"We already store data.  In a database. It works well" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226868636020805632 <comment><USER3> What I find fascinating is that the person pushing Jimmy to use crypto for Wikipedia does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching.

1\. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast

2\. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchain

What a sales pitch.

<comment><USER4> What you have to know is that there are thousands of people out there who made windfall gains during the rise of bitcoin and the others. Say you bought or mined 100 bitcoins back when they were a dollar, and somehow didn't sell - they're worth a million today, on paper.

If you can talk up BTC/blockchain in some public place such that someone notable agrees it's useful - Wales qualifies - the crypto press would go nuts. "Wikipedia founder looking into blockchain!!" \- anything to get it back in the press/public consciousness. If you can get it up just 10%, that's on paper $100k.

For thousands of people, this is their motivation. Talking up bitcoin is literally their full time job.

<comment><USER5> I remember reading an article about Bitcoin where the author pointed out: when you buy some bitcoins, you're buying because you're hoping it will go up and you can sell and make profit in the future. So automatically, you're going to be cheerleading and promoting it, in hopes it rises in value...

<comment><USER6> Same with every asset, I would think.

<comment><USER7> Nope. Assets have a sale value and an ownership value.

Suppose a company makes $100,000 per year and this is expected to continue. How much would you pay for it?

Now, suppose it makes $100,000 per year, but for some reason once you have it, no one will buy it off you. How much would you pay for it?

You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less. The company has a value which it gives to you for having ownership of it.

Meanwhile, bitcoin produces....$0 per year for owning it. The _only_ value is in sale at a higher price. You have to bet on appreciation.

This is something fundamental people often misunderstand about, say, stocks. The _price_ is set by supply and demand for the stock, but the value is determined by the cashflows. Usually price and value move at least somewhat in sync. But if stock markets went insane and valued everything at $0 for some reason, you'd still want to own companies.

<comment><USER8> What about a company which grows every year but never pays dividends and can't be sold for more than $0? Would you want to buy it for $1? ( I prefer to use $1 because $0 has the problem of indifference )

Even if this company owns the whole world at the end, is it worth even $1?

<comment><USER9> Yes, because then I am entitled to voting rights so that I can force them to give me the money. Usually, voting rights are a tiny fraction of the stock value.

If I get non-voting shares that do not pay dividends, then these aren't shares, they're just useless scraps of paper. If the only utility I can get from them is being able to point out that I "technically" own the entire world, it is indeed useless.

Maybe I'm willing to pay a dollar for it but certainly not two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't help but think the next response is "Do you use MongoDB? MongoDB is webscale".

This is just trolling. No thought has gone into whether Wikipedia has a problem to solve, nor whether blockchain has the capabilities to solve any problem. It's just memes.

>Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant

<comment><USER11> There was a Reddit user u/passwordissame whose nodejs mongodb webscale copypasta was very funny to read. Is that you?

<comment><USER12> There is a famous youtube video the above poster is referencing. Search 'MongoDB is web scale' or something along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Welcome to the future, where a blue cartoon deer can attempt to convince a balding man who runs an encyclopedia that he should change his encyclopedia to run on top of a complicated substrate of unnecessary cryptography, so that the deer's stake in said unnecessary cryptography will become worth more.

<comment><USER14> I didn't really expect our cyberpunk future to look quite like this

<comment><USER13> seriously how do I get out of this parody of a Bruce Sterling novel

<comment><USER15> Feels more Strossian to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A stable battle tested database isn't cool anymore, this is 2020, Jim. /s

Jokes aside, I would rather see a working proof of concept 'Blockchain Wikipedia' being made from this crowd rather than have them shout suggestive buzzwords at Jimmy Wales.

That being said, I wonder if Linus is open to making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain, might have to ask him someday.

<comment><USER17> Actually, Git is technically a blockchain.

Commit hashes are a hash of the previous commit hash + new data. The structure (history) is replicated in a decentralized way on every user's node. The only missing thing is a proof-of-work, but that is optional in the definition of a blockchain.

<comment><USER18> > Actually, Git is technically a blockchain.

No.

You can say that git reduces to a Merkle tree. And blockchains use Merkle trees.

But you can't say that git is a blockchain.

[https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434f...](https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434fd029b)

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make- you-q...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question- need-for-blockchain-technology)

<comment><USER19> I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) is the most important quality of a blockchain. To say that git is technically a blockchain is not entirely inaccurate IMO.

I think you are looking for the other qualities that typically apply to a blockchain such as the implicit need to "mine" its resources. Git simply produces these resources incidentally. I think this is the only major difference.

<comment><USER20> It's still missing important pieces. They both fall under the superset of "hash chain" / Merkle tree, but cryptocurrency blockchains are designed to deal with the possibility of bad actors. Git can't ensure trust, unless you PGP sign commits.

Git + PGP + some computationally expensive mechanism to broadcast verified PGP key attributions + a consensus algorithm might be a little bit like a blockchain, but I can't think of a good use case for that. Git repos generally aren't intended to be pushed to by the whole world.

<comment><USER21> A blockchain doesn't ensure trust either. The blockchain "trusts" whoever has the most powerful hash cracking array.

<comment><USER20> I should've said "attempt to ensure trust".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its hard to tell if this user is a troll, or if they just don't get tech, but surely Jimmy would be better off not replying?

Surely he gets bombarded with rewrite suggestions and pointless distractions all the time, and he is pretty practiced at just ignoring them?

<comment><USER23> Wales was invited to speak at the Coingeek conference, an event funded by Calvin Ayres who is one of the main movers behind the Bitcoin SV ("Satoshi's Vision") fork.

After some dismay from people opposed to this (both people who are "anti- Bitcoin", and the Bitcoin proponents who are anti-SV), he stated that he intends to speak his mind and tell the conference that BSV won't help Wikipedia in any way.

Wales is no stranger to social media or publicity. The fact that this thread has been posted to HN shows that.

<comment><USER24> Something tells me that this twitter interaction will make it into his presentation.

<comment><USER23> I really hope it will be available online after the conference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This follow-up thread is hilarious: [https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480](https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480)

<comment><USER26> > He has all the world's knowledge in his system yet it doesn't tell him why > Bitcoin is useful.

That should perhaps be a sign.

</comment></comment><comment> m-i-l If you really need WORM, e.g. for compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4, it is sufficient to copy your data to non-eraseable media, not _master_ your data on non-eraseable media. And you don't need blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some people would take issue with the "It works well" part. [https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February/013793.html) Turns out that scaling up a general-purpose triple store beyond 10B triples is really, really hard, and that few or no people in the FLOSS community (important due to Wiki's reproducibility and freedom-to-fork requirements) are paying attention to the problem.

<comment><USER28> It does work well though. As a user, I can't remember significant Wikipedia or Wikidata outages.

And I'm really not sure if whatever blockchain solution that person on twitter wants Wikimedia to use is even able to get to that scale, yet alone perform better an it than what Wikimedia currently has.

<comment><USER29> Here in Turkey, we had Wikipedia banned for 4 years. Luckily, the ban has been lifted last month.

I'm not arguing blockchain would be a good mitigation for a future incident though.

<comment><USER30> Was that the fault of Wikipedia's database?

<comment><USER31> In a limited sense, yes, it was.

Because Wikipedia's database is centralized, and lives at a particular (range of) IP addresses, it's trivial for a state actor to censor it.

Does a sprinkling of magic blockchain solve this problem? Not really. But something more specific to the problem might; being able to torrent the full data dump is a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER32> You can torrent a full snapshot

[https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages](https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages)

And also download snapshots from IPFS

[https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable- wikipedia/](https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

I guess the issue with snapshots of large datasets is that they go out of date, and downloading the whole data set regularly is a bit painful

<comment><USER31> Well, yes, that's why I indicated that being able to torrent a fully snapshot is a step in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Another crypto post here:

Wikipedia has grown to the point where it's really so important that the database is going to need to be WORM compliant so records can't be changed and editors can be encouraged to be more responsible. This would make inserting false info more expensive & increase trust.

Jimmy replied:

It is really important that records can be changed. Removing that feature would be bad.

<comment><USER34> This is where I diverge from Jimmy, as he is misinterpreting what the commenter is saying. The commenter is talking about _audit logs_ of changes to Wikipedia being kept in WORM compliant record, which is a good idea - <USER2> logs should be immutable. Jimmy seems to be interpreting the comment as saying the pages of Wikipedia should be immutable, which obviously should not be the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Please use this technology I find interesting, because I want it to be useful"

<comment><USER36> Not cynical enough. Try:

"Please use this technology I'm financially invested in, because I want its value to rise."

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I can't help but feel the person pushing for the idea has something to gain personally from one of the most well-known website out there actually using blockchain for... "something", whatever that something is.

And that makes the whole exchange pretty surreal.

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel like, after a few years decline, there's been a _sharp_ rise in incidence of "have you heard the good news about our lord and savior magical internet money" lately. Not sure what's driving this.

<comment><USER38> I'd wager the start of a new multi year bullrun, fuelled by developments in different technologies.

<comment><USER39> I'd wager it's tether, and the market manipulation that comes with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Blockchain is overdone. It's good for crypto currency but really doesn't solve the myriad of things its being pushed on. There are a dozen consultants trying to sell corporations on what blockchain can do. While it's true that if you spend money modernizing some legacy way of doing things it'll probably be better but doing it on blockchain is not the secret sauce. It's buzzword market and a buzzword solution that isn't worth the complexity.

<comment><USER41> It's still unproven that it's good for a currency, too: a decade in, the only significant uses are speculation and money laundering. There are a few users trying to do normal daily life purchases but that volume is a tiny rounding error in the global financial system, which is why backers have lately been trying to retcon it into some sort of reserve currency store of value after having failed at the primary purpose.

<comment><USER42> Sovereign store of value is the primary use case.

<comment><USER41> No. Just because that's the community's preferred PR answer after failing to become a useful currency doesn't mean the rest of us forgot the previous decade of breathless claims that Bitcoin would replace the USD and Visa, PayPal, etc. in daily usage. People used to write these glowing stories about routinely buying coffee and paying for Ubers with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> As always the shitty communication medium that is twitter prevents one from discerning any context within which the post was made.

<comment><USER44> You scroll up for context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> People new to blockchain and tech in general seem to think that blockchain invented the database and public key cryptography. All the ideas they propose are solved by them.

<comment><USER41> It comes back to money: a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin is only worth what its users believe it to be worth — otherwise you've just paid a lot for some random bits. That means that everyone who has spent real money in that space has a vested interest in getting other people to buy in. They're not going to benefit from your use of a database or PKI and thus won't consider those as possible solutions.

This works as well as any other system designed by the sales team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> In finance, this is called "talking your book." The prevalence of this in the crypto space should be embarrassing.

</comment><comment><USER47> Are these crypto nuts or just kids who found a 'new thing'?

Either way it's a solution looking for a problem and the solution it's always these people being the ones in charge.

</comment><comment><USER48> I find it interesting that Jimmy is even engaging in the discussion, because the other party clearly does not understand Blockchain or Cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER49> Which colour do you want that blockchain?

<comment><USER50> I think mauve has the most RAM

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Better Tweet from Jimmy in that thread:

"That isn't how blockchain works. That suggestion - to force people to strongly identify and pay for the privilege of editing Wikipedia - is a bad idea independently. And [it] would be easy and cheap to implement without blockchain."

This is the key problem with most DLT applications. Any blockchain that's used for audit and verification needs some way to connect what happens in the real world (the person uploading content) to the digital one. Putting the digital side onto a blockchain doesn't help if you can fake the data you're putting in. Garbage in, garbage out.

</comment><comment><USER52> > But what specifically are you proposing?

> That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea.

This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain proponent.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all- projects](https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects) says there have been 44 million edits and 21 million user edits on Wikimedia sites, so 24 edits / second. That's about the fastest bitcoin could possibly go.

</comment><comment><USER54> Wikipedia is almost already a blockchain. All they need to do to become one is to add a cryptographic hash of the previous database backup to a page included in the backups. (This is what git does when it inserts the parent hash(es) into the commit metadata, and it is a generalization of block chains —it's "chain" is actually a set of directed acyclic graphs)

Anyway, wikimedia posts backup copies of the database at dumps.wikimedia.com, and those pages include sha and md5 hashes. I even found a page of magnet links for english wikipedia on the meta wikipedia.

Magnet links contain the hash of the target, but it's unclear if meta.m.wikipedia is included in the english language dump file, or if it includes magnet links pointing to itself.

I'd love to find the missing links. I'm sure Jimmy Wales would love credit for accidentally reinventing the blockchain before the term was coined.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is BSV supposedly the new cool altcoin?

Edit: Searching it seems to be a Bitcoin fork made by a fraud claiming to be Satoshi.

</comment><comment><USER56> Big fan of the follow up tweet:

>> Why are you anti-capitalist?

> I'm not anti-capitalist, are you on drugs?

[https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808)

Ahh, Twitter.

<comment><USER57> Seriously. I think this was my "peak twitter" moment for the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> HN is very anti-blockchain which is surprising. I'm not agreeing with the twitter user saying Wiki should be on a blockchain but projects like Visa B2B Connect, which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party supply chains are valid use cases. They're also technically interesting.

They have specific use cases sure, and some people who made a load of money in 2017 do chat a lot of rubbish, but it has become a bit of a meme topic around here which is a shame.

I don't feel I could post a genuinely interesting paper on decentralised consensus without it being downvoted because blockchains won't work as the data store of some web app.

<comment><USER59> > which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party supply > chains are valid use cases.

I've been hearing about these use-cases for blockchain for years now ... and still waiting for actual production use.

I'm also skeptical that a regular server-based approach wouldn't be better to solve those issues. If banks and suppliers can get together and agree to use blockchain to track their transactions, they can get together and set up a centralized server to do the same.

Blockchain is a 'technically interesting' architecture in search of a problem to solve.

<comment><USER60> > _I 've been hearing about these use-cases for blockchain for years now ... > and still waiting for actual production use._

Preserving the integrity of log files and other records is a very obvious and huge use case. Enterprise products have been on the market for years and have been put into use by companies like Ericsson and Lockheed Martin.

[https://www.ericsson.com/en/press- releases/2014/9/ericsson-a...](https://www.ericsson.com/en/press- releases/2014/9/ericsson-and-guardtime-create-secure-cloud-and-big-data)

[https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed- Martin-C...](https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed-Martin- Contracts-Guardtime-Federal-for-Innovative-Cyber-Technology)

[https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/modules/...](https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/modules/sigprov_ksi12.html)

[https://github.com/GuardTime/ksi-tool](https://github.com/GuardTime/ksi-tool)

<comment><USER59> Did these projects actually go anywhere? Those press releases look very aspirational ... and are already a few years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I used to have a small black board in my table with the phrase "we don`t need blockchain!" Every time a boss would came and propose that we use blockchain tech, I would just wave it.

<comment><USER62> Where did you work? What was your job title? Who were all these bosses preaching blockchains to you? So many questions!

<comment><USER61> I used to work in a small startup. We buid .a system that collects sound of water passing in public water distribution network, to identify water leaks.

The company had a few owners, and most of them non computer science people (administration, markting, eletronic engineering backgrounds), and would always sugest the use of blockchains, to store the sound samples, and metadata, just because was the cool term at the time.

Since it would not add anything to our business model, and would come full of techical hurdles, I would always opose, wath lead to the creation of the sign.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I've been in businesses like this, too.

Though the keyword was AI or Machine Learning.

The mission was always "how can we implement a machine learning solution?" not "what are our needs and how can we most effectively meet them?"

Someone is looking to pad the resume.

"Oversaw implementation of $TRENDY_TECH solution that $MEANINGLESS_METRICS"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> > furry

> bitcoin

> blockchain

> proposing /g/ memetech without even understanding it

yeah the memes write themselves.

</comment><comment><USER64> Any time I come across these scene I am reminded of this story:

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi- ma...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-masters-down- the-rabbit-hole-i-go).

HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505)

</comment><comment><USER65> The other person in the debate is trolling, have a look at their youtube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg)

Hackernews fell for it hook, line and sinker. We've got to stop taking life so seriously!

</comment><comment><USER66> One Commenter put it best: _Bitcoins are to be owned for 35 min while you place the order for drugs and that is all._

</comment><comment><USER67> A solution looking for a problem is resorting to 'think of the children' marketing. Neeeext!

</comment><comment><USER68> I can't wait until there's a run on the exchanges and they all go insolvent/cease trading. This house of cards has created the most undeserving kings ever.

</comment><comment><USER69> " Blockbuster: "We already have a DVD rental service, and it has worked for many years. No issues. We do not need to move to online streaming services."

Netflix..."

I absolutely love this sentiment. I hope this user launches a blockchain based Wikipedia competitor, and announces it on Show HN, so I can have monthly updates on the technobabble fulled madness of a platform built by people who don't understand the technology or the space they are trying to solve, but think it will all be ok as long as they can issue an ICO of their wiki-coin before the feds shut them down.

I'm thinking it will pan out like a breaking bad/Silicon Valley cross over.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is the problem with the blockchain. Any non-currency use-case for blockchain can be done faster and more efficiently by a central server.

</comment><comment><USER70> Wales is a Hayek fan?

That is not something I would have guessed.

</comment><comment><USER71> TT;DR: a random nobody made a nonsense comment, and Jimmy Wales made a boring reply, and gawkers and gossips are wasting everyone's time.

</comment><comment><USER72> An incredibly sick burn

</comment><comment><USER73> Why did this drop completely from the front page?

</comment><comment><USER74> "If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail" \--Maslow

</comment><comment><USER74> BlockChain = AuditTrail + PKI

</comment><comment><USER75> This reminds me to take a Wikipedia snapshot. It seems like it has become more of an ideological battleground lately, and I'm not sure how long their editors will be able to hold the line against various manifestations of astroturfer.

Lots of libertarian/anarchist types putting all their bets on blockchain without really knowing much about it. Jimmy's response was gentle considering the circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER76> And needs thousands of donations to run...

<comment><USER77> Who's gonna run the frontends to make the contents of the wikipedia blockchain accessible to billions of people on commodity web browsers? Does a blockchain make that free somehow? The cost of the database servers is the only thing you're potentially optimizing out here, except unless every frontend stores the entire wikipedia blockchain locally you will need database servers still anyway, they'll just be blockchain "frontends" instead of database frontends.

</comment></comment><comment> M-R-X Why is that even a discussion?

Ain't it obvious that this is a good idea?

</comment><comment><USER78> One potential use for blockchain (or chain of hashes) might be for authorizing video by putting each of the frames in a blockchain. That way the raw video can be authorized to not have been tampered with.

<comment><USER79> You could just hash the video file.

<comment><USER80> Yes, and in the process 1) not spend CPU cycles extracting frames... 2) not have a permanent+widely distributed copy of `$illegal` thing someone tried to upload. 3) have a technology that works regardless of content type! amazing! It supports new video codecs right out of the box ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Guys you are all going down some block chain tangent. The point is that a relational database is designed for storing data, and that works well. The moral of Jimmy's response was _if you need to store and retrieve data a relational database is the tool to do that_.</comment>


The State of Kubernetes Configuration Management: An Unsolved Problem (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.argoproj.io/the-state-of-kubernetes-configuration-management-d8b06c1205 <comment><USER2> Re jsonnet not being yaml, arguably that's a pro and not a con.</comment>


Steve Ditko Dead: Spider-Man Co-Creator Was 90 - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/steve-ditko-dead-spider-man-creator-was-90-1125489 <comment><USER2> One of the marks of genius is when a creator's work becomes so influential, copied and expounded upon that to modern eyes it appears "normal".

Steve Ditko was such a person.

Here's a good article covering it:

[https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-steve-ditko-defined- generatio...](https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-steve-ditko-defined-generation/)

Here is Hugo nominated author Saladin Ahmed describing (far better than I can) just how stylistically ground breaking Ditko was:

[https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1015407245109137408](https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1015407245109137408)

Jim Lee describing how Ditko provided the foundational "visual vocabulary" to comics:

[https://twitter.com/JimLee/status/1015398670831898624](https://twitter.com/JimLee/status/1015398670831898624)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ditko was a really interesting person. Created such iconic characters. Rarely gave interviews. Super Objectivist.

The article says he had no children so I wonder what will become of his estate?</comment>


Sars-Cov-2 Is Mutating - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53325771 <comment><USER2> Misleading title. The virus has been mutating ever since March when it was discovered everywhere. The fact that it's mutation rate is much lower than other past viruses we have seen is the key.</comment>


Stop Talking about Inner Beauty - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vitchyr/stop-talking-about-inner-beauty-af6ae93326b7

<comment><USER2> >As people, we do great things. We make babies laugh. We conquer mountains. We volunteer at soup kitchens. We do things that entertain, inspire, and comfort one another. In return, these things make us happy, awestruck, and loved

As people, we don't do great things. Some of us do great things. Some don't. Some conquer mountains. Some can't even run up a hilly street.

In other words, stop being politically correct, just be politically correct in the ways the author approves?</comment>


If Satan was a web developer - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/qA4Bu?utm_content=buffer56d42&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> Not pictured but also terrible:

Enter your phone number in these three separate fields. We may or may not automatically take you to the next field when you've entered enough digits in this one.

Enter your phone number in this specific format (which may be: with dashes, with dashes/parentheses, without any punctuation, some other crazy thing). We can't simply extract the numbers on our end; that's unbelievably difficult.

Pick your area code from this dropdown.

<comment><USER3> It's surprising how many websites (mis)handle internationalized phone numbers, or insist on an area code when there is none.

<comment> norea-armozel Yeah I always wished for people to just give one text box for the number and a dropdown for the country of origin. I never understood the need to represent phone numbers as US only format(s) in the input.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The rotary dial one would pair well with Apple's "brushed metal" theme and other Skeuomorphic GUIs of old.

</comment><comment><USER5> what do you mean, "if"?

</comment><comment><USER6> I really want to use the last one in something.

<comment><USER7> Pitch it as an antikeylogger security measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw this on Reddit the other day, brilliant! The person who came up with these should apply for patents just in case!

</comment><comment><USER9> In fairness, number 5 is pretty great

<comment><USER10> oh how I hate this :)

Every second audio software has turn knobs you have to turn with your mouse. The "best" ones let you drag in a straight line (up or right = more), but even than it's a UI misery.

What you actually want: a slider where click holds the value and up and down than adds or subtracts. If the control is small, slow the movement while dragging (so you allways have to travel X pixels from min to max, no matter how small the control. beware of screen edges). Also please no jumping when hitting besides the handle.

<comment><USER9> These are all obviously terrible, but at least this one comes with a little bit of cute skeumorphic charm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could someone edit the URL to remove the referral parameters?

</comment><comment><USER12> Number 8 is amazing. I'd love to see it for real in a website.

</comment><comment><USER13> *were</comment>


Ask HN: How the hell is Whatsapp worth $18 billion? - <AUTHOR> $40 per user someone calculated to be.
My question is, how is it $40 when the app itself is free and doesn't get the $40 from the user?
How will Facebook monetize it?
The moment they track users or show ads won't people leave and a new Whatsapp emerges?
Please help me understand how MAU without pay from user's wallet works because porn sites have a lot of MAU and they are not getting bought out, and they are free and offer value to the users as well. <comment><USER2> Facebook mentioned the volume of messaging sent through the application is approaching that of the SMS volume of the entire world. So, it's like buying a huge (the largest by far) global telco which only allows texting. In some poor countries, that's all people really use a cell phone for anyways. Calls are too expensive, so you see far more people texting than talking.

As big as thing thing is, it's possibly headed to 1 billion users. I'm assuming that's about as massive as anything which exists right now. It's one big platform among very few that are operating at that level.

I just don't think there is any comparison. Money doesn't matter. You make big plays. If Zuckerberg were thinking small when he built Facebook, it would be a small e-commerce store selling T-shirts or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> You may want to read this blog post from Prof. Damodaran. I thought it was one of the best valuation/ pricing article I read on Whatsapp acquisition.

[http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/02/facebook-buys- wh...](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/02/facebook-buys-whatsapp- for-19-billion.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> WhatsApp is not really free but supposedly cost $1/year from the second year. Yes they are doing free renewals for now and i am guessing it will not be long they begin to charge again.

They have 400 million active users now and will be around billion users by next year. If they charge the usual $1/yr in the emerging markets and say $5/yr in the developed markets that will get them around $3 billion revenue. Also they have almost 90% gross margins as from what i read its a tight operation with just 50 people and 600 servers.

So with a $2.7 billion EBITDA by 2016 the $19 billion dollar valuation is just 7x multiple and very reasonable. This is not even considering the strategic value of WhatsApp to Facebook!.

<comment><USER5> WhatsApp will never be a paid app since Facebook acquisition. Otherwise users will go for the free alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is a couple of theories I have had about it:

Firstly, Facebook doesn't need to monetize it. WhatsApp seems to be generating enough cash to run on its own. Instead, WhatsApp is a data-cow (I, phantom_oracle, officially coin the term data-cow on 21/2/2014 :P, which is the 21st century equivalent of a cash-cow).

WhatsApps value proposition lies in the data it has access to. I've already read on pandodaily/wired/one of those tech blogs that explains that whatsapp can access your private data, as it is in their terms.

So now think about it.

WhatsApp is always on/connected, so user tracking and trend-creation becomes easier.

People discuss a lot of things on it too, thus a lot of personally identifiable info exists (think, planning meals with your loved one, chatting to your kids, etc.).

By combining these 2, FB can improve its targeted ads on the FB platform and Instagram. Link all three and they basically have the equivalent of a user- database that is the envy of the NSA (pictures, messaging, location, etc, etc.).

If FB can improve its ad-revenue by even US 1 billion each year through this purchase, then the real ROI will be over 19/16/14 years (whatever the true amount they paid is).

Chances are, it will increase by a lot more than 1 billion a year. There's just too much data they control.

If you want to spot how they might monetize on their data, look at FB for jobs about natural-language processing (now or in the past). Also look at their ad pages to see if they boast about targeted ads.

</comment><comment><USER7> The deal is only worth $18 billion if FaceBook can sell additional shares into the market worth $14 billion dollars without lowering current share price. Since the announcement of the deal itself influenced share price, such an opportunity seems unlikely. It's supply and demand. WhatsApp is in the same boat. They cannot dump $14 billion worth of Facebook shares into the market without likewise influencing share price.

Thus neither company values the deal at the headline grabbing number because the opportunity costs are low. Facebook doesn't have a lot of options to move that much equity and WhatsApp does not have a long list of potential buyers with $4 billion in cash plus the discounted value of Facebook equity.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read a comment that said people run their entire businesses on it, and that in many places there is a 90% chance that someone you're talking to has WhatsApp on their phone. Sounds pretty valuable to me. It's a communication platform, what's more valuable than communication.

You might say they don't have enough lock-in, that someone else could come along and take their business. True, but I don't think that changes the value of this space in general. People always say that startups focus too much on problems that young white males tend to have, well here's something that's as generally useful as you can get.

<comment><USER9> Imagine sending money via What's App.

<comment><USER10> Oh god, never saw this one coming. This would be huge.

<comment><USER11> Great idea. I wonder why Facebook isn't allowing sending money now...could be a great platform...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's how much it's worth to Facebook. Not to you and I but to Facebook.

<comment><USER13> I think that's understood

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most acquisitions should be compared from a lenses of a peer company acquisition (Peer multiples in financial-speak). If you compare the acquisition of Whatsapp with Viber a few days back, you would know why Whatsapp was such a steal.

Read more here: [http://appiterate.com/whatsapp-vs-viber-who-got-a-better- dea...](http://appiterate.com/whatsapp-vs-viber-who-got-a-better- deal/?utm_source=HN&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Dis)

</comment><comment> workhere-io We're in a tech bubble. I don't see any other explanation, because it's unlikely that WhatsApp itself will ever generate the amount it was bought for. Some years (months) from now the bubble will burst, and IT companies will be bought for a far more reasonable sum (a sum they'll have to justify to the buyer by having decent revenue. Sure WhatsApp has revenue, but nowhere near $18 billion).

</comment><comment><USER15> price is what you pay, value is what you get. it cost 19b, doesn't mean it's worth 19b. intrinsic value is the amount of future cash flow the business will generate discounted to present value. projected earnings must be measured against the returns of the s&p 500 rate of return 6% per year adjusted for inflation. they would need to have profits in the range of 500M to 1B for that valuation compounding much higher than that. it is a totally bogus valuation based on new metrics a la zuckyberg

</comment><comment><USER16> Nobody has answered the OP's question: why $18B? why not $18M or $523M?

<comment><USER17> Isn't the price somewhat arbitrary? WhatsApp's market value is based not on revenue but on what the highest bidder will give them. WhatsApp probably had an idea of what the big players (Apple, Google, Facebook) might offer and that becomes what their going rate is.

I don't know if this is how the amount of an offer is determined but it sounds plausible to me.

<comment><USER18> Whatsapp does charge $1/year or something, so that times XXX million users = some baseline value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's worth that much because it has the growth potential to overtake Facebook. The value is in futures. In order to keep your lead in the market, you sometimes need to buy out the competition. I'm not an expert on it, but that's just how I understand it.</comment>


Issues with 2018 MacBook Pro Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/a13n/status/1050131164445306880 <comment><USER2> Wasn't dust originally blamed for this behaviour in earlier models? I seem to remember Apple redesigning the butterfly mechanism around the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's the news here. They said they improved the keyboards in the 2018 model, but they (anecdotally / reportedly) aren't any better.</comment></comment>


Venture capitalist says a $28 minimum wage would create a more robust economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2016/venture-capitalist-says-28-minimum-wage-create-robust-economy/ <comment><USER2> " _Everybody_ should earn above the median wage"

<comment><USER3> So, the Lake Wobegon wage?

(from Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average")

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Hey you should absolutely ignore Economics fundamentals and listen to what I say. Print currency and regulate! After all I've bet early in Amazon and I'm doing great!"

With that logic, why 28 and not 5000? This Keynesians are being so cheap!

Let me give you a good pair of austrian rolling eyes...

</comment><comment><USER5> This is sadly one of those situations where the guy's heart is in the right place but he is simply wrong on the number.

$11-15[1] by 2020 is a reasonable _national_ range for a minimum wage with certain states/localities raising it higher. The simple fact is, the peach picker in rural Georgia has a lower cost of living than the Subway "sandwhich artist" in NYC.

[1] 2016 Dollars, permanently adjusting for inflation against 2016 USD indefinitely. This whole "random correct every so often" is simply disruptive to both businesses and workers since it makes projection difficult compared to small, annual raises linked to inflation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Might as well just give everyone $45 hell why not $50

<comment><USER7> And make Mexico pays for it.

<comment><USER6> Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall: [https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/pay-for-the- wall](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/pay-for-the-wall)

<comment><USER8> When you start strong-arming people, expect them to push you back sooner or later.

I say we make Donald Trump pay for the wall, and we have many ways of making his life miserable to make sure he does it.

1) Revoke his citizenship. 2) Make IRS audit his companies. 3) Stop approval of various permits for his various buildings until he complies.

The things we can do as a government to this chump are endless.

<comment><USER9> So you propose violating a birthright, the 4th amendment and and the 5th because you don't like this guy. Your statement is a glaring example of what is wrong with the US. Everyone is willing to look the other way so long as the violations are for their team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's funny that people(at least in Canada) are worried about low inflation rate. Increasing minimum wage should really help with that.

<comment><USER11> I've been hearing this low-inflation nonsense for years. Okay, 1 lb. of chicken is still $4 at the grocery store, same as it was 10 years ago, but I'm guessing the cost of that chicken has been cut in half considering the 'chickens' are now HGH mutants and the workers virtual slaves that aren't allowed to take a piss during their shift.

On the other hand, I just looked at the cost of my public university: 100% increase, flat out, on tuition, compared to what I paid 10 years ago. In the expensive east coast city in which I live, home prices have doubled since the market crash in 2008. My medical insurance went from $10 copays a few years ago to my current 'catastrophic' plan; this means I pay 100% out of pocket for EVERYTHING until I hit a $2000 deductible. My premiums have not gone down.

So in essence, inflation seems rampant in those products in which the majority of my income is used.

Things that I spend a few percent of income (food, junk from Walmart, electronics) seems to have stabilized in price, yet is in every way inferior to past versions. And the costs to manufacture have dropped precipitously since technology has improved so much while third world wages have become the norm for the owners, even now in the West.

So what's this BS about low-inflation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this guy invest in robotics or something? Say goodbye to manual labor in anything that can be automated ... even at expense.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm all for minimum wage increases, but they should generally be tied to cost of living and inflation.

And yes, it should be far more fragmented than state-wide. There should be a premium for urban areas.

<comment><USER14> There are different views on just what it should be tied to:

[http://www.epi.org/blog/putting-9-minimum-wage- context/](http://www.epi.org/blog/putting-9-minimum-wage-context/)

"..if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages—i.e., if minimum wage workers saw their paychecks expand at the same rate as the average worker—it would be about $10.50 today. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity[i]—i.e., the economy's overall capacity to generate income— it would be almost $18.75 today. Finally, imagine if workers at the very bottom were seeing the same kind of raises as workers at the very top. If the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate as wages for the top 1 percent, it would be over $28 per hour."

The person in the story is using EPI's last number</comment></comment>


RIM's Playbook may be in trouble - <AUTHOR> http://alexknight.net/blog/2010/12/28/rims-playbook-may-be-in-trouble.html <comment><USER2> Removing Flash support ought to save an hour or two in battery life.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's too early to tell without a lot of details what their issues are (if the rumour is true). I do have to agree with you that Flash is going to be a problem. Adobe still can't get their act together with their implementation for Android. Should be interesting to see some benchmarks of the Playbook with flash enabled vs disabled to see how well it does.</comment></comment>


I want this job at Evernote - <AUTHOR> http://hire.pe/

<comment><USER2> Nice Job. That's a motivated boy ! Evernote, here he is.

<comment><USER3> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154224></comment></comment>


Questions you should ask at the interview - <AUTHOR> http://recoding.blogspot.com/2013/01/questions-you-should-ask-at-job.html

<comment><USER2> that scene in transformers 3 was pretty cool in this regard:

The Impress me scene!</comment>


Infrastructure for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/infrastructure-for-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> While its useful to have this kind of info, IMHO its still far from 'infrastructure for deep learning'. What about model versioning? What about deployment environments? We need to address the whole lifecycle, not just the 'training' bit. This is a huge and underserved part of the problem bc people tend to be satisfied with having 1 model thats good enough to publish.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, deployment is a whole set of interesting issues. We haven't deployed any learned models in production yet at OpenAI, so it's not at the top of our list.

If the data and models were small and training was quick (on the order of compilation time), I'd just keep the training data in git and train the model from scratch every time I run make. But the data is huge, training requires clusters of machines and can take days, so you need a pipeline.

An industrial strength system looks like this: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072626246134461/introducing...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072626246134461/introducing- fblearner-flow-facebook-s-ai-backbone/)

<comment><USER4> CTO of Algorithmia here. We've spent a lot of time thinking about the issues of deploying deep learning models. There are a whole set of challenges that crop up when trying to scale these kinds of deployments (not least of which is trying to manage GPU memory).

It would be interesting to compare notes since we have deployed a number of models in production, and seem to focus on a related but different set of challenges. kenny at company dot com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know much about deep learning. Just noticed that there are 40+ upvotes and 0 comments. I propose the HN Bikeshedding effect theory. Take the number of comments and divide it by the number of upvotes.

<0.1 = Too technical for even HN audience 0.1-1.0 = At the right level for the HN audience >1 = The topic is similar to painting the bike shed.

<comment><USER6> The high amount of upvotes and low ratio of votes/comments on deep learning/big data posts is unfortunately accurate.

It's not a problem that HN has topics which are frequently upvoted; topics such as employment and Rust are popular memes.

It _is_ a problem, however, if the upvote-for-the-title crowd upvote articles which are _bad_ and would not get upvotes if they were about another topic. That's a legit hard problem to solve (what makes a good submission?), unfortunately, but one I've been looking into.

(For clarity, this submission is a good submission, but I've seen quite a few top-ranking HN submissions that are just a bar chart on a controversial topic that is poorly sourced. And linkbait about deep leaning tends to get upvotes, but flagged too.)

<comment><USER7> There's a problem with upvoting on HN: upvote is also the only saving mechanism available: If I run across some click-baity title, but I don't have time to read it right now I will click upvote, but what I really mean by that is "save for later".

Maybe HN just needs to separate bookmarking and upvoting?

<comment><USER8> ... HN has added favorites recently ("favorite" link, on the submission/individual comments page) and thus has both. And apparently really needs a more public changelog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see people talking about the infrastructure they use to manage their deep learning workloads.

One area where we've had trouble with other orchestration tools (e.g. Docker Swarm) was in managing resources at anything beyond whole boxes. They are all good at managing CPU/RAM/Disk but we've had trouble with give this task GPU2. We had planned to try Mesos (given that we already run it for other things) but it sounds like maybe we should take a harder look at Kubernetes first.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _Like much of the deep learning community, we use Python 2.7_

It's unfortunate that so much effort has been spent on bringing tools up to speed with Python 3, but some groups still insist on dragging their feet. I understand the motivation when we're talking about an established company with a huge legacy code base, but within the research community it's kind of embarrassing.

<comment><USER11> Python 2.7 is the present and future of scientific computing with Python. If there is one field in which a print statement is a critical feature it is quick interactive analysis prototyping. That won't change no matter how much Guido and co want it to change.

<comment><USER12> Curious here, what difference does it make if it's a statement or a function?

<comment><USER11> 4 extra keystrokes. If you could add a statement I would add "p" and change my muscle memory to use that. For me it doesn't even need the ">>" syntax, just quick display. Rapid prototyping needs rapid feedback.

Edit: it's not just the quickness of a single statement. It's that the print statements are about 30-50% of the code when you are working this way.

<comment><USER13> To be fair we've ingested a fair amount of python 2.7 research code for our Python 3 codebase and the print statements are the quickest of fixes. There are rarer actual gotchas, but 2to3 catches a fair number of them. We only switched for the machine learning project I'm working on right now as an experiment, but it's surprising how smoothly it's gone.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about it being a bug that needs a fix. That is easy enough in existing code. Im talking about when you are using Python like Matlab or Mathematica. Analyzing data and quickly viewing the results or subsets of the results.

<comment><USER14> You should probably use Jupyter notebook if you don't use it already. It's great for exploratory coding like data analysis. And as the last evaluated expression of a code block is automatically printed, no need for a print statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tensorflow is actually pretty slow and problematic on large clusters outside the Google Cloud. Probably because that's not what it was designed for.

For Java/Scala people, Deeplearning4j has a pretty sophisticated Spark + GPUs setup:

[http://deeplearning4j.org/gpu](http://deeplearning4j.org/gpu)

[http://deeplearning4j.org/spark](http://deeplearning4j.org/spark)

[http://deeplearning4j.org/spark-gpus](http://deeplearning4j.org/spark-gpus)

[Disclosure: I help create DL4J, and it's supported by my startup, Skymind.]

<comment><USER3> How does DL4J training scale across >8 GPUs?

<comment><USER16> I don't know, but I am curious about how many people, in percentages, outside Google and Facebook and the likes, need to scale _their_ models to more than 8 GPUS?

<comment><USER3> Many of the models people are building here, such as generative image models, take a few days to train (say, 100 hours) on our 4 GPU boxes. Research would be faster if we could train on 400 GPUS in one hour, but the communication bandwidth required makes it hard to scale.

<comment><USER17> What is being shared between GPUs?

Training data is easy to duplicate and share nothing.

Large models with shared weights get tricky but less frequent asynchronous updates with schemes like hogwild seem to work with SGD. I believe TF has support for this too. It won't scale linearly but might be good enough.

There's some excitement about synthetic gradients to allow less communication and further parallelism.

The hpc community has certainly leveraged 400 GPU clusters.

It seems like a fun problem, and if you want to focus the resources, there isn't anything insurmountable about utilizing 400 GPUs :)

<comment><USER18> The DeepMind paper on synthetic gradients is super interesting for training in clusters. I hope it gets built into TF soon.

Also really hope there will be more options for GPU hardware on public clouds.

Eventually the pieces will come together and it will be trivial to deploy cloud 400gpus for an hour to run the load your local 4gpu workstation would spend 100 hours on, but we are definitely not there yet.

We are working on a packaging format called snappy ([http://www.snapcraft.io](http://www.snapcraft.io)) and starting to talk to TF guys about packaging TF with it (kubernetes is already packaged as a snap) - hopefully this will take some pain away once it's working

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Top performance thus requires top-of-the-line GPUs."

Would be curious to see the data around the economics of the different options.

<comment><USER20> Especially metrics comparing cost of getting your own vs offloading to AWS or whatever. When is the "break even" point for buying your own?

<comment><USER21> So, a single GTX 1080 GPU deep learning box would come around 1500$, if you pay 0.7$/hr for your cloud server, you should buy if you use more than 1500/0.7 = 2142h. So, if you need more than 90 days of GPU time, you should probably buy your box. Of course, if the cloud server is slower than GTX 1080, then the benefit is multiplied.

But ... your own box would not be scalable. You'd still need AWS to speed up training.

<comment><USER22> AFAIK, AWS is stuck several architecture revisions behind Pascal (most things I see say it's still a Kepler GK104). At a best guess, that 1080 is probably 2x faster than any single GPU AWS instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On a related note, I'm running a poll on deep learning frameworks: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391744)

</comment><comment><USER24> Very interesting article but I guess the scale is not for everyone. 1600 AWS GPU? I'll be lucky if my infra request for g2.8xlarge is approved.</comment>


A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jacius.info/2012/05/29/a-personal-lisp-crisis/ <comment><USER2> I enjoyed skimming over this again -- I happen to be the guy who wrote the first comment on it.

I'm pleased to say that I've stuck with CL, and I'm glad I did. I've managed to use it at work, and have been using it to build something I can't picture doing (easily?) in any other language. I've managed to pique the interest of a few coworkers, too.

Much of what the article says is indeed true, but I just don't feel they're as problematic as they're made out to be. There are some ugly corners of the language, but they're, in my opinion, vastly outweighed by a fearsome arsenal of tools at your fingertips. I'd contend that it's warts are "warts in the small" \-- some weird naming, some inconsistencies in usage. Other languages -- even pretty good ones -- have problems in things as basic as their scoping rules. I believe that by comparison, CL is actually pretty reasonably designed.

<comment><USER3> > I've managed to use it at work, and have been using it to build something I > can't picture doing (easily?) in any other language.

Could you expand on that? I'd love to know what you built and why you think it would be some hard work to do it in any other language.

<comment><USER2> Sure, s/built/are building/g.

Without going into too much detail, I basically am subsuming another language (statically-typed, Algol-ish) wholesale into Common Lisp. It replaces that language's syntax with an s-expression syntax, but also provides a way to embed its native syntax. So you can use CL macros to build syntactic abstractions, and use them as low-ceremony wrapping around native code. It also makes many of the primitives of that language into first-class objects in Lisp, so a REPL for the embedded language is emerging (or expressed another way, you can evaluate the embedded language in the CL REPL). I don't think Clojure would do as good a job (gut feeling; I'm not a Clojurist). Racket would probably be a decent choice, but not sure if I'd get good performance (again, not a Schemer).

One of the more arrogant things I've heard Lispers claim of their language is "a superset of all other languages". While that's not entirely true, this work has made me feel that there's more than a kernel of truth in that hyperbole. Warts and all! :)

<comment><USER4> That's pretty amazing. What sort of tools and features did you use to do that? Genuinely interested as CL is a language I always keep in the back of my mind for the "next project" and this is giving me a big push to use it.

<comment><USER2> Programmable syntax (reader macros), programmable printer are 2 big ones. Also regular macros are key, manipulating code as structures not text, having both lexical and dynamic variables, closures and all the other nuts and bolts stuff. Type and compiler-optimization declarations help keeping things fast (well, not fast enough, but I'm trying!)

<comment><USER4> Thank you :)

I think you were correct about Clojure. I read recently reader macros are not an available feature.

<comment><USER5> Yes, mostly. reader macros are not extensible by the user. The compiler has and uses reader macros.

Rich Hickey has said he hasn't seen an implementation of reader macros that is compose-able across libraries. i.e. two different OSS libs using a two different incompatible macros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I don't doubt the author's claims about the CL community being unwelcoming, my admittedly anecdotical experience with it was very different:

I wrote a small utility library this year (cl-strings) as my first ever open source project, showed it on #lisp and r/lisp asking for feedback, and received mostly encouraging comments and very constructive criticism.

I've also made some PR's to jscl as a complete newbie to the project, and felt very welcomed.

Hopefully this meme about the CL community is taken with a grain of salt, it certainly is not true universally.

<comment><USER4> Despite the interesting read, I had the same experience too except as a complete newbie.

I tried redefining the plus operator to see how flexible the language really was (after, you know, all the talk of its power). I'd led myself into a rabbit hole with a macro. The guys in #lisp fairly and in humour told me that using eval in a macro indicates my macro is wrong. Second, I'm trying to redefine a core operator so I should read up on packages. Despite that, they guided me to get my macro working anyway to conclude my sandbox play with success.

I remember being very grateful for their help and feeling like it was a community I wouldn't mind being a part of.

I imagine with a dumb rookie mistake like that, I should have had my self esteem shredded to dust. Instead, I carried on dabbling and reading. I'm no CL programmer but I know more than I did that day so I wasn't put off in the slightest.

EDIT: I just remembered they advised I could make my day job more interesting by writing my own way to inline CL code in PHP as a good project to up the ante.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> CL is designed so that code written for earlier Lisp dialects can run with little or no modification, which means there's a lot of bloat and historical baggage in the core `common-lisp` package. But even if that weren't the case, you'd still need conventions like you do in any other language. Clojure is a young language with a BDFL. It already has historical baggage that prominent members of the community will tell you to avoid.

The fact that so many people write their own cleaned-up wrapper libraries like CLUEL isn't a sign that CL especially needs them; it just means it's easy to do. If a language doesn't have macros and doesn't let you shadow built-in operators, you have to play the hand you're dealt.

It's trivial to deal with cryptic function names and inconsistent parameter ordering in a language's _core library_. I can read code with `car` and `cdr`; I write code with `first` and `rest`. What makes a poorly designed _language_ is something you can't paper over, like broken lexical scoping. There are definitely some things worth complaining about in CL as a _language_ , but I didn't see any in this post.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author is right. This was a great read. The LISP family has some of the highest potential of any language. Amazing things were done with it, from software to hardware, in the 70's and 80's. Then, after politics and Common LISP, it's been pretty stagnant while most of the best stuff happens outside it in about every attribute. Often, someone ports such works right back to Common LISP to show it could do it all along. It just didn't due to a combo of language and community issues it will never fix.

Leads to two conclusions. The first is for the author to open-source, if it hasn't been, these analyses and work in the article so people can start fixing up a version of Common LISP. The second is to ignore Common LISP entirely in favor of a newer project like Racket Scheme that builds on better, more- consistent foundations with good community and batteries included. It's become most of what I expected of the Common LISP's while Common LISP withered.

The third result is some brave academics need to implement a Genera clone using Racket or Chicken. The rapid iteration, live updates, and whole-system debugging should be preserved. Also feature a deploy-to-executable model that can run in more suitable environments (eg desktops, containers). That would be badass.

</comment><comment><USER9> Common Lisp certainly has plenty of warts, and the author is not the first person to attempt a rationalization.

The problem with any such thing is getting people to use it. Experienced CLers have already learned how to spell 'makunbound' [0] and that the argument order of 'gethash' and 'assoc' is inconsistent with that of 'aref', and that '+', while generic in a sense, is not a CLOS generic function (you can't add methods to it), etc. etc. etc. So it's going to be a tough sell to these people (myself included).

Your real audience is newcomers to the language. But to appeal to _them_ you need excellent documentation including substantial tutorial material, at least as good as what already exists for CL itself. That's a massive effort on top of the effort of just designing the rationalization.

And then you have a third problem. While implementing your rationalization on top of CL using the package system -- so as to be able to use existing CL libraries -- is the obvious approach, the fact remains, all those existing libraries are written in standard CL rather than in your dialect. So once a newcomer learns your dialect, if they want to read or modify any of those libraries, they will _still_ have to get some familiarity with existing CL.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but boy it seems like a tough mountain to climb.

[0] Randomly omitting letters was a bit of a thing in the old days; consider 'creat' and 'umount', from a different tradition altogether.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know what he/she ended up writing their lisp game project in? I've been learning Clojure for the past couple of months and now I'm thinking about writing a game in Lisp. I've considered Clojurescript obviously, but it seems a bad choice since everything is immutable by default. Chicken Scheme seems interesting since it compiles to C and it's multi-paradigm so I can program functionally or imperatively.

Any thoughts on a Lisp choice for game development?

<comment><USER11> For some inspiration see here:

[https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki](https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki)

<comment><USER10> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think anyone really thinks CL is all that special or that it is clearly "the best" LISP dialect -- it's just that part of the problem with LISP is that there are so many dialects and CL is a reasonable enough dialect and is kind of a standard, so why not use it?

<comment><USER13> "kind of" a standard? In some reasonable [1] sense it was the first language to be a standard.

[1] - yes, there are other reasonable metrics

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author forgot to mention the most used Lisp dialect: Emacs Lisp.

<comment><USER15> There's an awful lost of AutoLISP out there still too.

<comment><USER16> AutoLISP is barely worth the "Lisp" name, except for the syntax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > There is a half-jocular saying among atheists, that the surest way for a > Christian to lose their faith is to read the Bible, cover to cover. The idea > is that if you really scrutinize it, and don't gloss over the strange, > antiquated, or inconsistent parts, it stops seeming so profound and special.

Reading the Bible had the opposite effect on me. It made me into a Christian. It's so Holy and so truthful. It's exact. I've never read anything like it.

</comment><comment><USER18> About a third of the text is wasted whining about the "negative" community, which actually makes me want to look at CL again.

<comment><USER19> Which perhaps is evidence for their claim of personality-based self-selection?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The opening paragraph about becoming a skeptic after researching the bible seems to be a bad analogy. One could list contradicting examples of skeptics who became believers by looking further into the subject (C.S. Lewis, perhaps Lew Wallace who later wrote Ben-Hur, and Lee Strobel in our own day).

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." \- G.K. Chesterton

<comment><USER8> I disagree. I used to cite them back when I was a Christian, esp Stobel. You find looking further into them that they didn't really become Christians by investigating evidence, esp alternatives in religion. It was always a faith- based thing. Strobel, one I pulled myself outside the echo chamber, was especially one-sided and fraudulent as shown below. Author even encourages you to whip out Case for Christ and follow along with him.

[http://www.bidstrup.com/apologetics.htm](http://www.bidstrup.com/apologetics.htm)

You have the logical arguments that most ex-Christians come up with on their own. Also, recall Genesis says we have ability of "gods" to know right from wrong. So, we know the shit is wrong. Especially all the rape and slavery linked to on the right. ;)

[http://www.evilbible.com/evil-bible-home-page/god-is- impossi...](http://www.evilbible.com/evil-bible-home-page/god-is-impossible/)

Then there was the contradictions we kept noticing. Some of these are justifiable but others (esp integer section) clearly show unreliability.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB3g6mXLEKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB3g6mXLEKk)

So, it's not as if we don't read the Bible. The number of ex-Christians that spent years dedicated to it, reading it daily, studying its history, doing apologetics, and so on counters that easily. It's that the book itself & evidence behind it doesn't add up to reason. So, once faith leaves, reason takes over and we leave it for rational things. That simple.

Note: I'm not going to continue a Bible debate from here. Believe what you want to. It's not the point. I'm merely countering this myth that anyone that rejects it didn't read it, try it, commit with their heart, whatever. That's straight-up lies perpetuated by a subset of Christians. It's actually a combo of logical and emotional reasons plus issues with Bible itself. That leads to opposition to it.

<comment><USER20> I think it's not how much you scrutinize the bible, but whether you look beyond the surface and ask whether on the whole it does in fact represent a cohesive view of reality. Sure, you will find what you go looking for -- for both good or ill. All find what they truly seek.

But beyond motivations, there is the deeper question of whether it is really true.

"If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest many will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all." \- C.S. Lewis</comment></comment></comment>


Harvard Business Review: The Consolidation Curve (2002) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bi.edu/ShippingakademietFiles/Shipping%20Logistics/Presentasjoner/1b,The%20Consolidation%20Curve.pdf

<comment><USER2> Very nice concise summary of the evolution that sectors/industries go through. This needs to be upvoted because it's very useful for startup founders to understand where they stand in this cycle and where they're headed. Both from their own perspective and the perspective of competitors and acquirers. It's useful for example to help you understand if you should start thinking about buying competitors, buying startups and/or forming alliances.</comment>


Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html?repostindays=413 <comment><USER2> This is a very powerful message. I've been trying for three years now to recapture the feeling that sucked me into computer science. It was an introductory CS course, and the assignment was to draw a scene using Python's turtle graphics module. The idea I had was to draw cube structures in one- point perspective, as I had long done on graph paper. This was in ignorance of how the entire field of computer graphics worked, and so my method was laughable in its simplicity. Analogous to Feynman and the tap water curve, I suppose; I was immensely proud of the final result[0].

That very week I switched my major from physics to computer science. The code I wrote then was truly, truly awful[1], but the feeling it brought the first time a line of cubes was correctly drawn was incredible. I, and only I had made it do that.

I've not felt that way again. Programming contests bring only the feeling of excelling in competition. Algorithm textbooks bring only the short-lived satisfaction of having a magic trick explained to you. Now it seems any time I research a new project I'm drowned in best-practice recommendations and intense fear of writing my own extensive library when a tested, vetted, and fully functional copy exists elsewhere.

What to do? I would do anything to recapture that feeling.

[0] <http://i.imgur.com/wih35.png> (find the tetris pieces!)

[1]* [https://github.com/ahelwer/UofC/blob/master/cpsc217/as3/grap...](https://github.com/ahelwer/UofC/blob/master/cpsc217/as3/graphics.py)

* If you want to run the script, you'll need the modified turtle graphics module found in the same github directory.

<comment><USER3> My advice? Write personal projects where you can tell people to go to hell ;) Let me elaborate for a second though: when I work on a personal project, if I want to implement a functionality and there's a library that does it, I write it myself anyway. If I need functionality and I don't really want to write it, I look for a library that does it.

Personal projects give you freedoms that professional ones can't. If your personal project isn't quite as stable because you rolled your own middleware in Node instead of using something that's already built, you can tell people to go to hell. These are projects that exist first to let you explore, interact, and build. Perhaps they exist second to provide utility to you. Only as a distant third do they exist to provide utility to others.

Now, that isn't to say that such a project can't or won't evolve into a professional one, or that you won't decide to make utility to others a higher goal. At that point, you'll have to see about revisiting some of your early decisions. But to me, what keeps things fun in that context is exactly that: creating something for me and no one else. Because then there are no rules and no constraints: just a canvas, a paintbrush, and paint.

<comment><USER4>
      when I work on a personal project, if I want to implement
      a functionality and there's a library that does it, I
      write it myself anyway.

That's a great idea, and I'm going to do that the next time I find a library for something I'd rather play with instead. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. URL ends with "?repostindays=413". And it happens to be 413 days since the same page was submitted before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773>. What's going on here?

<comment><USER6> Hm, that is interesting.

<comment><USER7> Several of the OPs submissions have ?repost on them, maybe just to get around the repost catching, maybe it's totally automated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can never forget that chapter and how well Feynman expressed his burnout. It's hard to imagine that even charming roguish nobel prizewinning physicists who play the bongos can feel useless sometimes. I think most likely everyone has, but it doesn't make for a very interesting blog post unless it's followed with "but I turned it all around with the Pomodoro technique!"

Nobody picks a date and says "from that point on, I'm going to grow up and lose my sense of wonder", but still it happens. I worry, sometimes, about how dangerous slow changes can be. The boiling frog thing turned out to be a myth, but the fact that it still persists as pseudo-fact tells you something about how well it aligns with our experiences. I saw a child today play for, honest to god, about half an hour with a low concrete wall. What if I'm just getting a little bit less playful every day?

With achievement I feel like you have an internal zero point that you measure from. But the zero has a dangerous tendency to climb. When I was a child I felt like the zero was at, well, zero. People got impressed if I just managed to fall over with gusto. Now I'm a proper software developer and aspiring startup guy, the zero is more like being well paid writing good code for successful projects that make an impact but are also somehow deeply meaningful, about which I make clever insights while blogging, tweeting, plussing and getting a million internet points on Hacker News.

Even if it's not quite that bad, expectations build up pretty quickly, and it's easy to end up worried about being in the negative. Why can't it all just be positive? Imagine if you could return to the days when just getting something to compile was a victory that would stay with you for days. I don't really know if it's possible, but I have been making some attempts to try.

I read a book on Stoicism that was referenced on Tim Ferriss's blog (that he writes from the deck of his jumbo yacht on the shores of lake always successful), and it actually had a lot of great stuff to say about how to stop expectations wrecking your happiness. But even armed with the ability to bring up Marcus Aurelius at dinner parties, it's tough going. I've cut down to one day a week of work (and pretty fun work with a low responsibility factor) on the theory that I should undersubscribe myself for a while and let myself naturally gravitate towards things I like without an expectation they'll be my life's work, or even very good at all.

That's meant I've spent a lot more time doing things, but I still feel a sense of residual nervousness that things I do will be bad. My website, for example, has been blank page for nigh unto half a decade now, just because I want to write something good on there and I'm not sure whatever I write will be good. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Having written this now I look back and it seems long and rambly without any particular point other than what goes through my head when I think about that part of Feynman's book. I feel an overwhelming urge to go back and tidy it up, try to tie it all into a nice conclusion or something. Maybe that's the point, though. Can't I just be proud of the fact that I wrote something without worrying that I should be able to do better? Maybe we're all standing around worried but nobody says anything because it would ruin our carefully tended never-fail image. Alright, I'm going to post it. Here goes...

<comment><USER9> From what you wrote I'm getting some feeling that you worry a quite bit about many things. I used to do that too. I was always afraid, what would other people think of me, if I said this or did that. But a while ago, while trying to find a way to become less shy, I ran into blog of person who works as charisma coach [1]. And when he was talking about starting conversations with people you don't know on the street, he said quite interesting thing about messing up: Either you will have a nice chat or you will have funny story. So in both cases it will go great. And while I still don't have courage to talk to people on street, I started applying this in the rest of my life. And my life started getting much better, since I stopped to worry so much. I made new friends and got closer with the ones I had and I became happier too. So, try to enjoy life more and worry less. (:

[1] <http://www.yourcharismacoach.com/>

<comment><USER10> Marcus, the guy behind Your Charisma Coach, is a very old friend of mine (I'm the one filming the bungee video!) - I've watched him overcome some of life's hardest worries and deepest funks with all the charm and charisma of Feynmann himself!

I was really pleased to see you referencing this site - the Feynmann piece reminded me of his attitude to interaction and life generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried writing some software for fun and while it worked for a little while, I'm still burned out. Now what?

<comment><USER12> Just find another creative outlet. When I can't come up with a solution to a design I'm working on, I just pick up my guitar and play for a bit. Generally the excitement from _that_ exercise gets me back in the mindset to work on the design I'd left. Of course your thing doesn't have to be music. Just explore different topics of interest and see what sticks.

<comment><USER13> I do the dishes. Since I can go into automatic mode, the hot water loosens me up and I get to daydream. More often than not these dreams can turn into future features for my project. Any chance I can take to daydream I take.

It's a lucid dream that you can get to work immediately after. Letting y imagination run has pushed me to build many things I wouldn't have rationally considered. The dishes are the most sure fire quotidian way to get there.

<comment><USER14> Have you seen the book "Imagine: How Creativity Works" by Jonah Lehrer? It explains how the above process works in a general way, and it's really interesting. It's a pop-science book, to be sure, but still a really good read.

[http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah- Lehrer/...](http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah- Lehrer/dp/0547386079)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think John Cleese does pretty good job corroborating the phenomenon in this speech:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VShmtsLhkQg)

<comment><USER16> That was a very interesting talk (that provided surprisingly concrete advice). Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Takeaway: its nice to be tenured.

<comment><USER18> Did Feynman have tenure at Cornell?

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty confident that Feynman did not have tenure at Cornell _at the time of this story_. He didn't need it though - he had free reign to do whatever because Hans Bethe was there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is probably the only chapter of that book I really enjoyed. It mostly felt like an "I'm so awesome" series of events. But this was a really valuable chapter. If you feel burned out on something you loved it can be hard to figure out what made you love it. Hacking CRUD apps for 8 hours a day for weeks, months, years can be seriously depressing. CRUD just isn't that interesting, but it is what a lot of programming jobs involve.

I'm really rediscovering the joy of programming by teaching intro programming classes at the local community college. To some extent it's let me relive the first time I realized I could make the computer do what I wanted, not what someone else said I was allowed to.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is actually a video of Feynman himself elaborating further: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzPfKI4b-dg&feature=relmf...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzPfKI4b-dg&feature=relmfu)

I would say that the death of his first wife Arlene and the aftermaths of the Trinity Project affected Feynman greatly, as exuberant as he is usually.

Feynman's magnificent exuberance and puzzle solving enthusiasm was also illustrated during his last days, where his coworker Christopher Sykes remarked "Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn't know whether he is going to live through this week. But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long...." <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h11m46s>

Feynman was the epitome of the "Doing things for the fun of it" philosophy. His last words to his artist friend Jirayr was "Don't worry about anything~! Go out and have a good time~!" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h32m10s> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h32m10s>

<comment><USER21> Apologies for the double URL at the end of my comment. I was rushing to class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of a Zen Buddhist text that goes like this - "The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in everything he does, leaving others to determine whether he is at work or at play. To him, he is always doing both."

<comment><USER23> I would like to know the source, please.

<comment><USER24> Use the Google, Luke.

The first hit on searching for the quote explains its history: <http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/08/27/master/>

<comment><USER23> Alright!! Obi-Wan Kenobi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this also alludes to his talent more than simply his burnout. For him, physics came naturally and he enjoyed. He happened to get a Nobel Prize while doing what he did for fun.

We should all follow our natural tendencies in order to do what we want. Whenever you fight it, it creates a cognitive dissonance within you that makes you feel depressed and unworthy sometimes.

Great post.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm only 19 years old, so I can't speak for many. However, I've found that when I (or my friends) suffer from this "the excitement is gone" bug, I recommend learning how to program web applications. They let you make something big that can instantly be deployed to millions, and some frameworks like Ruby on Rails have a veyr low barrier of entry.

Also, with web applications you get to make websites, and experience the thrill of crazy traffic, ad revenue, and making sure people have a good time.

Web apps is what brought the excitement back to me. Again, I'm 19 so I'll most likely end up finding another vehicle for my excitement in the near future.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. As a professional web developer with ten years of experience behind me, my cure (well, one of my cures) is the opposite: getting re- acquainted with making desktop games. They let you make something fun that can instantly be played ;).

<comment><USER27> Also, desktop apps don't involve wearing a pager ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Was Feynman talking about precession (like in a top or a planet) ?

</comment><comment><USER29> vs "If it isn't going in a text-book or you can't sell it, don't bother." --my thesis advisor

</comment><comment><USER30> I've only gotten burned out when I was forced to work on projects I hated for long periods of time.

I guess I've been lucky in the fact that I've never truly been so burned out that I've stopped coding completely. I still get that feeling that I used to get when I first started writing software 16 years ago.

The key is to have interesting personal projects. Even if I'm working on a project I hate, I can always find some piece of it that I like (and I can use for future projects).

<comment><USER31> Having a personal project, or even something I'm just studying on the side, gives me a feeling of freedom and control over my life which I increasingly feel less of in other areas, with marriage, a mortgage, children, and especially a job with projects that I hate. Not that those things aren't all fine (well maybe not the bad job), but not being beholden to anyone else, having the pleasure to mess up or explore dead ends without worrying about the cost, are very nice in the face of all of life's other responsibilities. I think this goes back to Feynman's spirit of play, but there is more to it than just "having fun" in my opinion, at least it's a lot more complex than that for me personally.</comment></comment>


Why MongoDB is worth $1.2 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-2013/131010-why-mongodb-is-worth.html?source=nww_rss

<comment><USER2> _Not only is MongoDB considerably lower in cost than Oracle, but adding nodes to a MongoDB cluster is an exercise in simplicity._

It was my understanding that MongoDB scales poorly.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention, considerably lower in cost means considerably less revenue. How exactly is that supposed to be justification for a high valuation? Especially when NoSQL databases are a fairly small niche compared to RDBMS, so it's not really possible to make up the difference in volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comparing MongoDB to Oracle? _Really?_ Next thing you know we'll be reading articles about how oranges are threatening to take significant market share from apples.

As for, "[Oracle] also does not affordably scale to the tens or hundreds of terabytes required by some", an honest question: if scaling to "tens or hundreds of terabytes" is so easy with MongoDB, why is scaling to 100GB a big enough deal to warrant a presentation[1]?

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/mongodb/partner-webinar-the- scalin...](http://www.slideshare.net/mongodb/partner-webinar-the-scaling- checklist-for-mongodb-100gb-and-beyond)

<comment><USER5> I view this as they have Oracle to thank for there being such a large database market independent of the big ERP and hardware vendors. And for that, you do have to thank Uncle Larry.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Simplest way to create a very basic data driven website these days? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys
I'm not up to speed on the latest cloud offerings out there.
For very simple side project ideas that are essentially static websites with a search engine component that needs to query some data, what is the quickest/simplest options out there these days to get something running in a few hours?
Here's what I was hoping to achieve:
1. Upload a CSV spreadsheet of data to some cloud storage solution
2. Be able to quickly define some simple API endpoints hosted in the cloud to query said data.
3. Write the website as static files with a js client querying the API endpoints as needed.
4. Host the website as static files in S3 or similar for low cost and ease.
What is out there that is similar to this and do people recommend as the easiest to use?
Thanks!
T <comment><USER2> I would look into AWS Lambda. Lambda host backend functions written in javascript, python or java. You can then use the AWS javascript sdk in your frontend code to invoke these lambda functions. This will be very low cost and cuts out a lot of boilerplate work. You pay on a per request basis versus an hourly or monthly basis. So if no one is using your website, then you pay nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Python with the Flask framework is great, very easy to do the API endpoints. The whole app can fit in one .py file of about four lines plus 3 per endpoint, see the sample at [http://flask.pocoo.org/](http://flask.pocoo.org/).

You can host it on Heroku in their free tier of service if it's just for testing. That includes a PostgreSQL instance if you want one.

I don't know much Javascript but with the Flask framework, all HTML/JS/CSS files are static templates that sit in a folder with your app's code. You can deploy with Git or even with Dropbox if you want it on super easy mode.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome presentation about building blocks for Product development — [https://speakerdeck.com/fson/building-blocks-for-product- dev...](https://speakerdeck.com/fson/building-blocks-for-product-development)

</comment><comment><USER5> Firebase + Firebase Hosting for the backend API. Filestack to upload csv files and or to S3.

</comment><comment><USER6> if the data is small, I would convert it to JSON first, it would be one less thing to have to do in your code.

</comment><comment><USER7> Firebase + AngularJS</comment>


Silicon Valley faces backlash over attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34855462 <comment><USER2> No doubt extremism has come about because of silicon valley, not the failure of government policy over many years, and the alienation of people in the middle east. It's not the result of twenty years of war against people who have no power to strike back except with terror tactics.

Clearly terrorism is the fault of those secure instant messaging apps that have led to the end of peaceful society. I think I saw a terrorist in a newspaper photo using snapchat.

Oh and computer games too.

Time to get my witch hunting pop-gun and dig up McCarthy.

The good news is that with encryption banned, there will be absolutely no way for terrorists to communicate in secrecy, and all communications will be intercepted and terrorism will end. Can't come soon enough.

Our governments have really, really tried to stop terrorism - I promise - it's just that really with encryption, it's kind of impossible so you can't blame them.

Thus we see the terrorists have succeeded in turning our most powerful institutions against each other. Tech versus government. The government have become the agents of the terrorists without even knowing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> And look at what the Beeb decided not to report:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after- endless-demonization-encryption-police-find-paris-attackers-coordinated-via- unencrypted-sms.shtml)

"""Yet news emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted."""

I guess that wasn't "on message."

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, the U.S. government has really shown themselves to be responsible stewards of other people's data.

</comment><comment><USER2> A gorgeous quote from the article:

"I propose banning words," he said. "There's evidence [to suggest] that they're being used by terrorists to communicate."

</comment><comment><USER5> "In the piece, published back in August, they wrote about a murder near Chicago in which a father of six had been shot. At the scene, officers found two mobile phones. But they were passcode locked. Neither Google or Apple (the phones ran their software) could unlock the phones, and therefore the data was inaccessible.

"On behalf of crime victims the world over," the opinion piece read, "we are asking whether this encryption is truly worth the cost.""

Am I missing something here? Don't phones have SIM cards, IMEI numbers, serial numbers etc? Don't service providers keep records? Would they complain if a gun was found on the scene but the killer had not made the effort to engrave his name on it? Maybe they should spend their time doing investigations rather than writing editorials?

</comment><comment><USER6> The media seems to do this rather frequently -- they report on other people's opinions, sometimes claiming "outrage" on their behalf, while offering scant evidence or analysis. Not impressed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh gee, we sure are scared!!

Of course by Silicon Valley, they mean Silicon Valley and every business in the world that does any sort of online transaction. Because, news flash, they all use encryption just as much as everyone in Silicon Valley.

Also, as far as I can see there are way more stupid apps the valley pumps out (like snapchat) that DON'T encrypt than ones that do.

Way to be a mouthpiece for bozotron government officials who _wouldn 't even know what to look for if they HAD the unencrypted data_.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even if encryption made it easier for a terrorist to organize, it also has made it easier for dissidents to organize against oppression.

Although, I suppose that the government sees both as a problem...</comment>