What's So Great about Continued Fractions? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2015/03/17/how-hard-do-continued-fractions-roc/ <comment><USER2> And there's the rabbithole again...I spent much of last week being fascinated by reading around "Exact Real Arithmetic With Continued Fractions" ([https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00075792/document](https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00075792/document), PDF). More resources on this on the Haskell wiki: [https://wiki.haskell.org/Exact_real_arithmetic](https://wiki.haskell.org/Exact_real_arithmetic)

...which is a bit mindblowing when so much of what we do uses numbers with limited precision. How can irrational numbers be represented in finite space? Using representations like this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_continued_fraction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_continued_fraction)

<comment> grumpy-buffalo Careful -- because R is uncountable, there is no system for representing arbitrary irrational numbers with finite strings. All irrational numbers with periodic continued fractions are quadratic irrationals, i.e. they can be written as A + B sqrt(C) where A, B, C are all rational. And of course, that formula immediately provides a much more straightforward way to represent such irrational numbers by finite strings!

<comment><USER2> Yes, I avoided the word 'arbitrary'. The references make it clear that what they're dealing with is the computable reals - only a countably infinite subset of R. Other representations get used too (like streams of dyadic rationals), and the computable reals contain more than just quadratic roots - eg: pi - but the computable reals are all you get, and this means there's some rough edges - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specker_sequence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specker_sequence).

Still fascinating though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Project Euler has a great series of problems showcasing their power, starting on Problem ~50 or so, up to their relationship to Diophantine Equations and integer solutions to optimization problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> Continued fractions show up in odd random places, generally when you need to represent a value as precisely as possible with a ratio of two integers that are, themselves, as small as possible.

I was writing code to program an RF synthesizer chip the other day and found myself going back to an old Graphics Gems chapter by Ken Shoemake, after discarding three or four newer implementations of rational approximation solvers that I wasn't happy with for various reasons. Ken's application was for intersection testing (presumably for polygon clipping) on machines with limited precision. It's a great introduction to the topic if you can find it.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to learn about fractions: [http://twinbeard.com/frog- fractions](http://twinbeard.com/frog-fractions)

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny I should see this. Just today I finished section 1-3-3 in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) which dealt with continued fractions. I threw my answers up on Pastebin if someone wants to take a look, it's exercises 1.37 through 1.39 [0].

[0] [http://pastebin.com/Vp1JsVh0](http://pastebin.com/Vp1JsVh0)

</comment><comment><USER7> Another neat application of continued fractions is Wiener's attack on RSA:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener%27s_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener%27s_attack)

</comment><comment><USER8> Brings back old memories of Van Vogt's World of Null-A.</comment>


With an official description, Google Drive is more real than ever - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/30/with-an-official-description-google-drive-is-more-real-than-ever/

<comment><USER2> I think this is the most clear-cut case of people getting excited about a product _solely_ because the brand name is Google.

Online file storage is boring. Dropbox is free and works really, really well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sound's like someone hasn't been keeping up with the GDrive rumours.

From what is being suggested, is that Google will be giving people the equivalent of dropbox's premium services... for free.

I think dropbox is great, I have a free account and use it all the time, I'd like to get a premium account if my needs ever get to that point - but if Google can provide significantly more space + their brand recognition, it's going to be hard to compete with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> DropBox are excellent. But I'll move to Google the moment they will provide the service because I'm using Android (Assuming that an Android client will be coming out)

</comment><comment><USER4> In the mean time one can use <http://www.jungledisk.com/> it keeps stuff in S3, looks like a local disk drive, client-side encryption, standard amazon s3 rates + $20 for software itself.

You can also give your key to their middle-tier server and have web access to your files.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love dropbox, but if google release basically the same thing, how are dropbox going to survive?

<comment><USER6> I would suspect that Dropbox has a pretty fanatic group of fans out there. I'm one: Dropbox saved my ass when Boot Camp wrecked my hard drive. 7 years of documents were all saved, even though I'd deleted them from Dropbox previously. That's an _incredible_ service. I recommend it to everybody who needs a good way to store stuff online, or share stuff.

Google isn't omnipotent. Orkut was a terrible social network because they just didn't _get_ what to do. I'd guess same goes with that animated world they made that just recently closed. While they're powerful, it's really hard to beat out a truly stellar product, and Dropbox is one of the best I've seen.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to compete with free. Google can afford to undercut Dropbox.

<comment><USER8> Many people view free as a reason not to use a service.

Clearly, if I was going to use the service as disaster recovery, I'd pay for dropbox. (I use dropbox for free right now)

<comment><USER7> Google's services are synonymous with free. I don't see many people freaked out by it.

Competing with Google is like competing with MS in '90s... a really hard proposition.

<comment><USER8> _I don't see many people freaked out by it._

Depends on your circle really. For personal stuff, I make full use of google. However for anything business related my leash of trust would be a lot shorter. I'd feel much more comfortable to pay for a service that gives me someone to blame/sue should the response to a disaster be less than adequate. You really just don't get this with google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google just needs to acquire Dropbox and scale them out.</comment>


The Acme Text Editor - <AUTHOR> http://acme.cat-v.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe this is the only truly novel text editor out there, but it's dated in so many crucial ways.

I'm hopeful that someone with more time and talent than I would adjust it to align more closely with today's UX conventions ('Copy' instead of 'Snarf', scrollbars on the right, syntax highlighting) If these were done, I bet Acme would enjoy a larger fan base.

What I love about Acme is that the UI makes no distinction between terminal and text editor. This allows you to build your own tools in your own languages to make Acme as useful as possible for you. That said, since it offers so little out of the box, you have to spend a lot of time working out what those tools should be first.

Anyone wanting an easy way to try out Acme should download AcmeSAC (Stand Alone Complex) here: [https://code.google.com/p/acme- sac/](https://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/)</comment>


Analyzing Hacker News Users' Join Dates, Karma, and Profiles - <AUTHOR> http://breckyunits.com/?p=58 <comment><USER2> Linear fits? Why? _Why_?

Karma is a function of time since joining, participation, and quality of contributions. And it starts at 1. 'Participation' can be determined by looking at contributions per length of time. Quality is average score of each submission -- separating it from participation is a useful way to extend this to a more complicated model taking into account the fact that people stop using HN. So the line of best fit should be something closer to 1 + t * q * p, or the sum of 1 + (t0 * q * p0) + .... (t _n_ * q * p _n_ ) to describe folks who are off-and-on contributors.

<comment><USER3> If nothing else, it's legitimate to filter non-participants before doing a regression analysis on the rest. It's _technically_ true that you can't predict karma over time, but that's not really an interesting statement until you eliminate the large number of people who sign up, then never post or comment.

My instinct is that once you filter these people, you'll see a much stronger linear relationship between time and karma, since karma isn't normalized by the number of contributions, and number of contributions is probably a poisson process.

<comment><USER4> Removing all 1's and 2's improves the relationship somewhat (moreso with log(k)) but still not a whole lot.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like there's a vast gulf of people with little (but not zero) contribution, then. Can you plot # of contributions versus membership time?

<comment><USER4> don't have the contributions data, just the karma score.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could you post "General Composition of the Dataset" with a logarithmic vertical scale please? Should help compensate for the outliers so we can see more detail at the bottom of the graph.

<comment><USER4> Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I didn't really expect to find a whole lot of interesting things, and found what I expected."

Which is a great way to conduct research! Nice work.

This reminded me of my senior project in number theory, when I manipulated a large data set, wondering what I'd find. Eventually, I found quite a bit.

Also reminded me of this quote by Wernher von Braun:

"Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

</comment><comment><USER7> You may want to take into account differences in file timestamps because the data was collated over many days.

<comment><USER4> Ahh, I didn't notice that. That would affect things. The timestamps and counts are: ('04/15', 630), ('04/16', 1993), ('04/17', 1994), ('04/18', 491), ('04/20', 270), ('04/21', 1049), ('04/22', 59), ('04/24', 33), ('04/25', 342), ('04/26', 29), ('05/03', 165), ('05/06', 86), ('05/07', 23). So most of the members have older join dates than I figured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The interesting thing about karma.. I find that I can't/I get tired of posting insightful comments day after day..and take breaks and lurk..edw519 I don't know how you do it. I probably won't make the "leaders" (but I don't think its important)

<comment><USER9> | (but I don't think its important)

I think that's the crux of it. Somebody could monitor all the various news sites and spend an hour a day here posting comments and stories and so forth, but I suspect most folks would rather spend that time doing something else.

That said, edw519 is a pretty cool guy.

<comment><USER10> I tend to post in bursts, so most of my karma comes over periods of a week or two when I'm posting several times a day. It's actually a bad sign, because it means I'm not working on my startup. ;-) Then there are periods where I'll post like twice a week and my RescueTime log'll show that I'm spending like 80-90% of my computer time coding. So yeah, it's a tradeoff, and ultimately the code is more important, but I find that I burn out if I spend too much coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice work. I love manipulating large data sets :)

Which program did you use to produce the plots?

<comment><USER4> JMP

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Scatterplots are too dense!

</comment><comment><USER13> Just curios, how does the karma point work?</comment>


Raspberry Pi Cluster Ep 1 – Intro to Clustering - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-episode-1-introduction-clusters <comment><USER2> This reminds me back when people built "supercomputers" by clustering hundreds of Pis.</comment>


Passport ownership in America, by state. Let's play "Correlations" - <AUTHOR> http://exp.lore.com/post/44802179035/passport-ownership-in-america-by-state-lets

<comment><USER2> Wealthier states do more global travel? It's expensive.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's basically the reverse of [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/US_states...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/US_states_by_GDP_per_capita_\(nominal\).PNG) but they didn't mention that correlation for some reason.

<comment><USER4> There's a pretty good correlation with "states on the verge of bankruptcy", too.

Alaska being the outlier here.

<comment><USER5> take away alaska's enormous per-capita federal subsidies and they'd be dead in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER6> Give Alaska back the vast majority of its land and resources (something like 80-90% of the land is outright owned by the Feds, and they restrict access to vast amounts of state land, using environmental reasons as the excuse) which are owned or controlled by the federal government and we'd be self-sufficient in a heartbeat, even if we aren't already.

I seriously doubt your characterization of our Federal subsidies. Just as one example, Hawaii gets more interstate highway funds then we do, and we're responsible for the Alcan highway, one of the largest highways in the nation. Hawaii, as you might notice, _has_ no interstate highways. We aren't heavily subsidized, as we have more than enough revenue from the oil leases on the North Slope.

If every state was left to its own devices (just a thought experiment here), Alaska would be one of the best situated due to is vast resources, active port (air cargo in particular uses Anchorage's facilities in huge amounts), and economic stability.

/rant

<comment><USER5> [http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas- fiscal-union)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how "the Northeast" is represented as wealthier. As a resident of Maine, I can tell you that ain't why we have more passports. Rather, think about our position in the North, having almost no markets for manfuactured goods to the south (better served by cheaper states in the Southeast), our markets are almost all in Canada. And thank you 9/11 now we all need passports to get over the border.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget this one: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas- fiscal-union)

Honestly, all these (with the exception of Alaska) come down to population density. In the US, it's not North versus South, it's urban versus rural, as far as demographic divides go.

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) More than 60% of residents in the northeast, California and Alaska have passports. Northeast and California because of higher incomes and higher education levels, Alaska because it's isolated from the lower 48.

2) In the southern states, many people don't have passports (except for FL). There's a lot of poverty, few college graduates, and they don't have much in the way of LBGT rights in the workplace. Nothing new there.

3) People living in the Indian reservations [1] are amongst the poorest, but they do tend to have passports.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bia-map-indian- reservation...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bia-map-indian-reservations- usa.png)

<comment><USER4> "Northeast and California because of higher incomes and higher education levels, Alaska because it's isolated from the lower 48."

Alaska has high incomes and high education levels also. In fact it has the second highest median household income of any state (only Maryland is higher).

It also has education levels higher than either New York or California. 91.4% of Alaskans have a high school education or more, compared to 80.6% of Californians and 84.7% of New Yorkers.

Edit: added references.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income> [http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Alaska wasn't shown on most of the maps that were linked to the article, that's why I didn't mention income or education level.

 _"It also has education levels higher than either New York or California."_

According to your stats, that's certainly not the case for higher education – Alaska scores below the national average.

Bachelor's degree or more:

DC 48.5%, New York 32.4%, California 29.9%, US average 27.9%, Alaska 26.6%

Advanced degree or more:

DC 28%, New York 14%, California 10.7%, US average 10.3%, Alaska 9%

<comment><USER4> "According to your stats, that's certainly not the case for higher education"

I didn't say "higher" education. I said "education levels".

20% of Californians don't even have a high school education, which is pretty bad.

If you want to argue that allegedly liberal states like New York and California tend to be bimodal, with an elite overclass and an impoverished underclass, I won't disagree.

<comment><USER9> _"New York and California tend to be bimodal, with an elite overclass and an impoverished underclass"_

So true.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


US superpower status is shaken - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7645743.stm

<comment><USER2> Disagree Completely.

Heart of superpower lies in its Research and Entrepreneurial environment. I don't see anyone coming close to it in near future.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Innovation is still strongest in the US, but it does seem that unfettered markets lead to some unstable economic situations. I don't like unstable economic situations.</comment>


Apache Hudi: Ingests and manages storage of large analytical datasets over DFS - <AUTHOR> https://hudi.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> what exactly is this displacing or incrementally doing better than?</comment>


Why 'playing hard to get' may actually work - <AUTHOR> https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/why-playing-hard-to-get-may-work-435602/ <comment><USER2> _May_ work?!

It definitely does, no questions about that, but only as long has you have a high enough perceived value from the other party. A hobo playing hard to get won't win anything from it. You have to display some sort of value, be it real or faked.

To put it simple, if you chase something (job, love interest, etc.) it means you really need that something, if you need it, it means you have no other options, if you have no other options it makes you desperate and being desperate signals low value. If nobody else wants you, why should I?

Think of it like ivy league or a night club. Everyone wants to get into the ones that are the most difficult to get into whereas almost nobody wants to go to the ones anyone can just walk into. That's why girls will flake on you if you're always too available for dates while they're trying to go out with that guy who keeps ignoring their texts.

It's basic human evolution from our tribal days to desire what's scarce and discard what's not.

<comment><USER3> If you play hard to get, aren't you selecting for the most desperate suitors? And therefore the ones of the lowest "value" themselves?

<comment><USER4> You could use "determined" instead of "desperate" and then suddenly it sounds like a value proposition again.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure. Determination is not automatically positive quality.

<comment><USER6> . . . and probably cannot be sustained indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I shredded off the last bits of my "childhood" / "youth" / "young person vibes" in the last years I realized that dating is just as horrible as the rest of life.

Everyone just runs around with a fuzzy version of the dating calculator* in their head. Is that person good enough? What's my chance to find someone better? Is it worth sacrificing the energy I spent on my current partner for the chance of finding a better one? I see "settled" and unhappy people all around. Those who have "reproduce" as next point on their bullet list for life.

In gay dating it's even worse, because there are usually no wombs with their "best before" date involved and social pressure to settle is lower.

* [https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/dating-theory](https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/dating-theory)

<comment><USER8> Maybe try meeting someone who is not "everyone", and also make sure you don't fall into the same trap yourself? If you meet a person you settle down with, it doesn't stop attraction to other people, but you have a choice to limit that expression to managable levels, or live with the hell of not doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want to hear what everybody knows, ask behavioral psychologist.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Get shot down cuz you 're over-zealous / Play hard-to-get, females get jealous_ -Young MC, 1988 or so

In all seriousness, if this is a strategy to make yourself look better than you are, shouldn't prospective partners ask why you need to do that? Doesn't your playing hard-to-get imply that _you 're_ the desperate one, on some level? Or rather it's the "I drive a Dodge Stratus" of dating. It separates/differentiates you from the lowest tier, but I think those who are truly in the top tier will probably use some kind of counter-signaling approach.

Welcome to the wonderful world of over-thinking it and trying to game the system.

<comment><USER7> There is a difference between "playing hard to get" and "BEING hard to get"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on what I've seen in online dating in my own experiences and the experiences of others, this is not an effective strategy. In fact I'd say it's a counterproductive strategy. Timing and options are large contributing factors to this.

The largest problem with online dating is that there are no natural filters in place. Dating in meatspace means that oftentimes you mean people in contexts that help pre-screen them and give you an idea what you are dealing with (mutual friends, work, gym, hobby, etc.) Online dating strips that away and forces you to have to evaluate each person in person in order to have any clue if things may actually work out in a relationship. In this case, the important thing is to drive things to the first date and then take it from there.

(Technically I guess this is easier if all you're looking for is sex)

With a large pool of options it means that the entire game of "waiting for a couple of days to signal non-desperation" is a counter productive strategy. People constantly have potential people to meet. If you take too long to respond, it will signal disinterest or that you are ghosting them, and they will simply move on.

Note that none of this means "always make yourself available at all times". That will reek of desperation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Texts like The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley are eye openers in this genre.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "Playing hard to get makes it seem as if you are more in demand—we call that > having higher mate value," says Harry Reis, a professor of psychology and > Dean's Professor in Arts, Sciences & Engineering at Rochester.

>"People who are too easy to attract may be perceived as more desperate," says coauthor Gurit Birnbaum, a social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the IDC Herzliya.

Thank god for theses scientists undertaking this examination of this curious ritual called "human love"

</comment><comment><USER14> That headline makes me laugh. "may" work? Obviously it works, that's why women have been playing that game since the dawn of civilization.

<comment><USER15> When a lady cardinal is being wooed by a couple of bright red guy cardinals and she eventually chooses one, we call that nature. When humans do this, we get our feathers ruffled. Strange.

<comment><USER16> Because humans have a choice in it. Women can choose _not_ to do it, the female cardinal can't, it's just an indelible part of their mating ritual and instincts. Ought implies can - there's no reason to be angry at someone for something if they can't help it.

In addition, female cardinals do that ritual because it's a way of filtering for mates without conscious/rational assessment and communication... something which human women are entirely capable of, so they don't need wacky evolutionary tricks to do it.

But also, the GP doesn't seem to have his feathers ruffled anyway, so it looks like you're just searching for some offense here.

<comment><USER15> > Because humans have a choice in it.

This is the assumption. (Most)Women nest when a child is on the way. That's an involuntary behavior. Why can't there be some involuntary behavior associated with choosing a mate?

And I'm not searching for some offense. I keyed off the OP saying "Game", but I don't feel they particularly had _their_ feathers ruffled.

<comment><USER16> Right, there are indeed involuntary behaviors. But I think there are plenty of examples of women that choose _not_ to play hard-to-get - if it was involuntary we would have no, or vanishingly few, examples. If "voluntary" means anything - and I'm not talking about free will vs determinism here - this is one of those behaviors that is indeed voluntary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nexus 4 oversold, Google places many on back order - <AUTHOR> http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/15/google-appears-to-have-oversold-the-nexus-4-surprises-customers-with-status-change-backorder-emails/

<comment><USER2> If Google sold 1 million vs 30 million would really matter to you as a consumer? The sales numbers only matter to stockholders, competitors and analysts. Why is there such a demand to know how much N4s were sold during launch to the consumer? Aren't we just perpetuating the "sheep mentality" Android users accuse Apple users of by demanding that we know the sales numbers during launch to assure that we don't have buyers remorse?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it matters. The psychological reward of validation of your choices through group behaviours is very real, and very strong. Call it the "sheep mentality" as much as you like, but it is just as much the "human mentality" - popularity is a key indicator for us for the quality of a product, but even more so it also shapes how happy we are with the product after purchase.

<comment><USER4> It does matter in real ways too. The Palm Pre may have been an awesome device, but tell that to the people using it with no community for support and development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What irks me the most about this whole ordeal is the utter lack of communication from a company that prides itself on being open and transparent.

There was no release time, no numbers on the amount of phones after they sold out way too soon, no excuse for the Play Store and Wallet glitches, and now, finally, no statement on how they somehow managed to miscount their inventory. I cannot even fathom how something like this can happen to a company like Google to begin with.

I'm really disappointed in Google, to say the least.

<comment><USER6> _> What irks me the most about this whole ordeal is the utter lack of communication from a company that prides itself on being open and transparent._

The amount of suckage with Google's automation-first customer service pattern and the corporate ossification of the various carriers still leaves an opening for Apple to exploit. The question is, will Apple remain supple enough to exploit this, and will the other companies wise up?

(I'm on a 2nd hand Verizon phone bought off ebay, with StraightTalk no- contract 4G for $45 a month.)

<comment><USER7> I've never heard of StraightTalk before, but after checking them out they seem like that might be a path I want to go down. I'm been shopping around for pay as you go/ unlocked plans for a bit now, I'm kinda fed up with verizons offerings. How do you like the plan/ do you get service everywhere/are there roaming charges?

<comment><USER6> So far, no roaming charges. The service seems okay. It's basically AT&T towers. I may change back to SimpleMobile once their 3G access for iPhone gets good enough. They're not so uptight about tethering as StraightTalk. (Probably because of AT&T)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Got my order in a solid 4 hours after the actual release so I'm not that surprised.

You'd think a company like Google would have a better system for 1. Preordering and 2. Giving a better estimate for when you'll actually receive your product.

<comment><USER9> _You'd think a company like Google would have a better system..._

I would think the opposite, since Google is not used to selling physical products and they've managed to botch every previous Nexus launch in some way.

<comment><USER10> Except that they have spent over a decade culling the world for the smartest and most accomplished employees.

<comment><USER11> Just because you're a genius with search algorithms doesn't mean you know how to run a successful, physical, product launch

<comment><USER12> This. But, not everyone at Google is a search engineer. Many many engineers at Google work on one of our other products. We should, and probably do, have experts on online retail scale-ability somewhere

(disclaimer: i am a search engineer at Google)

<comment><USER11> I was being a little ridiculous but only because rhizome seemed to be implying that Google shouldn't have hiccups like this because they've been hiring intelligent people.

<comment><USER10> Am I supposed to believe that they've been selling cellphones for almost three years without putting their recruitment strategies toward their fulfillment chain?

<comment><USER11> Yes. People fuck up all the time. My employer has been in the eCommerce for almost 12 years and we still have feature launches that destroy our website. I'd say I work with some of the brightest people I've ever had the chance to work with, but we're still just human and we sometimes underestimate demand and over estimate our hardware. Just because Google is Google doesn't mean they are infallible, they are perhaps overly arrogant due to their culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You know that I'd like? To be able to pre-order one _now_. I don't want to have to keep track of news for when I can buy one (I got the notification email hours after it was sold out in the UK). I want to give them my money and have one within a month.

</comment><comment><USER14> That means it won't be available again for ordering until all those orders are shipped (> 3wks).

I guess they still have enough to sell for $500 through T-mobile... And enough to supply the scalpers on eBay. I'm still upset from the errors during the order window but maybe it's all for the best.

Google is still not making any visible effort to communicate what's happening to the customers. Very disappointing. Do no evil?

<comment><USER15> How is the email not a visible effort to communicate what's happening to the customers?

<comment><USER14> I signed up to be notified. I tried to buy many times and failed. I lost time and sleep because Google decided to play all these tricks on us. I never got an e-mail or any sort of communication. I guess it depends on your definition of customer but in the physical world when someone goes in a store to purchase something and talks with the staff I would consider them to meet the definition of a customer.

EDIT: Let's say you drive to a store knowing a product is going on sale. You go to a shelf, they have pieces of paper saying take this paper and claim the product at the register. You take the paper. You queue up, you get to the register and they tell you tough luck, we have no inventory. Wouldn't you be annoyed? Then you leave the store to find stalls of people selling the product for double the price.

This sort of stuff _can_ happen but it would be nice if Google said _something_ about it. The only thing they told the community is "sold out" and "check again soon". I was hoping to use this phone while traveling next month but I'll have to make some other arrangements for a reasonable unlocked phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am traveling so I had the phone shipped to where I am now. Got the email about the 3 week delay. Just called them and they said that they can't change the shipping address due to the "privacy policy." The rep couldn't explain what that meant, but said I would receive a follow up email. Pathetic customer service.

<comment><USER16> Here is the follow up email.

"Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to change a shipping address once an order has been placed due to security reasons. If the current shipping address for your order is accessible to you, we recommend leaving it as is and receiving your package there.

If that won't work for you, we can instead intercept this order immediately with your consent. You are welcome to update your shipping address in your Google Wallet account and place a new order.

If you'd like for us to intercept your order, please reply with a message containing "I Consent"."

Now I get to call back and ask what "intercept" means. Great.

<comment><USER17> It means they can tell UPS/whoever to not deliver the package or to return to sender. [http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/service/delivery/...](http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/service/delivery/delivery_intercept.html)

Note that they probably _cannot_ use the intercept to deliver to a new address if they are requesting signature authorization/etc

<comment><USER18> What doesn't make sense here is that they can only issue an intercept order on a purchase that's been back ordered three weeks. In that case they should have zero problem changing the shipping address. Google really needs to get on top of their shipping and customer service issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off-topic, but I think the Nexus 4 is a good opportunity for Mozilla. It will be sold mostly unlocked, I imagine, and mostly to geeks, so it could be a great platform for Boot2Gecko. Nice looking, fast hardware for a relatively low price will make for a good development platform.

</comment><comment><USER20> Still no e-mail for me. But I guess I should be expecting one soon since my order still says "Pending" in my Wallet account :(

I also ordered a 32GB Nexus 10.. I wonder if this will impact the delivery of that item as well :S

</comment><comment><USER21> <i>We'll send you a notification when your order has shipped and will credit the shipping charges.</i>

Does that mean that we're getting free shipping for our backordered phones?

<comment><USER22> Yes that's exactly what it says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I managed to get my order in about a minute or two after they became available on the website but have yet to get a shipping notification.

My drug of choice might not be here on Saturday. :(

</comment><comment><USER24> In the absence of actual numbers we can look at Google Trends. iPhone 5 is about double Galaxy S3 and Nexus 4 had been about half of Galaxy S3 for a week before almost reaching it on Tuesday. It may have peaked though (Wed shows it falling but that could be an artifact of the weekend/holiday or whatever); another week should give us a better idea. My guess is it will get swallowed by the Droid DNA hype train which Verizon will be pushing like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Google should start using Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Shopify etc. for managing their store and inventory.

<comment><USER26> This was a clusterfuck, but I'm still sore at Yahoo, when the same thing happened to me trying to buy world cup tickets. So I dunno if others are any better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got the email. It's a disappointment, but such is life. I'm in no rush and now I'll get to enjoy the installation of CM 10 I installed last night a litte bit longer.

</comment><comment><USER28> And I accidentally ordered multiple Nexus 4 because it wasn't clear if the system took my order or not. I wonder if their ordering system was hosted on App Engine.

<comment><USER29> I'm sure "multiple Nexus 4s" is a problem a lot of us would like to have :)

<comment><USER28> It's very possible that they'll get bumped by a few weeks like these other people here. Still, two lottery tickets is better than one, right?

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, it's quite possible that they'll bump us multiple orderers to the bottom of the line, due to the possible perception of abuse. We could have also been bumped to the bottom because we were given an additional opportunity to cancel one of our orders because Google thought that one of our orders may have been an error.

That was the case for me, but rather than cancelling one of the errors, I offered the phone to a friend who didn't manage to order in time. I hope I don't regret that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was uber pissed off when I got that email today. I've been eagerly waiting since day one and was expecting it tomorrow or Monday.

</comment><comment><USER31> I got the same email 10 minutes ago.

Will Google return money for 2 day shipping? :)

<comment><USER32> Yep, the email says "[they] will credit the shipping charges."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems like they launched with 1000 units or less. 3 stores in LA got 5 units. So 15 units for the 2nd largest city in LA? They probably got shipments late, or manufacturing went behind schedule, but they had a published launch date so launched even though they weren't ready.

<comment><USER34> Do you have some sources?

<comment><USER22> Can't you read? He said he "seems".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems like Play credit would be an easy way to make this a less sour PR blip. (Not to say it's the same, I just found out my Nexus 10 order is stucked pending, needless to say I'd prefer it over Play credit right now).

<comment><USER36> If you look at the email sent, they're crediting the shipping charges, which were $13.99. I think that's a pretty good gesture on their part.

That being said, mine shipped out today and should get here Monday. I don't know why they didn't give the option for overnight shipping or ground service. Or they should have planned better than having 2 day shipping with a weekend included, so it's really 4-day shipping.

<comment><USER37> No kidding. At least they are shipping from Kentucky otherwise I'd be even more upset seeing as how where I live I always get 2 day shipping from California when it's shipped via ground anyway.

While technically it's still "2-day shipping" since it's always been 2 business days, I wish they would have added Saturday delivery for the ones that were shipped on Thursday.

Oh well, better to have it shipped than to be one of the unfortunate that got the back-order email.

<comment><USER38> Shipping air from Kentucky is about the best service you can get since UPS has their main air hub in Louisville. I actually expected ground shipment since it said 3-5 days for delivery and was pleasantly surprised to see my Nexus 10 shipped as 2 day air.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nothing Twitter is doing is working - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/26/11513294/twitter-q2-earnings-miss <comment><USER2> If Twitter were a Show HN today would anyone notice?</comment>


Here's why other countries beat the U.S. in reading and math - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/11/heres-why-other-countries-beat-the-u-s-in-reading-and-math/?tid=socialss <comment><USER2> I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation.

Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.).

If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: <http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/>

A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too.

[1] [http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd...](http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pdf)

[2] [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the- small-schools-myth.html)

<comment><USER3> The U.S. looks bad compared to other countries because we have more poor children than they do. If you compare our middle-class and upper-class children to theirs, we look a lot better.

The U.S. does not have an education problem; it has a child poverty problem.

<comment><USER4> In turn, the child poverty problem is related to whether a child has both parents in the household.

<http://www.heritage.org/childpoverty>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like kids are held back in the US primarily by the curriculum. I immigrated to the United States having grown up in a couple of commonwealth countries and I was shocked to go from a school where I had been learning basic trigonometry to a school where basic algebraic principles weren't even taught until the next year. So whenever I see a discussion about all the social issues that impact education, I have to roll my eyes and wander why people just aren't seeing the kids are capable of more. Thoughts?

<comment><USER6> We have a subculture of anti-intellectualism and cottling our kids that is perhaps a little less prominent in the countries that out-perform us? Fitting in socially is also heavily emphasized in the US system, so early advancement for high performers is generally frowned upon.

<comment><USER7> I think the biggest cultural problem we have is the constant search and glorification of the prodigy/wonderkid and the consequent obsession with "natural talent", as if everyone has some special innate skill that they're destined to discover and be the best at.

If you don't understand calculus the first time around, it doesn't mean you're not a "math person", it means you need to sit down and RTFM for a few more hours. Likewise, if you're really uncoordinated and can't hit a baseball, go outside and practice for 2 hours every day. I guarantee you'll improve dramatically. There's not many things that humans do that can't be improved through practice and discipline.

For some background, I say all this as someone who was told up and down during his childhood how smart and gifted he was, all of which came crashing and burning during high school and college when I realized there were actually things I needed to put in effort to learn. I'm still trying to repair my study habits and fill in knowledge gaps to this day, and I truly wish people had congratulated me more when I had put in a lot of effort into something than when I appeared to grasp a concept quickly with no effort.

<comment><USER8> Great points. My background growing up was similar to yours.

If it makes you feel better, in raising my daughter I'm trying to do things a better way. I do believe my daughter is gifted, but I spend little if any time praising for that. Instead, I talk about how things like hard word, perseverance, and practice are the key ingredients of success, and I point out and discuss examples wherever I can.

I'll let you know in about 10 years or so whether it made a difference. :)

<comment><USER9> > I'll let you know in about 10 years or so whether it made a difference. :)

To do that you need twins to treat differently. Every experiment needs a control group ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) dragging the US average down. European Americans do very well when compared to European nations, and Asian Americans do well when compared to Asian nations (a bit worse in math, better in reading).

[http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth- abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa- scores-usa.html) [http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do- above-...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above- average-american.html)

Do we have any reason to believe that situation has changed? (I haven't read the latest report, so I don't know.)

<comment><USER11> > In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African > Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree > in Europe or Asia)

There aren't many Hispanics in Europe...?

<comment><USER12> Oddly enough, there aren't that many (statistically significant) African Americans anywhere outside of America either... :)

<comment><USER10> Yes, I should have more carefully stated that the correct category for comparison would be non-immigrant Europeans of African descent. Which is a very small fraction of the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sheer size has to play a major factor here. Comparing the US to city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore or relatively tiny countries like Finland is really suspect because there is so much difficulty in the managing and improving an education system as large and diverse as the US has.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great country to compare to: the countries with the closest populations are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. and comparisons there have other problems. I'm guessing the best possibly comparisons are probably Brazil or China.

<comment><USER14> I would love to see a comparison of individual states with these European and Asian countries instead of just the "US". It's statistically difficult for a group of 50 country-sized states, with its high outliers and low outliers, to have an average that beats all of the high outliers of other countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this averaging the education system as a whole? If so, then that is a ridiculous way of studying how well the US education system is doing. It's already been pointed out that MA outperforms most of the world. How are you going to compare an education system for 100MM people to the education system of Singapore, Hong Kong, and "the Flemish region of Belgium"?

The US is huge and disparate; the fact that the country that has HONEY BOO BOO is in the top 15 should point out that by and large the US has a decent educational system.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's what I learned from this article. In order to outperform the US in education, be a city-state with a higher per capita GDP than the US and only a few million citizens.

Or be Finland.

</comment><comment><USER17> Silicon Valley has so many tiger moms. Yet I bet that the Americans who succeed here, on any measure of success including just plain fun, were raised in America's lax educational system. I'd be surprised if anyone showed a correlation between standardized test scores and life success; in fact, I'd be surprised if people actually tried to look for such a correlation, instead of worrying that it is an important indicator.

<comment><USER18> How on earth can you define life success?

SATs correlate positively with family income and negatively with incarceration rates. That seems like a start to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Singapore's system sounds like the most logical system. College doesn't work for everyone, and there has to be a way for these people to succeed in society instead of penalising them or pushing them to drop out of high school. Too bad it could never be implemented here in the US because it pretty much sets up discrete social classes.

</comment><comment><USER20> Actually, I'm just surprised that the U.S. is ahead of Germany in both categories. Naiveté on my part?

<comment><USER21> As far as I know (I was born and live in Germany, but please correct me if I'm wrong) the German education system is known for a great variance in performance of pupils.

This means there are some pupils that perform very well, but also some that perform very poorly. These extremes are more pronounced than in comparable countries.

Many people say that the education system is cementing the social hierarchy: if you are very well educated, your children will mostly become the same, but it is rather difficult for children to move up the social ladder if they have poorly educated parents.

Because there are many top performers the German economy has enough skilled personnel to be competitive (what to do with the less well educated is a much- debated topic - because of the distinct German health and welfare system the status-quo leads to less social tensions than it would probably in the U.S.).

TLDR: it is plausible that the U.S. is ahead _on average_. The German education system is probably better on the top performers and worse on the bottom performers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is just hyperbole to pry more tax dollars for education and I appreciate the sentiment behind it.

However, US is the driving engine of innovation and creativity and will continue being so. Asian societies prize conformity over creative thinking ; they are good at Math/whatever-subject because they are forced to be good at those subjects because proficiency in those subjects is seen as the ticket into middle class. In America, every kid has a choice to do whatever with his/her life. The American society nurtures its rebel thinker and lone wolf ; it prizes creativity over conformity. This choice gives us Beyonce, Vint Cerf ,Steve Jobs / Bill Gates , etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR "because they test really heavily, or because they don't test much at all. Wait, what? There's got to be some causation here somewhere."</comment>


Notes on indexes and index-like structures - <AUTHOR> http://www.dbms2.com/2015/04/16/notes-on-indexes-and-index-like-structures/ <comment><USER2> Outside of DBs, indexes have shown themselves to be extremely useful in string problems in bioinformatics (my area of research). The modern workhorses of this trend are the Burrows Wheeler transform + FM index (together) and Bloom filters (also mentioned in the link). These have been applied to sequence alignment, de novo assembly of genomes, and compression of sequences. I posit the same bag of tricks can be applied in the NLP/machine learning settings, but I know less about how commonly they have been.

There's a good set of notes touching on this stuff here: [http://www.langmead- lab.org/teaching-materials/](http://www.langmead-lab.org/teaching-materials/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh wow

      > The latest example is my former clients at Tokutek, who just
      > got sold to Percona in a presumably small deal — regrettably
      > without having yet paid me all the money I'm owed.</comment>


Legalizing Ivory Trade: Taking to New Heights a Dangerous Policy Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/22/legalizing-ivory-trade-taking-to-new-heights-a-dangerous-policy-proposal/

<comment><USER2> I have a quite different proposal. I may or may not be serious about this--I have not yet decided. Countries with problems with poachers taking elephants from game preserves should do this:

1\. Legitimate parties entering the preserves must register and receive a GPS tracking device which reports their position in real time to the park management.

2\. Sell poacher licenses to hunters. By "poacher license", I do not mean a license to poach. I mean a license to hunt poachers.

3\. A hunter with a poacher license must call in any targets they are considering to the park management, which will check their position against the legitimate parties on the preserve, so that the hunters can be sure they are not targeting researchers, tourists, hunters of non-protected animals, and so on.

4\. Once confirmed as not legitimately in the park, the hunters may treat the poachers as if they were any other game animal and kill them and take trophies. If they are going to kill them, they must do so promptly. They cannot capture them and abuse them first. We are not trying to be inhumane here.

5\. Poacher licenses should be expensive, with the cost going to help the animals. I would be surprised if there were not plenty of wealthy people who would pay millions for a license.

6\. Hunting poachers is at your own risk. Man is the deadliest animal.

Of course, there might be unintended consequences. For instance, if someone has the disposable income to buy a poacher license, they would be a good kidnapping target. A kidnap gang might pose as poachers to try to lure poacher hunters for kidnapping.

Probably too many problems with international treaties and other legal issues to actually do this. It could make an interesting setting for a movie or a TV series, though.</comment>


That Promises mistake everyone makes in JavaScirpt - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/23803743/1348195

<comment><USER2> An other common mistake when you begin with promise:

        var result = promise.then(identity, function (error) { console.log(error); })

Oops, you just recovered your promise with undefined. result will always be successful. Yes if you don't throw again (or return a new failure promise) in your error callback it will make the resulting promise successful.

I haven't checked if this behaviour is the same on the DOM Promise API but it is on Q (which is the most popular JS lib for Promises).</comment>


Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/bing-to-google-try-updating-your-index-once-in-a-while/ <comment><USER2> Funny. But seriously, google indexes a few more pages than just bing, they ought to be praising google for already indexing this relatively new and unknown site :)

At least when you search for bing on google you get a few links that point to something else than bing itself. If you search for google on bing all you get (or at least I get) is endless google domains.

Even with the one 'down' page captured there is still a lot more good content in google about bing than the reverse!</comment>


Final Fantasy VII Remake Cutscenes Rendered in Real-Time? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZbFXSLLtk <comment><AUTHOR> More in uploader's channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf7y6pZ- rnrFtHpX0vqB5HQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf7y6pZ-rnrFtHpX0vqB5HQ)

He said he only hacked the save files.

There were reports that at least a few cutscenes were pre-rendered and cannot be changed.

How far are we from "procedural scene generation"?</comment>


The Sea's Weirdest Creatures, Now in 'Staggering' Detail - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/science/ocean-biology-larvaceans-lasers.html <comment><USER2> Yes, Apendicularians are weird.

The real animal in this 3D scanner is the tadpole shaped thing at the center. The remaininig structure is its home and hunting net. The article is confusing because it seems to thing that this is part of the soft body, but is just a temporal enveloppe. The animals can lose or discard it and create a new one if necessary. They have also a second one that is more external and is like a spiderweb made of mucus.

<comment><USER2> The interesting part in the article is that the entire structure collapse and starts disintegrating when you try to manipulate it, so it was a very difficult group to study because your sample melts in front of your eyes. Scanning the live animal is a good solution for navigating this obstacle.</comment></comment>


Apple now taking Red Cross donations through iTunes for Japan relief fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/55877/apple-now-taking-red-cross-donations-through-itunes-for-japan-relief-fund/

<comment><USER2> What's the bet they'll be taking a 30% cut of each donation, as a facilitation fee.</comment>


React-hydrate – Generic data fetching and SSR hydration pattern for React - <AUTHOR> http://estrattonbailey.com/oss/react-hydrate <comment><AUTHOR> Hey y'all. First time poster. This is just my take on a common problem. Maybe it's useful to you, maybe it's a terrible idea. Would love feedback/issues/PRs!

Features of this lib:

\- Co-locate data dependencies with your components \- Supports infinitely nested loaders \- Fetches requested data on the server and hydrates on the client for a fast startup \- Wraps components so users can easily define loading states for components \- Routing agnostic. Works with react-router v4. \- Lightweight ~1.9kb</comment>


Why I will never pursue cheating again (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://chris.improbable.org/2011/7/18/why-i-will-never-pursue-cheating-again/ <comment><USER2> _Almost all cheating happened within groups with cultural ties._

 _I did not even want to think of being in my office behind closed doors with a female undergraduate student who is crying loudly._

 _More than 45 hours in completely unproductive discussions, when the total lecture time for the course was just 32 hours_

That was painful to read. Why would any sane person want to become a teacher? :(

</comment><comment><USER3> This is wrong on so many levels I cant even count! This is probably one of the main reasons that traditional teaching/learning is going away and I'm very happy to see it gone ASAP.

<comment><USER4> It is so wrong. The author alludes to the way the system is set up as the main reason why it is so dysfunctional:

>The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat and "perform well"; in exchange, I get back great evaluations.

This is so obviously the way it is set up, but few professors and higher-ups in college and university are willing to admit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion (2011): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254)

</comment><comment><USER6> i'm not sure what i think about the central role this "Turnitin" 3rd-party software played in all of this.

is Turnitin a for-profit company? it looks like they are.

what if a student does not want their papers stored in Turnitin's databases for perpetuity to be used in an ongoing basis to help Turnitin continue to acquire profit?

i'd demand royalties for each and every time any paper of mine gets used in a comparison op.

<comment><USER7> I imagine it's just a hash? Is a hash considered a derivative work? This is an interesting line of questioning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> He should compare the time required to create entirely different assignments each year with the time he spent catching and addressing plagiarism.

<comment><USER9> This. Reusing assignments is just asking for trouble.

No, it doesn't excuse cheating, but creating a new assignment is like using a consumer-grade lock: it helps keep honest people honest.

Also: an _essay_ about WiMax and LTE? Seriously? That doesn't sound like a very...useful...assignment to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the solution(s) listed at the end of the piece. This is wise stuff and the best way to handle something like this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just make homework a smaller percentage (10%) of final grade.</comment>


HTML5 iPhone app I wrote while on the train - <AUTHOR>

I had been reading a lot about the mobile ad market and had some spare time on a train ride. I thought I'd write something to play around with admob and mobile. The first problem I encountered was I don't have mac and didn't have the android sdk downloaded. I thought for a little bit and then figured I could write a html5 app. I had seen a life hacker article (http://lifehacker.com/5658814/how-to-create-a-visual-speed-dial-folder-on-your-iphone) about speed dial for iphone that I thought I could make into an app within my 2.5 hour train ride. So I wrote it, bought a domain for it and hosted it when I got off the train (http://www.iphone-speeddial.com/). Then I got busy so I left it alone for a week.
The second time I got some time so I added admob, analytics and emailed the author of the life hacker article. Nothing came of the email but the analytics was interesting. As of today I've had 140 unique vistors. The best thing I did was listed it on the iphone subreddit. I also posted it on a bunch of forums (basicly no hits from that) and submitted to apple (still haven't heard anything from that).
Looking back on it, I made several mistakes. I picked a bad idea, there aren't many people who want speed dial and those that do don't use it that often but it was a fun project for the train. <comment><USER2> I just used your web-app and it's very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Andrew. It's nice to hear somebody else find it useful. I'm a big fan of your site too!</comment></comment>


Old-skool virus writers still exist.  - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/8ZN3BVTJ

<comment><USER2> What exactly is "Old-skool" in virus-writing and what is new-school?

<comment><USER3> Back in the days viruses had to hide themselves in executables to travel from machine to machine, undetected.

Today, as most users don't care about what processes are running on their system, and since the most common vector of infection is through the internet, what we call "viruses" are actually worms: they don't infect other programs, they are just self-replicating, malicious, executables.

<comment><USER4> older school: boot sector viruses which triggered when an infected floppy was left in a machine on bootup. They'd then TSR and infect any other floppys inserted into the machine, as well as any hard disk drives if the machine was an expensive newer model with a hard card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      "- Microsoft
      hh86:  love it"

<comment><USER6> Why do all these virii start with 'W32.' ? ;-)

<comment><USER7>
      virii

OT, but please: viruses. In Latin, 'virus' is like 'sand': it has no plural (and if it would've had a plural, it would've been 'viri').

[http://stason.org/TULARC/security/computer-virus/14-Is-it- vi...](http://stason.org/TULARC/security/computer-virus/14-Is-it-viruses- virii-or-what.html)

<comment><USER8> > and if it would've had a plural, it would've been 'viri'

That's not immediately clear. Depending on whether you think it's second or fourth declension, and masculine or neuter, the various possibilities are virua, vira, virūs, and viri. My best guess is that the "correct" usage was one of the more exotic varients (virua or vira), but the word was so rare that many people didn't learn the nuances, and instead adopted it to the more common patterns. Similar to how "begs the question" is often used incorrectly, and that ends up becoming an accepted usage.

However, the plural could not have been "virii."

<comment><USER9> <http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/virus.html>

More than either of you two probably want to know about the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do viruses of this type (exe infecting) still have much impact "in the wild"? Most news these days seems to be about worms and trojan horses. I presume this is because it's harder to transport a "useful" payload inside of a true virus, so they are more often than not written to satisfy the curiosity of the author.

<comment><USER11> In old days, software were copied (yeah, on floppies) from friend to friend. A true "sneakernet" P2P^W F2F-network.

Nowadays, software is either obtained directly from authors (or packagers), or from more centralized P2P sources, and, in my personal perception, most of time flash drives are used is to transfer documents, not executables.

<comment><USER12> Planning.doc.exe

<comment><USER11> Yeah, and autorun.inf, and a lot of other tricks. That's not generally considered "old-skool", though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> why would you want to write viruses?

<comment><USER14> It's a way to play Core Wars across the whole Internet with other people's computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am torn by these young tinkerers; on one hand they're exploring the technology around them unlike most their peers, but on the other hand they very often seem to be totally full of themselves.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think that the title of that post does not do justice to the interview. Old- skool vs New School is a tiny part of an interview representative of the psychology of a virus writer. Virus writing seems like the most brilliant way to kill your creativity. Or in other words making your creativity a slave of the most boring of all arts: destruction.

<comment><USER17> Well, you can destroy something blandly, or you can destroy it in an intricate, even intelligent fashion. Just as you can create something blandly — to just barely serve its purpose.

See, destruction is also creation. She _creates_ viruses. These things then go on to destroy other stuff.

Destruction is not at all a boring art. It's as legitimate an art as creation.

Somewhere around 10th grade I finally gave in to my urge to put a lot of energy behind a simple question: why do parasites exist? Why are there lice, ticks, bacteria and viruses?

Turns out they do, just because they do. They're legitimate 'creations,' living beings. And in non-parasitic beings, they inspire toughness and survival strategies — if it can't adapt to the parasite (in one way or another) it'll die out.

Really, I don't get why people are biased against 'evil' black hats. If they target you and your app failed, you better get some security going. It's better some 'artist' who just feels the need to destroy intricate systems in an ingenuous fashion makes me aware of my security holes than someone with a malicious intent.

From the interview, I can't see anything sociopathic or even malevolent in her (granted, I haven't read the whole thing.)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for sharing another point of view. The destructive force of kids, and their love to create traps and make pranks is something that I really like. The life of non-human parasites or microbes is at least amazing, I am with you in that. My point was that destruction is the most obvious form of expression, for these reason we see it every time in kids. Personally I find it boring(since it is obvious and in a sense natural)- I can not change that. Of course somebody could tell me how come I do not complain about people that make sophisticated weapons for example. This is a whole different discussion.

<comment><USER17> I'm with you when you say that I find it more engaging now to create useful stuff, or generally beneficial stuff.

But when I was a teenager, it was quite different. I admired black hats, and people who wrote viruses, because they were playing a game: there were people whose sole existence was based on working _against_ these 'bad guys.' They got paid to fix security holes, to design programs in an 'un-hackable' manner. And yet, the intruders often prevailed. It's a game of outsmarting. There's someone, incredibly smart, trying to prevent you from achieving goal x. He's getting paid, probably has a whole team of experts around him. And yet, you find your way into the system; break it. That sounded almost heroic to me.

Of course, the whole metaphor works even better when you're discontent, or even at odds with society at large. Read: when you're pretty much every teenager on this planet :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of another female virus writer "Gigabyte" who she references in the interview : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte_(virus_writer)>

</comment><comment><USER19> \- Dark Avanger

Have not heard that name in a while! Admired his code</comment>


Bitcoin just passed $5,000 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/12/bitcoin-just-passed-5000/ <comment><USER2> It is amazing to think that only a few years ago you could take an old laptop, download a miner, stick it in a closet and it would spit out something now worth a quarter of a million dollars every few days. There are a lot of problems with Bitcoin. If you look at my comment history you will see I am pretty down on it for all sort of reasons I won't go into at the moment. However sometimes you just have to take a step back and admire how crazy impressive it is that Bitcoin has reached this point.

<comment><USER3> If you go back far enough, you didn't even need to download a specific mining software, just download the Bitcoin client at the time and you could generate bitcoin (or mine) using it. So crazy to think about now in hindsight. Back then you had to really try hard to find someone that would accept any amount of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I'm invested in Ethereum, and not Bitcoin. There is no good reason that Bitcoin is still going up once Ethereum came on the scene. Transaction times, transaction cost, decentralization, future development work, consensus under one leader all favor Ethereum. The only reason I see for Bitcoin to still be strong is that it has name recognition and first mover advantage. People talk about "Bitcoin" and "cryptocurrency" as synonyms. If you want to "get into cryptocurrency" you buy Bitcoin. I think this is a bad thing, but I don't know what it means. Anyone have any insight with a differing opinion as to why I am wrong? Does anyone know a good reason (technical or economic) Bitcoin is going up while Ethereum is not?

<comment><USER5> Saying that Ethereum is strictly superior to Bitcoin is a very bold statement. I would certainly not invest based on that assumption.

First, Bitcoin is already as good as it will ever need to be to function as a practical store of value. Even without scaling, it can support enough transactions to effectively work this way. This can support price growth for a _long_ time, and first-mover advantage is critically important here.

Second, Bitcoin development, as fraught as it is, isn't dead. If such changes come about as to make Bitcoin seem obsolete, there's still a good chance that Bitcoin would adopt those changes. Also consider that a solution for an effective 2-way swap would make protocol differences essentially moot.

Finally, I admire Vitalik and other Ethereum developers and think their musings about cryptocurrencies in general have advanced the field as a whole. However, I'm still skeptical that Ethereum, as envisioned by Vitalik, can be made to work through sheer force of engineering. It's stunning how far it's come, but it still faces very real problems. A successful move to proof of stake would be the first indication that it might happen.

Footnote: "consensus under one leader" is probably the most critical weakness for Ethereum right now. Not only for legal/state interventions with the DAO precedent, but as a single point of failure. I think it's fair to say that Satoshi left Bitcoin precisely because it needs to "stand on its own feet" if it's to be truly decentralized. In this way, I consider Bitcoin to be far more mature.

<comment><USER6> "Bitcoin is already as good as it will ever need to be to function as a practical store of value."

Bitcoin is the worst possible 'store of value'in any financial scenario.

It's highly volatile, subject to unknown future regulations, competition from other things - and of course, it could go to zero tomorrow.

Moreover - there are any number of other, better opportunities for 'store of value' \- most notably real-estate.

There has been demand for real-estate in London for at least 1000 years.

So think, in 100 years, will there be at least some demand for real-estate in London. Probably. Probably more than today - but at least some.

What will the demand be for BTC in 100 years? Will it even exist? Will anyone even remember what it is?

The volatility alone makes it really not something you want to 'store a lot of value for the future'.

Just because there is pragmatically a 'fixed number of BTC's that will ever be created, and that it has some crypto-viability - does not inherently make it a 'good store of value' \- or a 'store of value at all'.

<comment><USER7> It's probably most useful to compare Bitcoin to gold (apparently the Biggest Bubble in Stock Market History: [http://gainspainscapital.com/2017/08/08/officially- biggest-b...](http://gainspainscapital.com/2017/08/08/officially-biggest- bubble-stock-market-history/)).

Let's take a random sample of reasons why gold is a store of value: [https://www.quora.com/How-did-gold-become-the-historical- sta...](https://www.quora.com/How-did-gold-become-the-historical-standard- store-of-value)

Pretty much every of those attributes can be created in most cryptocurrecies (or made obsolete), with arguably these exceptions:

\- Universal (as of now) - Bitcoin is indeed universally recognisable and tradable, compared to other cryptos.

\- Stable - very unknown, but so far the long age of Bitcoin made it a bit more stable than most other well-known alternatives. Though that could be challenged if an inherently stable cryptocurrency mechanism is invented.

Perhaps universality will be always there and will be enough. But overall that makes me bend in the direction that inherently there is nothing special about Bitcoin in the long term, while other cryptocurrencies are researching and reinventing very foundations of value, trust and finance in general.

Imagine if there will be no reason for any currency to be a store of value in the future. Why choose that, versus some kind of automatically diversified crypto-index or other portfolio, that is for example bound assets related your interests and beliefs as a person.

Just take a micro-sized chunk of it each time you make a payment.

<comment><USER8> Here's a big difference - Bitcoin requires the existence of a computer network and all that entails about global stability (computers, electricity, infrastructure). Gold (or any physical medium of exhange) doesn't.

<comment><USER9> Those people that hold gold as a hedge don't hold gold. They hold a database entry on a computer somewhere that assigns them ownership of some gold (supposedly) in a vault somewhere.

This requires global stability, and a great deal of blind trust in multiple third-parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Blockchain has real promise, but Is anyone using Bitcoin for anything other than speculation?

<comment><USER11> Payment obfuscation (which is not inherent in the protocol, but how you use it).

International money transfers. I've personally met a few backpackers who use bitcoin ATMs in SE Asia in addition to the traditional banking system.

FWIW I suspect that these use cases are negligible compared to speculation.

<comment><USER12> How do the ATMs get around money laundering laws?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ITT: effective consensus that the utility of Bitcoin today is its popularity in the "gray" (or black) market.

How does anyone not believe this is a bubble which will burst as previous ones have, at the first sign of the next inevitable crack down?

Blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin at its current value is surpassing poppy level speculative inflation.

I get the notion of accepting high risk of loss and incredible transactional friction when trying to move back to a fiat currency.... but only for people who are either desperate to exfiltrate funds etc.

For everyone else it seems like a comically bad time to be buying in. Beyond comical, really.

</comment><comment><USER14> Years ago my boyfriend at the time said "hey we should buy some of these bitcoins, they're only a few pennies each, it'll be fun!" Boy do I regret missing that boat...

<comment><USER15> you mean you didn't marry her?

<comment><USER16> Him I suspect.

<comment><USER14> No, I didn't marry him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am really curious if the situation will be the same after November. At the moment it seems people are eager to buy into Bitcoin in order to have the extra chain that will come out of the forking as Bitcoin Gold.

The precedent with Bitcoin Cash was bad in this aspect, because it created a valued blockchain (albeit of lower value!) out of the blue. People want this to happen again.

Invention of the money tree... :)

</comment><comment><USER18> All aboard the hype train.

</comment><comment><USER19> And that valuation is based on ..?

<comment><USER20> The price people are currently paying for it on exchanges [0], with > $1 Billion in volume over the past 24 hours.

[0] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets)

<comment><USER19> Ok, but why? Why are people willing to pay that much for it?

<comment><USER21> Mainly because they believe it will stay valuable. Which is what backs all stores of value - gold and diamonds are definitely not bought for their practical applications.

Now why exactly people believe it is and will stay a good store of value is more complicated, but mostly a mix of trust in how miner self interest will keep the keys safe and general desirability of online currency

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And now it's at $5,280

<comment><USER23> It's hit a milestone.

<comment><USER24> ISWYDT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think it's the perfect time to buy :)

<comment><USER26> You're either right or wrong and your opinion is valid. Downvote isn't justified IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> good lord why?

<comment><USER28> Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.

<comment><USER18> Fools and their money are soon separated.

<comment><USER29> Here's some good evidence. Increase in the Monetary Base 1984 - 2010: [https://www.aftershockpublishing.com/pub/images/c03f002.jpg](https://www.aftershockpublishing.com/pub/images/c03f002.jpg)

<comment><USER30> Exactly this. Yes, Bitcoin is having another bubble moment because folks are trying to get rich quick. But, the underlying technology—the reason why Bitcoin has stuck around despite countless "deaths"—is that the existing financial system is a glass floor on the verge of shattering. We can live in denial all we want about what that means.

Bitcoin, though not perfect, is the first viable solution we've ever seen as a means for preventing financial corruption. Not to mention, it enables banking access for billions of people who don't have it. It makes transfer of large sums to _anywhere on the planet_ inexpensive. It's divisible down to 8 decimal places (a satoshi), making it a great fit for micropayments. These are just the top of mind solutions.

There are ideas we haven't even thought of yet. Bitcoin is programmable money, meaning the possibilities are seemingly endless.

<comment><USER15> "making it a great fit for micropayments" except that you currently have to pay about $4 for any transaction to come through ... eventually

<comment><USER31> Absolutely not true. I paid $0.40 cents on a $5.00 transaction yesterday that was confirmed within an hour. I could've easily paid the same $0.40 cents to move $50,000,000.00.

<comment><USER32> > $0.40 cents on a $5.00 transaction

Visa or Mastercard is cheaper than that

<comment><USER33> Actually it is in the same ballpark. 2.9% + 30¢ is a usual price in US for a small business.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building responsive apps for Linux smartphones with GTK and libhandy - <AUTHOR> https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-smartphone-apps-libhandy-gtk-part-1/ <comment><USER2> It's a bit sad that Gnome Builder is so flatpak focussed, I tried to use it to make a non-flatpak gnome app and it was so annoying I switched back to vim.</comment>


Blizzard introduces the Tauren Marine into StarCraft II - <AUTHOR> http://eu.starcraft2.com/features/terran/taurenmarine.xml Blizzard's April Fool 2008 arms the Terrans with these creatures from Azeroth. <comment><USER2> But I don't see the taurens defining feature in any of the moovies! Peanut butter jelly time anyone?</comment>


Coca-Cola buys Costa Coffee for £3.9bn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/31/coca-cola-buys-costa-coffee-from-whitbead-for-39bn <comment><USER2> Wasn't this discussed intensively just recently?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884299)

</comment><comment><USER3> On the same front-page on HN for me right now is:

"Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M"

It is a shame that the difference here is so big. Many people would rather pay $3 for a cup of coffee multiple times a day, than pay a fraction of that for valuable content.

Edit to clarify:

I understand that consumer products are different than content and that news is not a direct competitor to coffee products. What I mean is that news companies are struggling to get enough out of the advertisement model whereas nobody expects to get coffee for free/less in exchange for advertisements on their cups.

<comment><USER4> > valuable content

If I could buy a paper here in the UK that gave me a good mix of local and broad global coverage, focused on the facts rather than pushing its own agenda and stopped telling me how to think, speak and behave, I'd buy it, but that paper doesn't seem to exist.

<comment><USER5> The FT might be the closest? I recently switched from the Guardian. But it plays up financial issues and plays down social issues, as you might expect.

<comment><USER4> That's a good suggestion actually, but still probably more anglosphere focused than I'd prefer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one thinking "Well that amount is peanuts in the tech world".

After all Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19bn.</comment>


Scuba: Diving into Data at Facebook [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/scuba-diving-into-data-at-facebook.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm so happy to see this posted. I've been at Facebook for two years, and Scuba is hands-down one of my most favorite internal tools we have (and we have a lot of good ones).

The article focuses a lot on the implementation, but thankfully you don't need to worry about that when using it. The flexible/quick/easy UI is what seals the deal for me, combined with the fast query times and realtime data -- you can use it to query things that happened literally seconds ago. On the React team we use it to collect all dev-time JS warnings from React that our engineers see so that we can easily track what the most high-firing messages are and how frequently they occur.

I haven't tried them extensively, but honeycomb.io and Interana are both Scuba-inspired products by ex-Facebookers. If this tool sounds at all interesting to you, I'd definitely look into using them.

<comment><USER3> I really miss the awesome tooling like Scuba since I left.

<comment><USER4> I'll second the post above -- if you miss Scuba, honeycomb.io is for you. [https://honeycomb.io/blog/2016/11/honeycomb-faq- in-140-chars...](https://honeycomb.io/blog/2016/11/honeycomb-faq-in-140-chars- getting-started/)

<comment><USER5> There's also Snorkel, mostly written by Okay Zed (one of the authors listed on that Scuba paper) [http://snorkel.logv.org/](http://snorkel.logv.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was at FB from 2006-2015, and Scuba caused a phase change in how Facebook's performance was analyzed and how quickly insights were gained. For many of us in Infrastructure, we spoke of the pre-Scuba, post-Scuba eras. It was such a joy to have aggregated realtime performance metrics for our internet scale services and have the ability to drill down on just about any dimension when doing perf investigations. It gave us so much more confidence in our systems, both in our ability to detect issues, as well as pinpoint what was causing them.

I'd also like to echo what spicyj said about the UI, it is very usable. It was common for managers, PMs, and even people in completely non-technical business roles to use Scuba. It was my favorite internal product at FB and the one I miss the most.

</comment><comment><USER7> Former Facebook employee and current Googler. I really really miss Scuba. The visualizations are what really cinched things for me.

At Parse I was able to diagnose some seriously complex performance issues for customers by breaking splitting queries (precomputed in logs) into families and looking at probability distributions. It was amazing. Every time the customer told me XYZ was the problem I could send them a screenshot and refocus the conversation where the data sent us.

Some ex Parse employees left FB to build a visualization tool based on the same white papers (honeycomb.io). I'm really hoping to add that to my tool belt again.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's also a blog post about it here [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under- th...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood- data-diving-with-scuba/10150599692628920/)

My YC company [https://www.interana.com](https://www.interana.com) took a lot of lessons from this and is doing something that I think is even better for cos like Reddit, Sonos, Comcast, Bing. You can sign up if you'd like a demo :)

<comment><USER9> It would be really nice if I didn't have to fill out a form to see a demo-- having used Scuba I'd love to advocate for Interana at my current company, but it keeps getting pushed down my TODO list because of the extra friction

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a special-purpose time-series data warehouse and a UI for querying it. If you are not Facebook, it is _almost always_ better to do projects like this by using a standard data warehouse like Redshift or BigQuery, a queue like Kinesis, and a BI tool like Looker or Tableau. Your data won't be quite as real-time and your queries won't be quite as fast, but it will take much less engineering effort and you'll be able to use the same tools for other projects.

<comment><USER11> Here is a good list of redshift 'gotchas' \- [https://github.com/open- guides/og-aws#redshift-gotchas-and-l...](https://github.com/open-guides/og- aws#redshift-gotchas-and-limitations)

We ran into several of those. Notably, it's difficult to achieve the 'real- time' promise of redshift because of the huge performance hit while loading data into the DB so you have to do it off-hours. You can update a replica and then 'hot-swap' it in but this gets expensive. For operational analytics it's better to go with one of the purpose-built timeseries databases and dual write to that and your data warehouse.

<comment><USER10> The biggest gotcha listed there is how Redshift gets bogged down if you're loading a lot of tables, frequently. You can't run a production Redshift with lots of tables at <15m latency. But in most cases, Redshift is still an overall better choice than a timeseries database because:

* It has all of SQL, including JOINs

* You can use it for both timeseries data and all your other data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yay!! So happy to see Scuba get more visibility. I can't even count the number of times I said, and heard other engineers say, that the thing they would miss most about Facebook was Scuba.

That's the whole reason why we built honeycomb.io. If you're a FB expat, check us out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Former Scuba dev, Okay Zed, wrote [http://snorkel.logv.org/](http://snorkel.logv.org/). It's open source.

<comment><USER14> I gotta say, I don't think a snorkel will help the poor person in your logo.

<comment><USER15> seems apt for this: [https://www.flickr.com/groups/stickfiguresinperil/](https://www.flickr.com/groups/stickfiguresinperil/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The engineer who built this, Lior Abraham, went on to start data analytics startup Interana (YC W13).

<comment><USER17> Yes, indeed. Cofounded with Ann Johnson and fellow ex-Facebooker, Bobby Johnson, who led the infrastructure team for many years.

Interana draws much of it's inspiration from Scuba combined with learnings of analyzing massive amounts of data at scale.

Many high-growth companies use Interana for behavioral analysis of their event logs (Asana, Reddit, Imgur, Nextdoor, Bing, Azure, Tinder, SurveyMonkey, Sonos...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does Scuba differ from Presto which is also developed by Facebook? It seems that it stores data in-memory and have data expiration feature but also has many common features such as SQL and distributed processing.

<comment><USER19> Scuba is a complete system of log collection, storage and retrieval, and UI/visualization.

Presto would only cover the storage/retrival part. Scuba has its own backend for that which is very optimized for the kind of queries the UI needs to support, while Presto is a generic SQL store for analytics.

<comment><USER18> How does Scuba optimize the stored data-sets for aggregation queries compared to Presto (Raptor connector)? They both use common columnar data storage techniques such as compression, delta encoding and dictionary encoding. The main difference seems to be the real-time nature of Scuba and the UI.

<comment><USER19> Oh yeah good point, I had forgotten that Presto does not support realtime. About optimizations, I don't know the details, but for one, Scuba is C++ and Presto is Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems very similar to BigQuery. I wonder how the architectures compare.

<comment><USER21> [https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html)

^ This is Google's equivalent (mentioned at the end of the paper in "Related Work")

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this replacing the Gorilla database? Or is it using it under the hood? Or do they co-exist? If so, how are they used differently?

For those who don't know, the Gorilla database is also from Facebook and they published a paper about it roughly a year ago: [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf)

<comment><USER23> They're complementary. The ODS system mentioned there is more for monitoring numerical metrics (like Graphite) and doesn't support logging arbitrary data.

ODS is good for top-line metrics and can handle more volume but doesn't compare to Scuba if you want to dig in and look at individual rows in your data (or even just analyze your data and group based on certain columns).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So it samples data less than or equal to a second old and at a rate determined by the person making the query?

I wonder how often the data is inaccurate given the potentially low sample size?

<comment><USER25> Not sure where you got the "less than or equal to a second old"? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean?

There is no single system-wide imposed sampling rate, so it's up to you to set the sampling rate based on what sort of queries you want to be able to do with good enough accuracy. We have 1:1 rate data for some things (say errors served on a particular service), while a ten or a hundred thousand to one data for other things where there are, say, tens of millions of log lines per second.

<comment><USER24> Ah yeah. I misread the pdf; the rows expire at millions per second and not after 1 second.

I was wondering about the size of the sampling error. Apparently it's negligible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can confirm --- was at FB. Scuba is awesome --- especially the surprisingly sophisticated statistical aggregations and the call-stack view that somebody added.

<comment><USER27> That was me. Or rather, I created a table with columns s0-s255 and built a primitive tree interface for a stacktrace dataset called Strobelight. Searching was literally if s0 == 'foo' || s1 == 'foo'... etc. This horrified the real Scuba devs enough to add proper vector type and search operators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does this compare to Splunk on machine data or Tableau on relational data?

<comment><USER25> Comparing to Tableau, Scuba is schema-less and doesn't require any setup beyond creating the table (which doesn't have any approval process in the way and gives you a reasonable amount of scratch space to test before you get serious) and then having data arrive. Once Scuba is aware of your column by you submitting data for it, it allows you to query/group based on it very quickly. Scuba is entirely real-time. There are some other projects to do pre- computed aggregates if that's important to you.

I haven't used Splunk in ~7 years, so I can't remember enough about it to compare well. Splunk has some structured-on-top-of-unstructured stuff in it, whereas Scuba is always structured. If you want to turn something unstructured into something structured, you generally run a separate pipeline to do that (using one of the tailing frameworks for your preferred language). In terms of the alarm system in Splunk, we have other systems for handling that using the data that flows into Scuba.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The title made me picture Mark Zuckerberg diving into facebook user data like Scrooge Mcduck</comment>