density, which right now is heat removal and quantum tunneling in transistors.

<comment><USER10> What do you think would be harder to implement in a fab on a budget in the future? A chip full of large gates that can handle 7 voltage levels stably, or a chip with 5x [1] as many of the smallest gates that physics and logistics allow one to build?

[1] If memory servers, adders and cache access and a bunch of other logic typically require O(nlog₂n) gates in binary, but O(nlog₃n) in ternary, Which means as the native integer size increases, bases greater than 2 scale better.

<comment><USER11> There's a huge constant factor involved, which is why we still use binary. As in many algorithms, asymptotic analysis doesn't tell the full story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What could be the main benefits of Ternary vs. Binary computing in real world applications?

<comment><USER13> It is mathematically the most "economical" integer base in terms of space, when considering complexity of digit representation along with word length [1].

[1] Hayes, B. (2001). Third base. American Scientist 89: 490-494 ([http://lrss.fri.uni- lj.si/sl/teaching/ont/lectures/third_bas...](http://lrss.fri.uni- lj.si/sl/teaching/ont/lectures/third_base.pdf))

<comment><USER14> Of course the "optimal one" would be base "e" but nobody is going to be able to do anything remotely reasonable with it... (pg. 491 of that manuscript).

<comment><USER10> base 7 is very nearly e^2, and 20 is almost exactly e^3. Base 20 would fix many problems with floating point math, wouldn't it?

By the time someone built a base 20 computer it would probably be an anachronism anyway.

<comment><USER15> Okay but what's the significance of (non-unity) powers of e? e is the optimum of a specific function[1], and you lose the benefits for higher values.

It's true that you can conveniently represent the numbers by using integer powers of the base (like representing binary with hexadecimal), but the whole reason e is a "good" base in the first place is because you're (partially) minimizing the number of distinct symbols needed to represent a number, and you lose that once you go to a higher base.

Plus, using a slightly-off integer like 7 breaks the integer-power-mapping anyway.

[1] x ^ (N/x) for any N.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> trinary.cc (don't go there except in the wayback machine, it's dead and replaced with a spam site) used to be a great reference on three-valued logic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Of course, people DID build ternary computers.

The most notable of these is Setun' (I had a chance to play with it at Moscow State University).

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Setun is the only example, and it had a binary memory.

<comment><USER18> There was also the Canadian QTC-1. [0]

[0] [https://jglobal.jst.go.jp/en/detail?JGLOBAL_ID=2009020829793...](https://jglobal.jst.go.jp/en/detail?JGLOBAL_ID=200902082979377680)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is ROM only, not a fully functioning computer.

<comment><USER18> Head to the end of the paper about the ROM [0], and you'll find the QTC-1 was the computer said ROM was designed for, not the ROM design itself.

[0] [https://wwwee.ee.bgu.ac.il/~kushnero/ternary/Using%20CMOS%20...](https://wwwee.ee.bgu.ac.il/~kushnero/ternary/Using%20CMOS%20gates/A%20CMOS%20ternary%20ROM%20chip.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK it was never built, only partially designed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow something that runs IOTA natively (lol)</comment>


Verified Extortion - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/21/verified-extortion/ <comment><USER2> Why is he complaining about Facebook when all the company did was respond to user complaints about apps that behaved badly?

When thousands of people got daily invites to stupid apps, something had to be done. Regardless of whether facebook had ever announced the verified apps program, the new restrictions would make sense.

When you develop for a young platform (particularly a proprietary one) you should realize it may be a moving target. It's far from extortion!

<comment><USER3> They didn't really do that at all. Open up your Facebook home page and take a look. Maybe you like knowing which 80's sitcom star each of your friends are, but for most people the platform has just gotten spammier over time.

The new restrictions certainly made sense when they took average apps from infinite invites per day down to 20. But dropping that 20 back to 12, then charging you to get back to 20 doesn't help users in any way.

<comment><USER4> I assume you're referring to the algorithm change around January/February for allocations. There was a change to the allocation algorithm related to spam weighting - it wasn't an across the board drop from 20 to 12. Allocations actually rose for certain applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are people still making money from facebook apps these days? I thought it was over a while back (and thus why the mass exodus to develop on the iPhone although apple's approval process sucks.)

<comment><USER3> Are you joking? The top Facebook apps make more in a month than the top iPhone apps make in a lifetime. Even mid level apps, the sort that would never make the top 25 on iTunes, make more in a year than a top 10 paid app on iTunes does.

Try Googling for Zynga Revenues. The Facebook platform is orders of magnitude more profitable than iPhone.

Don't mistake buzz for profitability.

<comment><USER6> > Zynga

Don't get me started on my Mafia Wars addiction.

<comment><USER7> The game that can be (and is) played by a script.

<comment><USER8> World of Warcraft can also be played by a script. That hasn't hurt it's profitability or popularity.

<comment><USER3> Does World of Warcraft still make money? I thought everyone was on the iPhone all day now ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article left me with a few "Facebook apps"-newbie questions. Hope someone here will be able to answer.

1\. How are Facebook apps monetized? Advertising?

2\. What do applications use the collected user data for? I once saw a description of the kind of access an application gets to the user's data, and it seemed a bit daunting.

<comment><USER8> 1\. Advertising + Virtual Goods (selling "items" or "currency" inside a game for power, pleasure, or status)

2\. You can't really "collect" the data. Facebook's Terms state that you can't keep user data for longer than 24 hours. The original idea was that you could use their data to display demographically-relevant ads.

<comment><USER10> Also affiliate offers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As far as i see it, for media/gaming apps there are two platforms that you can (try to) make enough money to buy a small island with: facebook and iphone. Both are flooded now with competitors, and not of the stupid sort, so good luck...and await the xbox mobile!

<comment><USER8> I don't think Matt is "trying" to make money on the Facebook platform with games. He's already profitable and growing - <http://www.bluefroggaming.com/company.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last line: "It could be worse, they could be Apple."

Ouch. And that can't be something Apple is looking for either.</comment>


Learning is Not Growth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@foxish_/learning-is-overrated-1ddcf4bf58c6 <comment><USER2> TL;DR

 _In summary, the three questions I'd definitely ask before deciding to learn something new are:_

      *Future — is this learning oriented towards my future?*
      *Fit — Am I the best person to learn/do said activity?*
      *Timing — Is it most effective to learn it now, or could there be a time when it's more relevant?*

The best time to learn something is when you're interested to do so, not when you're no longer interested.

The _fit_ point is silly. I would never tell anyone not to learn something if they show an interest. When a child is interested in music, we don't know that it's for their future, just that they're interested and enjoy it. Similarly, you don't always know what's in your future. The more you're exposed to and interested in the more possibilities your future will hold.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learning is personal growth.</comment>


InfluxDB Clustering Beta and Data Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://influxdata.com/blog/influxenterprise-beta-clustering-monitoring-influxdb/ <comment><USER2> We evaluated InfluxDB for our TSDB solution and found it to be generally high performance (up to about 100k unique series). Kapacitor also had some promising features for realtime aggregations, but was ultimately pretty buggy and didn't have support for out-of-order event processing. All in all, it looks like a great suite of products and we're curious to see how it evolves over the next few years.

Like many other users here, we were disappointed about paid clustering, but when the original press release said $400, we were willing to wait it out and see. However, we ultimately decided to go a different direction after seeing they wanted $20k+ to run clustering on a 256GB node. We ingest 10s of millions of data points per day from IoT sensors, and expect our data size to far exceed that capacity.

That said, we plan to run our own Cassandra cluster w/ KairosDB ([http://kairosdb.github.io/](http://kairosdb.github.io/)) acting as a read / write abstraction layer. It'll cost us about $11k to run the cluster for the year, with 3 nodes @300GB/ea., leveraging Cassandra's (free) and open source clustering, HA, and replication technology.

<comment><USER3> +1 for Cassandra and KairosDB. We use Instaclustr to host Cassandra on AWS and do time series data management with Kairos. It's been a hugely scalable, robust system we use ingest about 5B datapoints per day.

Also, Brian (project leader of KairosDB) agreed to a small consulting project for us to help us configure and tune Kairos. He's a very nice guy and was very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have just shut down 95% of my collectd/graphite infrastructure after migrating it over to InfluxDB+telegraf+grafana. I'm loving it! Since shutting down collectd, system load and io wait time across my fleet has gone way down, and available CPU has gone way up.

Though I wouldn't say it was a smooth transition. I started with 0.8, IIRC, and while it worked ok it used an amazing amount of storage. 4GB for a year worth of graphite data blew up to 100GB for a month of InfluxDB.

I gave up on InfluxDB a few times during the process, but at 0.11 I tried it again and is has been pretty good. We are only putting the Telegraf data and one small service statistic in it, but the storage is pretty reasonable at 12GB for a few months of data. Querying and graphing the data with Grafana is great.

If you have tried it before 0.11, definitely try it again. The guys giving a Prometheus talk at PyCon were really down on InfluxDB, but they hadn't tried it for 6 months. I was like "Yeah, it was unusable then". I wanted to like Prometheus, but I just couldn't figure out how to feed my data into it.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried 0.13? How much disk space is it using? It's supposed to be "better than graphite".

Really curious as I am looking forward to set up InfluxDB (moving from graphite too). I was going to use collectd, but your comment makes me wonder if it's the right choice.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm currently running 0.13.0.

It's really hard to compare and say better or worse than graphite, because it isn't an apples/apples comparison. I, so far, haven't figured out how to do roll up like graphite has built in, so I think I'm holding onto the high precision data. So that makes it not even close to a fair comparison. Still though, 12GB for our current data set feels reasonable. Back in 0.8 when it was more like 150GB for a month, that was not gonna work.

For a while I was feeding collectd into InfluxDB. It didn't really produce anything I could use immediately, and I haven't gone back to revisit it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great news from influxdata. Though all of these features (clustering, monitoring, and data elxploration) could be released with standard edition. The start of InfluxDB looked very promising, not sure if people feel the same with the chosen marketing model.

<comment><USER7> What other method would you suggest they become a sustainable business?

<comment><USER8> Prof services, training, dev support, production/tech/enterprise support, hosted services, managed on prem, fancy management interface (ala Datastax)...

<comment><USER9> There is a lot of discussion going on currently around OSS business models. The general consensus is that support contracts / professional services / support do not monetize well enough to grow a large business.

Hosted services is a viable business model. The risk here is to ensure that your product, if successful, cannot simply be deployed by Amazon. Dual licensing has been one response to the Amazon risk.

Admin tools alone are also thought to be difficult to monetize at sufficient value to grow a large business.

While DataStax has a nice UI, they have built a data platform with Cassandra the core, much like Cloudera has built a data platform with HDFS/HBase at the core. Personally, I view the data platforms as prepackaged and productized SI (which is very valuable..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the influxdb interface -- reading and writing data are super simple, but in some recent testing I did, it really really hated high- cardinality data sets.

[https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.10/guides/hardware_s...](https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.10/guides/hardware_sizing/#when- do-i-need-more-ram)

Show stopper if you're in the same boat that I am.

<comment><AUTHOR> After 1.0 is released our two highest priorities are to handle high cardinality data sets (on disk and in memory inverted index) and continuous queries that are more automatic (downsample everything and give users the option for query results that scale automatically like Graphite)

<comment><USER10> Right on -- for the record, this data is ending up in mongodb at the moment, so I need to write logic for binning by time and so forth myself. Our use case is maybe odd in this space -- sampling a handful of values per item a couple times a day, but for millions of items.

I compared a dataset to postgres and the new mongo storage engine is very good -- dunno if wiredTiger is something you guys are looking at, but it's very compact and fast to query with the proper indexes.

Dumped some stats into a gist as well: [https://gist.github.com/mattbillenstein/89969980025414e2bca8...](https://gist.github.com/mattbillenstein/89969980025414e2bca8325cf503342f)

<comment><USER11> i had a similar issue with mongo and time series data. for special purpose event data like that gist, i think you should consider using a column store.

<comment><USER10> I may eventually -- we're using mongo for the rest of the metadata for now, so this is good enough to not need something else at the moment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>