'Give Away Your Legos' and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/ <comment><USER2> Great article, this is absolutely true. My greatest managers and mentors have been the ones who delegated a domain to me without micromanaging or meddling -- it made me feel valued, as well as let me know I was fully accountable for the outcome. Meanwhile, they were free to focus on other areas of the business, or even pursue new opportunities.

For myself, I once had to forego an assignment that I wanted because my boss didn't think he could do without me. This was a wake-up call for me that I needed to "hire my replacement" to give me the ability to move on.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _" Adding people doesn't mean there's less work for the people that are > already there. It means that the entire company can do more."_

I wish the article expanded further on this in the section on firing beyond the mantra of "fire fast." Taking the infamous Netflix presentation as an example, there may be plenty of other jobs that need to be done at the company, but the reality is the generalist wearing multiple may need to be swapped for a specialist wearing one or two. So there may not be any other jobs for that generalist, and it isn't necessarily a critique of their performance.

While the article touches briefly on this, it doesn't seem to follow through and connect it with the examples of questions/concerns people voice during phases of growth and team changes.

Unfortunately, unless it is deeply ingrained in the culture, it is often not a great approach as a manager to tell a team "well, your concerns are justified and we'll be evaluating whether there's still opportunities that are a good fit for you here." But that is ultimately the candid answer I think a lot of employees might be looking for in response to the sorts of questions the article gives as examples.

<comment><USER4> It's hard for me to believe that you can't find roles in a growing company for a generalist. My experience has certainly been different.

<comment><USER5> Especially since you will be a specialist in the company's chosen technology and processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the time when Sun Microsystems fell apart into several different companies: SunSoft, Sun Labs, etc.

Scott McNealy called an all-hands meeting, and made grand sweeping gestures with his arms while imploring everyone: "Stop hugging your trees! Everyone has to let go of their tree! No more tree hugging!"

As if we understood what the hell he was talking about because we'd all read the same management self-help books about preventing tree hugging in large corporations that he had, and that by making tree hugging and releasing gestures, everybody would be able to empathize with him and figure out what the the fuck he meant.

After the meeting, I confronted my manager: "You never game me a tree! Why didn't I ever get a tree? I want my tree! I promise not to hug it, but I want one too!"

</comment><comment><USER7> One issue: Lego is the plural of Lego.

Legos make tomato paste.

Sidenote: If you're trying to coin a catchy phrase - make sure it's correct and doesn't play into a grammatical flame war.

<comment><USER8> I just can't bring myself to care. I'm a life-long lego fan, been playing with them since I was old enough to play with Duplo. As an adult, I've got shelves covered in lego sets, a lego brick tattooed on my wrist, and saw Lego Movie on release day. And I don't give a single shit what people call the bricks so long as it's not megablok, one of the other knockoff brands, or for some reason K'Nex.

I'm not lego's marketing department, I'm not their lawyer, I'm not their CEO. It's not up to me to give a crap about the pedantic nonsense that is their preference for how you refer to their product. It's not brand confusion. Lego, Legos, LEGO, LEGOS, whatever. People know what you're talking about, and they aren't getting the name "lego" mixed up with anything. People that see the Megabloks and other knock offs and think that they're legos are what they need to worry about. But an informed child, consumer, etc. knows better already. It didn't take very many Megablok sets before I realize they were incredibly inferior in quality and the colors were way off. Lego is obviously the superior product even to a child.

Okay so I lied. I do care, a lot. More than I should. But I'm just so sick of pedantic idiots hopping into conversations like some sort of know it all "WELL ACTUALLY....". Fuck off. Lego, legos, LEGOS, LEGO, doesn't matter we all know what's being talked about. And derailing discussions over that nonsense is obnoxious.

<comment><USER7> A discussion is what it is and in this case a meta discussion on the language used in an article is no less appropriate given the response.

I couldn't bring myself to read it and wasn't alone and it annoyed me enough to say something. Should she have known better or care - maybe not. Her audience is probably just Silicon Valley and extend to the rest of the US.

But this is the Internet, so welcome to the wider world.

<comment><USER8> Honestly if you can't bring yourself to read an article because of a brand used incorrectly, you need to get a grip. Fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "During her 4+ years at Facebook, the company exploded from 500 employees > serving 80 million users to 5,500 employees and over 1.1 billion users."

Tangential to the article. But, I find it kind of surprising that the employee to user base growth was linear. I would expect it to be closer to logarithmic in a well run company. Although I have no data points. Am I off base?

<comment><USER10> Sorry for the nitpick, but is it logarithmic or exponential in this case?

To the point, I would not be surprised if 5,500 was the "settling" point. In my experience, the hiring pendulum takes some time to swing far enough to include an adequate number of employees in a rapidly scaling environment. (e.g., I would not be surprised if 500 million users were served by 750 employees.)

<comment><USER11> Further more, without a third datapoint, it will always be linear. Unless you're including 0,0?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dunno, hopping on board the rocket ship still seems a lot easier than building the rocket ship.

<comment><USER12> But building the rocket ship is more fun.

Especially if you know it's going to explode midair once it's launched and you don't have to be in it when it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cognitive dissonance: This seems true to me, and so does the idea that adding people to a project late in the game makes it later (as per Fred Brooks).

</comment><comment><USER13> There is some good advice buried in this nauseatingly sycophantic puff piece.

<comment><USER14> I hate the infantilism of modern "tech". We're adults who play in ball pits, have a ping pong table, office Nerf wars, and have our metaphors in Lego format, pre-chewed for easy digestion!

And there are plenty of people who eat that shit up. I know a lot of engineers are a bit socially retarded, but is it helping us to progress to accept this infantilization? Can we stop pretending to be "big kids"?

<comment><USER15> amen, the faster we can give away with the bros office culture the better.

sadly it's central to the silly con valley ploy, so don't expect change to come out from here. there's plenty company out there that value professionalism out of its workforce, but those aren't building cool toys for mid twenties bros.

<comment><USER16> Amen here, as well.

I've spent the last 17 years working for (and now running) tech startups in Boston; the worst of them ceded all fun to cube farms, but the best of them never went all-in on the culture described here. Perhaps there is an east/west coast division here?

I look at the folks working alongside me now, building an incredibly sophisticated machine learning engine for cybersecurity, and I wouldn't think to draw upon a Lego metaphor for what they're doing. It's hard, substantive, mathematical work, and certainly not akin to playing with toys. I expect my senior engineers, sales guys, and marketers to be both protective of the brand we're building and understanding of the need to grow fast and expand our teams.

<comment><USER17> I live in Toronto and work independently. Productivity = prosperity, and so I live a life of work punctuated by relaxation an rest.

Of the tech companies that have tried to woo me, most fall into this infantilization trap and its such a big turn-off. If the reason I should come work with you is because you have a foosball table and on fridays you put a keg in the break room......I want to build things! I want to create. I will take your company and move it forward, I dont have time for ping pong.

Shouldnt the goal be to make your comoany rich, so you can be rewarded enough to buy the comforts YOU want, instead of lounging in the comforts of an employer as you work?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Renaming multiple files simultaneosly without using any software - <AUTHOR> http://webnesbay.com/703/renaming-multiple-files-simultaneously/ <comment><USER2> Spammer ?

this has to be the absolute worst title ever for an article.

You mean using rename does not involve using software ? Operating systems are not software ? GUIs are not software ?

<comment><USER3> I didn't read the article but I assume it's about flipping the appropriate bits on the disk using a small needle? No? I'm shocked :) Perhaps this guy has a bright future as a Nigerian scammer!</comment></comment>


Startup School notes - <AUTHOR> http://dylanv.org/2011/10/30/startup-school-notes/

<comment><USER2> Could I ask whether these were the exact words you wrote down during the event, or whether you pared it down when publishing?

(I ask, because I had a bad habit of taking verbose notes, and wanted to ask about your thought process when crunching down the information to succinct quotes.)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is basically everything I wrote during the event, edited for clarity. I'm not usually one to take copious notes, but I felt compelled to soak up everything I could from all of the speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice notes here. Well worth reading if you want to hear or recall most of the highlights.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the notes. Is there a link to the videos?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos></comment></comment>


Smart classification using Bayesian monads in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/03/03/smart-classification-with-haskell

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. Are there any classification libraries for haskell?</comment>


A new twist on quantum theory could solve its biggest mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532750-700-how-a-new-twist-on-quantum-theory-could-solve-its-biggest-mystery/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.is/Nq7j7](https://archive.is/Nq7j7)</comment>


iconfu - icon editor and library - <AUTHOR> http://iconfu.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link, soundsop. Iconfu is a pixel-oriented icon editor written almost entirely in javascript - ie no flash or flex. It uses <canvas> heavily so no Internet Explorer either, sorry microsoft (and google's ex-canvas doesn't do the trick, it doesn't have all the features iconfu needs).

In a previous life I developed web applications at a bank and occasionally we needed icons. Finding the right icon was next to impossible, and MSPaint was our only option for drawing. Most frustratingly of all, in many cases all we needed to do was take a little "adjective" icon (a miniscule '+' or '!' for example) and overlay it on an icon we already had ... not possible.

I figured there had to be a better way, so I quit my cosy job to make iconfu. Technically, it does almost everything I'd want an icon editor to do - especially drawing a given icon on top of another icon. And drawing icons, pixel-by-pixel if necessary. There are some neat features I'd like to add - layers, more HSV controls, multiple parallel edits for example - but not yet. Financially ... um, I'm not sure how to put this ... my family has been very helpful.

I admit I'm biased, but it looks like iconfu is the best _online_ icon editor out there. I haven't figured out how to turn it into cash, yet. HN ideas would be greatly appreciated.

There was some discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636388> earlier today about the concept of an online icon editor.

</comment><comment><USER3> For better or worse, I wrote a blog about your site. Hope you don't mind the critique. :) <http://slapstart.com/2009/06/iconfu/>

<comment><USER2> Not at all, on the contrary, thank you. Sometimes my wife comments on my "original" colour combinations when getting the kids dressed in the morning. I retort that she should tag their clothes with proper CSS labels.

But for an icon editor, I'm guessing HSV colour choosers work better for most non-developers. But don't worry, you'll get your #rrggbb field (I prefer it, too :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know why people would make web applications that entirely depend on canvas + js instead of using flash because it just shrinks your potential userbase due to the number of IE users out there. In contrast flash player is installed on like 99% (?) of all computers out there.

Until HTML5 gets wide-spread adoption I guess.</comment>


Alain Rossmann on Klip: "Last 10% of refinement gets you 90% of market share" - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2011/11/11/klip-iphone-video-sharing-refined-to-a-high-art/

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough, this resonates, however how can a claim like this be supported? It can't. Seemingly small UI changes, which might appear to fall in that "last 10%" category can require immense research and iteration to achieve.

This quote should be restated: "10% of variation in features can account for acquiring 90% of market share."

In other words, seemingly small variations in features tend to lead to product differentiation. This does not however mean that simply refining your product a little bit more will get you the runaway success you are seeking.</comment>


Skyfire iPhone app: Gone from iTunes, - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/1104/Skyfire-iPhone-app-Gone-from-iTunes-but-for-how-long

<comment><USER2> It's not 'gone from itunes'. They didn't have the capacity to handle more customers, so they stopped selling it. For once, Apple had nothing to do with the decision.</comment>


Can you scan the internet in 5 minutes? This GitHub project claims that - <AUTHOR> https://bitbook.io/port-scan-the-entire-internet-in-5-minutes/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the worst blog posts I've ever seen. I was going to put a list of important resources about zMap and masscan here, that constitutes required reading (/watching) before using any of these tools. But the blatant ignorance in this post makes it clear that it isn't worth the effort.

Not coordinating with your ISP and hoster before running a scan? Scanning in a virtual network? ...

It's things like this that hurt real scanning work by serious researchers. All this does is help alienate the involved parties. Nice that masscan includes a link to the project page when the scanner requests headers. If I were Robert, I wouldn't do this to myself.</comment>


Millennial Men Leave Perplexing Hole in a Hot U.S. Labor Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-02/millennial-men-leave-perplexing-hole-in-a-hot-u-s-labor-market <comment><USER2> Am I the only one a bit perplex that we focus on "men lagging their older counterpart" while women have employment rate 15% lower than men?

<comment><USER3> They're comparing men to men here, across generations.

Women's participation rates are lower but increasingly while men's are going down. Look at the chart under Persistent Gap in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> whats the reason that younger women were able to catch up to their older cohort? why is that never discussed as that seems highly relevant</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best UI creation method of all time? - <AUTHOR> I'm doing some research on the various ways application UIs have been created ever since computers have been capable of displaying windows. What I would like to know is, what's your favorite and why? Feel free to name any UI creation method you personally enjoy, whether it be for mobile, desktop, the web or something else. It can also be from any time period. Were you a fan of NewS? Adobe Flash/Flex? Some obscure web framework nobody's ever heard of? Tell me why it tickles your fancy. <comment><USER2> WinForms. Drag and drop. Drag to resize. Each object has a handy block of understandable property fields to adjust how it looks and behaves. Double click to open up an auto-created function to run when you click it, just add functionality from there.

Sure, WinForms did not really output a stylish UI design, but I have yet to see anyone make a functionally useful UI editor that is nearly as convenient and approachable.

<comment><USER3> WPF and Silverlight WPF. Also Java FX.

I am not a big fan of GUI UI editors because I like building the GUI from models instead. Microsoft had a strong vision in the Visual Basic era that they've carried through for some time.

<comment><USER2> WPF has nowhere near the ease of use of WinForms. I get it can do a lot more, but at the cost of a truly amazing development interface.

<comment><USER3> I did a stint of Silverlight and got very familiar with the themeing capabilities in WPF.

Themeing was a scouge of the Windows 9x age that developers had largely given up on and the support for theming in WPF as part of the backlash against what people perceived as visual excess.

It was fun for me to see this "visual excess" at work years later in the 2-d graphics of games written against Sony's PhyreEngine

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

such as

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Universe_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Universe_\(video_game\))

Even though people hated Vista, the WDDM model that it brought in is one reason why Windows crashes much less than it used to and why GPGPU computing is a thing. Someday Linux is going to switch to Wayland or something else like WDDM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I want to see more things like Zork and Inform7.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? What about Zork and Inform7 do you like?

<comment><USER3> Text-based UI that is smarter than the conventional command line.

With Zork you somehow have a (seemingly) plain-English conversation with the computer that takes you through a fictional setting and story.

With Inform7 you write the scenario in what looks like plain-English (eg. "The shed is north of the building") and it compiles to a Zork-compatible runtime engine.

Inform7 uses a number of "clever" tricks such as accepting the word "seven" for the number 7 that are unusual in software practice, not conceptually deep, but contribute to the illusion that you're writing English. The rules engine is half-baked but confronts head-on the problem that "commonsense knowledge" that it is mostly built around defaults. (eg. by default you can not pick an object up, but if an object has the "portable" attribute you can pick it up, unless it is a bird statue that will turn into a real bird and fly away when you try to catch it unless you are wearing the medallion)

The author of Inform7 would like to enable English majors to write interactive fiction and the success there is still partial because once the story gets complex enough the authors have a hard time understanding why the system does what it does.

The author of Inform7 is plugging away at it, maybe somewhere somebody else is building something similar out of stronger wood. I was talking with a European aviation regulator who would love to see "Inform 7 for business rules".

It is much easier for rules in this kind of system to be readable by subject matter experts than writable, but readability is a big plus -- if you can show the rules on a slide and a get a check-off that is a great way to keep in sync.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hypercard</comment>


Twitter Blog: Building on Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/building-on-open-source.html <comment><USER2> cache-money is great idea for a plugin. the author has a really good write up of it:

[http://magicscalingsprinkles.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/introd...](http://magicscalingsprinkles.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/introducing- cache-money/)</comment>


Ask HN: Building a Better Clippy? - <AUTHOR> I'm fascinated with using ML/DL to build useful features that augment work and productivity, and for my master's thesis at Georgia Tech I'm trying to build a virtual assistant for student learners.
Do you think Clippy, the microsoft office assistant, could have been much more useful if it had learned behaviors rather than rule based decision making?
Do you think this is an interesting opportunity? Is there anything out there like this? <comment><USER2> I would look at IDEs, specifically feature requests that are the same across platforms, the same in every forum from Eclypse to Amethyst 2. Specifically features that don't tend to be implemented because they're just a bit too complex to be rule based.

IMHO an agent is the wrong way and discovery (like in Emacs) or a status/hint line is the way to go. Keeping it unobtrusive enough not to be annoying, but still present enough to be helpful when needed. AKA be more like Alfred from Batman and less like Ace Ventura.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thank you for the feedback! I love the idea that its a more natural, unobtrusive extension rather than an explicit agent sitting there.

<comment><USER2> Spacemacs has IMHO a great setup that might interest you. Check out their hotkey discoverability with mnemonics and their use of which-key for suggesting functions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amiga Learning claims they use Deep Learning to leverage AV processing to measure stress of students to inform restructuring first-readers curriculum of children.

I think Charlse River Analytics is doing dynamic dialog systems as well, for guiding through experimental design

I think this is also the strategy that Knewton uses for their product

</comment><comment><USER4> I think Google Assistant is awesome. But it seems that its advantage over Siri is rule based.

Word doesn't seem great for digital assistants, but I think what really needs help is documentation. There's often a good deal of bad documentation, and it's something an assistant could learn to navigate.

</comment><comment><USER5> You might find this interesting: [https://medium.com/@saranormous/clippy-s- revenge-39f7387f9aa...](https://medium.com/@saranormous/clippy-s- revenge-39f7387f9aab)

TLDR Clippy was probably ahead of its time. Since then the tech to understand behaviours and NLP inputs has got better, but more importantly the median users have got increasingly used to typing queries rather than browsing or reading manuals to get fast results, and spends a lot more time reading and responding to instant messages. I don't know about student learning specifically, but conversational AI assistants for commercial use are approaching the peak of the hype cycle.</comment>


A Wyoming Creek Flows into Two Oceans (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cntraveler.com/story/this-wyoming-creek-flows-into-two-oceans <comment><USER2> There's a creek like this in Banff National Park in Canada [1]. It is amazingly fake. It was rebuilt when I was younger and the rocks that keep the creek in place are not found upstream or downstream of the divide. Before it was rebuilt, it flowed into a marshy area and trickled off to both sides. My guess is that it was originally constructed by the railroad (which is right next to it) as a tourist attraction when crossing the divide.

The problem with a divide creek is that it is inherently unstable. One of the sides _will_ erode more quickly than the other, which diverts the water and erodes the remaining side to permanently capture the water.

I note that photos of the Wyoming creek show a suspicious number of rocks in perfect place diverting some water off to the lesser branch. Perhaps someone has been fighting off the inevitable end of the fork.

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

<comment><USER3> Maybe someone has been hiking out there to maintain the creek, but that's some serious middle-of-nowhere territory, so I doubt it. Also, it's depicted as a big flat marsh on the USGS 7.5' maps, so I imagine it doesn't experience much erosion.

<comment><USER4> It is a day's hike from the roadhead, on an established trail, and at the point of the split, the water flows freely. The run-off from a single storm could be enough to close off one branch, and if left to its own devices, this fork would probably open and close repeatedly before settling on one direction.

Pics and more info: [http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/09/parting-of-waters- creek...](http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/09/parting-of-waters-creek-that- flows-into.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! That website is a JavaScript-soaked nightmare, but I'll try to check it out when I'm next in the area (and maybe even do some creek maintenance ;-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also a "triple divide" point in North America, from where water can flow into the Pacific, Atlantic or Arctic Oceans. It's either in Montana or Jasper National Park in Canada depending on whether you define Hudson Bay as part of the Arctic or Atlantic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_\(Montana\)) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Dome_(Canada)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Dome_\(Canada\))

<comment><USER6> Similar to "Pico Tres Mares" (Three Seas Peak), in Spain:

> The Pico de Tres Mares (Three Seas) got its name because it is the source of > three main rivers which flow from it into three different seas - the Híjar, > tributary of the Ebro which flows into the Mediterranean, the Pisuerga, > tributary of the Douro which flows into the Atlantic and the Nansa which > flows into the Cantabrian sea. This peak, which rises to 2,175m, reveals a > splendid circular panorama to the north of the Nansa, to the east of the > Sierra de Peña Labra and the Montes de León, and to the west of los Picos de > Europa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, if you were a salmon, you could swim up from the Pacific and back down to the Atlantic--theoretically. Is there anywhere else you could do that?

There are some really long salmon runs in Idaho. The Salmon River is one of the longest, I believe. Fish travel several thousand miles up it to spawn in their home creek.

<comment><USER8> That's an impressive feat of endurance considering that salmon seem to eat very little (if at all) in fresh water.

[http://salmo.proboards.com/thread/39/salmon-eat-fresh- water](http://salmo.proboards.com/thread/39/salmon-eat-fresh-water)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "All the explorers looking for the Northwest Passage between the oceans never realized that they could have sailed across America this way—if they'd used tiny little boats that could handle the six-inch shallows of Two Ocean Creek."

Is anyone going to take that as a challenge? And video it?

<comment><USER10> I wonder how navigable it is - you _are_ paddling up a mountain; I imagine there's a few spots you'll need to carry the boat around rapids/falls.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking more of a sort of robotrout with leaping abilities..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This means everywhere uphill from this creek can't be assigned to a watershed, or we can't model watersheds as a tree. My guess is water modeling software can't handle this situation.

(Cases where an elegant model covers almost everything but not quite are frustratingly common.)

<comment><USER4> I think only if watersheds are required to terminate on an ocean, but that does not work for basins that are not connected to the sea, one notable example of which is not that far south of this point, containing the Great Salt lake. An alternative view (touched on in the article) is that technically, the fork is the end-point of the Atlantic-Pacific divide, and everything upstream on this creek is in a watershed that has one end on one branch downstream of the fork, and the other end on the other branch. In this view, it is the paths downstream of the fork that are not in a watershed. This is not a useful viewpoint, so I agree that this is a corner case in which the tree model does not work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also in Wyoming is the Great Divide Basin, an endorheic basin straddling the Pacific-Atlantic Continental Divide.

In a not-to-distant past it probably drained out northeast towards the North Platte [1], but is now a closed basin with about 43 meters of elevation separation before it would overflow at bedrock. Further complicating this is a bunch of sand dunes over its most likely outflow.

[1] [http://geofaculty.uwyo.edu/heller/Papers/Heller%20GSAB%2010....](http://geofaculty.uwyo.edu/heller/Papers/Heller%20GSAB%2010.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Nice, I found that to be most fascinating on Rand McNally maps from back in the day. I cycled past the Great Divide Basin on the road down from the Tetons, through the Snake River canyons and the view did not disappoint. High points on the divide were attracting lightning on a near continual basis from the late afternoon onward and it was quite a light show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Other instances:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_drainage_sys...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_drainage_systems)

</comment><comment><USER15> That was a really interesting tidbit of information.

I was also caught a bit off guard by the website, cntraveler. I only ever heard of conde nast as the company that used to own reddit. The author's name was also interesting as it's the same as the famous Jeopardy winner, which this being a quirky trivia type of article makes me wonder if it's the same person.

<comment><USER16> It is the Jeopardy winner. As a hint, in most online publications you can click on the authors name and it will take you to a bio and/or a list of other articles by that author in that publication.

<comment><USER17> It's always amusing to read articles "from the future". The byline date is May 1, 2018. Perfect for a super human like Ken.

<comment><USER18> Apparently it's been corrected to 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea For some reason on Firefox mobile as soon as I load this page I get a drop down at the top with my search history.

<comment><USER19> Ditto, Firefox desktop Linux. I suspect it's javascript selecting an input box with a very common _name_ like _q_ or _search_.

<comment><USER20> Likewise, Chromium on Linux. Search box appears when I try to scroll with the down-arrow key.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter's Daily Deal Product Flops: Early Bird "Set Aside" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/twitters-daily-deal-product-flops-early-bird-set-aside-2010-9

<comment><USER2> More info available on TechCrunch: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/twitter- setting-aside-early...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/twitter-setting- aside-earlybird-program/)

It does seem as thought Early Bird wasn't getting much attention from Twitter. I don't understand why, because daily deals are looking pretty good right now. I wonder if they would have seen far more success if they had localized the offers.</comment>


On Being Relentlessly Resourceful (HT Paul Graham) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.trytomo.com/on-being-relentlessly-resourceful-your-company-culture-starts-day-1-17a35bc93c90 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm building a new company from scratch and know that company culture starts Day #1.</comment>


E-mails from Amazon regarding user's e-mails being disclosed - <AUTHOR> https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/nice-we-re-contacting-you-to-let-you-know-that-our-website-inadvertently-disclosed-your-email-address-due-to-a-technical-error/429577/38 <comment><USER2> This was one of the poorest emails I've received about a breach. I had to triple check it wasn't an odd phishing attempt.

The email, in full:

—— Hello,

We're contacting you to let you know that our website inadvertently disclosed your email address due to a technical error. The issue has been fixed. This is not a result of anything you have done, and there is no need for you to change your password or take any other action.

Sincerely, Customer Service [http://Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) ——

No template; not addressed to me; no details. Capitalized domain name.

The email is checking the "we have to notify" box and not an inch more.

<comment><USER3> I too was perplexed to see "[http://Amazon.com"](http://Amazon.com") instead of "[https://"](https://") in this day and age...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I received one of these emails. It does appear to genuinely be from Amazon.

The interesting thing to me is that some people seem to have received the email from email@example.com. I received it from email@example.com

Perhaps that's just due to being on different TLD but seems interesting to me that I should receive one from the firstname.lastname@example.com address.

firstname.lastname@example.com exists and would seem like the better email to send out such a notice from. I'm curious why they'd use the order update email system.

Maybe the name and email was revealed as part of a mis-configured ordering process? Perhaps revealed to sellers and not a 'breach' in the traditional sense?

<comment><USER5> I got one from email@example.com too. Looked genuine -- didn't seem to be fishing for anything. However, the complete lack of information bothered me a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me very sad. You'd think a company with so many employees and SO much of our data could do a better job at the very least telling us what happened in a decent way. I get that data leaks happen. It's unfortunate, but with so many people and so many complex systems, I'm not mad. But it's absolutely unacceptable to send such a poorly worded email.

<comment><USER7> > You'd think a company with so many employees and SO much of our data could > do a better job at the very least telling us what happened in a decent way

You are not their primary concern or interest. Market share and margins are. You are 100% replaceable within seconds on their platform.

<comment><USER8> This is the unfortunate truth. You have to stand up for yourself and own your own data. I like to hope that over the next few years we are reigniting the technologically literate into self-hosting and providing small hosting services for their less technologically literate connections. I think the secret to making this happen is through PKI edcutaional initiatives and simpiliar access to administration automation. I live in NYC, and my wild imagination sees a world were each building has a technically literate "supervisor" that is making a stable profit off hosting the basics for tenants. It's a pipe dream I know, but that's not going to stop me taking what steps I can to make that happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Counterpoint: I haven't got one, despite using both the UK and US Amazon website regularly. So it remains to be seen what happened, and if Amazon is to blame.

Edit: Asked around, so far, none of my friends and family who use the UK site exclusively have gotten an email.

Could also be phishing gone wrong? Because what better time to do it than close to Black Friday?

<comment><USER10> It looks like it has something to do with being a _seller_ on Amazon. Had the email been sent by someone with a clue, it would have been explicit. Instead everyone is just speculating (including me).

<comment><USER9> I didn't get that from the thread title ("user's e-mails") or the Register article [0] which says:

> Amazon's UK press office acknowledged that the email was genuine, saying > only: "We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been > impacted."

and

> [...] this is not a breach in the sense of a hack while maintaining that the > snafu is an inadvertent technical error and that they emailed customers from > an abundance of caution.

Looks like they've ballsed up the incidence response quite badly, and seems to be Amazon's fault.

[0] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/21/amazon_data_breach/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/21/amazon_data_breach/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess that prevent-public-bucket feature they released last week can come in handy.</comment>


Getting your first 500-1000 users - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/sideprojects/how-to-get-your-first-500-1000-users-for-your-product-project-and-or-service-for-free-41a888a08764 <comment><AUTHOR> This article contains a collection of resources (websites, subreddits, etc.) I had been assembling where you can garner early users for your product/service. Let me know what you think :)</comment>


Make it Rain – Animated gif notifications whenever you get paid through Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fitztrev/make-it-rain <comment><USER2> I have a filter on my gmail so my phone plays the coin sound from Super Mario Bros. every time I get a Paypal/Etsy/Ebay/Amazon payment. It's quite satisfying to hear that throughout the day.

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate? I've been looking for a way to do this on an iPhone.

<comment><USER4> You can use Pushover for that: [https://pushover.net/](https://pushover.net/) Just install the client on your phone and ping the API on each sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We implemented something similar 5 months ago, but wired to an event in segment (we don't use stripe). The bot would post a random gif from giphy tagged with 'money'. After a while we became tired of seeing Nicki Minaj appear in our slack...

<comment><USER6> I just realized that my favorite Nicki Minaj gifs are not included in that set. Pull request submitted!

<comment><USER7> For those curious -- here are the new images.

[https://imgur.com/BRDCAXR,JL8AwZw,JWnWT39,tIentMt](https://imgur.com/BRDCAXR,JL8AwZw,JWnWT39,tIentMt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You quickly realize that this is a bad idea when the payments come in fast enough.

<comment><USER9> Lets solve that problem when we get to it :)

<comment><USER8> I'm simply speaking from experience.

<comment><USER10> Embrace it. Use the Mario Bro's coin sound, so then when they come in rapidly, you can pretend he's running through a long line of coins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For Hipchat users, here's a fork of this I made: [https://github.com/tim- thimmaiah/make-it-rain](https://github.com/tim-thimmaiah/make-it-rain)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've wrote a little console script that played a cash register sound after a google analytics conversion. We only had a few sales a day though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Current GIFs:

[http://i.imgur.com/lnK1nBF.gif](http://i.imgur.com/lnK1nBF.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/ptqA6dW.gif](http://i.imgur.com/ptqA6dW.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/r1o0uyH.gif](http://i.imgur.com/r1o0uyH.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/N0aYJTJ.gif](http://i.imgur.com/N0aYJTJ.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/j25gaOc.gif](http://i.imgur.com/j25gaOc.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/tkbHsDZ.gif](http://i.imgur.com/tkbHsDZ.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/HaNu5ka.gif](http://i.imgur.com/HaNu5ka.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/5ZcUxTg.gif](http://i.imgur.com/5ZcUxTg.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/5CiZA5v.gif](http://i.imgur.com/5CiZA5v.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/nDUasjq.gif](http://i.imgur.com/nDUasjq.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/8ExBVb4.gif](http://i.imgur.com/8ExBVb4.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/cskbcM2.gif](http://i.imgur.com/cskbcM2.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/49tP7pc.gif](http://i.imgur.com/49tP7pc.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/28bfK1I.gif](http://i.imgur.com/28bfK1I.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/ERyoPf3.gif](http://i.imgur.com/ERyoPf3.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/PbADlZW.gif](http://i.imgur.com/PbADlZW.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/dgBtPpD.gif](http://i.imgur.com/dgBtPpD.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/2BgTeUI.gif](http://i.imgur.com/2BgTeUI.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/OYAgYcf.gif](http://i.imgur.com/OYAgYcf.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/gh7uW50.gif](http://i.imgur.com/gh7uW50.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/6fYah3Z.gif](http://i.imgur.com/6fYah3Z.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/yuB67q5.gif](http://i.imgur.com/yuB67q5.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/JeEHZL9.gif](http://i.imgur.com/JeEHZL9.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/BxFlFvv.gif](http://i.imgur.com/BxFlFvv.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/n6K78PG.gif](http://i.imgur.com/n6K78PG.gif) [http://i.imgur.com/AbHWKoc.gif](http://i.imgur.com/AbHWKoc.gif)

<comment><USER14> All on one page: [http://fitztrev.github.io/make-it- rain/](http://fitztrev.github.io/make-it-rain/)</comment></comment>


Ronald van den Heetkamp's Webapplication Firewall. - <AUTHOR> http://www.0x000000.com/?i=558

<comment><USER2>
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(java|curl|wget).* [NC,OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(winhttp|HTTrack|clshttp|archiver|loader|email|harvest|extract|grab|miner).* [NC,OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(libwww|curl|wget|python|nikto|scan).* [NC,OR]

Yeah, that ought to stop all those crazy h4ck3r5... for about 3 seconds until they change their user agent to firefox. It's always a bad idea to trust user- provided data. How does this help your security?

<comment><USER3> I use ruby so I guess I am ok ;) Oh noes - he may pick up on it !

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm wary of any one-size-fits-all solutions.

However, someone with intimate knowledge of how their web application works ought to consider doing some of these things on a case-by-case basis.

I would avoid anything dealing the with User-Agent at all, because you never know if two years from now the most popular web browser will be called Mozilla WebHarvest or something weird like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> See also <http://www.modsecurity.org/> (which now seems to have a very professional web site but still seems open source).</comment>


Visa Doubles Down on Bitcoin, Partners with Bitcoin Startup Zap - <AUTHOR> https://ryze.substack.com/p/ryze-recap-73-visa-doubles-down-on <comment><USER2> This is dope, I wonder if they are working with Zap on the merchant side too</comment>


Four-year-old may be source of swine flu - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-search-outbreak-source

<comment><USER2> Not accurate. He's not the source - he's just the only one with an intact sample that was positive for mexican flu.

</comment><comment><USER3> The kid in the article isn't the source, it's this one:

[http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=28mion8&s=5](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=28mion8&s=5)

</comment><comment><USER4> Edgar Hernández Hernández? This virus not only replicates itself, it replicates your last name too. We're all doomed!</comment>


Is it the End of Jordan as Silicon Valley of the Arab World? - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2013/08/is-it-the-end-of-jordan-as-silicon-valley-of-arabia-it-companies-threaten-to-move-out-of-jordan.html

<comment><AUTHOR> as Jordanian IT companies threaten to move their HQ out of the country if proposed tax law passes.</comment>


OVH's North American data center has been down for 3hrs - <AUTHOR> http://status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=11304 <comment><AUTHOR> Lots of tweets here: [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=OVH&s...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=OVH&src=typd)

No ETA on when it will be fixed. Yikes.</comment>


In Silicon Valley, Buying Companies for Their Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/technology/18talent.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I agree this happens - a lot. But if it's a matter of supply/demand and engineers being worth "$0.5m - $1m" then why are we not seeing salaries for developers a lot higher?

It would be a lot cheaper for Facebook to offer good developers $500k/year + options straight up rather than spending several million to buy a startup of a few devs, where a large %age of the purchase price is going to invetors and not the developers.

I wonder if Facebook, Google, etc paid that kind of money whether we'd see more young, talented developers joining Facebook rather than creating a startup?

 _Or maybe companies like Facebook already do pay that kind of money to the best engineers - we just don't hear about it?_

<comment><USER3> it's a one time payment (often in stock, which tends to be accounted for differently) and not a recurring $500k a year

<comment><USER2> You've missed my point - re-read my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its an expensive way to acquire talent but it can keep some known producers in your company for a while. Generally its good to look at how much funding went into a company before trying to analyze the per-capita numbers. Most VC's don't want to leave with just their money back or worse less than their money back (I've heard such deals being called a 'hair cut')

So company A gets 10 million in funding and then gets acquired for 25 million, all 25 million might go to the investors with may be 2 or 3 million divided up amongst all the common stock. The goal it seems is to have the big 'retention' contract where you get some chunk of stock as part of the deal (or an 'earn out') 12, 18 even 36 months later. It keeps the stars on the payroll and out of the hands of competition or worse disrupting your own market.

A conversation I had with an entrepreneur friend who had been acquired by Cisco went like this ...

Me, "So how's the company doing?"

Them, "We were acquired by Cisco."

Me, "Oh, so how long are you in for?"

Them, "24 months but we can get out in 18 if we meet the numbers."

We both joked that if someone had over heard us and didn't know the valley they would think he was in prison or something :-)

One can always 'walk away' from these deals, generally it leaves stock and cash on the table if you do that. And there is a pretty steep drop off in benefit from the founders to the last person who was hired and had yet to reach their stock options first vesting cliff.

<comment><USER5> having to pay big retention bonuses tends to have a significant downward impact on the value at acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yea, agree with bifrost that this article is stating the obvious. But I guess it might not be so obvious to those not in Silicon Valley.

Seems to me that this is just enabling companies to pay engineers what they're really worth without having to deal with the HR repercussions of having really large salary disparity.

</comment><comment><USER7> So what's the line on this practice? It does seem to work in out some cases, but entrepreneurs seem to be gaming the system now, which would make this practice a much worse deal for the buying companies.

24 months does seem to be the avg. term, minus let's say, 3 months ramping up and 3 down. Consider weekends and holidays, and companies are not getting much for their dollar.

I understand the company's need to compete in an entrepreneurial market, but the investment doesn't seem to be worth it on it's face.

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems rather expensive, but the money probably just keeps churning around many of the same circles eventually anyway.

I guess they'll try anything as long as it doesn't involve using remote workers or satellite offices in less expensive cities to attract other competent developers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Its kindof stating the obvious, but detailing some of the juicy parts of these deals is pretty fascinating. Definately gives you a better idea of the value your company has, even if your company on a whole doesn't succeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> "It is not what we are aiming for as investors, said Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, a venture fund. We are trying to build large, lasting businesses."

Aren't these the same VC's who want to sell/flip your startup (instead of letting it grow) in order to pay their investor?

</comment><comment><USER11> I would have thought the kind of people that build startups aren't always the type that would enjoy working at a company large enough to acquire them.

What's the standard obligatory time a founder has to stay with the acquiring company? How many founders stay beyond that time?

<comment><USER12> There is no "obligatory time." It is just the benefits package that they would have to forgo should they choose to leave their acquirer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm assuming it's not... But... doesn't this sound like slavery? Especially if you are an engineer who joins the startup and has no significant say in who you get acquired by... My guess is that you could just walk away but lose any promise of some kind of substantial pay. What's the deal?

<comment><USER14> The deal is that you can withdraw your labour at any time and seek work elsewhere, but you will probably give up earning opportunities in exchange.

Comparing "golden handcuffs" to slavery is a bit of a stretch.</comment></comment>


Scottish scientists develop new technique for killing cancer cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/health/scientists-make-cancer-cells-vanish-1.1022114 <comment><USER2> See

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295315>

submitted just today.

I find it interesting, pg, that you latch on to certain news stories that are based largely on researcher press releases to announce medical research results. Do the stories that catch your eye seem to have more start-up potential than other medical news stories, or do you use some other screens to decide which medical news stories are of most interest?

My own posting behavior reveals that I like medical news stories too, but I especially like those that are more cautious in drawing conclusions about clinical importance, and that bring up issues of research interpretation,

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

as it is well known that many initial research findings in human medicine are never replicated.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAD but I always thought that cancer cells were relatively weak and therefore actually killing them was not a big deal - all kinds of things can kill cancer - the problem is effectively delivering the killing mechanism to the site of the cancer without harming surrounding tissue.

<comment><USER4> That's what apparently makes this quite nice - uses the same mechanism as that which carries iron in the bloodstream so it seems low overhead (vs chemo) and high selectivity.

 _The intravenous administration of transferrin-bearing polypropylenimine polyplex resulted in gene expression mainly in the tumors. Consequently, the intravenous administration of the delivery system complexed to a therapeutic DNA led to a rapid and sustained tumor regression over one month, with long- term survival of 100% of the animals (90% complete response, 10% partial response).The treatment was well tolerated by the animals, with no apparent signs of toxicity._

Intravenous administration is very promising, as it suggests the possibility of targeting cancer anywhere in the body. The transferrin receptor is apparently common to many human cancers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More info here: [http://spider.science.strath.ac.uk/sipbs/staff/Christine_Duf...](http://spider.science.strath.ac.uk/sipbs/staff/Christine_Duf%E8s.htm)

Paper itself here (the Journal is paywalled, boo): <http://www.scribd.com/doc/30300545/sdarticle>

It has only been shown for skin cancer so far, but a) that's still a big deal as skin cancer is very common and b) indications are that this vector should probably work with other types.

Somewhat related: [http://vaccinenewsdaily.com/news/212802-new-use-of- proteins-...](http://vaccinenewsdaily.com/news/212802-new-use-of-proteins-in- genetic-material-could-help-in-cancer-fight)

</comment><comment><USER5> ...with a headbutt!!

<comment><USER6> You're getting downvoted, but I chuckled :)</comment></comment>


San Francisco most intensely gentrified city in new rankings - <AUTHOR> https://ncrc.org/san-francisco-most-intensely-gentrified-city-in-new-rankings/ <comment><USER2> Read past the headline and it is in fact Oakland that is gentrifying. San Francisco was almost entirely too rich to be considered.

<comment><USER3> 5 of the 41 gentrifying areas were in SF. The rest are all of East Bay or in South Bay. It's incredibly misleading to call that SF. SF had completed it's gentrification process much earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does a community (edit: geographically defined, not the people living there at time X) receive investment while avoiding gentrification?

There seems to be a logical pattern of receiving investment -> community gets more resources/becomes better -> more people want to live there -> prices increase -> gentrification and the original residents being forced out.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> Gentrification is a symptom of limited supply. The way to reduce housing prices in the face of increased demand is to flood the market with supply, by increasing high-density zoning, and loosening requirements such as parking. SF will probably respond with even more rent control, which won't work.

<comment><USER6> Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The number 1, 2, 3 and 4 problems the Bay Area specifically (and CA generally) faces are an undersupply of housing.

Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness, gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality.

If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions

<comment><USER7> High density housing? That sounds like it's going to devalue my own property. Not in my back yard!

<comment><USER8> Not sure if you're being sarcastic. From what I've heard, if you own a SFH and SFH are being torn down for apartments then your SFH becomes more desirable over time because SFH are less common. (Presuming finite land and SFHs) And if a developer can make 5x the housing on your one lot then probably $$$ - right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read another way: neighborhoods are getting investment and safer.

<comment><USER10> Read another way: white people are moving into neighborhoods that black people had previously been redlined into, and are reaping all the benefits of that investment and safety instead of the former residents.

<comment><USER11> In SF's case it's probably a good mix of asian and white tbh

<comment><USER12> Asians are the new white people

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For anyone wondering, gentrification in the study is defined as increase in median income and house value as well as college educated levels.

<comment><USER14> In that case this report is figure out. From the report, "Do Opportunity Zones benefit or gentrify low-income neighborhoods?" If one is looking just at socioeconomic indicators, and after an investment they go up, and that's defined as bad ... I have trouble following the logic from the report. Don't we want investment to improve the numbers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I no longer live in SF, but I found it funny seeing the dissonance of people new to the Bay Area who moved there for a high paying tech startup and then talk about how bad gentrification was while being blind to the fact they were doing exactly what they were saying was wrong.

Not an exact conversation, but along the lines of what I've run into:

Rob: "It's terrible what's happening to these communities. The Mission used to be a haven for artists. Now those people are moving out and it's losing its history"

Mayk: "dude, didn't you just move here 2 years ago and have a $2,500 studio in the Mission?"

Rob: "Yeah, but it's not like any of those people could have afforded it anyway, so I'm not taking it away from somebody else or anything".

SF is a boiling melting pot of many different communities and cultures, and it's interesting to see which cultures people ascribe to while also being part of others that run counter to what ideals they say they believe.

<comment><USER16> The programmers have as much of a right to be there as anyone else does. People who owned their condos and houses weren't pushed out, they usually sold to buy something bigger. That would be practically everyone my parents knew. (Edit: Of course, people who rented apartments for 20 years and then had their rent jacked sky high by a new landlord, that's a different story...)

The fun part for me is I was born in SF. My family relocated to a suburb when I was little to get a bigger house. They never could afford to move back. Now that I'm a programmer, I can afford to take us back there! Would I feel guilty about it? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

That said, if I were to do that, I'd be buying an old beat up house in outer sunset. The only thing I'd be displacing in that case, are the people who decided to sell it after owning it for 20+ years because they wanted a bigger house in Fairfield or something. (Let's be real though, I can't afford to buy a house in SF at all haha. Maybe a few more years of saving.)

I don't know, there's a large gap between "I've got mine, fuck you" and "You must be apologetic for having a good career and being able to afford the rent."

Of course, I feel that displacing all the old hole-in-the-wall restaurants for shit like starbucks and panera bread is a disgrace. Especially because I don't eat shit like starbucks or panera bread lol. I'm all about the $5 lunch special at the chinese place. (Although now it's a $20 special!)

<comment><USER17> Buying a house at SF prices is always contributing to displacement, for in your absence there would be less demand for houses and the prices would be lower.

<comment><USER2> This depends on a very liberal interpretation of what "displacement" means.

<comment><USER17> Disagree, I think the opposite interpretation is very conservative. If a tech bro moves in to a house that was just vacated voluntarily by someone who had lived in the city for twenty years, have they not displaced anyone, since that house would be vacant anyway? What if they moved to a nicer place in the same city, and the tech bro is taking their old residence? What if the last tenant passed away instead?

You can split hairs all you want, but anything that causes even a perceived (by the landlord) increase in demand contributes to keeping that price from going any lower. In an extreme case, that could be data from the housing data broker saying that the average apartment in their zip code goes for $X. In an even more extreme case, maybe their proxy for a data broker is the weekly number of Craigslist views for an ad they put up. Sometimes landlords keep vacancies open for multiple months or even years on end, hoping to get someone who will pay their asking price.

Either way, the perceived demand is the thing keeping it up, and someone buying a house as opposed to them not being able to sell the house is also what stops them from renting it out to Joe Schmoe who can only pay $900/mo in the meantime.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Is it that buying a house from an owner occupier at high market rates displaces the person who couldn't bid market rate for the property?

<comment><USER17> Exactly; buying the house contributes to the displacement in the sense that if they weren't buying the house, someone of less means could buy it instead.

<comment><USER2> Displacement the word means moving something out of a place it currently occupies. You should find a better word.

<comment><USER2> I described a situation where an owner occupier was selling their home. You are describing being priced out. The concepts overlap, but what I described is certainly not displacement.

<comment><USER17> If someone says you are contributing to the mistreatment of animals by buying fur coats, they are not implying that you personally skinned a beaver/fox/what-have-you. Although your purchase of a house does not necessarily directly cause someone else to get ousted, it is still contributing to the problem of displacement, because through a sequence of events it does cause someone to get displaced when their landlord says, "I can rent this place out for 4 times the amount you're paying, so get out."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine if San Francisco had not been lumped in with Oakland!

</comment><comment><USER19> To the risk of being naive, I'd imagine that gentrification can be at least somewhat mitigated by adding housing as the location becomes more desirable. This can take various shapes and forms depending on where. In the Bay, open space is mostly inexistant in desirable areas, so (one of) the main solution would be increasing density.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've always wondered why we have two pejorative words for opposite effects: when rich people move in, it's gentrification. When the rich leave it's "white flight".

Is there some kind of equilibrium term here where a neighborhood is staying exactly the same, getting neither richer nor poorer?

<comment><USER21> Stagnation</comment></comment>


How Mark Zuckerberg Forever Changed the American Wedding - <AUTHOR> http://hellogiggles.com/taking-a-wedding-private-how-mark-zuckerberg-forever-changed-the-american-wedding

<comment><USER2> Henry Winkler would be embarrassed to jump a shark as blatantly as this author. Facebook IPO'd. Everyone has an account. It's time to stop writing stories about it.

Normal people have normal and inexpensive weddings ever day.

The Chan-Zuckerberg wedding disrupted nothing. In fact, the couple went out of their way to disrupt nothing.</comment>


Do not sign up for Rippln, it's a piramid scheme (and not the next big thing). - <AUTHOR> http://ripplnmobile.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been getting invites from friends to sign up at <http://www.startmyripple.com/>

I couldn't find info on the company or it's team. After some more research I found a post on Yahoo about it. I think this guy did a pretty good job explaining the possible dangers when you sign up:

[http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/rippln- investigation-...](http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/rippln- investigation-mlm-pyramid-scheme-scam-020306821.html)

Be warned.

<comment><USER2> I received an invite as well. Not signing up for this. You have to sign an NDA and cannot remove your account if you want to. TechCrunch also has a post up: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/what-not-to-do-in-your- star...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/what-not-to-do-in-your-startup- promo-video/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read their home page and still have no idea what the hell they are actually selling or doing.

<comment><USER4> Obviously they do appification, gamification, and mobile! Actually I don't know what they do either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Look at this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7-nxxkjS0>

I cannot imagine the human being that would watch this video and not have an overload of mental-alarms screaming "scam". I want to meet the people who fall for this. I want to know how they function in society day after day. They must see the world in a way that is beyond my comprehension.</comment>


High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homework/64857/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

<comment><USER2> Seems like it's time to randomize questions. And technology could be used for this, too.

It wouldn't be too hard to come up with something that changes a few key numbers in each question, and reorders all the questions. This could be used to automatically generate the answer key for the professor, too. Each student could be given a personalized assignment, that is useless to copy from anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to miss the one rationalization I saw most in my college days for 'technological detachment phenomenon'. That being that "in the real world, it doesn't matter how i got the right answer". I don't fully agree with the statement, but its worth a thought at least.

<comment><USER4> Of course it matters how you get the right answer. That's the whole fucking point of our schools. If you get the right answer via careful study and practice, you tend to learn something useful, and if you get the right answer via cheating, you probably don't learn shit. The exact same thing is true in the "real world."

I've heard that too, of course, but I disagree that it's worth a thought. The only implication of that remark is that college is a waste of time for the speaker thereof.</comment></comment>


Databases at 14.4Mhz - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foundationdb.com/databases-at-14.4mhz

<comment><USER2> This is Foundation DB's announcement they are doing full ACID databases with a 14.4M writes per second capability. That is insanely fast in the data base world. Running in AWS with 32 c3.8xlarge configured machines. So basically NSA level data base capability for $150/hr. But perhaps more interesting is that those same machines on the open market are about $225,000. That's two rack, one switch and a transaction rate that lets you watch every purchase made at every Walmart store in the US, in real time. That is assuming the stats are correct[1], and it wouldn't even be sweating (14M customers a day vs 14M transactions per second). Insanely fast.

I wish I was an investor in them.

[1] [http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company- statistics/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/)

<comment><USER3> Not all ACID transactions are equal. This is just a key-value store-like test. It shows the potential to scale, yet nothing regarding performance in real word.

32 c3.2xlarge instances have 1920GB memory. Given 1 billion 16B+ 8..100B values the whole dataset fits just into memory.

The Cassandra test mentioned [1] sustained loss of 1/3 instances. That's very impressive! Would love to see how F-DB handles this type of real-life situation (hint hint for follow up blog post).

[1] [http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.cz/2014/03/cassandra- hit...](http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.cz/2014/03/cassandra-hits-one- million-writes-per-second-on-google-compute-engine.html)

<comment><USER4> They do seem to talk about writes per second. That means you must flush to disk, not read from cache.

[Edit, more info] They seem to run with multiple clients which also stresses the system. From their explanation * The clients simulate 320,000 concurrent sessions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very impressive, however...

See this tweet by @aphyr: [https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/542755074380791809](https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/542755074380791809)

(All credit for the idea in this comment is due to @aphyr)

Basically because the transactions modified keys selected from a uniform distribution, the probability of contention was extremely low. AKA this workload is basically a data-parallel problem, somewhat lessening the impressiveness of the high throughput. Would be interesting to see it with a Zipfian distribution (or even better, a Biebermark [0])

[0] - [http://smalldatum.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/biebermarks.html](http://smalldatum.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/biebermarks.html)

<comment><USER6> Actually, @aphyr's analysis is wrong. In fact it's actually worse that he says. There is an exactly 0% chance of conflicts between two transactions that each only write 20 random keys (as they do in this test). This is perhaps counterintuitive, but, because there are no reads, any serialization order is possible and therefore there is no chance of conflict.

Equally wrong is his assumption that this has any bearing on the performance of FoundationDB. In fact FoundationDB will perform the same whether the conflict rate is high or low. This isn't to say that FoundationDB somehow cheats the laws of transaction conflicts, just that it has to do all the work in either case. There is no trick or cheat on this test--this same performance will hold on a variety of workloads with varying conflict rates as well as those including reads.

<comment><USER7> Your definition of performance is a little weird.

Presumably you will want to retry conflicting transactions, so you generally would not count them towards your throughput.

For example if I commit 100 transactions per second, and 90% of them return conflicts, I am only successfully committing 10 transactions per second.

<comment><USER6> That's true: a large conflict rate would eat into your budget because clients would be retrying.

Of course most real world workloads are (hopefully!) no where near 90% conflicts. If you had a 90% transaction conflict rate you could expect FoundationDB performance to drop by about 30-60% due to retries (and, worse news, you would need to rethink your architecture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've been using FoundationDB in production for about 10 months now. It's really been a game changer for us.

We continue to use it for more and more data access patterns which require strong consistency guarantees.

We currently store ~2 terabytes of data in a 12 node FDB cluster. It's rock solid and comes out of the box with great tooling.

Excited about this release! My only regret is I didn't find it sooner :)

<comment><USER9> Why do you need a 12 node cluster for 2 TB of data?

<comment><USER8> With a replication factor of 2 (for fault tolerance), it's ~4.5 TB.

FoundationDB requires SSD drives, which the best we can get efficiently in our data center is ~670 GB of usable space (3x480GB raided).

12x670 = 8040 GB

We try to keep extra space available for node failures (FDB will immediately start replicating addition data if it notices data with less than the configured number of replicas).

Our dataset currently grows at a decent pace, so we over provision a bit as well.

<comment><USER10> Why do you use RAID on your nodes if you have an RF==2?

<comment><USER8> A few reasons off the top of my head:

1) We're still interested in the nodes being as reliable as they can be. With RAID 5, we need two simultaneous disk failures to brick a node. With RAID 0 (to increase usable disk space), any of the 3 disks can brick the node.

Even with 12 nodes and RF of 2, an order of magnitude more node failures would be more likely to disrupt our service. Perhaps this makes more sense in a larger cluster with a higher RF factor?

2) We're using commodity hardware from a dedicated server provider, which uses RAID 1 or 5 configurations exclusively by default. We haven't reached the point where we felt that was enough of an issue or gain to investigate changing it.

3) Having more CPUs/disks in the cluster (12 nodes rather than cramming all data on 6) can be a good thing... as FDB scales fairly linearly.

<comment><USER10> I think you misinterpreted what I said. I explained it more clearly below. I suggested using the same 12 nodes but putting each one as a RAID 0, which would get you more reliability and more storage for the same cost. In your current config, two dead disks possibly bricks the system -- in the config I propose, you'd need four dead disks before anyone noticed.

What I'm suggesting is that you think of the cluster more holistically, since I assume your goal is a reliable cluster, not reliable nodes. As a nice bonus you get more "free" disk space.

<comment><USER8> That was my interpretation of your comment, but I'm still not sure I follow. In my understanding, by using RAID 0, _any_ single disk failure will brick a node. Each node would then have 3 disks that are ticking time bombs (multiplying the failure rate by 3). How is that more reliable?

In RAID 5, I can have 1 disk failure on a node with no problem. 2 disk failures on the same node, and I only lose 1 node of my 12 node cluster (I.E. cluster is fine). I can also theoretically lose 12 (1 on each node) + 2*(RF-1) disks, and gracefully repair the situation with 0 interruption.

What's the benefit of RAID 0 other than increased usable disk space and perhaps write performance? It seems you're decreasing reliability significantly for those gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just watched the linked presentation about "flow" here : [https://foundationdb.com/videos/testing-distributed- systems-...](https://foundationdb.com/videos/testing-distributed-systems-with- deterministic-simulation)

Is it really the first Distributed DB project to have built a simulator ?

Because frankly, if that's the case, it seems revolutionary to me. Intuitively, it seems like bringing the same kind of quality improvement as unit testing did to regular software development.

PS : i should add that this talk is one of the best i've seen this year. The guy is extremely smart, passionate, and clear. (i just loved the The Hurst exponent part).

<comment><USER12> At Couchbase we have a plethora of simulators. Simulations of cluster topology changes, simulations of failure scenarios, simulations of workloads to estimate requried cluster sizes, etc. Here's one: [https://github.com/couchbaselabs/cbfg](https://github.com/couchbaselabs/cbfg)

<comment><USER6> I think the difference is that FoundationDB has only one, and it's not an external simulation. The actual code that runs in production can also deterministically simulate a cluster of itself.

I do believe this is unique among publically-available distributed databases.

<comment><USER13> Why is it a good thing that it's not an external simulation?

<comment><USER14> I'll give you some brief thoughts from my experience working at FoundationDB, but if you really want the in-depth answer to what makes our simulation framework an enabling technology for everything we do, you should take a look at the talk my colleague Will Wilson gave at Strange Loop [0].

Everything in our core is written in Flow, our asynchronous programming environment. The architecture of our server is essentially single threaded, with (pseudo-)concurrent actors allowing a single process to satisfy multiple roles at once.

The interfaces that these actors use to communicate -- with the disk, over the network, with the OS in general -- are abstracted and implemented in Flow as well. Each of these interfaces not only has at least one "real" implementation, but at least one, and sometimes more, simulated implementations.

Since we run multiple actors in a single process all the time, running yet more actors, pretending to be different machines, all still in the same process, was an obvious step. These workers communicate with each other via the _same_ network interfaces that real-world workers do in real clusters.

In the end we are able to become our own adversaries, pushing the limits of the system in ways that just don't happen often enough in the real world to test and debug in the wild. Our simulated implementations are allowed to present any behavior that can be observed in the real world, or justified by the spec, or implied by the contract. And they can do so much more frequently.

But most importantly -- as in, without this our system would never have been developed -- we can simulate these pathological behaviors in a completely deterministic fashion. Having the power to run a million tests, simulating multi-machine clusters trying to complete workloads while suffering from the most unbelievable combination of network partitions, dropped packets, failed disks, etc. etc., all while knowing that any error can be replayed, stepped through in a debugger, in a single process on a single machine... without this capability, we would never have had the confidence to build our product or evolve it as aggressively as we have.

tl;dr: We're not making simulations _of_ the system, we're running the system _in_ simulation, and that makes all the difference.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm only familiar with other key-value storage engines, not FoundationDB, but it seems like the goals are: "distributed key-value database, read latencies below 500 microseconds, ACID, scalability".

I remember evaluating a few low latency key-value storage solutions, and one of these was Stanford's RAMCloud, which is supposed to give 4-5 microseconds reads, 15 microseconds writes, scale up to 10,000 boxes and provide data durability. [https://ramcloud.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RAM/RAMCloud](https://ramcloud.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RAM/RAMCloud) Seems like, that would be "Databases at _2000Mhz_ ".

I've actually studied the code that was handling the network and it had been written pretty nicely, and as far as I know, it should work both over 10Gbe and Infiniband with similar latencies. And I'm not at all surprised, they could get pretty clean looking 4-5us latency distribution, with the code like that.

How does it compare with FoundationDB? Is it completely different technology?

<comment><USER8> Don't know much about RAMCloud, but from the description:

"Many more issues remain, such as whether we can provide higher-level features such as secondary indexes and multiple-object transactions without sacrificing the latency or scalability of the system. We are currently exploring several of these issues."

Sounds it doesn't provide multi-key ACID transactions at the very least.

<comment><USER15> Yes, It looks like it doesn't support multi-key ACID transactions. As per:

[https://ramcloud.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RAM/Deciding+Whe...](https://ramcloud.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RAM/Deciding+Whether+to+Use+RAMCloud)

> If your application requires the higher-level data model features of a > relational database, such as secondary indexes and transactions spanning > multiple objects, then it may be difficult to get that application running > on RAMCloud. The current RAMCloud data model is a key-value store with a few > extension (such as conditional writes, table enumeration, and multi- > read/multi-write operations); it does not yet support secondary indexes and > multi-object transactions. Most of these operations can be implemented on > top of the existing RAMCloud features, but it will take extra work and these > operations will not run as fast as the built-in RAMCloud operations. We are > currently working on adding higher-level features to RAMCloud.

Still. Aside from that, it is free, and open source and gives _hundred times_ better latency?

<comment><USER16> > Still. Aside from that, it is free, and open source and gives hundred times > better latency?

It doesn't have the same guarantees. If you need those guarantees, then there's no comparison and it doesn't make sense to compare latencies.

<comment><USER15> I'm not so sure. Have the latencies claimed by FoundationDB been measured on multi-key transactions?

And if you need these guaranties, it seems like "Most of these operations can be implemented on top of the existing RAMCloud features". I would expect it to be possible to implement that and stay well withing the latency budget, provided that a single-key durable write is 100 times faster.

<comment><USER17> All of the transactions in the test noted in the blog are multi-key transactions. (20 key updates)

<comment><USER15> When claiming the 14.4MHz number, is that per 20-key update? Or a single key update in the 20-key update? And what's the latency on the 20-key update?

<comment><USER14> The writes we are measuring are individual keys, modified atomically in transactions of 20 keys at a time. So this test is doing 14 million writes per second as 720 thousand transactions per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This looks very interesting and congratulations to the FoundationDB crew on some pretty amazing performance numbers.

One of the links leads to an interesting C++ actor preprocessor called 'Flow'. In that table, it lists the performance result of sending a message around a ring for a certain number of processes and a certain number of messages, in which Flow appears to be fastest with 0.075 sec in the case of N=1000 and M=1000, compared with, e.g. erlang @ 1.09 seconds.

My curiosity was piqued, so I threw together a quick microbenchmark in erlang. On a moderately loaded 2013 macbook air (2-core i7) and erlang 17.1, with 1000 iterations of M=1000 and N=1000, it averaged 34 microseconds per run, which compares pretty favorably with Flow's claimed 75000 microseconds. The Flow paper appears to maybe be from 2010, so it would be interesting to know how it's doing in 2014.

<comment><USER19> There's got to be some mistake there somewhere - on your part, or on theirs - because there's no way erlag improved from 1.09 seconds to 34 _micro_ seconds on pretty much any benchmark between 2010 and 2014. Even the factor 1000 (the message count) isn't enough to account for that difference - something's fishy.

<comment><USER6> 1M messages passes in 34 microseconds would be ~0.1 CPU clocks per message pass. Maybe an optimizer is stepping in and short-circuiting?

<comment><USER18> heh, not only that, but my fingers accidentally made my test massively concurrent! Such are the perils of erlang. When I defeat the optimizer and also force message passing to be serialized both inside and outside a trial, I get an average of 525000 microseconds, which is more in line with the other results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As someone who has no idea about the cost of high-scale computing like this, is $150/hr reasonable? It seems like an amount that's hard to sustain to me, but I have no idea if that's a steady, all the time rate, or a burst rate, or what. Or if it's a set up you'd actually ever even need -- seems like from the examples they mention (like the Tweets), they're above the need by a fair amount. Anyone else in this sort of situation care to chip in on that?

<comment><USER21> Per the article, it's about 1/20th the cost that Google would charge you for the same number of writes.

<comment><USER20> I had seen that as well, actually. Is this the kind of data or transaction level that might only be expected for a Google level throughput?

<comment><USER19> Well, do you do 14.4 million serializable writes per second or anything close to that?

<comment><USER20> Note my original comment -- nope. I haven't worked on anything that would have a need anywhere near that amount of throughput.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I thought it was DB connections over radio waves just above 20 meters. Also, it's MHz, not Mhz.

</comment><comment><USER23> This sounds great compared to my anecdotal experience with DB write performance; but is there a collection of database performance benchmarks that this can be easily compared to?

The best source for DB benchmarking I know of is [http://www.tpc.org/](http://www.tpc.org/). The methodology is more complicated there, but the top results are around 8 million transactions per minute on $5 million systems. This FoundationDB result is more like 900 million transactions per minute on a system that costs $1.5 million a year to rent (so, approx $5 million to buy?).

The USD/transactions-per-minute metric is clear, but without a standard test suite (schema, queries, client count, etc.), comparing claims of database performance makes my head hurt.

<comment><USER6> I think you mean "900 _million_ transactions per minute". Of course that overstates things since each TPC-C transaction entails a lot more than one write. TPC-C is about 2/3 read and 1/3 write, and each TPC transaction might do 20 low-level read+write operations (I'm actually not sure, but I think that's in the ballpark.)

In the NoSQL world many people have converged on a workload of 90% reads/10% writes to individual keys. We show 90/10 results on our performance page [1] but in this test we do 100% writes to stress the "transaction engine", which processes writes.

Since we have our SQL Layer [2] as well, we will run some more-comparable SQL tests in the future.

[1] [https://foundationdb.com/key-value- store/performance](https://foundationdb.com/key-value-store/performance)

[2] [https://foundationdb.com/layers/sql](https://foundationdb.com/layers/sql)

<comment><USER23> (Ah, yes, thank you, 900 million per minute. I typo'd.)

Nice performance page. It pre-answers my follow up question, which was how linear is scaling with more cores? Looks solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Impressive.

However I think there's still plenty of room to grow.

320,000 concurrent sessions isn't that much by modern standards. You can get 12 million concurrent connections on one linux machine, and push 1gigabit of data.

Also, 167 megabytes per second (116B * 14.4 million) is not pushing the limits of what one machine can do. I've been able to process 680 megabytes per second of data into a custom video database, plus write it to disk on one 2010 machine. That's doing heavy processing at the same time on the video with plenty of CPU to spare.

PCIe over fibre can do many transactions messages per second. You can fit 2TB memory machines in 1U (and more).

Since this is a memory + eventually dump to disk database, I think there is still a lot of room to grow.

</comment><comment><USER25> MHz not Mhz.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wish I would work with such great professionals as a Junior for 10years, right after school!!!

</comment><comment><USER27> Any chance of an open source release for the database core? :)

</comment><comment><USER28> "Or, as I like to say, 14.4Mhz."

Sorry, I don't like that at all.

<comment><USER29> I would agree. While 14.4 million writes per second is impressive, it definitely doesn't fit the definition of the Hz unit (cycles per second).

<comment><USER30> "Hertz" just means "per second". It can be anything per second, there are no units in the numerator. It just a measure of frequency, anything per second.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz)

If anything you are counting is happening 14.4 million times a second, then that thing is happening at 14 megahertz. It's just a unit. If there are 14.4 million writes per second, then the writes are occuring at 14.4 mega hertz. That's just the definition of hertz.

Haha, Google agrees, check it out: [https://www.google.com/?q=4+per+second#q=4+per+second](https://www.google.com/?q=4+per+second#q=4+per+second)

<comment><USER31> "Hertz" just means " _cycles_ per second".

The reference is to frequency, not average or typical rate; there's a difference between a tone and pink noise.

<comment><USER30> And in their test, they made writes at that frequency, right?

It is, however, commonly used for average frequency rates too, not just measurements of constant frequency. "Frequency" the word means how frequent something happens, right?

I don't know what the 'something' to measure frequency of in pink noise would be, but if there is something to count over time, you can measure it's frequency.

"Frequency is the number of occurences of a repeating event per unit time" says wikipedia. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency)

However, it is true that "In some fields, especially where frequency-domain analysis is used, the concept of frequency is applied only to sinusoidal phenomena, since in linear systems more complex periodic and nonperiodic phonomena are most easily analyzed in terms of sums of sinusoids of different frequencies." In some fields.

I have no idea why we're arguing about this except that we like arguing on the internet though.

<comment><USER31> _I have no idea why we 're arguing about this except that we like arguing on the internet though._

This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why the deliberately misleading comparisons? If you are doing something genuinely impressive, then you should be able to be honest about it and have it still seem impressive. One tweet is not one write. Comparing tweets per second to writes per second is complete nonsense. How many writes a tweet causes depends on how many followers the person who is tweeting has. The 100 writes per second nonsense is even worse. Do you just think nobody is old enough to have used a database 15 years ago? 10,000 writes per second was no big deal on of the shelf hardware of the day, nevermind on an actual server.

<comment><USER30> it's just a comparison to give you a sense of what those numbers look like, order of magnitude comparisons. I didn't find it misleading, and didn't think it meant that you'd be able to run twitter on their db on one commodity server. But it's an order of magnitude estimate to give you a sense of the scale.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any non-programming entrepreneurs & founders?  - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering whether there are folks on here that are involved in startups / projects that are not cs / programming related. If so please share your story.<p>I personally started a restaurant with four other friends /with money from an old programming job/ that has just broken even after 11 months. And I am sure that there are others like me, so I was interested in hearing your stories. <comment><USER2> Congratulation! Share your story in your blog or something. I will be curious and follow your progress. Couple years ago, I almost started like you but then gave up. I am in IT and wanted to get away from it. I started doing research and made a lot progress. The idea was to start a kiosk business at the local mall and then expand. Start up cost was low but it was still too risky. In the process I convinced a retired pilot to start a similar thing and he became very successful but I bailed out :-). My biggest challenge was getting some honest and stable people to work for me. I didn't want to quit my job and wife was and still is busy with kids. The second challenge was getting stuff (and the right/good/real stuff) imported from China. Lost some hard earned money but of course learned some good tricks. There are tons good ideas for kiosk business. At some point in the future, I will probably look into this again. With all the limitations I have, I thought of doing something on the side within IT. I think it's better. So I started a mobile app development business. The first app is built and submitted to Apple yesterday. The same app I am also making it for Android market and will submit soon. I learned the process so now the plan is to outsource everything and I will just manage the high level stuff. I sharing everything thru my blog <http://tukulogics.com/blog/> . I even plan to share my income report too, just so everyone knows the end to end process. You can also follow me on twitter @saidulislam</comment>