Ask HN: Best way to identify energy waste in a house? - <AUTHOR> Our power bill has been a lot higher lately and I've been wondering about ways to track/fix it. Any suggestions? Looking for everything from device power usage to things that could cause the HVAC to work too hard. <comment><USER2> Hot weather will cause an AC system to work harder, e.g. San Francisco at 106F on 9/1/17\. Humidity will cause an AC system to work harder and people produce a lot of humidity just from respiration and even more from hot showers...and coming back to hot weather, air contains more latent heat at higher temperatures given a constant relative humidity because hotter air holds more water vapor (at constant relative humidity).

It's worth noting that managing humidity is why smaller A/C units (fewer tons) are often more efficient in practice. Residential A/C units are controlled by thermostats and an oversized A/C unit (often preferred by consumers because "I'm no expert, but bigger is better") will short cycle [1].

Or to put it another way, if the air conditioner is running hard the most likely culprits are the air conditioner and the weather. But since this is HN, it could be your server racks in which case give them their own A/C...which reminds me that dividing a building up into many small zones, each with separate control is a good way to design an efficient system and why I am a fan of mini-split systems and room air conditioners. The goal of A/C is to cool people not buildings.

Good luck.

[1]: Short cycling is quickly lowering air temperature to the point the thermostat shuts off cooling before a substantial fraction of the latent heat from water vapor has been removed from the conditioned environment by the system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beyond other advice: a kill-o-watt for 110v plug-in appliances. We found our TV using $5/month worth of electricity just sitting idle.

Our library actually has kill-o-watts available for lending.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where do you live? Not to come raid your fridge, just to see if Its heating or cooling that you use. There are several passive heating/cooling techniques you could use.

If, as you say the problem arose "lately", it is probably your HVAC being over extended. For starters, buy one of these babies [https://goo.gl/4YFNZt](https://goo.gl/4YFNZt) (you could return it afterwards :-) and take some images of all the rooms from inside and also from outside the house. It will basically show you if heat/cool is leaking from your house.

Follow it up with educating yourself using something like this provided by your local energy company [https://goo.gl/HzY3QZ](https://goo.gl/HzY3QZ) OR start with a simple checklist like this [https://goo.gl/wx55iC](https://goo.gl/wx55iC) and make sure all the bases are covered.

If you want to do spend a little and do a more professional job, get one of such guys in your area to come do an energy audit of the house [https://goo.gl/mTmAeg](https://goo.gl/mTmAeg) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Upstate South Carolina. Thanks for the tips!

<comment><USER4> So its probably really hot there now. One thing you could do if space allows it, is to plant the right type of trees in a formation like this [https://goo.gl/nChH4r](https://goo.gl/nChH4r) in the east-west direction. This way, only the mid-day sun will directly hit your house. This reduces load on your HVAC system from unnecessarily being used.

For the right type of trees (grows fast, doesn't shed too much and doesn't fall over in a strong breeze etc), ask advice from a landscaper in yelp/craigslist. The garden section at some Home Depots might help you out.

More tips can be learned from just googling and learning about Passive Cooling techniques.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other suggestions here are good in terms of how to track it, but I suspect you don't need to track it beyond what you already know- it's most likely that air conditioner.

Even if every other electric appliance in your house doubled or halved its power consumption, it wouldn't move the needle near as much as the biggest energy user in the house.

If your AC is more than 5 years old, consider replacing it. Not only do they eventually wear out, wasting more energy, but newer ones can be more energy- efficient.

Consider buying a cheap mister for your AC's radiator. It uses a small amount of water to conduct the heat off the coils. Cool-n-save, Mist-n-save, Mistbox.. may want to soften the water you use to avoid scale deposits.

The smartest thing would probably be to explore a 5kW PV system on your roof. Not only will it remove heat from your roof but it will also save a lot on your air conditioning no matter how efficient it is nor how hot it gets outside. SC's government and utility incentives (visit dsireusa.org) look a lot like those in PV-friendly states from 5 years ago (which is to say, ridiculously good for the homeowner).

<comment><AUTHOR> Do those mister's really work? I remember liking what I saw from the promo's but there seemed to be a lot of people claiming snake-oil.

<comment><USER2> Evaporative cooling is more useful in dry arid climates. If you live in Pheonix, AZ, you may get by with nothing but a swamp cooler [1]. If you live in Phenix City, AL, you'll just get mold because the relative humidity is high. So if spraying water on your coils will cool them, then a swamp cooler may be a better option.

At large scale, evaporative cooling works even in humid climates but by large scale I mean upwards of 20 tons [2] square feet plus a place to put industrial level noise.

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

[2]: The 20 tons is based on the current Trane US product line. It equates to upwards of 12,000 square feet of conditioned space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Check your air filters in your heater. If they aren't clean then your AC has to work a lot harder to cool the house since air flow is blocked.

Also another good one is clean the coils on your AC. Its the same concept. If air can't flow through the coils then your AC will work a lot harder and suck up more energy.

If you live in a area where it cools down at night and don't have a lot of humidity, then look into buying a whole house fan. I live in the Denver area and it will really cool down my house quickly.

</comment><comment><USER7> If your power bill has "been a lot higher lately", then it's your air conditioning.

Take a look at the changes that you've made lately with your power consumption, and what's gone up. Once you've narrowed it down to your air conditioning, you can do something about that problem.

(Important note: The biggest use of electricity isn't always air conditioning. But after a hot summer... it's air conditioning.)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you have children... ha, but seriously, go around your house and unplug anything not plugged in that isn't charging something. Even if your chargers aren't connected to your phones, you are still consuming electricity. I believe its known as "trinklets".

So plugged in, your devices are consuming something like (don't quote me on this) $.007 per minute or something like that, and then unplugging them, but leaving their cords plugged into the wall is still consuming something like $.003. It all can add up over the month.

This includes any ceiling fans... they may be turned off, but if they are plugged in, it's still consuming resources.

</comment><comment><USER9> Measure first. Eg for measuring power usage you could borrow a decent quality power meter. Public libraries near me have them.

If your house isn't well designed and constructed for passive heating/cooling/insulation that's probably a whole other can of worms to identify and fix

</comment><comment><USER10> A friend of mine managed to wrangle a device from his local fire department that measures the heat or lack thereof of whatever it's pointing at. It shows a picture of what you're looking at, but colors the hot / cold spots. It was really enlightening to see the different places around the house that heat was escaping. Food for thought.

<comment><USER11> Infra-red camera? eg [http://www.flir.com/uploadedImages/Store/Products/Instrument...](http://www.flir.com/uploadedImages/Store/Products/Instruments/T-Series/t-series- models-t500b.jpg)

<comment><USER10> That's it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> See if your power company offers a home-energy audit. Usually they'll have a FLIR camera and look for air leaks, uninsulated portions of the house, single- pane windows, etc. Then look at appliances like the refrigerator, which often use around 11% of your electricity each month.

</comment><comment><USER13> Our heat pump had a relay get stuck a few years ago and ran constantly. This can run up your bill.</comment>


How I Made $4000 Selling A Product I Didn't Have - <AUTHOR> http://adii.me/ultimate-validation/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why you posted this. Are the pageviews from the controversy really enough to offset a long-term loss of reputation? Maybe you don't understand the line you crossed.

You advertised video courses taught by talented entrepreneurs. Later, you launched what is effectively a forum. These two things are hardly similar, but you charged users for the latter when they signed up to pay for the former.

Couch it in as many euphemisms as you want, but you tricked people for your own gain. I don't want someone to do that to me, and I won't do such a thing to someone else. Unfortunately, you didn't treat others as you like to be treated. I think that's unethical.

In the future, please treat your customers with more honesty and respect.

<comment><USER3> Adii isn't forcing anyone to pay and as he stated in his essay, he personally reached out to customers to inform them the video content was ready YET. Adii isn't doing a bait-and-switch without intention of delivering a quality product. He left his successful startup, WooThemes, to build a platform to help entrepreneurs. Before criticizing his approach coming from the outside (with less context), I'd prefer to hear directly from his customers.

<comment><USER4> He's doing exactly a bit and switch, and he's proud of it judging by his writing.

Let's consider a meat space analogy. Say I'm establishing a maid service. I don't have any maids or cleaning equipment, but I want to gauge interest in the neighborhood by signing people up for appointments and take their billing info. I don't tell them that this is what I'm doing. If I "reach out" to my customers and then say "J/K, I don't have an actual business yet, but I will soon!" that doesn't make it all okay. If I took any money on top of that, that's fraud. Indeed, even if I didn't take any money, taking billing info for a product that doesn't exist without telling customers as much is sketchy as fuck at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You lied to customers to get something valuable from them (in this case, the information that they were prepared to pay you, and their engagement with your site). You used this, by your own account, to gain $4000. I wouldn't want to make a large bet that that isn't fraud and outright illegal.

It probably isn't, unfortunately. But I hope your company fails. You should not get away with such behaviour.

A decent person would learn from all the people here saying "This is not an acceptable way to behave", and issue an apology for boasting about how they made a profit from deceiving their customers. I wonder: are you a decent person?

<comment><AUTHOR> You realize that the title is obviously exaggerated and that I didn't gain $4000 on day one. I did however gain the kind of validation that eventually allowed me to gain $4000 in cash when we launched a month later.

For every person that has criticized this, I have had another one saying this is great. I also know for a fact that I'm not the first startup entrepreneur to do this.

I have already apologized to each and every one of our customers. I have also mended the relationships (AFAIK) to the extent that the "angry" customers would consider being customers in future.

Ultimately, I think that this was ballsy publishing this and being open about the pro's & cons of this. I'm not saying that this is the best technique ever and neither am I saying that everyone should follow this approach. I am however saying that it worked for us and I am keen to engage others on this topic.

<comment><USER6> This is deception which and walks a fine line between legit and fraud. It doesn't matter what you think about who should do this or not - someone will attempt to emulate it, and they will end up in prison for taking money and not producing anything. It degrades the reputation of entrepreneurs everywhere who are diligently trying to build their businesses the RIGHT way.

The fact that you brag about it so boastfully is atrocious to be honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> You did read that we never took anybody's money, right?

<comment><USER7> Since no-one reads newletters properly, I bet at least one of your "customers" thinks they are paying for access to some videos which they will intend to watch at some point in the future, and will be pretty pissed in the future when they discover they've been paying for months and those videos are still not available.

The shady part is doing the pivot without doing another opt-in. It's a classic bait ("Subscribe to get access to videos") and switch ("Continue paying to get access to a community and the promise of plans to make said videos in the future").

<comment><AUTHOR> If that's the case, I'm happy to issue a full refund, no questions asked.

There's a major difference between trying to scam someone and pushing the boundaries to validate (and de-risk) an idea. If our ideas are shit, I will never take someone's money for that (hence the no questions asked, full refund).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Launching early is certainly a good thing. Launching a product that is only a proof of concept so people can really see what you're trying to do is also a good idea. But taking people's money under the banner "WE'RE A COMMUNITY OF ENTREPRENEURS THAT HELP EACH OTHER." when no such community exists seems borderline dishonest.

When 5.5% of your initial customers feel scammed and are are upset about being deceived it may be an "acceptable loss" from a business perspective, but I certainly don't think that's a "great result". 5.5% is a lot. For comparison, an eBay vendor with that many unhappy customers wouldn't last long.

Bootstrapping communities is notoriously difficult, and I'm well aware that the use of "community building hacks" are more the norm rather than exception, but I'm still not going to applaud this behavior.

<comment><USER9> "taking people's money under the banner ..."

He didn't actually charge people before the product was finished and they were able to opt-out after they knew what happened. Would have been a whole different story if the cards had actually been charged.

<comment><USER10> While the author did not charge the credit cards, he did not communicate to his site visitors about the situation either. It was only after the fact once they essentially gave out their information did he reveal the truth. Sure, you can argue that he did not charge for those that wanted to opt out. But from the get go, his visitors were not provided with the correct information to make an informed decision.

<comment><USER9> Communicating about it would defeat the entire purpose of the idea.

The way he did it allowed him to validate the idea in the exact same situation he would end up after building it, so it's a great way to take the (huge!) risk out of building a product.

Personally I wouldn't mind as a customer as you did know all the facts before you were actually spending the money.

<comment><USER11> Ethically, you must be honest and upfront with your customers. If your experiment involves misleading the, in any way, then ditch the experiment.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the unknowing recipient of his "experiment".

<comment><USER9> It's hard to experiment if everyone knows what's going on.

If you didn't like the experiment you had the possibility to opt-out and never become a customer of him again, without having to pay a single dime.

<comment><USER11> I don't care. It's not my role as a customer to make it easy for you to experiment. You either tell me the truth, front up, or you don't try to make the sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This type of thing has the potential to ruin the reputation of startups everywhere. If it isn't outright fraud (selling people something that doesn't exist) I'm not sure what is.

I'm amazed someone has the gall to boast about this type of thing publicly while blatantly ignoring the long-reaching repercussions their actions could have throughout the entire startup community.

People routinely go to prison for similar types of deception in other industries. It is a slippery slope that is surely testing the bounds of fraud while ruining the reputation of legitimate startups everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting - he gave a talk on this at Microconf Europe which was this last weekend, and a very good conference with lots of cool and interesting people. There was (I thought) something of a feeling in the room of "hrm, maybe this is a bit over the line?" although everyone was appreciative of the fact that it was a much stronger validation of the idea than just handing over an email address. Watching Adii talk, I certainly got the impression he was not 100% happy with the approach himself, and wrestled with it some.

OTOH, I can understand the risk avversion: if they've given you a CC number (they were not, however, charged), they're a Real Customer and your product is far more likely to have legs than just getting an email address, which is in turn better than not even having a pre-launch page and just hoping people want whatever it is you've slaved away building for months. Spending a lot of money to build something only to find no one wants it, or wants a fairly different version sucks big time!

<comment><AUTHOR> Do I think that this technique can be refined? For sure. :)

One of the reasons for publishing this and being open about how this worked is to be a catalyst for a conversation around this, which would hopefully see a refinement of the technique.

<comment><USER10> I applaud you for being so open and transparent. Although I personally feel that the line was crossed, your openness to see a refinement in technique is refreshing. There are just too many "entrepreneurs" these days justifying their practices by saying that it works and it's completely legal. For me there are 3 responsibilities (in the same order) to any entrepreneur/business: 1\. ethical responsibility 2\. economical responsibility 3\. legal responsibility

To say that something is completely legal does not make it unethical. So I do hope we can find a better way. The false advertising that companies put out makes me sad but it's also an opportunity for businesses to be honest with their customers.

Question for you though: You mentioned you received numerous signups signalling their interest. Could you have conducted your interviews with them instead? From the story, it seemed to me like the key point was identifying the needs of the customers. Of course, the ones who placed their credit card information are the ones most interested which filters them out from the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I could have just done customer interviews without requiring CC details. I truly believe that this feedback is however still hit-or-miss and we might've optimized for the wrong thing thereafter. Paying customers' feedback is always better than the feedback from any kind of "free user".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you use deception to found a company, you'll find reasons to continue using it while running the company, and you'll eventually lose the company because of it.

There are ways to measure buying signals. Please research them. Here, I'll do you a solid, and Google "how to measure buying signals"

Oh, look: [http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media- marketing/ca...](http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media- marketing/can-you-get-roi-from-simple-words-on-twitter/)

While it's not my intention to hold this up as _the_ authority on buying signals, what you will pick up on is that nothing on this page talks about the number of subscribers on an email list. Subscriber counts are, _at best_ a weak buying signal. It measures interest, not willingness to purchase.

</comment><comment><USER14> It already goes right up to my ethical "pain threshold" to have a "buy" button that links to a page that says "sorry! we're not quite ready yet. enter your email here" just to gauge interest. It's questionable.

This goes way beyond that. This is no longer a grey area. This is lying to potential customers. Justify it however you want, it's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is specifically what services like Kickstarter were designed to address. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that crowd-funding services are viable funding models, especially for low budget projects like this.

This feels like deception for the sake of deception and I would have been among those who were pissed had I signed up.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll see in the article that Kickstarter or crowdfunding would not have validated this idea, as the difference between backing / pre-ordering / investing in a product versus purchasing a product is significant. To validate an idea, you need to know that you can actually sell it in a repeatable fashion. Kickstarter or crowdfunding is generally a once-off process, so doesn't give you that validation.

(I know that many Kickstarter projects that were successful have turned into longer-term, sustainable businesses.)

<comment><USER12> We don't have any data, but "would not have validated the idea" is ... perhaps not 100% accurate?

People do manage to "kinda/sorta" validate their ideas by getting email signups. Granted, it's less accurate than actually collecting CC details, but it does provide some indication. And kickstarter involves actual money, so perhaps it gives you a better idea than email, even if it's not _quite_ as good as getting their CC. Maybe that tradeoff is worth it in terms of openness with your future customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, maybe that is a worthwhile trade-off to consider for anyone considering something similar in future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The comments here have covered all the shady/illegal aspects of the post, but the most dangerous part (and you may not experience it in person outside of major tech areas): people get _really_ excited about manipulating and abusing others for their own gain (especially small numbers of technically competent people abusing large numbers of "normals").

People are just anonymous hits online, right? Drive up the hits. How? Just manipulate people. Oh, we got money? Chest bumps and high fives all around. We did it!

When you start thinking about "right" or "wrong" when doing work like this, your world falls apart, so you don't think that way. You run the hustle. You run the borderline-illegal practices all in the name of growth. When you're successful it'll all be forgiven by rich people who want to leech of your success anyway.

If we keep telling ourselves it's bad/wrong/illegal, all the people willing to do this shady work will end up ruling the world while we still sit on our poor sanctimonious asses.

</comment><comment><USER17> TL;DR - Putting up a marketing site and asking for money up front sets customers expectations for what is to be delivered. But startups change significantly in the early stages, so it's very difficult to meet customer expectations.

I'd like to hear more about what people said in the customer interviews. Here's my experience as a consumer...

After flipping through the library, I signed up immediately. The cost/value was very high.

After putting in my credit card details, I was put in a queue, which was a little frustrating as I was expecting instant access, but I got over it quickly and didn't mind waiting. I think this was fine.

The big problem came when the library disappeared from the site and the business went in a very different direction. I had pledged $30/month for something specific (the videos from high-profile entrepreneurs), so it was disappointing to see that it wasn't going to happen. It even entered my mind that it was only ever a carrot to get my credit card details and that there was never an intent to make the videos. So, some confidence lost there. Also, still having my credit card on the hook for something else that I hadn't yet learned about was a bit disconcerting.

Adii is a friend and I was still curious about what it would be, so I stuck with it. It's highly likely if I didn't know the founder, I would have cancelled immediately.

I struggle to consistently participate in communities, so I will be cancelling my membership. The video library was more my thing, consumption without engagement. And that's what I pledged my $30/month for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to clarify two things:

1) The intention was always to produce the videos / content. And it still is too (we have just deprioritized this and tweaked the roadmap from our initial plan). 2) The customer interviews we had (along with the survey we did thereafter) gave us insight into what our founding customers really paid for and for the majority that wasn't the content.

<comment><USER17> 1) Ah, excellent! Perhaps I missed the communication on this?

2) Yep, re-prioritizing based on this makes complete sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 1995Vaporware = 2013ProofOfConcept.

Sigh.

<comment><USER19> So true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am currently doing a startup too. It seems that I can handle all the design, coding and technical side of things but I cannot market and do sales.

Although I agree with some of the points such as launching early and the communication aspect of it. I'm against deceptive tactics to get sales. Even though he said that it didn't feel good, then why continue with the same tactic? Does getting the sales and numbers justify the actions?

I'm in the same boat as the author at the moment and if anyone out there has any advice I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER21> Best advice is to not do this, or anything like it. If you're a one-man show, then be sure to blog, tweet, or otherwise communicate with your customers often. Treat them like people, and build a following. When your startup fails (and 99% do), hopefully a good portion of those will follow you to your next venture. Building customers through respect is what builds a lasting brand (you). Don't take money until you have a product to give them, unless you're upfront about it.

<comment><USER20> @drharris:

That's what I'm doing at the moment. One of the biggest pivot in my Internet habits is that I've changed from being a lurker (just looking and not doing things) to being more active in the community, discussion or post. Even on HN. I've been here for ages but never contributed anything of value.

That will change now as I have to be able to harness the comments and engagements of people who are more knowledgable than me in this respect.

Thanks again for your advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have mixed emotions about this strategy.

On the subject of deception, Adii hasn't yet replied to my comment about this section from his previous article:

"So I took the testimonials that they had left on my Clarity profile, reworked them (for the purpose of my book) and sent it to the individuals (along with a sample chapter of the book) for approval."

[http://publicbeta.co/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-a- landin...](http://publicbeta.co/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-a-landing-page- without-social-proof)

<comment><AUTHOR> Responded to your comment on there now. :)

<comment><USER22> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure this tactic would cross a line for me personally. Different story if you actually started out with even just 1 video, but to base a sale on a lie of content not yet created is a bit dubious.

I wonder if you looked in to your legal obligations at all? I know in the UK a company has a duty to trade fairly and not mislead consumers....I'm not sure to what extent you fall foul of the law if you do something like this?

</comment><comment><USER24> Why in the world would anyone title a blog post this way? It sounds like he purposefully went out of his way to phrase his tactics in the worst possible way. Call it "market testing", call it "product validation", anything but "selling shit I didn't have".

Worst PR ever.

</comment><comment><USER25> A good read. However, the first rule of using white lies is you don't talk about it (in public - this would be a great thing to use PublicBeta for! ;-)) otherwise you get the sanctimonious types in the peanut gallery excited, as some of the comments here demonstrate.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Obviously being open and sincere about all the facts after the deception helps, but it also contradicts the very fact that you were deceitful."

I don't understand how this is going to help anybody's cause.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's like reactive transparency. For some people this means that I / we have broken their trust and any future relationship is thus dependent on earning back that trust. Being open, honest and apologetic after that fact, helps with mending those relationships.

<comment><USER11> So am I to assume you'll never try this sort of thing again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If other people knew we didn't have the content, they probably wouldn't sign up any more."

Damn straight I wouldn't. And I sure as hell wouldn't be giving you my credit card details to _store on file_. I don't care what your PCI compliant third party provider is like, if I give you my credit card details, unless its a refer payment, then you debit it and throw away the card details.

This is totally unethical business practice. It's a bait and switch as far as I'm concerned!

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a feeling this would be illegal in the United Kingdom.

<comment><USER28> I wonder what Braintree and Recurly think about it? (I'm pretty sure that "5% angry customers" would have been enough for Paypal to trigger its "hang on to all the money for 180'days" thing. Probably righty so…

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Honest question: taking customers' billing information with the promise of a product at a later date without they _actually knowing_ that you don't even having the product. (more importantly when customers' are made to think the product exists: [http://publicbeta.co/library/](http://publicbeta.co/library/))

Is it even legal?

</comment><comment><USER30> This is really sad.

</comment><comment><USER31> When did HN-headlines start to be interchangeable with randomly selected YouTube scam comments?

</comment><comment><USER32> That's seems immoral and just wrong.

The angry customers you get can ruin your reputation very very quickly. Angry customers are the ones that usually go out of their way to write bad reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this from Abraham Lincoln: [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/281050-you- can-please-some-o...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/281050-you-can-please- some-of-the-people-some-of-the)

The reality is: Yes, angry customers are never good for business or brand building. Neither are bad reviews. Trust me when I say that I hate the fact that I had angered even one individual.

That said, I interacted with every one of the angry customers and explained the rationale behind the decision. I managed to resolve the emotion to the extent that they were appreciative of my explanation / reasoning and would even consider becoming a customer in future.

<comment><USER8> You can't use a pithy quote to excuse bad behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't excusing bad behaviour at all. In fact, I've been very up-front about the fact that this technique relies on deception and that I didn't like that bit.

I stick to what I've said though, which is that putting up a landing page with an e-mail signup and a "Request Early Access"-kinda thing is similarly deceptive. The only difference is that I actually asked for CC details. To that extent, I'm willing to do whatever I need to do to see my startup succeed.

This is obviously not for everyone and that's why I posted the quote from Lincoln.

<comment><USER21> Oh, well since you didn't like it, that's ok then. Wait, no it's not; it's horrible, indecent advice. Good business is being honest with your customers. Count me among the ones who would never turn over money with scumball tactics like this. Do your domain research, spend a few months making an MVP, and sell it in a working state. Give your early adopters premium pricing so they stick with you through the early churn. I wish your customers the best, as they're in for a rocky ride turning money away to such a scammy businessman.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Design by Introspection [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U7WAlKpQ <comment><USER2> Speaker here. Slides at [https://erdani.com/dconf2017-slides.pdf](https://erdani.com/dconf2017-slides.pdf). Ask me anything!

Abstract: Over the years, a few programming paradigms have been successful enough to enter the casual vocabulary of software engineers: procedural, imperative, object-oriented, functional, generic, declarative. There's a B-list, too, that includes paradigms such as logic, constraint-oriented, and symbolic.

The point is, there aren't very many of them altogether. Easy to imagine, then, the immensely humbling pressure one must feel when stumbling upon a way to think about writing code that is at the same time explosively productive and firmly removed from any of the paradigms considered canon.

This talk shares early experience with Design by Introspection, a proposed programming paradigm that has enough demonstrable results to be worth sharing. The tenets of Design by Introspection are:

* The rule of optionality: Component primitives are almost entirely opt-in. A given component is required to implement only a modicum of primitives, and all others are optional. The component is free to implement any subset of the optional primitives.

* The rule of introspection: A component user employs introspection on the component to implement its own functionality using the primitives offered by the component.

* The rule of elastic composition: a component obtained by composing several other components offers capabilities in proportion with the capabilities offered by its individual components.

These rules, and how to use them to build powerful software, are the topic of this talk.

<comment><USER3> Excellent talk, it really makes one envious of the compile time facilities offered by D.

Do you see any other languages out there being amenable to at least ideologically similar techniques, or do you think this design paradigm will remain unique to D for the immediate future? In particular, I think some of the modern JIT-compiled languages, which often feature extensive reflection and runtime introspection capabilities, could theoretically be used in a similar way, as long as the compilation overhead incurred on the first run remains reasonably small. What are your thoughts on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Andrei Alexandrescu discusses Design by Introspection as a design methodology to create full featured abstractions without the kitchen sink style fat interfaces.</comment>


Ask HN: Write admin in Golang or just deploy two languages/frameworks? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I am in a state of analysis paralysis.
After doing a nice part of this realtime Golang API (Postgresql backed, say 1k lines) I want to write an  admin page and I'm finding it a big hassle in Go, even with https://github.com/marmelab/admin-on-rest - and I only have 5 tables or so.
I have to write a lot of repetitive code for each HTTP operation and for each table... I also have to duplicate my "models" (structs) since the keys I want to JSON encode aren't the same as in the "main application" (cf Golang type tags).
Should I just suck it up and write the code, or throw Django together, redefine the models there and present that as the admin (operating on the same database as the main app) ? <comment><USER2> Give [https://github.com/qor/admin](https://github.com/qor/admin) a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this worked well, though now I have to decide if I migrate the original app to Gorm as well...

<comment><USER2> Glad to hear.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most complete C++0x compiler ? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
what is in your opinion the "best" candidate compiler to learn the new C++0x standard ?
Unfortunately there is no compiler that implements the complete standard, but hopefully we will see one in the next year(s).
Thanks <comment><USER2> This table is a round-up of C++0x support in various compilers:

<http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport>

<comment><USER3> Judging from this table: GCC 4.x, the later the better. Too bad it'll be a while before we see GCC 4.6!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has the specification for c++0x been approved by ISO? I know various versions were floated, but I don't seem to recall a rubber-stamped standard ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the standard was approved, have a look at this article:

[http://herbsutter.com/2011/03/25/we-have-fdis-trip-report- ma...](http://herbsutter.com/2011/03/25/we-have-fdis-trip-report- march-2011-c-standards-meeting/)

<comment><USER4> from the article: "If all goes well, and we expect it will, the International Standard _will_ _be_ approved and published in 2011, henceforth to be known as C++ 2011." <\-- i interpret that as it not having been approved yet</comment></comment></comment>


Flic – Smart Button - <AUTHOR> https://flic.io/ <comment><USER2> (in Safari 9.1.2 - page never loads)

        SyntaxError: Strict mode does not allow function declarations in a lexically nested statement. (at app.mdl.js:135)

SO WEBSCALE BRAH

</comment><comment><USER3> How long does it last? I read somewhere that the amazon button only lasts 1000 presses. Is yours less wasteful?</comment>


Multi-Task Learning in the Wilderness: Karpathy on Autopilot progress [video] - <AUTHOR> https://slideslive.com/38917690/multitask-learning-in-the-wilderness <comment><USER2> As someone who works on ML, in particular 'deep neural networks', I am always surprised when someone seriously mentions using them to solve complex (anything with humans in the loop fits solidly within this category) real- world (i.e. real-world inputs and outputs) problems. I am very surprised when the problem definition additionally involves potential injury and death.

And yet it seems that Karpathy firmly believes that Neural-network-based self- driving systems are not only reasonable, but within reach using something close to today's algorithm.

This always leaves me wondering whether (i) I am somehow using an entirely different class of algorithms from what these guys are using (ii) the AI/ML bubble has even the top minds in our field drinking a little too much kool-aid (iii) My colleagues and I are just not good enough at ML to unlock it's full magical potential.

(To be more exact, I am not debating the truly impressive power of today's ML/deepNN algorithms when it comes to statistical inference. Yet, does anyone here believe that you can get to Level 5 on today's roads without something close to general-purpose intelligence? How do you react to written roadsigns explaining temporary route alterations? How do you know to take special precautions in situation where context indicates the likelihood of unmodeled irrational behavior?)

I am genuinely curious, who here believes/doesn't believe today's AI can really generalize that far when (i) adversarial attacks are still a real issue [1] (ii) random seeds can sometimes have a greater influence than model architectures [2] (iii) we are not even sure how well these models approximate learning which takes place in biological brains [3]

[1] [https://sites.google.com/view/lidar- adv](https://sites.google.com/view/lidar-adv)

[2] "We do not find any evidence that the considered models can be used to reliably learn disentangled representations in an unsupervised manner as random seeds and hyperparameters seem to matter more than the model choice." \- [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.12359.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.12359.pdf)

[3] [https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S136...](https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613\(19\)30012-9)

<comment><USER3> I also work in ML/DL. I'd use a different word than "surprised". "Appalled" is more appropriate. If the video proves anything, it's that everything they do is a hack. There is no principled way to do anything. There is something seriously wrong when they have to resort to oversampling to deal with catastrophic forgetting, aka, learning instability. Yet I'm supposed to trust my life with this thing? Today's DNN are still incredibly crude. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved before we can deploy them in anything other than toys.</comment></comment>


Show HN: html-vault – create self-contained HTML for password protected content - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dividuum/html-vault <comment><USER2> On the topic of toy web crypto projects, here's mine: [https://emojicrypt.com/](https://emojicrypt.com/)

It offers scrypt + aes-gcm, encoded into 256 emoji; all the crypto is in [https://github.com/aurorabbit/libemojicrypt/blob/master/prot...](https://github.com/aurorabbit/libemojicrypt/blob/master/protocol.1.js) (I could have went without a subrepo, but in theory it makes non-web integration or alternate interfaces simple.)

It's based off of ricmoo's scrypt.js, pfrazee's base-emoji, and WebCrypto.

Output contains a header (with N/r parameters), salt, IV, and HMAC. Room for a dozen more protocol versions as well.

It's abandoned, looking for a loving home! Work for some new (and some unimplemented) features is laid out here: [https://github.com/aurorabbit/emojicrypt.com/issues](https://github.com/aurorabbit/emojicrypt.com/issues)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. Did you measure the performance of scrypt.js? The PBKDF2 implementation in Python and both Chrome/Firefox are similar for me and the Python documentation states something like 3x slower that the OpenSSL implementation [1]. So it sounds pretty usable to strengthen the password while still being usable.

[1] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/hashlib.html#hashlib.pbkdf...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/hashlib.html#hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I didn't, but maybe I should have. I thought the API of scrypt.js would work well and don't think I came across anything better. I also figure scrypt is plainly better than PBKDF2; being designed from ground up for key lengthening and offering memory hardness. I figure bitcoin ASICs might be repurpose-able to attack PBKDF2; though I'm not sure if that's a threat, and I imagine it mostly somewhat applies to scrypt anyway because of litecoin and friends. If I were more worried I would have researched the default parameters more, I think this is 128- vs 256-bit territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I made something similar to this: [https://github.com/camsjams/mr- roboto](https://github.com/camsjams/mr-roboto)

With a slight difference, it works 100% in the browser, you can use it here: [https://camsjams.github.io/mr-roboto/](https://camsjams.github.io/mr-roboto/)

But you need to store the output somewhere safe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I guess the big difference is the key used for the symmetric encryption. I'm using PBKDF2 to derive the final key to make it harder to brute force in case you get the HTML file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey! I also made something similar to this (uses a password-derived key to create protected, self-contained HTML).

[https://www.maxlaumeister.com/pagecrypt/](https://www.maxlaumeister.com/pagecrypt/)

Mine was originally in-browser, but thanks to some contributors (Zoltán Gálli and Nial Francis) it has Python and PowerShell CLIs now.

I like your use of async to make sure the work stays off the main thread.

<comment><USER5> I like it! Works well. Do you see a way to reduce the required code?

<comment><USER4> I just glanced through it again, and it seems to me that aside from styling, every section of code fulfills an important purpose. But it could definitely benefit from being more broken out into components and library-like, so that the only code surfaced in index.html is the UI code.

<comment><USER5> Looks like your code predates the Web Crypto API, so switching over to that should get rid of more than half the code. Right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It took way too long on my laptop (i5-6200U). With a decent random password (say, 14 letters), the search space will be very large. If a determined attacker (with a couple of GPUs) can attempt 100.000 passwords per second it will still be impossible to crack in an acceptable time.

If we assume that this determined attacker is calculating these hashes 100.000 faster than the average browser, it should be enough if the user has to wait for one second, not one minute.

On the other hand everyone has different security requirements so perhaps making it configurable is the best way to go proceed (with some recommendations).

PS according to [https://github.com/analsec/hashcatbenchmark/blob/master/Nvid...](https://github.com/analsec/hashcatbenchmark/blob/master/Nvidia/rtx_2080ti.txt) a RTX 2080Ti can crack 750k WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2 with 4096 rounds per second.

</comment><comment><USER6> Similar: [https://github.com/sowbug/quaid](https://github.com/sowbug/quaid)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. The project motivation is even similar to mine (bootstrap yourself in case everything gets lost). I guess the main difference between the two is that I tried to make the generated HTML minimal so it's easier to verify before entering a password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might take a moment it said but I think I waited two minutes with no result in sight.

<comment><AUTHOR> If there's no error message in the browser console, I guess the 20 million PBKDF2 might be a bit much. Which browser are you using?

<comment><USER7> Recent release of Firefox, on a developer laptop.

Edit: add more details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Works, but takes a little while. Nice -useful

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very much by design. The idea is that even if the file is stolen, a good password should still protect against a lot of bruteforcing.

<comment><USER9> By design? Or running code in the browser is inefficient? (not your fault, that's the way it is) Keepass (Desktop app) for example doesn't take ages to open.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes: By design. This helps make brute forcing the password harder by forcing each attempt to take a while. The crypto implementation in the browser itself is pretty fast.

You can easily make it faster or instantaneous by lowering the number of PBKDF2 rounds in the html-vault script. The default of 20 million seems a bit excessive based on the feedback so far.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing AKS (managed Kubernetes) on Azure - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-container-service-aks-managed-kubernetes-and-azure-container-registry-geo-replication/?cdn=disable <comment><AUTHOR> There is a large ecosystems of tools, frameworks, and companies that make it easier to run Kubernetes outside of GKE, but for users (like myself) that would rather just pay a cloud platform to handle all the work, this is great step forward.

I'm eagerly waiting to hear AWS offering a fully managed Kubernetes service at this year's re:invent

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been waiting for this!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, good stuff!

</comment><comment><USER4> fantastic news!</comment>


Google's Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook "Like" - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-social-circle-in-search-results-including-page-rankings-65202 <comment><USER2> Sometimes I think social search may be one of those things that sound good in theory but don't really add a lot of value in practice.

<comment> mkr-hn Google's record on this sort of thing is to try it out for a week, then pull it. I'm guessing they don't have much faith in the concept, but are willing to try anyway.

<comment><USER3> That's completely wrong. Google's had social search since 2009. It never put it out there for a week and yanked it.

The opposite is happening here. Google rolled it out, then just kind of let it sit -- no big huge improvements, and it was hard to find. Now they're putting much more faith into it, making it more visible.

<comment> mkr-hn I meant user-controllable results like searchwiki.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Google to search for things my friends don't have answers for. I use Facebook to ask my friends about things they have answers for. I don't want my interests influencing my friend's searches, nor do I care about their input on 95% of the things I'm searching for (coding, SEO, tech news, hardware, etc)</comment>


The Promotion Problem - <AUTHOR> http://coroutine.com/blog/3-The-Promotion-Problem

<comment><USER2> I think the problem comes from promotion being seen as a linear path, which conflates the two orthogonal values of programming skill and management skill. Getting managers out of programmers is a good thing, that's how you get managers that understand programming, which is important. However, manager is not always strictly an upgrade, or strictly a downgrade, from senior technician, in any sense. Management should be a separate, parallel career advancement path, and technicians (including but not limited to programmers) should have promotions (and raises!) available that recognize skill and add responsibility in the areas that they are best suited to, be that managing, or technicianing, or sales, or whatever.

<comment><USER3> Intel for instance has a very well organized promotion track for purely technical roles (principal engineer and Intel Fellow if you go far enough). Many companies do not have such deep respect for engineering and management often becomes the only way up.

<comment><USER4> Its competitor ARM does too, iirc. In addition, almost everyone (including many in top roles, such as the CEO) come from an engineering background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a specific instance of the Peter Princple. It's typically concieved as a joke, but probably often inevitable in a linear carreer path.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle>

<comment><USER5> The Peter Principle is darkly amusing, but it's not joke. I wish it were.</comment></comment>


Google has open-sourced SkyMap - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/open-sourcing-sky-map-and-collaborating.html

<comment><USER2> My first thought was "this is going to be a spin on dumping another cool product."

It's better than that, however. There are a lot of these cool apps from Google that are/were obviously 20% projects but which really showcase Android. "Listen" was one of my favorites for a long time. I _wish_ they would open source that. This is a great solution to deal with something that is a nice showcase product but which is not a core competency / business driver and probably should be sidelined in some regard.

Google: please open source the other stagnant, cool apps you have in your product stable. Think of it as releasing the horses back into the wild.

Free range your unhealthy apps, big G. Let the apps run away like wild horses over the hills. /bukowski

<comment><USER3> like google googles!

<comment><USER4> goggles?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Tim-Boss Like many of you I'm sure, Skymap was the first app I downloaded when I got my first android (thanks to one of my friends previously showing off his new android using it!) and it really opened my mind to what the future would hold for smart-phones and sort-of-augmented-reality software in general.

Many an hour has been spent sat outside, usually round a camp fire, with friends locating planets and other points of interest, walking round pointing my phone at the sky looking like a loon to the uninitiated! I find it very VERY encouraging that this product wasn't just left alone to die a graceful death of old age, but that it will be dissected in front of all, enabling the knowledge and skill imbued in its programming to live on in educating the next generation of programmers. .. I hope it inspires them as much as it inspired me!

Thanks Google!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Market Link for the uninitiated: [https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.sta...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's Apache licensed, and the data files are embedded in the app. Looks like there's nothing preventing an iOS port (for iPhone 4 and up).

</comment><comment><USER6> OT, but I detest blogspot blogs. You get nothing, just a blank screen, if you use NoScript or have javascript disabled.

</comment><comment><USER7> Title should read: Google is abandoning Sky Map. That's what the article says (in so many words).

<comment><USER8> People are always hating on bigcos around here.

"Sky Map's development will now be driven by the students, with Google engineers remaining closely involved as advisors."

That sounds pretty awesome, especially for the students involved.</comment></comment>


The best qualities of high- and low-level languages - <AUTHOR> http://tlb.org/busywork.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. I wonder if he's working on Arc with Paul and if any of his ideas are making it in there.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's a good article. If you read it in conjunction with "succinctness is power" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html you can get another view on what parts of languages are useful & why.

'... working on Arc with Paul and if any of his ideas are making it in there ...'

Dont know. They both appear to be pretty busy on their own stuff.

Matt you made the comment on reddit, 'Arc "compiles" into Scheme' didn't you? ~ http://reddit.com/info/15gkq/comments/c15iof</comment></comment>


Explore JFK case files with OCR and entity extraction (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://jfk-demo.azurewebsites.net/#/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source Code: [https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureSearch_JFK_Files](https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureSearch_JFK_Files)

Blog Post: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/machinelearning/2017/11/...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/machinelearning/2017/11/15/gain- insights-into-the-jfk-files-with-azure-search-and-cognitive-services/)</comment>


A post mortem on the UNIX SCO litigation - <AUTHOR> http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2010/06/articles/open-source/what-can-we-learn-from-the-sco-litigations/

<comment><USER2> Garbage. Just before the SCO Group (new SCO) started their legal jihad they tried to get Novell to acknowledge that SCO owned it. Novell said "no way" (rather obviously). At least to PJ of Groklaw and myself, this demonstrates that the SCO Group knew exactly what a house of cards they were basing their Hail Mary Microsoft funded lawsuit against IBM and, well, the world, on.</comment>


Deep Learning Image Classifier - <AUTHOR> http://deeplearning.cs.toronto.edu/

<comment><USER2> LOL! [http://i.imgur.com/Xs3GrGk.png](http://i.imgur.com/Xs3GrGk.png)

<comment><USER3> Not too bad! It was low probability, but it did somehow recognize Mike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't give me results at all to the three images I uploaded. Might be broken.

<comment><USER5> It looks like that's the case -- none of the example images on the front page work for me.

<comment><USER6> Same for me. Tried safari and chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> President Obama is recognized either as ...

... a mountain-bike / all-terrain-bike ([http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-galleryV9-vuuv.jp...](http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-galleryV9-vuuv.jpg))

... or a rugby ball ([http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-breitwandaufmache...](http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-breitwandaufmacher- vuuv.jpg))

... or a bullet proof vest ([http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-thumb- vuuv.jpg](http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-730849-thumb-vuuv.jpg))

I guess the implementation leaves room for improvement :)

</comment><comment><USER8> There are several of these image classifiers now that someone should run an accuracy/speed/price comparison between

AlchemyAPI: [http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemyvision/](http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemyvision/)

UToronto

Rekognition: [http://rekognition.com/demo/concept](http://rekognition.com/demo/concept)

Clarifai: [http://www.clarifai.com/](http://www.clarifai.com/)

I'm doing it myself, but I have a conflict of interest

<comment><USER9> Well there is the ImageNet challenge [http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2013/results.php](http://www.image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2013/results.php) I'm not sure if Alchemy or Rekognition maps to any of those teams though.

<comment><USER10> Also see [https://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classifica...](https://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classification_datasets_results.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://rekognition.com/demo/concept](http://rekognition.com/demo/concept)

Rekognition API has a similar API for all developers free.

It's reliable and very fast.

Checkout their demo page.

<comment><USER12> I only tried one (hard) image, pizza-, sandwich- bloody mary [https://imgur.com/30OgNdd](https://imgur.com/30OgNdd). Rekognition seems to be working better than submission

Rekognition:

7.55% fruit; 0.92% dinner; 0.88% produce; 0.87% alcohol; 0.84% sliced

Toronto:

50% American lobster, Northern lobster; 12% plate; 7% crayfish, crawfish, crawdad; 7% Dungeness crab, Cancer magister; 4% king crab, Alaska crab; 4% butcher shop, meat market; 4% grocery store, grocery; 4% pomegranate

I find this interesting because I thought Hinton's group had state of the art tech. Who are these people and how do they do it?

<comment><USER13> I think that when you're not expected to publish any papers to rationalize what you're doing, you're free to use any possible ugly hack to improve your results, (using a "kitchen sink" approach where you just combine the results of lots of unrelated techniques, extracting words from the URL, using the URL to actually fetch some related textual content on the website, etc). This gives private companies a competitive advantage over research institutions - their only purpose is to "make things work", not to introduce new techniques and have interesting insight about them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tried two images:

[http://kephra.de/Dampf/IMG_20140620_133839_800x600.jpg](http://kephra.de/Dampf/IMG_20140620_133839_800x600.jpg) <\- an ecigarette, and the classifier thought its a fountain pen. Well thats not bad, I got this joke/question from humans also.

[http://kephra.de/pix/Snoopy/thump/IMG_20130822_135928_640x48...](http://kephra.de/pix/Snoopy/thump/IMG_20130822_135928_640x480.jpg) <\- here it thought its a speed boat ... well my boat is fast, but not a speedboat, but an sailing boat. It offered several more boat types, but not just a plain sailing boat. Interesting here is that the last suggestion of only 1% could be considered right as "dock, dockage, docking facility"

Tried some other images from the lifestyle section of my homepage, but it looks as if the system newer saw a sewing machine before as it gives "Low recognition confidence", and no tags.

<comment><USER15> I can see how it could get speedboat from the shape of the hull.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems strange that they would include in their set of example images, a picture of the most famous mausoleum in the world, without it being tagged with mausoleum or tomb or anything like that.

<comment><USER17> And it is tagged 99% mosque, while it isn't one. (the building on the left of it, not in the image, is).

<comment><USER16> If I uploaded my own picture of the Taj Mahal and it told me it was a Mosque, I wouldn't be surprised, and I'd probably be reasonably impressed. The dome and minarets do rather give that impression, and I wouldn't really expect a computer to be able to tell the difference.

The reason I find it odd is that I would expect the first example on a demo to be carefully chosen to show off the system in the best light. It would be one that has perfect or near-perfect tagging. Maybe later on, I would show the shortcomings with a tricky image like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there actually any image feature detectors and descriptors involved (like blob, edge and texture detectors) or is this solely based on artificial neural networks?

<comment><USER19> Interestingly it has been shown that the result from some neural networks is equivalent to using classification with some predefined filters. These filters could be considered as a feature descriptor. See this talk from CVPR [http://techtalks.tv/talks/plenary-talk-are-deep-networks- a-s...](http://techtalks.tv/talks/plenary-talk-are-deep-networks-a-solution- to-curse-of-dimensionality/60315/).

<comment><USER20> Thanks for sharing this. I enjoy Mallat's point of view. He has some similar talks on videolectures.net for anyone who's interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What data was it trained on?

Also can it tell you where in the image the identified object is?

<comment><USER22> This was pre-trained on ImageNet classes. You can find more information here: [http://www.image-net.org](http://www.image-net.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My results (yeah, a tough image) [http://imgur.com/pbH52xW](http://imgur.com/pbH52xW)

<comment><USER24> From my experience with cats, "doormat" is actually pretty accurate. Damn things always dart right under my feet.</comment></comment>


Serial Correlation in Time Series Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Serial-Correlation-in-Time-Series-Analysis

<comment><USER2> Financial data are inherently 'smudgy', sometimes one decision or action gets spread out over multiple observations, sometimes many decisions/actions get combined into a few overlapping observations.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the point of distinguishing lambda, block and proc in Ruby? - <AUTHOR> (I would have asked on #ruby but it's more interesting to hear from people with wider spectrum of language preferences) <comment><USER2> Distinguishing lambda, block and proc (function, sub) is traditional, and only in advanced lisp/FP circles people know of the equivalence.

Or do you mean technically? pure mini optimization. A block needs no signature/arg processing, and no name, a lambda needs no name. Otherwise they are the same. For the compiler they are almost the same.</comment>


Why Is Twitter Using A Database In The First Place? - <AUTHOR> http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2007/04/twitter-rails-hammers-and-11000-nails-per-second/ <comment><USER2> _"(Or if you're a crazed wunderkind like LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick, you invent a memory-based distributed hashtable as a cache to put in front of the database.)"_

The cool thing about Brad is that he released that creation as open source -- we can all benefit from his genius, like Facebook already has. Memcached is an amazingly effective way of getting the benefits of SQL storage in a simple, scalable, and reliable way. It's impossible to over-hype how much it kicks ass.

<comment><USER3> Using MogileFS (also by Brad) might be a solution.

<comment><USER4> MogileFS looks interesting.

If a class of files requests N>1 copies, at what point after the HTTP PUT can the application be happy that N copies exist? It seems fine to think I've three copies of that file but what if machine failure occurs before MogileFS has created the other two?

Also, it's intended to operate on whole files at a time, although HTTP GET might be usable to fetch a run of bytes. If two web servers both try and write the same filename, doesn't the latest one win?

I can see it's great for certain things, e.g. storing the user's images, but not for the stuff traditionally in the database. Or have I missed something?

Cheers, Ralph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SQL Databases are so astonishingly slow that I just switched my most intensive app to only use the database for backing up the data to disk and reloading from on startup.

This arrangement is so much faster and easy to understand/measure/optimize for me that I can't see myself going back.

<comment><USER2> Can you be more detailed about what you're doing and the application? Has your solution opened your app to corruption or data loss in the event of app or server crashes?

<comment><USER5> I have a separate thread that writes changes back to disk at its leisure. There is also a special shutdown/restart mode that I can trigger which stops accepting input from the user and flushes everything to the db.

This can be implemented very simply and has lots of advantages all around.

<comment><USER4> You're fortunate your data fits in RAM. And it seems you don't have to worry about machine failure causing unwritten data to be lost despite having accepted it from the user?

Cheers, Ralph.

<comment><USER5> "your data fits in RAM"

Not so. It's not too hard to check if you have some data and then retrieve it from the db as necessary.

<comment><USER4> Oh, you said earlier "I just switched my most intensive app to only use the database for backing up the data to disk and reloading from on startup" so I thought you meant you only read data from the database on start-up, hence all data fitting in core.

If you're reading data from it whenever you find the data isn't in core then aren't you using the database?

As for the "thread that writes changes back to disk at its leisure", how do you guard against machine failure after accepting data for writing but before it's been written?

Cheers, Ralph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remember Paul Buchheit's advice at Startup School. "Maybe consider not using a database", or some similar statement.

<comment><USER7> "use in-memory hashmap for small data, Amazon S3 or filesystem for large data. treat disk as sequental device."

<comment><USER6> Yeah there you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Twitter is using a database because the Twitter engineers chose not to prematurely optimize their system. They now fully understand their problem domain and thus now would be the appropriate time to make optimizations such as replacing the SQL back-end with faster, less flexible solutions.

<comment><USER9> The article does have a strong whiff of premature opt. However, using a SQL db in the first place is usually causes extra work to use something unhelpful. Usually it's way less code to just skip it.

<comment><USER8> A non-SQL solution surely can work well and be a fine solution to some problems. Especially problems that are very well understood (like problems at the optimization stage of the project).

But can a minimal non-SQL solution provide the basic features that people want and expect from a persistent storage layer: transactions, allowing multiple process concurrent access to the data, relatively foolproof failure recovery procedures, etc?

A decent RDBMS gives you those features out of the box in addition to allowing you great data manipulation flexibility. It is this sweet spot of data manipulation flexibility and fault tolerance that makes SQL/RDBMS such a ubiquitous tool.

I suspect code you're "skipping" is the code that would give you those extra features that help with reliability and fault tolerance.

While it is possible to implement those features without using the RDBMS- crutch it takes real code and real engineering effort to do it. If you are writing "way less code" you are likely not providing replacement features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _'... up to 11,000 requests per second'. Jesus Christ, thats a lot. Where does that come from? ...'_

One of the bottle necks is the continuous polling on the public timeline and its RSS file. It makes me wonder why they don't charge for the privilege.

_'... polling for updates every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, thats still only about 1,000 hits/sec ...'_

try every 0-10 seconds per client per person using such clients. [0] If this was happening in other sites it would be throttled.

Reference

[0] google search, 'twitter updates timeline every seconds'

<http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+updates+timeline+every+seconds>

<comment><USER11> Why not simply static render these things when something actually do change... huhu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know of detailed write-ups by people that didn't use a database. I too dislike the overhead of SQL as an interface. How did they cope with the problems that DBs solve? Did they ever have to scale to more than one "DB server"?

Cheers, Ralph.

<comment><USER12> <http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_2_bloglin.html>

Check out the whole series.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I've read that and will continue through the others.

One of the cases given could fit all the data in core, the other used BerkeleyDB for its smallish "database" data, cutting out SQL, and a GFS-like system for the large amount of BLOB archiving it had to do. It's the doesn't fit in core, and is changing data not archiving, case where it seems harder to use flat files since the DB server is a convenient place for concurrancy controls.

Cheers, Ralph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I posted over there:

Look at Prevayler and HAppS, two systems that don't use a database at all. In- memory persistence with write-ahead logging, and they handle give-or-take 1000 hits/s on a stock Xeon server.

<comment><USER7> Having looked into Pevayler, I think it buys you more problems than it solves. Thanks for the happs reference.

Terracotta may be a good solution for Java.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, prevayler is handicapped by the fact that it's java. Happs is really cool, haven't worked with prevayler, but it's cited as an influence.</comment></comment></comment>


Trader Made 295% on Cryptocurrency Derivatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-27/cryptocurrency-derivatives-you-bet-this-trader-has-295-return <comment><USER2> > The price of bitcoin has increased sixfold in the past year

Later, regarding the trader in question,

> His portfolio is up 295 percent in the past 12 months.

...am I interpreting the numbers wrong, or has he done significantly worse than the market here?

<comment><USER3> Yes. The price of Bitcoin was ~$600 12 months ago, ~990$ Jan 1st and it's now ~4080$. Trading should be compared against simply holding, otherwise what's the point?

<comment><USER4> You want to compare it against holding through market fluctuations. Sure holding would have been better this year. Should bitcoin crash next year, it will be interesting to see if he is still in profit or not when the person holding is down. I assume this is why he is currently not up against holding, because he has spread his risk to accommodate any crashes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only 295% in a year? Not that spectacular in the current market.

<comment><USER6> I got 500% in a few months. Clear sign of a bubble, high risk high reward

<comment><USER7> But no one knows when and if the music will stop. I'm not a huge crypto bull, but if you count Bitcoin + Ethereum, you're "only" looking at $90bn in market cap. There are at least several clear use cases now, unlike several years ago when it was all talk about revolution / anarchy / we're taking the power back to the people -- that nonsense.

Let's assume the technology has some value and Bitcoin could become a store of value at some point. I don't know if it will, but let's make the assumption. Then $90bn is a pittance, in comparison to the value of the global equities and gold market.

Apple is an $800bn company. Visa is a $250bn company. Mastercard $150bn. Facebook $480bn. And so on.

Crypto could very well become a $1-3-5tn market (again, I have no idea whether this will happen, and most of these ICOs look like garbage, but if either Bitcoin managed to become a store of value or Ethereum achieves a fraction of what they're trying to do, both will be very valuable). And if institutional money at some point enters the space, that will be (very) positive for the value of these things.

But even IF it's a bubble: the .com bubble wiped away $1.9tn in value. Crypto is at $100bn at the moment. The main currencies (Bitcoin + Ethereum, which account for 75% of crypto value) might very well go 10-20x again before any major breakdown occurs.

I've been on the fence multiple times: it's a bubble, it's not a bubble, and frankly, I have no idea. But the potential might be there at least, so it's probably a good idea to at least own some. The potential downside is: you lose your money. But the upside is 10 to 20x, which seems pretty good.

<comment><USER8> >There are at least several clear use cases now, unlike several years ago [...]

What would you say are these use cases? From where I stand the use cases of bitcoins are pretty much the same they were a few years ago, only the volume increased. It's a lot of speculation, some black market purchases and some donations. A few shops accept bitcoin but it's still pretty niche, and most of them convert into fiat immediately anyway.

Arguably there are even fewer use cases than a few years ago because of the prohibitive cost of the transactions, you can't move money around for cheap like you used to (that might change in the near future with segwit, we'll see). It's simply not cost-effective to use bitcoin for small transactions anymore, at least if you want to be reasonably sure it'll be confirmed in a short amount of time during the busy time of the week.

<comment><USER7> The only use case of Bitcoin (I think) will be store of value. Digital gold essentially. Ethereum seems more interesting and versatile.

I'm not big on gold either, but like Bitcoin it has limited use cases aside from embedding tiny amounts into electronics and jewellery.

Speculation, probably. Alternatively, the returns could be due to the uncertainty: will it or will it not become a store of value. You're essentially getting compensated for not knowing and for the risk you're taking.

If you look at Microsoft, when it IPOed, it was worth $750M. Now it's worth $550bn. Companies IPO a lot later now, so unless you're seed investing, you can't get those returns by investing in the public markets. With Bitcoin, it essentially started from zero, hence the crazy returns.

Having something that is safe "outside of the system" is also pretty good. I know for a fact, if the Bitcoin price would be relatively stable (or comparable to normal gold) and it would serve as a store of value, I would rather own Bitcoin because it is 1) more convenient to move around (in comparison to gold bars, or no fees in comparison to an ETF), and 2) more safe from confiscation. And I say that without trying to sound like a conspiracy nut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > His portfolio is up 295 percent in the past 12 months.

The coins on Coinbase alone (BTC, ETH, LTC) are up 600%, 2200%, and 1300%, respectively. Many altcoins have done several times better.

</comment><comment><USER10> Probably a naive question, but I wonder if money in and out of bitcoin could be regulated by the governments in the future as "gambling" income or loss? Since I hardly hear anybody use bitcoin or *coin as cash rather than just speculating that the value will go up...

<comment><USER7> Gains are generally seen as investment income, and taxed as capital gains (depends on the country however)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're comparing his returns with your own, take into consideration risk- adjusted returns. Traders try to avoid massive downside risk, and the best ones structure trades where they stand to lose very little in most outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it an article? I think I just read a very lengthy eToro ad.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, your portfolio is up now, but when the crash inevitably comes, how are you going to get that money out?

<comment><USER14> any of the many exchanges where you can convert coins to fiat?

<comment><USER15> During high volume in the past Coinbase has suspended withdrawals of Ether. Call it a glitch, scaling issue, or whatever but it's still a valid concern.

<comment><USER16> "whatever" \- market manipulation?

I think on more than one occasion, Coinbase, and other exchanges have been guilty of having outages/ suspending withdrawals etc during crashes... never seems to happen during upswings, though...

<comment><USER15> That is a serious accusation. They have had outages during peak traffic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Running Gambit Scheme on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://asivitz.com/posts/running_gambit_scheme_on_ios

<comment><USER2> Would it be possible to run a repl on the iPhone and evaluate scheme code on the fly, maybe via Geiser from your devel machine?</comment>


Paywalling the laws of the universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.authorea.com/users/101586/articles/124967/_show_article <comment><USER2> I'll link this comment I wrote yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374642)

It's ridiculous that copyright lasts so long. At least for nonfiction works, copyright should expire after a relatively short amount of time. There is no benefit to society by looking these great works behind paywalls.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer. Boltzmann died September 5, 1906. The US copyright on anything for which he was the author expired on September 5, 1976 as I understand it. Similarly, all Euler's works should be public domain.

<comment><USER4> Euler's work is in the public domain. You can download the 1755 publication with Euler's transformation from the Internet Archive here: [https://archive.org/details/institutionesca00eulegoog](https://archive.org/details/institutionesca00eulegoog)

That and much more is also downloadable from the MAA's Euler Archive: [http://eulerarchive.maa.org](http://eulerarchive.maa.org)

Note that Euler generally did not write in English. His math was usually published in Latin. If you want to read it in English, you need a translation. Although the underlying work is public domain, the translation may still be under copyright. The particular translation that the site links to was done in 2000, and so is still under copyright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a super frustrating phenomenon given that more recent work was typically funded publicly in some way...

Nit: I'm not sure if I'd call Black-Scholes a law of the universe

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not entirely sure how copyright works, but does this imply someone has the exclusive right to Boltzmann en Schrödinger's articles? 142 years seems way beyond any term limit

<comment><USER2> It's the life of the Author plus 70 years. So in theory, if you wrote an article when you were 20, and died at 92, the copyright would last 142 years. Also it gets extended every so often to protect the mouse, so for all intents and purposes it's indefinite.

That said, Boltzmann died in 1906, so even under this ridiculous system, it should have expired by now. However that doesn't mean it they can't put it behind a paywall. You can charge money for public domain works.

<comment><USER4> > Also it gets extended every so often to protect the mouse [...]

I'm not sure twice really counts as "every so often".

The first was part of the Copyright Act of 1976. That extended the term from 28 years with the possibility of one 28 year renewal to life of the author + 50 years, or to a fixed term of 75 years for anonymous works and for works made for hire.

While Disney certainly was in favor of this change, the driving force behind the 1976 Act, and its term extension, was to bring US copyright law into closer agreement with that of most of the rest of the world in anticipation of the US joining the Berne Convention. Berne required a minimum of life of author + 50 years.

Many (most?) other countries don't seem to have the notion of a "work for hire" in the sense that the US does. In the US, when an employee creates a work as part of their job the employer is the author for copyright purposes and is the sole owner of the work. Outside the US, the employee is the owner of the copyright, and all the employer might get is a license to use the work.

Because the author, not the employer, retains copyright, most of the world doesn't need a separate term for corporate works. In the US, where the corporation is the author, life + 50 years could be indefinite since the life of a corporation is indefinite. Hence, the need for a fixed term for corporate works. If you want that to approximate the effective term of corporate works in the rest of the world, 75 years seems reasonable. I would guess that most of the time it works out to shorter than it would be if it were life of the human who actually made the work + 50 years.

The second was the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which changed the term to life + 70 years for non-corporate works, and for corporate works to either 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever was shorter). Disney pushed for this change, although a big part of what sold it to Congress was again bringing the US into alignment with others, specifically with Europe which had gone from life + 50 to life + 70 with the "Directive harmonising the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights" in 1993.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure but I can just go to the Wiki page for Information Theory and see the relevant information. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory)

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess "Paywalling" means click a link that says "paywall" and view the entire pdf for free.

<comment><USER9> Are you accessing them from e.g. an university network that is quite likely to be included in their subscription agreement? The links I tried there definitely require payment to obtain the full articles.

<comment><USER5> I just confirmed that the PDF links for Boltzmann prompt me for a sign-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand that this is the law, and seems like a law to be worked around and a fine time for piracy to do something useful.</comment>


Ask HN: Converting Subscribers to Users? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I beta launched my service a while ago and got around a 100 guys to sign up. Some of those guys have started using the service when I sent them the welcome email while the rest of them have never even logged in.
So I have two questions:
1. Any ideas as to how should engage those guys who never logged in?
2. Them subscribing to the service implies that they are interested in it so why wouldnt they use the service?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I am not sure what ur service covers, but I would focus on the following:

1\. Personally write or use something like [http://www1.toutapp.com/](http://www1.toutapp.com/) to reach out to the subscribers and see if you can get a 5 min phone call or something. Worst case, send them a survey and provide $5 starbucks card as an incentive. 2\. Write content (tips/tricks) email each week and send out

For some people (including myself) I want to play with new tools. For others, it might be a pricing/feature/who knows - which is why you should talk to them

<comment><AUTHOR> My service is about iOS Games. Its a discovery service.

onion2k mentioned the 'playing with new stuff' part as well. But, I guess you're right, unless I dont somehow communicate with them, I'd never know.

And for communication, your link looks great. Right now, I am using Signals by Hubspot to keep track of emails and user behaviour. It does almost the same thing as well. Will try the tips part as well. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To answer point 2: Some people like _seeing_ new things. Just because they want to see it _doesn't_ imply that they want to use it.</comment>


An Introduction to APIs - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/learn/apis/

<comment><USER2> I find the layout to be very refreshing. Whoever put it together did a pretty sweet job since it doesn't feel like reading the usual technical guide on how to use XYZ.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love this! More companies should do this. Teach your customers how to use your product.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of this: [http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/apis](http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/apis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really respect these guys for taking on one of the most soul sucking dev jobs which is API integration and make it work. And they integrate hundreds of APIs! I would just go crazy if it was my day job.

<comment><USER6> Well, we are hiring! ;-)

[https://zapier.com/blog/help-automate-business-zapier- jobs-a...](https://zapier.com/blog/help-automate-business-zapier-jobs-and- careers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great document, so I'll bite, since they deserve it:

What is this Zapier really? What are some examples of what it can do?

These services that basically sound something like "With our tools, you can do _anything_ with data!!" always confuse me.

Until otherwise convinced, I'm of the opinion that if you can do "everything", you do nothing.

<comment><USER8> They connect APIs.

They've defined a bunch of methods for popular APIs. You can then pipe the results into another API.

e.g. Watch Disqus comments and auto send thank you mail

Send email attachments to your Dropbox

Create Trello cards from Evernote items

Checkout the Directory, then click on an item - you'll see all the possible interactions:

[https://zapier.com/zapbook/](https://zapier.com/zapbook/)

<comment><USER7> [https://zapier.com/zapbook/](https://zapier.com/zapbook/)

Oh wow, that's what I needed to see. Impressive. Almost overwhelming! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> very well written and refreshing as others said. +1 absolutely!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is beyond useful.

</comment><comment><USER11> Shameless plug: Wrote recently about how API, platform thinking are changing the business in ways not imagined: [http://www.vishalbiyani.com/api- economy/](http://www.vishalbiyani.com/api-economy/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Really nice presentation. Clear, professional, interesting and useful.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hey I like how they've blurred this DKJX3-7KBW5-237BT-K22TX-6XG7J key here in Chapter 5:

[https://zapier.cachefly.net/static/CplbOk/images/learn/apis/...](https://zapier.cachefly.net/static/CplbOk/images/learn/apis/ch5-product- key.png)

... beyond any recognition!

<comment><USER15> Honestly I am not sure if it is such a good idea to post a license key for Windows 8 in public like that. I really hope it's fake ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The section on OAuth needs to be made better.

<comment><USER6> Of course, there is a lot of nuance in the OAuth spec(s), but we didn't feel the need to be that verbose for an "An Introduction to APIs". We'd love to hear more about what broad but important aspect of OAuth that we missed! We'll absolutely make revisions and updates.

<comment><USER17> Completely agree - that's the first time I've read a guide to oauth and actually understood it. So big thanks from me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks cool, but I really get a little tweaked when incomplete things are shared like this. To me, it's not useful if I can't read through and work the whole guide, which leaves this one somewhere between email-bait to get updates on the end or just regularly incomplete.

<comment><USER19> I see it as more of a multi-part blog series, where you can read the first few parts and wait for the rest, or you can wait until all parts have been written and read it all. In this case, it's better than a blog series, because you can be notified as soon as it's complete without having to keep checking back.</comment></comment>


Forgotten Books – 1,271,515 restored old books - <AUTHOR> https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en <comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently reading "Principles of Secondary Education" by Inglis as an inaugural project for a blog. Share any interesting finds!</comment>


Google is Losing Top Talent; Twitter is Growing It - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/08/02/google-twitter-talent/ <comment><USER2> I think these numbers need to be scaled by the total number of employees at each company for them to have any real meaning. Consider that Apple and Zynga appear, on the first chart, to be doing similarly poorly in the "keeping key talent" department. However, Apple lost one key employee per 7,000 employees, and Zynga lost one per 250 employees. Obviously larger companies will have more key employees, spread out over more components of the company, and it is natural to expect them to churn (lose or gain) more key employees in absolute terms.

<comment><USER3> Another vague thing is, how do they define "key employee"? The article describes it as, "those notable enough to make it into the tech news". How does one get to be so notable? Having a high-responsibility job at an important company probably helps a lot. So by the term's own definition, you're naturally going to find that big companies like Google are where "key employees" are grown and exported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ... then Twitter will IPO, their lock-out period will expire, Twitter brain- drain will start, next hot startup will gain said talent, and the cycle will start all over again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Google can buy talent, twitter (being a loss making venture) can only offer imaginary riches.

</comment><comment><USER6> When you're as large as Google, these kinds of talent losses are natural. Take, for example, Marissa Mayer, disregarding whatever people on HN might think of her (she almost certainly represents one of those 'Key Employee' numbers). She clearly has ambition, and she was clearly not going anywhere at Google, so the only thing to do was to leave.

I also suspect that the challenges Twitter faces are more business-oriented - they probably attract a different type of talent.

TL;DR Google is frickin' huge and just plain different than Twitter. It makes no sense to compare the two this way.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think Google could go a long way towards addressing their current woes by doing away with their blind allocation policy. During my brief tenure there, the number of times I was told that Google runs on generalists and not specialists was ridiculous. Seriously, would you allow a podiatrist to do your heart transplant because the heart surgeon was too busy with his many proctology patients? That said, the food was great and TGIF was always fun.

<comment><USER8> The blind allocation policy exists because a lot of the work at Google isn't very interesting.

<comment><USER7> That was precisely my experience, but I did see a lot of things going on around me that were both interesting and for which I was far better qualified than what was assigned to me. The dealbreaker for me was when it was made abundantly clear that there was a near zero chance of transferring off my assigned gig, and given that I had plenty of other options besides Google, I quit and moved on to one of them.

<comment><USER8> _The dealbreaker for me was when it was made abundantly clear that there was a near zero chance of transferring off my assigned gig, and given that I had plenty of other options besides Google, I quit and moved on to one of them._

Yes, that's horrible. It's harder to get a decent transfer than a promotion, but if you start out on a dud, you're not going to get either on a decent schedule.

Did they say why they were keeping you stuck there? Don't they realize that they're losing good people with these policies?

For most people (the 80% that will never get anything interesting, but that Google will happily use for grunt work) Google is culturally a halfway house for those who are afraid of adult life. You have foosball tables but no chance of getting on a good project. It's infantilizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels like handwaving. How is "key employee" defined?

<comment><USER10> Noteworthy enough to be detected by their news sifting algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Statistical power is hard, let's go shopping!

</comment><comment><USER12> Google will just acqui-hire new talent.

<comment><USER8> Too bad that strategy almost never works.

<comment><USER13> I think it works better at destroying competition than it does at acquiring talent.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Devops-is the future just handing a dockerfile to container services? - <AUTHOR> Devops: Wont the future just be handing a dockerfile over to a container service?<p>What is the point of Puppet/Chef anymore?  A dockerfile specifies everything you need. Do people really want to continue to script company specific infrastructure code? In the future, with a docker file, can't a container service just figure out the loadbalancers, networking, etc? Isn't this more secure?  Will this end the devops madness? <comment><USER2> If there is a no devops reality any time soon then it'll be something following the AWS serverless pattern.

The container orchestration craze (i.e. Kubernetes et al) is buoyed by irrational decision making. I.e. the number of legit use cases are much smaller than the number of implementations purely because it's cool or career building.

Meanwhile, in the cost-efficient world, running 5-10 mega-machines in rackspace and managing them with Ansible is still often the most rational option.

<comment><USER3> "or career building" is an undersold point.

for some reason, hopping onto the hypetrain and shitting out a github repo over the weekend that does the minimally possible thing for a really new technology is about as much career building as having been the PM responsible for google maps.

"having a repo" is somewhat equal to claiming non-"provable" 5 years of experience.

<comment><USER2> Interesting point but I disagree on grounds that most devs don't have github repos and dont contribute to open-source IMO.

<comment><USER3> that makes those who do have them so appealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So let's consider the hypothetical future where you hand a dockerfile to a container service.

Where is this container service? Maybe it's in the cloud, you're paying Amazon for it. That's a possibility, and there's nothing for you to do there, but maybe you're a F500 company (or Amazon) who runs everything in-house.

How do you provision the container cluster host? Maybe you PXE boot, but you still need a configuration to join the cluster.

Maybe you don't configure via confs, and instead try to auto-detect nodes via multicast. Sure, but now you're constrained to a single broadcast domain on your network. Can't make that too large or you'll have a very chatty network.

How do you provision the switches? They need configurations still.

You'll also want security enforced on the hosts, to ensure certain container ports aren't exposed to the world (oops MySQL is now public due to a debug container instance getting rolled into production).

You still need backups of your data. What, where, when are the backups? I doubt tape robots connect into containers, but I could be wrong.

So there's definitely ops work to be done, and configuration management is a part of it. Maybe you outsource this, but it has to be done.

Let's go back to the what goes into the container. You're going to be running an application, and depending on the language you may need to compile it, and your production containers are going to be slim so you strip the build tools. So you need some other kind of build container or host to manage this.

In most (all?) cases you're going to want to test your code. This means a CI system, and probably a CD system since you want containers to be built automatically with the latest code so it's easier to deploy. What manages the CI/CD system? More importantly, who? DevOps, in the conceptual sense, even if the title changes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Docker files are good for small units of your app stack (nginx, web frameworks,etc). As you grow you need to have consistency and predicability between all your servers. Like same version of libs, configs, etc.

As docker is a userland[0] app it does not provide that natively (there are some workarounds).

My workflow:

1\. machine setup - puppet or ansible 2\. Is machine ready for app? If yes pull app using Docker or Git 3\. Need to modify update? Change configs, commit (always version your puppet/ansible configs and apps) 4\. Profit

[0] - [https://docs.docker.com/get-started/#container- diagram](https://docs.docker.com/get-started/#container-diagram)

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope the future is containerless (as in "serverless"). I don't want to deal with container configuration and infrastructure in general at all. These technologies will still play a vital part in the fabric underlying software solutions but deploying software should as easy as defining a function, its inputs and its output.

Function as a Service platforms such as AWS Lambda are definitely a step in the right direction.</comment>