EC2 I/O - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at-ec2-io/

<comment><USER2> I've been working on some similar analysis with EC2 and other providers. I think the big missing point in this post (acknowledged by the author) is with regards to EBS optimized instances and provisioned IOPS where we've observed a dramatic improvement in IO consistency. Another interesting observation I've experienced is that performance consistency often declines using multi-EBS volume raid, likely due to variations in spindle tenancy or network latency variations. EBS test volumes were 300GB. Better performance/consistency is possible using larger EBS volume sizes.

Here are links to a couple summaries of the analysis I've done on EC2, Rackspace and HP. I plan on writing a blog post regarding this analysis soon.

Disk Performance: The value columns is a percentage relative to a baremetal baseline 15k SAS drive, where 100% signifies comparable performance. Benchmarks included in this measurement are fio (4k random read/write/rw; 1m sequential read/write/rw), fio – Intel IOMeter pattern, CompileBench, Postmark, TioBench and AIO stress:

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/1012-disk-io- analysis/disk-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/1012-disk-io- analysis/disk-performance.html)

Disk IO Consistency: The value column is a percentage relative to the same baseline. A value less than 100 represents better IO consistency than the baseline. The value is calculated by running multiple tests on an instance, measuring the standard deviation of IOPS between tests, and comparing those standard deviations to the baseline. Testing was conducted over a period of a month on multiple instances in different AZs.

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/1012-disk-io- analysis/disk-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/1012-disk-io- analysis/disk-consistency.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the keys reasons I recently started my new project, Uptano (shameless plug: <https://uptano.com>), and all servers use dedicated RAID 1 (two drives) with 10K RPM or SSD storage.

The same issue applies to network performance. I've seen very expensive EC2 instances that couldn't even push 50 Mbit/s to the net, while instances of the same type could at least do a few hundred Mbit/s. AWS' answer was always to simply buy even more expensive instances, so _less_ people are sharing, but that's a terribly costly answer.

I'm doing bonded (802.3ad) 2x1 Gbit/s connections on all servers, because that's what I wish EC2 had.

Multiple customers, with highly varied workloads, sharing the same physical server hardware is simply a fundamentally flawed idea. IMHO, it only makes sense to use a VPS for very small personal projects, where you don't want to justify ~$140/mo in server costs.

EC2 was a really novel thing and it brought lots of great technology to the scene, but they made a few fundamentally wrong choices.

<comment><USER4> We've had similar issues in the past like when we've used RDS for some of our projects (In particular issues with disk IO). AWS a great place to start, but chances are the "one size fits all" solution is going to get difficult once you're doing more advanced tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. We'd like this work to be a useful resource - everyone benefits when there's more / better information about how these complex cloud systems perform in real life. So please comment with suggestions, questions, or any other feedback!

<comment><USER5> I wish you tested with larger numbers of EBS volumes. I've just started researching EC2 and EBS, and the links I saw seemed to indicate that large numbers of EBS volumes with raid0 smooths out the performance (8,16,24 volumes). [http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs...](http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs/)

The graphs are very well done. That amount of data would have been incomprehensible if not for your carefully thought out charts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I did put in quite a bit of work in finding the best ways to present the data, which depending on how you count is around five- or six-dimensional.

I'll see whether we can work larger RAID configurations into a follow-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article got all the way through it. It was similar to what we saw, is that ephemeral storage on large and xlarge are almost always the way to go. One thing missing from the article was a good comparison of $/iops and $/iops/storage between the instance types.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

$/iops between storage types is the subject of the "Cost Effectiveness" charts near the top of the post, but I suspect I'm not quite catching your meaning. What do you mean by $/iops/storage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Enjoyed the article, but it feels very incomplete without discussion of the solid-state, provisioned iops, and ebs optimization options. Would be interesting to see if those get rid of the bad apples and what sort of benefit they give.

</comment><comment><USER8> Really great article and neat product!

One question: on the throughput graphs, I understand why you normalized them per graph, but were there any differences between graphs (particularly in terms of EBS vs. ephemeral) that would be sufficient to drown out the variability within the throughput graphs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the differences between graphs were fairly substantial. You can get a sense of the EBS vs. ephemeral difference by looking at the "Throughput by Threadcount" graphs (about 1/3 of the way through the post). Briefly, EBS has much higher throughput for random writes; ephemeral (instance storage) is faster for reads and bulk writes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What size were the EBS volumes? Would be interesting how important the volume size is to performance.

If you only provision 1TB (or larger if they have them available now) EBS volumes then you'd have spindles dedicated to you whereas with smaller ones there might be a lot more variations because you share.

More background: [http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and- using-...](http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon- ebs.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're double-checking, but it looks like all of the EBS volumes were 100GB. It would be interesting to see the impact of using 1 TB volumes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Confirmed: all EBS volumes were 100GB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, it shows "4-EBS RAID" getting around 2.6x speedup for 4k writes. They don't say what RAID configuration they are using, but it sounds odd.

A 4k write has to be synced to all the disks unless they have a <=4k stripe size AND are using RAID-0 AND are using stripe-aligned IO ops. It's also possible they use 4k writes to cache that end up forming large dirty blocks which the OS then syncs as larger I/Os. But that would be measuring something else than the benchmark claims.

<comment><USER10> Correcting myself: they do say in the methodology section that they are using RAID 0 and say that the write benchmark is multithreaded. So that explains it, it's measuring write throughput for 4k writes.

Nothing to see here, move on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> i wish OP would've atleast included some "conclusion/final words". for someone in the same boat of choosing the right platform, this benchmark serves no real help in deciding which to go with. a comparison with Rackspace Cloud for one, would be very helpful.

<comment><USER12> I think the conclusion is that you need to provision a lot of machines, and benchmark your own workload thoroughly to assess any cloud provider. That way you'll have solid performance numbers that are relevant to your case. They (rightly, in my mind), don't come down one way or the other on particular instances or options, because the cost/value analysis depends so specifically on your workload. If you know your workload very well already, they give enough detail that you could reuse some of their data.

<comment><USER13> Or not worry about it so much and just go with good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazon's IO/IOPS performance is pale on comparison to a lot of providers (shameless plug): <http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/io></comment>


Face detection – An overview and comparison of different solutions - <AUTHOR> https://www.liip.ch/en/blog/face-detection-an-overview-and-comparison-of-different-solutions-part1 <comment><USER3> Note that if you use open source models, it's orders of magnitude cheaper. In my own tests, an off the shelf face DNN-based face detector [1] ran at 20 FPS on a 16 vCPU machine (Google Cloud). With our hand-rolled distributed execution engine [2], we processed around 40 million images for about $2000, which is 14x cheaper than the cheapest figure cited in OP. I don't know the accuracy difference, but it sounds like OP will cover this in the next post.

[1] [https://github.com/davidsandberg/facenet/tree/master/src/ali...](https://github.com/davidsandberg/facenet/tree/master/src/align)

[2] [https://github.com/scanner-research/scanner](https://github.com/scanner- research/scanner)

<comment><USER4> It's not open source, but our FR software runs on as low as a $100 Intel Compute Stick, while still providing 10+million FR compares per second, at accuracy rates in the 90's. On a 3.4Ghz i7 we provide 24M compares per second. That could be video or stills, acquired from live cameras, media files, or still images, via local/network storage, rtsp and related ip streams, or a REST API. Exports have full customization, able to include video tracked heads, pose corrected heads, and even full 3D mesh reconstructions of each tracked face per frame. If one wanted, video "face swaps" are a piece of cake with our software. Not open source, if the expenses above are typical, we cost far less less than using open source: [https://cyberextruder.com/facial- recognition-software/](https://cyberextruder.com/facial-recognition-software/)

<comment><USER5> I don't see pricing or a download/demo link on your website.

"Please contact us for a facial recognition demo or to discuss your requirements for a facial recognition technology solution."

My assumption from that is the price is way too high for me as a hobbyist developer, and it's not worth the hour or more of back-and-forth to try a demo and get prices. Give me clear pricing on the website and some way to access a demo without having to contact you, that way I can tell in 60 seconds if this is worth pursuing or not.

I actually am in the market for something like this, I built AllThePeople.net and would love a better large-scale face recognition system. But no, I will not contact you for a demo and to discuss pricing.

<comment><USER4> No, the price is not high at all. FR tends to attract laypeople as well as sophisticated developers such as yourself. We've found that just giving a download leads to too many "casual support requests" from not real users. So, if you can stomach the stress of a human voice, you can get our software in minutes. This simple screening blocks those that would just waste our time.

<comment><USER6> I'm actively working on facial recognition in a retail store context, but I also quickly dismissed your product due to a lack of pricing information.

3D-AI looks like it would be a great fit, but "Call for demo" translates to "probably $100,000+ with lengthy on-boarding and extortion-level support contracts"

I don't mind calling or emailing to get a trial license, but I'm not going to waste my time or yours if I don't even know if it'll be in-budget.

<comment><USER4> Actually, try $2000 and you own a license. Support is negotiated, and if you're technical nearly nothing. Support is typically for the non- technologists. None of the major players in FR list their prices on the sites, BTW. Just look them up at the NIST FR Challenge website; you'll see us in the top ten year after year, and you won't see anyone from the article above.

Oh of, 3D-AI: I'm the lead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a marketing misdirection; to compare these companies as if they were leaders in facial recognition is suspicious, nearly fraudulent. They are far from it. These companies are merely brand names laypeople recognize. If one wants to know the leading contenders in facial recognition, formal tests are performed and published by the NTSC every year: [https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face-recognition- gran...](https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face-recognition-grand- challenge-frgc).

Not to mention the article does not address any real world key points of using FR. Their usage rages are a joke; real world scenarios begin at 100K much sooner than a month, and are typically measured with these numbers per minute or hour. Real world usage of FR at the rates of these services breaks banks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice overview. Too bad the test set was rather tiny (33 images). Detection rates in this test:

      Amazon    52.66 %
      Google    40.43 %
      IBM       39.36 %
      Microsoft 17.55 %

<comment><USER8> just for comparison, I used this open source library ([https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition](https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition)) on the dataset and even with the cpu model (according to the github page the CNN is more accurate, but I couldn't test it out right now) it identified 59/188 faces.

I'm wondering what's up with the Microsoft result. Some sort of error in processing the images?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've tinkered with face recognition in the past days, and am now waiting for a response to my GCE quota request for a V100 GPU. $8/h rate for a preemptible instance seems really cheap, yet I am not sure if I will ever be able to process my dataset.

Does anyone have a clue on how much it will cost to detect faces and extract 128d encodings from ~100M of 200x200 photos?

<comment><USER10> PixLab do offer quota based monthly plans for such task including standard face detection, shape extraction, gender, age and emotion pattern extraction. They do charge $0.9 per 1000 requests after you reach your monthly quota (1.1M API calls).

[https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=facedetect](https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=facedetect).

<comment><USER9> Woah, that would be $80k to process my dataset. I'll try renting hardware instead.

<comment><USER10> Not that much. Contact them and they will bring back with an offer adequate to your dataset and budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have found Rekognition to be quite good. Maybe the most interesting machine learning service result for me from the past year was IBM being much better than Google at speech to text. Specifically they offered some key features, like speaker attribution, that made their offering standout. I also found their accuracy rates to be very good.

When I first started exploring these apis I just assumed Google would be amazing but that is _not the case at all_. I suspect they save their best stuff for their own products and the api solutions always lag a little behind. IBM may be better because their apis are such a core offering. Microsoft's stuff is a clear afterthought and the only Amazon service I've had success with is Rekognition. That said, Transcribe just launched so it may/will improve with time.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Before we compare the different face detection API's, let 's scan the images first by ourselves! How many faces would a human be able to detect?_

This is great! Honestly, most researchers need to start doing this step. Baselining around accessible human capabilities (even if rough) is a super great way to show the benefits or drawbacks of using ML, especially in image processing applications, where it's more directly comparable.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting but to me the most appealing aspect of Face APIs is around detecting identity or emotions. I don't care often if a face is present - <USER2> I want to know things ABOUT the face which this test didn't even go into.</comment>


It's lose, not loose. - <AUTHOR> http://www.losenotloose.com/ <comment><USER2> One of my pet peeves is people who say "reign him in," a malapropism seen with increasing frequency where "rein him in" is what is actually meant.

"Rein" is what a cowboy does to a horse.

"Reign" is what a monarch does to a kingdom.

The problem with errors like this is that computer spell checkers can't correct them, because the wrong word is nevertheless a word.

My other pet peeve are people who confuse "sight, "site" and "cite", a malady I call "homophonitis". I regularly receive e-mails saying "I like your websight."</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a solution for eye-contact when video chatting? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a hardware solution for video chat, so one can look at each other at the same time, in the eyes? <comment><USER2> I've found using phones at an arms length has worked reasonably well, but found no elegant solution for laptops</comment>


Almost half of homeless men had traumatic brain injury in their lifetime - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140425104714.htm <comment><USER2> Just a few weeks ago, I was walking home from work and witnessed one homeless man suckerpunch another in the face, knocking him off balance on ice and causing him to fall straight back and crack his head open on the ice. There was an instant pool of blood that started spreading quickly, with other homeless people scattering instantly. A cop arrived on the scene almost immediately.

I was incredibly surprised reading this that 87% had TBI before becoming homeless. I wonder what the numbers are for repeated TBI after becoming homeless among those that had their first instance pre-homelessness.

<comment><USER3> I'll echo what is said further down; it is good to see a reasonable look into homelessness here on HN.

I literally just came bsck from a vigil for a man who died in a self-lit fire in an abandoned moving truck parked in my hometown. The vigil was attended by homeless advocates of all political stripes, had a local police officer singing at the beginning and end, and a gubernatorial candidate was around as well. The "issue of homelessness" is definitely complicated, and amongst the crowd tonight, all holding candles, were those who take stands for rental vouchers, more conservative "housing first" policies, expanded mental health care, and a few other approaches. There were plenty of compassionate Christian conservatives there who I appreciate for their emphasis on pragmatism and on human dignity, even though the solutions run against their deeply held political beliefs.

As someone who has always felt just a day a way from slipping into homelessness myself, including struggling with alcoholism - the one thing I can say for certain is that the only way to address this is by continuing to address the issue honestly, trying the best we can with evidence of what works. I wish I could say I trust my faculties, but week to week its obvious I have a problem, even back when I was 9 years into sobriety..

In America, we definitely err on the side of personal liberty and responsibility, and though I agree with that in some abstract sense, it is obvious to me that moralizing the issue as one of choice, or as one of laziness vs. hard work and determination, is a failure. We can do better, and we will, but in the process we're going to have to accept responsibility for each other in a costly and politically inconvenient way.

The fact that people came out tonight in my hometown to celebrate our common humanity, despite another tragic loss, is admirable. It is what defines us as a human family. Although the circumstances anger me personally, all these people tonight, and the people here on HN, prove there is a solution, even if it is a hard process and not a clear destination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The aftereffects of traumatic brain injury is a very intractable problem that significantly damages a person's life. People tend to be on the street because of intractable personal problems, not because of lack of money per se.

I have thought a lot about that and I often wonder what we can do to heal the bodies and minds of the homeless as our first priority instead of trying to act like homelessness itself is the problem and like getting shelter of some sort is the priority. Homeless shelters are often really crappy shelter, with no privacy and terrible air quality and so forth. I won't go to one because I am on the street to get myself well and I can't solve my problems if I can't get well. Homeless shelters are generally not clean enough for my needs. They would help keep me sick. I can't ever solve my problems by staying chronically ill. My financial problems are rooted in my health problems.

I never know how to explain that effectively to other people who think a) my lack of housing proves I am incompetent and thus not credible or worth listening to and b) housing, any housing, is the single most important detail to address.

Years ago, I lived for a few months in a crap trailer. My health took a turn for the worse and in some ways never recovered. I am still trying to undo the damage of those few months. I have enough income that I could probably go to someplace super cheap, like rural Alabama or Mississippi, and find a trailer for rent to live in instead of choosing to be on the street and inexpensive California where the climate is good for my health but I can't afford housing. And I never know how to explain to people that I am doing the right thing and this focus on get a home, any home, is the wrong focus and is part of the problem.

I am glad to see this posted here. I think this is probably a lot better thing to post on HN than a lot of stories that wind up here which showcase specific homeless individuals and, more often than not, seem to convince people that the individual in question just needs to "be more responsible" or "make better choices."

</comment><comment><USER5> My relative is almost homeless three years after a TBI in an accident he drove home from. Prior to that he was a talented contractor who supported a family and had many friends.

Despite herculean efforts by friends and family and even strangers, he is fundamentally broken in ways nobody seems to understand. He still largely thinks of himself as the person he was prior to the TBI.

My guess at this grim stage is the mechanisms are broken that allow him to self-correct his behavior and make accurate, up-to-date "I am" statements. Clues to this are when you confront him about his behavior or how he never bathes. He is not offended or worried but rather agitated, as if his brain short-circuits. At best you get cognitive distortions and at worst he storms away in a rage he won't remember five minutes later. Interventions and threats have no postive effect.

He will talk your ear off all day about hobbies he had prior to his TBI, and if you didn't smell him or notice his pan handling sign, you might not know there is any problem. But make no mistake, invite this man to live with you and you will be tearing your hair out after two weeks and kicking him out in three, if not sooner.

Every TBI is unique just as every person is. My relative does not accurately remember what parts of his brain was injured, so interviewing him would not yield much. Besides that, after this happened I read that something like 80% of TBIs do not even show on common medical imaging devices. In my relative's case there was evidence "suggestive" of DAI (diffuse axonal injury) which may explain why his deficits are so profound, but nobody can say. During therapy there was clear evidence that his deductive reasoning skills were seriously compromised, so imagine practical consequences if you cannot do simple deductive reasoning but also cannot realize it.

Then of course TBI survivors are many times more likely to suffer additional TBIs. Add substance abuse and limited to no impulse control and you have a person who is a danger to himself and often society, but who also may refuse to get the level of help they truly need. In his case, he needs assisted living including someone to manage all of his money, but in his mind he does not and he appears ready to fight it until his last breath.

I hope studies like this lead to more humane and informed programs to help people like him. I was just thinking this morning how unjust it is that murderers and other criminals can get room and board for life yet the best we can manage for this once talented and caring member of society is a room in a drug-infested flop house that costs half of his disability income.

<comment><USER6> It is sad we don't have a safety net any longer - we used to have asylums now we have homeless people who are mostly mentally ill in some fashion or another.

I'm not sure how I'd cope if I had a relative with a similar situation. Thanks for sharing your story.

<comment><USER7> Asylums are better than homelessness, but to go as far as saying they are "safety net" is a stretch. They were usually not designed to help, but to put away. Then again, I'm not american and whenever I come to the US I'm amazed by how many homeless people one see in the streets.

<comment><USER8> There are people that we cannot help with current medical technology. Letting them live somewhere safe, with people who can care for them, is probably better than most of the alternatives - homelessness and prison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Need a control group - the rate of TBI amongst non-homeless men.

<comment><USER10> The full paper[1] addresses this to some extent (my emphasis added below):

"Accurate estimates of the lifetime history (prevalence) of traumatic brain injury within the general population are scarce, which makes it difficult to compare rates of injury among homeless people with rates among those in the community. Two community cohort studies suggested prevalence rates of 3.8% (for experiencing at least 1 admission to hospital for traumatic brain injury by age 35; northern Finland birth cohort) and 31.6% (for experiencing a traumatic brain injury for which the person received medical care; Christchurch, New Zealand, birth cohort). Together, these data suggest that rates may be higher among people who are homeless than within the general community. _A recent study estimated that homeless men had rates of head injury 14 times higher than rates for the general population of Canada, with a rate 400 times higher among those who were chronically homeless and had drinking problems._ "

And not oranges and oranges comparison, but[2]:

"Separately, a recent study by Dr. Stephen Hwang of the hospital's Centre for Research on Inner City Health, found the number of people who are homeless or vulnerably housed and who have also suffered a TBI may be as high as 61 per cent -- _seven times higher than the general population._ "

[1] [http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full](http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24651000](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24651000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While it is quite plausible that brain damage associated TBI can cause homelessness, the causal influence is probably lower than the given percentages imply. According to the article:

"In Canada, the leading mechanisms of traumatic brain injury leading to hospital admission over the decade 1994–1995 to 2003–2004 were motor-vehicle- related for adults less than 60 years of age and falls for those 60 years of age or older, with assaults reported as the mechanism of injury at a substantially lower rate than we have reported here."

The article also shows high prevalence of alcohol/drug-related TBI in the homeless, whereas in the general population, "being struck by or against an object, motor vehicle collisions and sport-related injuries were the most common mechanisms."

Together, the differences in the causes of TBI between the homeless subjects and the general population imply that, in at least some cases, the TBI and homelessness are likely to have a common cause (e.g. alcohol/drug addiction or certain personality traits). The article recognizes this possibility, but doesn't attempt to correct for it. To get a better idea of the causal effect, it would be informative to compare the homeless subjects with non-homeless controls with similar drug histories, personality traits, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER12> What shocked me when I used to do the soup van run in my local city was how age didn't discriminate when it came to homelessnes. I saw men (and boys) across the whole age range living in unnacceptable situations. Some of them could have been my friends for all I know as they did their best to hide their homelessness.

Furthermore, I was always perplexed as to why there were far more homeless males than females. While my local government provides a number of shelters for men and women, there was never enough room for men. We would frequently scout the local homeless haunts (under bridgers, besides powerstations or in church car parks) looking for people who might need some supper.

In this day and age It's pretty disagraceful in my view. I've always thought it would be nice if someone could come up with a kickstarer/kiva like hybrid where you could sponsor local homeless people with enough money to find accomodation _and_ medical/psychological assistance.

<comment><USER13> Women have an easier time finding somewhere to stay because they are considered more valuable to society. Men are disposable, which is why far fewer resources are devoted to helping them.

Women also can just get a boyfriend if they lose their job or health and need money; I've seen my female friends do this loads of times, but have yet to see it go the other way. Gender roles definitely favor women pretty heavily when it comes to financial matters.

<comment><USER14> Ummmm no. Maybe, _maybe_ , on a statistical level, this happens more for women than for men. But I certainly know women who have been homeless, and there are even more women who can't get a boyfriend at all, especially if they're sick or unemployed. Women's magazines are full of dating advice for a reason.

<comment><USER15> Note: To be clear, I do not agree with the OP's characterization of "women being more valuable to society" and thus treated better. In general, men have the advantage. But homelessness does tend to affect men more.

Most homeless are men. A couple sources I found places the number in the mid 60% range.

[http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf](http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf) [http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html](http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html)

You say some women can't get a boyfriend at all. I expect it's true for most of them that they can't get a boyfriend _they want_.

But many of them might be able to get a very disagreeable boyfriend, if their choice was living with him, or living on the street.

It's not a very good choice. In fact, it's generally an awful choice. But it's still a choice.

Obviously, there are homeless women, but they tend to be less vulnerable to homelessness. Orwell wrote about this in down and out in Paris and London. Mind you, this was in the 1920s, but it's evocative:

>Tramps are cut off from women, in the first place, because there are very few women at their level of society. One might imagine that among destitute people the sexes would be as equally balanced as elsewhere. But it is not so; in fact, one can almost say that below a certain level society is entirely male. The following figures, published by the L.C.C. from a night census taken on February 13th, 1931, will show the relative numbers of destitute men and destitute women:

Spending the night in the streets, 60 men, 18 women _. In shelters and homes not licensed as common lodging-houses, 1,057 men, 137 women. In the crypt of St Martin 's-in-the-Fields Church, 88 men, 12 women. In L.C.C. casual wards and hostels, 674 men, 15 women.

[_ This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably hold good.]

It will be seen from these figures that at the charity level men outnumber women by something like ten to one. The cause is presumably that unemployment affects women less than men; also that any presentable woman can, in the last resort, attach herself to some man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A link to the actual paper (full text):

[http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full](http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full)

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried to follow the DOI link to the underlying article, to see at least its abstract, but that link is dead. I don't see any uptake of this hospital press anywhere outside Science Daily, a press-release recycling service often decried[1] by thoughtful readers here on HN. Another kind reader here found the link to the original paper,

[http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full](http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full)

which reports

"Methods We recruited participants from an urban men's shelter in Toronto, Ontario. Researchers administered the Brain Injury Screening Questionnaire, a semistructured interview screening tool for brain injury. Demographic information and detailed histories of brain injuries were obtained. Participants with positive and negative screening results were compared, and the rates and mechanisms of injury were analyzed by age group.

"Results A total of 111 men (mean age 54.2 ± standard deviation 11.5 yr; range 27–81 yr) participated. Nearly half (50 [45%]) of the respondents had a positive screening result for traumatic brain injury. Of these, 73% (35/48) reported experiencing their first injury before adulthood (< 18 yr), and 87% (40/46) reported a first injury before the onset of homelessness."

In other words, I think this is an interesting idea that deserves further investigation (and, for all I know, despite the statement in the article, has been investigated a lot already), but I have no idea how representative the patients that Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic found are of all the homeless people in her country, or what the direction of causation is here (could something that increases risk for homelessness at one and the same time increase risk for traumatic brain injury? very likely yes). Research on how to help people who have suffered brain injuries to recover from those injuries is of course a good idea, as is research on the consequences of those injuries, including social consequences like homelessness. Best of all is to figure out how to reduce risk of suffering such injuries. As the article says, "Additional research is needed to understand the complex interactions among homelessness, traumatic brain injury, mental illness and substance use." I would definitely wonder about the substance use part of that.

[1] Science Daily has been decried so often on Hacker News that I have been collecting those comments for a few years.

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206)

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

[http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare- dn...](http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dna-changes- following-population-explosion-may-hold-common-disease-clues)

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1219240)

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

[http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare- genetic-...](http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic- variants-1.10655)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603)

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185)

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867348)

"A useful rule of thumb is that whenever you see anything on sciencedaily.com or physorg.com, unless it's absolute nonsense there's another more direct (and often more informative) source you should link to instead."

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529)

"Original source:

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole- asymmetry...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole- asymmetry.html)

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361)

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766)

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

<comment><USER17> Cheers for a demonstration of how debatable these claims are.

One thing that bothers me about such claims is they hardly explain what seems to be a secularly rising homeless rate over the last thirty years. Sure, we haven't seen a brain injury epidemic during that time but certainly we've seen social and economic policy changes during that time.

<comment><USER18> >we haven't seen a brain injury epidemic during that time but certainly we've seen social and economic policy changes during that time

That doesn't rule out a correlation between brain injury and homelessness; the social and economic policy changes might have the effect that fewer brain- injured people get the care they need to avoid becoming homeless.</comment></comment></comment>


Dating advice, fashion advice and matchmaking for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://socialhacks.me/

<comment><USER2> 1\. "Ruby" for your "Rail." Haven't let the Python out of the cage in a while Ugh. Terrible quotes.

2\. Ignoring the fact that there ARE female engineers and hackers.

3\. Your "request an invite" only has one corner out of four rounded.

4\. The photos of your "consultants" look like awful Facebook profile pictures. And why are off center as if one on the left was missing?

5\. There's a ton of empty white space at the bottom of the page.

6\. No favicon OR <title> tag.</comment>


Ex-Facebook engineer mocks the culture and jokes about how he was fired - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/ex-facebook-engineer-patrick-shyu-makes-fun-of-company-on-youtube.html <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-brF6SUXbns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-brF6SUXbns)

Brutal and hilarious. Good deadpan. "Without a doubt Facebook is one of the best offices I've worked in ... open office is like working in a warehouse, food is good, they have decent coffee."

<comment><USER3> Wow. There is so much stuff here on the borderline of dystopian nightmare, e.g. how he describes how [http://work.facebook.com](http://work.facebook.com) get's used as a popularity contest for decision making. It's almost exactly what David Eggers was describing in The Circle. Suddenly all those boring corporate workplaces pushing stuff in and out of an RDBMS look a lot more attractive...

<comment><USER4> I work at a place that pushes stuff in and out of an RDBMS, life is good here.

<comment><USER5> I just interviewed at a small startup, but one that has real customers and hasn't needed to raise VC money. Some customers them millions to develop their platform features, others pay them just to use the platform as it is.

No thrashing around for product-market fit, changing goals every week.

Everyone I talked to seemed so... calm. It was surreal. At my current startup job people seem to take a weird sort of pride in how frazzled and overwhelmed they are.

<comment><USER6> If you're in debt and not making money, at least you can have the decency to appear frazzled and overwhelmed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my experience of working for corporations, all of them tend to be cult- like. Office politics: bringing down others to cut ahead, cutting deals, favoritism, etc. are the norm and your work and quality of it matters very little in the long run as long as you can deliver something on time.

The difference lies in perception. Or to put it more elegantly, if you like (or at least can tolerate) that specific flavor of Kool-Aid.

<comment><USER8> This has been noticed for a while now, to the point where there are various theories as to how corporations (and companies in general) are able to persuade people not only to do a service in exchange for money, but to adopt the desires of the company for themselves, to see "a job well done", and go above and beyond, even sacrificing compensation for some time for the company. It's fascinating from a social psychological perspective; Frederic Lordon has some recent work on it.

<comment><USER9> I've worked in large corporations most of my life. Each is its own ecosystem. The top dogs use their staff as minions. The tough minions get an attaboy. The weak (normal humans with a soul) leave. It is a self cleaning/adjusting system, no need to fire anyone, most people quit for softer/calmer/humane companies.

In these large companies the #1 employee is the one who crushed everyone else on their path. No strange that many high-performers are sociopaths.

<comment><USER10> > In these large companies the #1 employee is the one who crushed everyone > else on their path. No strange that many high-performers are sociopaths.

I often argue with my female colleagues who see this as an aspect of patriarchy culture since these sociopaths tend to be men. I disagree because their victims have no gender, these people simply don't care who they're mistreating. Nevertheless, I met many women who perceive it as a huge gender issue.

<comment><USER8> Although I'm not sure if what they're saying is true, it's entirely possible to be an aspect of patriarchal culture _and_ affect both men and women. For instance, feminists argue that "toxic masculinity" is harmful to both women _and_ men. Nevertheless, in my experience most people are averse to saying women have masculine traits; if a male is a strong leader, typically he's described as commanding, dominating, effective, strong-headed, whereas women in that position may be described as "bossy".

As such, if it is an aspect of patriarchal culture, it is more accurate to say that it is a patriarchal attitude that both men and women adopt, rather than it being something essentially "manly".

<comment><USER10> I could agree with you, but why call this culture "patriarchal"? I'd call it "animalistic" if anything. "Patriarchal" involves male/female duality and ascribes certain features to men and women that they might not currently be comfortable having. If someone is dominating, let's just call this person "dominating", not "having male features." If we go down the rabbit hole of patriarchy, in the end sooner or later someone starts accusing men for all evil, and this is one of the greatest misunderstandings of our age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been following this guy for around 1 year or so. Really funny guy, the content is enjoyable more than informative. The moment he said "politics" in his last video I hoped he wouldn't be getting a visit from the activist press, now it looks like he's on the radar and at risk of getting the pewdiepie treatment

</comment><comment><USER12> Not far much from what he's doing on Youtube, isn't? Posting clickbait titles, crazy thumbnails .. etc to get views, likes and comments to rank up.

I'm not defending Facebook nor attacking Shye, I just want to say that rules are pretty much the same for different games so why criticising one and accepting the other?

<comment><USER13> Because in one instance, it's a one-man-show, in the other, it's a giant international company?

<comment><USER14> Let us celebrate this small moment of poignant joy of him being able to give a big "fuck you" gesture to Facebook, before he realizes that the very platform that he was able to express that sentiment is actually owned by Google and he hasn't really escaped the wrath of Silicon Valley tech companies at all. (Maybe he's even worse off than before; his labor as a Youtuber isn't protected by any law at all, and he can lose his job at any moment with a touch of a Google employee's algorithm.)

<comment><USER15> I mean, I reckon he's well aware of this, given he was a tech lead at youtube

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Watching a friend of mine land her dream job and imbibe the KoolAid has been very interesting...

<comment><USER17> What about the KoolAid that HN drinks against anything Facebook, Google ? Biased takes without even reading the article.

<comment><USER18> Lots of HN readers (including myself) have worked at FAANGs.

The cultural characterisation seems completely accurate to me.

Everybody plays multiple games of performative open plan activity, pushing other people to join their projects, all with the friendly face of 'make the world a better place' while counting their RSUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Love that dude's humor sense. So cute, serious and satiric at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER20> "It's kind of this game for people to get as many likes and comments on their posts," he said. "If you're into popularity contests, if you thrive in that type of environment then you'll probably do really well." - Well that's exactly the game he's into with YouTube... so then why did he get fired?

<comment><USER21> Producing original content != sycophantic ladder climbing.

The means might look the same on the surface, but very different beasts under the hood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> He's almost as good at selling advertisements as Facebook.

<comment><USER23> I actually think the way he advertises his products in his videos is pretty good, he does it so unashamedly

<comment><USER24> Facebook ads arent placed as ironically to make them so funny. He segues from "facebook is a nightmare" to "and if its your dreamjob this company can get you the skills." All without insulting the company hes advertising, and somewhat implying that it would be better to use skills learned there to get a job anywhere but facebook. That kind of added humor through juxtaposition is not popular.

Its like that Kris Lindahl radio ad that starts "are you sick of Kris Lindhal ads? You could change the station, but wed be playing it there too!!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> hahaha, I love the Tech Lead is the top class master troll!

</comment><comment><USER26> Basing on his milion videos that use "ex googler/facebook" in title to lure people, how he ain't just programming celebrity?

Why should I care about his opinion?

<comment><USER3> Check out his LinkedIn profile - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickshyu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickshyu) \- from the projects he describes there, seems like he can back it up. And what's wrong with telling people you're an "ex googler/facebook"? If that's the experience you have to share, fair enough.

<comment><USER26> There's nothing wrong with telling people you're an "ex googler", but mentioning it whenever you can is quite... weird?

I mean from Youtuber that wants to get viewers perspective it's perfectly reasonable, but generally it looks not nice for me.

<comment><USER27> Here's a good starting point for understanding what's going on:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's something ironic about the criticism of Facebook internally as a popularity contest, then making $500,000/year from advertising on your popular YouTube channel.

<comment><USER29> I heard it as a criticism of deciding work decisions based on popularity, with product choices, technical implementations, etc... based on facebook likes, not real deciding factors. Which is very different from growing a YouTube audience.

<comment><USER30> What works for gaining viewers on YouTube will not work when you have to decide on highly technical manners in software development.

For one purpose likes are useful, for other purposes they are absurd.</comment></comment></comment>


Oxford Professor Is Accused of Selling Ancient Texts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/europe/oxford-professor-bible-hobby-lobby.html <comment><USER2> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191022121515/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191022121515/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/europe/oxford- professor-bible-hobby-lobby.html)

[http://archive.is/66GpS](http://archive.is/66GpS)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Obbink stuff has been on slow boil for a few years now. Part of the problem is that even ancient papyri texts aren't actually worth anything, unless they are really famous, but they are getting caught up by all the export regulations for gold and jewels (sometimes under new interpretations of law).

Obbink has made some poor decisions, but I feel that the rules have changed on his watch. Also, while "Hobby Lobby" is a fun way to denigrate the people involved here, they are actually behind the Bible Museum in D.C., probably the most important Biblical antiquities collection in the world, and were purchased for museum display.

That said, the museum acquisition team has run into export issues before, and their team was caught buying items from Saudi Arabians without a proper chain of custody (and therefore likely looted), and shipping it back to the US under false pretenses.

Not good, but a big part of it is that they have "Bible" in their museum name, and that gets all the bigots out in arms.

(I wish I could read this article, but my usual NYT tricks aren't working.)

<comment><USER4> The headline is factually correct. The contract was made in 2013 between Dr. Obbink and Hobby Lobby Stores, not between him and the museum, which didn't yet exist. The first sentence of the third paragraph reads:

"Thirteen fragments from the collection were found in the Museum of the Bible, a Washington institution founded by Hobby Lobby's evangelical Christian owners, the Green family."

So the headline is correct and the article provides additional details. Also, I don't see what the worth of the texts has anything to do with it. Here's the statement from the EES:

[https://www.ees.ac.uk/news/professor-obbink-and-missing- ees-...](https://www.ees.ac.uk/news/professor-obbink-and-missing-ees-papyri)

"These texts were taken without authorisation from the EES" is theft regardless of the value of those texts.

Edit: if this article has any bias, I don't see it. It is short and filled with facts. I has a dozen links to sources. It implies that the Museum of the Bible could do a better job verifying its acquisitions, but it points out that other museums could too ("Museums in general have faced increased scrutiny over the origins of their prized antiquities"). Unless some facts have been left out, this seems like a good article to me and the type of reporting we should applaud.

<comment><USER5> "but it points out that other museums could too"

That's the bias right there. There is a broader problem here, but that's not indicated in the headline. Hobby Lobby was specifically targeted in the headline to create emotional engagement. Not the end of the world. Not a vast conspiracy - they need to sell clicks and paper. But not totally honest either.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point, but astute readers aren't likely to be misled by headlines alone.

Unfortunately, headline scanning for confirmation bias of one's current beliefs is rampant. This means (a) biased headlines will get more clicks, and (b) such headlines do constitute a certain lack of honesty in journalism, because of the likelihood that they will mislead many readers.

<comment><USER7> You don't mislead in headlines for astute readers so there isn't a point in discussing that. You mislead in headlines for everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The _founder_ of Hobby Lobby has an amazing collection of historic religious texts (I've seen them). The retail chain does not.

<comment><USER9> [https://www-m.cnn.com/2017/07/05/us/hobby-lobby-ancient- arti...](https://www-m.cnn.com/2017/07/05/us/hobby-lobby-ancient-artifacts- trnd/index.html)

The company itself was receiving artifacts in the past.

<comment><USER10> Was the founder just using the company as a front to collect dubiously legal artifacts perhaps? Basically as a way to insulate himself behind his company in case some irate government came looking for them.

<comment><USER9> Considering the relation between Hobby Lobby (father) and the Museum of the Bible (son), I would be shocked if there was any corporate veil left intact on the Hobby Lobby side. It is a private entity, so not sure the shareholders have much desire to complain about the running of the organization.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Green_(entrepreneur)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Green_\(entrepreneur\))

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scanda...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I should re-read Snowcrash. Was one of those texts the namshub of Enki by any chance?

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I was having a "this sounds like something out of ... out of what?" feeling about this.

It's out of Snow Crash, of course!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did Oxford University legitimately acquire the ancient texts in the first place or did they steal them/acquire them from thieves, as well? What's the chain of custody on any of these? Why did Hobby Lobby return the many times stolen texts to Oxford instead of to whoever the actual owner is.

And when will the stolen Elgin Marbles of the Acropolis be returned by the British Museum to Greece?

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems extremely prejudicial and even driven by a bigoted and hateful motivation to emphasize the purchaser of the fragment when the story is really about the person who is accused of illegally taking and selling the fragments.

It would be like writing the headline like this "Oxford is Officially and International Illegal Historical Artifacts Dealing Organized Criminal Enterprise." if one were to have a bigoted bias against Oxford.

When one takes a step back the far worse villain then Hobby Lobby, is definitely Oxford, which was apparently complicit in this type of activity by way of insufficient controls to prevent it. But even that would be ridiculous in many ways, but not as ridiculous as blaming the other victim Hobby Lobby, that was defrauded by the Professor who also used Oxford's credentials and authority to make the sale.

<comment><USER15> You are suggesting here that when purchasing such artifacts for a major museum collection, that the Hobby Lobby/Bible Museum owners have zero responsibility to verify the provenance of the artifacts and the legality of their sale. All they have to do is just not ask any probing questions, and they should be able to claim that "we didn't _know_ they were stolen!" Sorry, but that's outrageous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This clickbait headline should be a bannable offense on HN

<comment><USER16> Who or what would you ban? The New York Times? The submitter who used the NYT title verbatim, according to HN guidelines?

<comment><USER17> The guidelines specifically call out linkbait titles: "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" so in the parent comments argument that the title is clickbait it certainly isn't "according to HN guidelines".

I'd be interested in what the ratio of users that only know portions of the guidelines that are often repeated in comments vs those that have actually read through the guidelines.

<comment><USER16> > The guidelines specifically call out linkbait titles:

That's true, they do. And the parent comment here claimed linkbait. The suggested guideline is to _default_ to the original title first, and avoid editorializing by _default_ , that's the spirit of the rule, and then if the title is egregious, try to fix the wording to be less misleading.

There are lots of possibilities, one of them is that the submitter doesn't know or doesn't believe the title is linkbait. One of them is that @LegitShady has an opinion that is shared by a minority or nobody.

The problem with suggesting a ban when not editorializing titles is that it assumes linkbait is clear and absolutely recognizable, and that everyone agrees. Banning someone for an offense they might not be able to recognize in advance is a draconian measure that will reduce the quality of open discussion here. We already have mechanisms that help filter bad titles, including article downvotes, a flagging system, and moderators that actively respond to title wording complaints.

> I'd be interested in what the ratio of users that only know portions of the > guidelines that are often repeated in comments vs those that have actually > read through the guidelines.

I'd likewise be interested in what ratio of users read a comment and use assumptions to jump to a hard conclusion that denies benefit of the doubt without acknowledging the possibility that other causes are possible, including their own misinterpretation.

Having read through the guidelines completely, I know that reading with charitable interpretations and giving benefit of the doubt is in the spirit of the guidelines. With respect to the top comment here, I humbly suggest that banning anyone for using verbatim titles goes directly against the spirit of HN, and the literal wording of the guidelines too.

<comment><USER17> Speaking of reading a comment and using assumptions to jump to a hard conclusion: The "ratio of users" comment wasn't directed at you personally it was directed at wondering how many are voting your comment up in the discussion assuming "The submitter who used the NYT title verbatim, according to HN guidelines?" is all the guidelines had to say since you made no allusion this was simply your interpretation and not all the guidelines say about titles.

I don't even agree with LegitShady I just find it disingenuous to disagree purely by stating your interpretation of the guidelines as if that's all the guidelines had to say about clickbait. It's tautological that if you disagree your interpretation is that the guidelines disagree and it just masks the minority opinion rather than discussion the opinion.

Personally I my interpretation is a bit stronger on changing linkbait titles (though really you should just try to find a less linkbaity source) but banning is a definitely overkill (even if likely to be simply exaggeration instead of a recommendation). I probably should have included this in my original comment to make my intent clearer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Amazon Is Such a Threat to the Grocery Industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/whole-foods-amazon-prices/538002/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> The reasons Amazon is dangerous in every consumer industry dealing with physical goods are the same. Logistics and a multi billion dollar war chest. Amazons logistics solutions are unparalleled. If Amazon can make Whole Food more efficient shipping goods and gain even a single percentage point in profits that's huge. And the billions they have to play with means they can afford to be more aggressive in pursuing market share, and riskier in pursuing additional revenue streams. If you're subsisting on 1.5% margins you literally can't afford to bet on something new and it not pay off.

</comment><comment><USER3> How much does advertising and marketing add to the price of products in grocery stores? Can Amazon reduce that extra cost by reaching people in new ways, or by creating its own brands? Store brands are generally pretty good and cost less. Maybe it's food manufacturers that should be worried, not retailers. The premium one pays for advertised brands might become a thing of the past.

</comment><comment><USER4> So Amazon is such a big threat because it promises(via PR) to make organic food cheap enough for everybody ? A task that doesn't sound very realistic ?

How reliable is big company PR anyway ? how much of those big declarations come to be ? and how much is just for the ears of the stock market ?

<comment><USER5> Organic food is already becoming cheaper due to it being available even at low end grocery stores. Whole Food's margins have been falling for years due to this fact. What I find interesting is that Amazon intentionally keeps their operating margins at 4%. This is a reason they are very hard to compete with. What I find interesting about the grocery purchase, is that most grocery stores have very small margins already, and I wonder how much this signals the beginning of Amazon buying into lots of other low margin businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or another possibility is whole foods becomes a huge drag on the company especially the AWS area and google, Microsoft and others start taking share from them.

<comment><USER6> can't see a lot of grocery companies wanting to stay on AWS.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's one quirky habit that adds a lot of value to you? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't know if I would call it that but I have a few:

1\. I live 20mi from my office, I prefer to use my bike (bicycle) over any other means of transportation. I hate riding Lyft/Uber, driving is insanely stressful at times. I like the time on the bike and it adds a ton of value in my life in general. It is quirky because I never really take the 20mi route and often prefer the longer routes.

2\. I wake up at the same time every single day. 4:45 am. Wether it's the weekend, weekday, doesn't matter, I wake up and I just get up of bed.

Again, I don't know if I would call these quirky but those are the ones I can think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good for you. Glad you enjoy those long bike rides. Also, the ability to wake up every day at 4:45am is a massive asset. Very impressive!</comment></comment>


Show HN: 8,760 hours – How to get the most out of next year. Now mobile friendly - <AUTHOR> https://letharion.github.io/8760hours/ <comment><AUTHOR> Last year the link to Alex's original PDF was posted[1], and I really liked it. I couldn't understand however why it was a PDF, how was I supposed to consume the content in a reasonable way? Now converted to HTML, it's significantly easier to read on a small screen.

        [1]: https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours-v2-update-announce/</comment>


GCD libdispatch w/Blocks support working on FreeBSD - <AUTHOR> http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/libdispatch-dev/2009-September/000059.html

<comment><USER2> For anyone else who wasn't previously familiar with the acronym, GCD stands for Grand Central Dispatch: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch>

</comment><comment><USER3> More information on the GCD FreeBSD port is here: [http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/libdispatch- dev/2009-S...](http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/libdispatch- dev/2009-September/000014.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much software is written just for FreeBSD or Mac OS X - i.e. how much traction does this news provide for the GCD movement?

<comment><USER5> jkh was the lead for the FreeBSD project before he went to Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That was fast. I knew OS X and FreeBSD were very similar, but I didn't expect to see GCD in FreeBSD until at least the end of the year.</comment>


My 2019 Apple Report Card - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2020/02/my_2019_apple_report_card <comment><USER2> > MAC: D

> ... But I don't know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed > by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single > expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS > 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the > opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting professional > Mac users from just using their machines as they want and expect to — I > genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer > users ...

Rightly said. This is the exact fear and worry I have - that if the macOS is turned into a highly controlled and restrictive environment like the iPadOS, I have wasted my money by investing in a mac. I won't be updating my macOS for another year to see whether Apple sees sense.

It's a pity that the Mac Mini too has been turned into an iDevice with no scope for real upgrade without paying the exorbitant Apple tax.</comment>


With rifle and bibliography: General Mattis on professional reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.strifeblog.org/2013/05/07/with-rifle-and-bibliography-general-mattis-on-professional-reading/ <comment><USER2> Worth a read. Though some may be disinclined to hear him out for what he is[0], his words ring true and are applicable to any profession, including ours.

[0] Foolishly, in my opinion.</comment>


Do acquisitions ever work? Examples? Why? - <AUTHOR>

Do acquisitions ever work?  Examples?  If you have an example of a success, please feel free to speculate (wildly even) as to why it was successful.  I mean this to be a serious question.<p>[Update: added "Why?" to title] <comment><USER2> A few off the top of my head:

Microsoft:

\- Vermeer

\- Hotmail

\- Visio

\- Bungie

Google:

\- Pyra

\- Urchin

\- Applied Semantics

\- YouTube

Of course, most of the time they seem to flame out miserably. Microsoft, for instance, took a $6.2bn charge for their Aquantive acquisition. I also once remarked to a couple friends on the Kin team (yes, Kin, remember it?) that Microsoft would've been better off taking $500m in cash to the middle of their soccer fields and lighting it on fire, since at least then it wouldn't have been a huge distraction in the face of launching Windows Phone 7.

Google, of course, has a long history of bungling acquisitions (Jaiku, Dodgeball, etc.), too, but their bigger, more strategic acquisitions seem to have worked out far better than the little ones.

<comment><USER3> Add Skype to the Microsoft list.

<comment><USER2> Too soon to tell, I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google acquired Urchin (became Google Analytics), YouTube, Android and Applied Semantics (AdSense).

Ebay acquired Paypal and Stubhub.

Twitter acquired Summize (Twitter Search).

Apple acquired PA Semi (designed the core chips used in modern iphone/ipads).

Demanded Media acquired eHow (which is now vastly larger than it was in 2006)

Amazon acquired Zappos.

Microsoft acquired 86-DOS (which became MS-DOS/Windows) and Hotmail.

Lenovo acquired IBM PC Group and in three years went from $3bn revenue to $15bn.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just thought of this one.

Ebay << Paypal.

I think this is an interesting one, and somehow extra satisfying, because its both a vertical integration and a complementary product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most of the examples are just the 3% of the companies acquired in the whole existence of the company. Google bought so many companies that most of them were just talent acquisition.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So far the successful examples seem to me to be in 2 categories:

\- a clearly separate product allowed to more or less continue its trajectory, perhaps with some light integration

\- in google's case, there are a few examples of a piece of core tech that had a clear application to their core business and a clear integration point

</comment><comment><USER6> Next acquiring Apple worked pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unusually structured deal too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mint

Reddit

Android

MySpace(I kid)

<comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone is wondering, here are the acquiring companies:

Quicken << Mint

Conde Nast << Reddit

Google << Android

<comment><USER8> How has the reddit acquisition worked out for Conde Nast?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a times article on it from 8 months ago:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit- thri...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thrives- after-advance-publications-let-it-sink-or-swim.html)

The article is mostly about leaving reddit alone. IME, that's always the pitch to the acquired company though: "We love you and we'll leave you alone. We didn't buy you to break you." However, also IME, the acquirer can't help itself. It is what it is. You can see this, for example, in the article when Alexis Ohanian (one of the reddit founders) says "We ran into some annoying human resources bureaucracy when we tried to hire people, but we run lean and don't make a lot of hires, so that didn't come up a lot". But what if it had? Hiring practices and processes are a key way, IME, the acquirer completely undermines the acquired company as it can't let go of its hiring practices.

In the article, they also say "Like many digital media companies, it [reddit] has a big audience and minuscule revenue." So its a long term play I guess at least financially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> adsense/adwords?

<comment><AUTHOR> According to this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History>

ad sense was part of the Applied Semantics acquisition mentioned above.

Adwords, according to this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords>

was done internally once an acquisition attempt for a similar product failed.</comment></comment>