An Introduction to Probabilistic Graphical Models (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/prelims/ <comment><USER2> A few comments have mentioned neural nets in this post. adamnemecek mentions in this thread that PGMs are a superset of neural networks, and and Thomas Wiecki has a few excellent blog posts on creating bayesian neural networks using pymc3.[0][1][2] If you're curious about how these two concepts can be brought together I highly recommend reading through these three posts.

[0] [http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2016/06/01/bayesian-deep- learn...](http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2016/06/01/bayesian-deep-learning/)

[1] [http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2016/07/05/bayesian-deep- learn...](http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2016/07/05/bayesian-deep-learning/)

[2] [http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2017/03/14/random-walk-deep- ne...](http://twiecki.github.io/blog/2017/03/14/random-walk-deep-net/)

<comment><USER3> Do they train with backpropagation efficiently?

<comment><USER4> No, back-propagation would not give full Bayesian inference (although there are some tricks [0]). They instead use variational inference[1], which allows for fast inference of continuous PGMs.

[0] [http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html](http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00788](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00788)

<comment><USER5> Most variational inference are not full-Bayesian as well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> PGM's are great, but my experience from Koller's course is that it is very hard to identify cases where they can be used.

Part of the reason is that you need a-priori knowledge of the causal relationships (coarse grained I.e direction) between your variables.

Presumably if you're doing ML you don't know those causal relationships to begin with.

Particularly good fits are things like physics where laws are known.

<comment><USER7> A heuristic guide...If you have more data than knowledge about the domain, and you want to do classification/prediction, then NNs are a good.

PGMs are good if you have knowledge that is important to encode; you need modularity i.e. you don't want to embed priors in the model; you have strong causal relationships e.g. diagnostic models with 'explaining away'; you want to integrate value of information e.g. what test should I do next to resolve uncertainty.

You can mix ML with knowledge in PGMs. The downside is the computational complexity of inference which is NP-hard for both exact and approximate inference, although you can identify the complexity of the model at design time and make the appropriate modelling trade-offs.

<comment><USER8> by complexity of inference do you mean the complexity of learning the structure of a model ? because inference on an existing PGM is linear in the number of edges with belief-propagation isn't it ?

<comment><USER7> It's linear in singly connected networks, not for multiply connected graphs. However NP-hard is the worst case as I mentioned (p288 Koller & Friedman)

<comment><USER8> by multiply connected graphs do you mean graphs with cycles ?

<comment><USER7> Yes, although in directed acyclic graphs the 'cycles' manifest as multiple paths to a node.

<comment><USER8> cycles can be handled in two ways: if you are happy with approximate solutions, loopy BP can give that (still linear, but may take longer and there's parameter tuning), for exact solutions you can rewrite the graph to "carry" dependencies (latest paper by Frey)

<comment><USER9> Could you link to that paper? And does it have anything to do with the junction tree algorithm?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.psi.toronto.edu/~psi/pubs2/1999%20and%20before/13...](http://www.psi.toronto.edu/~psi/pubs2/1999%20and%20before/134.pdf)

I don't know about junction trees but it probably connects as junction trees are a generalization of factor graphs

<comment><USER9> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the best textbook on graphical models, also from Jordan but later (2008): [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/Papers/WaiJor08_F...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/Papers/WaiJor08_FTML.pdf). It also covers some general theory of variational inference. Source: I worked on PGMs in grad school.

</comment><comment><USER11> This course also referred M.I Jordan book: [http://imagine.enpc.fr/~obozinsg/teaching/mva_gm/fall2016/](http://imagine.enpc.fr/~obozinsg/teaching/mva_gm/fall2016/)

One of the best course I have ever taken, F. Bach and G. Obozinski are incredible teachers.

<comment><USER12> I couldn't agree more! This course features has slides, which many will prefer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's an excellent course on PGM by Koller on Coursera. My friend took it and now he's a PGM evangelist. If you are wondering where PGM lies in the spectrum of machine learning, you should research the difference between generative and discriminate modeling. We have been driven to PGM to solve our ML problem that was hard to frame as A NN. Mainly because we had some priors we needed to encode to make the problem tractable. It reminds me a little of heuristics in search.

The person I'm talking to: an early ML student.

<comment><USER14> The hot use-case of the PGMs approach has often been in the discriminative setting (see M^3 and latent SVM) - which is good because discriminative classifiers work well with fewer data points (see Ng, Russel).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good article: "Big-data boondoggles and brain-inspired chips are just two of the things we're really getting wrong" \- Michael I. Jordan ref: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/ma...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/machinelearning-maestro-michael-jordan-on-the-delusions-of-big- data-and-other-huge-engineering-efforts)

</comment><comment><USER16> PGM seems to me harder than neural nets, but the trend in the last couple of years is to include probabilities in neural nets, so they're hot.

<comment><USER17> Not an expert but PGMs are mostly a superset of NN, so it's kinda understandable.

<comment><USER18> What is the connection other than "they both have graphs somewhere in them"?

I sort of see what you mean since NNs transport information across a graph in a straightforward (non-loopy) way, and PGMs can propagate information in crazy (neverending loops) ways when doing belief propagation...

<comment><USER16> From my limited understanding, pure NNs are not able to express confidence in predictions. By adding probability to the NN, we can have both predictions and confidence scores. In practice, noise is being injected, or connections dropped out randomly, then predictions averaged over multiple runs.

<comment><USER18> Sure they can, many output probabilities: [http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/mlp.html#mlp](http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/mlp.html#mlp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/ma...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/machinelearning-maestro-michael-jordan-on-the-delusions-of-big- data-and-other-huge-engineering-efforts)

Jordan: Well, humans are able to deal with cluttered scenes. They are able to deal with huge numbers of categories. They can deal with inferences about the scene: "What if I sit down on that?" "What if I put something on top of something?" These are far beyond the capability of today's machines. Deep learning is good at certain kinds of image classification. "What object is in this scene?"

I think Jordan refers here to Bayesian models that incorporate gravity, occlusion, and other such concepts.

[http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2013/ht...](http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2013/html/Jiang_Hallucinated_Humans_as_2013_CVPR_paper.html) e.g. postulates entire humans to improve scene understanding.

What I get out of this: Deep learning has to be enriched with progress from other machine learning fields

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice high level talk on Statistical Inference for Big Data by Jordan. Been one of my favorites since his LDA/PLSA papers in 2003 with Andrew NG. [http://videolectures.net/colt2014_jordan_bigdata/?q=jordan](http://videolectures.net/colt2014_jordan_bigdata/?q=jordan)

</comment><comment><USER21> Related?:

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/probabilistic- graph...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/probabilistic-graphical- models)

[http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...](http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=ProbabilisticGraphicalModels)

</comment><comment><USER22> Note there's an exploding literature that reads these models as causal models: [http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf](http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> Michael I. Jordan was a mentor to Andrew Ng. Probabilistic Graphical Models are the next frontier in AI after deep learning.</comment>


The return of the mainframe: Back in fashion - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15276714&subjectID=348909&fsrc=nwl <comment><USER2> I swear I have been reading a variation on this article every other year or so for the last decade. It's almost like the old 'bsd is dying' joke.</comment>


Easel: Design without a Designer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.easel.io/blog/2012/07/02/design-without-a-designer/

<comment><USER3> The gist of the post is not that you don't need a designer, it's rather that you should become one. Which is fine if you have some basic enthusiasms and talent in the area. As a designer it sort of pisses me off that people are going to skip hiring me, as a teacher I feel great about people learning about design :)

<comment><USER3> I would never recommend dribbble though, it's glossy run of the mill boring stuff! You'd do better with dabbling in design history… My favourite design education text is the book 'Thinking with Type', which combines practical knowledge with a inspirational reading of typographic history, renaissance books, swiss grids, postmodern experiments <http://www.thinkingwithtype.com/>

<comment><USER4> The post is aimed at people who admit they can't design well. Starting with the boring run-of-the-mill stuff is exactly what they need.

For people with some good designs of their own under their belt, moving onto more advanced topics is appropriate.

<comment><USER3> That's like saying that if you want to learn how to paint you shouldn't be visiting the Louvre, you should go to a mediocre art fair instead! That's not true, you need great examples at each stage of the journey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A designer's job is not about using tools to make things look good. A designer job is to make decision about how things work together. And because of that, this post title pissed me off. If you're talking about a visual tool, talk about the tool, don't say you can design without designer.

</comment><comment><USER6> The title should be Designing without design :)

I am a little confused as to how this is helpful (I did read it)

</comment><comment><USER7> As far as iOS goes, for the recommendation to look at Dribbble, I'd substitute pttrns to see iOS app designs. For the recommendation to have a style guide, you can use a theme protocol (in the 2012 WWDC videos, I THINK it's the UI Design video, the one about the rocket ship).

</comment><comment><USER7> On the recommendation to look at sites like Kuler, are color schemes copyrightable? I see people claiming copyright on colourlovers.

<comment><AUTHOR> IANAL so I can't say for sure but the COLOURlover team doesn't seem to think that the palettes are copyrightable, as copyrights cover specific executions and not the colors themselves.

[http://www.colourlovers.com/forums/1,1,149/Copyrighting_colo...](http://www.colourlovers.com/forums/1,1,149/Copyrighting_color_schemes#comment-1664)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> demo looks great. can't wait to try it out for real!

</comment><comment><USER9> Neat app. I'll be using this when it launches.

</comment><comment><USER10> Love Easel.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're not a designer, don't design. Just focus on building your product, app, service, whatever. Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product itself works as advertised and is fun to use.

Set your hourly rate, configure it to represent how much time you think you'd waste sifting through online designs and spend that amount on a decent theme that will work with Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework that a developer can configure.

Designers don't post billable collateral on the web. They're too busy working and keeping their design under the radar is part of the business. They don't have a Github mindset so don't bother trying.

<comment><USER12> > _Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product > itself works as advertised and is fun to use._

This is so wrong on so many levels. _Of course_ it will hinder the adoption. In fact a poor design is likely to kill it altogether.

For one, and print this out in bold Comic Sans and hang it at the eye level, - "First impression lasts." If something looks like poop, no one will bother checking out if it works as advertised.

For two, and this follows from #1, a good product with a poor design is not likely to outperform a poor product with a good design simply because there will be fewer people trying former.

For three, it's not "fun to use", it's "a pleasure to use," again meaning that the visual component is the product is vital. Show me a poorly designed product that is fun to use. Seriously.

Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects. It is about forming an appropriate product impression. You just can't expect an average user to look past an ungodly frontend and appreciate the beauty of the guts. This just doesn't happen. You need... strike that... you _must_ consider the design at the same level of importance as any other feature of the product. The same goes for "oh, just pick a theme" - sure, but it's a goddamn theme that's used in hundreds other places, so guess what - it comes with a "generic shit" tag. You want to have your blog/site/service have this vibe - fine, but is it sensible thing to do - hardly.

<comment><USER11> > "First impression lasts."

You're obviously too young to recall the first versions of Facebook or maybe you haven't even taken a good hard look at the latest one. They all suck but they're fun for their users and adoption rates speak volumes.

> Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background > textures and glass effects.

You have no idea about what you're talking about. You're not even a rookie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The command key shortcuts don't work on Linux, and that's particularly critical as the reason I am interested in this app is that I can't run the Adobe suite.

(And will never work, because I use xmonad and my super key is reserved for that.)

<comment><USER14> Did you try control key instead of command?

Apologies for the apple key on the demo. We'll fix it soon. In non-mac environments, the control key is substituted for all key commands.

<comment><USER13> Control key worked. The reason for the confusion is I _am_ a Mac user and the cmd key is the super key on Linux. I'm even using an Apple keyboard :P

Thanks for clearing that up.

<comment><USER15> Off-topic - but doesn't that confuse you? I gave up on desktop linux - <USER2> because I don't like Gnome 3 or Unity (Gnome 2 was good though) but also because my fingers are so used to Cmd-S, Cmd-T etc. I tried mapping Ctrl to the Cmd key but that breaks other stuff (like the Unity launcher).

<comment><USER13> >Off-topic - but doesn't that confuse you?

Nope, I've been using multiple OSes since I was a wee boy.

>partly because I don't like Gnome 3 or Unity

I don't use either of those, I use XMonad. XMonad is about 33% of why I prefer Linux to OS X.

>but also because my fingers are so used to Cmd-S, Cmd-T etc.

wee boy, multiple oses, etc. I use Emacs _and_ vim concurrently as well (although Emacs is my primary editor for programming 97% of the time).

>I tried mapping Ctrl to the Cmd key but that breaks other stuff (like the Unity launcher).

Train the mind, train the hands. Linux, OS X, Windows, and Emacs are practically part of my spinal cord.

The video gaming probably didn't hurt either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> sean-duffy Nice, some good little tips here!</comment>


What to do while waiting on my incorporation? - <AUTHOR>

My lawyers are taking a bit long to file all the stuff...they're having issues with my company name and a couple other things. They're some of the best in the country, so I'm not worried. It's just that it's been over a 2 weeks of total inactivity on my end and I need stuff to work on.
Here's what I have at the moment: 1) A functioning MVP 2) A mailing list of <200 people that I've never even used. 3) Some companies I've been in touch with that expressed interest in my software. FYI, my software can be used by both freelancers and companies in the design field.
I'm being told that I need to figure out what my customers are willing to pay (and if they are). From talking to many of them, the answer has been positive but I guess until I have yet to see people buying, there's no proof.I'm waiting on getting my bank accounts set up and all the company paperwork so I can start using Stripe and finally getting around to following the advice I got about Twitter/FB ads, and together, trying to understand my market even better.
Is there anything else I can do in the meantime? I need something to do...it's killing me. Admittedly, I've never done this before and pretty much everything I've done so far wasn't figured out properly the first time around. Scold me. <comment><USER2> Either start putting together blog posts, so you can continue to pump out good content even after you get too busy to write it (technical, domain based, but "proper" article, not just puff pieces) , or adding features.

Although you should arguably wait on adding features until you get feedback.

I'm still at the 'building MVP' stage, but I have an Evernote file called "Awesome things to do to product when done" with links to ideas, products, blogs etc I see as I'm going along but don't have time to do now, or it's not appropriate to do now.

For instance, it was announced yesterday that Stripe is coming to the UK, so that blog post has gone into my list so that when I come to add payment, I don't have to think too hard about options. (Actually, thinking about it, you could certainly be coding the Stripe stuff now, even though you don't have the bank account in place... you know you're going to need it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Blog posts. Hm. Should I write about my market research? Interesting people I've met (Without naming names) who've taught me something about the field I'm working in? Features for the website and how/why they do what they do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SEO? Marketing? Meetings? Customer interviews? Coding beyond a "functioning MVP" into something robust and thoroughly tested?

<comment><AUTHOR> I really need an advisor. Although I "have" one, it takes him many, many days to reply to my questions. So much for being put in touch with him by one of leaders in tech. startups....

<comment><USER3> Drop an email to the address in my profile. I can probably write up a laundry list of things for you to work on tonight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see an email?

<comment><USER3> email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> email sent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Would you bring your electric car inside your home? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cfmccormick/would-you-bring-your-electric-car-inside-your-home-58317bf40918 <comment><USER2> Garages cost a whole lot less per square foot than a living room. We put everything we can in our garage to have a bit of space in the house.

</comment><comment><USER3> In MI and other snowy states, the salt and snow get your car very gross. Sometimes enough of the black/gritty snow gets up in the wheel well that makes the garage gross in the morning. Never will i put my car in my living room.</comment>


And This is Why China is Every Internet Company's Dream - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/07/25/china-internet-users/ <comment><USER2> The article basically summarizes into this: "Even though the Chinese government has heavy control over [the internet], if you factor in the population growth of 1.3 billion people, there is a lot of potential there."

The article only has one point: China has lots of people. The author's basic understanding of how internet companies work is the following:

1) Operate in a place with a large number of people

2) ???

3) PROFIT

I would LOVE to read an article that discusses strategies for successfully penetrating a market where there is heavy government censorship, corruption, and tonnes of bureaucracy. Tell me how some companies deal with the fact that most of the 1.3 billion are poor, and the fact that the rich are even stingier than the poor. Tell me how to run a business in a land with no respect for intellectual property, where many of your hired hands are capable and willing to memorize your business/machine's idea/database/blueprints, and sell it to your competitor for pennies.

Tell me how you could do it when so many businesses have failed, and you have written something of worth.

<comment><USER3> You make a good point, but you're missing the main point: China's internet users aren't destitute and they're growing, along with a growing middle class. Lots of farmers are very poor; they're not your market.

If you've ever been to a high end mall in China, you'll know people like to spend money (I'm not sure where you got the stingy idea from).

There are lots and lots of very successful software and web startups in China. Most are not foreign owned because most foreigners have difficulty navigating the political/business climate here (I guess it's the same reason why most startups in the States aren't foreign owned either).

I hear a lot of high-level complaining about the Chinese <fill in the blank>, but if you are really motivated, you can overcome those barriers. I don't think that's specific to China.

The real problem, I think, is lack of understanding. All people hear about are great opportunities in China, but are frustrated when there's no prescribed formula for attaining such opportunities. This is analogous to a non technical person reading up about all the web startups and trying to take advantage, then complaining about this or that when he doesn't understand how to go about doing a web startup.

The solution is simple: dig deeper and immerse yourself in understanding the Chinese market.

<comment><USER2> cglee, re lack of understand, high-level complaining/frustration and pretty much your entire post, I couldn't agree with you more.

The point I was trying to make was that the article author is only echoing the idea that's been around for decades, that China is a land of opportunity, without bringing any new insights into _why_ internet startups will do well. Just stating the potential isn't interesting, informative or insightful any more than proclaiming that "the internet is the future of business"

I guess I sounded a little erh, racist when I called them stingy: I guess I meant more along the lines of "frugal" and "cunning". Frugal: compare a Linen's n' Things to a chinese houseware store. You don't find NEAR as many useless kitchen knickknacks. Cunning: if i can duplicate your idea with a low- tech solution, I won't pay for your idea.(5-sizes melon baller set?! Multi- purpose automatic measuring devices for dry, powdered, wet, sticky foods? it's called a SPOON. singular.)

<comment><USER3> Maybe perceptions of Chinese American immigrants taint your attitude towards Chinese people. Most immigrants have to be frugal because they're poor. Most immigrants have to be cunning because they're at a severe social disadvantage. It's being an immigrant, not Chinese, that's the difference (interestingly, this is also why a lot of Americans think Chinese people on the whole are really good at math).

I find that Chinese people run the gamut on frugality and cunningness. You'll probably find more cunning people in the business world, for sure, but not necessarily more frugal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you guys think are some ways to infiltrate this market? I think that a lot of existing models here might work there with just a simple clone.

Perhaps Twitter?

<comment><USER5> I think the first step is not to look at the market and say "What US company can we build in China? Chinese MySpace, Chinese Facebook? Chinese Twitter?" Chances are they've been done. As the market in China grows, developers are going to have to ask themselves what is unique to the Chinese culture that is in need of a technological solution.

<comment><USER3> Imagine a couple of young ambitious Chinese hackers, sitting around asking themselves "what's unique about American culture that is in need of a technological solution?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More interesting topic would be: how to do business in China and not be evil.</comment>


Gawker Smeared Me, and yet I Stand with It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/opinion/i-stand-with-gawker.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-3&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> The article is full of non-sequiturs.

"I believe that Gawker serves an essential function in a celebrity-obsessed culture"

? So, in a celebrity shunning culture they'd be useless?

"...the public right to information is more important than any individual's right to privacy"

What is this public right to information, where does it come from?

"Gawker is responding to an asymmetry of celebrity power"

An obsession with celebrities. As if celebrities were the important aspect of society. If celebrity power is unfavorable to ordinary people, legislate their power down to size, don't rely on a white-knight like "protector of the people"

If Gawker wanted to do the public a favor, rather than say, just another way to make a buck or to wield power, they'd do hard journalism.

I mean, who cares what kind of sex HH has or Peter's sex preferences are? That's salaciousness disguised as news. And no, I don't care to see a congressperson's sex tapes either. I do care that they engage in illegal things, yes, but not about people's peccadilloes. Isn't society beyond voyeurism-thru-media-cum-news already?

</comment><comment><USER3> > ... the recent investigation into Donald Trump's hair, [is] directly in > opposition to the triumph of celebrity culture.

There's so much going on in that phrase it's hard to know where to start.

<comment><USER4> >> ... the recent investigation into Donald Trump's hair, [is] directly in opposition to the triumph of celebrity culture.

>There's so much going on in that phrase it's hard to know where to start.

I think I've figured it out. It's like reading Lacan or Derrida.

The author or speaker generates these statements that create a combinatorial explosion of possible meanings. The author then moves swiftly on while you're trying to work out what the fuck they are talking about.

Since you're still cogitating on whether they've said something profound or something ludicrous, you become the slow one. Eventually you resort to skimming their sentences as they are spoken or written, desperately attempting to extract sense from meaninglessness.

This is seen as victory by them. They are deep. You are dim.

This is like a programmer authoring code that takes up a lot of machine time and then ascribing sophistication to the program because why else would it use so many resources.

It is true that it is often difficult to follow somebody's argument when they are of sufficiently evolved intellect. The difference is that there exists a 'ladder', a key metaphor or strand of thought that connects all together, and once you find that element, everything else they were talking about on that topic begins to make sense.

The key is to resolutely pin them down on a particular point. The intellectual will, with sufficient prodding, be able to break it down using simple language without jargon. Metaphors. Pictures. Beginning from the beginning.

The pseudointellectual will flower into a fully developed argot that extends everything and explains nothing. If they cannot interpret their reasoning for another mortal it is likely they do not understand it themselves.

If they want to feel complicated, I say we leave them to their devices. Good luck building on that foundation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well that was incomprehensible.

What is the politically correct word for these people?

Ah yes, 'intellectually challenged'.

In related news Gawker has partially sold itself to Viktor, a man for whom people like Nick Denton are human chew toys.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is tangential, but I'm somewhat surprised at how many journalists are recording with their iphones in the picture. Are these guys not big station reporters who can afford the big mics? Those mics themselves can't be that expensive.

<comment><USER6> They're not recording for broadcast - just as a note of what he said for when they write about it later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Peter Thiel makes people draw all kinds of analogies...</comment>


What do conductors do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10782663/What-do-conductors-do.html <comment><USER2> (I was expecting an article about electricity.)

Having done a little of both, I found it easier to write for full orchestra than to conduct one. Conducting is extremely hard. Just the simple practice of conducting ahead of the beat (where you're motioning beat 1 while they're still, roughly, on beat 4) is a bit of a brain bender. The first time I tried to conduct a student orchestra, that alone was enough to make the tempo get slower and slower over time, as I kept trying to correct to their beat while they would in turn correct to mine. Add on to that all the emotive requirements - you need to be a special kind of extravert to take to conducting naturally, I think.

At any rate, conductors are essential to the rehearsal process, as they're responsible for the interpretation, which is rehearsed. By the time performance comes around, the conductor is less essential, serving a more of a coach that gives cues, triggers, and reminders about the shape and interpretation that the ensemble has worked up.

<comment><USER3> I sometimes operate media servers that deliver video for several classical pops concerts including Fantasia and a number of more modern Hollywood type movies. The conductor gets a special synchronized video feed with white dots flashing to indicate tempo, colored lines to show when changes are coming up and bar numbers, all superimposed over the movie. The conductor has to speed up and slow down the orchestra in order to match the music exactly (or as close as possible) to the original video. I never change the speed of the video. Some pieces seem to be harder and also require a click track. These are shows that obviously require very close attention to the conductor.

I always wonder if all the orchestra was given a click and a copy of the modified video, if the conductor could just sit down and eat a sandwich. Of course, that is kind of like contrasting watching a DJ that selects mp3 tracks vs someone who can adeptly spin vinyl.

Curiously, I can tell you from listening to the conductors speak candidly, they often consider this sort of conducting much harder despite these added tools. Even when they are playing very familiar pieces like the music from Fantasia, it is very difficult to match it so exactly to the original. They compare adjusting the speed of an orchestra to speeding or slowing a freight train.

With professional orchestras, most only do 1-2 rehearsals before the shows I control video. It is amazing how fast the musicians take notes and adapt to the direction of the conductor. There is almost always a marked improvement between 1st and 2nd rehearsal and the actual show.

I will say that having stood at the conductor's podium at many of the top theaters in the U.S. (while empty) - it is an incredibly intimidating thought. Every seat points straight at you. It is much more singularly focused than a dramatic stage. It definitely has given me (someone with very little musical understanding) a great deal of respect for their responsibilities.

<comment><USER4> Mixing MP3s is no less of an art than mixing vinils...

<comment><USER3> I am sure that is true (I don't have a music background). I just think it is usually much more interesting to watch someone perform with vinyl. More showmanship or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can think of the orchestra as a meta-instrument. Just like a violinist plays the violin, a conductor plays the orchestra.

 _Someone_ has to make the musical decisions. In a string quartet, it might be the first violin. In a baroque ensemble, as the article stated, it might be the harpsichordist. In a symphony, it's the conductor.

Sure, a conductor keeps time, but not so much during the performance itself. With enough practice, any professional orchestra should be able to keep time on its own, but during rehearsal, someone still needs to say exactly what that tempo is in the first place.

Having played with many amateur orchestras, currently rehearsing with one weekly, I've seen good and bad conductors. Just like a CEO or basketball coach or political leader, the conductor shares his/her vision of "success" yet knows the low-level technical details of the craft required to lead them there. The part about waving one's arms on stage has little to do with it.

An organization -- any organization -- acquires the characteristics of its leader. Therefore, one must not underestimate the importance of a good conductor.

<comment><USER6> What is excellent about chamber music, in particular, is that no individual makes the musical decisions. Each musician is talented enough to be able to react and expound upon the decisions of each of the other players. Honestly, chamber music is often more of a social challenge than a technical or musical one.

<comment><USER7> I've been told the same thing by people who do Jazz, that they just sit down and go with it because everyone there is talented enough to run with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I played in orchestras from 6 to about 23, from small professional quartets to huge 100+ piece complete symphonies - mostly enthusiastic amateur ensembles, but I did manage to get hooked onto a small tour ensemble that hit a handful of cities in just post Iron Curtain Russia and took part in some national level Orchestra competitions. plus made a little bit of spare change playing weddings and benefit events for a while. Had to give it up due to medical issues, but nothing beats sitting in the middle of a Symphony Orchestra going at full-steam.

I'm pretty convinced that the act of a symphony doing their thing is one of the most impressive split second coordinated acts of cooperation humans have every achieved. A conductor is really important for this, especially as the number of players gets larger.

A small trio/quartet can get by just by themselves. Even moderately sized chamber orchestras can manage "ok" with maybe a lead instrumentalist kicking off a tune with an exaggerated nod -- you just rehearse a lot and listen to each other. But once you break maybe 30 or 40 people trying to synchronize complex sound production, manually, with 1/100th of a second precision, it starts getting hard.

Conductors are really critical also in setting the "tone" or interpretation of a piece and the program that the orchestra plays. It's why some orchestras play a piece soft and loud in some bits, or another might play quiet and fast. Or one might use a version of the piece where the oboes pick up a flute harmony in the third movement, etc. In many orchestras they also set the position of players, usually through section auditions. It's how one violinist ends up near the conductor and another one ends up in the back row of the 2nd violins trying to hear themselves play over th e bassoons.

Rehearsal is harder at scale. It's hard getting 100 people together over and over, so there's section rehearsals where maybe just the violins break off and work, or just the brass instruments. At that level maybe just the section leader runs the rehearsal with the conductor dropping in to set vision.

Then you build a bigger part of the orchestra and rehears that, maybe with an assistant conductor or the conductor proper. And maybe you do the full thing a couple of times than go out and perform. A pro-level orchestra can get an all new program of music and turn it around into a performance inside of a week or two.

Think how hard it is to coordinate just a half dozen programmers.

<comment><USER9> After reading your comment, and considering Serf (the docker coordination thing), I wonder what it would sound like for musicians to coordinate over a gossip protocol (rather than through a centralized conductor which as you note struggles to scale). What would that even look like?

EDIT: Or, as sgeisenh points out below, that's chamber music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, in a metal, it has to do with free electrons at the Fermi surface ... oh, you mean _music_. Never mind.

But more seriously, cool article. I think I understand the conductor's role in the orchestra better now.

<comment><USER11> HN readers, please raise your hand if the first thing you though about when reading the headline was _not_ electricity. Now put your hands down if it was something to do with thermal energy. Now put them down if you were thinking about trains. If your hand is still up, please remove all metal items, swallow this, step into the fMRI, and hold still.

<comment><USER12> So, basically, whoever thought "orchestra conductors" needs an fMRI?

<comment><USER11> The elements of the joke are as follows. I assumed that HN readers have a higher probability than the general population to associate words with scientific or engineering meanings. I further assumed that as this site has a high association with electronics, the electrical meaning of conductor would be most prevalent. This was reinforced by the parent post, who stated nearly exactly what I had been thinking, right down to the smirking overcleverness with which it described to motion of elecromagnetic charge. Before clicking on the link, I thought of other things that could be meant by "conductor". I came up with heat transfer and train tickets. I didn't even think of orchestras, probably because I had always been in bands, where the leaders were overwhelmingly _directors_ , _band leaders_ , and _drum majors_.

The second element of the joke is that I presumed that HN readers, having a variety of esoteric hobbies, might also have an interest in cognitive science and linguistics (particularly the AI folks), and might want to analyze the brain of an outlier. I then decided that, while less accessible to a home hobbyist than brain surgery or in-depth psychological profiling, fMRI imaging conveyed the point of the joke in shorter, more recognizable wording, without actually being a very probable outcome.

In reality, you would probably be wired up to a home-made sensor array and presented with a series of time-indexed sensory inputs via headphones and a computer screen, and perhaps asked to press certain button sequences in response.

So, in short, no, those people do not need a fMRI. You, however.... I would like to analyze your physiological response to traditional comedy and contrast that with nerd jokes....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My music teacher at school called conductors "meat sequencers". After reading this, perhaps it was a little bit of an understatement!

</comment><comment><USER14> The drum major of Stanford's Band is pretty exceptional:

[http://www.sfgate.com/collegesports/article/Stanford- band-s-...](http://www.sfgate.com/collegesports/article/Stanford-band-s- spiritual-leader-drum-major-5102715.php)

I auditioned for the job this year in a King Tut costume but didn't get it. I can't say that I know exactly what the drum major does either, but I think spiritual leader is a good way to put it.

While it may be hard to describe the exact purpose of the drum major, some definitely stand out. This year was the 50th anniversary of the Band and many old drum majors came back to play with us. At one point each of them got to conduct a song, and some of them were just incredible.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Grammar of Conducting: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Conducting- Comprehensive-I...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Conducting- Comprehensive-Interpretation/dp/0028722213)

</comment><comment><USER16> They're also called maestros (to disambiguate for those technically inclined). Great ones are heard instead of being seen. By the time we see them on stages, most of the things great conductors do have already been done, and they're basically metronomes. The even better ones have a showmanship in them to help the audience to appreciate the music even more. Check out (rehearsal) performances by Szell, Solti, von Karajan, and our very own Michael Tilson Thomas.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a worthwhile TED talk on the topic: [http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_con...](http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors)

</comment><comment><USER18> Where can I listen to the same composition, by the same orchestra, but with different conductors?

</comment><comment><USER19> > They know that at bottom, there is something deeply primitive and > instinctual about the ability to make 70 people breathe, move and feel as > one.

This is absolutely true. The rest of the article is random observation that explains very little.</comment>


The DLang Tour - <AUTHOR> https://tour.dlang.org/ <comment><USER2> the cert has expired</comment>


Show HN: PCSS = syntactic sweetener for CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/harmankang/pcss <comment><USER2> Perhaps you could explain what the advantages are of writing CSS using PCSS. I couldn't quite tell from the README how it might improve the workflow - curious to hear more...</comment>


Are You Concerned Your 4 Year Old Isn't in a Cool Band? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/are-you-concerned-your-4-year-old-cool-band/ <comment><USER2> The most important part here is probably that they give access to a room full of instruments, then will use anything that can contribute to a song, even if it's just two notes alternating on a beat... and get the kids into that before they know anything at all about playing music "properly".

This seems like a great way to cultivate a life-long creative understanding of music - "if you can make interesting noise to a beat, that's music, and the rest is just details and practice".

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife and I brought my son to a rock band camp in the Boston area. My son loved it and maybe helped encourage him to still be an amateur musician all these years later.

At the same time it felt very weird to be seeing rock-n'-roll packaged, codified and commodified the way it was. At pick-up time you see a bunch of youngsters mirroring the clothes and attitude of rock culture - while being loaded into their parents' minivans. I couldn't help feeling a bit uneasy about the whole thing to be honest.

Back In My Day™ rock was a much more organically rebellious activity.

<comment><USER4> "Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform - don't kid yourself." \- Frank Zappa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" They put the most distortion on the pink guitars, to subtly encourage the younger boys to break gender norms."_

I love it!

Seems like a really well thought-out program, albeit - in my eyes - let down somewhat by an advert that implies it'll have much less depth than it actually has.

<comment><USER6> So the boys-like-distortion gender norm trumps the pink-is-for-girls gender norm?

<comment><USER5> _So the boys-like-distortion gender norm trumps the pink-is-for-girls gender norm?_

No, that's not what I'm saying, nor what I believe the program is saying either.

To my mind, _everyone_ likes fun with distortion, and colouring the relevant guitars pink helps break down the "pink is for girls" gender norm, nothing more, nothing less.

Actually, being perfectly honest, I'd never even heard of "boys like distortion" as a gender norm; _is_ that a thing?

<comment><USER7> > _I 'd never even heard of "boys like distortion" as a gender norm; is that a > thing?_

It obviously IS a thing. Check out the predominantly buyers of distortion pedals, or the near absolute majority of workshippers of "shredding" guitarists and heavy players. Also check any magazine about those kind of things, incudings any advertisments of heavy guitar gear, amps and distortion pedals. You will of course find 2-3 counter-examples. You'd be hard-pressed to find 10, much less 50.

<comment><USER8> Are you correcting for low representation of women in those magazines anyway?

<comment><USER7> Is the low representation based on that publishers of said magazines not liking women's money [1], or that there aren't enough women players buying those magazines?

[1] Especially considering that women are the most sought after group by advertisers/marketeers, even more so than men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read this and thought: there should be some forum like reddit's NotTheOnion called NotPortlandia for this sort of thing. I went to reddit and discovered that there was. Shock.

</comment><comment><USER10> _You can't just say "no" to an idea: it's your responsibility to adapt it._

There's a similar idea at Pixar - it's called 'plussing'. You accept someone else's point and use it as a starting point to build something amazing. There's a _really_ worthwhile Randy Nelson talk about it on Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds great, actually, if I was living in SF I would sign up my kids immediately.

</comment><comment><USER12> the opposite: I would be concerned if my 5 year old kid was pushed by someone to become a rock musician.

On Earth we only need that many rock stars, and there is already an intense competition over the only few places available. I know many musicians that didn't get enough success and have hard time earning food money.

I suspect that a kid whose fate is to become a musician will find a way to become one. This do not need to be encouraged even only a little. I find it more responsible to give kids the most "normal" (classic) education, while keeping doors open for later. It is easier to pivot from postman to writer (Bukowski) than from pretend rock star to bank teller.

<comment><USER13> Do you understand that this is an extra-curricular activity and not an actual primary school?

If you understand that point and still balk at a program like this because it doesn't 'keep enough doors open' (???), I strongly encourage you to readjust this mindset before you have children. And, if you do have children, I am even more vehement that you need to change your tune.

Small children deserve to use their imaginations and dream the wildest dreams imaginable. They deserve this not only because they are little kids and childhood is brutally short, but also because their brains are highly plastic and they are rapidly developing cognitive skills that adults take for granted.

Children who are interested in the arts absolutely deserve encouragement because every single child on earth deserves to be encouraged. Children deserve to be encouraged to be the best versions of themselves that they can be.

<comment><USER12> I do encourage imagination, mostly by giving the example. But this means building weird things with Lego, it doesn't mean pushing babies on a stage with sunglasses and fake ovations by the parents. In our difficult times living a happy life most often means living far away from the media and the society of spectacle. Nothing bothers me more than the exhibitions of those little prodigy on t.v., it is rewarding for the parents only and steals away childhood from the kids.

<comment><USER14> I know people who have their kids in this program. It has nothing to do with prodigy culture or even really about the actual performative aspects in front of other people--it's about encouraging a love of music and feeling good about making something. That you're getting salty about it is, to be honest, _kinda really weird_.

<comment><USER12> I know it is not a very common way to think about parents responsibilities nowadays, but it was more so in the past. And I think it was reasonable to ask children to first pursue normal "un-sexy" education before getting more "creative", because in the end the kid will have to get a job, and choosing paths where jobs are not too competitive and pay the rent makes sense.

A good friend of mine has his preteen daughter embarqued into writing a book, and this is ridiculous. Kids do not have to be creative, nobody has to be creative. Being creative is a gift (or a curse) that only a few have, and when it is strong enough to be a vocation, it will find its way, even against a classic (boring) education.

Also, I hate the star system where a few crasy people are given as examples to the populace, while in fact they have most often a miserable life.

<comment><USER13> Okay but once again, do you understand that this is an extra-curricular program and not a primary school??? That means that it is recreation outside of school hours. It is recreation outside of school hours where kids are encouraged to be creative, to take risks, to perform in front of people and to tell stories. Do you force your children to spend their recreation time working on things that will directly result in a job?

I will be blunt. The way that you are talking has me feeling serious concern about your children. Being creative is not 'a gift that only a few have' \- every child has an imagination and I have never met a person who cannot come up with a new idea.

<comment><USER12> In developped western countries, we live in a world where being original and creative is supposed to be the norm. It is not the same in other parts of the planet, and it was not always like that in the West. Allow me to question this new party line. There are many other values that can be prefered in a human being, like being reliable, good to others, respectful, etc. I also think that being ambitious is not always the best way to get an happy life.

I happen to live in China, and there encouraging some creativity in children is quite required, because the education system is very strict and allow only few expression of the self, if any. But in the West, we went too far, and kids and their parents feel easily frustrated if the offspring is no Mozart, that's why I would not encourage more in this context, and certainly would not push my kids (who are doing well, thanks) to Rock Star Schools of any kind (I certainly do encourage drawing the things they want the way they want, but I usually do not post their drawings to my social medias in the hope of showing who genious they are).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The International Flag of Planet Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.flagofplanetearth.com

<comment><USER2> I feel having a flag for "Planet Earth" is a really strange thing, particularly if you were to do something like plant it on Mars.

Flags more commonly represent groups defined by political or cultural boundaries, and planting one of those outside their territory makes sense in a way because their boundaries are malleable.

To me it'd make more sense calling it the "Flag of Humanity" or something along those lines.

<comment><USER3> We could have used one of those on the Moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Instead of that bird's nest, how about a blue marble on a field of black?

</comment><comment><USER4> I would rather like a flag one could easily draw by hand (like most flags). Not too fond of the color neither; if we want it to represent Earth, maybe a blue/green blend?</comment>


How to Get Back into IT? - <AUTHOR> Back in the mid 90's I was an IT Director, doing in-house email, ftp, e-commerce and VoIP on a metro WAN in a windows/MacOS/Solaris mixed environment; while I was going for my MBA.  Then I went into the non-IT management.<p>I am looking into going back into IT, but - while I can do the work of a director-level or IT specialist, I don't have the degree or certifications: what would I need to do to get back into the IT game? <comment><USER2> Assuming you're looking for a job (i.e. to be an employee at a company), the first steps are likely to be:

1) Identify one or more jobs that you think might be a fit for your capabilities and ambitions.

2) Try to get an interview for those jobs, using your CV as a primary tool.

Have you already completed those steps? How many jobs did you apply for? What's your conversion rate from application->response, and response->interview?

Please take the following as food for thought and not an attack or criticism: If someone says they "can do the work of a director-level" then I would expect that, when they ask for help or advice, they are far more detailed about:

1) what specifically they're trying to achieve ('back into IT' and 'back into the IT game' are vague statements and could indicate vastly different specialties and types of environment)

2) what they have tried already, and why (and what they haven't tried, and why)

3) what the results have been, and why those results aren't in line with what they need

I hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't put management on your resume. Most people see "manager" on a resume and assume you're not technical enough. Focus on technical skills that you did at jobs and start doing your own work at home to get up to speed so you can answer relevant questions in interviews.</comment>


Show HN: Knocker, automate finding businesses without a website - <AUTHOR> https://knocker.io/ <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Theres a few typos that I noticed looking over the page.

Int -> in

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh nice one! Thank you for reporting I appreciate

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful land page, I just register ! This kind of service can be very helpful for me. Great idea and useful tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback @cclleemm May I know what is your position/profession?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great idea! It can be very useful for my digital agency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Sure, feel free to get in touch with us, we would be happy to show you how Knocker can best help your business

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, congratulation for this tool ! I will use it to find new leads for my sales team !

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear that! Feel free to reach out to us directly, we can give tips to your business developer to create optimum searches

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool idea! This is very useful especially for my soon to be marketing agency. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! What kind of businesses will you target with your marketing agency?</comment></comment>


The Internet of Every Single Thing Must Be Stopped - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/smart-tampon-the-internet-of-every-single-thing-must-be-stopped-1464198157 <comment><USER2> And that's not even mentioning the privacy problems caused by all these 'smart' devices. Too many of them rely entirely on company servers and send too much data that can be useful for groups like the NSA to spy on people. The 'internet of things' is an Orwellian nightmare.</comment>


GitHub was down - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/?dupe=no <comment><USER2> Everyone is saying: just work on your local repo. But GitHub is way more than just git. There's bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, etc etc.

Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect and I'm not sure what GitHub offers to mitigate this.

<comment><USER3> > Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a > scary prospect

At every company I've worked for, internal services have been less reliable than github. Certainly way less reliable than gmail.

I get that it's scary, in that it feels like you're giving up control over something important to your business. But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of control.

<comment><USER4> > But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of > control.

That's a weird way of phrasing it. When you run your own services and they break you have total control and _do_ have the power to fix it.

When you buy SaaS you are relying on someone else. You may very well have more reliability and uptime but you are nonetheless giving up control.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly the point. Sure you have "control" but what good is all that control if it takes you 4 hours to track down the source of a problem and fix it (for example). Github has 100s of engineers (with heavily specialized knowledge that you don't have btw) working to fix any problems, I'd bet on them over myself and (maybe a handful of engineers) everytime ... and I've run my own subversion/git servers before.

Some folks just hate the feeling of not knowing what's happening and how long its going to take to fix, vs having direct access to work on problems themselves even though its not necessarily "better" in any sense of the word ... hence the illusion

<comment><USER6> Your post gets to the false tradeoff that turned "devops" from a push for better interdisciplinary collaboration into a "2 jobs, 1 paycheck" role.

Software teams are often pathologically unable to create a deliverable that is scrutable and manageable by an operations audience. Building a product that can stand on it's own two feat without constant minding is work.

For all the testing dogma that files around, constant delivery has resulted in systems that are more brittle than ever. If someone with all the institutional knowledge is always there to catch the system when it fails, why bother making it easy to investigate failures? Why bother with analysis and building in fault tolerance when someone can worry about a long term solution for that failure mode when it causes them to get paged at 3 am?

So it becomes easy to say minders are necessary, and they must be developers. Business incentives mean that answer isn't always scrutinized as heavily as it should be, because it means spreading maintenance costs over time instead of an upfront investment in resilience and maintainability. Refusing to provide a toolset and manual for maintenance means some nobody with access to google can't fix 99% of the problems that could occur. That way the magic black box creators can ensure they're the ones getting paid to do it.

We don't have or need Windows engineers, kernel engineers, or Cisco engineers on call. Nor do we have nginx, postgres, cpython, exim, apache, php, mysql, Active Directory, Exchange or Office engineers on call. We use weird enterprise software from companies that have gone out of business, we don't have high-priority support contracts with many of the rest.

Software that needs minding from the developers is just bad software. That's technical debt they took on to get the product out the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What do people do to get around this? Run my own git server like the good 'ol days? Github has become a central source of failure for us now...

<comment><USER8> Your question seems to indicate that you have a runtime dependency on github. If true, this is a problem no matter where your git repo resides. You need to architect a solution wherein you do not have a runtime dependency, especially if it is a single point of failure, or accept that your reliability will never be better than the sum of your services' reli abilities (there was an article on the "calculus of availability" or something like that recently).

What I personally do in AWS is bake my artifacts or other git-sourced data into AMI's. If you want a middle ground, you can instead push your artifacts to an s3 target -- s3 has better reliability / track record than github for this purpose.

<comment><USER9> Is it still considered a runtime dependency if all you do is merge code and deploy while relying on GitHub? I assume most apps will not go down if GitHub goes down, but their ability to move code to production gets stalled.

<comment><USER10> Git is inherently distributed. There's really no reason that Github has to stand between development and production.

<comment><USER11> There's the convenience reason. Teams making that trade-off (not having a local mirror) need to understand they made GitHub itself a runtime dependency.

<comment><USER12> But in theory in a pinch you could spin up a git server somewhere publicly accessible and switch your site to pull from there, and push to there yourself.

<comment><USER13> Not if you're using more than git from github, for example downloading releases as zip files for deployment.

There are probably a lot of other tempting features to put on your deployment critical path but I'm not in an environment that uses github so I've forgotten.

<comment><USER14> Webhooks are a big one: rather than polling a git server for changes it is very easy for CI/CD systems to rely on GitHub's HTTP webhooks in their critical path to kick things off on push/PR/branch/merge. Especially because GitHub does a great job of populating its webhooks with tons of useful information about the event that's tough to replicate with just git post- hooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Blip, its back up. Nah, too much effort to host my own and I do need a coffee break from time to time.

Ignore this if you are on a big team of course.

</comment><comment><USER16> if only we had a decentralized version control system...

<comment><USER17> Exactly this. It's painful to realize that Git was invented to solve this very problem, but so many use GitHub as their source control server just like CVS and all the other old source control systems.

<comment><USER18> Then what's the alternative? Push and pull directly from other users who have access to the repository? What if that user is currently offline? There are huge benefits to having a main centralized repo. If you need redundancy for some reason, it's fairly trivial to mirror the repository somewhere else.

<comment><USER19> Push and pull to your own server running Gitea/Gogs or Gitlab, and mirror to Github if you feel the urge? Or, if you insist on having your workflow around Github, do it the other way around: have your local server mirror your Github repositories. That way, if Github goes belly-up you can just switch to your local server for the time being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the 3rd major outage in a week, wow.

<comment><USER21> App server availability is now 98.3% over the past month, which seems pretty bad!

<comment><USER22> Good ol' one 9 uptime.

<comment><USER23> "One nine up-time" rolls right off the tongue! Must be a PR play!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Such incidents remind me of 2 things

1\. No matter what 99.99999999% availability a service provides, its utterly useless if the time to get back up is unacceptable.

2\. Do not have remote services, which you cannot fully control to be a part of your run time deployments.

<comment><USER16> Uptime % includes time to recovery. Since you're not up if you're still recovering...

<comment><USER24> But that still does not provide much inside into recovery time. Its good to know, the median recovery time.

<comment><USER25> The only time that uptime would not give insight* into recovery time is if the service is not being regularly updated (remember, zero-downtime deployments should never affect your uptime numbers), then, the uptime numbers improve over time to something really impressive but go in the toilet once the shit hits the fan.

I hardly think it's reasonable to consider services like GitHub or infrastructure like AWS as being irregularly updated...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you want to host your own repos with user and access management, bugs, issue, task tracking and tons more, take a look at Facebook's Phabricator [https://www.phacility.com](https://www.phacility.com) (the self-hosted version, of course).

</comment><comment><USER27> Tangential: Slack was down for a bit earlier today as well.

<comment><USER28> I'm seeing errors on Segment.com as well.

<comment><USER27> Ha ha, nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://status.github.com](https://status.github.com) shows

> _18:19 CDT Major service outage._

<comment><USER30> What's CDT?

<comment><USER31> Central Daylight Time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seems like they're saying it's maintenance now?

      $ gl
      fatal: remote error:
        GitHub is offline for maintenance. See http://status.github.com for more info.

<comment><USER33> That is likely just their standard downtime message.

<comment><USER32> Only reason I brought it up because it was originally showing the all to familiar unicorn on the website, then it changed to also saying maintenance.

<comment><USER34> This seems like a pretty common response for a breaking incident for a scale app. Requests flow through to a failing system and trigger HTTP 500. Those requests may pachinko through the stack, making a variety of calls that can compound the degradation of a system weathering an unplanned failure state.

Engineers stop the bleeding by 503'ing requests at the perimeter or putting up a static maintenance page. This allows things like caches or DBs or app servers to cool off while a rollback or a revert goes out. Then, when the system is stable again, let requests flow through again (slowly, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> And now the office goes to the keg.

</comment><comment><USER36> As the last time, pull/push access to repos works fine for me, only the web service doesn't work.

edit: confirming, push doesn't work either

<comment><USER37> Pushes are failing for me. (To one repo, at least.)

<comment><USER38> same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Gone now!

18:41 CDT Everything operating normally.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's sometimes up ( perhaps bad to say this --> everyone will refresh )...

</comment><comment><USER41> This is different from yesterday's GitHub Major Service Outage.[1]

[1] [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

</comment><comment><USER42> I would love to see the outage postmortem. To be honest designing a completely redundant service today is just not that hard are compared to 10 years ago. The ability to load balance, route, us VMs/containers and move loads makes is fairly simple. In 1998 when I was building an backbone and ISP it was much harder. You had a ton of single points of failure by the nature of the hardware and software at the time. We purchased systems from Sun because of the quality of the HW and the stability of Solaris. Now a stack of cheap linux boxes with the right design (IP CLOS, BGP fabric, load balancing and containers) who cares if a switch fails or a rack goes out? Most issues today are caused my humans and bugs from software upgrades for new code.

<comment><USER43> Kind of?

How many servers did the average app depend on in 1998? 1? Get dual HD and you were in decent shape.

Compare to a modern microservice app, that maybe depends on 100 internal services and 4-5 external services. A lot of things need to go right or mostly right for things to function.

<comment><USER44> Sounds like an argument against micro services?

<comment><USER45> Only if you don't stop to consider the alternative.

<comment><USER44> "The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Oh man was just browsing a 3 month old branch for a feature that was just revived today, did not clone... Please come back!

</comment><comment><USER47> Run your own git server. Version-control locally, build automated systems to push triggered by uptime status.

</comment><comment><USER48> And its back!

</comment><comment><USER49> It seems to have been fixed now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > 00:41 BST Everything operating normally.

</comment><comment><USER50> 95.8%. What would AWS think about that?

</comment><comment><USER51> Does this mean we get the day off?

<comment><USER52> I'm down for that :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Ugh, time to go to bed then.

</comment><comment><USER54> anybody knows if www.atom.io would be affected by this?

</comment><comment><USER48> And its back!

</comment><comment><USER55> Not sure yet, but it seems to be due to AWS (S3 likely).

</comment><comment><USER17> Rough year for GitHub. GitLab is licking their chops right about now.

<comment><USER56> at least they didn't delete the db.

<comment><USER17> Ohhh yea, shows how good my memory is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wow.

Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.

<comment><USER38> Both days a different error on pushing, making me think it wasn't down and it was my fault!</comment></comment>


Advanced image transformations in the cloud with CarrierWave & Cloudinary - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/advanced_image_transformations_in_the_cloud_with_carrierwave_cloudinary

<comment><AUTHOR> This blog post describes how to easily generate advanced image transformations for your Ruby on Rails applications while using the CarrierWave GEM for uploading images to the cloud and assigning them to your ActiveRecord or Mongoid model. All image transformations and delivery are done in the cloud by Cloudinary.</comment>


A Cabinet of Infocom Curiousities - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4834 <comment><USER2> duplicate?

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this yesterday, and then someone re-submitted this today, and the auto-resubmit logic apparently just kicked in for my post. You can see on [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=a1k0n](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=a1k0n) that it was submitted "1 day ago" though it shows a different date here. It's a weird hack.</comment></comment>


Who Owns the Dead? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122130/who-owns-dead <comment><USER2> I dissected the dead in med school, and I've worked as a TA in anatomy class afterwards. Several close family members have died recently. I cared for my mother when she became terminally ill, and ultimately had to watch her die. I had my share of contact with death, and I'm only prefacing this to show where I'm coming from.

When a person dies, what made them a person is suddenly gone. What remains is a lifeless shell. I never saw a dead body that looked like it was "just sleeping". It may sound callous to some, but dead people are not people. It's a little bit different in the US though, compared to the EU, where I come from. Over here, funeral homes do not go to heroic lengths in order to cosmetically make a dead body appear lifelike again. But overall I stand by my opinion that it takes an extraordinary effort to look at the dead and _not_ see that the person who lived there is not inside anymore.

Contrast this to the article, where dead people are being talked about as if they were still alive. I suspect these wishes of taking care of dead bodies of loved ones comes from an inability to recognize what death actually is. To me, passages of this article read as if the dead somehow required nursing and comfort.

There are many good reasons why it's a good idea to use the services funeral homes provide. First off, I am very suspicious that following such a huge loss, handling the dead body of a relative is a good idea psychologically. I am very grateful I did not have to do this when family members died. Even in cultures where families are expected to take care of their own dead, usually outside people from the village come in to help with the actual process.

Most importantly though, a lot of dead bodies pose a public health risk, especially those of older people with a history of hospitalization. I would be very concerned about multiresistant infections such as MRSA. It's not safe for family members to handle these bodies.

<comment><USER3> >When a person dies, what made them a person is suddenly gone. What remains is a lifeless shell

This is a quite convenient thought conforming to our current pro-death culture.

Information that is stored in the cell connection structure of the mammal brain isn't irreversibly destroyed at the moment of death, as one of the many similar studies shows [1] . There are existing methods to preserve some (possibly large) part of this information lots of HN readers have probably heard about. Knowing these facts and being really honest with ourselves we will have to conclude that the final death of the individual occurs when this information-storing fine tissue structure of him disintegrates into unstructured matter. The question becomes then - who, by his indifference or by his profession lets this disintegration process run to its end.

Perhaps future generations will look down on us for perpetuating such barbaric customs that lead to rotting of uncountable millions of people into nothingness.

1\. [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature14225.html)

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, we know that just a few minutes of hypoxia produces irreversible brain damage. The brain is a delicate organ and begins decaying immediately at the point of death, with massive loss of information.

<comment><USER2> Yes and no. Most hypoxic brain damage occurs in the form of re-perfusion injuries. If that cascade could somehow be halted, prolonged anoxic episodes would not necessarily lead to the cell death landslides we see today after strokes and cardiac arrests. While anoxia most certainly depolarizes the whole structure, leading to the loss of whatever is currently in short term memory, the more permanent structures of the brain should survive episodes of maybe an hour or more, if we could only stop the apoptosis triggers from happening as soon as blood flow is restored.

<comment><USER5> This is super interesting. Links or other sources?

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischemic_cascade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischemic_cascade)

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

[http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1161422-overview](http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1161422-overview)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841970/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841970/)

The status quo of efforts basically discards the totally anoxic tissue after a stroke, focussing on protecting the (often large) partially perfused border region. This is what's practical now, but the fight about the totally ischemic core regions is far from over.

It's a race between anoxic necrosis (which is the point of no return, where passive cell dissolution happens) and active cell death cascades that are triggered in the fully or partially reperfused cell. The latter one can potentially be halted, the first one leads to irreversible information loss. What the _actual_ timing windows are on both of these in the human brain is subject to active research and the view on them is likely to change over the coming years.

I posted links mainly to stroke and TBI-relevant articles, because that's where the research happens. However it's important to keep in mind that the fully dead brain is relatively static, whereas damaged areas in the living brain are subject to internal "cleanup" mechanisms pretty much right away. In this context, prolonged cardiac arrest might turn out to be preferrable to a stroke.

<comment><USER5> Thanks you for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Requiring professional handling of dead people has certain benefits. It reduces the chance of infection (a lot of people in West Africa caught Ebola at funerals last year), and it probably also makes it more difficult for suspicious deaths to go unnoticed. Poisoned your uncle to get his money? The funeral director might call the police.

So it makes sense for professionals to get involved at least in the early hours after death, even if only to ensure that the body will not trigger an epidemic. But most of the rest of what we think of as a funeral is just a bundle of arbitrary practices -- some traditional, others invented and popularized by hospitals and funeral homes who profit from them. There is no reason to enshrine them in law. Families should be free to do as they please with their deceased, as long as they don't pose a threat to public health or interfere with a criminal investigation.

<comment><USER7> The public health aspect is definitely important. The country where I live has very strict limits about handling dead bodies - they can only be buried in official cemeteries. If you opt for cremation, the ashes must also be buried or spread in selected official locations where they don't pose a hazard. Keeping grandpa in a can on top of the fireplace is out of the question.

While I don't value physical remains, I understand some people really do and their opinions must be respected. But it's similar to religious circumcision - when your customs start interfering with people's health, you lose absolute rights to always do what you want.

<comment><USER8> Are the hashes of dead people really any more dangerous than the ashes of coal or wood that every fireplace or BBQ produces? Sounds too heavy-handed an approach to me.

<comment><USER6> Hashes of dead people sound like you took a SHA hash of each of them to remember the unique mark that they left on Earth forever.

"Here lies John Doe, commit ID: 1b372d0e."

On a more serious note, if the funeral director and crematory did their jobs properly, anything dangerous (such as dental fillings containing mercury) should have been removed, either before cremation or before grinding.

My country is slightly more lenient. My grandparents' ashes are buried in my parents' back yard, and we had to do quite a bit of paperwork to make it legal. It's still illegal to scatter the ashes in any public land or body of water, and I can understand that because certain scenic locations would quickly become a big pile of ashes if it were allowed.

<comment><USER9> What people do with ashes is completely unenforceable. How can anyone stop somebody from putting remains wherever they like? How would anyone know?

Technically, they're not "ashes" but "cremains" and are composed almost entirely calcium and salts which is very different from ash (the residue of a fire burning).

<comment><USER10> Correct, a huge amount is ground-up bone matter. For some reason though, society is more comfortable with the thought of grandma being incinerated than pulverised in a crusher, even though a cremation involves both, so it's not well known. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >The funeral home staff arranged the girl over dry ice to slow her decay

>Knox slept curled up in the small space beside it at night

Sounds like a recipe for more dead people than strictly necessary.

<comment><USER12> Is that likely to cause problems? CO2 burns and it requires a lot of it to displace oxygen.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean, it burns?

Well, it will stick to the ground since it is heavier than air, and it is toxic long before oxygen is displaced [1]. And dry ice contains a very large amount of gas!

[1] [http://www.principia-scientific.org/at-what-concentration- do...](http://www.principia-scientific.org/at-what-concentration-does- co2-becomes-toxic-to-humans.html)

<comment><USER12> >What do you mean, it burns?

Discomfort. But I can't seem to find a source on what percentage is necessary. It might be higher than the suffocation percentage.

<comment><USER13> You mean, the gas? Dry ice, yes, because it is cold, but the gas? (This is the first time I heard that and I find it hard to imagine.)

<comment><USER14> I think Dylan's referring to the way elevated CO2 stings your eyes, nose, throat. Lungs too if it gets that far. It's weird sensation, and it definitely feels "hot" in a way. Asphyxiation by CO2 is quite unpleasant.

<comment><USER13> Ah, I see. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Motorola wins patent suit against Apple in Germany, iPhone/iPad to be banned - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/12/09/motorola-wins-patent-suit-against-apple-in-germany-iphoneipad-to-be-banned/ <comment><USER2> It does feel that Apple is reaping the whirlwind here.

For a long time the major players have all held loaded guns pointed at each other's heads, with nobody willing to fire a shot because they knew it would be more trouble than it was worth.

And then Apple decided to take the first shot. The big question now, is whether the politicians will let this drag out, costing everyone a fortune, or step in and call an end to it by changing the patent system.

<comment><USER3> What on earth are you talking about? Nokia sued Apple first after it became clear they weren't going to be able to compete with the things Apple was doing. Nokia was able to successfully extort money from Apple. Apple was taught that this is how you play the game. If people want the system to change, they need to lobby for it, but please remember your history. Apple didn't start this and _everyone_ is doing it. Who is playing offense and who is playing defense depends on how well you remember the timeline and which "team" you side with.

<comment> Tuna-Fish >What on earth are you talking about? Nokia sued Apple first after it became clear they weren't going to be able to compete with the things Apple was doing.

That's not exactly how it happened -- every other major player pays Nokia licensing fees. Apple refused to purchase a license on the terms Nokia offered (mostly, Nokia wanted a cross-licensing agreement for Apple UI patents. Nokia actually cares about patents, and tries to not infringe on them.), so Nokia sued them to force it.

<comment><USER4> " Who is playing offense and who is playing defense depends on how well you remember the timeline and which "team" you side with."

At this level - All the major players try and license on FRAND terms first and foremost - limits your risk, and keeps your legal bills down - but Nokia was asking for more than Apple was willing to play - so they go to court.

All the players are looking at this from a Game Theoretic position, and, at the end of the day, Patent holders _have_ to send some of their negotiations to court, if only to make it clear their FRAND values would be held up.

Apple is somewhat unique, in that they aren't as keen on getting license value for their patents as their competitors are - and, FRAND values on a design patent is a lot more "mushy" than a radio chip function.

<comment><USER5> FRAND means "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair,_reasonable,_and_non- discr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair,_reasonable,_and_non- discriminatory_terms)

<comment><USER6> Yes, those are absolutely the first words that cross my mind when I read about the patent lawsuit of the week...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article title is inaccuarate. To quote the body:

"which _could_ see an injunction placed on iPhones and iPads."

I would bet money on the iPhone/iPad not being banned. How many times have we seen this now? Product gets 'banned', company appeals, ban is lifted. World continues to turn.

<comment><USER8> The other thing is that in Germany if you enforce an injunction and it's later overturned, you're liable for damages.

So the question might be how confident are Motorola that they might want to line them up for damages equating to iPhone / iPad Christmas sales?

As ever Florian Mueller is better on this than most of the regular news sources.

[http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/12/motorola-mobility- wi...](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/12/motorola-mobility-wins-german- patent.html)

<comment><USER9> Seriously, I would take Florian Mueller's opinions with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER10> curiosity: why is that?

<comment><USER9> I've read many of his pieces and I am 100% sure that he's a shill.

<comment><USER10> That didn't solve my curiosity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why are patents related to a wireless standard that one is required to use to interoperate with the networks not available for licensing?

How in the world is anyone supposed to even develop a cellular modem without infringing on these patents? Isn't there some licensing body like the one for MPEG that you can go to and get a blanket license to all of the tech?

<comment><USER12> As I understand it, Apple believes Motorola should be required to license these patents under FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discrimanatory) terms due to their importance in a fundamental standard. It even said this in the article:

> Apple tried to license the patent under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non- > discriminatory) terms but Motorola was again able to convince the court that > if Apple was judged to have infringed, the damages involved would total more > than the FRAND rates that were suggested.

What I don't understand, however, is Motorola's argument. If Motorola was supposed to have licensed this patent under FRAND terms to begin with, then why does it possibly matter how much the "damages involved" total?

<comment><USER13> Ars Technica (<http://bit.ly/rxK9jR>) has much clearer coverage of this article than TheNextWeb does:

"Motorola approached Apple in 2007, after the launch of the original iPhone, to license this and other standards essential patents for FRAND terms. "We have been negotiating with Apple and offering them reasonable licensing terms and conditions since 2007," Scott Offer, senior vice president and general counsel of Motorola Mobility, said in a statement e-mailed to Ars.

Apple apparently didn't consider the terms very fair...Apple apparently made an offer to license the patent on FRAND terms going forward. But the matter was complicated by the fact that Apple's agreement included a clause that would allow it to try and have the patent invalidated if Motorola tried to seek damages for past infringement over and above the agreed FRAND rate."

Basically, Motorola offered it on FRAND terms, Apple rejected it, and came back with a new offer that was on FRAND terms but with the corollary that if Motorola tried to sue Apple for any infringement they had already done their patent would be invalid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is just as bad for users as Apple's own patent shenanigans. Nobody "wins" these things but the lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's nice to see Apple getting slammed against their cheeks as well, but in general this just points out how degenerate computer business has become. And that's a lot sadder than Apple's karmic rebound.

</comment><comment><USER16> One man, one company, one device in Germany? Remember those Vic Gundotra shot's at Google I/O ? "Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice." "Not The Future We Want." Now, when Motorola (Google) succesfully banned iPhones in Germany, someone should ask Vic, what is he gonna do about it. If Vic stands behind his words and is not a whiny-shitty-marketing-puppy, I expect Google to do something. And soon.

<comment><USER17> Motorola doesn't belong to Google yet, the acquisition hasn't been approved yet so there is not much Vic could do. Second, didn't Motorola sue Apple as a defensive move because Apple was suing them? In that case, do you suggest Motorola should stay idle and let Apple sue them and ban their products? In what world would a company allow that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I should be happy, but I rather wish all the patent nonsense would go away. It makes everyone involved look bad.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what the "tax" on products I buy from Apple or Google's partners are by all these shenagens are. Do I pay $.10, $1, $10 of my iPad 2 price to help fund all this nonsense?

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems like competing for sales is old hat, now the strategy is to throw patent tantrums. This just comes off as a bummer for the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sensationalist title, inaccurate and begging for extra clicks.

I'm not surprised to see this from a journalist, nor am I surprised to see this from Nokia. Nokia's offerings have been near non-existent since they moved from Symbian to WP7 development. If anything, this is a plus for Microsoft, who I'm sure would've been happy to fund this (if they did not).

</comment><comment><USER22> Let me guess:

Motorola abusing a patent for an underlying radio standard and preventing Apple from using standardized radio technology: Totally legit.

Apple complaining about design and UI elements? APPLE IS THE MOST EVIL, LITIGIOUS COMPANY IN THE WORLD.

This kills me every time.

Can't wait for the next round of lawsuits against Apple, in which disingenuous tech companies sue Apple with patents they bought wholesale off a patent troll or shifted around amongst themselves as if they were nothing more than useful assets in a political game.

It makes it all that more hilarious when Apple sues using patents with Steve Jobs name on it.

One has to wonder how many CEO's at those other companies have their names on the patents they're suing over.

Or if their companies even had anything to do with the innovation the patent protects...

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a cute, interactive visualization of these lawsuits: <http://bl.ocks.org/1153292> (might be a few months out of date)

</comment><comment><USER24> I presume that by Motorola they mean to say Google, right?

<comment><USER25> The Motorola acquisition has not been approved yet. And I believe they are actually prohibited from coordinating efforts until that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Love them or hate them, this ruling isn't exactly a good thing for anyone except Motorola. This one ruling, even if Apple loses appeal too, won't change the way Apple operates. This will only hurt consumers in Germany. Like it or not, people love the iPhone and iPad and there's a huge number of people who would prefer those products over anything else. Poor German consumers. You can say the same for Samsung in the US too and I'd agree (but I would also say far less people would shed a tear for not being able to buy a Samsung phone or tablet. My opinions are just that, however, opinions)

</comment><comment><USER27> Pernicious falsehoods in HN mobile IP discussions:

(1) Apple is the only company that sues anyone.

(2) Apple was the first company to start suing.

(3) Whatever negative happens to Apple: well they deserve it for being meanies.

(4) Whatever negative happens to Android: miscarriage of justice that just shows how broken the system is.

<comment><USER28> I have to say that reading HN does not give me the impression that its posters tend to be anti-Apple.

<comment><USER27> Not really what I was saying. What I'm saying is that the same zombie falsehoods are repeated in every thread. Even worse, falsehoods are rewarded with upvotes because, more and more, bias trumps accuracy.

It becomes tiresome to correct them over and over again only to see that once again the highest voted comment is based on the falsehood that "Apple is reaping the whirlwind" because "they [took] the first shot."

And inasmuch as you can generalize about a diverse community it's not a great leap to go from the observation that these factually inaccurate comments are often the highest upvoted to say that when it comes to IP Apple is commonly treated here as the big bad.

This is despite the facts that:

(1) Apple is consistently the most innovative company and IP is supposed to incent and reward innovation.

(2) Apple has paid out more for patent infringement then all their innocent lamb competitors (put together?).

<comment><USER29> _Apple is consistently the most innovative company_

What does that even mean? You've got three unprovable terms in there: _consistently_ (What does it mean to be consistently innovative? Wouldn't Apple's copying of Android's notifications system contradict this?), _most_ (What metric are you using to measure innovation that gives the highest number to Apple?), and _innovative_ (How do you define innovation in this context? Patents filed (bogus)? Profit margins (not correlated)? Intensity of reality distortion? Lines of code?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Saw a chick on the train today with book 12 on patent law (can't remember if it was Germant or EU). It was about 7 cm thick, and the pages were real thin. Bureaucrats (the EU fuckers don't even pay tax), lawyers and politicians are just taking the piss now. I sure hope that is what the 99% are fighting against, and not the right for businesses and individuals to trade freely amongst themselves.

It is a wonder anything related to commerce can happen at all in well Germany at least

<comment><USER31> Apple is staying in Germany in my opinion. I could not see otherwise.</comment></comment>


Couchbase Announces $14 Million Series C Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.couchbase.com/press-releases/couchbase-series-C

<comment><USER2> Congrats to Damien Katz, J Chris, and the other founders.

Damien's all-in story to build CouchDB is inspirational:

"This is a talk I gave last year at RubyFringe, about the whole process of me and my wife selling our house and living off savings to create CouchDB."

<http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465653>

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats J Chris, Damien Katz, and all the rest!

<comment><USER4> Thank you. Now, back to work :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to see NoSQL growth with some $ attached (that's usually a marker that the growth is moving beyond the "techies in the basement" stage) <\-- I know: I'm generalizing

</comment><comment><USER6> What exactly qualifies as "leading NoSQL database company" ?

I've been lazily waiting for a NoSQL solution to be deemed 'the winner' by the tech community. Then I won't waste time learning the 'wrong one'.

<comment><USER7> I've been doing the same with transportation. I hope the whole "riding a bike, driving a car, flying a plane and walking" bubble bursts and people settle on one of them

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have a current benchmark showing initial load and view-indexing performance on a single mac mini (i7/ 8GB/ dual 256 GB SSD)?

That's the demo I'd want to see before taking another look.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great news, I've been really liking Couch and this means it sticks around much longer.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do you need the funds for?

<comment><USER11> Mobile is a growing market, so we'll need to grow with demand even in bad economic times. I'm happy we had such good timing, because now we can focus on our technology and our customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Series C? Wow, you guys must be hurting. That's got to be some serious dilution.

<comment><USER4> Nice FUD :) I obviously can't go into the details, but the fact that Couchbase is the result of a merger makes this a little different.

<comment><USER13> Haters gotta hate. Congrats to you guys.</comment></comment></comment>


3 Questions: Alan Guth on new insights into the 'Big Bang' - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/3-q-alan-guth-on-new-insights-into-the-big-bang.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting, since I heard Paul Steinhardt give a talk not too long ago concerning some skepticism towards the inflationary model's ability to explain the issues that it set out to model (such as the horizon problem, etc.). I wonder if the skepticism on the theoretical side will still linger given some empirical data.</comment>


Show HN: Data science methods for planning road cycling workouts - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1725424103/summit-training-automated-road-cycling-coaching <comment><AUTHOR> We're a team of computer and sports scientists developing a cycling training web application.

If someone happens to be interested in end product, we'd be grateful for any feedback. Otherwise, there's some more technical details we'd love to talk about.

We're using genetic algorithms to optimize planned workouts, according to different models and desired distributions. There's also digital signal processing, which we use to detect intervals in heartrate series (e.g. 2 minutes, rising to 180, check kicsktarter video for visual representation). We're using pattern matching, first derivative convolution, bandpass frequency filtering and calculate signal entropy, to automatically figure out if athlete has completed given workout or not.</comment>