Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook "isn't going to help" - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/11/zuckerberg-responds-to-hughes/ <comment><USER2> He might be right that breaking up Facebook, the company, might not help. But breaking up the different platforms will. Each individual platform is too big. They all need to be reduced. It seems that managing information at a gigantic scale is a bad thing. After all WhatsApp on its own has been blamed for causing problems in India and Myanmar and Facebook in many countries. Breaking up Facebook the company is not enough. The inability to control what kind of misinformation can be put on the different platforms is a problem that facebook as a company can't control. They want to use AI to solve the problem but even humans have problems figuring out how to deal with the information we read; how can software be able to do it.

The problem is due to scale. The same characteristics of social media that make it a great and cheap advertising platform makes it a great tool to distribute misinformation.

Zuckerberg is trying to save the company so his opinions are tainted so whatever he says should be taken with caution.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, FB has a problem worse than their scale. It's their complete lack of morality of any kind.

The fastest way to fix it is to permanently delete your account.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: good spot to work in Amsterdam? - <AUTHOR>

any café, library or similar you'd recommend? <comment><USER2> The public library (OBA) is a great place to work. The food at Vapiano just around the corner is amazing.

Apart from that I'd say any of the tons of nice little coffee shops or one of our many co-working spaces.

Drop by the VideoView office once as well if you're in town...

<comment><USER3> the thai noodles ("met cocos") in the library's cafeteria weren't bad either.

<comment><USER2> True; the LaPlace restaurant in the library is not bad at all either.

I just assumed he would find that anyhow, but that he might miss Vapiano as you need to get out of the building for that.

I just also remembered; if you want a good view the SkyLounge a few buildings down has an amazing view. It's a bit expensive but very nice.</comment></comment></comment>


Secure Boot and Restricted Boot - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html

<comment><USER2> In the comments, someone says: "We _were_ campaigning against Restricted Boot 10 years ago..." and gets the reply:

"Yes, you _were_ campaigning against Microsoft. However, when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter, most people folded because they were more anti-Microsoft than pro-freedom and were taken by the shiny stuff. Now it is acceptable to the public to buy locked down devices."

<comment><USER3> I saw that comment too. It's incredible what we as the larger tech community have let Apple get away with this decade that we never would have let Microsoft get away with the previous decade.

<comment><USER2> An amazing number of self-identifying FOSS fanboys still seem to have their tighty whities in a bunch over the evil deeds Microsoft committed in the 1990s, while giving Apple and Google free passes.

Of course, this makes sense. Scape-goating doesn't require anyone to use their brains ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a developer in Windows org, it pained me to see secure boot be so widely misinterpreted by the public.

<comment><USER2> I'd be amazed if many members of "the public" knew anything much about it. As far as I can see, it was a Linux fanboy phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's so right. Sadly this has come a bit too late and warnings have fallen mostly on deaf ears.

Linux desktop users risk to go back to being a niche, just when they were starting to rise above it.

Good move, Microsoft.

PS: Oh, and you'd think the fact Secure Boot "CA" is controlled by an American company would raise some eye brows at Bruxelles ...

<comment><USER6> > PS: Oh, and you'd think the fact Secure Boot "CA" is controlled by an > American company would raise some eye brows at Bruxelles ...

The CA is only controlled by an American company if you, the user, choose to stick with that CA. You are free to reconfigure your system to use a different CA.

<comment><USER7> Is it ? MS requirements are to be able to turn off Secure Boot, not allow changing the CA. I wouldn't be surprised if most manufacturers just implement the former.

<comment><USER6> MS also requires allowing for user replacement of all keys.

<comment><USER8> But only on x86_64 and not on ARM, right?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Kiwi – a minimalistic, extendable, in-memory key value store - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sdslabs/kiwi <comment><USER2> This looks interesting but how is it different from existing projects like redis?

<comment><AUTHOR> Redis is an external dependency and one of the major motivations behind making Kiwi was to integrate directly into a Go project. Internally, how Kiwi works is quite simple and the best part is all the data types it supports are extendable. Though the standard data types are inspired from Redis itself.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Audlist – Audio-First Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.audlist.com <comment><USER2> So there are a couple of these around or attempted. One of the main problems though is time. One of the strongest selling points of FB/Twitter/etc is mindless scrolling which you can do in 30 second spurts while waiting in line, on a break etc. Can't really do this with longer audio clips. There is a reason why TikTok is 15 seconds.

For longer content why not just listen to professionally made podcasts?

Not to be a downer, but what is the case that there is a more than just a small niche market for and audio social network?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

We are trying to solve some of the pain points that you addressed for Audio Social Networks by adding some additional features such as short titles, speech-to-text, and voice commands (the last 2 very soon).

With respect to your concern with longer audios, we understand that Podcasts will be a huge part of Audlist, and we will provide them a way to interact more closely with their audience. We think ourselves as a Youtube/Twitter of Audio. So we will help Podcasters by being the host, player and discovery place for audio content, as well as, a place to interact with users. Additionally, for content creators like podcasters, we will add more value trying to give them more information about their content regarding metrics (like when users stopped listening, demographics, among others) something that other types of content such as video already have but most Podcasters don't.

Finally, Let me give you another example of a type of content that is Uploaded to Youtube that I think that is a great fit for Audlist - A guy looks at a camera with no great shots and a bad camera and talks for 30 mins about a random subject and gets 15-100k views. That's a regular on a lot of youtube videos. While driving I find myself listening to a lot of those contents as well as Podcasts, but Youtube is not really made for hands-free usage and so its usually a painful experience for me.

Oh, and we will have "Voice Stories" (15 seconds audios) very soon! :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

We created Audlist as a new social network because we believe that talking is the easiest way to communicate and opens great possibilities for new voices emerge.

We still have a lot of features that we will like to add in the future such as speech-to-text, audio commands, editing and more but this is the core of Audlist and we wanted to launch asap to see the reaction of users and prioritize what people really want.

Let me know what you think :-)</comment>


Why we do machine learning engineering with YAML, not notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/why-we-do-machine-learning-engineering-with-yaml-not-notebooks-a2a97f5e04f8 <comment><USER2> Its quite simple to develop a model, bundle it up for deployment and deploy. Nobody cares about your fancy YAML based containerized deployment and monitoring setup, everyone has that. The challenge comes in when you have a continuous cycle of data ingestion to model optimization, training, evaluation and deployment. Pretty much everybody has huge amount of code duplication in there. It also comes from the fact that ml researchers are barely capable of programming a light switch, like how are you ever gonna put the horrible trash of code they ducked tape together from medium posts into a production environment. Hopeless.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's simple to deploy scaleable predictions - that's why model hosting solutions like SageMaker's and GCP's AI Platform exist, and there's no need for people to be re-implementing model deployment/monitering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is seriously misleading. They aren't doing their ML engineering in yaml. If you look at the snipper the article, you can see that their code is in flat .py files. The config is in yaml (which is also how everyone else uses it). It's like someone saying that they do their ML in a dockerfile.

<comment><USER5> The linked site (towardsdatascience) is kind of like medium blogs. High variability in quality with a lot of self-promoters and the occasional diamond in the rough. But a ton of rough.

<comment><USER6> It _is_ a Medium blog. Its literally a Medium page, they just rely on other people's contributions which they have editors look over and then aggregate rather than produce their own. I suppose the editing process may help with quality some, but it really shouldn't be seen as much more than a typical blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For .ipynb notebooks, I _highly_ recommend using nbstripout [0] to strip the Jupiter output before committing the notebooks to the repository (thus making the diffs sane).

You can also set it up as a 'filter', so it automatically runs before any git operations, whether it's add, commit, diff or an interactive rebase.

[0] [https://github.com/kynan/nbstripout](https://github.com/kynan/nbstripout)

<comment><USER8> > thus making the diffs sane

You can also use ReviewNB [1] that is literally built for Jupyter notebook diffs. You can see notebook visual diffs for any commit or pull request on GitHub. For pull requests, you can also write comments on a notebook cell (emulating the typical code review experience for Jupyter notebooks)

Disclaimer: I built ReviewNB for Jupyter notebook code reviews on GitHub.

[1] [https://www.reviewnb.com/](https://www.reviewnb.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The cortex tool mentioned looks really useful to get a service running out of a trained model. Though I didn't really understand what the article is trying to get at. Storing your deployment configuration in yaml and json files is pretty much the standard.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps for young people it's actually necessary to mention JSON and YAML as you people tend to read the news rather than history or best practises textbooks?

<comment><USER11> Many hyped development and administration practices make me snarky, too, but let's not take it out on random (young) people on the Internet. There's a great deal of history and best practices that are being ignored not just by ADHD juniors, but also by team leads and managers of every seniority level. Lots of people out there spend decades in the industry, build solid careers based on playing the right office politics cards and being friends with the right people, and miraculously manage not to learn almost anything.

(Edit: also, clearly, I don't read the news -- is YAML being "superseded"? By _what_ now??)

<comment><USER12> > is YAML being "superseded"? By what now??)

i hope by something that isn't the kitchen sink... i actually prefer XML and i hate XML.

started looking at [https://dhall-lang.org/#](https://dhall-lang.org/#) which compiles to json/yaml, is seriously strongly typed and explicitly not Turing- complete both as a design goal and current reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, every month or two I see another article tut-tutting people for putting notebooks into production, and I'm curious, _who is actually doing this?_ I've never seen such a thing in the wild, and I'm genuinely (morbidly?) curious what it would look like in practice.

<comment><USER6> Netflix apparently. They've built an entire software framework for enabling their data scientists to put their notebooks into production [0].

[0] [https://netflixtechblog.com/notebook- innovation-591ee3221233](https://netflixtechblog.com/notebook- innovation-591ee3221233)

<comment><USER14> We (Netflix) do a ton of prototyping/exploration in notebooks like everyone else. We run many ETL pipelines in production as _templated notebooks_. When something fails, you can just open a notebook to see the input and the output, which is handy.

We don't deploy or execute ML models in production as notebooks. We have many other solutions for that use case. In particular, check out [https://metaflow.org](https://metaflow.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > When I say production machine learning, I'm referring to machine learning > that manifests as a product feature. For example, Uber's ETA prediction, or > Gmail's Smart Compose.

You can bet that prod services from companies you heard of are running on something more analogous to versioned docker images. Not a yaml file which says, 'Go run whatever predict.py is in the current folder.'

The moment one of your dependencies breaks your code, or snookers your performance, there will be a lot of head scratching going on.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reads like someone was forced by their marketing team to write an article about anything at all.

<comment><USER17> I find the quality of articles on towardsdatascience.com has significantly decreased in the past months. This article is no exception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reason 1 (Your pipeline should be reproducible) for avoiding jupyter doesn't make any sense. That's the whole point of jupyter. Out of order execution can happen, but you can just as easily restart the kernel and run all... I can only imagine this is a problem for someone who doesn't understand the tool they're using.

Reasons 2 and 3 for avoiding jupyter are more justified but easy enough to work around between jupytext and papermill.

</comment><comment><USER19> I once wrote a survey of tools within the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem: [https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2020/03/16/jupyter-...](https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2020/03/16/jupyter- notebooks-in-2020-part-2/) (it's a three part series and that link is Part 2).

The topic of production notebooks often shows up. I've seen tools like papermill and dagster being used for notebook prod, just like in Netflix.

I concluded that using notebooks for prod is always a tech decision, often influence by a tradeoff: risk for premature optimization (writing scripts early on in the project that may only be used once) and underengineering (using non-maintainable and clunky code to support mission-critical workloads): [https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2020/03/16/jupyter-...](https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2020/03/16/jupyter- notebooks-in-2020-part-2/#putting-it-together)</comment>


Video courses for designers and product guys - <AUTHOR> http://uxtree.io/

<comment><USER2> I'm not a designer, I'm a product guy, but I really liked the course about user research !</comment>


Brain over Brawn: An Owner's Manual for the Human body (free e-book) - <AUTHOR> http://brainoverbrawn.com/get-the-book/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for linking this. As the book says, it's a survey of the fundamentals of proper exercise, nutrition, rest, recovery, and most of the stuff in between. It's short and to the point, and it's free.

Even if someone reading this post is immensely strong, has single digit body fat, and will live to 200, chances are good they know someone else who could benefit from reading it. And the ebook is complete and free, so if you decide you don't want it you don't even have to call for a refund. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Waste of time, a typical health/fitness guru style book. I skimmed it, didn't learn any new fact. It's just recycled nonsense, stating the obvious.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how thoroughly you skimmed the book, but in the introduction as well as throughout, it claims to be a straight-forward guide for any sort of human, young or old man or woman, and that purpose is at much a fundamental survey of nutrition, exercise, and everything else a body needs as it is a refutation of all the misinformation out there. Considering the 'average' person assumes P90X and the Ab Circle are proper exercise and that dietary fat makes your body fat, that doesn't seem too outlandish a claim.

As you didn't learn anything new, I trust you are well-read in fitness and nutrition, but since being a professional computer user doesn't explicitly require physical fitness, this might actually be a pretty useful resource for some of the readers here. And even if it weren't, said readers are likely to have mothers, fathers, significant others or children who could benefit from it. It specifically declares itself an "owner's manual for the human body", not some sort of secret hard-living comrade method for muscle growth or whatever; since you are already versed, your response would be like a Mathematics Professor writing an amazon review for "Fundamentals of Algebra" and saying "this stuff is all rehashed, there's nothing here I haven't seen before". Or you know, for a programmer to slam a "Computers for Dummies" book as being too basic.

Anyway, I respect your opinion and appreciate you giving it a shot, but I feel like you either were looking for the wrong thing or just didn't look too hard. Possibly since it's free, you got what you paid for it.

By the way I'm the author. I'm not trying to make a secret of that or anything, I just didn't initially feel it was relevant to the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing new, but very simple and well explained for a beginner!</comment>


Tell HN: Check out T-Mobile - <AUTHOR>

I've been thinking about posting this, and the Verizon story reminded me. It's not exactly related to hacking or startups (though if you're a start-up founder or bootstrapper, you're probably looking to reduce your expenses), but this is a community I frequent and would like to share it with people here.
If you're not a T-Mobile user, consider checking out their service.
I switched (back) this summer, and they paid $190 for my iPhone 5 trade-in, and $150 for the remainder of my Verizon contract (the latter as a prepaid MasterCard, received quickly and easily used for their bills or anything else):
http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/switch-carriers-no-early-termination-fee.html
If you're unsure, they'll send you an iPhone 5s to try for 7 days (I didn't try this, so can't comment):
http://explore.t-mobile.com/test-drive-free-trial
I have no contract to fulfill with T-Mo. I did have to purchase a new device which includes a payment plan, but the way I look at it, I got to upgrade from iPhone 5 to 5s (and now the 6 is available), they bought my old phone and paid my fees, and I'm still paying ~$25/mo. less compared to Verizon. Not a bad deal.
Service seems roughly equivalent in my metropolitan area (and when I had them the first go-round they were superior to VZW at my location).
I hope this helps someone.
Disclaimer: I'm not a shill, just an HN reader and occasional poster. <comment><USER2> As someone who has looked carefully at T-Mobile some things I have picked up:

\- Their stores suck, they will lie (per Reddit's T-Mobile sub, there are numerous threads about it, they flat out lie).

\- "Jump!" is a poorly conceived upgrade program that doesn't make financial sense.

\- Their selection of financed phones is limited compared to the big two (unlocked is $300+, some people want to pay $20-30/month, T-Mobile has a moderate selection).

\- Coverage varies. Coverage while out-of-town sucks.

\- I did the 7 day test drive, zero hassle. They shipped it, I used it, then I returned it to the store. Took 5 minutes to return, they didn't even TRY to sell me there and then.

\- The Test Drive order confirmation sends an invalid tracking link ([http://http//](http://http//) at the start). When I contacted T-Mobile via Twitter they didn't understand the issue with that.

\- In order to do the termination fee thing you have to trade in (for some reason).

\- You'll have to endure people saying "un-carrier" unironically.

\- You'll have to endure their "I'm a hip 20 something" nonsense advert/staff/feel.

\- They don't offer employer discounts (unless military/government) anymore, so if you get one NOW you might lose money on the switchover (we break even).

\- Their international roaming is pretty incredible. Free "slow" data, inexpensive calls, and free texts(!). Even their "fast" pay for data is cheaper than AT&T's offering (all on the Simple Choice).

\- Their music streaming thing is cool, but no Google Music.

My biggest problem with T-Mobile is I want to switch but their selection of phones blows right now. Fortunately the Sony Z3 just appeared to save the day(?), but would still like to see the Z3C.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because I spend so much time on Wifi/iMessage, I migrated my old $80/mo AT&T 450 voice/200 texts/unlimited data to TMobile's $3/mo 10c per minute/text (the fee includes 30 minutes/texts.) I average about $5 per month for about the same effective benefits I had at $80 per month, and plan to use my 4S on it as long as possible since I like the form factor.

They may lie in their stores, but I haven't had any trouble doing all my business online except for when I bought the TMobile SIM.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do not get T-Mobile.

Their coverage map, in Orlando at least, is a lie. Promised LTE coverage was constantly 4G, I even dropped to Edge and No Service on a daily basis where the map said coverage was "Good"</comment>


Tesla Model S Drivetrain spun up on the bench - <AUTHOR> http://insideevs.com/salvaged-tesla-model-s-rear-drive-unit-spun-bench-videos/ <comment><USER2> I would be down to drop one of these motors into one of the classic cars i own. The only downside i could think of is requiring the battery in the hood due to the unibody design, and getting into a front accident... other than that, i think the pros outweigh the risks.</comment>


Concrete-free washing machines are lighter to transport, just as good in a spin - the-dude http://newatlas.com/plastic-counterweight-washing-machine-concrete/50769/ <comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat tickled to say I thought of this about 10 years ago, told everyone who would listen, and many who wouldn't.

As I was not remotely interested in developing it myself I was happy to tell anyone. Got an audience with a designer at Dyson, gave it to him straight in the clearest most open terms imaginable, to be met by nonplussed disinterest.

Just kept it for cocktail parties since then.

<comment><USER2> I've been telling this for years every time I helped people move. The thought of patenting it crossed my mind, but I always assumed this would be "too simple" an invention, that companies probably already had figured out, but couldn't use because of some patent troll or something like that. Also, as a student, I didn't have the money for a patent application.

<comment><USER3> > Also, as a student, I didn't have the money for a patent application.

That's the big probem for individuals.

Patenting as an individual is expensive and as a friend learned the big companies can just sit-tight until the renewal fees become too much to bear.

He had designed a self-assembly glassfibre astronomical observatory on the Buckmeister principle, with a wide-opening orifice using petal segments, and toured the major manufacturers in the field. None wanted to license the patent.

Shortly after he let the patent lapse due to cost, several of the manufacturers brought out their variants. That's just the way the game is played.

<comment><USER4> That's the main failure on that argument that patents protect small inventors.

It's a wonder that the companies on your case decided to ignore the patent, instead of implementing it expecting your friend to not have enough money to sue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Newer washing machines have less concrete in them that before - My guess would be that in the past the water tank would have been to large to actually fit the machine.

I also wonder how the plastic will stand up to the vibrations. You might get leaks because the plastic will flex and eventually rupture from stress.

The reason why newer machines have less counterweight is that the motors are electronically regulated these days. That means you can partly dampen vibrations with the motor instead of with weights.

<comment> yoz-y 3.5 kg of plastic is quite a lot though, I suppose it is because the tank is very thick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The plastic counterweight (right) could save around 45,000 tonnes of CO2 each year in the UK..."

How about we just make machines that last instead of having to be replaced all the time.

<comment><USER7> Because no-one wants to pay for that. Washing machines which last exist, but they're expensive. They use sturdier, more easily replaceable parts, higher quality motors and control systems, etc. And sometimes _iron_ counterweights (even more CO2 there).

You can get a washing machine that might last perhaps 5-10 years for about 200-300 euro... or a Miele one that'll probably last over 20 years for 1000 euro. It's a hard sell for most people.

<comment><USER8> My problem is that I'm willing to spend the money but I'm worried about getting burnt. It can be difficult to ascertain what product is worth spending money on and how much extra to spend exactly.

There is zero guarantee of spending more to get higher quality and longer life. It takes a lot of research.

You need to be really, really determined to follow the "Buy It For Life" way.

<comment><USER9> A bit less than ten years ago, I had my home built and purchased nothing but high-end industrial appliances. I admit, this was costly and I made similar viewpoint purchases for the rest of the house.

So far, I've not had to have anything repaired - at all. I haven't even had to change an appliance lightbulb. I just keep the consumables replaced on schedule.

Initially, it was quite expensive. I do think it may be cheaper on the long run.

<comment><USER10> Do cheap appliances really have longevity problems though?

My place is going on 22 years old with the same gas oven/stove top, built in microwave, and standing washer dryer combo. No repairs needed that I know of and even if they did, they are all standard, whirlpool type appliance with an abundance of cheap parts online. Even the fridge was going strong until we had an internal water leak a few years ago which was easily fixed for $100. We did recently get rid of it for a more efficient model though.

Now that I think about it, the dishwasher was replaced a few years ago. Mostly because we didn't think the old one was cleaning well enough. But the new one was barely $200 all in.

Commerical, high end versions of these appliances would need to last more than my remaining lifespan to pay for themselves.

I don't think much financial argument can be made for spending large amounts of money on regular kitchen appliances for their longevity.

<comment><USER11> It's always a gamble, but I feel like your appliances probably fall in the threshold of manufacturers giving a damn about longevity.

Our 32-year-old home, with original washer/dryer, dishwasher, fridge, and oven were only recently renovated mostly because of aesthetics - not operation. Of those appliances, the dishwasher was the only real dud the last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having a "dead weight" has it's advantages - passive, no bacteria, mold, flex, resistant to shock etc. Pretty sure billion dollar companies like Siemens have thought this through and came to the conclusion that concrete is best. The negative externality of a disappointed customer seems to be larger (medium term) than the damage being done by producing the concrete.

<comment><USER13> Manufacturers really don't care too much about shipping costs (and the secondary CO2 burden) once the machine leaves their loading dock. Their concern is to make the machine as cheaply as possible for the features involved and maximize the margin.

<comment><USER14> Costs are probably not that high anyway. For most logistic companies, volume determines capacity for trucks, not weight. Transporting a washing machine amongst other deliveries will not cost much more than other deliveries of that size (except for the additional fuel which is probably low). Carrying it in place can be done within minutes, not much longer than other deliveries.

That's probably also the reason why machines are cheap to buy online. If shipping was a constraint, buying at big stores would be cheaper.

Therefore, concrete can save some CO2 but probably not much cost. The cost of replacing faulty water tanks could be higher than the saved cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never knew washing machines had concrete in them :(

<comment><USER16> Yeah, check out Secret Life Of Machines 104 The Washing Machine [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baFaEvBywGc&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baFaEvBywGc&feature=youtu.be&t=7m30s)

they show what happens if you take the block out. Also how comercial machines do without it by balancing the load.

<comment><USER17> Damn that takes me back! I used to love watch Secret Life of Machines, back in the 80s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one of those things where I'd have to think the washing machine companies have certainly thought of this and there's a reason they don't do it that's being left out of the article. It does seem like a good idea, but curious why it's not done already.

</comment><comment><USER19> My top loader has damping springs at the bottom and a plastic "balance ring"[1] around the top of the basket that's filled with fluid to reduce vibrations. Certainly no concrete anywhere in it, that I could see when I took the cover/case off anyway.

Though I've been having problems with it shaking too much during the spin cycle, so I wish it did have concrete.

[1] [http://www.appliancepartspros.com/whirlpool-balance-ring- asm...](http://www.appliancepartspros.com/whirlpool-balance-ring-asm- wp3956205-ap6008969.html)

<comment><USER20> Only front loaders have it. Top loaders don't spin fast enough to need it.

<comment><USER21> I was of the understanding top loaders don't require it because the axis of spin is oriented such that, so long as the load is sufficiently balanced, it doesn't matter how fast it spins.

Front loaders have a harder time balancing the load due to the orientation of the drum, so require greater inertial mass to stabilise them.

<comment><USER20> No, I don't believe that's true. An imbalanced top loader will "walk" across the room if it's not heavy enough to stay put.

No, it's simply that top loaders just don't spin very fast.

> Front loaders have a harder time balancing the load due to the orientation > of the drum

The opposite - it's easier for a front loader to balance the load, not harder (that's why they are able to spin faster).

A top loader has no ability to move the clothing into balance. But a front loader can - it spins slowly so that the clothing moves around, and then when it detects balance, it speeds up and locks the clothing into position.

A front loader is a better washing machine in every single way, except for one: it needs to be water tight, which means air tight, so it can grow mildew if the door is not left open when it's not in use.

<comment><USER21> Ah, yep, all going points, I think you're right. I sit corrected.

Yeah, got to leave that door open when not in use. Definitely something I always do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> s-berwick Was posted on BBC a few weeks back and in the comments sections this was posted.

[https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0326502A1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0326502A1/en)

<comment><USER22> He has another one where it seems it pumps water through a second reservoir. Looks like that expired recently so possibly why we are seeing this? (Far from a patent expert)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0707670B1/en?q=D06F37%2f...](https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0707670B1/en?q=D06F37%2f265&assignee=Georges+Martinez)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder when active damping systems will come to washing machines. You'll need sensors to measure vibrations, a control unit and some small but fast actuator coupled to a small counter weight.

The technology shouldn't be much different to the noise cancelling earphones I'm wearing right now. But with a larger actuator.

<comment><USER24> My current LG washer spins the drum at startup to detect balance and load, so it probably accomplishes some active balancing by modulating the drive motor during the spin cycle. This one still has a regular concrete balance though.

<comment><USER25> Same, but I figured it was doing something more like:

        int speed = 0, retries = 0;
        for (int time = 0; time < SPIN_LENGTH; time++) {
          speed += speed < MAX_SPEED ? 1 : 0;
          if (read_shake_sensor() > TOO_MUCH_SHAKING) {
            time = speed = 0;
            if (++retries > MAX_RETRIES)
              break;
          }
          set_spin_speed(speed);
          sleep(1);
        }

<comment><USER24> While it's possible that it is this simple, spinning the drum back and forth to detect load shows a significantly more advanced understanding of control theory.

<comment><USER13> I have an LG and noticed that it takes a _very_ measured approach to spin cycles, as if it's taking a bunch of measurements at certain speeds before going into the high speed final spin.

It can also reverse the drum to try and loosen loads that have fixed together in one lump. That has to be a huge advantage of the direct drive system and most likely something that concrete-filled belt-driven UK banger can't do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this a British thing?

I'm pretty sure my 22-year-old Kenmore washer doesn't have any concrete in it. I have it apart three or four times in 22 years for different maintenance (never costing more than $50 in parts) and it's not particularly heavy.

<comment><USER20> No, not a British thing. But only front loaders need it, since old top loaders don't spin very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Water has a density of 1000kg/m3 whereas concrete has a density of 2300kg/m3. Your washing machine will end up a bit bigger if you want the same counterweight.

Some washers even have cast iron counterweights (7000kg/m3).

<comment><USER28> what about sand? comes close to concrete but is easily (re)fillable.

<comment><USER29> and never gets moldy

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude This seems to be such an incredible innovation, the questions arise : is it really feasible and why has it not happened before?

<comment><USER30> it's one of those ideas that seems so obvious and sensible in retrospect it makes you wonder how many other stupid designs are hidden in plain view, and why did this problem not get solved until 2017, when there are robots on Mars and probes orbiting Jupiter and Saturn ?

<comment><USER31> I got this idea long ago but I couldn't think of a way of using this idea. Then I thought it was obvious and that it was not implemented for some non obvious reason I didn't know.

<comment><USER32> A block of concrete is cheap and zero maintanance. And the machine typically is carried only twice in it's lifetime.

A water reservoir needs some way of filling, thus extra work for the buyer (typical ad: our washing machine doesn't need filling as those clunky reservoir ones!!!), maybe requires some maintenance. If you leave water in it for years it will rot, so probably you also need to put some disinfectants in.

So basically this idea is more environmentally sane, but more expensive. But there could be a market here, people care and are willing to spend more these days to save the env.

<comment><USER31> > thus extra work for the buyer

The soap water inlet can be a flexible tube that one can put inside the reservoir, then push a button and the exact amount of water is added (or some more and have it overflow to the drum).

> maybe requires some maintenance

Not if done correctly. And if it wasn't done correctly it seems easy to fix.

> so probably you also need to put some disinfectants in

They can just come with a bleach tablet inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> god dammit, yet another stupid idea I thought nobody would ever like.

ps: same goes for almost every dead weight transport. Road blocks, you name it.

Someone computes the wasted energy ?

pps: what about vertical axis spinning models ? I remember people saying they were inneficient. Anyone can explain ?

ppps: I remember a guy in africa coupling a dead bike to a vertical spinning container. _sigh_

<comment><USER34> Horizontal axis is better because it tumbles the clothes through a small puddle of water at the bottom. Vertical axis requires lots of energy to agitate, and a lot of water.

<comment><USER35> My vertical axis washer uses probably as much as a horizontal one. The trick is in an improved impeller to properly agitate a full load in what's merely a puddle of water. Also the cycle starts with a pump spraying (recycled) water back into the basket so that all the clothes reach the same wetness therefore can have the same density and get impelled uniformly.

<comment><USER36> I always felt like vertical washers had to be harder on clothes. Horizontal washers are just flopping clothes around so the worst wear is probably on buttons. Vertical washers are scraping and stretching the fabric itself when they agitate. Especially if there's not much water to lubricate, seems like it would be tough on the fabric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Concrete is bad for the environment due to the amount of CO2 released in its production"

While this might be true for very large scale pours, is it really true of washing machines? burning 1 kg of gasoline produces about 3 kg CO2. Producing 1 kg of cement produces < 1kg of CO2.

<comment><USER38> Only slightly related- but is there research into genetic modified wood growth? As in - directly from a cell culture in a tank?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm going to guess this will go nowhere.

There is the human time to take the cover off and fill two massive water tanks, the cost of having plugs and caps for said tanks, the risk that they leak, the risk that they don't get filled and the machine vibrates to pieces, the fatigue risk (try designing a thin plastic tank to take >200 lbs of vibrational force), the risk of a new and unproven design, etc.

All of that only saves a few cents of extra gas for shipping the machines. Probably not worth it.

Probably the plastic tank cost is more expensive to manufacture than blocks of concrete anyway. Concrete is damn cheap.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why not force companies to standardize the size and shape of the concrete counterweight, and mandate that it must be easily removable and you can't sell them bundled with the machines themselves?

Then you could simply remove it for transport, and it many cases reuse the one from your old machine, or buy a really cheap second-hand counterweight from your local hardware store.

</comment><comment><USER41> So it is an old idea in a new usage.Water filled road barriers have been there for ages."The Jersey barrier, also called New Jersey wall, was developed in the 1950s (introduced in current form in 1959), at the Stevens Institute of Technology,[1] New Jersey, United States, under the direction of the New Jersey State Highway Department to divide multiple lanes on a highway". Wikifelia.

<comment><USER9> Interestingly, they first used movable concrete barriers in the late 1940s, in California. The plastic ones came out in the late 60s. Some of them contain sand or concrete.

Err...

I modeled traffic. I spent as much time as I could being on-site for data collection. I've also spent way too much mental energy on learning about roads. This is because I am still largely a child, even though I'm old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> >"We found it worked as good as a concrete counterweight, stopping the spinning drum from heavily vibrating the machine,"

Sorry to be off topic, but shouldn't it be "worked as _well_ "? Not a native speaker, but it sounds strange.

Very interesting idea, though as many have pointed out, I'd be worried of leakage in the long run. A plastic container should be cheap to replace, however.

<comment><USER43> I think this is a UK article, but I think people in the USA often say 'good' when they mean 'well'. Maybe that's crossing the Atlantic now.

<comment><USER44> This is likely correct - it's a common mistake in English on both sides of the Atlantic, and you are right that it should be "well". My clients from the UK use it about as frequently as my US clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I thought you were always supposed to take out the concrete block before moving the thing. It's usually very easy to do.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can't we just fix the damn things to the walls or floor? Maybe sell a separate, universal "base"?

<comment><USER47> I'd rather my _entire_ house not rumble when my washing machine has a heavy load :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I find innovations like this wonderfully elegant when they're so obvious in hindsight. It boggles the mind nobody thought of this before. There must be other problems with radically better obvious-in-hindsight solutions out there too.

<comment><USER49> What makes you think nobody thought of this before?

<comment><USER48> To my knowledge nobody did it, and I can't see a reason why having had the idea it wouldn't be used.

<comment><USER50> There are patents for this from 1989.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Bad idea, you are shifting a problem at the transportation side to a repair nightmare.

How is having a bucket of water on top of electronics being violently shaken on a daily basis a good design?

</comment><comment><USER52> How about we just reuse the concrete blocks? They don't wear out do they?

<comment><USER9> That seems rather inefficient and as though you'd want a standard across many models. I suspect it's worse than just crushing it up for reuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> For those on the lazy web like me; the answer is fill a hollow plastic counter weight with water when the machine is installed rather than lug great slabs of concrete round the world.

<comment><USER54> Concrete weighs 2.5 as much per given volume 150 vs 62 pounds per cubic foot. So, there are significant trade offs involved.

Also, adding a sealed water container creates a few more ways for these things to break down which was a larger concern when washing machines lasted ~5x as long.

<comment><USER55> What if they used sand instead of water?

<comment><USER56> Well, I don't know about your house, but in my house I don't have hoses with free-flowing sand guaranteed to be right next to my washing machine when I install it. A washing machine that required you to buy sand too would have a hard time in the market; it may be irrational in some sense, but that would be perceived as a huge installation burden by the market and it would not do well.

<comment><USER55> Excellent points.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn the first 100 digits of Pi - <AUTHOR> http://pitoletters.awardspace.com/

<comment><USER2> In a society with nearly ubiquitous access to the internet how valuable is it to memorize raw facts? There are a few anecdotes about Einstein not knowing his phone number and not knowing the number of feet in a mile. His answer was along the lines of questioning why one should memorize something that can easily be looked up.

Personally, I find understanding concepts and composing ideas to be far more valuable. However, I'd be interested in finding out if the memorization of facts somehow exercised/increased the brain's ability to perform more (arguably) meaningful tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Its a cool party trick - if you can give someone the 82nd digit of Pi in 8 seconds, they'll probably be impressed because you can't really do that using a conventional method of counting in your head through to that digit of Pi in such a short time.

2) Brain excercise - things like this will probably help keep your brain healthy.

> Personally, I find understanding concepts and composing ideas to be far more > valuable.

Me too, they're not mutually exclusive! I very much take the same view about memorizing facts and have a generally poor memory. That's partly why this is cool, I still knew the first 25 digits of Pi effortlessly 2 years after doing this.

<comment><USER3> You and I go to vastly different parties if that's a cool trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Use this to impress your friends by recalling the nth digit of Pi where n < 100

It took me four days I think, 5 words a day, and got me some beer money from my maths teacher.

Only slight relevance to HN because I'd like to think that its a cool way to hack number memory.

It works by sorting the 10 digits 0-9 by number of occurrences in the first 100 digits of Pi, and then associating each digit with the corresponding top n most commonly used letter of the English language (eg. the letter "E" is the most common English letter).

<comment><USER4> I don't know about English, but in Japanese digits can be pronounced in several ways and many of them are short (e.g. 1 = "hi", "i", "in" or "hito", 2 = "ni", "nin", "fu", "bu", "pu" or "futa", etc), so it's typical to compose a meaningful phrase or sentence to memorize various numbers (e.g. phone numbers).

Remembering pi is a popular game among nerdy kids; I can still recite 200 digits I remembered back in elementary school. Several friends of mime can do 100-800 digits.

For those who can read Japanese, this is one of old ways to remember first 40 digits or so. For 100 digits or more you usually need to come up your own mnemonics:

産医師異国に向こう/産後厄無く/産婦御社に/虫さんざん闇になく/ご礼には早ういくな

Pronounces: さんいしいこくにむこう/さんごやくなく/さんぷみやしろに/むしさんざんやみになく/ごれいにははよういくな

Corresponds to: 3.14159265 / 358979 / 3238462 / 643383279 / 502884197

Roughly translates to: An obstetrician goes abroad. Postpartum is without problem. The new mother is to visit a shrine. Crickets are chirping in darkness. Do not hurry to visit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> reminds me of an old rule of thumb:

[http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/031208/how-many-digits- of...](http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/031208/how-many-digits-of-pi-do-you- know.gif)

</comment><comment><USER6> An easier but shorter way:

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 chapters involving quantum mechanics. 8 9 7 9

Not as much as 100, but easier to remember.

</comment><comment><USER7> My math teacher in 8th grade used to have PI in one long print-out across the upper edge of the wall, and I'd usually space out and end up staring at the wall rather than pay attention. 10 years later I know that Algebra was at least 18 digits boring.

<comment><USER8> I had it memorized to 20 digits after buying a book about Pi. After that, I think I got bored with the topic, but I still remember about that many.

Lemme tell you how many girls this gets me at parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How(3) I(1) need(4) a(1) drink(5), alcoholic(9) of(2) course(6), after(5) the(3) heavy(5) lectures(8) involving(9) quantum(7) mechanics(9).

</comment><comment><USER10> I rather prefer the Cadaeic Cadenza <http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm>

</comment><comment><USER11> I'll try to spend my time on other things.

</comment><comment><USER12> So, I suppose the method is to learn the 20 5-letter words and the key that goes with it?

The thing is the words don't mean a thing and are not necessarily easy to pronounce. It doesn't really feel like less work than learning the digits straight.

<comment><USER13> Remembering words is different than remembering digits; mainly because remembering digits is actually remembering words that represent them ("five", for example). Therefore remembering digits would actually require you to remember 100 words instead of the current 20 which you then "decompress" into digits in your head using the simple decoding key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did this a while ago, and better, and posted the code:

[http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/03/14/learn-100-digits-of- pi...](http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/03/14/learn-100-digits-of-pi-at- lightning-speed/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Firstly, mapping consonants to digits is hardly original, Derren Brown teaches the method in one of his books, and its one of the techniques used by people who do this seriously. Its also not very space efficient because all of your vowels are counted as whitespace.

Secondly, it would be a lot harder to randomly access the nth digit using your conventional method because you would also need to be counting the consonants as you go along through the sequence, rather than just +5 for every word.</comment></comment>


Tensorflow Ruby API - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Arafat./introducing-tensorflow-ruby-api-e77a477ff16e#.9b170cfil <comment><USER2> This is wonderful... I really don't feel the need to invest into learning Python until I'm fish-in-water-proficient as I am with ruby, considering they largely overlap in their strength and weaknesses. It'd be great if it works with just a small adapter layer to include the python C library – otherwise I'd be skeptical if an independent project can keep up with Facebook's pace on Tensorflow.

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same situation than you (used to ruby, never used python).

Using tensorflow through its high level API, tf.contrib.learn [1] has been easy enough. Most of the actual work is about shaping data and tweaking hyper parameters (how many layers, how many neurons per layer, how many iterations, etc) which is just changing the value of variables, really.

In order to build my dataset, I use ruby or golang and dump csv files. Tutorial code already shows how to load them in python. The most python I wrote was to figure out how to take a json string from command line argument and decode it, in order to make prediction after the training. This took me like fifteen minutes googling and trying, python is really accessible, especially if you're already used to ruby.

Clearly, I do not recommend to do that for production code, but if you want to play with tensorflow and try to get skilled at vectorizing data and curating dataset (the most important tasks in all of this), you don't need to learn much about python.

I do recommend though to take time and read lessons about neural networks, because you'll need proper knowledge about it to use tensorflow.

[1] [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.9/tutorials/tflearn/i...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.9/tutorials/tflearn/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ruby definitely needs more love from the AI community! Especially with projects like JRuby really improving the performance of the language. I just can't seem to make myself like python, ruby is just too easy to think/dream in. I have hope we'll see some awesome scientific libraries in the future for ruby.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a ruby developer who had to move to python for its data science support, it's very nice to see that people help Ruby to evolve into this direction. Ruby is a beautiful language that should be expanded beyond web development and these kind of libraries will make it happen.

But, as encouraging as it is, if your'e thinking about developing a real, production-ready, data science project in ruby - don't. At least not yet. The libraries around machine learning, neural networks etc are old, unmaintained and usually don't even work.

<comment><USER6> > if your'e thinking about developing a real, production-ready, data science > project in ruby - don't.

Why is this? Are there inherent limitations in the language that has Ruby taking a backseat to Python in ML and maths/statistical applications? Or is it just due to neglect by the community?

(I started leaning ruby about ten months ago and have only just started to gain some proficiency, so I do not know much about the workings of the ecosystem - or the innards of ruby for that matter)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if there are inherent language limitations (not that much of an expert), but know there's more momentum around Python for ML/data science work, mainly as a result of a few good resources specifically for it, which has encouraged more libraries and developer support to focus on it.

So perhaps less about neglect from the Ruby community, and more proactive-ness from the Python one.

<comment><USER3> I think the key factor here has been numpy, the scientific library for python. Academics used python because of it, and they are the ones who wrote the neural networks tooling.

We probably can expect to see implementations in all languages at some point. Floating point errors are not even that a big deal since we're dealing with statistics anyway.

That being said, neural networks are very resource/computation heavy. I wrote one in golang and cut my execution time in half just by encoding my matrices as flat arrays instead of two dimensional arrays. If ruby is to be used to build neural networks, it will need to perform the big work in a binary binding, like tensorflow does with its C++ layer.

<comment><USER2> I doubt that anybody is thinking of actually running the networks in ruby, or python, or even C on the GPU. They're all run on the GPU anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's available at: [https://github.com/somaticio/tensorflow.rb](https://github.com/somaticio/tensorflow.rb)

</comment><comment><USER9> hi all, we need more help on this. If you are interested in getting tensorflow to other places besides python, this could help immensely. Especially if you are a ruby developer. Our goal is to get tensorflow.rb to get feature parity with tensorflow, but there is still a lot of work to do.

<comment><USER10> I would love to help. What is the roadmap and what do you all need help on? I might need a little help understanding tensorflow because I have never really used it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks very interesting. Great work porting it over. I haven't downloaded the image recognition code, but where is it getting the list of potential category names from? And where's the related training set for the puppy for example.</comment>


Joe Nocera on Hurd & HP - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/business/14nocera.html?_r=1&ref=business

<comment><USER2> I used to work at HP -- it was a very depressing work environment. As the article mentions, Hurd was absolutely despised and his "cost cutting" was very much ridiculous. The employees were left with nothing, salaries/jobs were cut, even seemingly cheap luxuries like tea and water. We moved buildings twice during my tenure there, each time to a smaller workspace.

As an outsider before I joined, I can say its reputation far exceeds reality. Leaving for YC was a no-brainer. On a sidenote it seems the only ones left are the "lifers," all of the younger engineers have moved on. Short the stock.

<comment><USER3> "In his five years at H.P., every metric Wall Street uses to judge companies had gone in only one direction: up."

And this is the problem. Cutting jobs/salaries/benefits/projects leads to the type of share-bumping profit and cost-cutting figures that Wall Street types love, all while destroying the culture of a company and its chance of long term success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Key graf:

       One thing I found surprising this week was learning that to many H.P.
       observers Ms. Fiorina no longer seemed quite so bad. It was actually
       her strategic vision that Mr. Hurd had executed, I heard again and again.
       Her problem was that while she talked a good game, she lacked the skill
       to get that big, hulking, aircraft carrier of a company moving in the
       direction she pointed. Mr. Hurd was a brilliant operational executive,
       but had the strategic sense of a gnat, and knew only how to cut costs.</comment>


The US Government Pressured a Small Local Library to Turn Off Its Tor Server - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-us-government-pressured-a-small-local-library-to-turn-off-its-tor-server <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200249)</comment>


3 Days, $100k and Why We Gave it Away - <AUTHOR> https://www.helpscout.net/blog/3-days-100k-and-why-we-gave-it-away/ <comment><USER2> I want one though...</comment>


Ask HN: Comfortable chair for small space - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to set up my home working environment to be a bit more ergonomic. I have about 2.5 feet of space between my bed and my desk, I myself am 6'4" and the desk has about 2 feet of clearance under it. Given these space considerations, does anyone have some recommended chairs? <comment><USER2> For my home desk I've been very happy with the herman miller setu: [http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/multi-use- guest...](http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/multi-use-guest- chairs/setu-chair.html)

If you get it without the arm rests, it just tucks away, and its very comfortable.

<comment><USER3> +1 for the Setu. Have 4 of them in my office and everyone loves the chair. Design is great and very comfortable. Also a great price for what you get. You can find them for $500 - $550 with some negotiating (all dealers will discount the product for you with enough persistence or if you just ask). A+ chair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Search on "low cost kneeling office chair". Just look at the small /simple ones. I swapped out my $1000 chair for one that I found at Staples for $100.

This chair also helped to eliminate my back pains while keeping my posture in good standing (by putting the weight on your knees you're taking it off your spine).

It's also very comfortable for longer sittings.

<comment><USER5> I used to love my kneeling chair. Then I gained about 20 pounds. After that my knees couldn't take the weight anymore.

<comment><USER4> That's odd. I would think your back would be more of a problem; after-all with the kneeling chair you move half the load off your spine (since you still sit) with the remainder weight being split across two knees... with a traditional chair you have 100 percent on your spine.) You must have weak knees and a strong back! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lorell Executive High-Back Chair, Mesh Fabric, 28-1/2"x28-1/2"x45, BK Price: $151.29 & FREE Shipping</comment>


New NYPD press officer co-wrote The Intercept Reality Winner story - <AUTHOR> https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/ <comment><USER2> Not the first sketchy thing spotted at The Intercept. Read also this excerpt on Glenn Greenwald's spurious reporting of Michael Flynn's prosecution: [https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/19/glenn-greenwalds- inven...](https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/19/glenn-greenwalds-invented- claims-in-defense-of-bill-barr-and-mike-flynn)

Old adage about incompetence and maliciousness being indistinguishable applies, but having whistleblowers land in jail MULTIPLE times should raise eyebrows for such a young news organization.

Wondering if The Intercept belongs in the nether world of "news" organizations (read: thinly veiled propaganda outlets) along with InfoWars, RT, etc.

<comment><USER3> >Wondering if The Intercept belongs in the nether world of "news" organizations (read: thinly veiled propaganda outlets) along with InfoWars, RT, etc.

It's worth noting that the submission is a link to The Gray Zone, which in my view falls squarely into that category. Their founder Max Blumenthal is a frequent contributor to Sputnik and RT. He also attended the same expenses- paid 2015 gala in Russia, celebrating RT's 10-year anniversary, at which Jill Stein and Mike Flynn were photographed sitting with Vladimir Putin. Flynn was later caught lying about taking payments from the Russian government in connection to the event:

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/flynn-putin- din...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/flynn-putin-dinner- payment-security-clearance-photo/)

One month after attending this gala, Blumenthal founded The Gray Zone. Its funding sources remain opaque. He also did a 180 from his earlier anti-Assad reporting to become one of the dictator's biggest supporters:

[https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bruce- bawer/usef...](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bruce-bawer/useful- idiot19/)

He's also published pro-state narratives for other dictators. Here's a 2019 video of Max cheerfully receiving honors from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled that country by violence and decree since 2015:

[https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970](https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970)

And here's a piece that goes into detail on errors in The Gray Zone's reporting from Latin America:

[https://medium.com/muros-invisibles/grayzone-grifters-and- th...](https://medium.com/muros-invisibles/grayzone-grifters-and-the-cult-of- tank-fbd9b8e0dbe2)

<comment><USER2> Interesting - thanks for the info! It's a good personal reminder to always vet my sources and keep reporting outlets accountable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It does make you wonder if this whole time the Intercept has just been a spook front to manage the revelations known to be coming from 'unfriendly' media. This is all confusing and none of it any good.

<comment><USER5> Even if that isn't the case, the integrity of the Intercept has been called into question and all would-be whistleblowers would be wise to prefer institutions that have a better record of protecting anonymous sources.

Has Greenwald or the Intercept made an official comment on how they helped the federal government go after a whistleblower?

<comment><USER6> Do you think it's probable that they exposed Reality Winner intentionally?

<comment><USER7> She exposed herself with bad OPSEC. NSA was going to find her eventually without the tipoff from the Intercept once they published.

<comment><USER6> Yes I know that's the case in this instance. I was doing further reading and found a couple other informants/whistleblowers were also burned by the Intercept, and the person who owns and founded it (Pierre Omidyar) has said some very suspicious things about how whistleblowers ought to be treated by the press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like the sort of conspiratorially-minded, innuendo-laden thing that the same author has previously written for _The Intercept_. _The Gray Zone_ having some sort of spat with _The Intercept_ is maybe an interesting spectator sport for those who are into that sort of thing but I think it's a pretty lousy as an HN topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> "conspiratorially-minded" is not the same thing as "wrong." can't deny the guy's sketchy career trajectory

<comment><USER8> It's not but both of these outlets are known for their motivated, advocacy- oriented reporting. A conflict of theirs (presented by one side) is a poor starting point for any kind of interesting discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it really that weird for a PR department to hire a journalist whose former beat is relevant to the client?</comment>


Dijkstra's in Disguise - <AUTHOR> https://blog.evjang.com/2018/08/dijkstras.html <comment><AUTHOR> Covering:

      1 : Bellman-Ford
      2 : Currency Arbitrage
      3 : Directional Shortest-Path
      4 : Q-Learning
      5 : Handling Randomness in Shortest-Path Algorithms
      6 : Modern Q-Learning
      7 : Physically-Based Rendering
      8 : Summary and Questions
      9 : Acknowledgements

</comment><comment><USER2> on similar lines, we also have multiplicative-weight-update [[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arora/pubs/MWsurvey.pdf](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arora/pubs/MWsurvey.pdf)], which has been characterized as :

"a basic tool [that should be] taught to all algorithms students together with divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and random sampling." - sanjeev-arora

"so hard to believe that it has been discovered five times and forgotten." - christos-papadimitrou [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP0WFbdHhJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP0WFbdHhJM)]

it has formed basis of algorithms in fields as diverse as machine-learning, optimization from e.g. tcp ^^), game-theory, economics, biology etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the tightest, best things I've read on HN in a long time.

<comment><USER4> Glad you like it! Happy to answer any questions. I've been trying to make my writing accessible to both the HN and academic research community; let me know if you have feedback on how I can improve here

<comment><USER5> [https://i.imgur.com/mlpUy4g.png](https://i.imgur.com/mlpUy4g.png)

The usage of text color on this image caption is brilliant. It never occurred to me that you can do this technique to explain a diagram. Definitely love it. Will steal this technique for my own purpose.

<comment><USER6> You might enjoy articles from BetterExplained. For example: [https://betterexplained.com/articles/q-why-is-e- special-2-71...](https://betterexplained.com/articles/q-why-is-e- special-2-718-not-other-number/)

There might be an article about this specific technique.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the pointer -- I have an article here.

[https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math- equation...](https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math-equations/)

If you hover any diagram, there are options for a colorblind-friendly version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The information density in this post is insane! This is easily the best things I have read on hacker news this year.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't agree more, it had me going back to the Algorithms book to refresh on most of part VI (Graph Algorithms). For those interested, Bellman-Ford is 24.1, and Dijkstra's algo is 24.3 in CLRS. Reviewing those helped step through the VisuAlgo link in the article: [https://visualgo.net/en/sssp](https://visualgo.net/en/sssp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was such a pleasure to read, holy cow. I absolutely love the interconnection between different fields bound together by graph theory.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a fantastic post! Thank you so much for sharing it.

Perhaps another post (which maybe you should write! Or I may (though I'm certainly nowhere as good), or why not both!) might the unifying principle of finding solutions to fixed-point equations. In general, having a Bellman-style update equation, you can usually construct either (a) DP solutions to this problem or (b) contraction mappings whose fixed point solves this problem.

Perhaps the most general form I know of the above principles is the Hamilton- Jacobi-Bellman equation [0], which is used absolutely everywhere in control theory and has deep connections to several fields (including the theory of PDEs, such as heat equations on manifolds along with several other cases). Many, many problems (including all of the ones mentioned above) reduce immediately to an appropriate instance of the HJB equation (either in the finite or the infinite case), which admits a simple DP solution that can be very quickly computed.

Anyways, again, awesome post. I'll be following your blog quite closely :)

\---

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman_equati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman_equation)

<comment><USER4> Great suggestions, thanks! Indeed, that's a beautiful connection and many proofs of reinforcement learning algorithms with function approximators actually use contraction mappings.

Say hello to Kwabena for me if you get the chance ;)

<comment><USER11> Hehe, will do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Path tracing integrals are fairly expensive because states and actions are > continuous and each bounce requires ray-intersecting a geometric data > structure. What if we do light transport simulations on a point cloud with a > precomputed visibility matrix between all points, and use that as an > approximation for irradiance caching / final-gather?

A crude variation on this is often used in games, known as "light probes". You precompute the light transport simulation on a subset of points in the scene (manually placed by artists), and lighting for dynamic objects simply lerps between the nearest light probes.

</comment><comment><USER13> What a beautiful write-up. Some colleagues and I used to joke that everything was Dijkstra. It's pretty awesome to see that elucidated so well.

</comment><comment><USER14> There seems to be a mistake about whether the currency arbitrage cost is -log(B/A) or log(B/A)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! There was an error in the embedded graphic, which I've updated. Edge costs E(A,B) should be log (A/B)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading this spiked my interest in graphs especially considering I never learned anything more than the basics taught in algorithms and data structures courses in college.

Any resources (i.e. textbooks) recommended for learning more about graph theory as well as currency arbitrage?

</comment><comment><USER16> That's a really neat article!

</comment><comment><USER17> Wonderful article! I absolutely adore graphs just for this reason - you can solve a massive number of problems with a few tools.

And of-fucking-course OP is at Google Brain.

<comment><USER18> Graph theory and abstract algebra were the two elective math classes I took that almost tempted me to switch from physics to math. But then I took real analysis and was like "Yup, nope, this is not for me"</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's up with all the WeWork posts lately? - <AUTHOR> What is all the fuss about WeWork recently? A lot of seemingly unimportant points about WeWork, whether it's a tech company or not. All the fuss about their IPO, not giving equity to an early employee, and so forth.
Why everyone is so obsessed about this company all of a sudden?
Is this an American thing? <comment><USER2> I guess everyone is excited about shit hitting the fan when they go public</comment>


Ask HN: How to improve skills in a bad job situation? - <AUTHOR> I've been working my first job as a software engineer for a year and a half. We're a very small team serving a niche industry.
We're in the process of rewriting everything on AWS. The rewrite is led by some consultants who aren't very team-oriented. They don't care about the customers (us) and tend to give us some incomplete solutions. All of their design takes place in a vacuum.
They pass ownership to my team with hardly any documentation. They use us as guinea pigs for whatever new AWS product they want to try and it leads to a lot of problems. We fix all the bugs and deal with their design decisions. I'm inexperienced at software, but it seems their solutions are overly complicated and just bad. When we come to them with problems, they are dismissive and disrespectful and act like they have no time to help since they already delivered on their part.
They have created a lot of toxicity for our team. In my time here, we've lost talented engineers, project managers, designers, and DBAs.
Despite all of this, my fellow engineers have been incredibly helpful to me while I learn this new industry. I've been exposed to a ton and learned so much. I was hired to work on the frontend but I've spent much of my time working on the backend and sometimes doing DBA tasks.
I'm just afraid that I'm learning some bad habits. Our code reviews aren't actually code reviews. I've asked for feedback on my code before but everybody is either too busy or just doesn't care. We hardly do any testing, so I don't know how to test my code.
I don't want to take these bad habits to the next job. I spend my free time learning and answering some of my questions, but I feel as though I'm missing out on some good mentorship at a crucial point in my career.
I've been applying to new jobs but this year is especially hard for somebody with my experience level. Is there anyway to overcome these issues without leaving my job? <comment><USER2> Look on the bright side your getting exposed to all the latest AWS products.

Study up on youtube and internet tutorials on unit testing for your language platform. Then start adding some when you have free time.</comment>


Monolithic Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.richardrodger.com/monolithic-nodejs#.Uq70yXgazCS

<comment><USER2> this post rolls out every OOP canard there is. OOP implies monolithic design; OOP models the world in a naive and impractical way (but functions and callbacks are clearly just fine, obviously); OOP implies you'll have to "roll out" GOF (implying GOF is a "cookbook"; anyone who read it and understood it knows that this is absolutely not what was intended); "design patterns" are a code smell; only OOP has "design patterns" (in which case what exactly is a "promise"? look at this link, it even has "pattern" in the fricking name! [http://modernjavascript.blogspot.com/2013/09/promise- pattern...](http://modernjavascript.blogspot.com/2013/09/promise- patterns.html)).

Really, node.js is clearly a great product, but the node.js community is often emanating that "smell" I got from the NoSQL movement a couple of years back; "we didn't understand how to use X correctly, therefore X sucked and that's why we use Y!"

edit: oh: "Node.js does require you to learn some new patterns, but they are few in number, and have broad application. " I see, node.js has patterns, but unlike GOF patterns, they don't _suck_. Got it. GOF was written decades ago and is all about C++ patterns as applied to GUI design in the early 90's (pre- Java); a modern app written in Python or Ruby would hardly exhibit much similarity to all but a few of the actual patterns in GOF book.

<comment><USER3> Many people don't want to care about types and correctness, they just want to be able to hack quickly in dynamic/weak languages. Future maintenance is someone else's responsibility,

<comment><USER4> You can write shitty unmaintainable code in a statically typed language, and maintainable elegant code in a dynamically typed language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I need a refill of coffee, but I couldn't really grasp what the point of the article was. JavaScript is half-usable, object oriented programming is broken (he even goes into a bit about inheritance), Java and .Net are enterprise-ready languages...huh?

<comment><USER6> The point is that node.js is a classic case of "worse is better." That is, because of its lack of namespacing, NPM came up with a great module system that made modular programming the default, making code cleaner. Its limitations forced smart architecture.

I don't know that I agree, per se, but that piece of the argument is interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found this article interesting and enjoyable, but I had some questions about this:

 _Let's apply this to our software systems. Instead of building a monolithic 100 000 line codebase, build 100 small services, each 100 lines long. Fred George, (the inventor of programmer anarchy) one of the biggest proponents of this approach, calls these small programs micro-services._

a.) With this sort of system, how do you avoid a sort of high level version of spaghetti code (spaghetti services), where services depend on each other willy nilly, and

b.) where if one service goes down, it brings other large chunks of the system down.

c.) Finally, any concern that a bunch of services communicating with each other over http might be substantially slower than a monolithic system largely communicating with itself in memory?

<comment><USER8> I like how you are basically drawing this to the microkernel debate. I've tried to make that comparison plenty of times at work, and I've yet to really hear why it doesn't apply here. I can think of a few reasons, but none that are satisfying to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "As a result, Node.js projects suffer very little dependency hell."

LOL: [https://github.com/bevry/watchr/issues/51](https://github.com/bevry/watchr/issues/51)

The article above will be especially funny in 5 or 6 years when everybody's cussing about how crappy Node is and how FooBarLanguageThingy will suddenly make all the complexity disappear.

<comment><USER10> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6896205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6896205)

> _They are constantly breaking backwards compatibility and committing to > "stable" at this point seems unrealistic_

>> _the various node.js libraries that so many people depend upon are either weekend fads that get abandoned, or moving at the same speeds and likewise breaking compatibility_

>>> _The team claims to have turned the corner. relevant comment from @isaacs:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82hJbjqbIt4#t=120](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82hJbjqbIt4#t=120) _

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The section on why objects are bad is awful. It appears the author is describing C++/Java/C#'s _class_ based object orientation, which is definitely open to critique, but it's so poorly worded and vague I end up feeling the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think there's a lot of good thoughts here, but also a bit of re-inventing the wheel. This is NOT a new, innovative way of developing large systems - it's called a Service Oriented Architecture ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service- oriented_architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service- oriented_architecture)). It's actually pretty common in enterprise apps (from hearsay alone).

I think this kind of thinking is great, but there does need to be some referencing of past work and existing techniques for solving these problems. Otherwise we'll be stuck in an endless cycle of discarding "old, stupid ideas thought up by enterprisey developers" in favor of "new, shiny ideas by intelligent hackers" without realizing the substantial overlap.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the author's discussion of Node's "enterprise" popularity:

      > The visceral rejection of Node.js that you see from some quarters is often
      > the spidey-sense of an experienced enterprise developer zapping them between
      > the eyes. JavaScript? No!

The author shouldn't be so quick to chalk this uneasiness up to discomfort with JavaScript itself but rather with the perceived instability of the NPM ecosystem. While NPM is filled with high-quality libraries, each has a bird's nest of dependencies like what you see with CPAN packages. To use Node, you need to use NPM. To trust NPM, you need to trust Open Source. Until the enterprise really trusts open source, Node will never be very popular there, regardless of how heavily it is used elsewhere. PHP overcame this hurdle because you can use PHP productively with no third-party packages.

The second problem for Node to overcome is that its design requires asynchronous I/O for good performance, and you need decent developers to write good asynchronous code. While this is a real problem, I'm not sure that many decision-makers are aware of this (or would care about it) because so much "enterprise" software is dog slow and resource hungry.

<comment><USER14> You don't have to trust anything. If you want to NIH everything yourself, nothing is stopping you. It is however more likely that many packages on NPM are better than the ones you or your team can create if simply for the fact that they may have been created by a person very versed in the particular domain the package is for. Or maybe it will be shit but whatever :)

<comment><USER13> I have no such reservations about the NPM/CPAN style, but your assertion that the only other choice is "NIH" isn't quite true. With Python for instance, you can choose SQLAlchemy for your ORM. It has no depencencies. In JavaScript, Mongoose (a good comparison) depends on "hooks, mongodb, ms, sliced, muri, mpromise, mpath, regexp-clone, mquery". Who knows what those in turn depend on. In a strict place, you need to get every one of those things approved, and each represents a moving target if you want to upgrade Mongoose later. Those shops begrudgingly let open source in as it is, so it's a tough sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The seneca toolkit that the post leads into and links to is super interesting. It seems like a pretty straightforward way to build with an SOA from the beginning. Does anyone have any experience using this for a sizable project that can comment on it?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the longest blog post I've ever read.

<comment><USER17> Which tells us more about you than about the post.

<comment><USER16> huh?</comment></comment></comment>


Who's Buying Property in San Francisco? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/san-francisco-city-apps-built-or-destroyed/587389/ <comment><USER2> Interesting analysis. One of the better data sets I've seen. Most real estate analyses stop at "median price" and attempt to draw a ton of conclusions from it.

Also interesting that the vast majority of the tech buyers are from the older companies - Google, Apple, Salesforce. Not that surprising.

The flashy start-ups do make people rich, but it's usually a handful of people. I'll bet the majority of those tech buyers have worked at FAANG for 5-10 years. Got lucky that their equity increased a decent amount, but still took a number of years to save for a down payment.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact there's only 6k sales a year is pretty telling.</comment>


Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and why he still has his job at Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-is-steve-ballmer-2016-10 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778470)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Despite Microsoft's remarkable financial performance, as Microsoft CEO > Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important > technology trends of the 21stcentury: in search – losing to Google; in > smartphones – losing to Apple; in mobile operating systems – losing to > Google /Apple; in media – losing to Apple/Netflix; and in the cloud – losing > to Amazon._

So what new markets exactly does Apple miss now that competitors have?</comment>


Elasticsearch for Beginners: Indexing Your GMail Inbox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oliver006/elasticsearch-gmail <comment><USER2> I've been doing a whole blog series on doing this also: [http://bitquabit.com/post/having-fun-python-and- elasticsearc...](http://bitquabit.com/post/having-fun-python-and- elasticsearch-part-1/) . It's intereting to see a different take on it.

<comment><USER3> I recently posted something similar focused on NLP analysis of Gmail messages in Python/pandas, with some notes on storing in Elasticsearch as well; glad to see others are covering that side of it, as I'd love to come back to this project and take it a bit further! [http://engineroom.trackmaven.com/blog/monthly-challenge- natu...](http://engineroom.trackmaven.com/blog/monthly-challenge-natural- language-processing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a totally shameless plug but if you'd like to learn Elasticsearch from scratch, I've got an introductory course up on Pluralsight. [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/elasticsearch-for- dotnet-...](http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/elasticsearch-for-dotnet- developers)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the first time I see github's Readme's being used as a blogging tool. Is this common? I've started to link to a Vagrant/Ansible repo for my setup / code intensive posts, but having the code and the text encapsulated as a repo is quite novel.

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/raganwald- deprecated/homoiconic/blob/mast...](https://github.com/raganwald- deprecated/homoiconic/blob/master/README.markdown)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a couple of libraries listed below. Would using any of them make life easier with ElasticSearch + Python?

\- [https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch- py](https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-py) (low level lib, from ES)

\- [https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-dsl- py](https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-dsl-py) (high level lib, from ES)

\- [https://github.com/mozilla/elasticutils](https://github.com/mozilla/elasticutils) (high level lib from Mozilla)

There are a few more, but they are either obsolete or don't have much traction. There's also django-haystack, but that's specific to django.

<comment><USER8> We (Infoxchange) use the official elasticsearch-py, I believe it's not without it's frustrations but we've integrated Elasticsearch with part of our large database of health services in Australia as part of a complete re-write (Django) of a very old application (Perl).

You can try it out here: [https://www2.hsnet.nsw.gov.au](https://www2.hsnet.nsw.gov.au)

Try searching for something like: psychiatrists near sydney cbd

The site is self is mostly just a front-end (as designed by / for a client) running across several Docker containers for the database (PostgreSQL) which is indexed into Elasticsearch and queried via the Elasticsearch API / Python ES Libraries.

If you're interested in Elasticsearch with Python / Django check out our (pretty crappy at the moment) tech blog: [https://ixa.io](https://ixa.io) or our github: [https://github.com/infoxchange](https://github.com/infoxchange)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking about making my own email searchable with elasticsearch. The main thing holding me back is security. With elasticsearch listening on localhost:9200, anyone with local access can read all your mail. Even if you would do this on a computer over which you have full control, even a tiny breach would leak all your mails.

I realize this tutorial is just meant to get started with elasticsearch and not meant as a tool to make your email searchable. Still would be interesting to take this to the next level.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not sure if people are still here. I tried moving through this and it appears to be failing on the import... I am running a vagrant and get everything installed just fine.

I don't know how to invoke the script properly...

I've tried so many ways. This seems like it would give results... though it does nothing much.

python index_emails.py test.mbox

Any help or tips are appreciated! This has been a fun project so far. Stumbling at the end. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> error and check and throwing mad -vv after python2.7 resulted in some sort of standard out directions.

python2.7 index_emails.py --infile=test.mbox

above is working

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just a word of caution: elasticsearch allows everyone access to the indexed data, by default. If you're doing this on a world-reachable machine with sensitive data, you should probably lock it down or make sure it's locked down.

There are a number of authentication solutions, and they will require additional configuration -plugins like jetty and elasticsearch-http-basic.

</comment><comment><USER12> The whole point of GMail was supposed to be that it was searchable. Did Google break that, or what?

If there's a demand for this, it might be worthwhile to build IMAP servers with more indexing. It's easy to request searches with IMAP, but the performance can be a problem for IMAP servers that aren't real databases.

<comment><USER13> If you want to get started with something like ElasticSearch it helps having large dataset to play with. Using your gmail/mail archive gives you plenty of weirdly shaped data to have fun with.

I don't think this has much to do with the search in gmail not being sufficient or broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting. This is a very useful and practical way of learning new things instead of reading an article about it. I don't know python programming but I was able to understand each and every bit of it and I will be coming back to this if I ever need to incorporate Elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER15> The 'notmuch' mail indexing system uses Xapian. I can grep through my 200k messages in seconds.

[http://notmuchmail.org/](http://notmuchmail.org/)

Since it's implemented as a "library" of sorts, there are interfaces for emacs, command line, GTK, mutt, ...

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow little tutorials like this with easy attainable data are so helpful. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER17> Analysing the "Turn mbox into JSON" section

[http://paste.lisp.org/display/145050](http://paste.lisp.org/display/145050)

</comment><comment><USER18> What was the performance like for those queries?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have > 110k messages indexed and responses came back within ~300ms, less than 100ms with a warm cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't this be "Indexing your mbox files"? It seems applicable to any mailbox that is in or can be in that format. Except for the x-gmail-labels part, of course.

Anyway if you do feel like you want to accomplish the stated purpose of finding which emails are taking up space, you can search in gmail with the word "larger", as in "larger:20MB".

</comment><comment><USER20> so when should you use elasticsearch? can't you get away with doing

        SELECT id FROM pages WHERE title LIKE "%elastic"

<comment><USER21> Those sorts of SQL queries aren't very fast compared to a dedicated index/search system like ElasticSearch. Especially when millions of rows are concerned.

Think of search engines like ElasticSearch and Solr as being purpose built for "search" rather than ad hoc querying.

They offer more advanced searching features like faceting and synonyms, if your example had been "SELECT id FROM pages WHERE title LIKE '%dog'" you could set things up so that matches for 'dog', 'dogs', 'doggie', 'puppy', 'pup', 'canine', and 'mans best friend' all returned the same results.

<comment><USER22> While you are absolutely correct that this won't scale, and doesn't have a lot of advanced features like faceting and synonyms, it's still a useful technique. I use the SQL LIKE operator all the time, especially when I just need a simple way of searching my data.

If you under a million rows, LIKE is reasonably performant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would LOVE to see this in Ruby rather than Python. My boss wants me to learn ElasticSearch.

<comment><USER24> me too...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for small investment for a new coming soon HN Forum - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for partners for a new project I'm working on, it will be a forum community board where not only HN users can post threads, but also YCombinator alumni's, and future applicants.
I believe this is a great project, I'm looking for  a small investment (-$150).
Just to purchase a domain, hosting, and other plug-ins for the forum to get it started.
If you are interested, please post below. This thread is for serious inquiries only! <comment><USER2> Previous discussion (on the initial proposal by shahedkhan30) at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2606311>

There didn't seem to be much enthusiasm about the idea there - a mixture of discussion about the "build it first, then see if anyone is interested" mentality and people wondering what benefit it would provide. I'm sure it could work - a forum would make the "who is hiring" threads much, much easier, as they could be pinned so that they wouldn't vanish - I'm just not sure how easy it would be to get enough users to migrate, or use it in parallel to HN (which seems more likely). Sorry if I'm being too pessimistic.

EDIT: It is definitely worth noting that the discussions was very low profile. It didn't hit the front page, and it fell off the front page of /ask really quickly. We haven't actually seen the opinion of the community as a whole, just that of a few people who happened to be around when the discussion was happening. So it's totally possible that there are enough people who would be enthusiastic about the idea to build up enough of a community and make it work.

A side-note: the email field in your profile isn't public, and when you're soliciting inquiries it might be useful to have an email visible in the "about" area, which is publicly viewable.

</comment><comment><USER3> i think hn doesn't need a forum, people cand sicuss here and this is the best place for discussion. Also a domain+hosting can be bought at very good prices anywhere so why don't you do it yourself? if the people will like it you might ask for donations but asking for money to open a forum seems very funny to me.

HN is already a place to talk, why we need another?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well you guys have to realize, HN has a great Community, I was creating a community for YC rejects/fellows/and future applicants, along with an HN subgroup.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also looking for some domain suggestions for the new forum! Has to be related to Hacker News and/or Y Combinator!</comment>


2 days before SOPA vote I will shutdown my websites in protest. Will you? - <AUTHOR>

In the interest of preserving free speech,
1) I hereby pledge to disable access to all (or most) of the content featured on my websites 48 hours before the full house vote (date unknown ATM) on SOPA in the U.S. Congress.
2) I pledge to keep access disabled until the vote is finalized.
3) Because SOPA's effects will be felt globally, I pledge to disable access to all users, regardless of geographical location.
4) I pledge to display a maintenance page directing people to more information on SOPA and how they can contact their representatives in Congress.
Who's with me? <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be "that guy", but unless your sites have a lot of traffic from non-technical people, I frankly doubt anyone will care.

Most techies already know about SOPA, already dislike it and have probably already signed a petition/called/written. If they haven't by now, they aren't going to.

Putting a message on a tech blog/website is like preaching to the choir at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> My sites are relatively insignificant, I only reach an audience of 100k-200k users.

My post was intended as a message of encouragement for those with a significant non-techie userbase to bite the bullet and consider a protest shutdown.

It's my belief that non-techie users are far more likely to take an anti-SOPA shutdown maintenance page more seriously than a forum post or added element in the regular page layout of a site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I might do that 48 hours before. In the meantime, I've put a big fat message on my front page (<http://gamerhighway.com>). I think between now and whenever the vote is, others ought to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps you can help me here; how does SOPA infringe on Free Speech again? Please layout your argument in detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261>:

All actions in 102(c)(2) are extremely broad. An entire "foreign infringing site" can be knocked offline and blacklisted solely on the assertion (of self- interested corporate players and their AG cronies) that there is criminal copyright infringement occurring on the site. A public forum with 1 million non-infringing posts and 1 infringing post can theoretically be killed by the AG. In my opinion this will lead to an uptick in self-censorship by website owners desperate to avoid losing everything. And those that do get targeted get no chance to make their case in the court of law or even file a counter- notice like the DMCA so _graciously_ allows (and we all know how effective that system has turned out to be.) A public forum is blacklisted and all you get is a nice letter in the mail.

I also believe the danger of prior restraint comes into play in the immunity clauses of 102(c)(5). No claim or cause of action against service providers, domain registrars, search engines, payment networks, or ad services is allowed for "reasonable acts" designed to comply with SOPA court orders. The likely result of this is hair-trigger blocking of websites at the first sniff of a court order. Why not? They get immunity for that behavior.

The anti-circumvention penalties in 102(c)(4) are naked censorship provisions. In my opinion, code is a form of speech, potentially protected by the 1st amendment. The authors of SOPA obviously feel differently.

And finally, SOPA will mandate the build-out of a new infrastructure dedicated to censoring websites quickly, based on a "master list" stewarded by the AG and compiled by his corporate paymasters. Others have argued, and I tend to agree, that the mere existance of such an infrastructure makes it all the more likely that lawmakers will seek to expand it's purview to other areas (domestic sites, "terrorist sites", etc.) in the future.</comment></comment>


ASk HN: Where is OpenBSD being used? - <AUTHOR>

Recent event has gotten OpenBSD into spotlight. Wikipedia mention OpenBSD is being about 50% of FreeBSD usage. Which is no small feat since FreeBSD is being used by giant like Yahoo and Netflix.<p>So the question is are there any cooperation using OpenBSD at the moment? Where is it being used? <comment><USER2> Good question. I checked reddit's /r/openbsd, but there was not a lot there. But maybe you will find something by searching over there.</comment>