Manchester City Council - <AUTHOR> http://www.manchester.gov.uk/ <comment><USER3> I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider.

While I agree that the trendy look of the site is better than most Government sites, it tries too hard to the point the change and potential this site could have had is gone. The reason Government websites are usually ugly is not because Government's are afraid of change or can't justify the cash it's because there are content accessibility guidelines to adhere too. And when you've got to make your content accessible to people with disabilities well your options can be somewhat limited (especially colour use).

This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design. Instead of thinking, "What can we NOT add to this site design" designers seem to be thinking, "How many full screen images, rounded corners, parallax effects, CSS animations, Javascript effects and large amounts of custom fonts can we cram into this site?"

I can foresee a lot of issues for people with eyesight problems on this site, aren't Governments supposed to adhere to WCAG rules and a lot more stricter than non-Government websites do? The images don't even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they're being used as icons in content sections, wow.

<comment><USER4> What a predictable top comment for a Hacker News thread. :(

A government website showcases a design that is _leaps and bounds_ ahead of _any other government site we can think of_ , and HN's top comment casually dismisses it.

To rewrite something you said: "This is the perfect example of everything wrong with [HN comments]."

I, for one, am floored that someone in city government was able to rise above the bureaucracy and ship something truly useful and delightful for citizens. I would love nothing more than to meet the people involved and buy them a pint. Well done, guys.

<comment><USER5> It's a shame you're being downvoted, hopefully constructive feed back will eventually bubble to the top. There was a similar submission yesterday where this occurred.

Clearly there are a group of elite web designers, UI and UX specialists that parade this site, who, unsurprisingly, have empty profiles. How else are we supposed to see their portfolio of exceptional work so we know what to aspire to?

<comment><USER6> This is a fallacy. If you need to show something to prove or give an opinion or a reason about 2+2=4 then we will have troubles to discuss on anything.

You cannot use argumentum ad hominem to this point. If people has to shown their portfolios or other stuff to prove their skillmanship you're only wasting time and finding on the wrong place to prove your points, since those designs may not apply or be used as a good example to counterattack the main point here.

<comment><USER7> We do have troubles discussing things.

Unfortunately, the world is so complicated that we can't make an informed decision based on speech/writing alone, and verification of achievements is one of the easiest and most accurate ways to judge credibility.

<comment><USER6> We should give opinions based on evidence, proven evidence. The rest are just, personal viewpoints who doesn't care what you prove. I try always to avoid these discussions, but sometimes i feel is a bit unfair to bring up the "show me your X card, sir" to talk about something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I actually prefer <http://www.gateshead.gov.uk>, which is a lot less "in your face".

If I go to a .gov.uk site it's because a need a specific piece of information, I don't need the design getting in the way.

<comment><USER9> Totally. One of my pet peeves is people who insist that "good design" has to have an emphasis on being pretty. Design is as much about function as it is form, and in the case of government sites, having easy navigation, accessibility and relevant content is far _far_ more important than being pretty.

Sadly, most UK government sites are both ugly and horrible to navigate. Or at least that was the trend until recently, thankfully it seems some of those organisations are starting to re-fit their site.

<comment><USER10> But users who perceive a site to be "pretty" will usually experience it as easier to use than an uglier site, even if the uglier site is easier to use structurally. "Pretty" often translates to "easy," because users trust the design more.

<comment><USER9> Interesting point. I hadn't considered that kind of psychological effect but it does seem plausible given the perverse subconscious crap that people perceive (wine tasters listing off red wine flavors when tasting red-died white wine, miracle healing properties of placebo drugs, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> UX fail: Big useless slider/carouse with the slide captions obscured under the huge pics, way under the fold... and to prevent this big fat carousel from being too low on the page (...but it still is), _useful services links are one click away under that 'other services' button, instead of being able to just scroll to them!_

...it's amazing how many people totally miss the point of sliders/carousels/slideshows: to sell profitable products or showcase _important_ site content! _if_ you use them, put them at the page top and have relevant captions with links that people actually click.

<comment><USER12> That's what they are doing -- they are trying to "sell" adoption and a city festival.

<comment><USER13> Really? I didn't notice. The caption was under the slider, and I couldn't see it. I just saw some picture of a family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Similar: <https://www.gov.uk/>

[http://storify.com/GovUK/gov-uk-wins-design-of-the-year- awar...](http://storify.com/GovUK/gov-uk-wins-design-of-the-year-award)

<comment><USER15> gov.uk looks like a domain squatter webpage :)

<comment><USER16> I must like that look then :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't mind a bit of design, as long as the design is fully functional for EVERYONE that needs to use it.

Yes, that means people using older browsers/machines, users with restricted vision, anyone that requires access to a council website, or requires information about council services. On IE7, this website works, but it takes a very long time to load, probably because the home page is 1MB, with just under 950k of this being images, and this isn't acceptable. The average user couldn't care less if the site looks nice, or is aesthetically pleasing, or if they are using a browser that StatCounter claim is at 1% worldwide. They want their information.

I picked up a council project a few years ago, where an agency had built a nice looking website. However, it had not been tested using screen readers or tested using a focus group. After a few months they had received complaints about users using screen readers not being able to read the pages regarding council services for visually-impaired people.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but if the site is designed poorly then the user will spend as much time trying to figure out how to navigate around it than they would waiting for this modern version to download. I'm not saying the new one is easier to use, but you get my point.

<comment><USER17> A basic site doesn't have to be designed poorly. My opposition is against design for the sake of designing, and in turn code for code's sake. A page doesn't always need to be loaded to the brim with JavaScript, and a home page doesn't always need a slider.

A good designer will create the bare minimum for a functional site, and a good developer will use the best tools for the job, instead of the tools that everyone else uses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Title: "Manchester City Council" which links to a the website of MCC. Is that supposed to be sufficient to explain why this is on HN?

<comment><USER20> I think the title was changed; the original one was something like "All institutional webpages should be like this one"

<comment><USER21> The original title was "How government sites should be designed".

<comment><USER22> changing it was a bad decision IMO.

Without the context this submission makes no sense at all.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the title changing has gotten seriously out of hand lately. I don't get it either, it's not like the original title was confusing (unlike the new title).

<comment><USER24> I was thinking the same. Could a mod elaborate on this please?

<comment><USER25> I don't know that any of them will actually respond … a number of people have been complaining about this, and I can't recall a time when they've responded at all, let alone with anything reasoned, or reasonable. But it's ridiculous.

The best word I have for it is that it feels paternalistic. I think there are many occasions where HN commenters write dumb things and reflect on themselves poorly. And in many cases, the original title of the linked page is fine. But people writing blog posts (or just titling demo pages or other sites, like the one linked here) aren't writing their titles with the intent that their title will give context to the readers of a random forum. It's bizarre that HN mods change the titles, and I really wish they would stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No. Goverment web sites should be minimal design & content - black text on white background, no extra graphics. I don't want to pay taxes so that these latte-sipping designers can create cool projects.

<comment><USER27> You want government websites to look like a domain-squatter's page: <https://www.gov.uk/> ?

<comment><USER28> This is the most good-looking gov. web I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While in general I approve of the policy here of renaming posts to match the title of the page, the change here done by the mods (to simply "Manchester City Council") makes the whole discussion make no sense. (The original title was "How government sites should be designed".)

<comment><USER29> This wouldn't have happened if the original submission had followed the site guidelines[1]:

> If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about > it and submit that instead.

I view it as similar to Wikipedia's "no original research" policy.

[1]: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER24> If we're gonna follow the guidelines, then the Boston bombing was entirely off-topic and should have been removed immediately instead of getting thousands of points. The only Boston-related on-topic story was Bruce Schneier's view on it, which is also the reason why the other stories should _not_ have been on HN.

> _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV > news, it's probably off-topic._

Edit: Well that was a quick downvote. Guess the Boston bombing strikes a nerve. But is it so hard to be objective about it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It looks lovely. But it's hard to find things. Consequently it's not how a _government_ website should be designed.

Try finding, for example, the cost of a planning application. It's a few clicks away from the home page, which is fine given that it's reasonably logical if you can spot the initial starting point on the homepage ... but the search is poor. For the terms "cost of planning", a link to [http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200074/planning/5865/plann...](http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200074/planning/5865/planning/4) is hidden at the 6th result in a page of links that's essentially a wall of text. Search results are likely to be a very important part of a large data driven site, so they should be _much_ better.

<comment><USER16> If you search for "cost of planning application" it's on the first result - <USER2> the context of a council website "cost of planning" could mean lots of things (e.g. how much do they spend on managing planning across the entire organisation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am really amazed how most of the comments assume that beautiful sites cannot provide the same amount of information as their uglier counterparts.

<comment><USER32> Most beautiful sites can. This one does not.

Those icons are confusing. Click expand to see the whole list together. What a mess! Ideally they should be using glyphs with much bolder lines, or if they're really set on using the current ones, place each on a solid white circle. Right now they blend in with the text and seem to add to the overall visual noise.

Scrolling down the page, why the hell am I looking at a gigantic picture of a girl staring back at me? That image would be better placed on an interior decorating portfolio, not a city council website. Ideally the images shouldn't be so large and vague, but if they're set on using it, they should've overlayed the image with its headline in a large white font (currently relegated to the invisible location of below the image)

I have issues with their color scheme too. I think most governmental websites should use white as their dominant color, for clarity's sake. GOV.UK is a website that is worth aspiring towards, not this. Very much not this.

<comment><USER31> > Those icons are confusing. Click expand to see the whole list together. What > a mess! Ideally they should be using glyphs with much bolder lines, or if > they're really set on using the current ones, place each on a solid white > circle. Right now they blend in with the text and seem to add to the overall > visual noise.

I always prefer iconic interfaces as compared to the ones with just text. Try to think of one thing that you would like to find and go to gov.uk and then to manchester.gov.uk. See which one is easier to find

Icons vs Labels vs Both: <http://edwardsanchez.me/blog/13589712>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me at least, <http://gov.uk> is a lot better - it's far more minimal and puts the information first, whereas I can't help but feel that this Manchester City Council site is more about the sexy design that it is about usability and actually giving you the information you want.

</comment><comment><USER34> How come this and all .gov.uk sites mentioned in the comments include Google Analytics scripts?

I would imagine that the sharing of the data collected on government websites with 3rd parties be rather strictly regulated. Especially when it's collected as a part of a tracking infrastructure that spans beyond said sites.

<comment><USER35> I recall last year the Uk wanted to integrate mandatory Facebook logins into all their sites. Looks like they've since dropped that idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In The Netherlands these two sites score very high every year: <http://www.capelleaandenijssel.nl/> <http://cms.dordrecht.nl/> They contain a lot more useful information above the fold than the linked one.

Good design involves a lot more than eye candy.

<comment><USER37> How do you find anything on those two pages without first mentally parsing the layouts? On the first link, the search bar is in the middle of the damned page, even though the site seems designed around search (meaningful static nav is confined to one element, the Information mouseover at the top)!

By comparison, the manchester site is dead simple, and search is at the top corner where it should be. That style of design reduces content areas (with a corresponding boost to element/object/image size, since there's less stuff competing for the space). Call it eye candy, but it's a lot easier to use for people who aren't used to visually parsing complex page designs.

My problem with the manchester site is the poor use of vertical space, and some of the icon choices, not the basic design style.

<comment><USER36> _"... search is at the top corner where it should be."_ Did you ever visit the Google homepage? Why should search be at the top corner?

I don't know if you understand Dutch but since text is part of the interface maybe this is why you are having issues with the design?

 _"My problem with the manchester site is the poor use of vertical space, not the basic design style."_ Well I was talking about exactly this. The Manchester site may look nice but it is lacking overview. Design is more than looks. It is also about text, interaction and so on.

<comment><USER37> The search box goes in a top corner normally because putting it elsewhere disrupts the content layout or takes unnecessarily long to find. If there's no other content, the search box can go anywhere.

I use google chrome which translates the page well enough for me to understand.

There are too many visually distinct sections on those Dutch websites for someone who isn't familiar with the site to find anything quickly. There are non-tech-savvy folks for whom anything more complex than the manchester site, or Google's front page search box, is too complex for them to deal with. They wouldn't be able to visually scan the Dutch pages for what they want. Whether it's lack of technical familiarity, lack of attention span, or something else, I don't know. Lots of text divided up into arbitrary sections simply doesn't work well for them.

How is the manchester site lacking an overview? It has four major categories near the top, another tier of categories which expands into 20 categories with one click, and if that doesn't find what you're looking for, or you're lazy, you can type what you want into the conveniently located search box.

I agree that the manchester site be improved (most of the stuff at the bottom should be eliminated or turned into links in the top bar), but I think it's closer to ideal than the two sites you linked are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Encouraging change! Typically before entering a any .gov site something like this goes in my head:

"I'm about to enter a boring website that makes getting to a point super challenging unless you read tons of word documents."

On entering manchester.gov.uk

"Oh look at this! They did a recent update to their design. It feels fresh and trendy. Maybe they actually care. Maybe they were able to update their information architecture as well! There is hope that I won't have to spend an hour reading a bunch of text."

The majority of government websites are very apathetic and poorly implemented. I am very happy to see that this is starting to change!

</comment><comment><USER39> If you are interested in this take a look at: <https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples>

[http://www.designweek.co.uk/analysis/govuk-goes- worldwide/30...](http://www.designweek.co.uk/analysis/govuk-goes- worldwide/3036144.article)

<comment><USER40> Good call, I was also going to mention this until I saw your comment.

It appears there are many UK city sites that are trying to implement these principles. Given that the principles include accessibility guidelines [0] and transparency of intent [1], I'd prefer to see more city sites designed this way. (That is if the sites in question faithfully implement the design principles)

Regarding the site OP linked, even if a little glossy, it's certainly not a disaster of usability. In fact, I tend to believe in the aesthetic-usability effect [2] in the case of not-so-design-savvy users, the added sheen might actually motivate them to use the city portal more often.

[0]<https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples#sixth> [1]<https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples#tenth> [2]<http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design_at.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I personally think the redesigned site for my county (Wake County, NC) is far, far superior. It looks nice -- not quite as "modern startup" as the Manchester site -- but is so much easier to use.

<http://www.wakegov.com/>

<comment><USER42> I'm not a big fan of the huge menus, but every time I've had to use the Wake site I've been able to find what I need pretty quickly.

One improvement would be an auto-complete feature on the main search box, but I think I'm in a pretty small minority that would benefit from that.

<comment><USER41> I agree completely, on both counts. I think I've used it for the few things I use it for, enough times to have just memorized what's where. It's definitely a huge improvement over the old site, regardless!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm going to go against the HN grain and say that it's great. Frequent complaints I hear about local authority websites boil down to: 1\. Too much top-level navigation - choice is confusing. 2\. No idea which information is in which section.

This one gets you to (what they believe to be) the most-commonly requested issues instantly, and gives you a quick idea of what you can find in each section. This is the perfect place for search results suggestions too. Remember, most visitors to these sites are not going to be frequent users - they won't have the time or inclination to learn a more complex system.

I don't think it's perfect, but I think it's a great idea that just needs a bit of extra polish.

</comment><comment><USER44> Please tell me you're joking.

The #1 priority of government websites should be _accessibility_ , not looking cool with whatever garbage unusable web trends are popular du jour and supported by only a handful of desktop browsers running on modern hardware.

<comment><USER45> Totally agree. All I see is the web site equivalent of William Hague in a baseball cap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The amount of hate against design work is high in the last days. For every programmer here trying to be a DESIGN CRITIQUE: Do you know that annoying type of intern that thinks he knows more than you about programming even when you have 20 years more experience?

You right now.

242 points means that the Design is a success. So stop being a dick, you're not better than anyone for pointing failures that doesn't exist.

If you really want to critique Design work, at least make sure you understand everything said here: <http://ia.net/blog/learning-to-see/>

<comment><USER47> > 242 points means that the Design is a success

No, 242 points means that the design critique is a successful conversation engager. I upvoted to give "government sites should give function more importance than form" more visibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The only reason that this has been driven up to the top of HN is because of its title. If it had been titled "A Nicely Designed Government Site", it would have gone nowhere.

As for the site, I can't see how the navigation would have me pulling out any fewer hairs than any other government site, but it is very large, multicolored and slidey, so if I were putting together an iPad commercial I might use it in a couple of shots.

<comment><USER49> I'm sure it all depends on what info you're after. But the site here have the typical info that people are after regarding the gouvernment on the front page. Most of the links there are related to the reasons we have government at all.

That's not how most government sites are structured in my experience, though I'm not from the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What I typically go to a council website to do: find out the cost of council tax in band D in 2013-14.

I am still clicking around... can anyone find it, I wonder?

<comment><USER51> Yup. Click on "Council Tax" on the homepage... then "Can't find it? Other council tax services"... then "See your council tax band" (Rounded red button)

<comment><USER50> So you're 3 clicks deep (having searched around a bit, I guess) and you still don't have a number...

<comment><USER43> That's not too bad for an information-dense site. You've not had many page loads.

Plus, you can find it very easily by putting "council tax band" into the search box.

<comment><USER50> Maybe you think "very easily", but I searched around for 10 minutes unable to find the numerical information required. I had concluded it didn't exist in tabulated form, so thanks for confirming I was wrong - although I'm still not sure if this is accessible via natural links.

Here's a particularly unhelpful FAQ, which says the data is "displayed on our web pages" [http://www.manchester.gov.uk/faqs/faq/19013/what_can_i_do_if...](http://www.manchester.gov.uk/faqs/faq/19013/what_can_i_do_if_my_property_has_not_yet_been_put_into_a_council_tax_band)

What I find bad about that - is that I know my way around a website, and I couldn't find the required information. I found it with ease on other council website suggested in the comments (Lambeth, Gateshead, Birmingham: all 2-3 links deep)

If we want people to look for information on the web rather than blocking council call centres: this website is not the right way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I feel like it's a step improvement, and will help people use the site.

However, what I'd have really liked to see is machine readable minutes of the council.

This is something that's a bit of a bug bear having ended up setting up a project awhile back to try and bring-out the minutes etc of the council meetings. We called it MCC Work For You: <https://code.google.com/p/mcc-work- for-you/> Sadly within the confines of a hackday we couldn't get as much progress as we'd have liked. However, as a proof of concept it was useful, and did inspire @CountCulture to go forward with his site: <http://openlylocal.com/>

I'd really like to see progress in this area, and the encouragement of councils to make progress with making the minutes readable. Definitely helpful for investigative journalists, as well exposing the good work of councillors.

I wonder if there's a plan somewhere for this? I couldn't find it on the site.....

<comment><USER52> Lots of pdfs with no alternatives here: <http://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/scripts/meetings_index.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I am becoming more and more a fan of the Jeckyll trend for front-facing web sites for government. I believe Hawaii.gov just rolled out their new site and it looks fantastic.

The Manchester city page is certainly better than a number of government sites I've seen in the past, (kudos) but might benefit from a bit better economy of screen real estate.

</comment><comment><USER54> I personally don't like this. 1) I don't like this style even when web startups do it... too much vertical scrolling, empty space, giant images, and icons; and 2) it just looks weird for a serious site to look like a web startup.

This is a modern government website design I like better: <http://www.kk.dk>

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm the front end technical lead for a major department in a top 10 U.S. State (that's all I can say). As much as I love the way that certain public sector entities are embracing modern design principles for their sites, there is a balance to be struck.

Form always follows function when it comes to design, and when it comes to government, function requires that the site is as accessible as possible.

Color selection, JavaScript use, and extended backwards compatibility with older browsers are among the the many considerations one has to take into account for the elderly, the impaired, and those who simply don't have access to modern browsers. That being said, it's definitely possible to have stunning design with these things taken into account, we just can't implement every bell and whistle we're used to.

<comment><USER56> "that's all I can say".

Lame. Put your money where your mouth is. It wouldn't take much work to find out just which State department has got Deloitte in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I love some of the new gov sites. Yes, there are some problems, but compared to the god-awful mess we had before they're amazing.

It's important to have good machines for development. But I wonder how many people have terrible machines for testing.

As for local government: Here's an example. Gloucestershire (<http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/resident>) - imagine you want to report a child at risk. The search gives you useful results, but also sends you to the Safeguarding children website. (<http://www.gscb.org.uk/>)

The Gloucestershire site is good[1] and the GSCB site is terrible.

[1] for some values of good, including 'you should have seen it a few years ago'.

</comment><comment><USER58> Looks really nice, but at first I thought I needed to scroll down to see the other services instead of clicking the button first. After clicking, it was clear to me that this obviously is a button. But this wasn't my understanding when I saw the page at first. Anybody else had the same issue?

When I go to a service, for example "Roads, parking & transport" and I go to the bottom of the page there is a section called "Policies, statements & resources". Now I need to click it in order to see the items, why not have it in this state by default? I've checked some of the other pages and there never really are a lot of links underneath there anyway, so this won't make the pages a lot longer.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is just this week's trend, it'll look really dated by the end of the year. And yes it does look like an off the shelf theme.

A government site has a job to do, primarily to provide information and contact details, this is more suited to someone peddling organic food.

</comment><comment><USER60> The site tries too hard to be eye-catching, and like other commenters have already stated, looks like the latest, trendiest WordPress theme.

Gov't sites should maybe be the opposite of this: as little art as possible and squeaky clean navigation getting you to your desired municipal information as possible so you can do what you came to do then get on with your day.

Anything else is _distracting_.

The designer and developers behind this are talented, of course, and to sell a redesign often involves these sort of hero shots and contemporary flourishes. But a bigger accomplishment would have been to pitch and win a design that is minimally invasive and efficient.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm pretty happy with our government's website. The first few versions where a complete data overload and looked liked they were made in MS Excel. Now its pretty fresh and well structured in my opinion. link: www.eesti.ee

</comment><comment><USER62> I totally love that there is a link that says "Report dumped Rubbish" on that site! That is fantastic. I am not sure if the preteen girl was thinking about adoption or the adoptee, but otherwise I think the site is great.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think this takes mobile first a bit too far. On my desktop with a high resolution this feels a bit odd. That said, it's really refreshing to see government sites properly designed and UX and mobile friendly.

</comment><comment><USER64> Looking past the knee-jerk reaction to "this design looks expensive", would love to see how the Manchester Council site performs from a service design perspective. How do local residents use the site? Can they find what they need quickly and easily, from both a desktop and a mobile?

I'm betting yes, and the cost saved (in terms of time, frustration and maybe money) over a poorly designed yet inexpensive-looking site will be worthwhile.

Side note: Would love to see a blog post about the thought behind the design, either from the design agency or the web manager at Manchester...

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure of that all. First of all, is the contect well indexed for search engines? At first glance, doesn't look like it is.

When I need information related to goverment services, first thing where I look are search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Looks like a template as <http://KashFlow.com> seems eerily similar. Better that than a custom design though, I imagine it saved a fair bit of money.

<comment><USER8> They look very similar but the markup is quite different (KashFlow is a Wordpress blog, Manchester is "Jadu CMS") so I don't think they just used a template unless they went back to the original PSDs.

FWIW, <http://www.jadu.net> are the agency who made the Manchester site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Government websites need to start with the user. What's the point of showing all the information if it's not relevant ? What's the point of showing me permits that only apply to residents, if they don't apply to a business owner ? What's the point of showing me tax information if I'm a tourist ? They shouldn't make you look at all that. They should make it easy. 3 buttons to start with : resident, tourist, business. Add 3 photo to make it attractive and a few language choices.

</comment><comment><USER67> On my screen size and browser chrome, the little girl's eyes are just above the bottom of the browser window. With the rest of the picture out of focus, it looks positively creepy.

</comment><comment><USER68> It's good to hear that governments start to pay attention to the UX. Their webpages are just the first step to making the govt services better.

</comment><comment><USER69> Since this is a UK Government site, I think the Equality Act 2010 requires WCAG 2.0 AA compliance. As difficult as WCAG is, and I've yet to see a fully- passed implementation, the lack of no-JavaScript support probably means they haven't met the accessibility mark. All that aside, I actually like the design, seems they got their IA in order, with a good prioritisation of content.

</comment><comment><USER70> What's with the last image in the carousel? It seems to take strong cues from soviet propaganda.

The red flag, workers holding their tools, ready to fight. Did Manchester become the Soviet Republic of Manchester?

[http://img0083.popscreencdn.com/101036667_amazoncom- chinese-...](http://img0083.popscreencdn.com/101036667_amazoncom-chinese- american-people-propaganda-poster-home.jpg)

<comment><USER57> People in the UK are fine with such images. Soviet imagery (usually fake cyrillic with reversed capital Rs) makes its way into advertisements and such pretty often.

Most youth will only be vaguely aware of the origins of that style of imagery.

It is a bit weird, now that I think about it. It's a bit like Korean bars being "Hitler themed".

It would have been a lot more weird if they were showcasing actual Manchester City Council workers.

EDIT: Here's a great book about soviet political posters. I won an award at school, and I chose this book. It was handed to me by, I think, Baroness Warnock. I can't remember what she said, but it was kind and funny.

([http://www.amazon.com/The-Soviet-Political- Poster-1917-1980/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Soviet-Political- Poster-1917-1980/dp/0140081879))

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Its pretty good for a government website, but the more I dig around the more I find a lack of attention to detail. For example, switch the theme to creme and many elements break: [http://www.adamwintledesign.com/screenshots/Manchester_City_...](http://www.adamwintledesign.com/screenshots/Manchester_City_Council_Homepage-20130503-011017.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER72> This changing the title thing really needs to stop. This title is completely useless to spur the discussion that the original one did.

</comment><comment><USER73> I know the students who put it together probably thought it was cute, but the "Join the Apprentice Revolution!" photo[1] strikes me as rather tasteless, given the ideology and events that inspired it.

[1] [http://www.manchester.gov.uk/images/75583_Apprenticeships_ba...](http://www.manchester.gov.uk/images/75583_Apprenticeships_banner_1000x550px.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER74> The swiss gov info portal is quite decent too <https://www.ch.ch/en/>

<comment><USER75> It's an interesting new take (new to me) on responsive design too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> In Australia, as of now, the website of every council presents the same information in a different way. What's required here is a consistent UI across the entire .gov sites.

Government sites by default need to cater for every edge case in terms of accessibility, and so functional takes precedence over pretty every time.

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm sure everyone else is aware of how local government websites look in their own parts of the world - but for a similar-sized UK city Edinburgh City Council's website is a good (i.e. bad) example for comparison: <http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk>

<comment><USER16> I honestly don't mind the Edinburgh site - I'd rather they focus on content and functionality rather than changing it every year to comply with the latest design fad.

<comment><USER77> True but nobody's saying they should - it's just a good example of a cluttered and disorganised website

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I'd prefer most government sites not designed at all, rather apis. And for whatever sites actually needed user input, etc just a header and form tag will suffice. I'm also in the minority which finds most modern web design intrusive. I want to use the service, not look at your art project.

</comment><comment><USER79> <https://www.gov.uk/> looks like a better example.

</comment><comment><USER80> It's pretty, but go and try to solve the problem "I want to see what library is open today so that I can take my kids there".

The best I could do involved clicking through to find a local library and then an alphabetical list that forces you to click through on each letter.

</comment><comment><USER81> Try to keep things in perspective - for a government site it is truly impressive. The usability should be the most important issue and in that category I Manchester did a bang up job. I'm impressed - and no framework it appears, the css is custom then?

</comment><comment><USER82> [http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200028/council_tax/5615/ge...](http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200028/council_tax/5615/get_a_council_tax_discount_or_exemption_or_claim_benefit) 404 - not so sure

</comment><comment><USER83> I'm not sure the accessibility is 100% correct. I think you should be able to use the tab key to get to the links but tabbing skips the top row of icons... Which aren't technically hyperlinks I suppose..

<comment><USER83> And some of the images don't have alt text. I think that's important as well

<comment><USER84> Not all images need alt text. See the documentation from the spec[1].

[1]: [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/embedded-content-1.html#the-img-element)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I can't believe how many upvotes this difficult to navigate website has.

</comment><comment><USER86> Design is nice, but "baaaam" too much for what the page is and for who the page is. Why i have to click to open the services? Better show them directly.

</comment><comment><USER87> I think the design of this site is very good, using modern styles and code, however I do personally find it a little "In your face." as it were.

</comment><comment><USER88> Beautiful design, bad navigation. Not bad in the sense that it is difficult to learn, but bad because I have to learn it (if that makes sense).

</comment><comment><USER89> It would surely be better if all government websites adhered to a predefined structure, layout and general look/feel standard.

<comment><USER90> It's interesting to see many local government websites now have a section of their website called "do it online" with sub-headings of "pay it online", "report it online", "request it online". It all seems a bit weird to me but there's obviously some communication channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I half expected to see a disclaimer, "We use biscuits on your computer or mobile device to help make this website better."

</comment><comment><USER92> Another example of a well-designed gov't site:

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

</comment><comment><USER93> This page is a bit of a mess <http://cl.ly/image/203V2O40372b>

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm just going to leave this right here: <http://shetland.gov.uk>

<comment><USER95> It times out at the moment, we may have killed it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Great design.

I don't know the rules in the UK, but shouldn't the site work without JavaScript enabled (For the visually impaired)?

</comment><comment><USER97> I like this site. The theming is broken though. When you choose creme, it messes up some of the layout elements

</comment><comment><USER98> It's quite pretty, but I worry it's a bit cutesy. Lego people next to a link for reporting child abuse?

</comment><comment><USER99> If there were more sites like this, I'd visit them by pure pleasure from time to time

</comment><comment><USER100> I believe the "/ home / ... " toolbar should be on every pages first page included.

</comment><comment><USER101> A great example is www.miamidade.gov It's simple and designed to get things done.

</comment><comment><USER102> I couldn't dismiss the cookie message on Chrome for Android on my Galaxy Nexus.

</comment><comment><USER103> The slowest site ever and it is in sync with how government works :-)

</comment><comment><USER104> Definitely, I really like the layout and use of modern styles.

</comment><comment><USER105> I wonder if they did a proper usability test on this website?

</comment><comment><USER106> not gonna nitpick because this is the first government site that actually looks decent.

</comment><comment><USER107> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER108> I'm going to regard all the negative comments on here as failed attempts of understanding Britishness.</comment>


Fred Dibnah – Steeplejack (1979) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBQrcKF5_rA <comment><USER2> If anyone is wondering how he got the ladders up the side of the chimney in the first place:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e0C57orM1s&t=10m25s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e0C57orM1s&t=10m25s)

I rediscovered Fred on YouTube a couple of years ago, and spent _far_ too much time watching pretty much everything I could find.

As the title suggests, watching the overhang climb in this is enough to make you feel dizzy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg)

<comment><USER3> Wow. Can't believe I've never seen that overhang climb video before. Found it hard to watch - I just can't imagine doing anything like that. But extremely impressive.

<comment><USER4> And 50 years old as well. He just looks like a tubby little fellow but I bet he's hard as nails under the overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His idea of a holiday was to knock a chimney down in Blackpool in exchange for a new boiler while his family went to the beach.

<comment><USER4> Yeah - that didn't work out too well for him. From his Telegraph obituary [1]:

"Dibnah did not much care for holidays and never wanted to go abroad. Alison, stoic for years, decided that there was more to life than climbing chimneys. She took their children on a package holiday to Greece, and on her return moved out with them."

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1476086/Fred- Dibn...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1476086/Fred-Dibnah.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Huge Fred fan here. A great example of a life spend doing what he loved and loving what he did. The rest of us could learn a lot from him.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was an avid fan of Fred when he was regularly on UK TV.

A quality unlikely to be appreciated outside the UK, but his "Yorkshireness" is superb.

<comment><USER8> but his "Yorkshireness" is superb.

He was Lancastrian. It's minor detail but as a Yorkshireman I felt compelled to correct you.

<comment><USER7> Bloody hell, you're right! _Existential crisis ensues_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it wasn't necessarily _what_ he did (steam engines, chimneys, etc.) even though that was pretty interesting in itself, but his attitude and infectious enthusiasm.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fred had a working replica coal mine in his back garden. Here is the full programme on Youtube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcH4nY43msk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcH4nY43msk)

</comment><comment><USER11> I went to school with Fred's Nephew!

Fred was well known around the area as a steam-machine-tinkerer extraordinaire.

</comment><comment><USER3> An amazingly enthusiastic and talented man, and a wonderful/revealing snapshot of (mostly) northern England during the 70s.

<comment><USER12> Truely. Self taught and brilliant at what he did.

Though I know the ending, I still get nervous watching him on the top of dodgy smokestacks with no safety equipment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure I shouldn't be spending my Monday morning watching this, but his enthusiasm is infectious. Also, the last thing I'd expect to see on HN, not that I mind.

<comment><USER14> indeed, and I'm (just about) old enough to remember this from the first time around. what on earth do people from America make of this? Mind you, they must have had chimneys over there to knock down too, so 'appen they had their own Fred to do it

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I saw him bring down a chimney in Leigh as a school outing. Marvellous.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fred was great. I used to love watching his programs when we moved 'down south' in my early teens.

From the overhang video: "Up here, if you make one mistake, it's half a day out with the undertaker"

Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER17> Absolutely loved watching Fred growing up. Interesting seeing it on HN, but I'm just glad it means a few more people can appreciate this amazing man.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I posted it in response to the robotic bricklayer. Semi-tangential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the last projects he embarked on before dying was to try and build a replica coal mine (with the help of a handful of friends) in his back garden. I believe there's a single episode made before the local council put the kibosh on things :(

Edit: Full hour long episode: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcH4nY43msk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcH4nY43msk)

</comment><comment><USER19> Amazing guy!

</comment><comment><USER20> It's the infectious enthusiasm that draws me in. He was an awesome man.

I see some of the same qualities in Guy Martin's presenting style.

<comment><USER21> Yes! I'm glad someone else notices the similarities. Both suck-it-and-see northerners (though I think Martin comes from Grimsby, not Lancs.)</comment></comment>


SAS awarded $80m damages in trial against World Programming Ltd - <AUTHOR> http://www.sas.com/en_us/news/press-releases/2015/october/wpl-damage-award.html?utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=press-release <comment><USER2> This looks like an important story, but it would be better to find a more substantive source than a press release. Is there one?

<comment><AUTHOR> The media is picking it up now: [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article39163671.ht...](http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article39163671.html)</comment></comment>


Computer Vision Research: The deep "depression" - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/computer-vision-research-my-deep-depression-nikos-paragios <comment><USER3> > Other than a handful number of people doing some fundamental research > towards understanding the theoretical concepts of these methods, almost all > the community now seems to target the development of more complex pipelines > (that most likely cannot be reproduced based on the elements presented in > the paper) which in most of the cases have almost no theoretical reasoning > behind that can add 0,1% of performance on a given benchmark. Is this the > objective of academic research? Putting in place highly complex engineering > models that simply explore computing power and massive annotated data?

I last dabbled in image processing research around 2011. Probably most of the papers i read during the previous 5 years were small little epsilon papers that added no real value. I did some work in other fields and noticed a similar trend there. I always attributed it to the trend of PhDs being pumped through the system in ever greater numbers and the need for researchers to publish a paper every few months.

<comment><USER4> This happened to me. I developed a computer vision technique that achieved a well known result but without the same constraints. Although it never surpassed the other technique for most images, it worked in a wide variety of cases that the previous technique did not.

My major professor diluted the paper and added other content consistent with the previous method. Not just adding prior art to the introduction, but changing the meat of the paper so that it didn't seem like a departure.

He assured me that this would make it easier to publish, and publishing was all that mattered. There were no bonus points for publishing a novel technique, and there would certainly be extra work having to deal with referees.

I'm very glad to be out of that environment now. I noped out of academia and happily dealing with corporate B.S.

<comment><USER5> Having dropped out of University while studying Computer Vision, i've witnessed this much too often in former friends and colleagues.

Smart people doing remarkable things don't seem to have a place in our society anymore, neither in academia nor in the private economy. Sure there are exceptions.

Microsoft Research, Google X and of course a handful of universities that actually work as they are supposed to, but for most of my ex colleague's these weren't real options as noone ever instilled the courage in them to find their way there, or survive the competition.

It's strange that most of them are building CRUD Software, Writing Shaders for Game Engines or work in marketing, instead of pushing us towards breakthroughs in CV and with that AI.

<comment><USER6> I keep having that same thought. However, making a breakthrough requires 2 things:

1\. Resources. Time and money. These research ventures might take years and sometimes need some funding in addition to your own salary. It is basically borderline impossible for most developers to contribute anything useful in an environment where they need to worry about paying their bills for this month.

2\. Know-how. Right now, most industries have advanced so much that you need very specialized knowledge and a metric fuckton of math/stats to contribute to any particular field in any significant way. A developer with a BS in CS can most often not even understand the papers being currently published due to the high math/specialized required knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Machine learning gives performance without theoretical undertstanding. Norvig discusses Chomsky on machine learning in linguistics: [http://norvig.com/chomsky.html](http://norvig.com/chomsky.html)

> I mean actually you could do physics this way, instead of studying things > like balls rolling down frictionless planes, which can't happen in nature, > if you took a ton of video tapes of what's happening outside my office > window, let's say, you know, leaves flying and various things, and you did > an extensive analysis of them, you would get some kind of prediction of > what's likely to happen next, certainly way better than anybody in the > physics department could do. Well that's a notion of success which is I > think novel, I don't know of anything like it in the history of science. > [from the linked transcript]

<comment><USER8> >Machine learning gives performance without theoretical undertstanding.

that is good experimental data and the role of theorists here is to look how that performance achieved and why. For example, one can reasonably suspect that there is a good reason why the kernels in a well trained image recognition deep learning net do look like receptive fields of neurons in visual cortex. I'm pretty sure that there is some kind of statistical optimality in that, something similar to like normal distribution is maximum entropy distribution for a given standard variation. The same way i'd guess Gabor of neuron receptive field is something like maximum entropy on the set of all possible edges or something like this. The point here is that the great success of deep learning generates a lot of very good data for theorists to consume. You can do only so much theory without good experimental data, and in the decades before the availability of computing power (and resulting success of deep learning) there wasn't that much of the computer vision theory advances to speak about, really.

>leaves flying and various things

Newton did that for 20 years. With great success.

<comment><USER9> Here's a problem: you can argue that Gabor filters arise _because we design neural nets to encourage them_. Gabor filters mostly arise in CNN or things otherwise regularized to be like CNNs. Convolutional layers are a form of regularization that restrict the space of models that a network can conform to. The Gabor filters are learned but none of this is evidence they are globally "optimal" given that a human manually decided whether or not to include the presence of convolutions.

It also goes without saying that the phrase "statistically optimal" is meaningless in this specific context. You _can_ claim they are a part of minimizing the cost function, but, again, you have to be very careful about the chicken and egg problem, because humans are the ones who manually craft the cost function.

<comment><USER10> You might find this 1996 Nature paper by Olshausen & Field interesting. In it, they describe how a coding strategy that maximizes spareness when representing natural scenes is enough to produce a family of localized, oriented, bandpass receptive fields, like those found in the early visual system of humans.

[https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse528/11sp/Olshau...](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse528/11sp/Olshausen- nature-paper.pdf)

<comment><USER9> This fits in with my point: they imposed several restrictions about the model space: maximizing sparseness, and they also make several linearity assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would hardly say that deep learning has taken over - some of the best results in the last few years have come from 'classical' domains like nonlinear optimization.

For example, LSD-SLAM: [http://vision.in.tum.de/research/vslam/lsdslam](http://vision.in.tum.de/research/vslam/lsdslam)

Deep learning / ML approaches certainly have a place, and they're getting a lot of attention right now, but the computer vision domain is about a lot more than segmentation and classification.

Maybe in coming years we'll see some more breakthroughs from the ML side on encoding priors - for example, teaching a network about projective geometry is a lot worse than just structuring it in a way that it 'knows' what projective geometry is. This could result in a closer collaboration between the two fields.

<comment><USER12> Wow, the video you linked is awesome. I would love to see how it would handle a huge dataset of something like time square footage.

<comment><USER11> You might be interested in Prof. Marc Pollefeys' work: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827854](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827854)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was a Computer Vision Phd student until I dropped out in 2007. I wasn't very good, but a lot of what he says now was also true back then too. A field lacking any agreed on underlying theory, driven by fads, un-reproducable papers, massive volumes of forgettable papers by an inexplicably growing population of CV researchers with dim professional prospects.

Yet there are still people out there working against the tide trying to find a 'unified' theory of what's going on, granted with limited success or support. Some argued at the time that the problem is simply too difficult to tackle with our statistical 'tricks' and computing power. It's somewhat disheartening that folks are still grumbling about the same things 10 years after I left.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've seen the exact trend in the field of optics where engineering work has replaced science.

The fundamental problem is that funding is given to those who promise the best outcome ("device that can recognize cancer") rather than the truth ("Where is the data located in an HBM").

Now, engineering work isn't bad, but today's university still has relics from a previous generation, like research papers. Hence, we're left with a bunch of research papers with little scientific content. The only fix I can think of is to offer useful alternatives to the PhD and prefer or mandate other markers of achievement like patents instead of research papers.

<comment><USER15> Is this a result of "hacker culture"? I.e. there seems to be a a pathological trend on HN of "fuck a CS degree, I can learn to code in a week" type of mentality. You have people who believe they can "hack" their way through complex fields without having a theoretical underpinning in it. No need to learn mathematics, you just need to "understand the main idea", code something up, run a bunch of simulations and tweak constants, run more simulations, etc. until you have some incremental improvement, write it up and publish.

It's the difference between giving a "brute force" computer proof like the four color theorem than try and come up with new theory where it's just a result from it.

<comment><USER14> No. I think its really the mindset of higher ranking people (professors) who due to funding or conflict-of-interest are motivated to do engineering rather then science.

Most folks I know are desperate to do actual science, experimental or theoretical. Instead, they optimizing some procedure/protocol.

<comment><USER16> you hit the nail on the head.

if someone wants to do science, there is no one stopping them from doing science.

if someone comes to someone with their hands out, then theres going to be strings attached.

<comment><USER17> > if someone wants to do science, there is no one stopping them from doing > science.

The copyright laws for scientific articles are. I just link to Aaron Swartz' Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: [https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto](https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto) [https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt) [https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...](https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf)

<comment><USER18> It is an important point in principle that should be solved.

However, in practice that isn't an issue:

1) At least in this domain, all publications are de facto open access, as in, if you just google the name of a paper in a random citation in 99% cases you will get a non-paywalled full text version - if not from the actual place of publication, then on arxiv, author's home page, etc. It's not _totally_ appropriate as there could be differences, but it's definitely enough to say "there is no one stopping them from doing science".

2) If you do actually need access to the university library databases for paywalled articles, then just go to the library. If you want to do science, there are options. Most people simply have or get some kind of university/college affiliation. If you don't, in many places you can still use the university library to access the data without the paywalls. If not, then you often can (depending on your country) "join" university to audit a single course, which would get you that affiliation and access to their infrastructure. I'm getting to more and more obscure scenarios, but even then there are options - the publications _are_ accessible (though at some times not conveniently enough) and _that_ is not a serious obstacle to doing science; it's still far less effort than actually reading and understanding these papers.

3) If you do need something that's _really_ not available to you, just email the author. As a rule, people write articles because they want people to read them, use them and cite them. My advisor has a bunch of papers that he received that way in pre-internet time when that involved expensive mailing over the ocean. The only realistic case where an author wouldn't send a preprint version to you is because you're either rude or haven't taken the five seconds to click on the link in their homepage to get that paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I consider deep networks as experiments. People try incrementally different models , and the results keep getting better. At some point the theory behind them will advance to the point where we can analytically describe them.

</comment><comment><USER20> _How from a community where all fresh incoming PhD students have never and most likely will never hear about statistical learning, pattern recognition, euclidean geometry, continuous and discrete optimization, etc. new ideas will emerge._

Except they are learning this stuff prior to their graduate work...so I don't know where the author is coming from here. All of our Computer Vision people are very familiar with all of those topics - especially complex geometries and topology.

<comment><USER9> Really? My impression is that most new grad students have a superficial understanding of this stuff, which they promptly never use, since they just end-to-end deep learning solutions.

<comment><USER20> I think it depends on the student and researcher. I would agree that most are implementing ANNs to "brute force" around existing fundamental problems - <USER2> to me that's as much a solution as doing it another way - I'm not sure it's worth the effort to do it otherwise. Maybe some efficiencies, but I think getting towards are more generalizable ANN based machine vision system outweighs the negatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Deep learning is getting all the attention because it gets the best results- If you don't like this, you either have to provide (1) a different measure for results, or (2) give an objective mechanism for evaluating the "worth" of a technique that doesn't involve looking at results.

I would still like to hear what the author of the post recommends as a course of action- Maybe he can write a followup post that provides these details to clarify this.

<comment><USER4> It gets the best results for what? Maybe for classification and recognition.

But the point of the article is that there is more to computer vision. Stereo, optical flow, geometry, and physics can only be aided by deep learning so much.

Another point not mentioned is the computational power required for deep learning. Consider programming the physics for a ball rolling down an incline. You could use (1) the math itself, vs. (2) a neural net. It's clear that the direct math approach could be orders of magnitude faster than neural nets. I wouldn't be surprised if directly coding the physics would achieve 1,000x the performance of a neural net.

<comment><USER22> I would posit that a deep learning network that learns to optimize _parameters_ for a complex algorithm _outside_ the convolutional network itself may have immense utility outside the classification problem. Call it a marriage of classic computer vision with deep CNN, or a hybrid approach. I don't think it's a binary decision. A deep CNN can find the optimal parameters (once trained) for a classic CV problem for a given image or video or other dataset, like superresolution, patch-based inpainting, or motion tracking. The training is the most computationally intensive part. As someone with way too many kids, I can testify...

<comment><USER9> You seem to be describing hyperparameter optimization, which I seriously doubt CNNs are going to be used for anytime soon.

<comment><USER23> It has been done already: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05700](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05700)

Edit: Although what they seem to describe is replacing GPs with neural networks in Bayesian optimization which is supposedly more efficient.

Since the point of Bayesian optimization is to limit the number of times you have to evaluate a new set of hyperparameters, I am not sure how useful it is to "be able to scale" (i.e. even if maintaining the GP is O(n^3) with the number of evaluations, the costly part should be to evaluate the hyperparameters in the first place) but I haven't read the paper so they may show some high dimensional hyperparameter cases where performing a lot of evaluations pays off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> CV seemed stalled out before deep learning, at least in the late 90s. By that I mean classifiers had hit performance limits and weren't improving, and so on. As a non researcher, I'm glad to see it moving again.

</comment><comment><USER25> I had very similar thoughts recently. Really glad someone took time to express them properly.

Even on this very website... I feel there is an immense bias in favor of anything "deep" and "neural" when it comes to AI. Can't recall any recent AI papers that made it to the front page without having those two words in the title.

And please, don't tell me there is nothing interesting going on in the field outside of deep learning. Even when an approach doesn't beat SOTA in terms of error rates, it can still contain valuable ideas or have interesting properties.

</comment><comment><USER26> I worked in computer vision QA at a small startup named Neven Vision. (Google Goggles, Picassa fame) It's interesting to see how much things have progressed. I think I may have developed some of the first field tests in mobile computer vison. IR was very sensitive to lighting at the time. Though extreme angles always seemed to work. By the way I was testing on the best camera phone in town, the t-mobile sidekick.

<comment><USER20> _IR was very sensitive to lighting at the time._

It still is. Any system using structured light will have big problems when confronted with sunlight (windows, outdoors etc...).

I'm not confident there is a solution within the structured light domain to this as the beacons will (more than likely) never overcome sun intensity. We're doubling down on passive systems and reference maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> One point that I've not seen mentioned yet, is that the neural revolution somewhat aggravates economic inequality. What recent progress basically has shown is that deep learning works better with more layers and more resources. Geoffrey Hinton has also recently conjectured that there exist a pretty much unexplored regime of applying gradient descent to huge models with strong regularization trained on relatively small (but still big) data. This inequality is alleviated to some extent by the fact that the machine learning community fully embraces online education and open science, but still, you need 50-150 GPUs to play human-level Go and having several grad students that explore a wide variety of complex and huge models is key for progress. I can only see this aspect getting worse in the years to come.

</comment><comment><USER28> Research paper needs more creativity than improvement. But it's quite difficult to come up with an innovative method, especially when the field is more explored and developed compared to decades before, and nowadays people need to publish a paper every few months.

</comment><comment><USER29> So he's upset that something _successful_ is happening in computer vision, at long last?

<comment><USER30> He is upset at monoculture in research.

Remember that throughout the eighties/nineties ANN classifier performance was as underwhelming as other approaches or even worse at many tasks. Now it reached a local optimum and all other approaches are being discarded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If using loads of data and cpu is a bad thing, he should propose a new measure of goodness that takes these into account. A bit like information criteria in statistics which penalise using a bunch of extra variables.

<comment><USER17> > If using loads of data and cpu is a bad thing, he should propose a new > measure of goodness that takes these into account.

You better separate between using lots of data (perfectly OK, in my opinion) and the number of parameters that the model uses (say, number of weights in the neural network) and where you better have good explanation for the existence of any variable and why it has this concrete weight and no other and why it is even necessary to introduce (consider any parameter that you have to introduce as some kind of physical constant - physicists invest lots of time to explain/reduce the number, so should CV researchers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> He should come up with a better benchmark then that requires the methods he fears are underexplored. Perhaps demonstrate something important that's being overlooked by the trendy crowd. If he can't come up with that, he's just being sentimental.

<comment><USER9> Those benchmarks exist. Anything to do with zero-shot or one-shot learning.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you currently mad about? - <AUTHOR> What's something that is currently frustrating? What is something that is a total waste of time? Etc. <comment><USER2> In the United States, most cities and towns are very forcibly restricting the number of house/apartments that can be built.

This results in skyrocketing house prices and makes everyone have to work much longer before they can retire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Going out on a limb here to guess you live in SF :\

<comment><USER3> I live in LA and I'm mad about this exact same thing! Seattle (where I lived for awhile recently) isn't much better at all.</comment></comment></comment>


For Samsung, all roads lead away from Android - T-A http://money.msn.com/technology-investment/post--for-samsung-all-roads-lead-away-from-android

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice try Microsoft.

Lol.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's a reprint article from some obscure content mill. And it goes downhill from there.

If Samsung somehow screwed up their relationship with Google and lost the ability to ship Google's proprietary app suite (Maps, GMail, etc.) with Android, huge amounts of revenue would evaporate, and heads would roll.

Samsung will experiment with Tizen and will be pleased if it flourishes. Samsung also flirted with Windows Phone and it didn't flourish. However, at this point, Samsung would throw Tizen under the bus in a nanosecond if it would benefit their Android business to do so.</comment>


Hack this for 20 BTC - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/warp/ Updated link: https://keybase.io/warp <comment><USER2> I don't think it's down. It's responding with a 403 FORBIDDEN. I think that's the challenge.

Edit: I was so wrong. Just a bad URL: [https://keybase.io/warp](https://keybase.io/warp)

<comment><USER3> Sorry, it's been fixed on the posted URL too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://keybase.io/warp](https://keybase.io/warp)

without the slash. The challenges are down the middle. 20BTC challenge at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://keybase.io/warp](https://keybase.io/warp) works for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hi everyone - just a quick update. (1) the URL is broken because the poster put it wrong (there shouldn't be a slash), not because the site is down. And (2) the github repository linked to is now public, not private. Enjoy the challenge. The first should fall fast.

<comment><USER7> I don't have time to really look at this at the moment (which is a shame because I love these sorts of puzzles). It looks as though it's pretty much a challenge in brute forcing though. I don't know anything about the algorithms used for the key generation but I'm assuming they're already very battle tested (though not infallible) and an amateur, like myself, isn't going to be able to find any sort of kink in the armour.

Maybe I'm going mad but it seems that Challenge 4 is one of the easier ones - there are only about 3000 keys to generate in that case. The final challenge is obviously leagues above that with 128,063,081,718,016 combinations (by my reckoning - I may have miscalculated).

Either way, great marketing hack :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found a bug, when you generate a wallet you can press the clear and reset button and the generate button remains enabled. This allows the user to generate a wallet using an empty string.

This is using Chrome 31.0.1650.57 m

All tips greatly received : 1Li2Dq9L49mJmCYcEh4n2eSQ9B6eWKCgBv

</comment><comment><USER9> Busy with challenge #3, which seems a lot harder than challenge #4.. The amount of username combinations are larger, and there is no specification as to if they only mean "submitters" or also commentators. Also there are no username lists available for reddit so you have to parse it from reddit manually... Again, the rewards seem a bit skewed from the supplied text file challenge #3 got.

For example, did the OP consider that reddit posts can dissapear? Therre is a max amount of pages you can go through at /r/Bitcoin/ Or did they mean from the top posts? Again, hard puzzle.

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I confused, or did a submission of a broken link get 14 upvotes and a position on the HN front page? Why are people upvoting a broken link?

Edit: it looks like the article just received a heavy scoring penalty and is now on page 3.

<comment><USER6> This is a good question: I posted the correct link 2 hours ago. It would be nice if everyone moved over there... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6764619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6764619)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you are interested in earning some bitcoin, there is currently a 25BTC bounty to solve a mysterious leveldb corruption issue on Mac OS X. Inquire the devs on #bitcoin-dev on Freenode for more information.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, bad link, but I can't edit my original post: [https://keybase.io/warp](https://keybase.io/warp)

</comment><comment><USER12> Brute forced the 1 BTC award.

The HN user was 'petercooper'.

<comment><USER13> Did you use the site generator or did you implement in another language?

<comment><USER12> Using the console:

I wrote a wrapper function around the site generator that took a callback so the next string to test would be called recursively. If a public key matched the public key I was aiming for, I dumped the response to the console, otherwise I just called the wrapper function again.

Then I wrote a function that iterated over a list of strings and output an array with all the possible permutations.

Then I just fed an array of the userids of the top 20 users into that function and fed that function into my wrapper.

I opened 5 browser windows and fed each of them 20 userids to take advantage of multiple cores, but I'm not entirely sure that makes sense to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems that's already done.

</comment><comment><USER15> >This passphrase is the username of someone in the Hacker News top 100 karma list as of November 19, 2013. However, we dropped 2 characters from his or her username.

That is definitely an empty string. _hint_ pg _hint_

<comment><USER16> I tried an empty string with no luck (had to enable the form button first).

EDIT: Not sure what you meant anyway, I don't see a pg on the top 100 list...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "And (2) you can "salt" your passphrase with your email address"

Uh, can't you do that anyways? Just... add your email to your passphrase?

<comment><USER6> Yes, of course. But structuring it this way encourages users who wouldn't have otherwise done it to do so. We were prompted to build this feature because of how much money has gone through brainwallet with poor passphrases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It may not be hacked. It may just be returning 403 for everyone anyway.

</comment><comment><USER19> The linked github is broken. They haven't uploaded the source.

<comment><USER6> fixed, thanks for the reminder!

<comment><USER19> Thanks, it's up now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's down. Someone exploited it or just attacked it for fun.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to contact u at freenode or something?

</comment><comment><USER3> Was out to dinner. Fixed it, sorry for the 403.

</comment><comment><USER22> for scrypt, does r = 1 and p = 8, or are those values swapped in the pseudocode?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing that out, it's bug in the pseudocode, but it's right here in the params file ([https://github.com/keybase/warpwallet/blob/master/src/json/p...](https://github.com/keybase/warpwallet/blob/master/src/json/params.json)). I'll fix it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Server mishap or DDoS?

</comment><comment><USER24> Where do you login?</comment>


The Bright Side of Being Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/technology/the-bright-side-of-being-hacked.html?_r=2&ref=technology

<comment><USER2> Anonymous isnt a hacking group, and DDoS isnt hacking. Sure they get their do the odd hack here and there, but it seems to be isolated to a few key members. The vast majority is organising DDoS - the project management of hacking if you will. Raising awareness of security issues is certainly a good thing to bring to the corporate and public eye - but public awareness of teenage-angst masquerading as 'hacking' isn't the best way to go about it..</comment>


What do you think about my idea - smart NFC authentcation device? - <AUTHOR>

While a lot of people are trying to solve security issues these days I cannot find a good solutions to some of the core problems. Where to store my private keys and how to access them. On the market there are some USB devices that can do the job but in my opinion they are not secure enough. Access to them is granted via PIN code typed on the computer keyboard. Intercepting the PIN code via ordinary keylogger is pretty easy task. Another problem is that you cannot see what actually the USB device is doing at the moment.And I think the best solution is standalone NFC device with keyboard and display. It can be used to automate site logins, data encryption, payments, filling web forms and a lot of other stuff while providing higher security not possible to achieve on any PC. Someone can say that a NFC smartphone can do the job but smartphones are too far away from secure devices and not very reliable. <comment><USER2> If you change NFC to USB this is something you can buy today. I'm not sure what NFC gets you, once you've already put a display and keypad on the authentication device.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK. There are several reasons. NFC is more convenient for the user, you don't have to plug and unplug it. Also increases reliability and usage scenarios for example as a payment device or door access, allows easy interactions between two devices.</comment></comment>


How to improve quality of development? - <AUTHOR>

I am co-founder of DIGICorp (www.digi-corp.com), a software development company based in India. We are doing decent amount of work for various clients across globe. We work mainly on .NET and PHP platforms and we have team of around 40 to 50 developers.
Even though we are doing some cool work (check some of our work on our website) I feel quality of development is still not good enough. We have a good team but probably we are not able to get the best output.
I am following the practices mentioned in the book "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of great management" and I am really satisfied with the output I am getting from my project managers. Now it is the developers who need my attention.
How can I make them great developers from just good developers? I know it is in genes but I also believe that we can also train them to greatness.
any ideas? suggestions? <comment><USER2> Developers are motivated by interesting work, and like to have chances to grow their skill set. Also, most developers I know hate rules: give them credit for knowing how to code, don't bog them down with arbitrary things like a 500 page policy manual. Finally, you hired your developers to write code, so make sure you aren't wasting their time on non-development tasks.

One way to keep work interesting is to give every developer at least two projects. This allows a person to switch between them if one becomes boring or frustrating for a few hours. You could even encourage small pet projects that developers are very enthusiastic about, even if the projects are not completely work-related.

You should invest in a bookshelf of manuals, and make a "cheat sheet" of places to look online for help in your technologies (PHP and .NET). Make sure everyone knows a few of your in-house experts. Developers should not have to look far to improve.

Give developers a lot of leeway. Avoid large policy manuals and rulebooks, instead occasionally remind them of simple guidelines like "follow the style of the rest of the code in the file", and "create libraries to handle the really mundane stuff". Be _very_ open to new ideas, even if this means a new language (I have seen projects spiral to their doom because the actual goal was incredibly awkward to implement in the "preferred" languages of the developers).

And finally, as I said, keep developers developing. Don't waste their time forcing them to (for instance) manually enter information into some form, such as a spreadsheet, or manually produce something like a set of progress slides for management. Focus on the _information_ you want from them, and have your managers simply ask for that information in voice or plain text. Your managers should be producing the pretty forms.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes we are giving all these freedoms right now but still we can definitely improve upon them. still you think there will be some major improvement? i am planning to implement code inspection to improve code quality over all. whats your take on that ?</comment></comment>


Why Do Big Irons Still Exist? - <AUTHOR> http://www.di.unipi.it/~nids/docs/why_do_big_irons_still_exist.html <comment><USER2> The general purpose answer to that question is OLTP. The transaction processing community has a number of benchmarks which look at the cost per transaction and large mainframes typically "win" in those scenarios. As for _why_ they win, that is an interesting question.

As a systems enthusiast and someone who has watched as computers got small and then big and then small and then big again, I believe the fundamental answer is based in state machine theory. Specifically around how data becomes "entangled" with other data. That is the essence of what makes transactions hard.

I first ran into this looking at scaling file systems. Unlike RAID where all of the blocks in a stripe are related mathematically, a "file" as a sequence of octets is defined not only by the mutations that happen to it, but the order in which those mutations take place. So "append 1, 2, 3", back up one, append 4, 5" leaves 1, 2, 4, 5 if applied in sequence but leaves 1, 2, 3, 4 if the last two steps are swapped. Thus both operations and the order of the operations are important. To hold the state of a complex sequence stable, you generally have to have it all in memory ready to complete (commit) and then rapidly verify its stable, and then commit it.

Clusters of smaller systems have a hard problem with this. That said, I would love to play with some of Google's spanner systems to see how well they handle the OLTP workload with respect to cost/size/power. The paper suggests that there is a credible path there as flocks of distributed systems get cheaper and more easily connected.

<comment><USER3> Spanner maxes out at ~10 transaction (batches)/second in that paper. By comparison, a standard PostgresSQL installation (on littleish iron) is capable of 50k TPS depending on the benchmark you're running.

In the Spanner design the maximum throughput is governed by the accuracy of GPS and atomic clocks and, ultimately, the speed of light. You can only make 7 round-trips per second between a data center in New York and on in Singapore unless you're willing to bore a hole through the center of the earth.

Order is expensive and, more fundamentally, coordination is expensive. At the center of traditional OLTP workloads is a promise given by the system to the developers that their transactions will happen in some order.

Peter Bailis and Joe Hellerstein are two prominent academics working on addressing this problem, and at the core of their research is giving up pieces of this promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a nice summary of their advantages:

[http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-and-Disadvantages-of- Ma...](http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-and-Disadvantages-of-Mainframe- Computing&id=7413087)

Hard to toss out a trouble- and hacker-free system that has handled everything thrown at it for 30+ years, can run any workload, maintains backward compatibility, and supports new stuff. Channel I/O is also frigging awesome:

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

Note: I wrote in Ganssle's Embedded Muse that real-time could benefit from a beefy CPU and low-end one for I/O interrupts. He agreed and one of us found a SOC that did something like that with quite some results. :)

Virtualization, pay for what you use, hardware accelerators, I/O offloading... all these "new" things have been in mainframes since the 70's. Unlike the modern stuff, the people coding them focus on making them boring, predictable, and reliable. Plus your old software is future-proof and you can do new stuff. So, risk-adverse businesses think they're worth the HUGE amount they spend on them.

That said, there is a negative reason many companies stay: lock-in. The older companies invested decades worth of money in mainframe-specific software and libraries/tools from companies that no longer exist. Porting all that over to modern architectures would cost way more than a mainframe plus have risk of catastrophic failure. So, they just pay the bill each year and accept any improvements they get.

<comment><USER5> Re "hacker-free", Pirate Bay's anakata was jailed for breaking into mainframes. See [http://insecurety.net/?p=877](http://insecurety.net/?p=877) (the doc link there is broken, try [https://wikileaks.org/gottfrid- docs/](https://wikileaks.org/gottfrid-docs/))

<comment><USER4> Most of them, not all, avoid serious hacks. There's not major disruption. Plus there's deniability: "people only hack mainframes in movies damnit!"

I always thought ancient interface and barrier-to-entry (esp price) added to it given it's hard to otherwise explain hackers ignoring such high value targets. There's at least one that's publishing mainframe hacks now. Blood in the water. More sharks will arrive over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Big Iron exists to do tons of high-reliability (as in, "fire some buckshot at the server, swap some parts, zero downtime") transaction processing.

Little known fact: the original high-throughput NoSQL document database was written by IBM and is still around.

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

<comment><USER7> Before Codd, all the DBMSes were "NoSQL".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work with a platform that fits exactly into the big iron use case. A typical machine will host millions to billions of rows of transactional data in memory. The round time from a user interaction to fully joined (across several or dozens of tables), aggregated (across several dimensions), and visualized data rendered by the client browser is expected to be less than 2 seconds. Each second of wait is an exponential cost to user experience. Yes, you have a single machine with dozens to hundreds of GB of RAM. You also have a responsive analytics experience, and that value makes it all worthwhile.

<comment><USER4> Curious, what's your hardware configuration for that?

<comment><USER8> I mainly work on the smaller side of servers, so you would be looking at Intel Xeon or i7 2.8-3.2 GHz (4-8 cores), 16-32 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008, a 100+ GB SSDs in RAID, 1 TB HDD, with nightly backups. Interestingly, management analytics applications can handle longer downtime than operational systems, so a full system restore from the nightly backup is an acceptable process. Data can recovery can just be performed without downtime, with background processes and zero-downtime database updates.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. Especially them doing a nightly restore. Many forget to ensure the restore process will work as well as the backup. That company will probably have no problem there. :)

<comment><USER8> The restore is only as-needed, but full system image backups are made every night.

<comment><USER4> Ah OK. It was too original and extreme to be true. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some database heavy applications were not designed with sharding/scaling out in mind. Rewriting an entire application to do so is not a trivial task and takes away the focus of an entire company and development team during the process of such a major endeavor.

At my last company we had this problem. We had a simple application for tracking inventory that morphed in to a CRM with tons of data from emails, notes, etc. Database grew to be terabytes in size. Using fusion-io cards and replicating to read only databases was required to keep us going and it worked. We had to keep buying bigger iron. A database server with 2TB of RAM!

At my new company, Stackify ([http://www.stackify.com](http://www.stackify.com)), I made sure we gave each client their own database so we knew we could scale out from the beginning. Now we manage over 1000 SQL databases and that has its own set of challenges. We use SQL Azure so that makes it all pretty simple thanks to their new elastic pool features. Versioning SQL schemas and using tools from red gate have helped us keep our sanity.

</comment><comment><USER10> A linguistic aside...

I always thought it was 'big iron' as in something big and made of 'iron'. The idea of 'Big Irons' makes me think of ironing shirts with some super-sized, barely lift-able iron rather than something the size of my Philips iron. I imagine the steam from a 'big iron' could be quite fearsome.

Having made the link I now have a sensible name for the server room where I work. We didn't put a sign on that door because it would be helpful for thieves. 'Ironing Room' as in what hotels have might be more befitting even though a server and a firewall does not make 'big iron'.

Either way 'big irons' is now added to my lexicon to go along with other deliberate misspellings including 'nucular' and 'skelington'.

<comment><USER11> The other name I've seen used is "dinosaur pen", and by extension the operators are "dinosaur herders".

<comment><USER12> Sounds like it comes from the same world as pet (one physical server, one job, carefully watched and maintained by admins) and cattle (containers/VMs/cloud where you can go for 1 to 1 million in a matter of seconds) servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One reason big machines might make a comeback is the increasing capability putting off the super-linear cost growth into the realm of > 100GB in-memory or > 10TB on disk. CPU hasn't kept pace unless you consider GPGPU or Phi parts.

Super-linear disk cost back when disks were already atrociously slow compared to the rest of the machine have largely gone away with SSD's hitting huge capacities and tech like NVMe, solid state RAM modules, and Intel's upcoming Optane tech ensuring that more than ever, scaling horizontally can be put off way more than used to be possible.

If you look at scale-out vs scale-up for any applications that were disk limited, disk performance is now ridiculous - > 1GB/s and IOP's measured in 100's of thousands. I'm expecting a bit of a comeback for HA over HP. More than likely, your app can be served well by a single big machine that is well within the linear scaling regime, and you need several for durability and geo- availability.

<comment><USER14> Terabyte sized memory will soon be possible with Xeon (if not already), Amazon announced x1 instances with 2TB of RAM + 100 cores. They are using Xeon E7 CPU's:

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance- update-x1-sap-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance- update-x1-sap-hana-t2-nano-websites/)

<comment><USER15> Oh yeah, supermicro has been selling dual-socket xeon boards with 1.5tb ram capacity for a while.

[http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10DRi-T4_.cfm)

that thing takes Xeon e5-26xx v3 CPUs which are pretty middle of the road server chips; Nothing fancy. If you want to go quad-socket with E7 xeons or something, you can get even more ram in one box, but the E5 Xeons are dramatically more economical than the E7 xeons.

I mean, the linked motherboard would be money, sure, but it would be the sort of cash that my company would be able to come up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A single "big iron" server is mostly simple and very understood whereas architecting distributed systems gets very complex very fast. It's easy to have a very large MySQL server and a MySQL slave whereas sharding gets complicated quickly and there is always network latency involved.

</comment><comment><USER17> The dictionary definition cited in the article confirms that the term "Big Iron" usually refers to High Performance Computing ("supercomputers" as opposed to database servers): "Used generally of number-crunching supercomputers such as Crays"

The question is still interesting, why does Big Iron still exist in High Performance Computing? I'm not completely up to speed, but I think the reason has a lot to do with specialized network interconnects, such as three- dimensional toroidal interconnects [1] ... These specialized interconnects differentiate "Big Iron" from commodity clusters. Another differentiating feature relates to memory, such as very large memory capacities and unique memory hierarchies using NVM, SSDs, etc. A third possibility is very large CPU socket capacities, going beyond the standard dual-socket or quad-socket configurations. This type of technology can certainly play a role in databases and it sheds some light on the "database appliance" trend (integrated hardware/software solutions).

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

</comment><comment><USER18> corporate developers (and their tools) can work with a DB on Big Iron - it is basically an appliance to them with SQL interface. The distributed/horizontally scaled systems are far from being an appliance and require Google, FB, etc.. type of employees to work with it, and there aren't that many of those employees around. This is why companies who make the horizontally scaled systems accessible to typical corp are going that well.

<comment><USER19> There are other advantages that typically come with a Big Iron type setup. They tend to have a combination of hot-swap RAM, CPUs, and IO cards, as well as more extensive circuitry to detect when a piece of hardware has failed, such as having CPUs and/or RAM operate in lockstep. With real big iron, they'll have hot spare processors that will automatically activate, plus make a service call to the hardware vendor to tell them to come and swap out the bad module. That SQL appliance will work come hell or high water, which is something that horizontal systems still have trouble with from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unrelated question I've been wondering about for a while now: I read a lot of "Unix-ist" writings growing up, and one constant target of hate was VAX/VMS—comparing it, usually, to something like an overwrought 747 cockpit where everything is automated and shiny and nobody can really understand what's going on underneath.

Given that even Linux is now used in HPC scenarios, are the "true mainframe" OSes really still so different, either in architecture or in average sysadmin experience? Or did the microcomputer OSes effectively converge to have all the same features?

</comment><comment><USER21> At first, there was the mainframe and all was good.

Then Sun pushed out SPARC boxes with 3 mouse buttons (don't even LOOK at those let alone touch those sayeth the sysadmin)

Then we moved everything server side to the cloud, and virtualize everything in our dev environments.

In the future, I predict that things will come around full circle: quantum computing will bring us back to the Big Iron days of "don't even look at it, don't even touch it" but given cooling requirements of QCs these days you won't ever see it.

"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again."

<comment><USER22> Imagine your datacenter is in a container floating in space. Nuclear-powered, advanced magnetic shielding, physically secure in Jupiter orbit, and networked to Earth with quantum entanglement networking.

But yes, everything new is old already.

<comment><USER23> and a sleek black outer finish

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want to put by DB in ram. I just need to keep it under 64TB. [https://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/uv_300_30ex.html](https://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/uv_300_30ex.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> "also Microsoft SQL Server on top of Solaris on Sparc"

MS SQL Server DOES NOT run on Solaris on SPARC. The author should have done his/her research before making that claim.

</comment><comment><USER26> To press big shirts?

</comment><comment><USER27> A "cloud" _is_ a mainframe to all intents and purposes.</comment>