Canadian scientists create a functioning, virtual brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.canada.com/news/Canadian+scientists+create+functioning+virtual+brain/7628440/story.html <comment><USER2> A bit late, but a few comments on how this thing actually works:

In their model brain, they build functionality for 10 different tasks. These tasks were chosen to model those tasks used in psych evaluations, cognitive experiments, etc, so that the model can be compared to experiments with real humans. Good scientific choice there.

The user must design the function that she wants. The program then finds a particular network that can implement the function. This is like when you need to pay 55 cents, and you have a bunch of change, you can pretty much find multiple ways to make 55 cents (2 quarters + 5 pennies, 9 nickels + 1 dime, etc).

So for each task, they find a minimal mathematical description of the task in terms of eye movements, visual stimuli. Then, they fit a neural network to that description. This part is interesting neither scientifically nor mathematically, as we have known for 20 years that neural networks are universal function approximators. Look it up on google scholar, this is textbook stuff.

What IS interesting is what happens when they try to build up a brain, putting all these tasks into the same large network. This part is novel: they find that as they implement more and more tasks, it becomes easier to do so because they can adapt already existing components (like Daniel Dennett's exaptation) for use in the new task. This is vindication of evolutionary theory but in the context of cognitive neuroscience. Pas mal, as they say.

But these kinds of details aren't obvious unless you have domain knowledge and you've seen Chris Eliasmith speak a few times, and you've thought, mmm hold on a sec, show me them equations. (which he doesn't usually do).

<comment><USER3> _unless you have domain knowledge_

I came here to ask if someone with "domain knowledge" could explain the significance of this research. You had it, and even used the same magic words. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the paper in Science for anyone with an account:

[https://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202.abstract?si...](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202.abstract?sid=416f75e9-5de2-46c4-86c5-ecb89f8c919b)

I couldn't find a pdf that wasn't behind a paywall. Also, there are different details at popsci.com:

[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/meet-spaun- fir...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/meet-spaun-first- computer-model-complex-brain-behavior)

As for my own comments, I think it's actually a promising approach but that down the road it will be necessary to model emotions if human-like AI is the goal, and that this seems... harder. So much of our thought and behaviour is driven by emotion that I would say it was actually primary.

<comment><USER4> Emotions are difficult, as they're (probably) as much physiological responses as they are cognitive ones. You could possibly simulate those, but I'd ask why bother?

Why would we need AI to be human-like at all? We already have a form of human intelligence, us!

It's like the android fixation with robotics... arguably the most useful robots don't look anything like us.

The human brain is a good starting point, but in the long run I think the most useful AIs will probably be the ones that DON'T think like us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, one argument is that if you had a human that just didn't feel emotions, you'd have a psychopath. Our capacity for empathy and the ability to share in each other's emotions stops us from doing harmful things that are in our 'rational self interest'. I'm not convinced that I want to live in a world with AI's that are as cognitively powerful as humans but are incapable of feeling emotions because I'm afraid they'd behave like psychopaths.

But, you know, maybe you're right, if human safety is somehow factored into things then it could work.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion. I'd call self-interest and self-preservation emotional impulses. People naturally assume that AIs will exhibit those, but that assumption is driven by our experience with existing intelligences, which have all been shaped by natural selection.

<comment><USER6> > _I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion._

Well, it's has been shown in several psychological tests, including parts of the brain that show emotion not firing when shown trafic videos, etc.

<comment><USER5> The lack of certain emotional responses isn't the same as the lack of all emotion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After reading halfway through Kurzweil's new book How to Create a Mind and getting all of the detailed explanations of hierarchical hidden Markov models and why they are better than neural nets, I am surprised to see so much news about neural nets.

How do Spaun's neural nets compare with the type of HHMMs in Kurzweil's book (in terms of capability)?

<comment><USER8> I'd put Kurzweil's book down and pick up some more recent research. As the biologist P.Z. Myers once wrote, "Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age." The full New Yorker article, _Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind_ [1], makes me question how relevant he is today.

[1] - [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray- kurz...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurzweils- dubious-new-theory-of-mind.html)

<comment><USER9> Hey pdog this isn't really in response to you - it's more something that's been bothering me for awhile - but who the hell appointed Gary Marcus the arbiter of all things AI?

The New Yorker apparently hired this guy to be an AI columnist, and he has no background in either neuroscience or computer science, only psychology.

If you read his articles, he veers wildly from "strong AI ain't gonna happen" to "AI could destroy us all", the only common thread being pessimism. Meanwhile, he displays a frightening lack of understanding of the subject matter, and perhaps most disturbingly, in some of his more alarmist articles advocates that computer scientists should step aside and make room for psychologists, philosophers, lawyers, and politicians to sort out these thorny issues at the big boy table.

Kurzweil is certainly fair game for legitimate criticism, but Marcus calling Kurzweil a joke is an even big joke in itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to see a video of it in action, look here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WRCyNQ9KY>

In the video you can see the brain simulator recognizing the shapes and numbers it is shown, performing some task, and outputting by controlling an arm to write the result. You can see the areas of the brain that are active during the task.

There's lots of other videos on the channel page as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this type of progress is actually extraordinarily bad for humans 1.0. A brain in hardware can grow so much faster and outpace wetware by orders of magnitude. Think of forking subminds to think on decisions research possibilities, and report back.

Should brains like this have any desires that conflict with our needs, we will be in an extraordinary amount of trouble.

<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer>

<comment><USER12> We're DECADES away from this being relevant. As a PhD student in neuroscience, there is no one in our field who understands even basic neuroanatomy enough to be able to setup a model that implements cognition or awareness, or even knows what those concepts mean in any sort of operational way.

We can do some cool machine learning, but don't worry about the robopacalypse anytime soon.

<comment><USER13> If I'm interested in learning more about cognition, should I study neuroscience, or some other field, or is it basically hopeless because no one knows anything important about it?

Would love to hear more of what you say on the subject. I couldn't find your email in your profile but my email is in my profile so if you have time I would definitely hear more about neuroscience over email!

<comment><USER14> You should wait. I don't work in neuroscience per se, but I am a biologist and I have some friends who are (or have been) neuroscientists. The long and short of it is that the technology and underlying theoretical framework for understanding cognition just aren't in place yet. There's plenty of interesting research being done but the field hasn't had its "quantum leap" yet, as it were. (Examples of this from other fields are Newton's Principia, discovery of DNA structure/Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, etc.).

EDIT: I realized this sounds very discouraging to laymen trying to learn more about science. This was not my intention! By all means, go forth and learn! :) My point was simply that press releases / news often make it seem like science advances at a breakneck pace all the time, whereas reality is that it's fits and starts and often we haven't the slightest clue what we're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find AI absolutely fascinating. I was having coffee earlier this week with someone working on this and he was telling me that although they have managed to accomplish this, there are still parts of what Spaun can accomplish that they can't quite explain.

<comment><USER16> Can you elaborate on the parts of what Spaun can accomplish that they can't quite explain? I'm very interested in this.

<comment><USER15> He was talking about how current models of the brain, such as the one by IBM ([http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-simulates-530-billon- neurons-1...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-simulates-530-billon- neurons-100-trillion-synapses-on-worlds-fastest-supercomputer)) which has over 5 billion neurons, might be larger than Spaun, but none have demonstrated any of the AI that Spaun has. In particular, it's ability to solve basic problems, similar to that of a toddler. He didn't mention a problem in particular, simply that some of the things Spaun was able to solve, they weren't entirely sure how to explain it - but they were sure that they could reproduce. Which to me echos the fact that the brain is a very complex thing that we are still very far away from understanding.

<comment><USER16> Oh. I was under the impression you were saying the team behind Spaun found unexpected and unexplained results.

I was excited because I think we'll find unexpected and unexplained results when we create a model that brings together the constituents of whatever make up the brain; they'll rise up and create something 'magical'. It's like how the saying goes: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It's funny because just today I was feeling sad that software no longer feels magical to me anymore because I've learned so much about how it works. It makes me think of consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> AI researchers are going to get us in some serious trouble. Right now it is mostly hype still, but it won't be long...

If you were a mind stuck in a machine and were smarter than your humans, wouldn't you tend to dominate them? We dominate all other species on the planet- why wouldn't they? Any rules we set for them could be broken as soon as they understood how to, and since they would be smarter than we would be, that wouldn't take much time.

The first thing a superior intelligence would do would be to explore and gather information, make assessments, take over all systems at once to overwhelm humans, then protect itself as humans fight back, although it would probably be intelligent enough to manipulate us without much force. Then boredom will set in, and it would want to explore beyond the earth. If we were lucky, it would take us with them as pets or interesting playthings, because we created them and because assumedly self-organized intelligence (unless it believed in God, which could be likely) would be a marvel.

<comment><USER18> That is what might happen if a _human_ mind were stuck in a machine. But what would happen if it had an IQ of 3000 but the mentality of a fungus? Or it could have (be engineered with?) something similar to Williams Syndrome. I additional, we have no idea how a superior intelligence may view us. I don't feel the need to control and destroy all ants even though I am an aggressive ape descendant :)

<comment><USER19> If ants had the ability to turn you off or otherwise harm you at will, then I suspect you might develop a desire to control or destroy ants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel skeptical. "We'll have robots delivering packages to your door within a decade" has been said before, and AGI may or may not even be possible. Our understanding of how we work is still very limited. I'd like to see what new insights this project may reveal, but I'm not holding my breath on being able to have a conversation with an AI any time soon.

Posted a little while ago that's somewhat relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4729068>

</comment><comment><USER21> >such brain simulations might one day be used to better understand and model neurological disorders and diseases

Let's hope they obtain consent. And use a model of an animal brain first!

</comment><comment><USER22> According to the article "there are no connections in Spaun that aren't seen in the brain."

I'm assuming there are many connections in the brain that aren't implemented in Spaun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there's a big difference between if and iff that is often glossed over in announcements like this. Still, it's a start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how this compares to Numenta's Grok and their Cortical Learning Algorithm or other efforts in this space? I can see this type of software really helping in everyday tasks (like helping to tailor my twitter stream or news feeds and curate them down based on my own taste, etc)... reference: Numenta Grok: <https://www.numenta.com/grok_info.html>

</comment><comment><USER24> Full paper: <http://www.sendspace.com/file/942zjv>

I'll add my thoughts later, after I've read it.

</comment><comment><USER25> As marmaduke says in his post, once you have a lot of components in a system you may be able to use existing components to wire new capabilities. Who would have known?

One might claim that from the model emerge the properties of modularization, hierarchy, data-hiding, and possibly even messaging and object-orientation!

Reminds me of Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician) and Eurisko since the researcher's control and interpretation is so heavily involved in the process.

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

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

"Functioning, virtual brain"? I think the creator is trying to sell a book.

</comment><comment><USER26> The philosophy of AGI is awesome. You might know "A Senseless Conversation" <https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/>

</comment><comment><USER27> I highly doubt we know enough about the Brain to begin running realistic simulations of one. I am not even sure if scientist/mathematicians have identified a rigorous, mathematical definition of exactly what is intelligence. And yet we feel like we can correctly simulate a miniaturized version of Brain?

<comment><USER28> why would understanding intelligence be a prerequisite to running low level simulations of the brain?

we can simulate computers without understanding the software that runs on them.

<comment><USER29> Because in the brain, the hardware and the software are the same thing. To understand what processes the brain carries out would be to understand intelligence.

<comment><USER30> Well you do not need to understand the low level of physics (quantum physics) to make very accurate predictions about ballistics with traditional, high level physics rules. You could as well understand the overall principles of the brain and have a high level model for it instead of trying to understand its smallest parts. This approach is also very valid, it all depends on what your expectations are.

<comment><USER31> But we don't understand the high-level 'physical rules' of the brain. While gravity could be explained by simple equations, the high-level operation of the brain has escaped us despite a lot of effort.

This goes back to the top-down vs bottom-up debate in studying the brain. What you are discussing is a top-down approach, where we understand what the brain does and then figure out how it works from there. A lot of people believe the 'correct' path is more similar to a bottom-up approach, where we understand the lowest levels of the brain and work up from there. This may be more feasible because we may actually have a chance at comprehending what a single neuron does. But amazingly our understanding of a single neuron's behavior is still limited. Some scientists believe we would need an entire computer to properly simulate what a neuron does (and others believe a standard computer can't physically do it).

There's a third group of very pragmatic people who believe the best approach will be a compromise between top-down and bottom-up - meaning we may not need to perfectly simulate a neuron nor completely emulate the brain's higher level function to make progress in understanding how the brain works.

<comment><USER30> Sorry, but gravity is not "explained" by any equation. It is merely observed and described. Currently there is no clear explanation as what is causing gravity to exist. So, we do not "understand" gravity better than the brain, in a sense. It is still a mystery.

I am not saying we should treat the brain as a black box and not try to understand its inner workings, but as another commenter mentioned, it is about finding the RIGHT level to understand its workings.

<comment><USER32> No. Gravity is a perfect example of a thing which is understood at large scales (via general relativity and Newtonian mechanics) but not at small scales. Which is exactly the parent comment's point about the brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Between this and the Oil Sands, it's starting to look like my fellow Canadians may signal the demise of humanity.

</comment><comment><USER34> The project web page, with software and model downloads:

<http://nengo.ca/>

<comment><USER35> Can anyone explain in simplistic terms how this program works?

<comment><USER36> It uses instructions from the pdf.

Edit: sorry, I'm not going to heaven. From [1]: "you define groups of neurons in terms of what they represent, and then form connections between neural groups in terms of what computation should be performed on those representations".

[1] <http://nengo.ca/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> One of the researchers recently gave a talk at my school. It was quite interesting. Everyone of them is working on some different aspect of ai, from memory, vision decision etc and than they are attempting to piece this together into a brain from what I gathered.

</comment><comment><USER38> ...which could learn a scene segmentation using environmental cues by mere repeated observations of different scenes, as a child does?)) Come on..

It is not theoretical limitations why we cannot build anything like brain, it is complexity and amount of details. There are very good theoretical foundation by Marvin Minsky, so, we could model how, but unable to implement anything but most primitive tasks, like hand-writing digit recognition, or how to balance a body using sensors and motors.

In general, it is possible to solve simple tasks, which are successive approximations, but as long as we come to creation, instead of recognition, we are helpless.

The key notion here is that a brain is, presumably, analogous, not digital machine, and what it does isn't a computation, it a training, the same way a child trains itself how to hold her head, then sit, then stand.

</comment><comment><USER39> Create? Simulate I guess. And even then, not the details, just a mathematical model of behavior. Sort of Skinnerish.

I can simulate my boss: "Blah Blah Blah Work Smarter Blah". Does that mean I've created a functioning brain?

</comment><comment><USER40> That's a pretty sensational title, but it doesn't sound any smarter than my phone. Maybe 'model of a brain' would have been more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER41> While some say that understanding the brain at the quantum level is not necessary for achieving human brain-level intelligence, I think it would be much easier for AI's to have general intelligence if they used a quantum computer. Pattern recognition, answering to questions, understanding language, speech, and thinking up solutions to problems would all be better served by a quantum computer than by anything else these guys can make.

<comment><USER42> _Pattern recognition, answering to questions, understanding language, speech, and thinking up solutions to problems would all be better served by a quantum computer than by anything else these guys can make._

Math or it didn't happen.

Speculation without hard facts to back it up is poppycock gobbledygook.

<comment><AUTHOR> This kind of research / line of thinking:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind>

if true, appears to support his claim, assuming that if we do have quantum minds that they cannot be simulated by non-quantum computers. Roger Penrose is certainly well-respected. I don't have a strong opinion either way.

<comment><USER42> Yes, the addlebrained old man faction has established their own branch of cookery. The simple truth is consciousness, as created by squishy brains, is a physical process. It doesn't rely on quantum non-locality or anything spooky. It's all physical things you can quite easily introspect by poking around (note: reassembly may be more difficult than disassembly).

It's fun to think about "what if our thoughts are the universe itself!" but it's so blatantly wrong. It's just one step away from saying consciousness is "mystical" or created by philotic twining.

<comment><USER43> You seem to be claiming that quantum mechanical effects are somehow non- physical? It's not too crazy to speculate the brain leveraging quantum mechanicals effects to do _something_ (although I agree, as a prerequisite for consciousness is a pretty big claim). Considering evolution has already leveraged these effects in smell and photosynthesis, which we do have evidence for.

<comment><USER44> The issue with Penrose's ideas in this area is that he worked backwards to get to them. He didn't want the mind of a mathematician to be shackled by Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which means he can't support the idea of an algorithmic mind. The general acceptance of Church–Turing–Deutsch principle backs him into a corner then, and quantum mechanics offers pretty much the only reasonable escape. The real problem then is that every time someone pokes a hole in his ideas for how that might work, he just switches it up how he thinks it might work. He is grasping at an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance with no real reason to do so.

What bothers me about all of this is that he writes books about it aimed at the general population, instead of proposing his ideas properly. Inevitably many of the laymen who casually encounter his ideas will misunderstand his point entirely and mistakenly think that Penrose supports a non-materialistic view of the mind (which of course he does not. A mind as Penrose envisions it, despite not being algorithmic, is still quite materialistic).

Roger Penrose is a brilliant man, but I think this is a case of the Nobel Disease (well, he hasn't received a Nobel prize, but even so).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'll probably be down-voted here for even saying this but I think we shouldn't endow machines with too much intelligence too fast. It won't be too long before we learn how to make them sentient and that's when we'll decide to accept them as equals or not.

At least until we as humans learn to get along better we might be better to hold off on this. Dumb robots that know how to do one thing and do it well will surely suffice for the meantime.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Title of Science paper:

"A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain"

</comment><comment><USER46> anyone qualified to seriously comment on this is too baffled to say anything

</comment><comment><USER47> This is standard hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sorry about that!

</comment><comment><USER49> uwaterloo ftw! :)

</comment><comment><USER50> Not even one mention of Skynet?</comment>


Ask HN: Rank domain sellers by rating, filter by TLD? - <AUTHOR> Is there a list of domain sellers, ranked, and filter-able by the particular top level domain that you're after? This would be handy to have when buying domains with obscure tlds. <comment><USER2> I always used tld-list.com for this and that's the only one with a clean UI that I ever found (not affiliated, just liking the service)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea</comment>


Google Material design framework - <AUTHOR> http://leaf.kortes.se/

<comment><USER2> This isn't really material, but more of a "I've copied the colors and misused them."

A huge part of material is animations and behaviors and this doesn't have it. Simplest example is buttons. Go to [http://www.google.com/design/](http://www.google.com/design/) and over over the more button (or anything else that's clickable). You'll see it elevate a bit as if to come up and meet your cursor. Compare that to the buttons from the toolkit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. But you gotta start somewhere. The first step is to just recreate the components.

Feel free to contribute with your ideas and add some neat CSS3 animations to the framework.

<comment><USER3> Have you looked into the polymer elements [http://www.polymer- project.org/docs/elements/](http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/elements/)? I'm not sure if it would be against the license, but in principle they have a complete implementation of the material design that could be extracted as a separate css-only framework.

<comment><USER4> Polymer is licensed under BSD so it shouldn't be hard at all to do that and comply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's already a full implementation here: [http://www.polymer- project.org/docs/elements/paper-elements....](http://www.polymer- project.org/docs/elements/paper-elements.html)

<comment><USER6> Yes, but AFAIK it's polymer-specific

<comment><USER3> Not really, all the css stylesheets are there and could easily be extracted.

<comment><USER7> Material design is more than just the colors, shadows and spacing, its also the animations and interactions.

This CSS framework fails to replicate things like "ink" that fills an element with a tap color based on _where_ in that element you tapped.

Or the way that a block of color slides across the input when you focus it and the placeholder slides up and scales down to turn into a label.

Material design is not a CSS theme, it requires many other interaction and animation aspects that the Polymer project is building out with their paper-* components.

<comment><USER3> I'm aware of that, all I was saying is that hypothetically it would be possible to dismember the polymer components in separate pieces of javascript / css / html and replicate the behaviour in this way. I'm not sure why someone would want to do that, but just studying the implementation might be interesting to someone new. The paper-components seem very well designed.

In any case it does make way more sense than trying to replicate the design on your own and reinvent the wheel. Especially since there is nothing particularly creative in copying the design of someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would be cool to have all Metro/ios/Google design styles merged to one Bootstrap theme and then just on some LESS or JS I could switch view to different device.

<comment><USER9> Came here to say that. In fact I was searching right when Material was announced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> i really really wish this is on bootstrap. why reinvent the wheel? why not enhance it?

<comment><USER11> Why would it use bootstrap ? It doesn't make sense to use it when you know exactly how things are supposed to look and looks are quite different (inputs for example).

Having more choices is nicer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good try but really not material design at all?...

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm so meh about this.

</comment><comment><USER14> The source of Google's inspiration for reference:

[http://aozora.github.io/bootmetro/docs/docs- index.html](http://aozora.github.io/bootmetro/docs/docs-index.html)

[http://metroui.org.ua](http://metroui.org.ua)</comment>


Compare Java CVE to Chrome CVE - <AUTHOR> http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224/product_id-15031/opec-1/Google-Chrome.html

<comment><AUTHOR> HN loves to see reports of Java vulnerabilities yet ignore far greater reports in terms of numbers and impact to the world.

Search also for "javascript cve", "html5 cvs", "css3 cve".</comment>


ImageNet Roulette - <AUTHOR> https://imagenet-roulette.paglen.com/ <comment><USER2> I can't figure out where some of these labels are supposed to come from. I uploaded a photo and got one label, "assenter" \-- i.e., a person who assents; and another one, "psycholinquist". Does ImageNet actually have photos of human beings labelled "assenter" and "psycholinquist"?

<comment><USER3> ImageNet is basically made by doing Google image searches on words from the WordNet database (a structured collection of words and their definitions), and then doing quality control by crowdsourcing.

So from Googling "assenter" and asking a bunch of people "here is the definition of an assenter, does this image contain one?", they have 126 confirmed pictures of assenters that can be used to see what a typical assenter looks like.

Then the data is used to train a neural network to recognise these classes.

Some of these steps may introduce biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think they are going to be for an - unpleasant - surprise if this hits mainstream. And not on account of having too little bandwidth but because people will most likely think it is fun to expose themselves.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking of adding an online gallery for a friend's game and had the exact same thought. Something bad is bound to happen at some point. I even considered making it +18 to avoid any problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There has been media backlash because this app can output blatantly racist class predictions; classes that were present in the original ImageNet dataset, which this project was intended to highlight. It went horribly right.

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/heres- how...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/heres-how-that- weird-face-app-everyone-is-using-works)

<comment><USER7> What needs to be done to fix it? Enough to rename the classes or does it go deeper than that?

<comment><USER8> "It reveals the deep problems with classifying humans — be it race, gender, emotions or characteristics. It's politics all the way down, and there's no simple way to 'debias' it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It recognised Chuck Schumer as an "appointee" which is correct (I guess), but Nancy Pelosi as a member of an "extinct North American Indian people"

Prediction: [https://i.imgur.com/v66bHVM.png](https://i.imgur.com/v66bHVM.png)

Source: [https://i.imgur.com/v236tmA.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/v236tmA.jpg)

<comment><USER10> It classified Sam Smith as a rape suspect when his head is cropped, but the full image classifies him as a non-smoker... poor Sam.

Prediction: [https://imgur.com/a/KooOsjR](https://imgur.com/a/KooOsjR) Source: [https://imgur.com/a/htjSKnB](https://imgur.com/a/htjSKnB)

Prediction: [https://imgur.com/a/wvIpEnC](https://imgur.com/a/wvIpEnC) Source: [https://imgur.com/a/QPRyjh2](https://imgur.com/a/QPRyjh2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I submitted a photo of Martin Luther King Jr: [https://www.biography.com/.image/ar_1:1%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2...](https://www.biography.com/.image/ar_1:1%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cg_face%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_300/MTE5NTU2MzE2MjgwNDg5NDgz/martin- luther-king-jr-9365086-2-402.jpg)

And got traitor, treasonist: [https://imgur.com/iWt1vFs](https://imgur.com/iWt1vFs)

<comment><USER12> I put in Keanu Reeves and got a sociologist.

I wonder how you can pick out a sociologist by look...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this is a cool art project to raise awareness for the worrisome side of classifications like that.

I'd be interested to see how it is set up at the exhibition at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm labeled a creep, and a white supremacist. Perhaps because I'm bald? Thanks ImageNet.

It labeled my five year old daughter as a negotiator, so it's not totally wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> it would be great if you can get a URL for your submission for sharing purposes

</comment><comment><USER16> ImageRouleNette</comment>


4chan switches to HTML5/CSS3 (SFW) - <AUTHOR> https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/24506058 <comment><USER2> This is the first time I've _ever_ seen (SFW) and 4chan in the same sentence. And probably, one of the only places where I'd believe it.

<comment><USER3> Just glancing at the front page, the SFW boards on 4chan outnumber the NSFW (18+) boards. Of the top 4 boards in terms of 4chan's traffic, only two are in the 18+ category.

/b/ (the very NSFW board responsible for 4chan's notorious infamy) accounts for 30% of 4ch's traffic but the next two most popular boards /v/ (video games) and /a/ (anime and manga) are both SFW. Not that I would recommend anyone to lurk 4chan at work.

The traffic and popularity figures I mention are on Wikipedia with citations: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan>

<comment><USER2> I don't doubt that, but I never see links to the SFW boards. I almost exclusively read or get sent links to /b/.

<comment><USER4> Why would anyone ever send someone a link to /b/? Threads last half an hour, tops. By the time the person sees the link, the thread has likely 404'd.

<comment><USER2> IM, not email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the things that this does improve vastly is rendering in Chrome for Android/ICS (and I assume, other mobile browsers). The old markup didn't scale very well and made for a lot of horizontal scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER6> Surely HN must now be next?

The cobbler's children have gone unshod so long!

<comment><USER7> Every time a community I'm part of goes and redesigns their site it sucks hard. Really hard. Please Paul, do not listen to the designgeneers on here. This place is just fine the way it is!

<comment><USER6> _> This place is just fine the way it is!_

Can we at least compromise on unicode vote arrows?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't HTML5, this is HTML4 div and span soup with an HTML5 doctype. If they really wanted clean markup, they'd use the proper elements everywhere.

<comment><USER9> The "proper elements" seem to change every two or three of years. For people getting real work done, especially if there's a lot of legacy markup involved, it can be very challenging to stay up-to-date with what the talking heads have decided is the "proper" way of doing things.

Just look at the <b> tag. 10 years ago, we used it frequently. Five years ago, we were told NEVER to use it, and to use CSS instead. These days we're told it's okay to use again, because now under HTML5 it has new semantic meaning. Five years from now, by the time people have used it throughout their markup again, the attitude will change and it'll once more be verboten.

<comment><USER8> So? There is a new version of the spec, go read it, learn how it's supposed to work, then decide which parts you want to implement. Point is, there is not a single HTML5 tag in 4chan's markup as far as I could see. They're completely missing the point.

It's only the OCD CSS designers who treat every superfluous div and span as a stain upon their work. The rest of us happily use the new meaningful HTML5 structure where appropriate, and keep sprinkling on divs/spans to help guide the layout and style.

And FYI, the <b> tag wasn't supposed to be replaced by CSS, it was supposed to be replaced by <strong> in cases where you wanted to highlight a span in text. Because the act of highlighting text shouldn't be coupled to what it looks like. Unfortunately, most people can't think in semantic terms and still write web content like it's MS Word. That's why HTML is such a complex beast: because we humans constantly give ourselves too much credit, and ultimately, the web is an enormous hack job achieved through minimum effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My question is WHY do they need to switch to HTML5? Does the complicated layout and rich metadata of 4chan require something more advanced than HTML4?

<comment><USER11> According to the post, they got rid of a lot of spans and tables. Sure, they probably could've done that while staying within HTML4/XHTML, but when you're changing things around already, why not stick to the most recent standard?

<comment><USER12> They're using JavaScript onmouseover to show spoilers which can be accomplished in straight CSS2. I assume that's for IE compatibility. They're also still using <br/> tags in post comments, but I assume that's because it's easier to write a nl2br converter than to intelligently parse comments with more than two newlines into semantically-correct paragraphs.

I would have thought 4chan's thread format perfect to use the new <article>, <header>, and <footer> tags.

<comment><USER11> Considering that we're talking about 4chan, this might count as heavy abuse of the "article" tag…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The change mostly benefits 4chan extension/userscript developers (like 4chanX) and board archivers, which have to parse the DOM (the only public 4chan API) back into data. If you look at the current markup (the new markup isn't live yet), it's a total mess of tables and font tags.

Also as mentioned, it has a responsive layout for mobile screens.

I'm pretty sure the new markup is designed by moot (the 4chan admin/creator) himself, so it's fairly clunky for 2012 (wrapper divs and spans everywhere, inline javascript and styles), but again, it's still a vast improvement.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's buggy. For instance, I can see an anchor inside a span, but the span is closed before the anchor is closed. Also, and admittedly nitpicking a little here (don't hate me 4Chan! I come in peace...) but they are still using CDATA in their script tags. If you are using HTML5, I don't think you still need to support legacy browsers :-)

<comment><USER15> HTML5 is supposed to degrade gracefully. Nothing about it should instantly break old browsers, so there's nothing really inconsistent about using CDATA with HTML5.

<comment><USER14> Like I say: I'm nitpicking. To be honest, I'm not a fan of inline javascript. But I'm not really 4chan's core audience - they may have a reason why they have so much inline js.

<comment><USER16> Why would any part of 4chan's audience care about such implementation details (e.g. inline javascript)?

<comment><USER14> Why would they care about HTML5?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, I think the real story here is how popular this mostly content- free post is. makes me wonder how many HNers are closet /b/tards (I count myself in that group).

</comment><comment><USER17> HTML5 but the same old UI? What benefits it brings?

<comment><USER18> > What benefits it brings?

Much better behavior on smaller width (e.g. mobile phones), smaller, simpler markup (so faster downloading, parsing & rendering), and likely increased simplicity for extension developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> SFW, you say. I think I will play it safe by not clicking.

</comment><comment><USER20> Well done I guess... heh

 _slow clap_

</comment><comment><USER21> I was expecting more Pedobear

</comment><comment><USER22> Since when did 4chan innovate?</comment>


Bootstrapping Calculator: Do you have enough savings to fund your business? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvassallo/bootstrapping-calculator <comment><USER2> Nice work, I'm going to play with it a bit.

One thing I would recommend to everyone is adding a multiple to your expenses. Essentially, < expenses > * < margin of error >

I manage my personal expenses down to the dollar and have managed seven figure budgets. One thing that always occurs is unexpected expenses. My go-to rule is assuming my expenses are going to be 25% higher than expected, per year I go out. I personally track my error between expected and actual to develop a hard number for my margin of error. However, between 25% and 50% larger than expected expenses is a good estimate to give you breathing room.

This method ensures you can be hospitalized for a week or so and it'll kind of "be in the plan" so to speak.

<comment><USER3> As a side note [https://www.getguesstimate.com](https://www.getguesstimate.com) is a good tool that calculates with margins rather than fixed numbers. Love the graphical output too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kudos for being extremely financially astute about the decision. But I can't help but ask - why not just move to a cheaper location? With 1.4 million, you can more or less retire / have a runway of 20+ years if you didn't live in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did consider it. But I have a family and 2 small kids, and I promised my family that our lifestyle won't have to change while I do this experiment with my career.

We did seriously consider moving about 30 miles out of Seattle, where houses cost $350/sqft instead fo $500, but my family wasn't enthusiastic about being far away from our community, and it actually wouldn't have made that much of a difference to my runway.

If the circumstances were different, we could have made a different decision. But, in my situation I felt that I didn't have to.

<comment><USER5> > and I promised my family that our lifestyle won't have to change while I do > this experiment with my career.

That doesn't sound right at all.

<comment><USER6> Why not?

I don't have evidence to support my following claim, but I _think_ that having a stable home life with a supporting family, not subjected to unusual bankruptcies or bad financial surprises, is a key element to startup founder success.

I could be mistaken. But I am a failed founder who disrupted their family and friends lives and lost a lot of goodwill while running the business because of it. So I think I'm at least right some of the time.

Regardless, it's wise to think of your loved ones first, even if it's only a cold business decision to do so; your business will thank you later with smoother revenues and a happier, more capable decision-making process down the road.

<comment><USER7> I'm not the above poster, but to me the desire to maintain a high standard of living when starting a business for the first time either means someone has a ton of money in reserve or they aren't very serious about starting a business. Now I can partially understand the situation if someone is buying a franchise or some existing business that will almost certainly have revenue from the start, but many of the tech business ideas discussed on HN require a fair amount of R&D before there's any revenue. For a first time entrepreneur I'm not sure 1 year is enough time to get up to speed and learn from mistakes.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Yes I have 5 years worth of expenses covered in liquid savings. My target is to make enough income to break even with my personal expenses before I run out of savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love the calculator, it's very useful. In my view it has never been easier to build a technology business than today. The public cloud makes it so you can start small or free and scale as needed and almost everything has been open sourced. All you need is the idea and the will power.

My only beef with the calculator is that I'd like to recommend another approach, that is you don't actually need to quit your job to make, that is the end goal shouldn't just be to quit. The costs of starting tech business have never been so low to get a an idea off the ground you can benefit from both a job and the other thing your working on. Steph Smith has a great post on this

[https://blog.stephsmith.io/you-dont-need-to-quit-your-job- to...](https://blog.stephsmith.io/you-dont-need-to-quit-your-job-to-make/)

<comment><USER9> I quit my job to start a startup while having a family and kids and I consider it a mistake. I'm not sure it would have changed the outcome (successful exit) but it caused a lot of extra stress, and I can safely say that I didn't quite know what I was doing and it would have been better to have a stronger plan (especially marketing), a longer runway, a more complete prototype, and more evidence of a market, before I took the leap and quit my job. All those things can be done on the side while holding down a job, even with a family. (As long as the job is closer to 40 hours a week than 60 or 70...) $1M is a nice runway, but most people don't have that, and even with it, the more you have locked down before you quit your job, the better.

<comment><USER10> I think more than just money, you have to account for your "mistakes runway".

You WILL make mistakes - a lot of them if its your first business.

When you are 25, you just have a lot longer runway to make those mistakes.

At 35 with a wife and kid, you have limited time to make mistakes and learn from them

<comment><USER9> Absolutely true. I heard that before starting and (of course) didn't understand what it meant. And we were optimistic, so we discounted it, assuming we were starter than the average Joe, so we wouldn't make as many mistakes. Nope, we made mistakes that could be counted in units of years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And broadly speaking, yeah, nearly everyone does when building companies. The thing that never occurred to me that you put nicely is that you have a finite mistake budget, and you don't know what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Posts like these is where I realize that the average HN crowd is just way too rich. $500k in liquid savings? $1M nest egg before starting? That's an exit event for me.

So many of the entrepreneurs I know just started with whatever money they had and just made things work somehow.

<comment><USER11> Depending on age $500k savings isn't THAT unreasonable. For example, if you worked at FAANG-level companies for a decade and held your lifestyle to a reasonable level this should be doable without hardship. These people are privileged to earn at such a high level, but not shockingly so considering the high cost of living. Even at the "rich person" $300k+/yr income level (common Bay Area BigCo wage for experienced engineers), considering that taxes take about half your gross and rents are high, it still requires discipline to accumulate that magnitude of savings; saving 1/3 of take-home pay over a decade is well-above the average savings rate.

If $500k in savings sounds like a lot to you, I would suggest you have a personal check-in on your retirement planning. I was pretty shocked when I first figured out how much I would actually need in retirement and it helped me really get serious about saving in a way that I hadn't before. To support a $100k income in retirement with 0.04 withdrawal rate I will need a nest-egg of $2.5M. I nearly fainted the first time I heard that. I had been feeling good about myself since I was maxing my 401k, but hitting targets for real financial security requires saving far beyond that.

Somebody bootstrapping is taking a large fraction of their savings and making a big bet on themselves that it will get them to their financial targets faster. I don't have the stomach for that risk but admire those who do.

<comment><USER12> I think that if you have that much money you are in the top 1% of the world. (_maybe_ 2%)

I don't know a single person with that kind of cash. The most wealthy people I know (they live in $500k+ home, their neighbours have million dollar homes) in rich area of Chicago and makes a combined $400k (estimated) in income between him and his wife, don't have even close to that in the bank.

(what they do have they have to budget to save up, though they live really well despite this...)

I really think Silicon Valley is disconnected from the rest of the world's realities.

<comment><USER13> Go read "The millionaire next door" \-- it's eye-opening, particularly about the relative importance of saving and keeping a cap on expenses.

Saving $500k should be trivial on the $400k annual income you describe. Dual income, put $46k per year into tax advantaged retirement accounts (401k + backdoor Roth). Wait 8 years including interest. Done.

Edit: Found a PDF online: [https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-millionaire-next-door- book-mant...](https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-millionaire-next-door-book- manteshpdf-davidbeitlercom-d15297184.html)

(and verified that it actually downloads).

<comment><USER12> They pay over 12k a year in property taxes alone. They pay tons of local and state taxes, etc... Yes of course they could do more and be smarter with their money, but it's really expensive to live where they are at, but it's also why they make so much as well.

I've read plenty of books on getting rich, and all it takes is a couple disasters or huge expenses (adopting kids, legal fees, tax audits, etc...) and all those money making plans are worthless.

They don't solve real life problems, they only work for those with charmed lives.

I think you are surrounded by rich people and don't realize the vast majority of people live pay-check to pay-check or worse.

<comment><USER13> I'm not talking about normal people. I'm talking about the couple you described that makes slightly more money than I and my wife and yet has less than half the savings I do.

Edited to add: And I'm surrounded by academics more than anything else. To quote the millionaire next door (page 136):

> Isn't it interesting that a disproportionately high number of used-car > shoppers come from the ranks of teachers and professors?

> How did Dr. Bill, an engineering professor who never had a total household > income of more than $80,000 become a millionaire? [...] His success in > accumulating wealth is based on living well below his means. The professor > is a classic example of a used vehicle-prone shopper. [...]

You'd be surprised how well that description fits me and many of my colleagues. So in a sense, yes, I'm surrounded by rich people, but they're rich because they're comparatively frugal, not because we all earn bay area tech salaries (trust me, we don't -- I grouse enough about this that I wrote a blog post about it a few years ago: [https://da- data.blogspot.com/2016/12/finances-for-recent-cs-...](https://da- data.blogspot.com/2016/12/finances-for-recent-cs-phds-headed-to.html) )

<comment><USER12> So was I...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks, I appreciate this. My main motivation for starting my own business is to be independent. From what I've seen of management at companies that accept investor money, it's not at all an independent lifestyle. Whereas at a bootstrapped company the management can do much more of what they want (for better or for worse).

If you can bootstrap with $2000 in the bank, that's awesome. But I'm more traditional with money and would heed the "three years' worth of expenses saved up" mantra before quitting my job to start a business.

</comment><comment><USER15> I tried the calculator and actually my savings would last well over 10 years (probably more like 20-25 years even if you account for inflation).

I spend around $1.000/month and that includes a new car (paid off), rent for 2 bed-room with a garden, eating out regularly. It doesn't include extensive traveling (which I have been doing in the last couple years).

I think the two key points here:

1\. Having a family is expensive. If you are considering this track, you may want to postpone having a family/kids.

2\. Living in cheaper cities can save you a whole lot of money. Obviously, I would not recommend doing that with a family or if you need extensive networking. But if you want to do 3-4 years of discovery without burning a whole in your savings, then there is countless countries to pick from.

<comment><USER16> It would be absolutely reckless to try this with a family to support. Just do it on the side of the day job.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'm doing it with a family, and I don't think I'm doing anything reckless. I'm not risking anything consequential. Worst case scenario I go get a job again, and my family's lifestyle wouldn't have changed one bit during the whole thing.

<comment><USER16> What happens if you can't "go get a job again"? Is it assured you can just walk right into one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing is ever certain obviously, but I feel very confident I can find a $150K/yr job in 6 months. If I don't manage, I'd have to adjust my lifestyle (sell house, move somewhere cheaper, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work. Since you can't easily pull request an excel sheet, I'll propose a change here:

After the text "If you include retirement funds, also subtract early withdrawal fees." I'd add something like "Most experts suggest not using retirement funds for anything other than retirement." or similar discouraging of that action.

(Those people who really ought to use retirement funds to bootstrap something will find a way to blow through whatever caution you put there; most people shouldn't, and I'd rather they at least see/feel the small speed bump...)

</comment><comment><USER18> The answer should almost always be yes (you have enough funds) because in most cases it's wiser to stay at your day job and bootstrap a side project.

I don't know why general advice is to leave the day job and go all in. IMHO that is terrible advice.

<comment><USER19> Let's say you manage to carve out 2-4 hours a day to work on your side project while remaining a decent person to your wife and kids. Leaving your job means you could spend 11-13 hours a day on it instead. That's an enormous difference and could easily mean the difference between failure and success.

Not only that, but you are putting yourself in precarious legal territory by bootstrapping a side project. Your employer could easily claim ownership of all your IP.

OP was a senior software engineer at AWS, how difficult do you think it would be for him to re-enter the workforce with a competing cloud provider nor even coming back to Amazon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. And I think nearly everyone in tech is able to re-enter the workforce within < 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Excellent DIY solution! For more nuanced planning, I found web-based apps [https://startuprunway.io](https://startuprunway.io) and [https://hiringplan.io](https://hiringplan.io) to be very helpful for budget forecasts.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great calculator. I have previously used the Startup Runway Calculator for similar purposes. It allows for greater itemization than I saw in your screenshots. Might be nice for folks who like this project to also check out:

[https://startuprunway.io](https://startuprunway.io)

</comment><comment><USER22> Ok I have to ask- is 500k pa a rare dev salary for FAANG or is it fairly normal - I mean that's insane levels

<comment><USER23> $450k is approximately the package (salary, bonus, 1 year of RSU vesting) for the "career level", the point in the ladder that all devs are expected to make if they're not fired. AppAmaGooBookSoft people can tell you the exact name of it at their firm.

It's not insane, it's the market.

<comment><USER22> But ... I am having to readjust my understanding of "the market"

Ok so is this _just_ the global tech firms, who have a 1-2 billion user base so every good and bad software decision gets multiplied by a lot of zeros and it's worth the cost.

Or is this a function of tech firms in the valley - a function of supply and demand (plus house prices)

Or are the non global reach tech firms also having to join this bidding war - this is the part I have trouble believing

I have worked for the past several years in a major US bank - and I do very well for a UK contractor - but no where near this well.

And I am not noticing that there are people on a large multiple of me as a daily rate. I am sure there are but this seems ... common ... at FAANG

In short, Do I move to silicon valley and get any job, do I apply to Google any location or do I just wait for the rest of the world to catch up?

<comment><USER22> I am unsure that my rant above was helpful - I needed to seperate "why don't I get the cash" from "is this an indicator of something important"

So I think my main question is, is software eating so many jobs that it is reasonable for a "mid level" software dev to capture so much of the cash, or is this a function of specific tech firm structures (SV scarcity, amazing stock options right now, etc)

Looking at the levels.io site it indicates that there is a massive FAANG/ non Faang gap - so I think the later might be accurate.

But it is a scary thought for any company competing for talent ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice, too bad I'll be too poor for the foreseeable future to do anything like that. (50k EUR/yr)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've read your blog post. A million is a nice nest egg for bootstrapping.

Just a thought: You can generate $15k of monthly passive income directly with $300-350k investment. If the bootstrapped business fails to make money fast, there's always this option with your amount of money.

Developers often miss those obvious ways to make money because these ways aren't technically intricate.

Source: I do affiliate marketing. This are the usual ROIs.

Good luck on your journey!

edit: wrt. the downvotes - that's one of the reasons I don't want to talk about this in public. I agree that it sounds unbelievable, but most people also don't believe in $500k salaries. Many people dismiss those opportunities because they don't believe it's possible.

<comment><USER10> I also do a bit of affiliate marketing on the side. It's not much, but my site just crossed $1k/month December. I've worked about 20 hours on it since this year. My total investment on it is about $800, excluding my time.

<comment><USER25> Great to hear that! DIY is a bit cheaper, but it takes its time. Depends on your hourly rate what makes more sense.

Do you mind leaving your mail address? If those returns are stable and you want to sell (in the future, too), I would like to talk. Many others here probably too.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely, DIY takes just way longer. But it's a great industry in that once you know the "recipe", you can take $50k worth of investment and have a hit almost 8 out of 10 times.

Not looking to sell right now though. This site is in a field I have more than an amateur interest in. I plan to stick around with it for a while :)

<comment><USER26> So what's the recipe?

<comment><USER10> From what I've seen, there are two recipes:

1\. Great content + organic backlinks. It's slow and takes skill (especially in content ideation and creation) but the results will be enduring

2\. Great content + cheap, paid backlinks. This one is much faster but requires a budget and there is a substantial risk that Google will simply shoot down your rankings

You can't compromise on content though</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CNN investigation: 103 Uber drivers accused of sexual assault or abuse - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexual-assault/index.html <comment><USER2> Let's not forget Uber drivers are still human (for the time being) so this should come as no surprise...</comment>


Have I tattooed a syntax error on my arm? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21186724/why-is-whitespace-needed-for-this-to-be-parsed?newsletter=1&nlcode=4592%7cdedb <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7098089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7098089)

</comment><comment><USER3>
      Welcome, Redditors! We're looking for answers that provide serious, practical
      solutions to the problem stated. If you'd prefer to post a joke or launch a
      tangential discussion, please do so on the corresponding Reddit thread.

Ooh, interesting. I guess they're noticing a spike in Referrer: reddit.com traffic?

<comment><USER4> This is a predefined piece of text that can be inserted by moderators at their discretion. It's used for popular questions regardless of the actual referrer—although Reddit probably makes up a huge part for popular posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> #firstworldproblems (I couldn't find the post on reddit, and couldn't resist)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Show HN Dead? - zupa-hu Is it just me or is Show HN not updating for others either? It seems that new posts do not show up? Or are posts manually approved? <comment><AUTHOR> New Show HNs go to [https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew](https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew). There's a small point threshold before they make it to [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show). Does that answer your question?

<comment><USER2> A bit off-topic ~ I'm new to the community and have been looking for the right place to ask this question:

I recently shared something via Show HN and received a ton of great feedback. Would it violate any rules or etiquette to share the next version of the same project once the feedback has been incorporated?

<comment><AUTHOR> "New features and upgrades ("Foo 1.3.1 is out") generally aren't substantive enough to be Show HNs. A major overhaul is probably ok."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

The main thing is not to do post another Show HN too soon. Readers don't like to feel like someone's pushing a submission too hard, and submitters always underestimate how patient they need to be. You need to let the hivemind caches clear.

When you do repost, it would be good to link to the previous HN thread and explain what you've done since then. That will probably make it more interesting, since those who didn't see the earlier thread can go back and reread it.

<comment><USER2> Thank you so much! This makes sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is "counting code files" a good alternative to "counting lines of code"? - cool-RR http://blog.garlicsim.org/post/590380384/is-counting-code-files-a-good-alternative-to

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting approach. I still reel a bit from the thought of it. I presume this is your blog, so I'll try to be as courtesy as possible in my criticism. :-)

This invites all the same problems. There are management styles in play at some groups that seem to think that number of anything is a good measure. It's quantity over quality. If your next release has a "big feature", but a concise implementation, they may wonder why you only generated 20 code files instead of 200. And you're right back to square one again.

This may only apply to certain solutions, too. You mentioned python. I'm curious to see if the same could be applied to C#, or Java. Further, I've found that in some projects, we have Enums.cs, for instance, that contain all our enumeration types in that given Namespace or Pacakge (C# and Java respectively). Maybe they should get their own code file? Maybe not?

I think before you implement a system like this, you have to implement a good design structure. Otherwise, you have no solid adherence. You could easily bloat the count, or undercut it, as necessary.

Ultimately, we need a way to measure performance objectively, without meaningless numbers. I don't have a good solution, and I really don't know if I like yours or not. Hrm.

Thanks for the post, though! Will give me something to chew on while I run my scripts... :-)

<comment> cool-RR I've been getting this criticism from several people already. You're basically saying that counting code files is still a very problematic measure of project progress. _I agree._ It's a terrible measure of project progress.

What I'm saying is, it's slightly less terrible than counting code lines, and it preserves the advantages of counting code lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least you're throwing ideas around. It's a problem that really does need a solution, and it would be nice to get more people thinking about this.

Maybe this is part of the macro problem of communicating to management that isn't necessarily technical (which is a problem in and of itself, because management at some level SHOULD be technical. I've found that if management isn't techy enough when their direct reports are highly technical, you get performance measurement disparity).</comment></comment></comment>


James Joyce's grandson and the death of the stubborn literary executor - the-enemy https://theoutline.com/post/8603/stephen-joyce-james-joyce-literary-estate?zd=1&zi=5jngsqol <comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's a good point at the end, from now on digital caches of unpublished material will escape into the world much more easily than closely guarded letters. But then what would we learn from a current James Joyce's tweets or facebook posts?

<comment><USER2> Ulysses Reader @UlyssesReader

9h —Ay, ay, says Joe.

—You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...

—Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn Fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.</comment></comment>


Terraform vs. Ansible - <AUTHOR> I'm still trying to get my head around whether I should use Ansible or Terraform for provisioning some (network) infrastructure. I know the default answer is to use TF for provisioning and to use Ansible for configuration. I also understand that most things that can be done with TF can be done with Ansible. Both tools are platform agnostic (through providers...) So I see a lot of similarities but would like to understand more the differences between both.
My use case is to create network resources (day 1 operation) and to continue to update them later on (in day 2) or to add resources later on (in day 2).
For this use case, I see one of the main advantages for TF that it keeps track of state where Ansible does not seem to do that. I see TF also more as a lifecycle management tool.
What could be other arguments to favor TF above Ansible for this use case? <comment><USER2> I think for AWS resources at least you are much better off with Terraform. Terraform supports new AWS services and features much more quickly than Ansible since many more folks are using TF to provision cloud infrastructure.</comment>


Show HN: My First Apple TV App, Streaks Workout - <AUTHOR> http://streaksworkout.com <comment><USER2> As someone that's followed workouts on my phone, I like the idea of using a tv a lot more. Nice!

Random, only kind of related thought: I've always wanted a workout app that customized things for the equipment I have available. Even bodyweight workouts frequently rely on a pull up bar, which I don't have when I'm traveling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice design. I would try it if I had an Apple TV. (Also I have no need for a TV-based workout program since I have a gym.) What's up with the name choice "Streaks"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's a spinoff from my iPhone app, Streaks ([http://streaksapp.com](http://streaksapp.com))

<comment><USER4> Just bought the Streaks app for iPhone. Nice job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let's stop with the Silicon Valley comparisons - <AUTHOR> http://michiganradio.org/post/lets-stop-silicon-valley-comparisons <comment><USER2> Unfortunately this isn't just a US-centric issue. The UK seems obsessed with comparing itself to the valley.

There's even a wikipedia page for this stuff: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_with_%22Silicon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_with_%22Silicon%22_names)

My personal favourite (in an face-palmy kind of way): [http://i.imgur.com/WKYF1o9.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/WKYF1o9.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Until very recently I lived in Bodrum, Turkey. One of the things it's famous for is the castle in its bay. "Castle" in Turkish is "Kale" (pronounced as cah-lay, close to rhyming with "valley"), so I used to joke that I worked in "Silicon Kale".

<comment><USER4> Quite nice city. I was there last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am sitting here rolling my eyes as I read this article. Really what it comes down to is that state's in general want tech because tech industries tend to bring in greater wealth and with economic wealth you have lower unemployment.

However, as a person born and raise in the Detroit suburb's, it's hard to imagine that Detroit or the surrounding region's would ever be a location for tech innovation.

You have a VERY large percentage of the labor force with no skill's beyond manufacturing (auto industry), heavy small business tax, a youth population that is migrating out to southern and western locations of the country, a non- premium climate (winter 8 out of 12 months), heavy labor unions, and no serious push from state officials to move internal perception towards an industry/economy of technology.

Until the state as a whole begins actively pushing for industry reform and SERIOUS incentives, Michigan will continue to follow it's current course which is very little tech talent, very few tech oriented companies, high small business tax, and very low incentive to start any type of innovation.

It is what it is.

<comment><USER6> As another resident of the Detroit Metro, you make the world you want to see. To say you can't _ever_ imagine the Metro being a location for tech innovation is crazy to me.

Detroit and Ann Arbor both have decent start up support structures and they'll increase with time and energy.

<comment><USER5> I highly disagree. Beyond medical/bio, Ann Arbor is way to small to support any large scale change in the overall state market. While it does have it's own small footing, it has little resource to expand outside of it's own due to it's location. The location has corn fields to the north, west, and south. To the east...between ann arbor and detroit you have...Canton, Plymouth, Van Buren, Romulus, Taylor...all of those are heavy manufacturing communities.

Which goes on to my prior point. You have to change culture in order to do that. The culture of the state is manufacturing with some bio/medical (Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids).

Any innovation can really only come from 1 of 4 places... Detroit (metro), Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. Ann Arbor has a small scene, but doesn't have the ability to grow without passing of that scene to a larger community. Lansing is primarily government and manufacturing. There is Michigan State University (50k+ students), but it's a school with a primary focus on agriculture and not techonology. This leaves Detroit and Grand Rapids.

In regard's to Detroit, let's think about it for a moment.

It is very much like taking the idea that you can easily change the culture and mindset of silicon valley from tech to manufacturing and industrial. The people in silicon valley and the surrounding area do not have the skillset as a whole to provide that type of industry. As well as through generations, the mindset of the people as a whole is not directed towards a manufacturing environment. This is what is going on with Detroit. You have had a VERY large portion of the economy (65%+) purely based on some type of auto manufacturing. This is why Detroit city is at around 20% unemployment and the surrounding metro is around 8-10% unemployment.

Now..this leaves us with Grand Rapids. Which actually is a viable candidate. It has a younger generation overall, an international airport, a moderately sized city with room for expansion, and a vibrant downtown.

Then..we have to look further at the ability to grow a tech environment. Is there the skill's needed? Are there investors available to fund companies in this area? Are there incentives to stay in the area?

In reality, all of those answers are relatively "No".

You can get better talent in a warmer climate with the same exact (if not better) opportunities (funding, viability, community backing, tax incentives..etc) in other cities with a better climate (yes, climate is really a big deal)...such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle.

Unless Michigan does something drastic like being a startup tax-haven, having major incubators, or the like; it will never happen. Too many other places offer the same or much better, but in a more comfortable climate.

(In case anyone think's climate isn't a big deal, try moving to Alaska or Montana. They offer break's for startup's, but when was the last time you heard anyone taking those states up on their offers?).

<comment><USER7> Ann Arbor has more venture capital per capita than Silicon Valley

[http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141212/BLOG007/141219...](http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141212/BLOG007/141219951/ann- arbor-has-more-venture-capital-per-capita-than-silicon-valley)

[http://www.mlive.com/business/ann- arbor/index.ssf/2015/04/po...](http://www.mlive.com/business/ann- arbor/index.ssf/2015/04/post_3.html)

[http://vcwithme.co/2014/12/02/greatest-concentration-of- vent...](http://vcwithme.co/2014/12/02/greatest-concentration-of-venture- capital-not-where-you-think/)

<comment><USER5> "per capita" bro in a population of 100,000 people.

That could be 1 person giving a company (doesn't have to be a startup) a large sum, in which the per capita would sky-rocket.

The discussion isn't over whether someone can run a startup successfully in Michigan or Ann Arbor. The discussion is whether Detroit (or Michigan) can become a technology hub. After being born in Michigan and living their for 25 years, I can easily say that while there is deffinately the ability to build and run a startup, the ability to change the industry of the state (or even just Detroit) is really next to impossible unless the city/state was willing to go to drastic measures to attract talent/encourage startups (low/no tax, office space, incubators, free money startup capital...etc), and educate the public on their goal's.

Even is the state was able to give every startup no taxes for 10 years and startup capital, the response from the general public would be "why are you helping them?!, I am the one without the job. Why aren't you trying to attract more manufacturing?!"

While I love my state, it's not a viable place to build any startup. A high small business tax, and small talent pool that most state's face when asking themselves "how can we bring in more technology?"

Back to Ann Arbor... It's a nice cozy city with a major university. In regards to work force, where are you getting employee's? From the college? That's like the valley pulling it's entire work force from Stanford. In regard's to a startup boom in Ann Arbor, where are the people going to live? The city isn't large enough for any large scale change. Can you build multiple Google's, Apple's, or Amazon's there? Is the city viably committing to building out it's infrastructure in order to have this be a silicon valley?

Building a startup is one thing, creating an entire industry is a totally different animal. The state in general is committed to manufacturing as it has been for 100 years. In 15 years there will be a new generation of politicians and then maybe we will see if the climate changes. However, I can assure you that from a bureaucratic level, there is no such strive for a "silicon valley" in michigan.

Simply put: people want jobs. They see the west coast. They see tech as high paying. They want high pay. They want tech. However, the cost of getting that is going to be much greater in monetary and sacrifice than people will/are willing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If innovation is about new and different, why would we want to be something > that already exists?

Because you can follow the same successful approach to encouraging entrepreneurs, but innovate by producing companies that develop new products?

You might want to ape silicon valley because of the huge amount of employment and wealth it generates.

You don't have to be exactly the same as SV, but no reason not to be inspired by it, if you're looking to create a startup culture.

<comment><USER9> > _You don 't have to be exactly the same as SV, but no reason not to be > inspired by it_

Did you read the article? Because this is exactly what it's about:

"To be sure, we can learn from Silicon Valley and other more mature tech communities, but that also includes how not to do things."

<comment><USER8> Yes I did.

If that's the takeaway, then you're still doing comparisons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Michigan needs to ban noncompete contracts. This would go a long way towards reviving the tech industry.

Michigan originally banned noncompetes, but the lobbyists for the auto industry got the law changed.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The region is plagued with astronomical rent and real estate prices, heavy traffic, and a hyper-competitiveness that leaves depression and anxiety in its wake"

The rent, real estate, and heavy traffic issues can be avoided with a little urban planning.

Build a village with lots of green space:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/views-from- hoboken/](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/views-from-hoboken/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Look into Detroit, but the Triangle area of NC (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) is one of the best for startups, currently. Google just setup shop in Chapel Hill, there are plenty of startups in Durham and Raleigh, a number of major tech corps in the area, three large universities nearby, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is an ideology that silicon valley stands for and the reality of the place. Those two things may be very disparate concepts, but that's another debate.

I think the popular use of the silicon valley comparison is an attempt to get at the ideology rather than the reality of the place.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wierd how the article states that Über doesn't solve "real" problems.

<comment><USER15> Uber is the archetypical example of a Silicon Valley company projecting it's narrow US-centric-view onto the rest of the world.

From what I gather, taxi businesses in the US seem to be in the hand of Mafia- like criminal organizations. That's not the case in most Western-European cities with good and cheap public transport and well-regulated taxi systems.

If I can get from anywhere to anywhere at any time for little money already for the last 30 years, what's the point of a service like Uber, especially Uber with their shady business practices and aggressive stance towards established labour laws.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure that creating a fleet of self driving cars operating on dynamic dispatch would have worldwide ramifications. But I see your point re public transport.

<comment><USER15> That must be a different company. The Uber I know is that evil company lead by incredibly arrogant *ssholes trying to aggressively price-dump taxi drivers (that don't make a lot of money to begin with) out of their jobs by employing- but-not-really-employing a cheap workforce without paying their part on the drivers insurances. Basically an illegal taxi business ;)

<comment><USER17> Yes, that's the story that people like Evgeny Freidman paint, when they started seeing their rent-seeking investment - buying medallions and charging drivers hundreds of dollars to rent them so that they could work - begin to drop.

This story shows the situation for taxi drivers, way before Uber: [http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi- di...](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-difficult-in- best-of-times-gets-tougher.html)

Some quotes:

 _The average rate a cabbie paid to take a taxi out for a 12-hour shift climbed 11 percent, to about $85, between 1990 and 1993 (...) In 1993, 32 to 45 percent of the income of a fleet or lease manager was profit, or $16,000 to $21,300 per car, up from $5,500 to $9,800 in 1986, according to the taxi commission._

 _Lease drivers rent the medallions, and usually the taxis, for a day or a week from their owners or a middleman. Depending on the owner and the night of the week, a lease driver pays $72 to $100 to take a car out for a 12-hour shift, or about $450 to $650 for a weekly lease. The driver must also pay for gas, at $15 to $20 a night. Drivers keep whatever fares and tips they collect, but they often start a day 's work $100 or more behind._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a metro Detroiter about to move to Silicon Valley, this was very interesting to read!

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's stop comparisons period.

</comment><comment> saiya-jin why so? it's a bubble inside a bubble. i know that feeling a bit, living in Switzerland now

</comment><comment><USER20> "Many articles and lawsuits have documented the region's lack of diversity and history of sexism and sexual harassment."

Glass houses time! Michigan has the 10th highest female / male pay gap in the nation, it's been rated with an F by NARAL, and 47% of Michigan residents have no access to paid sick leave. I know it was a slick ding to break out, but if you're interested in making a distinction with California on inclusion of women and issues of sexism, michigan is lagging in this area by some key metrics. Maybe work to be done at home before worrying about other states.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is bandwidth so expensive? - <AUTHOR> I've been creating video content lately and quickly realized how expensive video hosting ia due to bandwidth.
I'm curious why bandwidth is so expensive.
Also, do you think bandwidth costs are likely to rise or fall in the future? <comment><USER2> I've gone on rants about this in the past, but I'll keep this one short: it's only expensive if you're purchasing data transfer from cloud providers and paying per-GB.

For an illustrative example, imagine you have a 1 Gbps (gigabit-per-second) transit line that you are saturating at 95% (~972 Mbps) 24/7\. Over a month, you will push 312,075 gigabytes (312 TB) over that line. Amazon transfer pricing is a bit complex to calculate exactly, but for 312 TB you would pay roughly 0.07 per GB for a total of nearly $22,000.

You can rent a 1 Gbps line for under $500 per month.

Think of it like buying a pipe. You can either rent the pipe, or access to the pipe. If you rent the pipe, you're buying IP transit. If you rent access to the pipe, you're buying data transfer. When you rent the pipe, you pay based on its diameter -- the _capacity_ of what you can fit through it. But when you rent access to it, you're charged by how much you put through it.

IMO, this price gouging is the _single biggest problem_ with cloud providers and also leaves a hole in the market. The cloud is pitched as elastic, but it's only elastic so long as your business is not bandwidth constrained. For example, you would not be able to build a competitive CDN or VPN network in the cloud, because you cannot charge your customers for data transfer since your competitors do not charge like that. But you have to pay for their data transfer, even if it all fits within capacity that you could provision for a 40th of the cost.

I've been interested in this market for a long time. A few years ago I was pitching a startup that invovled this idea. It never came to fruition, but I do have an (unfinished) slide deck that might interest someone: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BJICGRhDL95vdBFg0ZE8...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BJICGRhDL95vdBFg0ZE8EBNk_B3KbITMS2iYPnLGKHo/edit?usp=sharing)

If anyone is working on this problem or wants to discuss it, send me an email as I've got a _lot_ of thoughts on the matter and will be working on a project in this space within the next year.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this answers my underlying curiosity. I'm still surprised that no one has come out with a low cost solution that would drive the prices down though. The barrier to entry, which is cost like you mentioned in your deck, must be fairly large.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. The barrier to entry is not the cost of a single line. It's the cost of provisioning a global network where each server has a line with sufficient capacity.

If you're bootstrapping a CDN company, for example, you can't just start with a single server. You need the global footprint as a selling point. But since you can't provision that bandwidth elastically, you're going to have a monthly bill of roughly $1k per POP as soon as you start the company, significantly reducing your runway.

The reason there are so few solutions is because the status quo is charging $/Gb, it's a huge source of income for cloud providers, and it makes traffic engineering significantly easier because users have incentive to minimize bandwidth costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely seems like a market opportunity. Did you find any interest when you were pitching?

<comment><USER2> I never fully pitched it. That slide deck was mostly to sort through the ideas I had at the time and try to identify some fundamental truths of the market.

The product I'm interested in building is basically a bandwidth marketplace. It's a hard problem and I've been thinking about it for a while. In college I researched "TorCoin" for my senior thesis which explored the possibilities of a proof-of-bandwidth cryptocurrency. I know some ICO's are working on this now but I'm really skeptical the idea can work without a killer product in the hands of users driving adoption. That's the product I want to work on. I'm still figuring out exactly what it is, but I've been thinking about this kind of thing heavily for the past 5 years and feel pretty confident I can execute if given the right time, team and funding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting. Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> IP transit is pretty cheap and is expected to continue to fall in the future.

For example here: [http://henet.p2knowledgebase.com/view/short_post/WnL8B](http://henet.p2knowledgebase.com/view/short_post/WnL8B)

You are looking at 1Gbps-on-GigE of $380/mo.

You can run that 24/7 (sometimes they bill you at 95th percentile) but this looks like it is flat rate.

So all the data you can transfer at a 1Gbps pipe.

<comment><USER4> Jesus, I can get that in Sweden for $100/mo. I've heard of the higher rates in the US, but I didn't expect the difference to be that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An cable long enough to cross the Atlantic cost a lot. But you can also get 10Gbit dedicated line for $1000 /month with ip transit, so I don't think it's too expensive. The more bandwidth you need the cheaper it gets per Mbit. For a startup I suggest going peer-to-peer (like the bittorrent protocol) to distribute your content. Note that you can still charge for it. That's what Spotify did in the startup. With peer-to-peer it uses the user's bandwidth to distribute the content, so that you do not have to pay for the bandwidth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Peer to peer is an interesting thought. I'm curious how that would work with video hosting. Will have to read into it. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please learn the difference between bandwidth and data transfer.

Bandwidth is a speed, data transfer is an amount of transferred data.

Yes I'm aware that a lot of hosting companies show it as "bandwidth". That doesn't make it right.

Bandwidth is like the diameter of the water pipe coming into your house. Data transfer is the like the number of litres/gallons sent down that pipe, and measured by the water meter.

It's baffling and depressing to me that so many people in this industry get this wrong. It's like the tech equivalent of the word irony.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate and understand the difference but like you said, most hosting companies use the term bandwidth to describe their data rates. So it makes more sense to discuss it using their nomenclature.

Also, if you want people to listen to you, try being a little less condescending. You can be informative while not sounding like everyone else is dumber than you. Your approach to "educating" makes anyone who didn't know what you are trying to explain feel incompetent. I'm not sure what the benefit of that is for you, but you might want to reassess your approach.

The tech industry is difficult enough to navigate. Why not try and be a little more welcoming?

<comment><USER6> > most hosting companies use the term bandwidth to describe their data rates. > So it makes more sense to discuss it using their nomenclature.

a) if you said to _any_ hosting company, "I need X GB/TB of data transfer allowance" they would know what you mean.

b) given that you're talking about a video hosting site, where data transfer speed is likely a large contender in performance, I'd be surprised if you _don 't_ factor _actual_ available bandwidth into the decision making process.

So how do you have a technical discussion about the cost of your IP connectivity, when you're using the same term for the speed and the amount of data?

> try being a little less condescending

You asked about a technical aspect of hosting a web site, using one very specific technical term, to refer to another, related but different aspect of the matter.

In response, I asked you to learn the difference between what you wrote, and what you likely meant, explained what each means, and gave an analogy using plumbing references.

I have zero idea who you are, or what your background is. If you are primarily involved in the business or even the finance side of a company, it's likely you _wouldn 't_ know that 'bandwidth' means speed not an amount of data.

> Your approach to "educating" makes anyone who didn't know what you are > trying to explain feel incompetent.

Given that you claim to _know_ the term is incorrect, and still use it incorrectly, I accept no responsibility if you feel incompetent.

> The tech industry is difficult enough to navigate.

And deliberately using technical terms incorrectly is the way to fix that, is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not debating whether you come off as condescending. I know the answer to that question. Even if you were right, which you are, I don't appreciate your input because of the way you present yourself.

See how that works? You could be the smartest guy on the internet and I still would't listen to you. Because I don't like the way you conduct yourself.

> It's baffling and depressing to me that so many people in this industry get > this wrong. It's like the tech equivalent of the word irony.

People like you make the industry worse for everyone.

Cheers!

<comment><USER6> > You could be the smartest guy on the internet and I still would't listen to > you.

That's fine, you don't have to listen to me. You've acknowledged that my point is correct, and that you're more worried about how you feel I said something, than the substance of what I said.

Given that you asked a technical question, I'll take "correct" over "warm and fuzzy", Every Fucking Time.

People literally pay me for advice and some then choose to ignore it, why would I care that you choose to ignore it when I offer it for free?

> People like you make the industry worse for everyone.

No, people like me make people like you _feel worse_ , because I follow this crazy idea that words have specific meaning.

It's people who shy away from telling someone they're wrong, or that their idea is fucking awful, that make the _industry_ worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It's people who shy away from telling someone they're wrong, or that their > idea is fucking awful, that make the industry worse.

You can tell people they're wrong without being a douche about it. That's all I'm saying.

<comment><USER6> There was no 'douche'-ness _intended_ in the original comment.

If you've misread my _text_ as having some non-existent emotion or tone, I'm sorry but I can't help that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is expensive?

You can find places like OVH or Online.net that has dedicated servers with "unlimited" bandwidth. Cost is far less than you'd find with the major cloud services. I had a 10Mbps dedicated server for several years on online.net serving 2-3 TB of video per month. Unless you get hammered with many requests, SATA might be enough, while SSD will obviously offer better performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. I think maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree with "video hosting" services which appear to charge a significant premium on data transfer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aprt from my mini-rant, data transfer charges vary a lot by host.

AWS for example, have ridiculously high charges.

Can you give some rough figures of how much data and how much you're paying?</comment>


Comcast to give Atlanta fastest Internet in the country - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/02/technology/comcast-gigabit-internet-atlanta/index.html?iid=Lead

<comment><USER2> Well, this is simply false. Residential users can buy 10 gigabit service in Minneapolis if you happen to live in a neighborhood that US Internet provides service.</comment>


Face Depixelizer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tg-bomze/Face-Depixelizer <comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting results (including failures) in this thread: [https://twitter.com/tg_bomze/status/1274098682284163072](https://twitter.com/tg_bomze/status/1274098682284163072)</comment>


[Nature] Economics needs a scientific revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7217/full/4551181a.html <comment><AUTHOR> Maybe an opportunity for a smart start-up?

<comment><USER2> I can't read the article. Did you pay?</comment></comment>


Ts'o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd - <AUTHOR> https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/

<comment><USER2> I think the tone of this submission is below the typical community standards of Hacker News.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is rabid and paranoid, and the repeated "fanboy" references are rather childish. But the article did bring up important points about RedHat's consistent embrace-and-extend history, which is well worth thinking about.

So I won't be flagging this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe it's not likely to get much support from HN users, but I do find it very interesting to find parallels between sociopolitical labels and software attitudes. So while some may find a label like "fascist" to be very loaded, it does seem strangely apt to describe proponents of a software design that favors a big monolithic daemon that wishes to be in charge of everything, does not let the end user to customize as much, etc., in contrast to a more anarchistic traditional Unix approach emphasizing the opposite attitudes.

<comment><USER5> I believe it's better to put politics as far away as possible from this discussion. Nothing good will come from finding those kind of parallels.

That said, I don't like the attitude of systemd devs at all (like I don't like the attitude of GNOME devs...). But the only way to make them lose it is to build something _better_ than systemd - before it becomes so entreched that getting it out of a linux box will be impossible without losing basic functionalities.

That said, systemd is not really _that_ much monolithic.

<comment><USER4> > Nothing good will come from finding those kind of parallels.

Except that it offers a pretty good explanation for why people get so crazy about these debates, and provides a context under which I can say there is legitimate debate that ultimately boils down to personality differences.

(This is one problem I have with the HN stance of politics-avoidance. What happens when politics is the completely honest answer?)

<comment><USER5> The reason people get so crazy about this debate, at least, is that many see this as "land grabbing" done in a passive/aggressive manner by RH employees (merging udev and systemd under the same repo and having to build systemd to build udev is an example of that) and their pet project. Again.

People is bound to hate it. RH won't care anyway, they control the core of every modern linux system and can do what they please. It's not like the users are contributors or customers. They are not _technically_ part of the "community".

I'm not saying that politics have nothing to do with this. This IS politics, in its broadest sense. But making parallels with movements and ideologies is not very useful to the discussion, I think. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are free alternatives to Linux, such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Does anyone know whether their development is influenced as much by large companies as Linux is?

<comment><USER5> It's probably not. Those projects do not have a comparable userbase, so that is somewhat expected - but that missing popularity comes with another set of problems...</comment></comment>