Tableau Software Threatened? Rival Growing at 70% Just Raised $103M - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2018/12/10/tableau-software-threatened-rival-growing-at-80-just-raised-103m/#6ba06e92108e <comment><USER2> My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there's a couple reasons why they're so successful.

First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that's as successful in practice as Looker's.

Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they'll ask for. But it turns out it's exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.

<comment><USER3> The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well.

Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it.

One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.

<comment><USER2> I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it _eventually_...still waiting after two years.

<comment><USER4> I think the community can have a big impact here, there are so many libraries that make it easy to add custom visuals. Specifically, vega is incredible [https://vega.github.io/](https://vega.github.io/) and there is a port for Looker [https://github.com/groodlooker/vega- lite](https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite)

<comment><USER5> Have you used that port?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tableau is the best at getting non-technical users to be instantly productive, and is completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. They aren't standing still here either.

However Tableau has absolutely screwed up their evolution into a cloud-based service. The current single-user desktop software with client/server design is painful and archaic, and the Tableau cloud is just a hosted server run on undersized hardware. They are losing a lot of business renewals because of this, even if the consultancy and enterprise deals will keep going for awhile.

<comment><USER7> > Tableau is the best at getting non-technical users to be instantly > productive

I keep hearing that this is Tableau's big selling point. And yet, as exactly the kind of "non-technical" user coming from the world of Excel, it has been astounding to me just how user-unfriendly Tableau is.

Want to create a line chart? No clear way of doing it other than messing around with Tableau's implementation of pivot tables, randomly dropping metrics and dimensions into boxes until it resembles a chart.

Want to not guess blindly and follow Tableau's tutorials? Prepare to sign in on every single video tutorial page. Opened multiple tabs? You'll have to sign in on each one. Refreshing the page won't do anything.

I have no idea how they compete with something like PowerBI.

<comment><USER6> There are 2 axis in the chart area or at the top of the window where you can just drag the fields you're interested in. It automatically makes a chart type that fits and you can change it with a click. Did that not work for your data?

PowerBI has no Mac app and supports less data sources, with all the same frustrations of client/server design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.

<comment><USER9> "it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part"

As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.

<comment><USER10> Is there an alternative on Mac?

Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.

<comment><USER11> We are working on a cross-platform solution at Chartly. We are still early but can already create dashboards more quickly than what I've seen Tableau do. See [https://chart.ly/](https://chart.ly/) for details! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is another "Forbes Contributor" post. This means that it's just a blog post, though, admittedly, Cohan is a smart guy.

Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?

It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story.

Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.

<comment><USER13> Forbes is cashing in their brand name, built over a long period of time, for quick wins. It's sad that they don't value their legacy.

<comment><USER14> Over the long term, this will destroy their brand. I don't take forbes.com any more seriously than I do medium.com, and I doubt I'm alone in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Better (less clickbaity) headline:

Looker raises 103 million in a series E to compete in enterprise BI.

<comment><USER16> I really hate the 'This startup's revenue grew at x%!'

Like what does that actually mean? For all we know they went from $100k to $170k in revenue while raising $100 million dollars. It could either be very impressive or just lame click bait to inflate a company they invested way too much money in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure the analysis front-end is really where the money is at. There are lots of industries that have trouble getting their data to a place where it can be analyzed at all. I know some very successful companies here in flyover country that picked a sector where this is a problem and made a business of fixing it.

<comment><USER18> Would you mind sharing some examples? I'm in the Business Intelligence space and always interested in what is available for integration & ETL.

<comment><USER17> Ag is huge, as you might expect from flyover country. Pipelines. Marketing data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Forbes seems to be 95% ads now.

Not just the content. I went on the page and a huge 3/4 page banner scrolled my view, then another popped into the side, then Forbes had a pop over asking for my email.

Yikes!

<comment><USER7> Places like Forbes, Inc and Huffpost appear to exist solely for content writers to use their logo on their portfolio websites under the heading "Published In: ".

<comment><USER20> Well they're also "owned" by lobbyist-style groups. HuffPost is clearly (ludicrously) pro Democrat, Forbes anti-Apple, and so on. It's close to amusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Growing a startup '70%' is very different to running a publicly listed global company

'...Looker is trying to become cash flow positive -- and its revenues are growing faster than its headcount. "We have visibility to cash flow break even over the next couple of years. We plateaued in spending. We now have 600 employees and expect to add 200 in 2019. We are seeing our cash burn rate decline," he explained.'

<comment><USER22> How can they add so many employees and have costs decline? Are employees not their majority cost?

<comment><USER21> making more revenue

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We use Looker and it's amazing. Comparing it with Tableau was laughable for people used to modern SaaS tools. Tableau was so far behind...

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone used Arcadia Data (the other company mentioned in the article) and have thoughts on it? I work in BI and had never heard of it before reading this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just exited a company the was competitive to Tableau and Looker. The BI space is insanely competitive, the lock in is very deep, and there are a thousand small players swimming in the wake of Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, and a few other "owners" of the category.

Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.

</comment><comment><USER26> Surprised nobody here mentioned Mode Analytics.

Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL.

That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful.

My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL user is totally doable, and probably most people making custom reports are already at least in the former category!

Additionally, a few of us have substantial Pandas experience: Mode makes it trivial to go from SQL to a Jupyter like notebook w Pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn etc all already there--no need for Python version or dependency hell. Zero devops at any layer below the raw datastore (MySQL / Redshift / etc).

It's really nice. You write code purely against open standards--SQL, pandas etc. Looker uses a proprietary query language, LookML. I am not tempted to go learn it.

<comment><USER27> Not the same level, Tableau is super strong in visualization, Looker is about Data Modeling, the new language is not that hard, but the most valuable thing is data model and explore

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone checked PowerBI from Microsoft? I think it's a great BI solution that isn't widely known yet.

Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA)

<comment><USER29> Isn't widely known? It was the top rated BI solution by Gartner in 2017 and 2018. Full disclosure I used to work on it, and when I left we had over a million users so some people might have heard of it.

[2017]([https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner- positions-m...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions- microsoft-as-a-leader-in-bi-and-analytics-platforms-for-ten-consecutive- years/))

[2018]([https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner- recognizes-...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes- microsoft-as-a-leader-in-analytics-and-bi-platforms-for-11-consecutive- years/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is lots of opportunity still to innovate in this space. We are focusing on making it super easy to create great looking charts and dashboards really easily at Chartly [1].

Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE.

We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily.

Here is an example of a dashboard with NFL data: [https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats- dashboard](https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard)

[1] [https://chart.ly](https://chart.ly)

</comment><comment><USER30> My company uses Looker a lot. It's fairly good. My only complaint is that its web-native interface makes it AWFULLY slow to do the simplest things.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like IPO prep.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just a question on wording, but doesn't 70% imply currentRevenue * .7. Whereas they really mean 170% aka currentRevenue * 1.7?

<comment><USER33> _Growth_ is expressed as % _over_ the previous period, not _of_ previous period, so 70% is the right number in this context.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your preferred method to backup Ubuntu 13.10? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> not ubuntu particularly, but i use rdiff-backup with a cron job (and rotate a couple of external drives, one kept elsewhere).

[i am just pulling things back after failing to convert raid 1 to 5 and losing my raid in the process!]</comment>


Atlassian Connect for Bitbucket - <AUTHOR> https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/06/atlassian-connect-for-bitbucket-a-new-way-to-extend-your-workflow-in-the-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Any Atlassian guys reading this: could you please take a more active role in Visual Studio extension maintenance?

[https://bitbucket.org/lmn/visualhg2/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/lmn/visualhg2/wiki/Home)

[http://visualhg.codeplex.com/](http://visualhg.codeplex.com/)

It's kind of demotivating to see all action happening in github-land.

PS: I am not a paying customer at the moment.

<comment><USER3> Just speaking for myself here, but, enabling the use of SourceTree as a VS extension would be pretty slick. Perhaps open sourcing the lower levels of abstraction so other projects like the one above could collaborate. There's surely plenty of work to do to enable that so I'm not sure if I'd expect to see anything like that any time soon.</comment></comment>


135 Terabytes for $12,000 - <AUTHOR> http://bioteam.net/2011/08/why-you-should-never-build-a-backblaze-pod/ <comment><USER2> The real lesson here is that if your service relies on "Big Data" processing it pays off to build your own storage.

If you were to buy 135Tb on Amazon EC2/EBS the same capacity would cost you ~$19,000 _per month_ , not counting charges for I/O and bandwidth.

<comment><USER3> Well, space, air conditioning electricity and redundancy comparable to what Amazon offers would add a few thousands per month (I guess $2000-$5000, depending on where you are).

Still, way cheaper than Amazon, but there are nontrivial running costs beyond the purchase and build price.

<comment><USER4> You should be able to rent half a rack with sufficient power to house this for around $1000/mo in just about any civilized datacenter.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to sell you a half rack and a 20a circuit for a grand a month. That's high even here in the sf bay area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been following the online storage space for years. Every time something like this comes out I redo my back-of-the-napkin math on potential profitability, get excited, then find excuses to not move into the space.

Prices have gotten so low that there's no excuse for lack of quality online storage providers. There are many, but there is only a handful I would consider good and their pricing isn't following the market. I see this leaving a huge opening for competition.

If anyone else is seriously interested in online storage contact me (see profile).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there would be a big market to provide $100,000ish per Petabyte collocation, when the hardware gets cheap enough for that.

<comment><USER5> Am I missing a zero? that's about $0.10 per gigabyte, no? which is dang close to what amazon charges. Unless you mean one hundred grand up front rather than one hundred grand a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean a upfront cost, and then some monthly hosting fee maybe. Might be a while for hardware to be that cheap.

<comment><USER5> hm. I think the problem is mostly the profit margin. cheap 3tb drives are what $130 each? and you need 333 or so of those to get 1000gb. If you go with, say, 12 disk zraid2 sets, that'd be around 400 disks. Of course, these are 'seagate petabytes' I'm counting, but that's only $52000 for the disk; then, say 10 of the supermicro chassis;

I think you could do it, I mean, at scale where labor costs are mostly amortized out, if you were willing to accept really low margins, or if someone would design and test it for free.

But that's the thing, someone like me? even a cut-rate dedicated server/VPS provider is used to charging around 1/4th to 1/6th the cost of the hardware /every month/ - obviously, this results in margins that are pretty nice by the standards of companies that sell goods with significant marginal costs, at least if you have enough scale that you don't blow it all on labor.

Really, the "big fee up front" model is interesting and warrants a discussion all it's own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There may be a reason to build 20 backblaze pods, but I doubt there is a reason to build 1. The whole point of a backblaze build is to move the redundancy out of the individual box.

<comment><USER8> If you're handling large amounts of data on your sever(s) and want a single backup just in case? I think that's what they wanted.

<comment><USER7> By itself this device is poorly suited to backup. Specially for their use case. A huge pile of desktop Hitachi disks isn't something you can stick in a rack and forget about, and people like to forget about backups.

Best case: you have someone who's constantly checking/maintaining this box and replacing the drives as they fail.

Worst case: an expectation of a backup, but every time you refer to it, it doesn't work.

Most likely case: A mix of both of the above. Where the box takes a lot of attention, and occasionally works as intended.

The only redeeming factor is that they proclaim all the reasons why this is a poor choice. So it seems someone is at least thinking about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, so maybe I'm missing the point here, but, uh...

No shit?

Is there anybody who seriously is tossing 135Tb at a _single_ JBOD?

I'm not a storage guy, not even close, and even I know that that is a frighteningly ridiculous, get-you-fired idea.

These are meant as individual parts in a larger, highly redundant setup. That's _the entire point_.

Is the next post going to be: "Why you won't be able to download music at 1Gbps even with a GIGABIT SWITCH! Cisco lies!"?

<comment><USER10> Read the post. In particular "Why the folks at Backblaze don't care about the "risks"" section.

<comment><USER9> I know, my point is that anybody with enough knowledge about this topic to be interested in this article would already know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The backblaze 2.0 pod has _exceeded expectations_ when it comes to data movement and throughput. We get near wire-speed performance across a single Gigabit Ethernet link." - <http://bioteam.net/2011/08/backblaze-performance/>

Oh my. These guys' expectations were very, very wrong. Many single-drive configurations can sustain 120MB/s+ at the beginning of the platter. A single drive! It should be no surprise that a 45-drive beast can saturate a GbE link!

<comment><USER12> It is too bad they didn't bond the two ethernet links. Reading through I didn't see a mention of what the other ethernet link was used for. That should have given them a jump in speed.

<comment><USER13> We're considering building one of these but I used to work for a clustered storage vendor. The import thing to notice here is this is single client performance - aggregate performance is often considerably better. ie, you might be able to push 1GB/s with 10 clients, but only 100MB/s with one...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well... You can make all 46 drives into a zpool with raid-z and boot FreeBSD or *Solaris from it.

BTW, I can't see the vibration sleeves around the disks on the pictures. Vibration must be a problem when you pack so much rotating media in such a limited space.

<comment><USER15> Backblaze's blog talks about the vibration problem and their solution.

<comment><USER4> Just a datapoint, yes, vibration is a real issue: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am mildly surprised they can dissipate enough heat from the pods--those drives are packed so close together.

I can't tell from the photos: Is there any airflow between them?

(For that matter, do higher temperatures decrease MTTF for hard drives?)

<comment><USER17> A Google study about hard drive failure indicated that they couldn't find any conclusive relationship between temperature and failure rate. However, they did mention it had some effect at the extreme high end of the temperature spectrum (based on the graph, above 45 °C or so).

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf)

<comment><USER18> It doesn't take a huge amount of work to drive a disk over 45 degrees. Using 5K drives helps a lot, since many 7K drives will idle at 35 degrees in a room temperature environment and passive airflow.

I've seen _actively_ cooled 7K drives in my ZFS NAS start giving checksum errors while silvering (i.e. recalculating parity etc.) after replacing a bad disk; smartmon reported temperatures of about 60, IIRC. Using an LSI 8-port SATA controller, I was silvering a 4-disk raidz at a rate of perhaps 300MB/sec, and it was making the drives too hot. I had to fall back to the motherboard SATA connectors (and ~150MB/sec array throughput) to keep things cool enough to complete.

<comment><USER19> If your active-cooled drives are getting that hot, then something is very wrong with either your ambient room temperature (is it 40°C?) or with your active cooling.

Active cooling in a reasonable-temperature room keeps even 15K drives well under 40°C at full duty (closer to 30°C, really, according to our monitoring data I just looked at, the room is around 20°C). Keeping drives within 15°C of ambient shouldn't be a huge deal (though it can be noisy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do you guys think about using this with Swift from OpenStack? Could I buy 100 of these pods, drop OpenStack on them and get close to 135,000 Terabytes with some level of redundancy?

<comment><USER20> Some of the hardware choices that Backblaze has made in their pod design are interesting. Most of the concerns I have (like the difficulty of getting to drives to replace them) can be addressed by operational practices (update the swift ring rather than immediately replace the drive). Other concerns (like 2gbe for 135TB) are more nuanced. Lack of redundancy in the Backblaze pods is addressed by swift itself--swift will ensure that no two copies are on the same pod.

I would love to see someone run swift on some Backblaze pods. If you'd like to talk further, my contact info is in my profile (or drop by #openstack on freenode).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What would the electric bill and cooling cost be? Power bill is quite expensive in data center.

<comment><USER11> Very low. I estimate the power consumption at the wall to be ~400W. That's $29/month at $0.10/kWh. Host this in a datacenter with a non-remarkable PUE of 1.5, and that's $43.5/month including cooling.

* 45 x Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 drives, 4.8W each (average when idle), a tiny bit more when seeking so let's round to 5W. Source: [http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/02D91977...](http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/02D9197756A273D0862577D50024EC1D/$file/DS5K3000_ds.pdf) and my measurements that HDDs seeking only consume a tiny bit more current than when idle <http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=50>

* 100 Watt for the mobo, CPU (73W TDP), SATA controllers, and all the fans. Source: my own clamp-meter measurements on dozens of PCs <http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=42>

* 85% average efficiency of the Zippy PSM-5760 power supply. Source: its 80PLUS certification report [http://www.plugloadsolutions.com/psu_reports/SP105_EMACS_HU2...](http://www.plugloadsolutions.com/psu_reports/SP105_EMACS_HU2-5760V_760W_Report.pdf)

* Hence: (5.0*45+100)/.85 = 382 Watt

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. The cost of 1 Petabyte of spinny disk storage is $100k.

A friend of mine who raised money in 1999 said that to get their MVP off the ground, it took 20 engineers, and $7M in venture funding. I doubt $100k would have paid for the Oracle licenses back then.

</comment><comment><USER23> Given that an empty pod costs $5,395, Supermicro might actually be cheaper (although a little less dense) and it's a real product instead of a prototype.

<comment><USER5> I'm looking at

[http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1400U.cfm) (36 drives, and room for a motherboard)

or

[http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-R...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-RJBOD1.cfm) (45 drives, das. I have had serious outages caused by DAS back in the SCSI-3 VHDCI days, so I'm likely to start with the 36 bay system.)

for my mass storage project. they are both well under $1500 with power supplies, backplanes and expanders taken care of.

For me, the big thing is that with my storage model, I'm going to be replacing disks as they fail and rebuilding the RAID, so having easily accessible and easily swapped disks is worth paying a premium. (I am planning to have some cross-chassis redundancy by using zfs snapshots, but I'd rather just keep the nodes going as is.)

Also, rack density? doesn't save you that much money. Most of what you are paying for in a data center is power. At the cheapest co-lo I'm in, here is the cost breakdown:

1 full cabinet (44u) with two twenty-amp 120v circuits: $875 1 full cabinet (44u) with one twenty-amp 120v circuit: $530

So, if I can double my density, I save $185 a month; and even at the disk density for my compute nodes (close to 100 disks in a rack) I get one disk failure maybe every two months per rack; so if I have to slide out the whole goddam computer, causing some chance of the power getting disconnected and downtime? yeah, with my model? it's probably worth paying the premium.

I'm just saying; if you are small enough that paying five grand for a backblaze pod.

Sure, at-scale, it's best to design your systems so that you can get zero downtime even when hardware fails. But, that's really difficult to do without introducing new failure modes; even amazon has trouble with it. My strategy is to accept that hardware failures mean a truck roll and downtime for customers on the hardware in question. As long as you don't have any one server go down more than once a year, (and a particular server failing once a year is pretty pathetic) and as long as you don't have a system where any one server brings down everyone, you are going to see pretty good reliability using this strategy.

<comment><USER24> Who would you buy through? Googling for the 45 drive version gives me slightly higher pricing.

Also- The big advantage of the BackBlaze version is that people have done it before, and it mapped out. With the SM case, there's less community.. But it does look like a good solution.

It looks like the drive bays are pre-wired up, so you wouldn't need to worry about that? What else would you need? Mboard/CPU/RAM, Raid cards, HDs and sleeves?

<comment><USER5> Like most supermicro chassis, it comes with the drive caddies, backplane, and power supplies. All you need is the motherboard, cpu, ram, and a SAS card, well, and the drives. It's even got an expander built into the backplane. If you want h/w raid, you need to bring that as well. (I plan on using zraid2, most of the raid cards that cost less per port than the drives are not better than software raid.)

I buy most of my supermicro stuff through kingstarusa.com - I know the site looks a little shady, and you have to email for quotes for almost everything, but they are good people. My office is actually above their warehouse; I'm unit C. Their price is usually a few dollars less than provantage, which is usually the next best retailer for supermicro chassis, and they don't do shady tax dodge bullshit, and I don't have to pay shipping. I could be misremembering on the exact price on the 45 bay.

Most of the 'mapping out' done with the backblaze version is already done and tested on the supermicro.

<comment><USER23> _most of the raid cards that cost less per port than the drives are not better than software raid_

Let's not get carried away; isn't a "gold standard" LSI controller only ~$1,000 ($27/drive)? But you certainly can buy a lot of Intel cores for that price.

<comment><USER5> yeah, I am exaggerating on the port cost some, but the big advantage of hardware raid over software isn't the hardware calculation of parity. A CPU can calculate parity so much faster than you can write to a drive that it doesn't matter at all that special hardware can do so even faster still.

The advantage of the hardware raid card is the battery backed cache. If it doesn't have a BBU and a fair amount of cache, as far as I am concerned, you might as well be using MD.

Hardware RAID cards have improved quite a lot recently; some of the stuff now has reasonably sized caches, so perhaps I should revisit my assumptions in this area. Of course, I'm planning on using ZFS on my storage servers, so even if hardware raid cards are now a reasonably good deal, they won't do me a whole lot of good.

<comment><USER23> As much as I like ZFS, I do feel a little misled by the rhetoric about replacing "expensive" BBUs with slog SSDs... that are actually much more expensive.

<comment><USER5> Until quite recently, I would not have understood what you meant. The cost per gigabyte for even really fast SSDs is lower than the cost per gigabyte of RAID cache ram, so I'd have said "what are you on about?"

But, I think I understand what you are on about now.

Most of us (well, speaking for myself, but I think this is true of most SysAdmins) have very strong experience telling us "more read cache is better" - I mean, more read cache, up until you can cache everything the server commonly reads, makes an absolutely huge difference in performance.

So we look for big caches.

The problem is that most of us don't have the same intuitive grasp of where the benefits stop coming when adding more space to the write cache, as most of us don't have a whole lot of experience with large write-cache systems (outside of netapp/emc type boxes, and I personally attribute their superior performance in part to their gigabytes of ram that can be safely used as write-back cache.)

So if write cache works the same way as read cache? yes I will pay the premium for the fastest 32GiB SSD I can find, if I can use it all as write cache.

The thing is, I'm told, that after a few gigabytes, the returns to adding more write cache fall off sharply; and if that's true, then yeah, you are right, 'cause you are wasting most of the SSD.

I mean, the real question here is "how much write-cache do I need before I stop seeing significant benefit to adding more write-cache?" and if that number is much above what you can get in a RAID card, then the zfs/ssd setup starts looking pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the backblaze pod just in terms of using it as a comparison, where it is the absolute cheapest possible storage really. (Sure you could prob go cheaper.)

I think they've done something that makes sense for them. It doesn't make sense for me to use it for storage where I work, but it works for them in this instance. And it seems to work for Backblaze.

</comment><comment><USER26> The application here is write once, read rarely. Would it be possible to unpower drives once they are full (until needed)?

</comment><comment><USER27> Grown defects. Graaah.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems expensive.

2TB drives are now around $70 (Maybe even cheaper if you buy in bulk).

135TB = 68 drives.

68 * $70 = $4,760

Is that rack so expensive?

<comment><USER29> The box has 48 slots, so they must use 3 TB drives. They may be not completely crazy and use professional, not desktop drives. A 3TB pro drive costs about $200.

<comment><USER30> If you're sufficiently crazy to trust your data to a Backblaze pod, you're probably going to go full retard and use desktop disks anyway. If you cared about your data you probably wouldn't be building one of these things in the first place. :)

Also: depends what you're considering "pro drives", but enterprise SATA 3TB disks are in the $250 - $300 range -- about 2x the price of a similar consumer-grade disk.

<comment><USER31> Has anyone done any research to find a difference between "desktop" drives and "enterprise/pro" drives? I'm inclined to believe it's marketing speak and targeted at the same people that buy electron-aligned speaker cable.

<comment><USER29> Actually the difference is only in firmware; each drive is tested when reaching the end of the factory line, and the test results decide if it'll be desktop or enterprise. So physically the only difference is the label.

Different brands makes the separation more or less clear : WD desktop drives firmwares are explicitly crippled to be made almost unusable in RAID arrays (on the web and forums you'll find countless horror stories of lost arrays); Seagate and Hitachi desktop drives work about OK in RAID arrays, but you may have surprises at times.

So what's the difference? First, the desktop drive assumes to be alone. In case of a read or write error, it will try and retry to access the data for several long minutes (long timeout). Pro drives assume to be in RAID arrays, in case of an error they fail almost immediately not to block any outstanding IOs to the array.

Another difference is in vibration compensation. Desktop drive don't use their movement detectors to compensate from drive-induced chassis vibration, which in case of high IO will significantly reduce throughput by augmenting error rate.

<comment><USER32> If you (or someone you know) has a write up detailing these statements and tests showing them to be true, I'd be very interested in reading more about this. Please do share.

It sounds like what you're saying makes sense, from a drive business and manufacturing perspective.

<comment><USER29> > _If you (or someone you know) has a write up detailing these statements and > tests showing them to be true, I'd be very interested in reading more about > this. Please do share._

This is NDA information :) I'm repeating what I've heard from drive makers and my experience after setting up several thousands of RAID systems. I didn't made tests recently, but vibrations can kill an array performance. I've seen a chassis where the central drive slot (among 24) wasn't usable because it vibrated more than the others :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lonnie Johnson: The Father of the Super Soaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37062579 <comment><USER2> Nice article... I remember when they neutered the SuperSoakers. One summer there was a mother of all model... IIRC the Super Soaker 3500, or something similar. Man, huge payload, huge tanks, and a lot of water. The next year, the entire line was smaller and less powerful. IIRC, this was around 1996-1997 or so.

Brilliant idea, and glad the Lonnie made some money on it. Same for the Nurf work.</comment>


Juul vs. Wilson Contempt [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/juul-v-wilson-contempt-final-approved.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes when discussing law on HN people will say "oho, but what if you try this?" thinking they've got some great loophole.

Courts are used to dealing with people who think they've found a loophole.

Here a man was using Juul's trademark, and they went to court and won an order. That man then started fucking the courts about. The result is a 16 week (not suspended) prison sentence for contempt of court.</comment>


The Verification Process on Twitter and what features you get with it - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2013/03/what-its-like-being-verified-on-twitter.html?fb_comment_id=fbc_112031332316682_20183_112044678982014#f126c05c5

<comment><USER2> I probably missed something, but where exactly in this process did they verify anything? It appears the person-to-be-verified was told how to tweet and asked for a phone number…and that was it? How is this 'verification' in any possible sense of the word?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it means more the process of getting the verification blue tick rather than any actual verification. I guess they manually verify it (email address, links from official site etc) before sending them the message to set up verification</comment></comment>


Incubator Incubator - Making All Your Incubation Dreams Come True - <AUTHOR> http://incubatorincubator.com

<comment><USER2> Great list of people ... very impressive that Larry, Reid, and Mark aren't affiliated with them.

</comment><comment><USER3> This event "Incubate 2.0" here is real, and sold out. Some of my friends are speaking =P <http://startupcause.eventbrite.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> They should make the submitted applications available as a shared Google Spreadsheet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ask I2: I don't have a co-incubator. Can I still apply?

Ask I2: We've already launched our incubator. Should we still apply?

Ask I2: We're in a hurry. Can you accelerate our accelerator application?

Ask I2: We want to launch an incubator for start-ups that produce gas pedals for cars, an accelerator accelerator for accelerators. Can you help us?

Ask I2: Our motto is, "Build something people will apply for?" Will that work?

Ask I2: We want to promote virtual start-ups. Do you think we can encourage all of our founders to use airbnb for different office space every day? Should we require that they all get netbooks?

Ask I2: My co-incubator is a cat. If we make it that far, can you assure us that Toby Huang won't chase him during the interview.

Ask I2: We want all of our founders to become egg yolk profitable by demo day demo day. What type of incubator would be best for them?

Ask I2: I love incubator news, but I worry that it's becoming too much like reddit reddit.

<comment><USER6> Ask I2: I want to start In³ (AKA 'Incubed'), the first Incubator Incubator Incubator. Can a simple Incubator Incubator like I2 help me? Or should I be helping you? I'm confused.

Ask I2: I'm starting In^∞ (AKA "Inaninifity", AKA "Ouroborcubator"). We will incubate everything for infinite leverage and returns. I believe we will soon have created your universe, so you may already be part of our incubator offspring. I suppose this isn't really a question. Or is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Othman Laraki. Advisor

Othman Laraki is a well known microangel (investments of $100 or less) and advisor to a number of incubators (e.g. BecauseCombinator) and marquee startups such as AirTensil (the AirBnB for people who own utensils), KitchenMine (a startup which builds custom kitchens within Minecraft), and the Like a Boss SNL video._

</comment><comment><USER8> I suspected a joke. Then I read the comments here and was mostly sure. Then I got rickrolled. Now I am sure.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty happy with getting Crystal-Lighted [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeMJOPlK-0E&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeMJOPlK-0E&feature=player_embedded)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone get this site running on PyPy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this a joke? I remember Jonathan Abrams (Friendster) referring to it in a TC interview.

<comment><USER11> Whoever is smart enough to downvote should have managed putting the mentioned facts into Google:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/07/historical-perspective- at-l...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/07/historical-perspective-at-least- this-time-around-we-didnt-have-incubators-for-incubators/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Got to love those stock photos.

<comment><USER9> I took a screenshot of contract guy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a moment I thought this was a tool to help you apply to all the different incubators... the name (incubatorincubator) would be a good one if you actually wanted to create such a service.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yo dawg

<comment><USER15> This comment is a reference to this site:

<http://yoyodawgdawg.com/about>

Essentially, a send-up of the "Pimp My Ride" show, where Xzibiti is always like: "I heard you like something gratuitously big, so we minified it and stuck it in your vehicle"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's it, I'm buying gold. First the Cisco forecast, now this.

</comment><comment><USER17> Regardless, do watch the baby dancing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sort of annoyed this doesn't actually exist. I need an incubator in Orlando, FL. Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER19> I proposed a human incubator. All it needs is one fertilized embryo.

</comment><comment><USER14> ProFounder = MicroAngel

</comment><comment><USER20> nice idea idea!

</comment><comment><USER21> Amazing. Cue the stampede of aspie HN literalists.

<comment><USER22> "We help accelerate company accelerators, so they can help accelerate their companies faster."

<comment><AUTHOR> <bad pun> So basically they're creating jerks </bad pun>

<comment><USER23> I prefer to think of it as an iterative accelerator feedback loop.

So that would be circle jerks then.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FPGA Stereo Vision Project - <AUTHOR> http://danstrother.com/2011/01/24/fpga-stereo-vision-project/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting, but seems outdates. Also couldn't find a link to the code.

<comment><USER3> <https://bitbucket.org/danstrother/dls_cores></comment></comment>


Power Water Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/03/hydraulic-accumulator-power-water-networks.html <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone who's studied some elementary hydraulics and electricity is aware of some of the parallels between fluid flows and current flows. Some are direct analogs, and the article mentions one: the fact that power water systems make use of _slow_ fluid flows under _high pressure_ to minimise _friction losses_. That's a direct analog to low-current (amperage), high-voltage currents to minimise resistance losses in long-distance electric power transmission.

Other relationships are inverted. Electricity must be generated continuously. Unused generation is wasted. Hydraulic pressure is retained in a system (absent leaks) until tapped, a periodic re-setting of a concentrator load is sufficient to re-charge the system. Tremendous forces can be made available over wide areas with little energy input.

Oh: and city-wide grids of this existed. Until the 1970s in some cases.

<comment><USER2> > _Electricity must be generated continuously. Unused generation is wasted._

Not quite: You can use a capacitor to store electrical energy. In fact, a capacitor corresponds to a water tower in the electricity/water analogy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I knew someone would mention that.

Turns out caps are kind of hard and expensive and finnicky. But yes, that's the analogue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a water engineer I find this pretty fascinating. Some issues I see on how this hasn't stuck throughout the 20th century:

700 psi is enormously high compared to current municipal water systems which rarely go over 150 psi. Maintaining and working on a pipeline of this size and pressure is more dangerous and very expensive. Over time, age will cause the network to lose pressure(through leaking, scaling, etc). How can facilities maintain power when a main line breaks? They would need their own water supply, tank and pumps in lieu of a diesel generator.

Electrical systems are generally much easier to install and work on. Piping is underground, large (compared to transmission wires) and much more prone to failures. A powerline going down can cause an inconvenience for a few days at most, but a broken water main will flood everything in its vicinity.

Also where will the water be sourced from? Municipalities are permitted to only draw a certain amount from their water supplies. This will definitely cause contention especially in drought conditions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reading the article, several of these points are addressed.

As with electricity, hydraulic circuits are high-pressure, low-flow, and are _largely_ self-contained. An advantage of water-based hydraulic systems over synthetic hydraulic fluids is that the water _can_ be bled from the system without contamination. But these are _pressure_ rather than _throughput_ systems. Actual water draw is minimal.

Pipelines themselves are small -- an inch or two in diameter. Not much larger, if that, than electrical conduit.

You're almost certainly right that there would be ongoing maintenance issues over time. Subcircuit isolation would have to be part of this, as well as perhaps redundant pressure circuits.

Early designs were widely distributed because prime movers / energy sources were scarce. We _do_ use hydraulic systems extensively today, but they're largely small and self-contained. An automobile braking system, front-end loaders or other construction equipment, elevator systems, and the like.

A thought is that such systems would be useful, on a localised scale, where _energy_ inputs are variable, but uses are relatively occasional. A home or factory power hydraulic system could operate small or occasional machinery (lifts, presses, punches, door mechanisms) _without_ requiring 24/7 electrical supply.

I also recall that the Amish make use of air-powered tools in certain situations, possibly not unlike those described here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm interested in raised weight hydraulic accumulators and their potential for smoothing out peaks and troughs in the production of renewable energy. German Prof.Dr. Eduard Heindl of Heidl Energy is developing the concept of a "rock piston" where the lifting of a large rock mass will be done hydraulically to store energy and then reversed to release it. Personally I believe this is a much more scalable approach as compared to pumped hydro.

[http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock- storage/overview...](http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock- storage/overview.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference between _force_ accumulation and _energy_ storage is ... that gravitational potential energy just doesn't give you that much. The practical instanciation of your idea would be pumped-storage hydro.

Another avenue is compressed-air energy storage (CAES). Here the problem is Boyle's Law: compressing a gas heats it. Over time, that heat will leak out through containment walls (even in underground spent gas field storage). _Releasing_ the gas cools it, to the point that icing over of equipment is a problem. One solution is to introduce a natural gas (or biogas) jet to the release stream, with additional heat of combustion not for _energy_ so much as to prevent icing.

This scales in theory, though it's still a tad complicated.

<comment><USER4> >>"..that gravitational potential energy just doesn't give you that much"

To that point I'll respond with a quote from Hendl's site: _A storage with a radius of 250 meters could store 124 GWh, which would correspond to the worldwide storage capacity of all pumped storage power stations._

[http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock-storage/idea- fun...](http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock-storage/idea- function.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, though I'm rather suspicious ths would work as stated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a modern version of hydraulic accumulator? One you could use to prevent your pressure dropping sharply when neighbor opens valves at his apartament?

<comment><USER6> It's called a header tank. Plus a pressure pump if you want high pressure.

There are literally millions of these in Asia, for exactly that reason (pressure fluctuations).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Low Tech Magazine has some great writing!</comment>


trains3.tcl (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://tcl.wiki/1359 <comment><USER2> Tcl is a neat language and I used to think it was perfect for its nominal domain of embedded applications. Having learned a little Scheme and Lisp, I think they're probably better-suited for that type of work and now I wonder does anyone use tcl for "tool control" or anything else embedded?

<comment><USER3> When Osterhout built Tcl, there was sort of nothing like it. I think you've identified one troubling point - Stallman sort of trashed Tcl as, I think, an effort to support Scheme. This was expressed in ESR's support of Python...

Yeah, I know. But the resulting obscurity fed what I think is a high degree of quality in Tcl.

Tcl's a bit big for embedding as "embedding" has evolved - in terms of PIC sized things. I use it mainly for desktop/laptop test rigs of embedded stuff but you're completely dependent on being able to serialize from the DUT.

This being said, RasPi/Cubie/BeagleboneBlack sized ARM things will support a Tcl interpreter handily and I do that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hah. Cool! Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Debugging Android native shared libraries - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dornea.nu/2015/07/01/debugging-android-native-shared-libraries/

<comment><USER2> I would like to note that IDA Pro has a very nice debug server which is a nice alternative to GDB for Android. Also I believe they recently added the ability to debug dalvik bytecode as well.

Gikdbg is a free alternative, which I believe is a UI wrapper around GDB. What's interesting about it is that it works for iOS and Android: [http://gikir.com/product.php](http://gikir.com/product.php)

It's a beta product, so it might take some work to get going, but once you do it makes you much more productive... especially if you feel at home with Ollydbg :)

<comment><USER3> Last time my coworker tried to use an older IDA's debug server on Android, it wouldn't work. The device was API >= 14 so it required PIE executables and the IDA debug server was not. Unfortunate. Luckily IDA 6.8 has a PIE and non-PIE versions. I also believe that the debug server source is now included in the SDK, so you could have supposedly rebuilt it in PIE mode yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone that works on a native-only app (using Qt's bindings), it has bugged me _significantly_ that Android apk's absolutely cannot handle versioned libraries nor files without the .so prefix.

For instance, bundling the "gdbserver" file that comes with Google's NDK into the armeabi folder to have gradled up and deploy in a debug version of an apk will not pack up "gdbserver". And if you have libtinyxml2.so with the SOVERSION as 3.0? Good luck getting that bundled up into your apk! Recompile without versioning! Or manually adb push it every time you reinstall your application. [0]

OK sure you can bundle that up into your apk by skipping gradle and manually adding and zipaligning it. But then adb will not unpack it onto the phone. So you are stuck back at square one.

I won't even get into the modifications I've made to my NDK python script with launching gdb. Suffice to say using gdb to debug nontrivial native android applications is full of rough edges.

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=98308](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=98308)</comment>


5 reasons Facebook's React license was a mistake - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/17/9/5-reasons-facebooks-react-license-was-mistake <comment><USER2> Developer for Fortune 200 company here. We already have a set of open source licenses reviewed by our legal department which we're allowed to use. A new license requires a new review - which we didn't even bother with. A legal review takes a lot of time (weeks), not to mention some political capital, and for what? To use React? Sorry, it's not worth it.</comment>


Show HN: Current – The missing Facebook app for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://currentformac.com

<comment><USER2> Looks great but do you have a demo? I really want to try this before buying it. I used MenuTab in the past and I found that it was pretty buggy after I installed and used it for a while. I'd like to try your app before I buy.

Also what is your privacy policy? When I installed Little Snitch I found that MenuTab was making all sorts of calls to ad sites. Do you do any of the same?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, but I don't have a demo available at this time. I tried to include a lot screenshots to demonstrate its functionality. If you buy it and don't like it, I'll be happy to issue a refund!

The only data Current transmits is device analytics (OS, CPU, RAM, etc) to DevMate, crash reports to Hockey, and error reports to Rollbar. All other requests made by the app will be generated by the Facebook website or any other website you visit from within the app.

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER3> If you want to offer a demo/trial to potential users maybe checkout Paddle: [https://www.paddle.com/sell](https://www.paddle.com/sell)

Full Disclosure: I'm a dev there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks really great. It has one critical flaw though: Facebook has depricated their chat api[1]. I.e. in a few more months this product wont work at all.

[1][https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliment! Don't worry, it doesn't use the Chat API at all. It uses the JavaScript from the Facebook page to power all of the chat functionality.

<comment><USER5> So is this an unofficial API?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article about the app on Cult of Mac: [http://www.cultofmac.com/301755/current-for- mac/](http://www.cultofmac.com/301755/current-for-mac/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh shit, nice. Are there obvious reasons why facebook hasn't made one?

<comment><USER8> There are no ads

<comment><USER9> Not true, Current is an entire Facebook client (not just chat) and it does not hide ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Current… where have you been all my life?</comment>


Ask HN: What is an acceptable or normal busy-work overhead in your org - <AUTHOR> I'd like to poll this community to understand overheads you encounter in the business of delivering a software solution. By overhead I mean things that if they were cut would not impact the quality of the product you ship
Some examples of overhead  (and this is not exhaustive) might be
- Preparing slideware or other collateral for checkpoint reviews, exec reviews including time spent reviewing them with other stakeholder ahead of the "final review"
- Managing up, communicating status for the purpose of visibility and not so much to inform a relevant stakeholder
Some examples of the reverse (i.e things that are core and not overhead) are
- Designing the stuff including prototypes that are unsuccessful
- Implementing solution, fixing bugs
- Working with customers at requirements gathering time and later at each iteration of the product
- etc. ....
Love to hear. If possible, provide the following context and anything you find relevant
Here's an example
Company: BigCo
Overhead: 40%
Details: Feel free to add anything you might have about your product. <comment><USER2> Company: Microsoft

Overhead: 30%

Details: Capacity management space in the cloud organization</comment>


Apple: Jobs to Take Medical Leave of Absence - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/01/14/apple-jobs-to-take-medical-leave-of-absence/

<comment><USER2> I'm going down the list reading a lot of the comments and there doesn't seem to be too many wanting Steve to get well soon.

So from 1 hacker to Steve, we wish you get better soon mate.

<comment><USER3> Is it just my impression or has Steve Jobs become some sort of Britney Spears of the techie world?

Just the fact that this sort of gossipy news appears everywhere dones't bother me that much (that's media for you), but I wish people would stop their silly speculations about corporate implication and just let the man rest, like he's asking for. This isn't the National Enquirer...

Hope he gets well, being sick sucks :/

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Frankly I think the man's contributed more than his fair share as is. He doesn't owe anybody anything. My guess to his sharing his medical status is more to protect the share value for the other people on his team, whose incomes may depend on it.

I hope the best for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just terrible news and so unfortunate that it has to play out this way. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to have to deal with a (seemingly) serious medical issue and have to justify every related move to the public.

<comment><USER6> What's more terrible and unfortunate is the fact that not only is this the top story on CNN and Google News, but today's supreme court decision doesn't even make it onto either page. Not even below the fold.

<comment><USER7> This shouldn't be surprising at all. Priority in news is not determined by what we might consider to be of real or objective importance.

<comment><USER8> How many people in the audience that advertisers care about would be affected by Apple tanking?

A lot.

How many people that advertisers care about would be affected by new police evidence rules?

Nowhere near as many.

Seems pretty cut and dried. If advertisers pay the bills you write to the audience they're interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Stock, stock, stock. Thats what most people are talking about. I saddens me that this guy is obviously seriously ill and all that people can first think about is the stock price. Personally I wish him the very best of luck with whatever his medical condition is. Without his input into the world of computing (despite the negatives that he allegedly has) we would live in a different world to the one we now have. He was there from the very beginning of the personal computer revolution and I have a lot of respect for him. Above all though he's a human being and both he and his family must be going through a lot at the moment. My wishes are with them and hope that he recovers.

Oh, and I own Apple stock too

<comment><USER10> If you really care about sick people and dying people, donate to the Methuselah Foundation (google it, or Aubrey de Grey). 150,000 people die of aging-related diseases every _day_ , and almost nobody is working on curing that.

<comment><USER11> I'd say if you care about sick and dying people, you should donate money to Medecins Sans Frontiers* or another development charity. Simple, basic medical care is much cheaper than trying to prolong life (per person) so you will be helping more people, often children who have full lives ahead of them.

*<http://www.msf.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hope he gets better soon, can't imagine how frustrated such a work-oriented person must feel about being out of commission.

On another note, might be a good idea to buy AAPL in a few days. Long-term, I think Apple will succeed, with or without Jobs at the helm, but it's sure as hell going to be down over the next few days.

<comment><USER13> "...Long-term, I think Apple will succeed, with or without Jobs at the helm..."

You obviously weren't with us in the 90s.

<comment><USER14> How Steve was outed in the 80's is far different then how he would leave if he had to leave today. In the 80's, he was forcibly removed from his position and couldn't set anything up. Today? Apple has people like Schiller, Ive and Cook - all more then capable - to run things.

//edit: Fixed the dates. Thanks for pointing it out. And yes, I did typo twice ><

<comment><USER15> Schiller and Ive were both there during the dark days. Ive designed the Newton and the Performa.

The thing about Jobs is he can marshall talent in a way that really drives technical staff nuts at the time, but delights them with the results. Other boards give the technical people their heads, and then you end up with OpenDoc and Taligent. God knows who can replace that. Gassée couldn't.

<comment><USER14> _Schiller and Ive were both there during the dark days._

Were they at Apple in the same positions as they are in today?

<comment><USER15> Schiller wasn't, he was medium-level in marketing; but Ive was fairly senior. His team were churning out great designs -- there's a book called AppleDesign that showcases the work, the majority of which didn't make it into production because Apple simply didn't know what it had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think this will change anything big. A leader is important to a company, but a leader needs to be able to create the kind of culture that runs itself when they're away. I'm guessing that Jobs did a good job of instilling the culture that Apple has today in a way that will continue because of how the workers see themselves and the company. It's sad to see him undergoing such medical problems and I wish him a speedy recovery, but I think Apple will do fine without him because he's given them purpose and direction and a definition that lasts beyond him.

I'm sure we all wish you a speedy recovery and many years of health!

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks like Fred Wilson got out while the getting was good:

<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/selling-apple-a.html>

<comment><USER17> AAPL peaked at $200 a year ago. Should have sold _then_ :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is now about 30 minutes after this broke, there are 10 articles about it posted to Hacker News.

My take is that it will have a good couple of days of news cycle, but ultimately isn't that important to anyone but Steve Jobs, his family, and friends.[1]

The key of Jobs at Apple is that he demonstrated a "different way". The Scully years were about performing business: perform incremental improvement, manage costs, and earn a return on investment. The return of Jobs was the proposition that the company could [also|instead] succeed by fostering a reputation for quality of user experience and changing the product landscape to make new opportunities[2]. That proposition is now proven, there is a generation of leaders (and lead) in the company that know this and believe it.

They should get along just fine.

What they will lose is the "star power" of Jobs and all the easy copy that media companies could generate based on that. That will hurt, less media coverage is not good, particularly since Apple is going to suffer though a massive salvo of easy FUD articles.

[1] if he has a family, he may just have an antiseptic white ceramic dwelling staffed by obedient Eve clones for all I know.

[2] also, break some eggs if you are making an omelette.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's on Reuters now, too.

Clever of them to wait until after the closing bell, but man oh man, that stock is going to plummet tomorrow, I imagine.

Hope he's all right...

<comment><USER20> They actually had to halt trading; they couldn't hold it til the bell, for some reason.

<comment><USER21> The news was released after the bell. It was halted in after-hours trading. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434426>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My prediction: I'll make a better % gain being short on PALM's inflated price post-CES then these AAPL shorters will. Apple is still an extremely strong company with lots of growth potential still left in the computer and phone markets. I'm sure there is money to made with these short term bets but I thought AAPL was bargain at the 85 close today, let alone what it drops to.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool. So I guess the best bet is to wait till the stock drops artificially tomorrow and then buy buy buy!

<comment><USER24> Yeah actually. I've got a few put contracts I'm going to dump. I've been betting against Jobs's health for a while. Plan B all along has been to go long after that happened. He's just not as important to that company as the market believes, because no man is that good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> All the news cares about is AAPL and not Apple or Jobs The Human. I'm not surprised -- and no one should -- because it all fundamentally comes down to money. The people in charge care about money and I'm sure Jobs knows this. He's already probably dead to the investors anyways. Only hackers or other ancillary types (in the grand scheme of things) care about innovation or the tech behind it. So save your tears for Woz's wake.

</comment><comment><USER21> _US STOCKS-Futures fall on Apple news on CEO's medical leave_ [http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN14482585200901...](http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1448258520090114)

 _Nasdaq stock index futures fell as much as 16 points. Apple shares were halted in after-hours._

</comment><comment><USER26> Simple question for those who think there's more to Jobs' sickness...

Imagine you're a millionaire hundreds of times over. You get a sickness that makes you tired, causes your hair to fall out and results in you not necessarily being able to control your bladder. Wouldn't you take a few months off?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"... Apple CEO Steve Jobs today sent the following email to all Apple employees ..."_

Don't see anything on the Apple pr site yet ~ <http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/> So it's unconfirmed.

<comment><USER27> It's there now: <http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/14advisory.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... It's there now ..."_

Thats what I'm looking for, Apple confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I hate to say it, but Apple's a company that's highly dependent on its CEO. It doesn't seem like it's a company that's very dependent on its talent, so if the "dictator with taste" steps down, I believe Apple is not going to be in for a great time.

</comment><comment><USER14> People need time off. Can we (as a culture) move on?

/edit: to expand: Mainly saying this because it's _not_ the first time Jobs has stepped down due to health reasons.

</comment><comment><USER24> Time to sell those puts.

<comment><USER29> If you're going to get into options, you can sell a bullish straddle, but that assumes that the share price won't go back to its highs (a fair assumption).

Selling put verticals would work too as it limits your risk.

Actually selling puts is going to depend on what the implied volatility looks like on the open.

Of course I'll be on my blog and stocktwits talking about it at 935 tomorow.

<comment><USER24> No, I meant sell put contracts I had already purchased. I'm not that brave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is awful.

In retrospect Jobs' hormone explanation for his weight loss looks like self- delusion. But I wanted to believe, too.

Hope everyone on HN is doing OK.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not good.

<comment><USER17> It's certainly not good for Jobs that his health is declining, and may not be good for AAPL in the short term, but it gives Apple the opportunity to prove that Apple != Steve Jobs. If Apple can continue to kick ass for 6 months while he's gone, it indicates that Apple may do just fine once he's gone permanently.

Of course, 6 months may not be long enough to really tell. There's also the possibility that he really is dying and they're hiding it, or he simply plans to permanently retire, and they're just "easing" investors into the idea of an Apple without Steve Jobs. I hope neither is the case, especially the former.

<comment><USER32> Completely agree. The truly big test for Apple would really come 12-18 months after Steve's departure, when the product development pipeline matures. If they're able to keep the same "magic" with or without Steve, then it proves that he built Apple's success into their culture.

<comment><USER33> Historically that has not been the case though. In the short run it probably will not be much of an issue for Apple as there is not a huge shift in management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You hear that? That's the sound of a million people ready to dump the stock tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER35> I like Steve. I hope he's OK.

</comment><comment><USER29> What's the over/under on a shareholder lawsuit?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd be surprised if its untrue...

</comment><comment><USER37> I really hope he's alright. This is unfortunate, but I think the press is overreacting by automatically assuming the worst.

It's not shocking that a 53-year-old man would suffer a health crisis requiring a 5-month reprieve from work. He's a cancer survivor (and cancer treatment side effects often persist for years) with a hormonal imbalance. It sounds like he's doing the smart thing.

Part of why I think this is major news is that, unfortunately, a lot of people have health crises that merit or require half-year career breaks. I've seen a lot of people work through illnesses that really deserved time off, especially when I worked on a trading floor. It sucks that most people can't take breaks when they need to; in his case, it leads to a billion-dollar drop in his company's market cap.

</comment><comment><USER38> Horrible news. Worse, the SEC is likely to come after him if it turns out (as we all probably think it will) that he's facing another round of cancer treatment. Now he's facing legal action as well, by publicly denying he has cancer.

<comment><USER29> I'm betting on a investor lawsuit over the SEC. If they knowingly misled their shareholders they're in for a world of hurt.

<comment><USER39> That's certainly what most people on CNBC were pulling for tonight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I hope Steve gets well soon. I'm afraid if he leaves Apple again, we'll see a repeat of the slow slide they experienced from 1985-1998.

</comment><comment><USER38> FWIW, the NYT is now reporting that inside sources are confirming that Jobs' problem has to do with nutrient absorption, not cancer.

</comment><comment><USER41> Expect a new iPhone, MacBooks and iMacs by the end of june

And one more thing ;-)

</comment><comment><USER42> is it time to start working on androind instead of iphone ?</comment>


Riak 0.14 is out - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/basho/riak/raw/riak-0.14.0/releasenotes/riak-0.14.0.txt

<comment><USER2> Blog post about the release: <http://blog.basho.com/2011/01/05/riak-0.14-released/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like 0.14 is a great release, from the notes. I'm setting up a Riak cluster tomorrow to evaluate performance as an alternative to our current HBase-based setup, so the timing on the release is perfect for me.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, if you're looking at HBase alternatives because of stability or reliability concerns, Cassandra is probably going to be an easy move because of the common BigTable datamodel ancestor. (With some notable improvements, e.g., [http://www.riptano.com/blog/whats-new- cassandra-07-secondary...](http://www.riptano.com/blog/whats-new- cassandra-07-secondary-indexes.))

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Cassandra require a lot of RAM?

<http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraHardware>

I can't find any numbers for riak RAM requirements...

<comment><USER6> For any SQL/NoSQL system, the more RAM, the better. They need as much RAM as possible to cache the data.

If you observed cassandra consumes a lot of RAM even with small dataset, you should tune the GC settings. Besides it, JVM itself consumes a lot of RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seriously, I recommend Riak to anyone who wants to experiment with NoSQL. I am using Riak w/ some MySQL and Riak is just SUCH a pleasure to use.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Guys at Basho are great to us.

<comment><USER9> I concur. They love us all and want us to be happy.</comment></comment>


Being an Environmentalist in the Age of Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkhardly.com/home/being-an-environmentalist-in-the-age-of-trump <comment><USER2> _> My career has been shaped by my belief that I'm more likely to make an impact on protecting the environment in the private sector than in the public or non-profit sectors_

Why does the author believe this? They run a farm-to-table delivery partnership company now, but they've been involved in the public sector in the past [1].

[1] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yushahu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yushahu)</comment>


Designing in the Open: My experiences with a transparent design process in Slack - <AUTHOR> http://duncanmalashock.com/blog/design/designing-in-the-open/ <comment><USER2> Great overview! We're just starting to use Slack for content/design work and beyond the nuts-and-bolts processes the biggest challenge is working in the open. Will share your experiences with my team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think the biggest challenges, for me, were the psychological ones. This process was helpful and collaborative, but not overwhelming.</comment></comment>


Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/01/valve-drops-steamvr-mac-support/ <comment><USER2> Gaming on macOS is a joke. They really burned a lot of bridges with developers and customers when they dropped 32-bit support, and refusing to support the next generation graphics API in favor of their own, dumb thing isn't doing them any favors, either. You built this bed, Apple, enjoy laying in it.

<comment><USER3> Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea and a step in the right direction in not carrying legacy cruft for generations... but Metal just doesn't make much sense. OSX is already a super niche market for gaming anyways and having a completely separate API just didn't garner any favors especially once Vulkan came around.

<comment><USER4> > Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea

No it wasn't. Apple has the resources to support 32bit apps. Wine is looking at adding support in userspace for mac osx. If it can be supported in userspace they could have added a translation layer themselves if they really couldn't stomach keeping it in the kernel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a VR headset, but it hasn't even crossed my mind to check if SteamVR would even work on my Mac.

Apple puts very low-end GPUs in Macs. Most models can't even be upgraded to a GPU that's decent for VR. The base $6000 Mac Pro comes with a $170 GPU! Latest maxed out top-of-the-line MBP has a weaker GPU than the last-gen lower-end GTX 1060.

<comment><USER6> There was a point where it seemed like Apple was going to throw its support behind eGPUs. Unfortunately it looks like they kinda half-assed it (new OS releases don't even work with modern Nvidia GPUs because Apple won't let them update the drivers)

</comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz I suppose that valve saw a too small userbase for it to be an attractive target for further VR games on macOS? Afaik VR is windows.

</comment><comment><USER7> I personally applaud Valve for braving to support as much hardware as they do. Even having built their own VR headset, they support a wide variety for their latest software a tacit show of support for the relationship of their customers and the VR ecosystem.

Perhaps this is anticipating Apple's upcoming move to a potentially new micro architecture that's been reported on -- I suppose if Apple thinks they need a software moat, they'll find a place to trench one up.</comment>


Amazon is testing a 30-hour workweek - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-30-hour-workweek-2016-8 <comment><USER2> My first reaction to this was to question are they doing this so they then can say people are part time and not pay healthcare benefits. Yet upon further investigation anyone who works an average of 30 hours or more a week is considered full time.

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/4980H](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/4980H)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For anybody that has worked at Amazon in the past (including me), just the title itself feels amusing and full of irony.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _And just this past July, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim said companies > would do well to adopt his company 's policy of working fewer than 30 hours > a week, with retirement at age 75._

75? There's no typo?

My folks are between 70 and 75. Despite not having had any serious physical/health problem in their life, I can guarantee they are not at all able to work any more. The decay in physical and mental abilities is too strong. Note that they don't lack energy however. But this big amount of energy cannot be turned in practical work any more.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well that's a title I never thought I was going to see..</comment>


The Fast Pencil Fallacy in Software Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghelmet.com/articles/the-fast-pencil-fallacy-in-software-development <comment><USER2> Very long article that could be summarized in one phrase: do what customer needs, not what he asks for. Not listening to what customer wants and treating him like user instead is sure way to produce unneeded software.

The main problem in industry is not suboptimal badly designed software. The main problem is amount of outright failed projects. Not delivered or with zero adoption and zero deployment.

Arrogance in ignoring real-world pencil experience of our customers, inability to extract that experience is often the reason why software project fails.

<comment><USER3> If it were up to me, nobody would major just in computer science for a programming degree. We should all have knowledge of some domain, any domain, so that we at least recognize what domain knowledge looks like.

A very few of us do study computers as computers, and they often are held up as the pinnacle of the field. We would rather discover algorithms or write tools for other programmers. But most of us make tools for people, and we can't do that well if we don't know what they need.

One way this shows up is in the way novice programmers fixate on the fastest language or algorithm, because it's a way they can show off their expertise to other programmers rather than a customer. They should be taught from the beginning that their job is to be useful, and it would be easier if they could be taught to be interested in something other than the computer for its own sake.

<comment><USER4> I studied psychology and outcompeted 10+ years experienced programmers when I made a greenfield application for a psychologist when I was still studying CS at university.

So in my world of anecdata you're entirely correct on how amazing domain knowledge is. I could help the psychologist with her research and could anticipate a couple of fun requirements (like an ever changing questionnaire :P).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. I love the "fast pencil" analogy, especially as I have used it for maybe forty years(!) in various consulting, sales, and software design roles.

2\. That being said, there is a thing we used to call The "maturity model." The customer using a pencil is very low in maturity. But leapfrogging past a fast pencil is often difficult.

Sometimes, customers have to evolve their way up the maturity model, so first you give them a fax machines (a fast pencil for sending documents by messenger), then you hook the fax machine up to their word processors (fast pencils for documents), then you wire the fax machine to the word processor so it can send faxes directly, then you introduce email and PDF, then you introduce collaborative editing, &c. &c.

Sometimes a customer can leap several levels of maturity in a single bound, but often not. The ones most likely to make a big leap are usually those with the least investment in their existing pencils.

So small shops, startups, young users early in their career are often good candidates for "you don't want a faster pencil, you want collaborative editing."

3\. Nevertheless, I like the fast pencil analogy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not the best of articles, IMHO. It has too many broad statements and seems to be trying to be a "one size fits all" bit of advice.

I like the metaphor and agree with this sentiment: "the problem of understanding what customer needs, as opposed to accepting what the customer is asking for".

A few points:

1\. The customer has a say in the requirements. They are often the domain expert. Even if they have no expertise, they need to be regularly consulted otherwise you _still_ run the risk of delivering software that no value to them.

2\. Understanding the business and eliciting requirements is often beyond the ability and scope of the software developer. These are the skills of a business analyst. Of course, developers can and do have these skills, but it shouldn't be assumed that they do.

3\. Proper business analysis may lead to a solution that doesn't involve custom software. The article doesn't seem to allow room for this.

4\. Implementation is often important to the customer. Many won't be comfortable to leave everything "below the surface" to the software developer.

</comment><comment><USER7> This needs examples throughout. I agree with the sentiment but I might argue that initially studying the pencil is the best way to trace back to the problem it solves.

<comment><USER8> This is what comes to my mind from my personal experience. Your customer uses excel spreadsheets to coordinate work. They ask you to move what they are doing in excel into custom software that can be shared with other users. If your not careful as a developer you end up re-inventing excel.

What is more important is to understand what the customer/user actually needs and solve that problem. Often times customers do not understand how software could make their life better.

In other words the customer might be asking for a faster pencil (the current tool) but what they really need is an email system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please, just read Don Norman's _The Design of Everyday Things_ instead of a hundred dashed out blog posts.

<comment><USER10> What's that book got to do with designing software? Genuine question.

<comment><USER11> Software is an everyday thing.

The book also coined the term "affordance", which is still used today in UI discussions. One of the criticisms of flat design is that it removes affordances, in contrast to e.g. the 90s-era Windows 3D buttons which use a consistent visual language to indicate what elements the user can interact with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article look at vendor software from the perspective of business. e.g. The users don't really care about the software itself, they use it as a tool to (semi)automate solving the business problem.

This is a good article for people want to take freelance, or run software vendor firm, or to come up "startup idea".

</comment><comment><USER13> So basically, listen to the customer?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's important to understand what the fast pencil might do for a business.

If a business presently has a slow process that they want you to accelerate, they probably also batch it. That is, they gather a lot of that same kind of work together and do it all at once (whether each task depends on any of the others or not).

By accelerating (giving them a fast pencil), you make it feasible to break this batch cycle up, distributing the work more evenly either across people (it's clearer what small units of work need to be done so other people can grab and do the work as needed) or time (even if it's still one person, if the work is now entering three items in a field and approving or disapproving then it's easier to do "on demand" versus waiting until the end of the month).

This doesn't mean they _will_ switch to small batches, but it means they _can_. If they choose to do this, the business will almost always see improvements in overall performance (assuming that those processes were ones that blocked other critical activities). Consider the improvement if this is purchase orders: The company isn't in the business of purchasing things but of doing X. The purchases, though, permit X to happen. If all purchases orders are batched at the end of the week or month, then everything else is stuck on that same cycle. If the purchases can now be evaluated and approved/disapproved daily (say the approver checks at 12pm and 4pm) suddenly everything else runs much better. (This is the basis of Theory of Constraints, with the assumption that the purchase is the bottleneck in this scenario for many/most projects.)

This is the transformation that businesses need to get to, but they can't break these cycles until they get something faster. And once they have something faster, real automation and improvement because feasible. It was technically feasible before, but the customer didn't understand _what_ they were doing or they felt overwhelmed by it ("It takes us 4 managers and 5 work days at the end of each month to do X right now"). This is the basis of process improvement. You start by accelerating (in a sane way) the things that can be accelerated and removing the unnecessary things, then you start real transformation because it becomes visible where things can or should be improved. You gain greater focus and clarity with the freed time and mental resources.

I faced this repeatedly over the last few years at my previous job. Everyone felt overwhelmed. The office was in a chronic state of panic. They batched all their work, and it led to lots of issues because it created artificial synchronization points and constraints. The only way to make improvements was not to reinvent everything, that would never sell (I tried). It had to be incremental with fast pencils. Automate this test suite, automate that build process, automate the deployment process to the extent possible (embedded, there are physical blockers here), convert a manual business process to a proper workflow, etc. Each one freed up personnel and time and let people start coming back from that panic state. After that, then you can focus on how to really change and improve the business because now you're making as much money for half the time, but if you're smart you keep all the people. You can move them around, or take on more work. Or let them run experiments to try and improve other areas or other projects, taking their lessons with them.</comment>


Sky Drone FPV Pre-Order Page Online - <AUTHOR>

Hey all, we want to let you know that our Pre-Order page is now online! Go to http://www.skydrone.aero/ to pre-order the Sky Drone FPV today! <comment><USER2> Clicky: [http://www.skydrone.aero/](http://www.skydrone.aero/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey dude why not post the link clickable directly through the feed?

Ps. Cool stuff</comment>