Yik Yak fires 30 of 50 employees - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/yik-yak-fires-30-of-50-employees-still-has-no-business-model/ <comment><USER2> Not too surprising. From a technology and hacker standpoint, I had a run-in with one of their earlier developers that left a really bad taste in my mouth.

An ex-engineer from Yik Yak reached out while we were hiring a while back.

They proceeded to supply a .zip file of their entire source code repository (yes, all of it). They said it was outdated now so it seemed okay in their eyes.

This included all of the dot files for configuration: keys, passwords, email addresses, Amazon instances where databases were at, and more.

I didn't ask for this .zip file, I was simply looking for some examples of experience.

Needless to say, it definitely made me look at Yik Yak differently.

<comment><USER3> I know a guy who interviews ops people and asks for certain details of their current employer's network security. The only answer he accepts is "no".

<comment><USER4> Is it really wrong to give architectural considerations of the security of a system? It seems like security is a _problem_ if having a discussion about such things could lead to its compromise.

However, I have no expertise in the subject so I could be wrong.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it is wrong. There's no reason to disclose the security systems of your previous employer, and there's no reason for an employer to ask. Any security question that can be asked specifically about one company, can be asked and answered in a more general way.

It's the difference between - "What security controls were in place at Corp?" and "What security controls would you put in place to protect X system?"

The 1st version is bad, not just because it discloses security controls at the previous employer.. but also because it makes the candidate responsible for (possibly bad) security decisions that were outside of their control and/or existed before they were hired.

The 2nd version gives the candidate a chance to talk generally/ideally about security.. even if the previous employer did something else.

<comment><USER6> > There's no reason to disclose the security systems of your previous employer

But isn't it relevant what technologies you used in your most recent roles?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work nearby their Atlanta office, and about a six months ago I received numerous phone calls and emails from an internal recruiter about a Go developer job in that office. Speaking of fad flame-outs, his pitch kept trying to link Yik Yak to Pokemon Go (i.e. " _one out of every eight yaks is about Pokemon!_ "). Uhh, okay?

I never responded... because I heard that they had shot themselves in the foot with recent app changes, and were dying. Obviously, now I'm glad that I made the right call.

I've seen this happen numerous times in my career, though. I just don't understand the sort of denial that keeps companies in "hire mode", even when their internal metrics must make it obvious that things have turned south.

<comment><USER8> I worked at a company in sf that went from bumping internal referral bonuses / pitching the employees to push eng friends to apply to layoffs in the span of a month. Including an h1b engineer that had been lured away from another company _3 weeks previously_. It is, btw, completely legal to lure people away from jobs knowing there's a good chance you'll have to lay them off in the very near future. CEOs are happy to fuck employees over and we should never forget it.

<comment><USER9> > CEOs are happy to fuck employees over and we should never forget it.

_Jerk_ CEOs are happy to do that. There are plenty of ethical founders and managers out there that loath this type of behavior.

Unfortunately I see more of this flavor at venture backed companies....

<comment><USER10> By their very nature, VC backed companies are likely to get more unpleasant surprises than "normal" companies due to their need for regular large injections of capital from willing investors. Everything can look great until a round of investment falls through or is delayed and suddenly things can become unpleasant _very_ rapidly.

<comment><USER11> that is definitely not true as a general rule for vc backed companies. this might be applicable to companies that have no business model/non-revenue- generating. but even then, any decent founder can do the basic arithmetic needed to figure out burn and runway

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Since it began in 2013, the company behind the purportedly anonymous > messaging app has never had, and still doesn't have, any obvious source of > meaningful revenue. Yet somehow, Yik Yak was valued by venture capitalists > at $400 million in December 2014 after Sequoia Capital invested $62 million.

Do investments of this size/nature typically have a raise-or-pay-us-back date associated with them? i.e. are they usually done as a convertible note to force the issue or pure equity?

<comment><USER13> Investments in money-losing companies have a natural raise-or-do-something date called "zero cash day". And generally, the company can't raise new money without having a majority of each class of preferred stock vote for it, i.e. a majority of the money in every previous round. So if enough investors have lost confidence in management, no matter how much board control management has, investors can let the company run out of money.

<comment><USER12> > Investments in money-losing companies have a natural raise-or-do-something > date called "zero cash day". And generally, the company can't raise new > money without having a majority of each class of preferred stock vote for > it, i.e. a majority of the money in every previous round. So if enough > investors have lost confidence in management, no matter how much board > control management has, investors can let the company run out of money.

I was thinking more about the situation where the founders fire all the employees, run the operation as lean as possible (to maintain their obligations), and stretch the $62M as long as they can. At $2M/year that's 31 years without accounting for any growth of the money itself.

Besides due diligence on the part of the investors to not give money to the kind of person that would do that, what prevents that situation?

<comment><USER14> If the founders retain board control and don't run out of money there is little the investors can realistically do. Both sides are taking a lot of risk, I wouldn't rate this as a terribly concerning one. Far far more founders spend too much money and nosedive into the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have not used YikYak since they required me to add a phone number, it's so antithetical to their entire point that, in hindsight at least, their decision to de-anonymize it is unbelievable. Are any of the wave of anonymous social apps doing ok or well?

<comment><USER16> As far as I can see, none. There was some discussion recently about Secret coming back into vogue, but that seems to have fizzled in the past fortnight.

The sad thing is, a lot of these apps are really successful in the outset, but then end up burned as the companies try, heavy handedly, to monetise.

As much as the startup world sees themselves as morally above the like of Google who will sell out customers, many startups seem to sell out both their customers and their product, making fundamentally incompatible changes with what they were built on in the pursuit of cash.

<comment><USER17> Speaking of Secret, the founder of Secret's subsequent startup just launched a side project which is definitely not a stealth attempt at revitalizing Secret: [https://bold.io/about-io-2016-12-06](https://bold.io/about-io-2016-12-06)

<comment><USER18> related [https://vimeo.com/179079175](https://vimeo.com/179079175)

<comment><USER19> Interesting seeing him shilling for Infinity, I thought he was all about ferraris: [http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founder-sells- ferrari-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founder-sells- ferrari-2015-4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> At a Sequoia-organized hiring event (which was dubbed as a conference) in New York this October, I got a chance to interact with over 10 of YikYak engineers, their hiring manager (ex-Google) and the CEO.

The CEO had an unconventional background (was in med school at Furman), so I was interested in knowing how he made it. I was shocked to see that he didn't have any insights about how anything at the firm worked. I asked him how he raised funds, he replied that he found a family friend who worked in startups and everything was good from there.

I wasn't interested in getting a job as I already have one, but the arrogant hiring manager didn't stop his attempts at (literally) pushing me towards a computer and asking me to apply.

The (now, unfortunate) engineers were the only people who had some clue what they were doing (they had some really decent cross-language optimization problems)...

<comment><USER13> Furman doesn't have a med school. He was a pre-med.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I saw two of the founders speak at an event during SXSW last year. They spoke about the privacy and anonymity features of their app as if they added no value and caused more trouble than they were worth.

To be fair though, half of the people asking questions during the Q&A were angry teachers and parents, grandstanding about how they don't sensor enough. I can see how that might wear you down.

I would have cut them a break if they hadn't generally come off as arrogant pricks.

</comment><comment><USER22> This was sad to see. I work in their building and there were a lot of people crying and unhappy and venting in the lobby.

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, the bad news hits hardest on those who believed the managements' positive spin. You hope that the leaders were being honest with employees as things began looking worse, so that it wasn't such a surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> People shouldn't say "fired" when they mean "laid off."

Being laid off means someone's position was eliminated. Being fired means someone was terminated for cause, i.e. because of something they did (or didn't do).

</comment><comment><USER25> What I don't understand are the people who still have it installed. They ruined the only interesting thing about the app when they forced names on everyone

<comment><USER26> How's that? Just use a fake name.

<comment><USER27> The problem with pseudonymous account names is that if you post consistently under one, it makes it possible for people to figure out who you are, people who know you in real life can figure out the pattern. Yeah you could defeat this by repeatedly creating new accounts, but that would be annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sorta related and not trying to pile it on, but I made a clone of Yik Yak during a hackathon a couple weeks ago.

Share notes with people nearby

[https://unturf.com](https://unturf.com)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've always wondered what happens to all the private conversations, guaranteed anonymized by the user agreement, when a company like this decides to start selling off it's assets.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yik Yak had 50 employees?!

I'd have thought anybody could tell them that was too many...

Wasn't Snapchat or Instagram at around that until fairly recently? Yik Yak is no Snapchat or Instagram.

<comment><USER31> You're thinking of WhatsApp

<comment><USER30> My point stands m.m.

<comment><USER31> Indeed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Yik Yak fires 30 of 50 employees, still has no business model

Oh, so what? Ars is trying to spin it off like the former caused the latter, while it's definitely the opposite. They hired too many people and realized it was time to let some go. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a company trying to rectify its mistakes. Instagram had 13 employees at acquisition, Yik Yak might have expanded too fast, but they're fixing it.

> still doesn't have any obvious source of meaningful revenue. Yet somehow ... > valued ... at $400 million in December 2014"

Plenty of companies have no revenue model initially, and can be valued at millions of dollars: Snapchat $800m in 2013[1], Instagram acquired at $1b.

Maybe i'm too naive, but a company makes plenty of epic mistakes throughout its lifetime, and can do some pretty outrageous things (Zuck's business cards [2]) but that doesn't mean they're incompetent, just learning. This article's trying to shovel as much dirt as it can on the company with cherry picked incidents about trouble the company's run into, and it's not a lot of trouble honestly. How is a company's experimentation with mandatory user handles part of a post on its downsizing?

[1]: [http://qz.com/97467/snapchats-complete-inability-to-make- mon...](http://qz.com/97467/snapchats-complete-inability-to-make-money-is-the- reason-its-worth-800-million/)

[2]: [http://nextshark.com/heres-the-story-behind-mark- zuckerbergs...](http://nextshark.com/heres-the-story-behind-mark-zuckerbergs- im-ceo-bitch-business-card/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Did they try running in-app ads? Why do they have "no business model"?

They should still have a big chunk of that $62 million left in the bank, if they only had 50 employees. Cutting that to 20 should give them a few years of runway.

<comment><USER33> I'd imagine they might have spent a bunch getting into campuses across the US...

<comment><USER34> They had a campus representative at my university (UK), not sure how that worked. But if you had high 'yakarma' you'd apparently get free Yik Yak socks/t-shirts etc. from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everyone is moving to Jodel</comment>


MapD Open Sources GPU-Powered Database - <AUTHOR> https://www.mapd.com/blog/2017/05/08/mapd-open-sources-gpu-powered-database/ <comment><USER3> I would very much like to see a blog post or some other explanation of how a GPU speeds up a database query.

Most traditional SQL databases are I/O-bound, meaning that the cost of pulling index pages from disk into memory overwhelms everything else, and adding more CPU doesn't do much good. Even for in-memory databases the cost of pulling a page into GPU memory is likely to be high. The calculations you do are pretty simple -- you mostly traverse arrays of pointers and do intersections and accumulations. No floating point, just increment and compare integers.

GPUs really shine when you can parallelize operations on blocks of data that are already in GPU memory. That's why they're great for graphics and games. I'm not seeing how they help with database queries over large volumes of data which cannot fit in GPU memory.

I'd really love to read some kind of tutorial on the topic. There's likely some kind of magic here that I don't see.

<comment><USER4> They don't help on large volumes of data which cannot fit into GPU memory. Obviously. PCIe is even slower than standard CPU memory, pulling non-trivial amounts of data across the PCIe bus is catastrophic for any GPU program.

GPUs shine because their VRAM has enormous volumes of bandwidth (up to ~512 GB/s for high-end modern GPUs). That's an order of magnitude more than CPU memory.

So basically you throw indexes and perhaps a few key columns in VRAM, but as little actual data as possible, and just return the row IDs (or ranges) of interesting data. That lets you cross-reference back into host memory, and at that point you would perhaps perform some further limitation criteria based on something that's not available in GPU memory.

GPU memory isn't super-abundant, but high-end cards have up to 24 GB, and if you stack a bunch of them in a rack then you are talking about a reasonable amount of memory for most use-cases. Four cards in a box is easy, and you can put four cards in a 1U chassis if you use GP100 mezzanine cards. So now we're talking 96GB of VRAM per box or per 1U, which works out to quite a bit of index data.

The other use-case would be something that's really computationally intensive to perform, but for some reason cannot be pre-computed and cached. So - <USER2> example find me all rows where "sha256(INTEGER my_table.my_val AND now() AS INTEGER) > 256". Which as you can imagine mostly trends towards crypto kinds of stuff.

<comment><USER5> Pascal supports upto 49bit memory addressing which covers 512TB worth of addresses, AST between the GPU and system memory addresses is done in hardware which means prefetches via usage hints / branch prediction and page faults are handled by the GPU.

In this case you are only bound by PCIE bandwidth (or NVLINK if you are using a supporting GPU) and performance wise it's pretty near native speeds.

You can also access network and other types of storage from within the GPU since MIMO is universal these days.

AMD will add similar functionality starting with VEGA.

This means that with both vendors you are no longer bound by the GPU onboard memory.

And if PCIE x16 isn't enough then NVLINK comes with upto 200GT/s these days and has an infiniband end point.

<comment><USER4> The problem is "PCIe bandwidth" is really bad. PCIe 3.0x16 is only 16 GB/s, which again is less than half of you would get from any old DDR4 memory. You might as well do that on the CPU then.

NVLink is fine as far as it goes... the problem is it's a two-party transaction, NVLink still has to be fed _by something_ and that's either another GPU or the CPU or something like a SSD via DMA. With a database type program, the CPU and GPU use-cases are pointless because you could just be doing the search there and returning results directly instead of device-to- device DMA. And NVMe SSDs are usually limited to PCIe 2.0x4 which is 2 GB/s. Absolute maximum, 16 GB/s, same as any other PCIe-attached device.

Remember, GPUs aren't always used on compute-bound tasks. There is a very valid use-case for I/O bound tasks where you are just using it as a super- cache. GPU database programs often (but not always) fall into that category. You are just searching indexes/target columns like crazy and throwing the resulting row IDs back over the wall to the CPU.

<comment><USER5> NVLINK is GPU to GPU or GPU to CPU link, if you are using it as a GPU to CPU link you are taking to the CPU at native NVLINK speeds either through a native NVLINK bus if you are using a POWER CPU which supports it or via an Infiniband/OmniPath interconnect on Intel/AMD CPUs.

16GB/s is a bit tight but that's where prefetches based on pre-defined usage hints as well as the branch predictor in the GPU and the CUDA Compiler/Runtime that feeds the GPU without stalling as much as possible.

OFC you can I/O bound a GPU that's is actually pretty easy these days even in normal (gaming) workloads (e.g. draw call limit).

Let's say you are building a 4 GPU DB, if you are using NVLINK you each GPU can see the entire memory space of the other GPUs connected on the same NVLINK (there is also RDMA which can be done over the network but this is a complicated scenario) in this case you have 96GB of high speed VRAM + which ever amount of memory you can put on your CPU which can be upto 1.5TB or so per socket these days, you also have 64GB/s of bandwidth to feed that 96GB of memory with which means that it takes a second and a half to completely refill the memory completely (and I'm still not sure that the same lossless compression schemes that GPUs use these days for won't work for your data which would give you much higher effective bandwidth that the compression/decompression if free on the GPU side).

With these figures I can't see a reason why you can't optimize your memory residency to have the best of both worlds fast key-value/hash or index lookups for IO bound tasks and then programmatically prefetching the workload or if the branch prediction is good enough just letting it roll in processing bound tasks.

So yes it's not "perfect" but nothing ever will, the question is it much faster or even orders of magnitude faster for certain tasks / workloads / implementations than a CPU only DB and clearly it is. How well would it compete against other contenders like Intel's Xeon Phis, programmable FPGAs and other emerging technologies that aim to solve this problem from another direction i don't know.

<comment><USER4> Even if you have a super-fast interconnect, you can only fill as fast as something else can send it, right?

I mean, if it's in CPU memory than you are limited to whatever the CPU memory can deliver. Which is 40 GB/s per socket from quad-channel DDR4, more or less. You can probably double that with compression, but it's still vastly less than you'd get from VRAM.

And you get the same speedups from _storing the data compressed in VRAM_ assuming you have some fast method for indexing into the stream, or you're searching the whole stream. But yes, assuming your data can be dehydrated and then stored in CPU memory you can squeeze a little more bandwidth out of it this way.

If it's GPU memory (in another GPU across NVLink/GPUDirect/etc), then you should be doing the searching on that GPU instead.

The stipulation here has always been "tasks that don't fit into GPU memory aren't going to work" so if you are assuming that the data lives on another GPU... then you are violating the pre-condition of all of this discussion, because it fits into GPU memory.

Yes, if your data fits into GPU memory it's very fast, because VRAM bandwidth is enormous. The catch is always getting it to fit into GPU memory. That's why you need a "tiered" system - indexes or important columns live on the GPU, then you return them to the CPU where you do additional processing with them. It's like L1/L2/L3/memory hierarchy on a CPU - sure, your program that fits into cache is super fast, but many real-world tasks don't fit into cache.

If your entire dataset is small enough that it fits in VRAM on one box's worth of GPUs (4-8 per box), or within a few racks or whatever... that's great, go hog wild. But it's not very cost effective versus a tiered approach, this is like asking for a CPU with 16 GB of cache (or enough CPUs to add up to 16 GB of cache). It's outright impossible for very large datasets (96-192 GB is not a very large dataset in this context, but it's a reasonable amount of _index space_ for a 1.5 TB or 3 TB dataset on the CPU socket).

Once you start having to transfer stuff into and out of VRAM, GPU performance typically starts to rapidly degrade. It's "only a second or two" to you... but that's a terabyte's worth of VRAM bandwidth that sat idle for that time. "Rolling" approaches like this do not work very well on GPUs. You want to avoid transferring stuff on or off as much as possible because you just can't do it fast enough.

Computational intensity is one way to avoid doing that, both in VRAM and to host memory. If you can transfer a byte (per core) every P cycles, and you perform at least P cycles' worth of computation on it... you're compute bound. And at that point you can probably make a "rolling" algorithm work. But the problem is doing that (without just being obviously wasteful). In practice, P is like 1 byte every 72 cycles or something (working from memory here). It's really hard to find that much work to do on a byte in many cases. So despite their massive compute power... GPUs are often I/O bound on most tasks. Crypto tasks (hashing) are a notable exception.

Note that I/O bound here can happen _in different areas_ too. You can be I/O bound over the GPU bus, or on the VRAM. It depends on where the piece of data you need lives.

Also, in gaming it's typically _the CPU_ which is bound in draw-calls. The CPU can't assemble the command lists fast enough to saturate the GPU (at least not on a single thread). I'm not sure I'd say it's _necessarily_ I/O bound in this case, either, but it's possible.

Normally GPUs will only use a fraction of their VRAM bandwidth while gaming - however, like anything else, throwing superfluous resources at it _will_ still produce a speedup even if it's not really "the KEY bottleneck". Having memory calls return in fewer cycles will let your GPU get its shaders back to work quicker, even though it means the memory may be idle for a greater percent of time (i.e. utilization continues to fall).

Assuming you were going to do a DB where you store literally everything on the GPU - I'm not sure whether it would be better to go columnar or by row. In a columnar approach you would have one(or more) GPUs per column, and they would either sequentially broadcast their resulting rowIDs and all perform set- intersection on their own datasets, or dump their set of output rowIDs to a single "master" GPU which would find the set intersection. In a row approach, you would have each GPU find "candidate" row-IDs and then dump them to the CPU, and the CPU handles broadcasting and intersecting (since hopefully it's not a large set-intersection).

Columnar might be faster for supported queries, but row would be simpler to implement and more flexible (since the critical data processing would more or be taking place on the CPU).

I would have to play with it to be sure, and I don't have access to a cluster of GPUs anymore (and never had access to one with NVLink or GPUDirect).

<comment><USER5> But the AST is effectively a "tiered system" lets say you have a 20TB of DB, 96GB fits in VRAM, 2 fits in your RAM, 17 and change are on your disks.

Today the GPU can see this as a single continuous memory space, you have it does the AST and handles page faults when needed and tries to optimize the execution of each task by prefetching the needed data to the VRAM by it self through branch prediction or by programming the usage hints yourself.

Here is a short paper/write up on the unified memory in Pascal, look at the difference between optimizing/profiling your memory usage and using the prefetch hints, you going from increasing your data set by 4 times of max GPU memory and getting performance reduced by about 3.8-4 times relying on page faults alone to only losing less than 50% of your performance while going over 4 times your maximum available VRAM.

The same thing can be done on cards with 24GB, and the magic is that the performance drop actually levels off at about 2-3 times your maximum available VRAM which is why the difference between 2 and 4 times the amount of memory isn't that big in terms of performance hit/gain to over allocation ratio, so 8 times your amount of memory is not that far behind the penalty you already pay for using 4 times more.

And yes there is no scenario in which you do not lose performance, but the unified memory solution in NVIDIA GPUs is a very good solution to reduce the penalty and if you really need to go balls to the wall you'll actually benefit from the scaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I ran cloc to get a better idea of the tech in this. Interesting.

Edit: I noticed a lot of Go, but only one live script in the repo. So I excluded the 'ThirdParty' folder, where some vendored libraries reside. Edit2: That 90K SLOC single-file C goodness is a full SQLite release, which is not vendored in the ThirdParty folder, taken it out as well.

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      Language                      files          blank        comment           code
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      C++                             127           4385           3960          54609
      C/C++ Header                    158           2960           4273          14301
      Java                             42           1599           1498           9539
      CUDA                              8            301             47           3125
      CMake                            36            377            967           2616
      yacc                              1            133            156            742
      Maven                             6              0            126            507
      Go                                1             72             12            491
      Bourne Shell                      5             72             43            369
      Bourne Again Shell                3             38              0            208
      lex                               1             28             12            204
      XML                               1             12             12            182
      Python                            5             65             25            168
      C#                                1             12             11            112
      JSON                              1              0              0             73
      SQL                               3              0              0             25
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      SUM:                            399          10054          11142          87271
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

<comment><USER7> Wow thats interesting, most of the languages other than C,C++, CUDA, Go and Java must be build related things, right?

<comment><USER8> I assume they are bindings? But I haven't found an API doc that confirms that.

Edit: never mind, many of the 1-2 file languages are excluded from the latest list, so they were in the "third party" folder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see they are supporting Apache Arrow ([http://arrow.apache.org/](http://arrow.apache.org/)) in their result set converter, which will be nice for interoperability with other data system that use Arrow: [https://github.com/mapd/mapd- core/blob/21fc39fab9e1dc2c1682b...](https://github.com/mapd/mapd- core/blob/21fc39fab9e1dc2c1682bcf3dcc2b49d5503aea6/QueryEngine/ResultSetConversion.cpp)

(I'm on the Arrow PMC)

<comment><USER10> Yes its definitely alpha functionality now but we're very excited about this piece and potentially supporting more of the Arrow spec. In case you missed it check out the first project we are working on with Continuum and H2O with the "GPU Data Frame" here: [https://github.com/gpuopenanalytics/pygdf](https://github.com/gpuopenanalytics/pygdf).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Available on the AWS marketplace already set up: [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B071H71L2Y](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B071H71L2Y) Can test it for as little as $0.90 / hour on a p2.xlarge. I know I absolutely cannot wait to play with it.

</comment><comment><USER12> This blog has a few performance numbers based on a NYC taxi rides dataset, and some setup notes. Might be relevant for HNers here. [http://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-rides-nvidia- pas...](http://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-rides-nvidia-pascal-titan- x-mapd.html)

I have nothing to do with the blog. Just sharing.

<comment><USER13> This is where I first got interested in MapD. The author has a new post detailing how to compile MapD: [http://tech.marksblogg.com/compiling-mapd- ubuntu-16.html](http://tech.marksblogg.com/compiling-mapd-ubuntu-16.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is quite cool. I'm curious though what the monetization strategy is now. After all they're a for-profit company that has taken a lot of VC.

Sure, they could sell integration and maintenance services on top but services are typically much harder to scale than software -- not quite what gets investors excited.

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that the distributed[1] capability of MapD is not open sourced. And I'm guessing a lot of the companies (especially the ones with money to burn) that would use MapD require at least some horizontal scaling.

[1][http://docs.mapd.com/latest/mapd-core- guide/distributed/](http://docs.mapd.com/latest/mapd-core-guide/distributed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the laymen, is this something that I can use to replace MySQL/Postgre (with ACID), assuming I only use ANSI SQL and no stored-proc?

<comment><USER17> Probably not. MySQL and postgres are both very general purpose relational databases that have a broad range of features aimed at a wide range of use cases.

MapD is designed for more specific use cases, specifically analytic querying and visualisation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The demo [https://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap/](https://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap/) is pretty laggy, I think you should probably make it more performant so people don't think it's the DB that is causing the problem.

<comment><USER19> And why finland is "scrambled" with that big rectangle of noisy tweets with uniform distribution even in the sea? O_o

<comment><USER10> It's a bot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> After reading a book on RDBMS design I had a similar idea, but after thinking for a couple of minutes I just could't come up with a use case of a GPU- powered database, it would be significantly slower in most scenarios.

<comment><USER21> Just curious, which book did you read?

<comment><USER20> I read a couple this is one of them: [http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf](http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great stuff! I wonder how it makes IBM, Oracle and MS feel right now.

I can even see INSERTs allowed, wonder how it works with JOINs and if it is ever going to support transactions.

</comment><comment><USER23> How does this compares to other GPU database like BlazingDB?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is processing speed the bottleneck for databases?

<comment><USER17> It depends what you're doing. I haven't looked in a while, but last time I did the idea behind MapD was to produce interactive visualisations over lots of data. That can certainly get pretty computationally expensive.</comment></comment>


Fedora 23 Released - <AUTHOR> http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-23-released/ <comment><USER2> I've been pretty happy with Fedora 22, so I was kinda looking forward to 23. But then I heard all that buzz about how 23 had a horrible KDE experience, and now I'm not sure I want to upgrade at all. Hopefully the KDE situation isn't as bad as it was portrayed. At any rate, I'm waiting to upgrade for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the way the Gnome Desktop has come together for this release, and I am very excited about the future if NVIDIA can provide better Optimus support in future releases.

I find it easy to use and suspend / resume etc hasn't been an issue as often comes up in these comment threads.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have always preferred and used Fedora over other linux distros. But the non- availability of Fedora LTS as resulted in a continuous upgrade of my machines, which is daunting.

I have now chosen the RH/Fedora variant CentOS for all my machines - desktop, server,e.t.c.</comment>


Ceramic-bearing bicycle drive shaft (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bikeradar.com/news/faster-than-any-chain-ceramicspeed-driven/?image=3&type=gallery&gallery=1&embedded_slideshow=1 <comment><USER2> Not sure why this is coming up again a year later.

They put it out as a marketing thing. It had a bunch of impractical caveats.

They haven't announced they solved any of the problems with it in the year since they put it out.

The friction thing & drivetrain is mostly a non-issue. If you're riding fast enough to care the % drag from the chain/drivetrain gets smaller and smaller the faster you go. It's pretty much a non-factor compared to air resistance.

You get way more benefit from doing some extra stretching and yoga so you can lower your handlebars and still ride hard than you do changing to ceramic bearings or fiddling with expensive lubricants or chains/belts/shaft drives.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, rolling resistance at 30mph (about the fastest you'll ever ride a bike, even down a steep hill) is about 50w of energy, whereas wind resistance at that speed is close to 1000w of energy.

Compare to 10mph (average speed for most casuals) where your total wind + drivetrain is about 50w of energy. Wind resistance goes up by the cube, drivetrain is mostly linear.

<comment><USER4> > Agreed, rolling resistance at 30mph (about the fastest you'll ever ride a > bike, even down a steep hill)

What do you consider a steep hill? There are hills here that I can routinely get up to 35 mph with a little effort. Many cyclists have gone downhill at speeds exceeding 50 mph [1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc2nqMXlZWg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc2nqMXlZWg)

<comment><USER5> Most people who aren't hardcore cyclists with really nice bikes are going to chicken out around 30 MPH.

Or they should. 30 MPH is _fast_ on a bike. If anything goes wrong, it's going to hurt.

<comment><USER6> Then i've been lucky, since i did that and much more in the past. Nowadays i'm doing 22 to 23 up to 28 peak on flat ground with no headwind. On a decades old 3-speed, with coaster/back pedal brake, mud guards and basket on the (rear)carrier. (27x1 1/4 pumped to 7.5 to 8 bars)

The only thing of going wrong i can think of is insects in the eye, and generally unpleasant airstream in the eyes. Use sports glasses. Problem solved. Anything else is situtational awareness, maybe a helmet, and good maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little background on this and a thought:

Friction Facts started out as a guy (with an engineering degree) that developed his own test equipment to measure drivetrain losses under load. He eventually published his own wax formulation so that a DIYer could replicate his best effort at reducing chain friction. It produced a chain that had about 4 watts of loss, which is pretty good. That's over 98% efficient for a person putting out 250 watts. 250 watts is high for someone that's never ridden a bike, doable for someone that commutes by bike every day, and a pro wouldn't even break a sweat. So going to 99% improvement, or "reducing friction by 49%" sounds like a lot, but you're only gaining back 2 watts out of 250. Also, Friction Facts felt really cool when is was just a backyard engineer publishing his results, but then he got bought and took all his results/website offline. Luckily the internet archive and many forum posts have the major results, but it felt kind of like he was selling out to the man. I understand that he has bills to pay so I'm not mad at him. I also understand that a regularly lubed bike chain has higher than 4 watts of loss and most people aren't willing to melt wax on their stove to wax their own chains (I do though).

The CeramicSpeed concept couldn't shift in 2018 and they haven't demoed a shifting version as of August 2019. The pie plate at the back is only for looks, and claiming 13-speeds is totally worthless at this point. Heck, I could CNC a 30-speed cog for the back, since it would fit inside the diameter of the wheel. I predict that when a shifting system is functional, it will increase the complexity and add to the friction of the drivetrain, bringing to about the same level of friction as top end chain based systems from Shimano, SRAM, and Campagnolo.

This is a promising idea, but ultimately it's _worth more as a way to avoid patent infringement_ than it is to make a faster bike. Another smaller player, Rotor, makes a 13-speed system that shifts hydraulically. Rotor's marketing claims that hydraulics shift better, but everyone knows that it's just a way to keep from stepping on the established players' toes.

<comment><USER8> In round numbers, the drivetrain causes about 4 watts of loss.

Tire rolling resistance costs about 40 watts (on regular roads with road bike tires; less in a velodrome and more with knobby, thick mountain bike tires).

The bike itself costs 8 ~60 watts or so in air resistance, less for aero, deep-dish tri bikes and more for round-tube wide-tire gravel bikes. But more importantly, air resistance increases with the square of velocity, no matter your starting drag coefficient.

The remaining 150 watts or so are caused by rider air resistance.

And of course, all 250 watts are produced by the rider and dependent on their fitness level.

Clearly, the best way to go faster is to put more energy in. Next, improve your posture to produce less drag. However, it's easier to spend money than to sweat and suffer, so people instead turn to aero bikes, tires, and the drivetrain.

<comment><USER9> >> However, it's easier to spend money than to sweat and suffer

not disagreeing with anything you're saying, however at the super-elite level _everyone_ puts in the maximum amount of perfectly allocated effort into training and preparation. _if_ we could eliminate 4 watts of drive train friction loss that would be material. For your average weekend warrior the points you make are definitely true, but hey, not the worst thing to blow your money on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494226)

Can't imagine this catching on. Ordinary chains are already really efficient, and the efficiency of this will only last until dirt gets into all those tiny little open bearings. (Sealed bearings would eat into the efficiency gains.)

<comment><USER11> Something which would be cool would be a electric hybrid drive. Electric generator + electric motor.

<comment><USER12> You can already buy electric bicycles. But regenerative braking on such a light vehicle doesn't gain enough to be worth the extra weight.

<comment><USER13> I know someone who uses an electric cargo bike. It has regenerative braking, and perhaps the extra mass of carrying loads is what makes it practical.

I believe it uses the Bionx system, which uses a direct hub drive. The company is lo longer in business, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the biggest innovation of this kind that I've seen in use (anecdata, of course) is the number of commuter bikes fitted with belt drivetrains (Gates Carbon Drive) paired with internally geared hubs. The reduction in maintenance effort is purported to be significant and it's not only limited to high-end bikes (plus it can be retrofitted although non-trivially for the majority of frames). When the cog wear becomes too bad on my single-speed I'll look into fitting a belt drive, if possible.

<comment><USER15> I have been using a bike with belt drive for about 2 years and while the lack of chain reduces some maintenance doing other maintenance like switching tires gets more complicated.

And of course the loss of efficiency due to belt drive is also pretty bad.

I am convinced that this will be my last belt drive bike.

<comment><USER16> If you're a tinkerer, and you like swapping tires, doing all your own maintenance, etc, then I agree with you 100%.

However, my bike is my car. I'd no sooner swap out my own bike tire than I'd swap out my own car tire. Not that I can't, it's just not something I enjoy doing. My hub-geared, belt drive, hydraulic-disc bike is incredibly difficult to maintain... but I also just bring it in to my local bike shop once per winter. That one trip is all the maintenance it needs for the 3200 miles I put on it per year, mostly in the rain. I'd never go back to lubing a chain every week, putting new pads on every month, replacing the chain every 3, etc. 6 months after I bought this bike I gave away my repair stand and it was glorious.

<comment><USER17> >I'd no sooner swap out my own bike tire than I'd swap out my own car tire.

In my neighborhood I get a flat every other month. If I had to pay someone else to replace inner tubes it'd cost as much as driving a car.

<comment><USER16> What tires do you run? That'll happen to me unless I run touring tires. With Schwalbe Marathons front and back, I never get flats.

<comment><USER18> There are also very tough plastic liners you can put between the tire and the inner tube. At some point picked up a 1 cm cut in the the tire that this inner layer not only prevented a puncture but kept the whole tire/tube/wheel together until I noticed it by happenstance weeks later. Search for Mr. Tuffy liner but there are others.

<comment><USER6> Tried them, felt bad, was harder to drive. The same goes for stuff like Schwalbe Marathon. When i look back into the times where i bicycled more, i wonder how i managed with the tires which had just a thin mesh of wires embedded? I feel like the modern stuff has more planned obsolescence built in. Tubeless makes no sense economically to me, so i go with a small can of breakdown spray.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm an enduro and downhill rider myself, and I don't see these coming anytime soon to the "mountain bike" world. Looks fragile and susceptible of failure under high forces and dirt/mud.

<comment><USER20> I am waiting for gearboxes to become competitive with derailleurs. Would totally be up for getting rid of that fragile and expensive part.

<comment><USER21> >I am waiting for gearboxes to become competitive with derailleurs

You mean the internal gear hubs?

They've been competitive for over a hundred years[1].

I had a bike with an 8-speed SRAM[2], it worked fine (got stolen one day).

[1][https://www.sheldonbrown.com/internal- gears.html](https://www.sheldonbrown.com/internal-gears.html)

[2][https://www.sheldonbrown.com/sram-g8.html](https://www.sheldonbrown.com/sram-g8.html)

<comment><USER20> Not in the hub, bad for unsprung mass. In the bottom bracket like this

[https://pinion.eu/en/](https://pinion.eu/en/)

But has some tradeoffs that mean it isn't quite there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What are the efficiency numbers when using normal, grease and shield laden bearings? This might have a place in cycle sprints or other short distance disciplines where you have a lot of time for prep, but the benefits are quite moot if you have to swap or service bearings every hundred km.

<comment><USER23> 92-96%

<comment><USER24> are those actual numbers or are you just showing it is high?

I'd have guessed it's more like 99%. isn't anything that isn't heat or noise = perfect efficiency? a normal bike chain doesn't get hot or make much noise at all, does it? seems to me just about 100% efficient. maybe transfers a bit of vibration to the rest of the frame? but not 8%-4% of its transferred force....

<comment><USER25> This paper gives a very detailed analysis of chain drive efficiency:

[http://www.ihpva.org/HParchive/PDF/hp50-2000.pdf](http://www.ihpva.org/HParchive/PDF/hp50-2000.pdf)

<comment><USER24> Wow, thanks. I only had a quick look but Figure 2 seems to show 91.5%-95% efficiency depending on configuration. Very detailed study and it sounds like it would answer all my questions if I spent an hour reading it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The sideways forces on those sprockets are going to lead to very rapid failure...

<comment><USER27> Absolutely, putting full-load on those sprockets is not going to happen, either the sprockets will bend or the bearings will pop-out. Interesting design tho

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The detail about changing gears is glossed over, there is that big stack of what look like sprockets so it is assumed that changing gear is possible, but, get to the bottom of the article, and it isn't.

This is doing well as a fake-halo product for Ceramic Speed and their existing products, it is a crowded marketplace and not many people care about bike bearings, this product makes people aware that there is room for efficiency gains.

<comment><USER29> > The detail about changing gears is glossed over, there is that big stack of > what look like sprockets so it is assumed that changing gear is possible, > but, get to the bottom of the article, and it isn't.

Actually, it's not - take a look at the renderings again.

If you notice (and the article details) the rear "cassette" is actually a flat disk with concentric "gearing" which the roller bearing "gear" on the shaft interfaces with.

Switching gears would be accomplished (in theory) by moving the roller bearing "gear" in and out along the radius of the rear disc "gear".

It reminds me in a way of old wood "peg" and "lantern" gearing seen in wind/water mills and similar old power transmission systems, except in this case the "peg" gear is a formed or cast disc, and the "lantern" (which you couldn't shift due to the plates at the ends) is a "ring" of bearings, the bearings forming the "teeth" of the gear (which isn't that strange, if you understand how a simple gear is basically formed out of partial circles along the edge of a larger circle, all "joined up").

They do mention though, at the end of the article, that they can't shift gears easily and something about an internal wireless servo (which I think is kinda daft). I would instead use a splined shaft, and just change the "length" of the shaft to move the end-gear in/out of the wheel gear, and actuate it with a normal lever and bowden-cable type arrangement, though that might interfere with their efforts/want for more efficiency...

<comment><USER28> The thing is that this gadget has been doing the rounds of trade shows for more than a year with this unfinished detail of having it actually change gear.

There is this difference between theory and practice. So even if there was a solution - yours is elegant b.t.w. - then it would take a whole lot of testing and fine tuning to get right.

I am actually quite astonished at how bicycle parts evolve, the derailleur took the best part of a century to get indexed gears and those took decades to go from clunky to smooth. What took so long to get right? Scores of refinements were needed, e.g. to the sprocket teeth profiles, to being able to manufacture a decent chain to basics of friction in cables. Then there is the challenge of mass manufacturing these things so they are durable and precise.

I am not dismissing the ceramic speed shaft innovation - it gets people thinking - but I doubt my bike will be losing its chain any time soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think one of the biggest problems is as the rear cassette shifts toward a larger gear, flex could become an issue. The driveshaft will push out on those larger gears making the 'disc' flex toward the wheel. Those larger gears are where you'd be when climbing a hill - where you're typically putting out a good bit of power too.

It's a great idea, and I do love innovation. I've honestly never really had a problem with a chain though, myself.

I have about 6,000 miles on my cross bike (that gets used in some pretty dirty, dusty, sometimes-muddy conditions). And maybe 2400 on my newer road bike. I just clean the chain with wd-40 when it's dirty (sometimes water/soap first if really muddy), dry it well with a rag, then apply some liquid chain lubricant (sometimes after every ride, if it's needed).

<comment><USER31> I have more miles than you :-) (14,000) ((I have exclusively biked for over a decade))

But you know what might be an interesting design idea:

Make a shaft drive like this which is centrally aligned. But the bike has TWO rear wheels as closely spaced as possible and the shaft drives a single axle for the rear -- but has more gearing up front...

But make the two rear wheels with a camber such that they angle out slightly such that their centerlines are as clos as possible - allowing for turning to be essentially the same as a single-rear-wheel bike...

<comment><USER29> I'm curious as to how you would drive both rear wheels with a single central shaft? Both sides would rotate in opposite directions; I can't find a good example to illustrate what I am saying, unfortunately. I trust you understand what I mean.

Now - there might be a way around this, but it would probably introduce more complications and friction to the mix (one way would be to drop/raise the central shaft off-center of the driving wheels centerline, then have separate fore/aft gearing on the shaft to drive the wheels in the proper direction).

<comment><USER31> Shoot I think you may be correct. I hadnt thought of that aspect. Maybe it would require the central shaft to rotate a single gear in the forward direction which was attached to via smaller chain that rotates the axle between the two wheels...?

Yeah... basically what you said in the second paragraph of your comment....

This would be a fun design challenge. Anyone Solid on Solid Works want to give it a go???

\---

OH . I thin I have it, but I dont know how efficient it would be:

A Worm Gear:

[https://i.imgur.com/BgJODdP.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BgJODdP.jpg)

<comment><USER32> Here's a solidworks tutorial making a differential gear which is how many/most vehicles solve this problem.

[https://youtu.be/qqFTMhubEtc](https://youtu.be/qqFTMhubEtc)

A differential gear solves both the direction problem and the distance between the wheels when turning problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Having been dumb enough to use ceramic bearings in a BMX bottom bracket, and in the hubs of a mountain bike... I would not purchase this system.

The replacement rate for those bearings would be astonishing.

<comment><USER34> Care to expand this comment? Do ceramic bearings have a higher wear-rate than a traditional steel ball bearing?

<comment><USER35> Hambini has a good article on this[1]. The basic problem (apart from cost) is that only the ball bearing itself is ceramic; the inner and outer races are made of steel and the ball wears a groove into them which increases friction over time. Near the bottom of the article there's a 'power consumption vs kilometres' chart which illustrates this nicely.

 _" Hybrid ceramic bearings are the equivalent of trying to run a locomotive on an asphalt road - the hardness differential causes the road (raceway) to become damaged."_

[1] [https://www.hambini.com/blog/post/ceramic-bearings-vs- steel-...](https://www.hambini.com/blog/post/ceramic-bearings-vs-steel- bearings...-an-engineering-opinion/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "The first shaft drives for cycles appear to have been invented independently in 1890 in the United States and Britain." ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaft- driven_bicycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaft-driven_bicycle))

This basic idea has had over a hundred years to take off.

The particular design seen here appears particularly impractical.

The rear shifting mechanism has a poor selection of gear ratios for road use. The gear ratios are not sufficiently close. In my bike I have a Shimano Claris (or Sora?) cassette like this: with 12-13-14-15-17-19-21-23 teeth:

[https://i.imgur.com/BFFBYzj.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BFFBYzj.jpg)

Even if the drive train has a bit more efficiency, if the gear ratios are bad, that will be a deal breaker, because bad gear ratios wreck the efficiency of the human power plant.

The system has to be extremely rigid for the gears not to skip. If there is any flexibility in the system, it requires massive preload to hold the parts in contact. The chain solves this problem; its own tension binds it to the sprocket teeth.

The rear engagement mechanism has a kind of gear made up of a dozen tiny bearings. Once dirt from road spray gets inside those, they are done.

This is a basically a fair weather toy for yuppies who don't know anything about bicycles.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've had two shaft drive motorbikes now and appreciated the low maintenance and general cleanliness but they are heavier than chain drives. On a bicycle, this looks great, although it would be better off enclosed for protection - but fewer showhorse points.

</comment><comment><USER38> There's a very in-depth talk by Keith Wakeham, arguing that shifting is practically impossible with this system: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9d_cBGXMwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9d_cBGXMwY)

If I understand it correctly, the issue is that the driveshaft has to move from one "sprocket" to the next in a very small amount of time at high rotational speeds of the cassette. Because of the weight of the bearings at the end of the driveshaft, a very large force is required to accelarate it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here's a picture I took of the 1899 version, in the fascinating bicycle museum in Amsterdam: [https://imgur.com/ZnA4kEM](https://imgur.com/ZnA4kEM)

</comment><comment> the-dude What is the news here? In NL cardan-bicycle's are commercially available.

<comment><USER40> This design doesn't use bevel gears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What I'm curious about is, how robust is it? How does it handle bumpy rides and rough terrain? The article doesn't say anything about it and i can't tell

<comment><USER42> Nor can anyone, because it doesn't actually exist as a product that can be tested. This pops up every few months for some reason, with the same note: The rear shifter is not controllable. A wire to the back half with a bearing to a ring around the drive shaft would solve that, but I'm guessing that messes with their stated high efficiency goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Was a fan of Dynamic Bicycle's earlier (now discontinued) version of this, but not to the point of ever riding or buying one. They used an internal hub gear for shifting: [http://web.archive.org/web/20160124015048/http://shop.dynami...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160124015048/http://shop.dynamicbicycles.com/Runabout-8-18-Frame- Size-Runabout8S-18.htm)

</comment><comment><USER44> Right, this is about going from 98% to 99%, which is not all that useful. Bearings today are quite good.

Before ball and roller bearings, though, it was really bad.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Peu5hH9vy7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Peu5hH9vy7E)

</comment><comment><USER45> 1% drivetrain efficiency using fancy expensive fragile materials ... or $100 300W hub motor for effortless commute? choices choices

</comment><comment><USER46> iirc a single speed or fixed gear setup is already as efficient and the prototype can't change gear anyway...

</comment><comment><USER47> (2018)

<comment><USER48> Thanks for actually pointing this out, when I read the article I thought I'd seen the exact same concept bike in a Global Cycling Network (GCN) video last year. Makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not unrelated to the patent [https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0105949A3/ko](https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0105949A3/ko)

<comment><USER49> 2019-08-16 Application status is Expired

What a funny coincidence

(Not implying anything about the company in article, the article is from july 2018)

<comment><USER50> I, too, thought I had magic patent expiring powers, but that line shows today's date and the status as of today.

If you check tomorrow, it'll say "2019-08-17 Application status is Expired" instead.

<comment><USER49> Of course, this makes so much sense, and it changed indeed, hahaha

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Ceramic-bearing drive shaft is twice as efficient as Dura-Ace, company > claims

A conventional chain in good condition is >90% efficient. How do you double that?

<comment><USER52> Maybe they should have said "half the inefficiency"

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> a video or animation would be helpful

<comment><USER54> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFAQ6CzNm7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFAQ6CzNm7s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> My God that's an ugly crank!

</comment><comment><USER56> It's never going to work.

</comment><comment><USER31> As a 100% bike commuter for the last decade.....

I need one of these YESTERDAY.

How get.

Ill trial the fuck out of this thing.

<comment><USER45> you need this 1% efficiency boost? one percent</comment></comment>


Gaudí's Great Temple - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/antoni-gaudis-great-temple/

<comment><USER3> I'm in holiday in Barcelona at the moment and visited the sagrada familia today. It is truly breathtaking. I honestly wasn't prepared for how incredible it is on the inside.

I've long since left the church, but in the building I understood and felt a connection to the kind of spirituality that the building is meant to impart.

It is a magical place.

<comment><USER4> I was there last summer, and felt exactly the same as you. Truly remarkable, the impression left upon me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a couple of wide-angle pictures I took inside this past February. I think they capture the magic of the nave better than the picture in the article:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/16528392319](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/16528392319)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/16714574002](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/16714574002)

<comment><USER6> thanks for sharing! I was there some twelve years ago and it seems a lot of changes happened. It is marvelous to see this work actually evolve in my lifetime, and I have, since I was a kid, hoped to get to see the finished work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two things that amazed me when I visited it years ago:

1\. The concept of long term planning (or rather fits and starts) in building these monuments. The construction time scale is in the centuries.

2\. The character of the various architects (Gaudi, Subirachs et al) that were involved at each stage of construction reflected in different parts of the church.

It makes us think of the relationship between our insignificant lifetimes compared to the institutions that endure long after we are gone.

</comment><comment><USER8> I live about 1km away from the Church, and walk by it on a weekly basis. The only issue we locals have with it sometimes is the amount of tourists around it, especially when your on your way home from work :P I was there two weekends ago at the baptism of a friends kid, which was an experience as it was a "express service" with 15 kids baptized in 30 min.

Edit [spelling]

</comment><comment><USER9> Not that you can easily escape it, but if you are ever visiting Barcelona (wonderful city) be sure to drop by the church - but don't forget to visit his many other little pieces throughout the area. Highly unique, and highly refined.

<comment><USER7> Beautiful, beautiful city (not to mention the people, the food). One of the high points in my life was spending 3 months there. Every little building has some unique architectural detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a fun point this magnificent building was chosen as cover for Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming:

[https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/bookcover.html](https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/bookcover.html)

They did so because it's a pretty good example of multi-paradigm architecture, and the book is all about multi-paradigm programming.

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't surprise me, but I am amazed every time I see something like this and realize all over again just how little of the world I've seen.

I would suppose I've traveled more than the average individual, but I'm still missing out on so many things. This type first-hand cultural learning is what truly excites me.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you go there, make sure you buy the ticket online, otherwise you'll have to stand in a line for an hour.

<comment><USER13> If you're a photo enthusiast, go UP and visit the towers - you can grab great pictures from the towers (best in the afternoon so the sun won't spoil the photos with the sea).

I _highly_ recommend to visit later Casa Batllo (also from Gaudi - <USER2> walking / 15 minutes metro) and enjoy the views of the sagrada familia and the city from the rooftop.

If you plan to visit Park Güel do it early in the morning before 1) it's too hot and 2) before you get tired/hungry - I found the park is too far from downtown. Use public transport!</comment></comment>


Facebook Deals/Google Offers - The new kind of online ads we will ignore - <AUTHOR>

Any site with tons of eyeballs is trying a Groupon to monetize. It will totally work but the fun factor will slowly fade. These "deals" will be seen as advertisements and the mass public will start to ignore them. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a little disappointed that Google Offers and Facebook Deals is really just another Groupon clone.

</comment><comment><USER2> Someone should buy Groupon/Livingsocial.</comment>


Ask HN: What's something that doesn't exist that you would pay for? - <AUTHOR>

Something your company needs? Something you personally need? Could be anything you would pay money for! <comment><USER2> > Could be anything you would pay money for!

As explained here --

<http://arachnoid.com/Sangean_ATS-909X/index.html>

\-- there is a gap in the shortwave radio market, between the radio the article's about (a reasonably good radio with some limitations) and the high- end Icom radios (superior). While researching the article, I was astonished to discover that there simply aren't any shortwave radios in the gap between an economical but limited radio at one end, and an excellent but pricey radio at the other.

It's an unmet market need -- hard to say how big, but the potential customer base is definitely nonzero.

</comment><comment><USER3> Firefly season 2</comment>


A real-time journey through the Apollo 17 mission - <AUTHOR> http://apollo17.org <comment><USER2> Hi everyone, Thanks for the props. I'm the author of apollo17.org. I really appreciate the post.

<comment><USER3> This is really nicely done. Can you give a brief explanation of how you made it?

One thing I was looking for, and might have missed, but is there a planetary/trajectory view where we can see the craft go through space in time with the events?

<comment><USER2> I made it in these steps: \- OCR data \- Create timeline in premiere, time media to orig transcript (36 8-hour videos) \- clean data by watching premiere by reading along OCRed data \- Sync data with youtube playback via JS \- create navigation scheme using paper.js \- build data lazy loader in JS \- collect photography, treat photography, time photography to timeline \- ask my good friend, Chris to make it look nice for me

The whole site is client-side. The entire mission is loaded into the browser upon start. There's no server-side. Ironic given that my roots are as a server-side dev.

It took me years. I blogged about the making of here if you're interested: [http://benfeist.com/category/apollo/](http://benfeist.com/category/apollo/)

<comment><USER4> Absolutely brilliant - I've only just had a chance to enjoy the first 15 minutes or so, and will be back for more when I have time, but thanks hugely for this immensely immersive experience. A real labour of love, but well worth it if the way I've just felt is anything to go by. I know that this will be taking up a lot of my time in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love these sites. Here's a similar one that covers the Apollo 11 moon landing:

[http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/](http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/)

Great to hear the banter of Cernan/Evans/Schmitt during the launch. A Saturn V must be a hell of a ride.

I hope we get back to this sort of thing in the next 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi again everyone. Today's the actual anniversary of the launch. As of 9:55pm EST, Dec 6, and until Dec 19th (when the mission ends), [http://apollo17.org/?t=rt](http://apollo17.org/?t=rt) will drop you into the mission exactly 43 years ago to the second. The crew might be working, eating, walking on the moon, or even sleeping. At any time you can jump out of "real time" mode and explore the whole experience, or click to sync back up with today's date an time to continue along.

Hope you enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this would be something like Spacelog[1], which is impressive in its own right.

I'm simply blown away by the integration of audio / activity graphs / images.

[1]: [http://spacelog.org/](http://spacelog.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I just poked around the launch, the landing, the initial EVA, and the splash down on return. This is simply a beautiful historical reference.

</comment><comment> oldo-nicho I've recently rekindled my interest of space flight by watching the series When We Left Earth ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233514/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233514/)). Loving checking out some of this site too!</comment>


How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/27/facebook-fedex-amazon-fun/ <comment><USER2> I predict a future where people, frustrated by the ambiguity, lack of direction, and disconnection from cultural traditions seemingly inherent in modern life, just play games all day.

<comment><USER3> Somehow the future seems even more dystopian when, instead of _actual_ games that might have some artistry, design, and cultural value behind them, the game they play is The Facebook FedEx Game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked>

</comment><comment> brown9-2 This article feels like it was heavily "inspired" by Jesse Schell's talk at DICE 2010:

[http://gigaom.com/2010/02/22/video-reality-tv-iphone-the- fut...](http://gigaom.com/2010/02/22/video-reality-tv-iphone-the-future-of- technology-why-its-all-a-game/)

<comment><USER5> On top of this, has everyone really being "going Gaga for game mechanics" ?

I had no idea the noted sites have had achievements. Upon noting this, I still have no inclination to venture to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is another person who doesn't understand real Facebook users (as opposed to the people who just joined so they could "participate in social networking") at all. A leaderboard ranking your connections is an idiotic idea.

 _Having more friends generally equates to greater personal satisfaction with Facebook and in real life_

This is the case only because the Facebook accounts of real users are actually a reflection of their real-life social networks. Those who are happy and outgoing in real life are likely to have larger networks of friends and acquiantances, which results in more Facebook friends. They do not "friend" random people, nor do they "make" friends on Facebook.</comment>


The FDA is powerless to stop right-to-try profiteers - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2018/06/20/right-to-try-opportunism/ <comment><USER2> I totally believe right to try should be a thing. Who is the FDA or anyone else to tell dying patients that they can't put something in their body to try to save their life? The reason this is necessary is because under the previous compassionate use policy, pharma conpanies are required to report any adverse events from these patients using these products to FDA which could result in a halt of their independent clinical trials running in parallel. Because the patients utilizing compassionate use many be in any stage of disease with multiple comorbidities, it makes root cause analysis of adverse events much more difficult than in a clinical trial, and presents a much higher risk to developers.

This strongly disincentivizes companies from leveraging the compassionate use pipeline, and patients are left to die and suffer as a result.

Also as far as profiteering goes, there is no way that an insurance company would reimburse for any untested therapy which by default would keep costs down, and patients would still be required to get a prescription from their physician who would hopefully review the trial data. The idea that this would be used as an end run around FDA regulation for huge profits is moronic.

<comment><USER3> People shouldn't be charged to serve as guinea pigs. On the contrary, they should be paid.

Here is a problem: if a pharma company can simply make money from someone's desperation, they have a reduced incentive to actually make the drug work.

The situation is reduced to a simple scam: the business model of selling some desperate people the promise of a cure which is just snake oil.

We always have to consider the effect of how the flow of money in a situation creates incentives that have unintended consequences.

<comment><USER2> What are you talking about? Pharma conpanies want therapies to work because billing insurance companies at scale is where the money is, not individual patients who can't pay. That requires FDA approval. Historically iirc compassionate use distributions were free, and it is likely that will continue to be the case because the amount of money companies can make off of individual patients is rounding error relative to bringing a product to market and getting widespread approval for reimbursement.

Also, the whole point is that these people are not guinea pigs. They are allowed access to promising therapies in late stage clinical trials in the hopes that they will help them, not just random investigational compounds. Let's remember that these requests would require physician approval.

The result of blocking this is to say that dying patients should just die, tough shit, but hey at least they will die with more money right?

<comment><USER4> "Pharma conpanies want therapies to work because billing insurance companies at scale is where the money is"

Small-scale quackery scams can be highly profitable even if there's never any move to large scale production. It doesn't cost much to run a clinic giving coffee enemas, but you can charge an arm and a leg. At that rate a few patients a year can keep you riding in Ferraris.

"hey at least they will die with more money right?"

Their kids might appreciate not being left homeless by an unethical fraud.

<comment><USER5> Their kids should get jobs if they want money.

<comment><USER4> Their kids might be too young.

<comment><USER5> Too bad. That's the parent's decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last year I read a book by one of the top oncologists in the U.S., who's been in the field for five decades and held senior positions at leading institutions. He did not have good things to say about the FDA.

In decades past, researchers could come up with ideas and use them on patients who had no other options, and often saved lives that way. The field advanced quickly. Now progress has slowed and clinical practice lags well behind the state of the art in research, largely due to FDA restrictions.

So I suspect the book's author is happy about this law. Here's the book: [https://www.amazon.com/Death-Cancer-Pioneering-Oncologist- Wi...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Cancer-Pioneering-Oncologist- Winnable/dp/0374536481)

<comment><USER7> > BrainStorm CEO Chaim Lebovits told Bloomberg he's considering charging > $300,000 for each NurOwn treatment

The problem isn't that they get to try an unproven treatment to see if it works. The problem is that they get to charge desperate people huge amounts of money for it.

Do it for free, as a way to validate a drug and advance research and this wouldn't be a problem (or at least it'd be a completely different problem).

<comment><USER6> I don't disagree; a better middle ground might be cost plus some reasonable percentage for unapproved treatments.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that akin to making people pay to participate in a study? Shouldn't their payment consist of all the information a company receives from essentially testing their new treatment on a human?

<comment><USER9> They are not participating in the study though, at least not the regulated portion of the trial.

The rule prevents negative outcomes for risky non-qualified patients from harming the trial, but the converse is also true. Positive outcomes for patients outside the regulated trial will not help gain approval at Phase II or Phase III.

On a board like hn, there's a tendency to look at all data as useful data, but this isn't true in the case of a clinical trial.

On further thinking, I'm not even sure what happens in the case of a patient receiving a pre-approval drug outside of the trial. Handling their data would likely need to meet the same standards required in trial (consent tracking, electronic signatures, etc) without any of the machinery of the trial to help. It could well be the case that nothing is collected if the cost to keep it and use it are too high.

<comment><USER10> _On further thinking, I 'm not even sure what happens in the case of a patient receiving a pre-approval drug outside of the trial. Handling their data would likely need to meet the same standards required in trial (consent tracking, electronic signatures, etc) without any of the machinery of the trial to help. It could well be the case that nothing is collected if the cost to keep it and use it are too high._

IIRC, some of this was handled by FDA (or could have been), if they were part of the process by granting an unapproved treatment waiver. This way some amount of 'informal' data could be collected and used to guide others, even if the treatment was outside of a formal trial. Now, without FDA having a role, I fear that none of this data will be captured (or at least not in a useable form).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of folks commenting in here should look up Thalidomide.

Approved by most of the agencies in Europe, but denied by the FDA, it turned out it was really really bad.

So yes, the FDA does slow things down, and yes, people have a right to try what they want, but just keep in mind that the FDA does serve a purpose.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#Birth_defects_cris...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#Birth_defects_crisis)

<comment><USER12> According to your link, Thalidomide was introduced in 1957, and banned in Canada and most European countries by the early 60's. I really, really hope that the FDA and EMA have improved their methodology in the past 50 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "We have to have an incentive," he said.

There already is an enormous incentive for therapies that work. Whether you agree or not, you kinda have to admire the leaps of logic that allow people to rationalize needing to make huge profits on unproven trials from day 1, for an industry that has some of the highest profit margins of any.

<comment><USER14> "for an industry that has some of the highest profit margins of any"

Big Pharma profitability generally is pretty good but not stellar, unless you only look at profitable drugs and ignore unprofitable drugs.

<comment><USER15> The 50% on marketing number isn't BS: [https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8018691/big-pharma-research- ad...](https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8018691/big-pharma-research-advertising)

Everytime I've gone looking for this, it's just been confirmed over and over.

<comment><USER16> It's not just marketing in that graph, it's sales & marketing. Insurance companies don't make getting drugs covered and to patients easy. Newly created drugs are pretty useless if neither doctor nor patient has heard of them.

<comment><USER17> _Insurance companies don 't make getting drugs covered and to patients easy. Newly created drugs are pretty useless if neither doctor nor patient has heard of them._

Ergo hookers and blow? I don't buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Read bad pharma by Been Goldacre. It's a detailed outline of many issues with the industry. The extent that pharmaceutical companies go to make profit, mislead doctors and harm patients is crazy. This law will definitely be abused for profit.

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

</comment><comment><USER19> Let me rewrite the headline: "Redtape fetishists outraged that people now have a choice"

 _Every therapy was unproven at a certain point in time_. It can only become proven with time and tests.

Now, I agree that an experimental drug should be sold at a discounted price, or even free. We can totally discuss that.

But blocking the last possibility of hope of a dying person is just being petty.

<comment><USER20> The article is about "right-to-try profiteers", not just "right-to-try" period.

>We can totally discuss that.

That's what this article is trying to discuss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's "right-to-try" not "have-to-try". Articles like this make it sound like patients are powerless and have to take and pay for whatever treatments these companies offer.

<comment><USER22> A dying and constantly miserable human is not a rational actor

<comment><USER23> Especially when the drug seller and the patient have asymmetrical information. As far as I can tell, there are no requirements for the drug maker to report the effectiveness of the drug on those that they sell it to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And this is bad? The healthcare industry desperately needs experimentation and cheaper options. If a product works, people will continue to buy it. Welcome to how markets work.

<comment><USER25> I agree, but there's an even more compelling argument in my opinion. Government (which is basically an abstraction for "another person that isn't me") has no right to tell me what I can and can't put into my own body.

<comment><USER20> Unless those other people are directly entangled with your finances and responsible for ensuring the wellbeing of you and others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious how this law might be leveraged for PTSD and other mental health folks access to MDMA and other psychedelics.

Would this allow for access to scheduled substances?

Could this law be useful in that regard?

<comment><USER27> Only if they can charge $300,000 for the privilege. Anyway it seems that the drug must have passed a first phase of testing. Are illegal drugs allowed to be tested to begin with? I don't think so.

Most disgusting news I've read this year.

<comment><USER26> MDMA is in Phase III clinical trials for PTSD and showing very promising results. It was given a special designation by the FDA as a breakthrough treatment to speed up the process.

Previous trials with the VA found 86% of soldiers with PTSD no longer had it after a couple sessions.

So, in this case illegal drugs are. It's the only way they would ever get unscheduled, as schedule 1 means no known medical use.

<comment><USER27> That's interesting, but wasn't MDMA a prescription drug _before_ it became popular as a recreational drug? I mean, not the only drug that's legal if prescribed by a doctor and illegal otherwise, like morphine etc.

<comment><USER26> MDMA was not a prescription, it just wasn't a scheduled compound. It was originally used by therapists however before it spread into the mainstream and then it was scheduled despite the recommendation that it be scheduled to allow for medical use.

There was a study cited where they accidentally used Meth vs MDMA as evidence to schedule it and then after it came out the study made a mistake, the legislation still stood.

But keep in mind that most other drugs were used medicinally before they were scheduled.

Cocaine, Pot, LSD, Mushrooms, etc were all legal before they were illegal.

The war on drugs is a relatively new obsession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Those gosh darn profiteers providing optional life saving therapies for patients. Drat them!

I'm not saying the FDA has no purpose but it would be really hard to convince me that giving additional options to people with terminal illnesses is a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER29> > The idea that BrainStorm could make a profit from NurOwn before the > treatment is proven effective and approved by the FDA is a bad look for the > company and the entire pharmaceutical industry. It reeks of opportunism, > even when couched in compassionate rhetoric.

If anything we need more experiments like that. If you have no treatments left to try and you are dying, being able to try something that is not 100% proven but that has some potential is better than nothing. It's not like selling snake oil or something, most therapies have clear identified pathways and targets based on actual fundamental research.

Companies are hardly going to make tons of money on unapproved therapies anyway, because the word will get out if x patients tried it and had no benefits.

<comment><USER30> The author of the article also seems to imply that FDA approval is the only process by which a treatment could be "proven effective." There are many treatments that are already available in Europe but spend years waiting for FDA approval.

There's also the fact that even when a drug _does_ successfully pass through the FDA testing process, there can be a period of up to a year between the drug being successful in Phase 3 trials and actually getting approved for prescription. If you're a terminally ill patient, a 12 month waiting period between "proven in phase 3 trial" and "actually finally getting the FDA's rubber stamp" can be a long time.

<comment><USER15> The FDA allows "compassionate use" exceptions for this type of thing and generally grants them. The point of the approval process (and the entire FDA) is to prevent charlatans peddling dangerous and ineffective therapies and drugs to desperate people for profit.

Which is what this article is about: you can have no choices, but here, pay us a ton of money for UnprovenDrug(TM)! It might work according to nobody but us.

You're making the classic misstep of assuming a Pascal's wager type situation - as though there's only ever 1 unproven option out there so you might as well, when in reality there's many and getting scammed out of all your money on one means you can't try others which actually might work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An expensive chance is probably better than no chance at all.

</comment><comment><USER32> >BrainStorm CEO Chaim Lebovits told Bloomberg he's considering charging $300,000 for each NurOwn treatment offered through a new pathway set up as a result of the right-to-try law.

Drug manufacturers have finally raced to the bottom. The explicit purpose of charging high costs for experimental drugs is to entirely empty the bank accounts of the most desperate people without even having to tell them a potential rate of success. This is sick and preys on people in the most desperate situation one is likely to face in life.

</comment><comment><USER33> Could the lede be any more biased or willfully ignorant as to how long FDA processes take? A terminally ill patient doesn't have much need for money if they are dead, so what business is it of anyone's if they choose to spend all of their money of a last ditch hope.

People waste billions on quack medicine such as Traditional Chinese Medicine but now we are concerned about the finances of dying people? And yes, TCM is quackery; any form of "medicine" that prescribes black rhino horn as a cure for impotence is pure nonsense. Is statnews writing strongly worded opinions about that? Or are they just interested in picking on big pharma— that, despite its warts, actually does make drugs that have benefited society in countless ways.</comment>


Ask HN: Ad providers that respect visitor privacy? - <AUTHOR> I want to set up a little free, ad-funded website, but I don't want to be part of the adtech tracking problem.<p>Are there any ad providers that refrain from using tracking scripts, beyond basic clickthrough detection? <comment><USER2> this shows up 3rd in my search results. its about an App1e technique. [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/24/safari-test- poin...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/24/safari-test-points-to-a- future-with-tracker-free-ads/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the gist of it, but I was hoping for a drop-in solution I could use today</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Independent/Remote/Part-time job opportunities for CS/Math graduate? - <AUTHOR> I have a background in CS and mathematics (former as Bsc, latter as Msc) and was wondering what kind of "flexible" jobs I could get with that. By "flexible", I more or less mean satisfying as many of the criteria in the title as possible, ie the kind of thing you can start doing remotely and adapt to your lifestyle.<p>I'd be interested to hear about the experience of any HNer with this particular background+job combination, even more so if it's not close to programming gigs. <comment><USER2> I think that most jobs that require CS & Maths knowledge will allow you to work flexibly if you find the right company/gig.

I also think that you are looking at this situation the wrong-way round. There is so much more to a job than just being able to work remotely. What you are asking is almost akin to "What kind of job lets me work at a desk?".

There are many, many kinds of jobs out there that could involve maths and CS, you need to be more specific about your skillset and what you enjoy. For example, the career path of an actuary will be very different from that of a computer games programmer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I was mainly hoping to get samples of different possibilities given by different people here rather than a specific advice for my case, since I'm not inclined on sharing too much about it.

But by a flexible job, I meant something you could ideally do as an independent, and grow as much as you like without having a big hierarchy above; things like consulting, or R&D possibly...

(and thanks for replying!)

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. Honestly I don't know how to help you, there are just SO many jobs that involve maths and computer science, and really most jobs you can do independently if you are good enough and have the drive/motivation for it.

I myself am a software developer working out of my own company, I became an independent contractor after three years working in permanent jobs, its definitely do-able.</comment></comment></comment>


Wireworld - a computer implemented as a cellular automaton - <AUTHOR> http://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html

<comment><USER2> Previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623754>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398283>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338845> <\- Some comments

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. This reminds me of the trick they used in "Permutation City" by Greg Egan for infinite computation power.

EDIT: shame there's no rule that allows to add copper cells from inside the automaton. It would make it possible to rewire the computer according to program.</comment>


Comma.ai is open sourcing their self-driving car project - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779336/comma-ai-autopilot-canceled-autonomous-car-software-free <comment><USER2> I understand that George Hotz (a very talented person) is frustrated with regulation but those regulations are in there for a reason. No one should be allowed to turn their car in to an autonomous machine (that has the potential to wreck havoc) with half-baked, potentially untested and unsafe software.

I'm sure he's very talented and developed great software, etc. but even the smallest bug could lead the car to crash in to a group of people because 'it didn't make a turn it was supposed to.'

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/visiond)

Vision Daemon is just a binary release!

</comment><comment><USER4> Direct links: OpenPILOT - [https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot) Neo - [https://github.com/commaai/neo](https://github.com/commaai/neo)</comment>


List of Free Data Sets  - <AUTHOR> http://www.grouplens.org/taxonomy/term/14 <comment><USER2> From <http://www.infochimps.org/> -

* <http://www.datawrangling.com/>

* <http://flowingdata.com/>

* <http://numbrary.com/>

* <http://swivel.com/>

* <http://theinfo.org/>

* <http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/>

<http://www.opendatacommons.org/>

<http://delicious.com/pskomoroch/redistributable+dataset>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/where_to_find_open_data...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/where_to_find_open_data_on_the.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.ntsb.gov/avdata/Access/> (get the avall)

<http://www.ntsb.gov/>

[http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_atla...](http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_atlas_database/2009/)

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.datamob.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Also, Machine Learning Repository: <http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know where to get a data set of all published video games?

<comment><USER2> See Home of the Underdogs.

<http://www.hotud.org/></comment></comment>


Amazon: System and method for transporting personnel within an active workspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.freepatentsonline.com/9280157.html <comment><AUTHOR> This ended up on PCMag as "Amazon Granted Patent for Workers in Robot Cages" [https://www.pcmag.com/news/363657/amazon-granted-patent- for-...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/363657/amazon-granted-patent-for-workers- in-robot-cages) I thought linking to the patent would be better

</comment><comment><USER2> So it's an elevator with a robotic arm bolted on the side? Decent idea, surprised this wasn't thought of before to be honest.</comment>


An OpenCV-based document scanner in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vipul-sharma20/document-scanner <comment><USER2> Similar: [http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2014/09/01/build-kick-ass- mobil...](http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2014/09/01/build-kick-ass-mobile- document-scanner-just-5-minutes/)

<comment><USER3> Too similar :/

<comment><USER4> Looks like OP literally plagiarized the code in that article (and changed one or two variable names) without giving credit. Really bad form...

<comment><USER5> Agree, and I have to say the note he later added to his blog (not even on GH) doesn't sound too convincing.

I think he did a great job _demonstrating_ this, and also the discussion on HN brought the original pyimagesearch.com blog post to people's attention. That's a net positive.

I'm wondering about the code license though. The code posted on Github is licensed as MIT, but the pyimagesearch code doesn't seem to indicate any license (I downloaded it by registering my email address).

<comment><USER4> If there is no explicit license that comes with the code, copyright applies by default and you can't reproduce the code without permission from the author (at least in theory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoyed your step-by-step explanation of the pipeline: [http://vipulsharma20.blogspot.in/2016/01/document-scanner- us...](http://vipulsharma20.blogspot.in/2016/01/document-scanner-using-python- opencv.html)

Great job! Computer vision is a really exciting field, and there are many exciting things you can do with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> >Resolve issue regarding the use of scaled down image

run your pipeline on scaled down picture, reapply clipping and transform on full size one

</comment><comment><USER8> What a resource! Just check out the link for a visual representation of what it does, which is to take a potato-quality, poorly-angled picture of a receipt and convert it to text, all in about 120 lines of very well documented code.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't go down to text, and I think the image quality is probably not good enough to do reliable OCR. Still great for archiving though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that Evernote has always done very well for me, is make scanned documents searchable. How much of a stretch would it be to take something like this, find the areas containing text, and do OCR?

</comment><comment><USER11> Very nice writeup, I did something simmilar but not as usefull [https://jeena.net/catdog](https://jeena.net/catdog)

"The goal of this project was to give a computer a drawing of either a cat's or a dog's face and let it recognize with high probability whether a cat or a dog is shown."

</comment><comment><USER12> is canny edge detection better than adaptivethreshold for pre-filtering the image? The AR tag implementations I've looked at all seem to use adaptivethreshold.

<comment><USER13> co-founder of fileee.com here(we do that for a living :) ). I can tell you that in general adaptivethreshold is better, because it is less error prone against low contrast situations and missing edges. That said there are also cases where canny performs better. That's why we actually decided to use a machine learning approach to decide when to use what. There are even more things one can do to improve the detection(e.g. hough tranform to find edges or use variance or fft to assest whether possible "document" candidates are just garbage rectangles or real documents.)

<comment><USER14> I am interested in learning more about using variance and fft to finding boundary in documents? Can you elaborate or link any good resources to learn more about this, I'm very interested in learning :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If document have handwriting on it, so how can get them after scanning document.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why is this flagged!?</comment>