RadiumOne CEO escapes felony charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/item/36623-radiumone-ceo-escapes/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a little ironic that Brendan Eich had to step down over a $1,000 donation to a political cause nearly a decade ago, but the Valley so far has no problem with "G" hitting a woman 117 times in 30 minutes on video (after which he tried to smother her with a pillow). If he indeed suffers no significant professional fallout from what he did - and as of this moment there are no signs that he will - then the Valley is truly a disturbing place with priorities that are completely out of sync with the rest of humanity.

<comment><USER2> It's not ironic, it's infuriating...

But the best way I've heard it explained is that everyone knows and cares about Mozilla and Github, and no one knows RadiumOne.

I tweeted John Gruber suggesting he might link to this, and he (rightly, I guess) pointed out that he had no idea who this guy is. And that will be most people's reaction, I guess.

<comment><USER3> I wondered whether it was the B2B vs B2C thing.

Mozilla and Github, both have consumers who will take action.

This is a far worse case, he provable beat the hell out of her, but a justice system screw-up has let him largely off the hook. Yet consumers (who make the most noise, push the strongest demands on companies, and can affect the bottom line when they are the customers) are not aware of Radium or able to directly affect the bottom line.

I remain uncertain (expressed on Twitter) whether hounding existing investors is the way forward, but certainly pressuring board members (which will include some but not all existing investors) and customers is probably the way.

Whereas my thoughts on Twitter mobs remain to the negative, this guy beat the hell out of his girl and clearly has issues with violence. He shouldn't be running a company, he isn't fit to.

The court got it wrong (from a moral/ethical perspective as the guy did it, but perhaps right on a technical perspective I'll concede)... and I loathe mobs, but if the court failed to do their job then I come down on the side of the mob (even though that doesn't sit well with me).

<comment><USER4> > The court got it wrong (from a moral/ethical perspective as the guy did it, > but perhaps right on a technical perspective I'll concede)... and I loathe > mobs, but if the court failed to do their job then I come down on the side > of the mob (even though that doesn't sit well with me).

There's a 1983 Michael Douglas movie on point: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356). It's pretty ham-fisted, but the first thirty minutes are a nice portrayal of a judge forced to throw out convictions due to 4th amendment violations by the police. There's a great scene where the prosecutor pleads with the judge to admit evidence in a murder case despite the 4th amendment violation, and the judge replies: "look, I'm just doing my job here--I suggest you start doing yours better."

<comment><USER3> Oh I agree.

It's just tough to accept.

The judge has punished the police and prosecutor for doing their job badly, rather than punishing the guy for beating up his girlfriend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fuck this shit! Anyone who invests in this scummy bastard's company, for whatever reasons, is an implicit supporter of such heinous behavior.

If you have any way of holding this bastard's feet to the fire, financially or otherwise, it is your moral prerogative to do so, without question. Shame on anyone who supports this pathetic slime ass!

If you care about it, put your money where your mouth is and find a way to publicize this before the IPO and find a way to keep yourself, your friends and your companies from having anything to benefit his business, now and in the future.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Someone_ has been desperately trying to edit his Wikipedia entry many times, trying to remove the Domestic violence conviction section.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gurbaksh_Chahal&of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gurbaksh_Chahal&offset=&limit=100&action=history)

<comment><USER7> _Someone_ == a PR firm: [http://www.eileenkoch.com/](http://www.eileenkoch.com/) (warning: noisy) but as the current revision reflects, Wikipedia articles are built with respect to due weight and neutrality. While it's not ok to hide unflattering info, it's also not ok to bloat a short encyclopaedic article with court case details with the intention of highlighting how bad a guy the subject is.

<comment><USER8> While in the real world, Wikipedia articles either hide unflattering info or act as smears depending mostly on which faction manages to edit-camp that article more effectively. Regardless of what is "ok"

<comment><USER7> That's a silly caricature of how the place works, and not something I've experienced in the 8 years I've had an account there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who's interacted with RadiumOne's engineering leadership, I hate to say I'm only _kind of_ surprised. At a minimum, the attitude and arrogance of its CEO permeates the rest of the organization. In my experience, this company gives off creepier vibes than just about any in SF, if not the entire valley.

I would encourage everyone to give them a wide berth.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ironically, Gurbaksh Chahal appeared on an episode of 'Secret Millionaire' where he gave a heavy check to a single mother of one who used to get beat up by her ex.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMAKwl1GW-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMAKwl1GW-I)

117 times in half an hour! That's worse than what Chris Brown did to Rihanna. And he's planning to raise a $100 million IPO for RadiumOne? Pssh, I wouldn't invest a dime in a company, RadiumOne for example, whose CEO beats on women. I'm thinking that there's an unfortunate team over at RadiumOne trying to save his reputation by flooding social media with his inspirational messages.

I've just lost all respect for you, Gurbaksh. I am now going to waste time out of my morning to unfriend you from all of my social networks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Our criminal justice system is designed to (except apparently at the federal level) keep it from being used against dissidents, but this is one case where the rules for evidence collection helped produce the wrong result.

What he did was completely reprehensible and while the courts have ruled, that doesn't mean that society shouldn't punish this behavior. As someone below noted, nobody knows who he is, but we can change that ... and I hope that RadiumOne's customers care enough to find another vendor.

EDIT:

Did anyone else find the line "Security footage from his bedroom" a bit creepy?

<comment><USER4> > Our criminal justice system is designed to (except apparently at the federal > level) keep it from being used against dissidents, but this is one case > where the rules for evidence collection helped produce the wrong result.

I think you would be surprised at the ratio of dissidents to scumbags that actually invoke the 4th amendment. This case is the common case, not the outlier. It's a scumbag who clearly did something bad that's getting off because the cops obtained evidence in violation of the 4th amendment.

I think this was the right result, because this was a square fourth amendment violation (search in a home), but you can see why the 4th amendment is so politically unpopular and constantly under attack. Ordinary people don't really think or care about the dissidents. They just see guys like this get off on a "technicality."

<comment><USER12> Can you comment on why this was a 4th amendment violation? It seems like the police were legitimately called to the scene of a crime-in-progress and found evidence of said crime. If they had found cocaine instead of a video of a violent attack, would that also have been inadmissible in a court of law?

<comment><USER4> As a background consideration, keep in mind that we're talking about the search of a house, which is the absolute heart of the 4th amendment.

Warrantless entry and search of a house is considered per se unreasonable under the 4th amendment. There are a few narrow exceptions. First, a warrant is not required when the sole occupant of the house consents.[1] However, in a situation like this one where the defendant is present, his objection is enough to render the entry unlawful, even if the other person consents.[2]

Second, even if there is no consent, there are a few narrow exceptions the police can use. One of those is when "exigent circumstances" require the police to enter to prevent bodily harm or the destruction of evidence. But even in such cases, the acceptable scope of a warrantless search is limited by the circumstances that give rise to the exigency.[3]

So in this case, the girlfriend called the police saying he was threatening to kill her, which would justify, under the exigent circumstances exception, their entry onto the property. However, that did not authorize them to conduct a search of the house for evidence of domestic violence. The scope of their entry and search should have been limited to the exigent circumstance that justified the warrentless entry: ensuring her immediate safety. The police raised "possible destruction of evidence" as a reason for the search, but they had no reason to believe, until they searched, that there was evidence to preserve. The exigent circumstances that justified the entry was securing the safety of the girlfriend. Once they entered, they cannot shift their theory and say the exigent circumstance is preventing the destruction of evidence.

As for drugs, it depends. One of the other exceptions to the 4th amendment is that police are entitled to seize evidence in "plain view" during an otherwise lawful entry.[4] Had there been drugs strewn around the house, they would have been admissible. However, the video evidence was not in plain view. They had to go looking for it. If the police have to go looking for it, then that evidence is not admissible. That is true even when the evidence is drugs.

[1] Fernandez v. California, 571 U.S. __ (2014).

[2] Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103 (2006).

[3] Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385 (1978).

[4] Horton v. California, 496 U.S. 128 (1990).

<comment><USER12> Very interesting, thanks. Follow up question: if the girlfriend had said something like "There's a camera in the closet that recorded all this, and he'll probably erase it when you leave" \- do you think that would have been sufficient to make it not a fourth amendment violation? The idea being that they were told about it by the victim, rather than searching for it.

<comment><USER4> My read of the precedent is that when it comes to the invoking the destruction of evidence exception, the exigency must be imminent. If the girlfriend had said there was video tape of the beating, it would take very little time to get a warrant signed. This happened in San Francisco, and a big city like that will have magistrate judges on call 24/7\. Meanwhile, if the police were lawfully on the premises to ensure her safety, they not only could lawfully detain him while waiting to get a warrant, but had probable cause to arrest him for domestic violence. My read is that courts favor a short detention like this over a warrantless search.

I suppose that if she had called and just said: "he's going to delete tapes showing him beating me" they would have exigent circumstances to enter to prevent destruction of evidence, even if the circumstances were such that they didn't otherwise have exigent circumstances to enter to prevent bodily injury. But that's somewhat contrived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Trying to find the written court verdict about the dismissal of the video footage is proving hard... all of the articles cite each other in a big circular loop.

The original court filing and allegations are in here: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/219900669/Gurbaksh- Chahal](http://www.scribd.com/doc/219900669/Gurbaksh-Chahal)

But has anyone got a link to the actual court verdict at the end, or whatever the deal is?

</comment><comment><USER13> For those who are interested in some large companies that use RadiumOne. Would be very interesting to see their stance on this:

[https://twitter.com/PhilippvH/status/459348305991204864](https://twitter.com/PhilippvH/status/459348305991204864)

Porsche, Verizon, United, UMG, & Conde Nast are all mentioned. I'm sure there are countless others.

</comment><comment><USER14> At the risk of evoking the wrath of HN...

It is curious that he was charged with 45 felonies and had a million $ bail (which is ridiculous) yet in the end he plead guilty to 1 misdemeanor charge? Which what happens sometimes when prosecutors want to save face. Plenty of charges are prosecuted with out video so it being ruled inadmissible is a pain but not some insurmountable roadblock. He might be a horrible person, and I will condemn him when I know for sure, but we seem to be possibly missing some details here.

<comment><USER15> Linked article said the victim declined to press charges. Possibly the DA felt it couldn't make a solid case without her cooperation, so they just got him to plead to the misdemeanors.

<comment><USER7> Apparently she went further than declining to press charges, the defendant's lawyer claimed that the victim "'provided photographic proof of an unblemished complexion to SFPD' and filed an affidavit requesting that the investigation be terminated" [0].

[0] [http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/attorney-for- internet...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/attorney-for-internet- mogul-gurbaksh-chahal-call-domestic-violence-charges- overblown/Content?oid=2540544)

<comment><USER16> That is the defense story.

Got salt?

<comment><USER7> I don't understand your expression but I was just quoting a news source without any interpretation implied. I can imagine how such a scenario would hamper the prosecution moreso than someone just not keen on pressing charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a little scary how many people on his Facebook page seem to be defending this shit because "she cheated on him."

</comment><comment><USER18> _With no felony conviction to his name, Chahal can remain on the board of RadiumOne_

I don't know why they'd want him to, though.

</comment><comment><USER19> Who puts a security camera in their own bedroom?

<comment><USER20> A man who thinks his wife is sleeping with another man in their bed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He hit her nearly 4 times every minute for 30 minutes. that's staggering.. i hope this destroys him.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you read something like this happening in a third world country you think is disgusting,but in the USA , i can't find the words.

<comment><USER23> Your comment is disgusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Don't favor vigilante justice but if by chance the victim's brother happened to see this scumbag on the street, I wouldn't waste much sleep over it.</comment>


Preview test pages in multiple browsers within Visual Website Optimizer - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/multiple-browsers-preview/

<comment><USER2> great feature guys.. keep it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Sahil.</comment></comment>


5 reasons to Run Windows 8 on a Mac is via VMware Fusion 4 Boot Camp - <AUTHOR> http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2012/08/the-best-way-to-run-windows-8-on-a-mac-is-via-vmware-fusion-4-boot-into-boot-camp-partition/

<comment><USER2> I've always preferred using Windows alongside OS X in a VM, unless it's a graphics intensive task.

Any reason VMWare is explicitly mentioned? I've always used Parallels and they've had the bootcamp integration for a while now.

<comment><AUTHOR> mainly haven't tried the Parallels method, prior experience with Windows 7 using Paralles always end up running out of memory. I found VMware has a better integration in terms of VMware tools that comes along.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Code to Graph: Visualize JavaScript code as a network diagram - <AUTHOR> https://crubier.github.io/code-to-graph/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I created this tool in order to help code review on Gitlab.

This tool allows to generate diagrams from JS functions. Super useful when you want you and your reviewers to understand some crucial high-level functions in your codebase.

Instead of drawing diagrams on one side, and coding on the other side, with all the translation errors between both sides, we just code a clean high-level function with the specified behaviour, run it through this script, and share the diagram on Gitlab.

Since Gitlab supports embedding diagrams in Comments/Issues/MR using Mermaid JS, the process is super streamlined, it takes 2 clics from code to diagram sharing.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is awesome!</comment>


Internet is slowly being killed by overregulation, censorship and bad laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/08/05/us/ap-us-black-hat.html <comment><AUTHOR> sad, but probably true to a degree. After a given innovation, there's usually a lag time for the government to respond with laws because prior to it, there'd be just abstractions to regulate.</comment>


DNSChain 0.5 released, brings full HTTPS support, Openname Resolver API and more - <AUTHOR> https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/03/dnschain-0-5-released-https-openname-resolver-api-more/ <comment><USER3> Is there a clear readme on dnschain somewhere? I looked at the github repo, but still don't quite get what actual benefits it brings over running one's own dns server? Using the public server obviously still leaks metadata (who looks up what when) - not that such metadata isn't rather obvious anyway by observing traffic between ips. How is it any better than cacert? Because you pin the trust to your own ca? What stops you from doing that now (how is the trust different with dnschain?).

<comment><USER4> DNSChain queries blockchains instead of querying DNS servers. The blockchain would have entries inserted by domain owners detailing their information -- functionally, A, AAAA and TLSA records. All the trust is put inside the blockchain. DSNChain allows you to query the blockchain with "traditional" tools, ie using DNS or HTTP queries.

> How is it any better than cacert? Because you pin the trust to your own ca?

There is no third-party to trust between you and the domain you want to visit (again, assuming the blockchain doesn't lie), so you really have the information the domain owner wants you to have.

<comment><USER3> > (assuming the blockchain doesn't lie)

Well, the blockchian lying is one thing -- another thing is if it tells the truth about lies ("it" has been lied to).

I suppose my confusion stemmed from the fact that dnschain is two things: a way to secure data, and an infrastructure for registering data. Apparently there's no trust at the point of registration, which means the whole thing is entirely untrustworthy from a certain point of view (I don't necessarily thing this is a bad thing/feature -- it's just that without any form of vetting, there can be only a certain _" kind"_ of trust), on the other hand if you trust the registration, you can trust your queries to return data that has been registered.

With the/a CA system, you can trace trust trough keys back to organizations/individuals (that either act in bad faith, or has been compromised) -- but detecting such bad behaviour is out of scope of the CA system.

<comment><USER5> > _and an infrastructure for registering data_

Currently DNSChain supports reading from blockchains. Writing is planned for a future release.

> _Apparently there 's no trust at the point of registration, which means the > whole thing is entirely untrustworthy from a certain point of view_

Trust is not involved "at the point of registration", unless you are referring to trusting a central authority for registering .gov's or something like that (which can be done on a blockchain as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Automatically generates 4096-bit HTTPS key/certificate pair for you

Will this be a problem for low-end phones? Why not ECC certificates?

<comment><USER5> > Will this be a problem for low-end phones? Why not ECC certificates?

That's a great suggestion, thank you. I chose to use RSA because it has excellent browser support and I don't know how good the browser support for ECC is. If anyone has any useful links/info on this I'd appreciate it very much. Note that you can of course generate and use whatever sort of key/cert pair you'd like.

<comment><USER7> I believe CloudFlare's free "Universal SSL" uses ECDSA. Support isn't, um, universal, but it seems to be widespread enough among modern clients.

<comment> ryan-c Clients supporting ECDSA certificates advertise it via a TLS extension - <USER2> server software can actually serve up a RSA or ECDSA certificate depending on what the client claims to support.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley doesn't care about black people - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jedmund/silicon-valley-doesnt-care-about-black-people-a91f9fcce8fc#.s0ookltkz <comment><USER2> The problem isn't that "Silicon Valley doesn't care about black people," it's that those issues they do take a stance on have a clear, prevailing opinion inside the community they're attempting to reach -- and they can use that to make money.

The black community is not monolithic, and the opinions expressed by this man w/r/t police brutality do not encompass the views of everyone these companies might want to reach. Therefore, it's not a solid money-making proposition to take a stance on this issue.

A more appropriate assessment might be, "Silicon Valley only cares about itself and the interests of black police brutality victims don't intersect with that."

</comment><comment><USER3> Polemical headlines doesn't make an argument more persuasive; Silicon Valley companies don't have a say in police use-of-force, but the author knows and is only trying to tie the two topics together for popularity points.</comment>


A New Era for Arduino Begins Today - <AUTHOR> https://blog.arduino.cc/2017/07/28/a-new-era-for-arduino-begins-today/ <comment><USER2> This seems like excellent news.</comment>


The IM Conversation In Which 19-Year-Old Zuckerberg Decided To Build Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-the-im-conversation-in-which-19-year-old-zuckerberg-decided-to-build-facebook-this-years-100-billion-ipo-2012-1

<comment><USER2> Interesting how there's no discussion on his decision to pretend to work on his other obligation, then drop the ball at the last minute in order to ensure that they fail or are severely hobbled because they relied on him.

He even mentions that his motivation for this is to ensure that they don't get someone else to do the work he's deliberately sabotaging due to a conflict of interest.</comment>


TokBox & EtherPad: Video Chat Gets Real-Time Document Editing - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/08/tokbox-etherpad-video-chat-gets-real-time-document-editing.php

<comment><USER2> Just think if AppJet were integrated into this!</comment>


Use a Fictional Tony to Maintain Customer Relationships, and Get Money Faster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makeleaps.com/2010/07/use-a-fictional-tony-to-maintain-your-customer-relationships-and-get-money-faster/

<comment><USER2> I have been wanting to do this in our own company, and in fact, we had decided to do this with a number of roles, assigning them as virtual roles, but a legal adviser told me that if i ever fell into a dispute with a client, where they made their purchasing decision based on the (apparent) size of my company, they could take me to court for mis-representation and i could be done for fraud.

So i think legally, you need to be very careful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a perfect storm of several very unlikely events.

I think when lawyers are involved, theres always a danger of optimising for the worst possible situation, which takes up a lot of time and effort, and often doesn't leave you, your customers or your business in a better situation.

In any case, no matter your final decisions, it's always prudent to be aware of the worst case scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is the reason that we send all invoices out in my girlfriends name because I'm a freelancer and a very small company most of the work I get is from people who know me directly and there is a massive personal relationship there.

It's really easy for money to get in the way of a friendship / client relationship but having a separate third party makes that so much easier to deal with.

It makes it very easy to bring up billing in the middle of of an email.

"It would be great to get together to discuss x next week, I'm across your way on Tuesday if your free (by the way, x mentioned that your invoice is still outstanding, any chance you could take a look at that so she stops moaning at me! :) )"

Makes the whole thing much simpler and gives them an easy way of responding with some humor.

(I will mention that x actually does exist and it is her email, she also looks after the accounts.. my main point was that the separation of the billing parts from the 'doing the work' parts has been a good thing for us)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this identifies a real problem, but I agree with those who are suspicious of the proposed solution. All that goodwill I would gain from playing good-cop-bad-cop with a sockpuppet as my partner will vanish, threefold, if and when my customers begin to suspect that I'm making stuff up. They will commence to wonder how many other aspects of my company are completely fictional, like my portfolio, or my qualifications.

What I wonder is how much it would cost to outsource Tony. The job of being Tony is, in the simplest form, _really_ simple: You have to physically exist, and send out stock emails that I compose for you, and forward the responses to me. Obviously if your Tony candidate can write and speak well and has great customer-service skills they can do more, like actually respond to calls and emails without checking back with you.

<comment><USER5> sounds like a neat business idea. You could get a bunch of polisci majors who can't find jobs in this economy (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545019>) and hire them out to be "fictional tony's". Sort of like a more specific version of the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

<comment><USER6> Amazon Mechanical Jerk. I like it.

<comment><USER7> Nothing about the article says that Tony is a jerk or a thug. Tony's requests for payment will be exactly the same as any other company trying to get paid for their hard work from a customer that is a jackass who won't pay. You start out with polite reminders, and gradually increase the sternness of the letters. At some point you start sending physical letters in the mail, via certified mail, you start printing headers in red, then you switch to the phone calls, and finally, Tony shows up in their front office and sits there every single day and asks to see the president, for as long as it takes. Then you'll get paid. And after the first time this happens, no more products on credit for that customer, payment in advance only.

Also, no products on credit for new customers either. Credit is only for ESTABLISHED customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is terrible advice.

If a client isn't holding up their end of a contract with you it doesn't suddenly make it okay to start lying to them to get what you want.

What happens when the client finds out that you invented a fake person to pressure them into paying you? What happens when word gets out in your industry that you are a liar who will stoop to deceiving your customers if you're not getting what you want?

There are few, if any, things more important in business than your name and your reputation. I would much rather take the loss on the contract and move on than risk being seen as untrustworthy.

<comment><USER7> The fake person is not to pressure them into paying you. It is to separate financial and customer service concerns.

If you want to talk about dishonest no good lowlifes, let's talk about the client who doesn't pay for the product.

<comment><USER9> Dang it, meant to down-vote you, but the voting arrows are broken here forever.

There is no excuse for lying.

<comment><USER7> Establishing a fictional name in order to separate concerns is not lying unless you are prepared to assert that Marion Morrison, Samuel Clemens and Brian Hugh Warner are lying when they do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What if one feels uncomfortable with inventing a fictional person? Is signing emails 'Company X Accounts Dept' a reasonable compromise?

Opinions?

<comment><USER11> You'd be shocked how easy it is to make The Computer into a bad cop.

This is your automatic notice: our accounting system has classified your account as delinquent because $YOU_FAIL_AT_TIMELY_BILL_PAYMENT. If you do not bring your account into positive status, the system will mark your account for escalation of collection activities. To make a payment, $PAY_AS_AGREED_YOU_MAMOO. If you believe you are seeing this message in error, $FEEL_FREE_TO_ASK_ME_TO_MARK_YOU_CURRENT_BEFORE_YOU_PAY because $THAT_WILL_BE_A_FUN_CONVERSATION.

You can automate paper nastygrams -- not that anyone will notice if they're actually sent by hand, mind you...

<comment><USER9> I like how you present a reasonable solution, in the face of a blogger presenting a total nutjob idea addressing the same problem.

It IS much more scary to get semi-automated collections threats, than to talk to some fake guy on email.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry I gave you the wrong impression with that article. My aim was to outline how important this kind of separation is, and I then provided an example of a strategy that I don't employ myself, but other people do. Unfortunately, instead of a discussion based around separation of accounts people and the service providing people, the discussion turned to the ethics of creating fictional employees.

I've edited the article in order to keep the focus on the point I was trying to make. In any case, thanks for taking the time to comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i dealt with a company that did this: after a short time it became obvious what was going on.

as customer i no longer trusted the company: they were lying to me, trying to make their business look bigger than it actually was.

if they were dishonest about this, what else were they being dishonest about?

at the first opportunity, i took my business elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> This opens up an interesting discussion.

To what degree is it alright to 'peacock' your business and appear bigger than you are, if (a) you're absolutely certain you can cover the client requirements, and (b) the client is choosing between you, and a few other solutions/providers?

Out of interest, did this company do something bad to you? Was the service unacceptable, and did you previously have a good working relationship with them?

<comment><USER12> after some time, they delivered me a faulty product: i wanted to return it. it turned out they were 'peacocking' their customer service team as well as their accounts team.

i don't think it's ok to 'peacock'; it's tantamount to fraud.

if your clients are concerned that you cannot cover their requirements, you should address these concerns, not lie to them as this impedes their due diligence. if you get caught, your reputation is destroyed, and i would be surprised if there were no legal recourse.

<comment><USER7> It's amazing you took your business elsewhere because they were "peacocking" and not because their products were faulty, as you said. Most people would take their business elsewhere when they find the quality is unacceptable. But you were OK with the unacceptable quality and planned to continue to be a customer, it was only because of the peacocking that you left.

<comment><USER13> Sounds to me like dododo was initially willing to give them a chance to rectify their mistakes, but not after discovering "they" was a lying weasel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I went back to read the article, I realised that I wasn't portraying my point very well.

My main focus was the importance of separation between accounts and day-to-day client relationships, and I've made changes in the original article to reflect that.

As always, thanks very much to everyone who took the time to post their thoughts, it helped me focus the article on the main issue I was attempting to discuss.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone else think this sounds weirdly passive-aggressive?

</comment><comment><USER15> I've thought of this before, but dismissed it as being completely dishonest. What happens when your client decides he/she likes Tony and decides he wants to take you and Tony out to celebrate some business milestone that your service was key to achieving? Do you get a buddy to play Tony? How far down the rabbit hole will you go? Even worse, what if the clients decides to sue based on some bad advice "Tony" gave? Then you're in all kinds of trouble.

I appreciate the advantages of psychological separation between founder/pal and money chaser, but why not just send an email from 'Accounts?'

</comment><comment><USER16> This is unethical. What happens when a client discovers that you've been deceiving them?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's unethical if you're doing it purely for personal gain.

If you're unable to hire a person to do this for you, having some distance from clients about sensitive financial matters can be beneficial for both you and the client.

It's a decision you need to make though - are you comfortable with this level of 'deception' if it's conducive to better relationships with your clients?

If so, go ahead.

If not, ideally hire someone else, or do it all yourself.

I was fortunate in that I could support an accounts person very soon after I started my business, but I think this strategy is akin to "No, you look great in those jeans", a statement that also benefits both parties. :)

<comment><USER10> Can you outline a scenario where you would be doing this for gain other than personal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure - my point was that it's beneficial to you and the client to have one insulating layer in regards to accounts.

Ideally, you'd want this to be your accounts person.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but in the non-ideal case, the client is still being deceived.

The general question is: do we have the right to deceive people "for their own good"? I say no.

<comment><USER7> They are not being deceived. They are being told to pay for the product they received in accordance with the contract terms they agreed to. There is nothing deceptive about a company wanting to be paid for services rendered or products delivered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You don't have to lie to your clients in order to decouple the billing role from individual people. In my company we have a "email@example.com" alias. Invoices go into a database and are mailed out to customers from that alias. Our billing system logs when the invoice was sent (and re-sent, if necessary). Incoming mail to that alias gets routed to the people responsible for dealing with invoices. Notices of overdue payment can come from the same alias (however we prefer to handle such matters personally and more directly).

If you are a one-man shop, go ahead and create the role alias and then delegate when you grow.

</comment><comment><USER18> Even better but not explicitly mentioned in the article, a fictional Tony gives _you_ some much-needed emotional distance in any money-related dispute. I see countless sole-proprietor businesses suffering damage because the owner, perhaps understandably, takes customer disputes personally. With a fictional bad cop, you are left free to 'play' the good cop, which might even help you to see the customer's side of the situation. Yes, you should do this anyway, but it's clearly harder than it sounds.

<comment><USER10> Are you saying it's easier not to take abuse directed at Tony personally even when you know you are Tony?

<comment><USER19> When you don't sign your own name, it is easier to think your are really playing a role, so it isn't you they are criticizing, it is that guy.

<comment><USER10> Personally it doesn't work that way for me.

On top of it, I'd feel bad constantly for pretending to be a Tony when I'm not one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nah, that's unethical, but...

It could be useful to do this internally. I'm just starting up a business by myself, and I was thinking of making a list of all the roles I need to fill, as a reminder to not just code.

It's easy to put on different hats when reacting to external crises, or events, but I don't want to forget about internal initiatives. E.g. proactive sys-adminning, creating marketing plans, etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems like the best-case scenario here is to just rely on software to do the chasing. Everyone already knows that software is a jerk.

FreeAgent does a great job of telling me when invoices are overdue. If I could configure it to send an obviously-automated email whenever that happens, it'd solve most of my invoice-chasing problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> How would this idea fit in with a web startup? Should the founders be directly handling money issues with users?

<comment><USER14> If you have more than one founder, can't you have one founder be the one dealing with money issues and another founder be the one handling other interactions? Like a good cop/bad cop thing?</comment></comment>


Hilda Geiringer Reshaped Mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191031-hilda-geiringer-mathematician-who-fled-the-nazis <comment><USER3> While I don't doubt that Geiringer did a lot of important work, I'm a little frustrated with how difficult it is to read about that work itself.

Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_\(mathematician\))

Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life.

Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article:

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

Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them.

The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics.

To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law:

[https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law](https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law)

<comment><USER4> For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - <USER2> horror! - in depth discussion of _actual mathematical equations_. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail.

Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.

<comment><USER5> (Public) TV used to be much more intellectual in several countries (including my own, Hungary). Partially because there weren't so many alternatives to compete with. The managers could afford to not care about dumbing it down and people watched it in lieu of more gratifying things.

Clickbait and instant gratification is now the norm and if you don't keep up, you just won't be able to attract enough viewers. Now theoretically publicly funded channels and publications could just ignore viewership/readership numbers, but their management style has also become much more commercial.

"Who wants to be a millionaire" used to be incredibly popular in many countries (it was huge in Hungary). In that show sometimes half a minute is just a person thinking in silence, staring at some question about medieval history or about an opera. How many people would watch this nowadays?

<comment><USER4> Thing is there were plenty of programmes on TV when I was younger that would have had a tiny viewership even back then, and were shown as they fulfilled the required 'boring but worthy' percentage of the BBC's output - these have almost all disappeared to be replaced by facsimiles that pretend to be the same thing but are nothing close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". Wish such articles would come without so much hyperbole.

And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue.

There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.

<comment><USER7> > She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics".

You missed the pun.

<comment><USER6> No I get it, her formula is about ideal shapes (of bridges). It is still misleading. They could have written "who reshaped bridges".

I suppose Grothendieck reshaped Mathematics - he invented a new way of looking at things, that made it possible to prove a host of new things.

In a sense perhaps every mathematical result reshapes mathematics. But they used it here to inflate her importance, to make it seem outrageous that she was supposedly forgotten. As if many Mathematicians are being remembered in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> if we are talking about female mathematicians don't forget Emmy Noether: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether)

<comment><USER9> We are talking about a migrant Jewish female mathematician who was discriminated against trying to start a career in the USA in mid-1940s.

<comment><USER10> Who did not reshape mathematics, unlike Emmy Noether.

<comment><USER11> Yes. When I read the headline, I thought it was going to be about Noether. Even then, I'd argue she reshaped physics, not mathematics itself, unlike, say, Galois or Gödel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This title isn't very good. At least name the person.

<comment><USER13> "Reshaped Mathematics" is quite an exageration.

<comment><USER14> I think it's a pun with plasticity, a field where she did work in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BBC has a way of doing this with titles. They start with a very broad title and then narrow it as the story ages.

</comment><comment><USER15> Summary: Woman contributes to mathematics; can't find appropriate academic position because she isn't a man.

As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too.

The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.

<comment><USER16> If the BBC is trying to build a case that female mathematicians were treated poorly 70 years ago compared to their male counterparts, they would somehow need to show that there wasn't a similar supply of men who made an obscure but significant contribution only to get coldly treated by the establishment (somehow I think there's no shortage). We must be careful to not fall prey to example-ism, building cases out of salient examples instead of evenly sampled trends.

<comment><USER3> Let's not fall into denialism here. There's absolutely no doubt that being a Jewish woman mathematician in the 1930s was doubly difficult than being a male Jewish mathematician -- double the discrimination. Calling Geiringer's situation "example-ism" is up there with doubting the sky is blue because I said I saw blue skies in Italy one time.

<comment><USER16> I have never seen any evidence that women were discriminated against in 1930s mathematics other than specific stories about women being treated coldly by the establishment. I have certainly never seen anyone compare their cold treatment to the ambient coldness.

Look at it this way. If I told you every time a coin came up heads, how many reports would it take for you to conclude that it was biased? The right answer is "the conclusion may never be reached," because I'm not allowing you to tally up the number of times it came up tails. Likewise, despite the huge number of stories about women being denied appointments despite having made significant contributions, no conclusion can be drawn until there is some indication that the effect is unique to women.

Another important point is that even if the 1930s were awful and sexist, there may have been islands of relatively fair people. So in the interest of remembing them as they deserve, it is best to check each social group individually for evidence of their bad behavior, so that you don't end up remembering the one admissions committee that wasn't sexist as just another bias enforcement team.

<comment><USER17> > I have never seen any evidence that women were discriminated against in > 1930s mathematics other than specific stories about women being treated > coldly by the establishment.

So you've seen no evidence of discrimination... other than specific stories of discrimination? What do you think discrimination in academia looks like? A giant sign on the front door of the university that says "NO GIRLS ALLOWED"?

Geiringer was the first woman professor of Mathematics in Germany but she probably wasn't the first woman in Germany who was _qualified_ to hold that position.

<comment><USER16> There is no number of specific stories that should convince anyone, unless there is also some indication that they are being evenly sampled! You would have to compare all of the stories of men who were denied appointments to make a conclusion. To get a probability from a count, you have to divide by something.

<comment><USER18> I mean, isn't the fact that there were virtually no women in academia back in the time a convincing enough proof in itself that there was, indeed, discrimination?

<comment><USER16> Discrimination on the part of gatekeepers isn't the only thing that can keep minorities out. A culture that tells them not to try doing it because it isn't their assigned role, a fear of being the only one of their group among a majority of another group, and _earlier_ discrimination that prevents them from getting qualifications but isn't the fault of the gatekeeper could all be responsible. Given the information I know and what has been brought up in this discussion, University mathematicians could have been perfectly willing to hire women.

<comment><USER18> This is just the good old pipeline fallacy all over again.

<comment><USER19> The fact you like to call it fallacy doesn't make it one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Classic HN baiting; I predict the comments will be over 50% meta-commentary about the title's inaccuracy and possibly something about the principle of highlighting female mathematicians, a sizeable chunk on suggestions for female mathematicians with a larger impact, and very little about Geiringer, her mathematics and her legacy...

<comment><USER21> It's incredibly unfortunate that you're correct, but I'm also not surprised.

Topics like these on HN inevitability devolve into complaints about the media or attempting to divert discussion into something entirely different (like missed male geniuses). Nevermind the pun people missed in the article title as they immediately jumped to attempt to discredit the entire thing.</comment></comment>


No native apps on Windows Phone 7 Series - <AUTHOR> http://androgeek.com/no-native-apps-on-windows-phone-7-series.html <comment><USER2> This actually sounds like a good idea. It gives graphically undemanding, data- driven apps a relatively streamlined dev environment, while game development can draw on the existing mindshare of XNA developers.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a little misleading. Managed code/Silverlight on WPS7 is the equivalent of the iPhone SDK. How low-level does this guy want to go?

<comment><USER4> Kinda funny coming from an Android-centric blog, since by that definition, Android's Java-on-Dalvik apps aren't "native" either.

<comment><USER5> AFAIK you can write native apps for Android. It's just that they won't run on every Android phone, but will be tied to specific architectures (not a big problem since all Android phones seem to use ARM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bad title. On PCs, 'native' means low-level machine code, and managed/non- native means .NET.

But on phones, 'native' means you get access to the phone itself, the OS, and its APIs, and non-native means javascript/html-powered everything.

</comment><comment><USER7> How long before this platform is commonly referred to as "WiPh" (Wiff)?

<comment><USER8> That's still better than Wince.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cell phones have enough horse power!

Let's waste it!</comment>


5 tips for startup ideas - <AUTHOR> http://aquaviva.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/5-tips-for-startup-ideas/ <comment><USER2> A couple notes (it looks to me like the submitter is actually the writer, so I'm putting my comments here):

Some of the ideas are interesting, but I wonder if the writer of the article has actually tried them out. For one thing, asking children and older relatives may present interesting ideas, but how are these people going to get exposure to your ideas if they aren't out looking for them on the Internet?

Also, I had a problem with item 3. "Ask women. It looks like that most of the startup founders are men. This leads to biased view of the world." Okay, this seems like a good start, it is basically stating that diversity can help produce more ideas. Continuing, "Women have better understanding of everyday problems." Whoa, there. Isn't this employing the very bias which the tip is supposed to avoid? I would say that women have better understanding of some problems and men have better understanding of some problems.

4 & 5 were also kind of cheap, in my opinion.

In short, nice thought, some interesting ideas, but I think it could use a little work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: I haven't tried all those tips myself :). I have asked relatives and friends only, but writing in this blog my ideas become clear and it is inspirational for new ideas too.</comment>


Designing RedditRiver.com Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/designing-redditriver-dot-com-website/ <comment><USER2> God, I just love this guy's posts. He's so freaking enthusiastic. It's really infectious. Normally, I'm not a big fan of the exclamation point, but somehow he makes it work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is one project which does a cloud view of top news in reddit. The author has a python and a lisp version. <http://nearfar.org/git.html> But I can't get the url to the actual cloud view page.

</comment><comment><USER4> this guy got some skills.</comment>


Zynga to Buy Peak for $1.8B in Its Largest Deal Ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-01/zynga-to-buy-peak-for-1-8-billion-in-its-largest-deal-ever <comment><USER2> this is the largest acquisition in turkish ecosystem. kudos to everyone involved. i hope this helps the ecosystem to get stronger and better than ever.</comment>


NTRU: Cryptography in Post Quantum Computing World - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NTRUOpenSourceProject/ntru-crypto <comment><AUTHOR> From Page:

A working, full-scale quantum computer running the process known as "Shor's algorithm" would be able to break RSA or ECC of any practical size in negligible time. In contrast, NTRU's security is reduced only slightly by quantum computers.</comment>


Amazon Neptune – Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/neptune <comment><USER2> Awesome surprise to see the embargo lifted -- sounds like I can now say the Graphistry team will be doing a follow-up talk at Amazon Re:Invent tomorrow (Thursday) on Amazon Neptune + Graphistry. We've been incorporating this into visual investigation workflows for security, fraud, health records, etc. They've been doing cool bits on the managed graph layer, and were early to graph GPU tech (Blazegraph team members), and our side starts bringing that kind of thinking to visual GPU analytics & workflow automation tech.

If you're in town and into this stuff, ping me at leo [at] graphistry, and would love to catch up Th/F for coffee+drinks. Also here + email, of course!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you actually read the docs, it's not Janus-based, it's based on BlazeGraph, which Amazon reportedly acquihired last year.

<comment><USER4> Is that public information? I don't see any press releases about it.

<comment><USER3> There was no PR. But there are traces, like Amazon acquired the domains, etc. Many former Blazegraph engineers are now Amazon Neptune engineers according to LinkedIn, etc. It was rumored widely in the graph db world fwiw.

<comment><USER5> To add on Kendall's comment.

Amazon owns the BLAZEGRAPH trademark: [https://www.trademarkia.com/blazegraph-86498414.html](https://www.trademarkia.com/blazegraph-86498414.html)

Blazegraph's CEO is currently at Amazon as Principal Product Manager: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley- bebee-a15764b/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley-bebee-a15764b/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another amazon service to lock you in.

And then after two years, when you're no longer startup with 100usd bill, but bigger company, you're completly tied to a jungle of amazon products, and your exit strategy is very very costly.

clever amazon, clever.

<comment><USER7> There is some truth to this, but in a larger sense (on an ecosystem level, rather than from the perspective of an individual company), I can only be happy when AWS enters a new space. It makes that component into table-stakes in the IaaS game, which means every other big player is about to step up with their own offering as well, and the third-party SaaS and open-source self- hosted offerings in the same space all are going to heat up as well.

Consider the evolution of container hosting services: first we had PaaSes like Heroku with proprietary container formats; then we got Docker, but Docker Swarm was nascent and there was no serious Docker Swarm IaaS-cloud offering. But then, very quickly, AWS built ECS; Google responded with Kubernetes; and then Kubernetes became the open standard, made everyone forget about Docker Swarm, and took over (and is even replacing ECS now.)

 _That 's_ what happens when AWS enters a space. And it's great.

<comment><USER8> It supports RDF/SPARQL which gives you migration options to twenty or so triple stores such as rdflib, Jena, Virtuoso, AllegroGraph, etc.

No lock in at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just an off-topic comment: i am the maintainer of a visual query builder for SPARQL queries. cf [http://datao.net](http://datao.net)

This tool proposes to design query patterns from a graph data model, via drag n drops. The tool can then compile the patterns as SPARQL, run them on an endpoint and format the results as map/forms/tables/graphs/HTML (via templating)/...

Another service of Datao ([http://search.datao.net](http://search.datao.net)) proposes a search-engine view of those queries so you can type the textual representation of an object in any public SPARQL endpoint, and the service will list the queries currently available in Datao that can be applied upon this object. You can then run these queries with a click, and get the HTML templating of the query results.

Feel free to have a look at the website, if you find any interest in this tool. ANy feedback is welcome.

PS: Sorry for the poor quality of the videos. I manage this project on my spare time :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Only had experience with Cypher, really liked it. It will be interesting to see how Neo4j responds to this. Regardless of tech specs, the fully-managed Neptune vs a community version on AWS Marketplace seems to give Neptune unfair advantage.

<comment><USER11> > seems to give Neptune unfair advantage

What do you mean by "unfair" here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this JanusGraph under the covers? Guessing since Neptune is a nod to Janus.

<comment><USER13> [http://janusgraph.org/](http://janusgraph.org/)

Support for various storage backends:

       - Apache Cassandra®
       - Apache HBase®
       - Google Cloud Bigtable
       - Oracle BerkeleyDB

I don't understand how a _database_ doesn't have its own native store. What exactly does a graph database actually _do_ if it doesn't manage the data fed to it? Same is true for CayleyGraph† [https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley](https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley) and proabably others.

†Plays well with multiple backend stores:

       - KVs: Bolt, LevelDB
       - NoSQL: MongoDB
       - SQL: PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, MySQL
       - In-memory, ephemeral

<comment><USER14> There are two main paradigms here

1) "native" graph db Neo4J is an example of this. This takes advantage of index-free adjacency. Each node knows what other nodes it is connected to and hence traversals are very fast. The issues you run into are when you try to scale. Data that fits onto a single machine is fine and you can replicate your data for fast parallel reads/traversals across disparate regions of a massive graph. However you no longer have the concept of data sharding and distributing the graph as index-free adjacencies don't translate across physical machines. And another drawback is highly connected vertices, you will expend a tremendous amount of resources deleting or mutating a vertex with, say, 10^6 edges. But that vertex is probably a bot so you should delete him anyway.

2) inverted index graphs, non-native graphs, whatever anti-marketing name it might have. These rely on tables of vertices and other tables of edges. Indexes make them fast, not as fast for reads but very fast for writes. And you get distributed databases (Cassandra, for example, a powerful workhorse of a backend with data sharding and replication factor, etc.). But then you have to yet another index to maintain and the overhead can get expensive. This is the model adopted by DataStax, who bought Titan DB (hence the public fork to Janus) and integrated it with some optimisations and enterprise tools (monitoring etc, solr search engine) to sit on top of Cassandra.

Both now have improved integration with things like Spark. Cypher is probably faster than Tinkerpop Gremlin especially with the bolt serialisation introduced in recent versions of neo4j.

So janus is the graph abstraction layer of the second type and so needs somewhere to save these relationships. It all comes down to use case (and marketing) to decide what works best for you.

<comment><USER15> Recommended reads on the native vs non-native topic:

* [https://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/a-letter-regarding-native-...](https://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/a-letter-regarding-native-graph-databases) (tldr; there is no such thing as a native graph database)

* [https://neo4j.com/blog/note-native-graph-databases/](https://neo4j.com/blog/note-native-graph-databases/) (tldr; native graph databases do exist)

Regarding Cypher vs Gremlin: serialization could be a thing but what matters among other things are efficient query optimizations, algorithm and (physical) data model. Ultimately, databases are all reading from 1-dimensional spaces (RAM or disk), either randomly or (best) sequentially. If you can colocate vertices with their respective edges, you're fine: this is trivial for graphs with no edges or graphs that form a linear chain. If not, then things start to become fun, especially in a distributed way. This will impact performance; the language, not so much.

<comment><USER14> I'm familiar with Marko and his arguments hence my quotes around "native" ;) But it sounds fantastic for marketing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone explain to me in lamens terms what a graph database is?

<comment><USER11> It's a database that's designed to store relationships between objects instead of just facts. It has efficient methods of following long chains of associations. So think of how you store tree structures in a relational database—there are a lot of different ways of doing it, and they're all frustrating. Storing trees is something graph databases do naturally.

<comment><USER17> Trying to get this straight in my mind here.

Is it fair to say that traditional RDBMS/SQL are for storing different "sets" of related information (tables for products, users, orders).

Graph databases are for storing data about the _same_ set of data as it interrelates to itself.

\- a User and and all their Friends (who are also users) \- a Keyword and all associated Terms (which are also keywords)

Is that right?

<comment><USER18> I think you're concentrating on the wrong thing, here.

Just as RDBMS can have tables about different things (Products, Users, Orders), graph databases can use labels on nodes for different things (so you can have :Product nodes, :User nodes, :Order nodes). Though with graph databases, there is often less rigidity in the associated data than in RDBMS, as there is no requirement for explicit schema for properties on nodes of different types in a graph db (plus you can multi-label nodes).

The real differentiator is how relationships are modeled, and how they're traversed in queries.

With RDMBS/SQL you're going to be working with data in tables, and use join tables as the relationships between them. You're likely going to need to be explicit about what is being joined together, so the relationship chain is likely to be very rigid.

With graph databases, relationships and relationship traversal is used in place of join tables and table joins, which gives much more flexibility over how to traverse. You can certainly do friend-of-friend-of-friend queries much more easily, but you can also perform variable-length traversals using custom logic for which nodes are in the path and which relationships are traversed (type, direction, and count), and that can be very well-defined, or very loosely defined, or a mix, as needed. I don't believe there are good ways to do that kind of ad-hoc table joining in RDBMS.

As an example of very loosely defined traversals in queries, you can ask for a shortest path between two nodes, knowing nothing about the nodes or relationships that could be between them, and get a path back showing the connecting nodes, with the relationships between the nodes providing context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems a lot of Amazon services are managed instances of open source applications. For example, commenters are suggesting this may be based on Janus. Elastic load balancers, at least originally, were likely based on haproxy. Etc etc.

Has anyone ever considered the licensing implications of this? How is amazon able to convert an open source product into a proprietary one and then charge for access to it?

Of course you can argue they're charging for the infrastructure management, not the software itself. But that argument quickly breaks down as Amazon introduces new software, under new names, with a proprietary management interface over an open source core. Try to find the source code; you can't.

And if you accept the premise that they're just charging for hosting, then it leads to the question of why an open source project doesn't reap any benefits from that hosting, or at the very least, from the management interface on top of it.

It seems like a better solution would be something akin to AWS marketplace, where open source projects are available to be hosted, and the maintainers can see some revenue from them.

It seems like unfair rent seeking behavior that amazon is able to slap a management interface on open source software and then charge for it under the guise of "hosting."

<comment><USER20> > How is amazon able to convert an open source product into a proprietary one > and then charge for access to it?

Totally no problem with liberal licensed open source software.

This is also the intended behaviour of such licenses.

Also many of those big bad commercial companies contribute back big time to a number of projects. Why? I guess sometimes because devs want to and also because it makes sense business wise so they don't have to maintain the code themselves.

<comment><USER19> Depends on the license, doesn't it? I'm not a licensing expert, but my understanding is GPLv2 / copy left licensing means that if you create a derivative product, you need to open source the new code along with the dependencies.

Seems like a management interface is a clear cut derivative product. Where's the source code?

Or perhaps amazon _does_ consider licensing and only builds on top of, eg Apache licensed projects?

<comment><USER20> Actually GPL allows you to keep your source code as long as you don't ship the software and only allows users to use it over the network. (The full truth is a bit more nuanced.)

The newer AGPL closes this loophole.

And yes: except for Linux and the GNU tools I guess most companies stick with Apache, BSD, Eclipse and MIT licensed software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So I get that this offers simpler paradigm for graph data, but how should we interpret the "fast & scalable" claim? Is it...

a) Slower than RDBMS/NoSQL but still pretty respectable, so it's a good choice for things like offline analysis.

b) About the same at RDBMS/NoSQL, so you could use it to handle production traffic if you want.

c) Faster, so you should definitely prefer it in production, e.g. for fetching upvotes and comments on posts.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why "Neptune"? Having a hard time riddling that name out.

<comment><USER23> Two other well known graph databases are "Janus" and "Titan" both of which are named after ancient gods

<comment><USER24> Janus is a fork of Titan, BTW. The core Titan devs got acquired by Datastax and redirected to their graphDB offering. Titan stagnated, then got forked as Janus under the Linux Foundation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are they using X1 ? [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/x1/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/)

For efficient graph DBs it's better to have a lot of ram and cores ...

<comment><USER9> Or they choose a horizontally-scalable architecture, a la TitanDB.

Btw, anyone knows how such solutions handle cross machine traversals? Are they schema-based? So the DB knows how to manage data locality and efficient joins/traversals?

<comment><USER26> I don't know about Neptune -- curious to hear what it is based on -- but TitanDB never really supported cross-machine traversals for the execution engine. The data was stored in a distributed fashion (across say a Cassandra cluster), but any instance of the execution engine was single-machine, with no easy way to talk between multiple instances of the execution engine.

<comment><USER27> One database service that supports horizontally scaled graphs is Azure CosmosDB Graph API: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/graph- intro...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/graph-introduction)

Worth to take a look if you need a managed Gremlin solution with some degree of global distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Super excited about this!!!!! BUT The preview link ([https://pages.aws.com/NeptunePreview.html](https://pages.aws.com/NeptunePreview.html)) is broken, can anyone at AWS team help us with that?

<comment><USER29> [https://pages.awscloud.com/NeptunePreview.html](https://pages.awscloud.com/NeptunePreview.html)

<comment><USER30> "Your storage cost will be $0.10 per GB-mon0h," on [https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/pricing/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1 point by lolive 14 hours ago [-]

I really hope Amazon will propose a facility to retrieve the RDFS data model of an endpoint in a uniform way.

</comment><comment><USER31> What inferencing does it offer to RDF?

How would I bolt on an inference engine to this if none is offered, i.e. to provide OWL:RL?

</comment><comment><USER32> It could be a modified JanusGraph frontend backed by DynamoDB.

</comment><comment><USER33> For wider context here, is this leading the pack or do other public clouds have competing products already?

</comment><comment><USER34> Sadly they use Gremlin that is so often said to have poor performances

<comment><USER35> AFAIK gremlin is just a query language - it shouldn't have much to do with performance.

<comment><USER14> Gremlin is indeed the query language but requires a gremlin engine. This is generally passing strings to the DB (which gives you advantages like pushdown- predecate, essentially DB-side filtering) but there is associated overhead with something like Cypher that is now serialised and very fast with the Bolt protocol

<comment><USER34> that was my point but my Rhetoric was not as good as yours :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting that it doesn't support GraphQL, but rather Gremlin and SparQL. Surely that will impact adoption.

<comment><USER37> I love GraphQL and use it quite a bit, but the "graph" part of it is a bit of a misnomer given all the existing graph database and query technologies. It doesn't really offer anything in terms of interacting with RDF triples or making complex graph queries. It has no relational algebra semantics or ability to query relationships between arbitrary nodes, which is what folks using graph databases typically want.

(I didn't downvote you though, it's a common misconception.)

<comment><USER38> > It doesn't really offer anything in terms of interacting with RDF triples or > making complex graph queries.

SPARQL is supported.

<comment><USER37> Yes, I was talking about GraphQL.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is up with the "scroll your own movie" websites? - <AUTHOR>

There seems to be a hype around websites which provide no controls except scrolling like this http://www.mozilla.org/de/firefox/os/
This is a terrible user interface. It is basically a video where you have to scroll for it to play. You keep ending up with half complete animations all the time and sometimes it is really hard to see that you even can scroll. (The above site even provides helpful blinky downwards arrows at times.)
Can anybody tell me what the merit of this method is? Is it just designers trying to show off?
And when did the firefox turn into an actual fox instead of a red panda? <comment><USER2> Other examples include [http://www.apple.com/iphone-5c/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-5c/) and [http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com](http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com) .

Trent Walton actually wrote an article about it: [http://trentwalton.com/2013/10/23/scroll- hijacking/](http://trentwalton.com/2013/10/23/scroll-hijacking/)

I myself sometimes trigger animations depending on the scrolling position. But I don't depend upon the _exact_ scrolling position to show or hide elements. I, like you, don't like this trend. It's like a vertical slider, where you can only stop at pre-defined positions.

It reminds me of custom scrollbars implemented in Flash or JavaScript that act completely differently, especially slowing down the scrolling movement (you need to turn your mouse wheel 10 times as much to scroll one single page).</comment>


Healthcare.gov data center fails, hobbling state and federal insurance exchanges - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/28/5037766/healthcare-gov-data-center-fails

<comment><USER2> Single point of failure. E.g. subsidity calculations for everyone, including all state exchanges, and, perhaps one day, insurance companies (it's on the list but at a very low priority) must be done by the Federal site.

Why are we not surprised not even this part has any redundancy?</comment>


The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

<comment><USER2> The slave trade accounted for an estimated 12 million victims.

Modern day human trafficking accounts for an estimated 21 million victims worldwide, according to the Polaris Project. [0] [1]

Food for thought. Donate today: [http://www.seetheunseen.org/](http://www.seetheunseen.org/)

[0] [http://www.polarisproject.org/human- trafficking/internationa...](http://www.polarisproject.org/human- trafficking/international-trafficking)

[1] [http://www.cicatelli.org/titlex/downloadable/human%20traffic...](http://www.cicatelli.org/titlex/downloadable/human%20trafficking%20statistics.pdf)</comment>


Bitcoin Price Slumps Again - <AUTHOR> http://coinde.sk/1hDdOuL <comment><USER2> As long as bitcoin is seeing these huge crashes for no real reason, it's not a mature investment vehicle. There's absolutely no valid reason to sell right now, this crash is just driven by panicking people. I think this is mostly because too much wealth is in the hands of too few people, and people who never really traded before (techies, mainstream people, novice traders, etc.) now invested in bitcoin, and try their hands on trading.

I hope all this panic selling will lead to a better distribution of the bitcoins, so that it may become a more stable investment vehicle. These random huge crashes aren't doing bitcoin much good. People want stability if they are to accept this as a currency.

<comment><USER3> Aren't those all arguments in favor of liquidating any position in BTC?

<comment><USER2> Yea, they may be. But not now. The trader's goal is to buy low, and sell high. Selling low makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> a trader needs to cut his losses. Selling low makes more sense than losing all.

<comment><USER2> Agree with the cutting losses, but we see these patterns all the time with bitcoin. Big chance it will be up to old levels in 4 days. The long-term sentiment for bitcoin is very bullish (or at least that's my opinion). Cutting losses is not a very logical strategy for long positions in bitcoin imho.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that at some point any rational trader will want to cash out at least some profits. This swings are showing how little it takes to tank the price. The less liquidity there is, the more academic the trading price is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just watched it go down from 750$ to 710$ in something like 5 minutes.

I know that it fluctuates like that other times too but this is extraordinary to watch.

[http://bitcointicker.co](http://bitcointicker.co)

PS: I got my first bitcoins 3 days ago. So, if you want something else to crash to ground, just let me touch it.

<comment><USER6> Oh, you must be one of the first people who tried to access healthcare.gov then :-) that explains it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There isn't a crash in bitcoin price, there is a market sale going on just in time for the holiday. Entry points in down markets is smarter than entry points at the peak of they hype. This happens on the stock market everyday. When buying, red is green.

In the end, crashes filter out the most speculative and eventually the shorts (in other markets -- the only way to short bitcoin is selling so it will be more volatile during these machinations, it will need shorting soon as it does help keep a solid bottom), there is apparently lots of speculation padded in the recent bitcoin price.

</comment><comment><USER8> With market activity like this, it seems humorous to hear stories of employees' [0] _salaries being paid in BTC_.

[0] - [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57614544-93/kentucky- police...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57614544-93/kentucky-police-chief- to-be-paid-in-bitcoin/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the Chinese Central Bank action (discussed on HN here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6853305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6853305)) prevented Chinese citizens from converting RMB into BTC directly from their bank accounts? Might be behind some of this (from what I understand, BTC was one of the only ways mainland Chinese citizens could /legally/ convert RMB into other currencies above the daily limit).

<comment><USER10> The interesting thing is you can still use bitcoin to convert RMB to USD regardless of bank policy, by investing in mining. If you can pay for the costs of mining (hardware + electricity) in RMB, you can then sell the coins you mine for USD, completely bypassing capital controls. Even if you are mining at a slight loss, it might still be worth it to someone really keen on turning more RMB into USD then otherwise allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The tiny division of Baidu which "quit" accepting Bitcoin (and was the only part of Baidu which ever accepted BTC) was tiny. Think 1/10,000th of Baidu.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bitcoin is crashing hard right now. Down to $730 on Mt. Gox, the lowest since November 21.

<comment><USER13> Dropped from $800 to ~$700 in the last 15 minutes:

[http://bitcointicker.co/](http://bitcointicker.co/)

<comment><USER12> Yup, just went down $30 in under 3 minutes. It's in free-fall.

<comment><USER14> This is when you are thankful for slower transaction times than the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yawn. Of course it did. Listen folks, China was driving value. The upticks now are the clueless looking to make some money. If you believe in it, by all means. If you're looking to buy for profit, please don't. I stand by my prediction of sub 100 soon...

</comment><comment><USER16> The Difference per "exchange" are interesting. A buy at [https://www.coinmama.com/](https://www.coinmama.com/) is still over $1050

A buy at [https://www.mtgox.com/](https://www.mtgox.com/) is $750

That's not quite but really close to 50% more than MtGox.

<comment><USER17> This ought to be a giant warning sign.

Illiquidity of that magnitude should suggest that you stay the fuck away, that there's no real market in bitcoins and therefore that the risk is probably much greater than you perceive.

But, hey, this just means that I'm envious of all your internet riches, or something like that, so feel free to disregard.

<comment><USER16> Actually, I only just bought A coin. And mostly because it will be more fun to watch with skin in the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow I lucked out. I bought about $70 in Bitcoin earlier this year. Cashed out on Monday fir $800, I needed the money for some car repairs. Looks like I might be able to repair my car and spend the leftover to get just as much BTC as I had last week.

<comment><USER19> And all from the comfort of your own home in your spare time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Couldn't this just all be someone dumping a huge amount of their Bitcoins to convert it to real $?

Same thing can happen when someone who owns a lot of stock in a company lets go of a huge amount of stocks in a company all at once..

<comment><USER21> I was wondering when Satoshi Nakamoto would decide to cash out.

If one (or several) big account(s) was making a huge trade like that, though, it would be visible on the block chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is crazy fun to watch. I just bought 4 bitcoins at $685 from Coinbase and it's already up to $777 just 10 minutes later. I think I hit the right time to buy, now I wait for it to go to $2000.

<comment><USER23> I think it's going to be pretty wild for the next few days/weeks because of the China news. I would sell at $777 and wait for the ride to be over before I bought in again. I got out earlier today at $900 anticipating the China news to sink in later today. Sure enough when China wakes up it crashes.

I'm going to wait until it stabilizes around a price before I buy again.

The good news: China can't ban BitCoin as a currency again, and the US looks like it isn't going to.

<comment><USER24> China woke up and itsnot crashing that much more.

<comment><USER25> Look at a chart of the last 30 hours. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions minute to minute here, it's anybody's guess where things will be in a few days (I suppose as is per usual with bitcoin).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just gained 100 dollars in a minute.

</comment><comment><USER27> Lost about $8000... made it back within not long. ughhh my stomach

<comment><USER28> Lost, as in you've invested N+8000 USD, and were down to N, or as in lost out on the opportunity to cash out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Under $660 now.

<comment><USER29> Over $800 now. I guess someone with a large wallet just dumped everything carelessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Went from 780 to 650 and back to 890 in 50 minutes.</comment>


Why does Gmail delay outgoing email? (for up to two days) - <AUTHOR> http://sites.inka.de/W1787/Google/2017-01-17+01_delayed.eml <comment><USER3> That message is short and consists of just a link to something, and one of the addresses may be tainted by recent SPF failures. At a guess, some heuristics may have decided to wait a little and see if that URL goes away due to abuse complaints.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the record, I also see delays with messages that primarily contain text, though many or all of these messages also contain a URL somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Welcome to the 1980s: SMTP is a best-effort, store-and-forward protocol - <USER2> fact that 90% of e-mail is delivered, that it's delivered near-instantly and that it's delivered directly(tm) to the destination server, now these are just accidental properties. In reality, there's no guarantee on any of these - there is even no guaranteed upper bound, e-mails can, in some cases, take _weeks_ to be delivered.

TL;DR: e-mail sucks, do not depend on it.

That said, this seems to be the actual culprit: `softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning @gmail.com does not designate 2a04:c9c7:0:1073:217:a4ff:fe3b:e77c as permitted sender)`

<comment><AUTHOR> The `Received-SPF: softfail` header is added between mail-oi0-f43.google.com and mail.inka.de. There is only a delay of one second.

The two day delay, however, happens on the sender's side, between the Google SMTP servers 10.202.76.146 and mail-oi0-f43.google.com.

In general, email received from Gmail users is delayed, often for one/two hours, rarely for a day or more.

<comment><USER4> In that case, that's e-mail working as designed. Adjusting expectations might be in order - and perhaps adopting an alternate protocol suitable for reliable+fast message delivery.</comment></comment></comment>


Supercomputers will start building a 3D map of the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2019/08/05/supercomputers-will-start-building-a-3-d-map-of-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Serious question: what on earth have supercomputers got to do with this?

My impression is supercomputers exist mainly for incredibly intensive large- scale simulation/calculation that can't be subdivided into parts -- e.g. weather or nuclear explosion simulation.

3D map processing feels like the literal opposite of that -- trivially parallelizable, with a much higher ratio of data/IO to calculation.

Are they running out of tasks for Blue Waters to do, or trying to find a high- profile project to justify it politically or something? I really can't imagine for the life of me why you wouldn't just run this in any enterprise-grade cloud.

<comment><USER3> Creating a 3d model out of 2d images requires computer vision to extract objects in the images and estimate their dimensions (including elevation). This will most likely require implementing an end-to-end deep learning model that's gonna need training, validation and test. Given the amount of data it'll have to deal with (100ks to millions of images) it'll need to load (high dimensional?) images in batch for them to get processed. This can still be done arguably on aws or Azure (or or...) with TensorFlow and HPC, but two things here, HPC bring a bit more overhead to the table, and a supercomputer could do better since none of the current cloud service providers have supercomputers that can compete especially in terms of cpu performance.

<comment><USER4> Theres no reason it needs a DL model. There's a lot of software that calculates tie points and creates point clouds from pictures, which is what they are almost certainly going to do here. DL to go from orthoimages to point cloud, if it is a thing, is probably still in the feasibility steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's already multiple global DEM data sources. It would be good to understand how this is better and what the planned accuracy is. Its a very light article

[edit]

Their referenced Arctic DEM gives a 2m resolution however on accuracy notes 'Without ground control points absolute accuracy is approximately 4 meters in horizontal and vertical planes'.

This is much better than most global data (SRTM and ASTER both at 30m resolution)

However it is not as high resolution as many existing free models for individual parts of the globe. As an example here in Australia I can get free 1m resolution DEMs of cities with accuracy noted at "0.3m (95% Confidence Interval) vertical and 0.8m (95% Confidence Interval) horizontal".

<comment><USER6> >As an example here in Australia I can get free 1m resolution DEMs of cities

source please?

<comment><USER5> [https://elevation.fsdf.org.au/](https://elevation.fsdf.org.au/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article misses the point a bit. There are 3D maps of the world, or rather, you can make your own on a weekend. Topographic data is out there for most things, the problem is just it's very inconsistent and of course, resolution. And I guess for the whole world you do need a decent computer.

To prove my point, here is some art I made [1] from open data (I think NASA) with Blender and QGIS, meaning free software stack on very much a normal computer. My model was the state Schleswig Holstein, a german county, but as said, you can find data for pretty much everything. The resolution is not astonishing, but enough to spot Germany's only high sea island, the "Wattenmeer" where tide causes some spots to lie below water level on average, the mouth of the Elbe and more cool stuff when you know where to look.

My point isn't to downplay the effort of EarthDEM, I just want to make more people aware of what is already very much out there :)

[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/rZUTajX](https://imgur.com/a/rZUTajX)

<comment><USER8> > And I guess for the whole world you do need a decent computer.

Nope, resolution is the problem, not scale. You need low orbit stereo photos, like from an airplane. Without clouds. With satellite you only get 30m, with airplanes you get under 1m. Cities usually rent a plane a year to adjust their maps. Countries don't, they usually just rely on the cheap satellite photos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish every game depicting the real world contribute to a common 3D world repository. And maybe allow crowd sourcing that repository too. Imagine what we would get to play in flight simulators or driving simulators with such a repository.

<comment><USER10> And imagine when some internet forum decides to put a phallic object on top of some significant building, and all go vote it as legitimate. I'm not claiming it's impossible, but there will certainly be obstacles (see wikipedia). This has to be one data-set we get right; with self-driving cars coming, it could cause injury or death if we don't.

<comment><USER11> Like you said: See Wikipedia.

<comment><USER10> Right, but Wikipedia still has lots of issues with vandalism. They do a good job, but it's just not accurate to keep something perfect at that scale. Here's the difference: wikipedia gets vandalized and people laugh. Mapping data gets vandalized and people could die.

<comment><USER11> The world is a dynamic place. People and AI need to be able to reconcile when what they see doesn't match a map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very valuable effort. Global mapping data should eventually enter the public domain.

</comment><comment><USER13> Supercomputers are exactly the wrong sort of tool to use for this- nearly every supercomputer has crappy disk IO and tons of fast CPU and RAM and network. Using a supercomputer for this would leave the expensive elements like the GPUs nearly idle, and the IO subsystem would be the bottleneck.

<comment><USER14> I'm confused by this comment, especially since you seem to work with super computers. One of the biggest challenges in ECP (exascale computing project) is disk IO. So much so that they were inventing complicated heterogeneous architectures. In fact many teams are just skipping disk all together and using in situ methods, only saving results. I would think that would be needed here.

But the question is what heavy processing computer doesn't have IO issues? Also, Blue Waters isn't really a GPU super computer like Summit and Sierra are (or the up coming Aurora and Frontier). It has 4228 nodes (out of ~27000 nodes) that have GPUs on them, and they only have one, and they are Keplers. Those aren't great GPUs and aren't going to do very well in parallel either. There's a big bottleneck in GPU IO. I think this program will not be utilizing GPUs very heavily. Worse, they don't have many CPUs per node. It's 8-16 cores and 32-64 GB memory per node. There's going to be a lot of time spent in communication.

I'll admit that BW doesn't seem like the best computer to the job, but you use what you got. I'll buy the argument that this is the wrong computer for the specific job, but what would you use besides a super computer? (I think Summit would be a good computer for this job)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone in the know - why do you need a supercomputer for this? From an amateur position it seems suitable for commodity compute and a big ol map- reduce.

Getting chunk edges to align might be tricky, but the usual solution to that is to stagger the chunks and throw away the edges.

<comment><USER16> There's not really a huge difference between supercomputers and a large number of ordinary computers these days. The computational hardware is basically the same. Only the communication interconnects are different.

I strongly suspect that they don't need a supercomputer, but they had one available and it sounds cool. I sit one building over from the ~13th largest supercomputer in the world and I've definitely used it when I needed a bit more computing power than my laptop could provide. I used the supercomputer because I could, not because I needed to.

<comment><USER13> Did you have an embarassingly parallel code (like, "map"), or a code that was ported to supercomputers?

I've worked on supercomputers for years and generally, one could not run code at scale unless it scaled- in terms of parallel performance- and also used the network in a non-trivial way. Supercomputers aren't just speedups for normal codes (I'm pretty sure you know this).

The real issue with modern supercomputers is that basically none of them have decent disk IO. That's what differs between modern Internet/cloud clusters and supercomputers. Cloud clusters emphasize very high connectivity between durable storage and worker nodes. None of the supercomputers have a decent disk IO stack (mostly GPFS and Lustre) and this ends up being no end of pain for applicaiton developers. The only recent improvement in this area was "burst buffers", but that's really just accelerated data staging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Article title is misleading. It's not "3D map", like city map with 3D buildings or something like that, it's just a DEM, digital elevation model. It's not a map at all.

It's useful for addition information to build a map, but it's not a map.

</comment><comment><USER18> I found a much better source regarding this in the form of a November 2018 white paper[1]. Interesting is that they say it will take 3.2-3.5 years of Blue Waters computing time.

[1]: [https://www.exascale.org/bdec/sites/www.exascale.org.bdec/fi...](https://www.exascale.org/bdec/sites/www.exascale.org.bdec/files/whitepapers/Kramer_BDEC2__WP_v2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> When I was in port in Gitmo in 1987 there was a civilian boat in harbor with a large tethered balloon. They were mapping Cuba for the US Defense Mapping Agency(DMA).

So I would guess that DMA had a 3D terrain map around 1989. I know it was used for cruise missile flight planning. No idea what the resolution was.

Even with our very detailed underwater mapping the Navy still has areas that are not well covered.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy- ships/a24158/...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy- ships/a24158/uss-san-francisco-mountain-incident/)

</comment><comment><USER20> This has already been a thing for at least a year.

For example: Go to Google Maps, satellite view. Then zoom in and rotate with Ctrl + click & drag. [https://email@example.com,-96.8061872,1158a,35...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-96.8061872,1158a,35y,11.78h,55.61t/data=!3m1!1e3)

Microsoft and Mapbox also have an experimental project where computer vision on cars maps the location of recognized objects. This is probably true of every company researching self-driving cars.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am wondering what resolution they work with. Because earth crust is moving continuously, and sometimes suddenly like 6 feet at once: [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-22/ridgecre...](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-22/ridgecrest- earthquake-images-broken-ground) I like the idea to survey the whole planet, I would be curious to see what resolution they end up with, and how often it is updated.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a bit strange that they use DigitalGlobe imagery, since DigitalGlobe owns 50% of Vricon who use aerial and satellite photos to make 3D maps. Their tagline is "The globe in 3D".

[https://www.vricon.com/news/saab-digitalglobe-announce- vrico...](https://www.vricon.com/news/saab-digitalglobe-announce-vricon-joint- venture-create-globe-3d/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The Arctic 3D map mentioned in OP, [https://livingatlas2.arcgis.com/arcticdemexplorer/](https://livingatlas2.arcgis.com/arcticdemexplorer/) \-- covers the whole area from 60deg N.

</comment><comment><USER8> Marketing: "With EarthDEM, we will take this transformative new capability to where most of us live, to cities and coastlines, that will directly impact their lives."

Tech: We need these maps for our cruise missiles.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another step in the right direction, but satellites will continue to be the bottleneck to unlocking the full value of maps.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there currently a way to get the elevation of a point? I know Google Earth has one but it's very imprecise

<comment><USER26> Here is one option: [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-elevation- data?qt-...](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-elevation-data?qt- news_science_products=7#qt-news_science_products)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This public effort is still way behind private efforts like google earth, it seems.

<comment><USER28> You say that like it's written in the article but I don't see it. And even if (!) the quality of the map were slightly below google maps, having it freely available would be a huge plus nevertheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is very exciting. One step closer to a manual for spaceship earth.

</comment><comment><USER30> How is this different than Google Earth / Maps?

</comment><comment><USER31> The silent cartographer

</comment><comment><USER32> Paging Hiro Protagonist

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't they already have the map of the world in 3D?</comment>


Packing algorithms could save the planet - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16716-recordbreaking-algorithm-really-packs-them-in.html

<comment><USER2> simulated annealing is really old, and sounds like a similar effect: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing>

Though explicitly representing back-steps in a search is an interesting idea. It doubles the order of complexity, which will result in the square root of the depth available.</comment>