Anti-Piracy Group to The Pirate Bay: We Want You To Sue Us - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-to-the-pirate-bay-we-want-you-to-sue-us-130216/

<comment><USER2> It's always interesting how content producers and groups like this seem to have so little regard for the copyright of content that is not their own...

I liked the one I read about recently, where an anti-piracy ad (which I must have seen a hundred times) used an unlicensed music track [1]. Of course when the artist informed them they would pay him what he is owed, right? No, he had to sue and they tried to get him to settle for a third of what he was owed!

1\. [http://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying- ar...](http://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying-artist-for- anti-piracy-ad-120717/)

<comment><USER3> This happens when you create private law for yourself. You forget that other people might think that it exists for their benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "We are outraged by this behavior. People must understand what is right and > wrong. Stealing material like this on the internet is a threat to economies > worldwide," a Pirate Bay spokesman told TorrentFreak.

Hilarious!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, they were definitely being facetious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a pity they didn't put sarcasm tags around what was said. I'm pretty sure they don't give a hoot about who copies their stuff. On another note if anti piracy groups can pirate they're lowering themselves to the level of their opposition. So they are essentially saying this is ok which could easily come back to bite them in future situations.

<comment><USER7> Lowering themselves?

You seem to be under the misapprehension that these people ever held the moral high ground in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can TPB lose?

Either it's deemed not to be copyright infringement and support is gained for TPB's position, ie wilful and complete copying is now allowed by legal precedent.

Or it's deemed infringing and the judge is obliged to throw the book at the infringers as they campaign for stronger copyright laws.

TPB are presumably not acting illegally in Finland in hosting links without hosting content? Can't they just send their lawyers as representatives, particularly as it would be a civil case.

</comment><comment><USER9> The current admins really need to channel their inner anakata for their responses.

</comment><comment><USER10> I honestly don't think that The Pirate Bay admins will chance rising to this. It is probably a (very obvious) ploy by CIAPC to trick some of TPB's admins out of hiding and put them in a court setting. Rather than rising to the bait with the threat of a lawsuit, they should have laughed, made a joke or two and moved on.

I don't think it will be long before the cloned site will be hijacked in some way and turned into a pirate bay proxy or simply nuked into oblivion by the numerous TBP defenders.

<comment><USER11> Is there anyone who genuinely doesn't think the original site creators who still speak for the site and were found liable for it aren't running it just because one day they said that?

They lie about a lot of stuff.

<comment><USER6> Yes but that's not proof they're lying about this.

<comment><USER12> They could just tell who is running the site then. I bet they are filling their bank accounts on one of the offshore islands and claiming that they are poor...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really though, they're announcing this strategy publicly because they really don't want to be sued and are trying to get the Pirate Bay to back down.

<comment><USER14> I don't know, presumably they have a lot more money to put into a legal defence. Even if they lost, in the long run the other side would probably bankrupt themselves in the process. And it's doubtful that the judgement against them would be very high. I don't really know how copyright/civil law would work in Finland or wherever the case would be, but I don't know how much lost revenue TPB admins could claim. They'd likely only be able to force them to cease use of their code/likeness, and I suppose an outside chance at recouping lost ad revenue.

<comment><USER15> If you lose in court, you pay all the expenses yourself. Both sides'.

<comment><USER14> Guess outside of America that's how it works. Never really looked into it, I just knew that wasn't usually true here in America[1].

[1][http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-fees-does- lo...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-fees-does-losing- side-30337.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nodelon – eductional startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.nodelon.com/

<comment><USER2> I only got a empty screen with then name and logo, and the background changes from one variant of violet to another. Is there something interesting to see here?</comment>


Should the Director of National Intelligence Be Impeached for Lying to Congress? - <AUTHOR> http://politix.topix.com/homepage/6485-should-director-of-national-intelligence-james-clapper-be-impeached-for-lying-to-congress-about-prism

<comment><USER2> Him, Obama, most of the intelligence committee, including Dianne Feinstein, and possibly even the FISA judges if they went along with the government even if they thought the law and the warrants were unconstitutional.

All of them should be impeached. I'm surprised there's so little talk about this. It's time to hand out real punishments for the Constitution oath breakers, otherwise they'll continue to spit on it with every occasion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Impeached by whom?</comment>


A replica of Path's scroll widget - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kentnguyen/KNPathTableViewController

<comment><USER2> Here's another: <http://cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/timescroller>

(shameless plug alert: I created Cocoa Controls, but not this component)

<comment><USER3> Hi aaronbrethorst, I just started with iOS programming. My background is Java and I've been accustomed to leveraging "3d party frameworks/libraries". Is there any website curating such thing for iOS? I believe Cocoa Controls is one of them?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Cocoa Controls is one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Path really seems to be killing it with new (but acceptable) ui features. The last time I remember such large groups of people just accepting dramatic ui changes without loudly complaining was windows 3.1 > windows 95 start menu.

<comment><USER5> Just out of curiosity, which features are you talking about? I'm only wondering so that I might be able to incorporate them into my own UIs. I did some googling for what you're talking about but couldn't find anything definitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interactive demo: [http://www.pieceable.com/view/p/da77824c6f31216e0bd474bfde5a...](http://www.pieceable.com/view/p/da77824c6f31216e0bd474bfde5a01fcd8a3ae29)

</comment><comment><USER7> The section one seems kind of silly since the header is already sticky, but the normal one is quite nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is just for demonstration. My point is that you can do away with the header and still showing useful info for that section with this control.

Maybe something like alternate background color for sections and use the widget to display the section name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work! A HTML version would be amazing too.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe for mobile web, not on desktop. it doesn't really make sense for big screen.

<comment><USER8> Agreed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice! +1 vote from me :D

</comment><comment><USER10> Path: "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love."

That tells me a lot.

Why don't they say something like "Trying to be Facebook and/or 4sq alternative with a focus on a/v that only works on mobile and is focussed on location. Really we're not sure of what we are and that's why we called ourselves Path."

I watched the video, is that what it is?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying I am an absolutely a fanboy or anything. I'm not. But the innovation they brought to iOS is undeniable. Just like Twitter brought about the pull-to-refresh.

Maybe this scroller widget will be adopted widely, who knows.

<comment><USER10> Kent - I am familiar with "jScrollPane - cross browser styleable scrollbars with jQuery and CSS" <http://jscrollpane.kelvinluck.com/>

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> erh what do you mean? This is an iOS thread.

<comment><USER10> ok. I thought we were talking about scroll panes for a sec. Sorry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Schema.org with GitHub and scripts: A tool to make data more useful - <AUTHOR> http://www.ditabase.io/ <comment><USER2> I liked your survey ;) It would be great if you could disclose (in a few days or so) how many visitors took part in it compared to how many people your site visited!

I find your concept a little bit messy though (while your website design is really clean, I love it!). I think it's because you described so many ideas without a lot of technical explanations. Your scenarios are helpful, but they are also quite superficial - I don't see exactly how your solution might be of help there. I also had difficulties extrapolating how your solution might work technically from you example document.

I think you need a very robust and clear implementation for it to be really useful!

Btw, I spent some significant time on a typed data description language meant to be an alternative to JSON, also with extensive schema support. I had a vision very similar to yours, but I failed to implement it. It just turned out to be too hard to do it so that its usage is always frictionless.

Just a couple of days ago, however, I started to port some of my ideas to a very slim JSON-Schema alternative. As a key difference to your idea, I don't want to include turing complete validators into the schema but rather use globally unique type names so that these validators can be implemented somewhere else in arbitrary programming languages. It also allows for automatic UI generation.

If you want to stay in touch and exchange ideas, you can reach out to me on twitter (hediet_dev)!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Well, I can tell you that as of right now, it's hovering around 0.8% conversion, which isn't terrible. We'll see if I can improve that before activity on the page dies down.

You're right, what I have now is relatively messy. I was balancing brevity and specificity. If I was properly technical in my descriptions, it may have read like documentation. And then the other issue is that I have both business people and programmers on the page, and each gets kinda confused because I'm not sure who to cater too. Same problem with the case studies. I had them more specific before, but I cut out what I thought was unnecesary and now they appear rather simple.

I think the solution is to split the whole thing up into several dedicated pages, which I resisted because it would take longer, and this is all probably less important than building product right?

Regardless, I do now intend to add an FAQ, and write some sort of a technical paper/RFC, (which I should probably do anyway before I run off and start writing serious code). I'm not totally sure what to do about the case study, maybe just replace the entire thing with a video?

I would love to hear more about the project you tried! Naturally, I haven't been able to Google examples of people who tried this idea before and failed. It does sound different in that, I really do intend dits to be fully, totally and completely generic. Nothing other than the idea of labels with scripts which describe payloads is sacred. Any language, any style, anything. This means that it can't possibly miss a certain use case (you can just build it) but it does mean that the whole thing is rather complicated, and as others have said, maybe too complicated, like a pipe dream. I am certainly willing to accept that, but no way to find out the result of that without building it.

I really question whether a more restricted system like JSON-Schema could ever become dominant because it's much more prescriptive, especially when you have a limited number of possible data types. In my mind, data can truly look like _anything_ , so coming up with a rigourous standard doesn't seem realistic: there can always be a more broad standard, ala [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) as others have mentioned. I intend to beat 927 by taking the high ground. Its like Lisp: you can't make a more generic Lisp, because anything that satifisfies the components of Lisp is just a dialect. You can't have incompatible data or an incompatible competitor to DitaBase, its totally generic. I also don't see why you couldn't do UI generation with DitaBase using the controllers (I concept I have not explained yet, they allow CRUD for a specific schema).

I am not very knowledgable on Twitter, but now seems like a great time to start! I appreciate the invitiation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I understand the concept behind this, it feels a bit like an attempt at using github-as-a-database or turning it into one with schemas, scripts and validators?

</comment><comment><USER4> While I get the idea and I get the benefit (I'm a programmer)... I see this as a pipe dream. There is not a manager on this planet that is going to be able to wrap their head around this.

You need to take one of those case studies and create a video that demonstrates everything in a clear and easy to "sell to a manager" way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, looking for feedback on the essential concept of the idea. I'd like to hear from real programmers whether they understand what DitaBase is and whether they think they would use, either now or in the future.

It's been difficult to explain DitaBase, and I still don't know if that's because its actually a terrible idea, and much too complicated. If it is a good idea, then I think sometimes good ideas look complicated like this until people figure out how best to explain them. You wouldn't have expected the internet, or say, object orientation, to be instantly and clearly obvious what it is when they were first being talked about, and that is how I see DitaBase.

Its basically that DitaBase is 4 essential concepts: schemas, validation scripts, conversion scripts, and public version control. If you take any single one out, then the really useful part, the dit file type, doesn't work. But it's also true that these concepts have never been applied in this way (that I have found), and so there isn't any default, easy language to call upon to explain DitaBase to people readily and easily.

The answer to the question "What is DitaBase?" feels like it has to be "1, 2, 3, 4" where I list out the essential components. Perhaps, its a "common language for data", or a "general data accuracy system", but those concepts sound totally meaningless by themselves.

I really would love to hear some feedback on how you understand the idea and whether my thinking on this is sound, or if I am totally off base, being caught up too close to the idea.

<comment><USER5> I love the idea, but i'm a little wary of the implementation, we are heavy json-schema users, so i worry that this schema data is not going to track the json-schema standard. we got burned with swagger, where in V2 they where pretty much fully J-S compliant, but then for some reason dumped compliance in v3, so we had to kiss them goodbye. I don't need my schema's tied up in yet another propriety format, even if it is close to J-S. I cant see any compliance statements on the site that tell me what level of compliance exists.

<comment><USER5> Bad form replying to my own response, but i have inspected it some more and have some comments.

1\. The site says schema.org is included, but schema.org is mainly just documentation, I woukd like something more like json-schema that I can actualy use the schema data directly.

2\. I dont get why the validators have function names, surely the validator is anonymous, and its name should be a function of the property path, the argumant is always "value", and it always returns a boolean. So why do you need to declare a name at all.

3\. If you cant support json-schema then you need an export function that allows you to export valid draft v8 json-schema.

4\. Some way of anotating properties for graphql endpoint generation would be cool, ie generating .graphql files, or mongodb bson.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me see if I can boil down your comments to specifc questions that I can answer.

"Is DitaBase compliant with JSON-Schema?"

The answer to this question is critical to understand about how DitaBase is different: if you want it to, then yes! The validators and converters are fully Turing complete, and not limited to Javascript either. If you can make a language interpreter in C/C++ (think Javascript V8), then you can use it with DitaBase. So whatever format you want, just rebuild it in (or port it to) dit schemas. Therefore, it isn't possible for DitaBase to not be compliant with something (at least, as far as I can think) because if someone thinks its important, they'll rebuild it in dit schemas.

"Schema.org is just documentation. Are there programatic, queryable schemas?"

Yes, but only optionally. In theory, all that is required to be a dit is a validator. You could inherit from "thing" and just directly have some text and a validator. But if you want to use Controllors (CRUD for a specific schema), Containers (abstract the shape of the data from the content) and other things like that, then yes, you need programatically defined schemas, just like in J-S. If someone has them, then you can use them. If not, in theory, if their schema is public, then you could just make a pull request with the relavent additions. DitaBase is very open compared to something like Swagger.

"Uh, anonymous functions? Duh?"

Oh, yes that makes much more sense that the ridiculous names I was giving those in the example. That actually just never occured to me. Of course these things will have to get slowly fleshed out over time, and I suppose there's no reason you couldn't have both.

"GraphQL, BSON, custom tools, cool things"

This is the great thing about DitaBase. Since you know the exact structure of any dit, and everything about dits is generic, you can just build all of this on top, without any overhead. DitaBase will almost certainly build some things like this in house, especially something like GraphQL, and some data analysis and statistical plotting utilites. Or perhaps, similar to how VScode absorbs open source projects into itself when they get really popular, DitaBase could probably do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An example dit is now live at [https://www.ditabase.io/example.html](https://www.ditabase.io/example.html)</comment>


A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-low-fare-loophole-for-international-travelers-1540992568?mod=rsswn <comment><USER3> Maybe I can't read, but the article talks a lot about the "fifth freedom", but doesn't explicitly tell you what it is.

There's a short little section that go "some airlines are allowed to do this strange thing, especially if a fuel stop is involved". But it doesn't explicitly say what the fifth freedom is, just alludes to it.

<comment><USER4> Example - Ethiopian Airlines flies from Dublin to Los Angeles. Dublin is, I believe, a "fuel stop" since the flight originates in Ethiopia.

<comment><USER5> To those wondering, Dublin is on the straight line path from Ethiopia to LA.

<comment><USER6> Well, technically, Dublin is on or near the _Great Circle_ route from Ethiopia to LA.

<comment><USER7> Which is the straight line path on a sphere.

<comment><USER8> Which is called orthodromic:

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

as opposed to loxodromic:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm, I think this article might possibly be astroturfing/stealth advertising Emirates, maybe some others.

It says due to a treaty they are the cheapest flight from New York to Italy, at $988, compared to United charging $3328.

Checking some flight sites I see Emirates prominently featured at the top of pages as a sponsored result. Their costs are not the lowest. And $3328 is not a normal lowest priced ticket, I wonder how many dates they had to look at and other cheaper flights they had to ignore to list that United fare as one of the comparisons. Definitely some cherry picking going on on that one.

I found Oct 16-Oct 30 from New York to Rome for $365. Granted outbound is American and inbound is Finnair makes a stop in Helsinki with a 12 hr layover. But hey for $365...

In any case I don't believe it's true that flights with the characteristics in the article are always the cheapest, or maybe not even most of the time.

It doesn't really seem like a loophole anyway. Singapore Airlines flying from Singapore to Honolulu to San Francisco is obviously a legitimate flight. If some people only want the Honolulu leg there's nothing wrong with that, it's not a loophole or trick.

</comment><comment><USER10> A list of routes like these:

[https://www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au/fifth-freedom- rou...](https://www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au/fifth-freedom-routes/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Really? The author touts how amazing a $900 fare is (MXP-JFK) but a quick search on Expedia returns the same flight, two ways, non stop, Iberia/American for $322. And I entered a random date. Depressingly bad journalism.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is there a requirement for only flying from/to the airline's country?

What is stopping any airline from simply opening fully owned subsidiaries in every country they want to fly from/to?

Or alternatively effectively doing the same by leasing their aircraft on a hourly basis to another airline from the desired country?

<comment><USER13> A fully owned subsidiary would (depending on the laws of the country) not be considered 'local'.

See complicated tracking of ownership of European Airlines to meet local ownership requirements.

<comment><USER14> At least any European airline can operate on any part of Europe. One of the problems with brexit, is that with the merge of British Airways and Iberia, Iberia may lose the rights to take of from Madrid for all their latam flights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So I assume if I search for flights on any aggregator site, these will show up? It's not like they're secret or anything?

<comment><USER5> Yes, they do. Not all cheap flights show up on all aggregators though - <USER2> ticketing data feeds used by airlines are arcane and very complex, and some aggregators ignore some corner cases, meaning some good tickets might not be shown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have used [https://skiplagged.com](https://skiplagged.com) that takes advantage of this rule but takes it slightly further. You book the entire flight but don't get on the second leg of your flight. Occasionally it comes out cheaper than if you just book the first leg on the same flight.

<comment><USER17> Hidden city ticketing isn't the same thing and can result in losing access to one's frequent flier account or even being banned from an airline. In the US I'd only risk it on Southwest.

<comment><USER5> Are there any reports of anyone being banned or punished in any way for this? (with the exception of bloggers/youtubers who are advertising the practice)

<comment><USER18> I did that two years ago when flying from Los Angeles . Not to save money but travel plans had changed so it was better to get off in Amsterdam instead of continuing to London. It took a lot of convincing to get the airline to stop the bags in Amsterdam. Finally they did it but we got a stern warning to never do this again. Not sure if there would have been a ban but they really really really didn't like it.

<comment><USER19> That is with bags though, with understandable is more work for them.

<comment><USER18> Possible. Although I don't really understand why it's more work.

<comment><USER20> They have to manually intercept your bags from being transferred to the next flight.

<comment><USER18> Are you sure? At check in they always put a destination sticker on the bags. In this case they just put Amsterdam instead of London on the bag. It didn't seem to be much of a hassle.

<comment><USER21> You normally check in bags for your final destination when all legs of the trip are with the same airline

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm missing the part of the article where it explains why this leads to lower fares? just because the native airlines on either end of a specific route don't compete with each other?

</comment><comment><USER23> geez, mark as (2018) please</comment>


5 Tips for Aspiring Web App Developers - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/09/18/web-developer-tips/ <comment><USER2> Great line from the article: Git is the new resume. In my corporate day job, I've lost count of how many times we've brought in dev candidates who claim to be passionate about coding, but have absolutely no code, projects or even screenshots to point to.

I know there could be many reasons for this, but developers who take advantage of this advice will have a _huge_ advantage over their peers.</comment>


Ask HN: Co-founding with international guys - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if anybody in the HN community has legally incorporated in the U.S. with international co-founders?
What are the special provisions? What are the hurdles?
Any advice would be extremely helpful. Thanks. <comment><USER2> What's your revenue like? Pass through taxation, the S Corp is cool for making startup accounting simple. You'll want a C Corp once over 100K in profit or basically when making more than you need to live.

Only problem? S Corps do NOT allow international owners so you may want to wait on international ownership until you're startup is ready. Also remember that getting legal probably shouldn't be your startup's priority.

According to PG...

"There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. I'm not even sure what the list is, because we, ah, skipped all that. When we got real funding near the end of 1996, we hired a great CFO, who fixed everything retroactively. It turns out that no one comes and arrests you if you don't do everything you're supposed to when starting a company. And a good thing too, or a lot of startups would never get started."

An excerpt from "How to Start a Startup"</comment>


Ask HN: Alternative careers where software development skills are useful - <AUTHOR>

I'm tired of software development for the sake of software development. The software I write has very questionable value, I feel like my work is largely disposable and I personally don't mesh well with hacker culture.<p>If anyone has successfully transitioned away from software development to a different career I'd appreciate hearing your story. I gather there are opportunities in the sciences for individuals with programming ability. <comment><USER2> Let me start this off by saying that I sympathise with you. But, you should start thinking outside the box. Software development is a craft - and as such, it plays a part in achieving outcomes. I don't consider the ability to program a super power - anyone with a technical background is able to learn programming given time and the proper resources.

Start thinking more about what you are trying to achieve (the goal) and why you are approaching it in this particular way (the purpose). "Meaningless work" is often the result of decisions made on a whim - take the responsibility to investigate the goal and alternative methods to achieve the same result.

In order to find your work more meaningful, you should become more focused on the business aspects. Sometimes the best approach to solve a problem is meaningless work - but at least then that would be a comfort.

If you want to try something outside of your day job and you consider yourself good at web-related things, there's little stopping you from setting up an e-commerce store and selling things. Shopify is an e-commerce solution on a platter, but there are many alternatives. I've recently setup a Wordpress + WooCommerce website + bought a theme (Kallyas) for my wife - [http://www.swartsbooks.com](http://www.swartsbooks.com) \- still busy working out the kinks. Even though I could have built the store myself, I opted for the practical solution. My current side project focuses on addressing communication issues (e.g. complaints, notices, notifications, sharing of documents) in micro communities such as complexes, estates, shopping centres/malls and corporate parks.

You could also write e-books about your craft, similar to what Authority ([http://nathanbarry.com/authority/](http://nathanbarry.com/authority/)) suggests and sell them on gumroad.

If you like doing business, you might consider doing consultation + web development. I occasionally did this the past 2 years and made about $6K at $36/h for development and $30/h for consultation. The consultation part revolves around advising the best approach to take regarding the technical side and the impact on business concerning the technical side. You could also do some research on behalf of your client if you consider yourself more knowledgeable.

The moral of the story is that you do not necessarily have to find your day job meaningful (and most people don't), as long as you can do other meaningful things.</comment>


Mozilla is changing its look–and asking the Internet for feedback - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/mozilla-is-changing-its-lookand-asking-the-internet-for-feedback/ <comment><USER2> These are a terrible. The moz://a is creative, but mundane. The first one is pretty good but will get lawsuits from Pixar for copying monster inc.

The rest are garbage. Who designed these? An 8 year old?

<comment><USER3> The second reminds me of the much maligned London Olympics logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the last thing they need to fix.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can they work on the memory leaks first?

<comment><USER6> Considering they wrote an entire language to help with just that, I'd say they're working on it.

<comment><USER7> The purpose of Rust is not to fix memory leaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like something from the 70's.</comment>


'Smart toilet' monitors for signs of disease - <AUTHOR> https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/smart-toilet-monitors-for-signs-of-disease.html <comment><USER2> Adult Swim's Smart Pipe coming to life.

[https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ](https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ)

I actually thought it was a cool idea when I watched that, besides the exaggerated parts for the joke.

<comment><USER3> Brilliant! That's some HBO Silicon Valley level parody.

Atlas Shrugged @ 5:15

Start at 4:55 for the set-up. SmartPipe CEO Kirk Peckley is played by Mark Proksch, who also played Daniel Wormald (a.k.a Pryce) the H2 driving Squat Cobbler from Better Call Saul!

[https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Daniel_Wormald](https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Daniel_Wormald)

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

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Squat%20Cobb...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Squat%20Cobbler)

K-Strass the Zim-Zam Yo-Yo Guy Super Compilation

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj9VF7LyffU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj9VF7LyffU)

[https://www.amc.com/shows/better-call- saul/talk/2016/02/bett...](https://www.amc.com/shows/better-call- saul/talk/2016/02/better-call-saul-mark-proksch-k-strass-zim-zam)

>Indeed, Proksch – who says he took Gilligan and Gould's reaction as "incredibly high praise" – says the K-Strass character isn't much of a stretch from who he is as a person. In fact, he says there's even a little bit of K-Strass DNA in his performance as Pryce on Better Call Saul. "Every character that I play is a variation of me," he says. "I have yet to play an out and out asshole or a villain. It's always kind of a pathetic guy wearing pleats. And that's what I love. I'm so happy that I get to play these arrogant idiots."

<comment><USER4> Haha.

"My father taught me the value of hard work and big ideas. But, he was in the union and so he grew lazy - "

 _zooms in on copy of Atlas Shrugged_

"\- and he failed to innovate. Uh, he died."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have not read the article, but every time I've heard about it my thought is, "make it not connected to the internet." Basically, keep the data local, then you can choose to take to your doctor, or find a way to analyze it yourself. No need for it to be transmitted anywhere.

Of course, that would require respecting a persons privacy and not falling for the lure of "big data" "saving the world".

<comment><USER6> That defeats the entire point of this, the whole point isn't a diagnosis but an early warning especially of it can be performed within a single bowl movement so when you are done and ready to flush you get some feedback.

If you need to go to a doctor to get any analysis you might as well bring your own stool sample.

This is intended to replace home stool testing kits which are well icky and tricky to use.

Having smart toilets in public or semi pubic places would be a good balance between privacy and utility, it can't tie results to a given user but it can collect collective health data and alert users of potential health concerns.

<comment><USER7> I think the point of the parent is not so much that you need to take your data to a doctor as much as it's about not uploading the data to the internet (ie keep the data local).

<comment><USER8> Or the obvious middle-ground: make it optional to upload it. I would certainly not want this unless it uploaded and analyzed the data automatically. If it can happen locally, no problem, but I guess it makes it much harder.

<comment><USER9> If they make it optional, I'd bet good money on the "Don't upload" being off by default and hidden behind five complicated menus.

<comment><USER10> It is also reset with every update, which have an ominously high frequency, like once a week. The device will of course disable it's features if an update is not applied.

Also, make it full of "useful" granularity like: "upload data on Tuesdays" or "Only upload data if the water PH is less than 7".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stool diagnostics are the future. So much health information is flushed down the toilet. I hope this will soon be a standard in houses. Except, the problem is what happens to the data of friends that use your toilet...

<comment><USER12> >I hope this will soon be a standard in houses.

I sure as hell hope is is not. Like every other piece of convenience crapware (pun intended) we've surrounded ourselves with, it would undoubtedly come packed with data sharing agreements with ad networks / data brokers.

If this ever becomes some sort of norm, I would encourage people to start mailing boxes of their own waste directly to Google for them to enjoy analyzing, as the data would inevitably end up in their hands anyway.

<comment><USER3> Darryl Cherney once organized a pee-in to protest a call by Ronald Reagan for mandatory government drug testing, convincing several hundred people to mail urine samples to the White House. When the containers were all ruptured by the sorting machinery in the Garberville post office, much of that part of the county's mail smelled like a public toilet for several days. Darryl was informed of the disaster and shrugged sheepishly. When you were saving the planet, you won a few, you lost a few.

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=WDvNaVv_sX4C&pg=PA164&lpg=P...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=WDvNaVv_sX4C&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&dq=mail+urine+to+ronald+reagan&source=bl&ots=l6xWPqKWCQ&sig=ACfU3U0q8XuycsLtsarRlqcGG4lD- bhB2w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi- yvyB0vLpAhWGqqQKHYf8Dk8Q6AEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Bob Shireman, who calls himself a "consumer advocate," created the "Piddle to the President Kit." Nw you can send President Reagan your urine in a leak- proof missive, thanks to the sterile specimen cup, the currugated mailing box addressed to "Ron and Nancy," and the set of mailing insttructions that come with each kit.

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=neYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT12&lpg=PT...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=neYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT12&lpg=PT12&dq=mail+urine+to+ronald+reagan&source=bl&ots=LFUJJpUtc5&sig=ACfU3U0hzqmdTH54ZQHuwDYK4OxYA3lT-g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi- yvyB0vLpAhWGqqQKHYf8Dk8Q6AEwAXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=mail%20urine%20to%20ronald%20reagan&f=false)

<comment><USER12> That's fascinating. Hopefully the effort can be revived should Google et al. pursue our health data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally I think this is going to be a critical aspect of healthcare in the future. That along with other continuous monitoring like smart watches with advanced pulse rate detection etc. And I think that the health improvements in terms of disease prevention and early treatment will be like night and day. They will look back at the pre-continuous-monitoring era of healthcare as the dark ages.

However, the part that I really disagree with is the idea that it would send your data to the doctor but not make it readily available to you. I personally feel like access to and control over my own personal health data is a human right that is actually often effectively blocked by our current healthcare system.

And I know that the belief is that normal people can't interpret health information, but with AI built into these types of devices and services and online knowledgebases, that isn't completely true anymore. Sure, we absolutely need doctors before making decisions, but that does not mean we should not be able to examine our own health data and do our own computer-assisted research. Especially when so many people cannot afford the costs of routine healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER14> I guess it's convenient and probably would save lives by way of course early detection...

But... what about going in for an interview and unbeknownst you get idd and samples get sent. Or your employer... oh so and so is coming on with an expensive disease which requires loads of time off to recover...

There are implications that need to be adressed.

<comment><USER15> I'm not quite sure that level of concern is warranted. It is illegal to ask for a medical examination before getting hired and I imagine this would extend to that. Testing poop, even with a smart toilet, would be pretty cumbersome and a huge PR nightmare. It would be just as easy now to remove hair for covert DNA tests - but I don't think that has ever been an issue.

<comment><USER16> > It would be just as easy now to remove hair for covert DNA tests

Thanks to companies like 23andMe, this won't be neccessary in the future. If enough of your relatives have sent their genome to those companies, they already have the sequenced genome as well as consent from your relatives to use their DNA. Their DNA is highly similar to your DNA which means that they can extrapolate to you, without even having to resort to covert methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The real problem is false positives. Suppose this system puts up a warning. What next? Expensive and/or invasive tests? Could be more trouble than it's worth. If it were me, I'd have to see a very high rate of accuracy before I'd trust it.

<comment><USER18> That's the common argument about almost every medical test. Prostate psa test could mean problems or not, and then prostate cancers have very different outcomes. If we scanned everyone we'd find lots of other anomalies that don't matter, but we'd find a few people with near term heart attack or stroke or early cancer. I'd personally take that risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its already main stream for cats to do the same with litter. [https://prettylitter.com/](https://prettylitter.com/)

Its matter of time before this becomes common.

Disclaimer: Investor in prettylitter.

<comment><USER20> I recognize this as being advertised on the podcast "Small Town Dicks" with Yeardley Smith ["Lisa" from "The Simpsons"] and two detectives "from Small Town USA" about actual true crime stuff.

Notification Again: I just listen to the podcast, I've simply just watched 'The Simpsons', and I don't have a cat.

smalltowndicks.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Hey buddy, you're the one with the sex toilet!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83KLxQ1jjdg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83KLxQ1jjdg)

</comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone actually build something good?

'What's another attack surface of a persons dignity and privacy?' - all new products.

You're all going the way of the dinosaurs with your 'new' bs

<comment><USER22> My wife has an autoimmune disease which can manifest with blood and protein spilling into urine due to impaired kidney function. To monitor this daily would be a tremendous improvement to our ability to monitor for flares.

<comment><USER21> Thats a brilliant example where we need to provide her with the device she needs.

I still dont want it as a product thats in every home

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "You'll never guess what Jennifer Lopez had for dinner this month. The number 9 will blow your digestive system"

But Wow, that adult swim video nailed that in 2014

Of course If a system can scan signs of disease, to modify it to scan silently drugs would be a breeze. Would be basically like putting a policeman inside each toilet.

<comment><USER3> Blue Lives Fecal Matter!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The downsides are huge, including everyone knowing or thinking that they know your medical secrets. More or less we know what we have or risk, yet until it hits us like a ton of bricks we keep eating, sitting and drinking.

</comment><comment><USER25> Literally "the internet of sh*t"

</comment><comment> vanilla-almond What types of health conditions can be detected in stools and urine?

For some conditions there are some obviously visual signs e.g. blood in urine or stools. Or the colour of stool may indicate a condition if it is persistently a very pale colour.

But what conditions can be detected in stools and urine that aren't visible by visual diagnosis? The article mentions some cancers but not much detail.

<comment><USER26> Look up urine test strips

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comments in this thread that can't see the obvious benefits and instead are focusing on far-fetched privacy issues. If we come to a point where everyone is forced to shit in a smart toilet we will have way bigger problems to deal with. Until then just let me have a smart toilet to analyze my poop.

</comment><comment><USER27> jokes aside, testing != outcomes; many comments here make reference to testing results taken by others, and then .. what ? Who owns the data ? what is the custody chain of the data ? When it is available, to the highest bidder?

Illness is a weakness, and weakness is used by humans against other humans, everyday. Some psychology suggests that the more removed and remote the decision-making, the more likely to be unfair. Therefore, collecting intimate data on YOU with this device, especially in some kind of mandetory, unescapable way, is the stuff of nightmares for real reasons.

This invention is useful, but its application is no joke. !

</comment><comment><USER28> there was no other method than anus scan for authentication? the fingerprint was not enough? if the anus is so reliable why bother with the fingerprint at all? how about voice authentication in lieu of all that?

<comment><USER29> This is honestly incredible. They had to have taken this out of the adult swim promo.

This comparison obviously begs the question, it it illegal to store a scan of a child's unique anal topography?

<comment><USER30> There was a gynecologist arrested a few years ago for taking related photos of (adult) patients.

Storing the photo in a visually-renderable format is probably unacceptable. Storing hashes should work though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious then, do they have a light in the toilet to get the picture? I imagine some light must stream in depending on your body size and the toilet size but is that enough light or do they need more?

</comment><comment><USER32> "shitbit"

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't need 1 more thing monitoring my shit.

<comment><USER34> Toilet-cloud interface unwanted

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's more like a lock and key mechanism that employs your topographical anal handshake.

</comment><comment><USER35> Inevitably another cloud connected device. I hope it keeps my crap secure...

</comment><comment><USER26> I saw some kitty litter that changes color for certain conditions.

</comment><comment><USER36> original paper [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41551-020-0534-9#](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1038/s41551-020-0534-9#)

</comment><comment><USER37> There's a Japanese startup that makes smart cat litterboxes. Clever stuff.

<comment><USER38> Do they analyze the cat poop?

<comment><USER37> Cat pee.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Botmarker, a bot that helps you bookmark tweets you like - <AUTHOR> https://botmarker.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Have you ever wanted to "bookmark" a tweet but ing it didn't seem appropriate? Or you didn't want your followers to know that you "liked" this or that tweet?

Or did you a tweet, but when you got back to it after few hours (or few days) you couldn't find it, either because it was deleted, or because you ed so many tweets that it became difficult to find what you are looking for?

botmarker solves all these problems (and many more).

botmarker is a bot that helps you bookmark tweets you like and organize them into categories (#tags) without revealing what you are interested in to your followers (or stalkers :) ). botmarker also keeps a copy of tweets you bookmarked even if they get deleted.

botmarker is NOT a "standalone" app (no need to install any additional apps), but rather it is more like an add-on to twitter, and you can use it "inside" your favorite twitter client. All what you need to do to bookmark a tweet is to DM it to @botmarker. You can add hashtags to you DMs to organize them by categories.

We are opening our public beta today, and we would love to get your feedback about our app.</comment>


Bill To Re-Legalize Internet Poker Coming 'In The Next Month' - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-to-re-legalize-internet-poker-coming-in-the-next-month-2009-2

<comment><USER2> just because a bill is introduced, doesn't mean it'll pass, the brick and mortar gambling industry has a pretty big lobby to make sure of it

<comment><USER3> Actually that's outdated. Most of them now want in on the action. Still won't pass though.</comment></comment>


Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent - <AUTHOR> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,078,349.PN.&OS=PN/8,078,349&RS=PN/8,078,349 <comment><USER2> The patent is about reading a symbol on the ground that triggers the reading of a QR-code to get precise GPS location. Roughly.

Actually, the QR-code (or equivalent) is used to fetch "instructions for performing the autonomous vehicle instruction" (which could be anything).

And the QR-code can be replaced by a lot of things (radio signal, etc).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it'd be nice if more people read patent claims before passing judgement.

I took the obvious practical implementation of this to be a method to guide autonomous vehicles into a parking lot/structure. The car rolls up to the landing strip, the driver gets out, the car switches to autonomous mode, gets the connection information to the parking management server, asks for and receives a spot assignment and instructions on getting there, etc.

GPS and map data are simply insufficient to handle autonomous parking. There are precious few universals in parking laws, customs, lot-flow, etc. And automatic parking is one of the unavoidable expectations of self-driving cars.

<comment><USER4> > it'd be nice if more people read patent claims before passing judgement.

It'd also be nice if patents were written in a language that made them readily understandable. Then more people might read them. I'm sure I'm not the only person who finds them obscure bordering on incomprehensible.

<comment><USER5> 'Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.'

<comment><USER6> Make things as vague as possible while still patentable, and no clearer.

<comment><USER5> I find them easy to read. It's a style imposed by the need to be exhaustively specific. Just keep at it, you get used to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The abstract says:

"Disclosed are methods and devices for transitioning a mixed-mode autonomous vehicle from a human driven mode to an autonomously driven mode. Transitioning may include stopping a vehicle on a predefined landing strip and detecting a reference indicator. Based on the reference indicator, the vehicle may be able to know its exact position. Additionally, the vehicle may use the reference indictor to obtain an autonomous vehicle instruction via a URL. After the vehicle knows its precise location and has an autonomous vehicle instruction, it can operate in autonomous mode."

So it does not patent "driverless vehicle", but a particular method of transition from mixed-mode to driverless mode.

<comment><USER8> "Driverless Vechicle" is a compound adjective modifying patent. It's not a patent _for_ (all) driverless vechicles, it's a patent _regarding_ driverless vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent. I was hoping technological progress in this area would be oppressed. The USPTO did not disappoint!

<comment><USER10> Car models aren't like software—people aren't constantly producing new, accidentally-infringing works. I'm pretty sure this is one of those patents that will get _licensed_ by all the other big companies, rather than sued over.

<comment><USER11> Well, there are clear prior art examples for driverless cars, but that's beside the point. The real issue here is that a driverless car manufacturer is going to absorb all liability for all accidents while with a driver, the driver absorbs that liability.

I seriously doubt Google will monetize this patent before it expires.

<comment><USER12> 1\. Google is NEVER going into the auto business, but they'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car.

2\. The auto manufacturers will only tepidly roll this out very with tons of regulatory and legal tiptoeing.

3\. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road.

4\. It will happen, eventually. It will save hundreds of thousands of lives/year.

<comment><USER13> _they'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car_

Of course, as you're riding down the road in your Google-powered driverless car, there will be ads on the dashboard monitor, paid for by the businesses you pass by on your route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This may indicate the Google has found 100% autonomous operation is not practical yet and so they spent time working on how to easily transition in/out of that mode. I could see a situation where you have a toll-both type area before entering highways that would trigger your vehicle's autonomous mode and another one to switch back to manual as you exit.

<comment><USER15> Practical or not, I think the first jurisdictions to permit robot drivers will limit where they are permitted[1]. This would work well for that, though realistically, I think an online map of allowed regions and a GPS will be the real solution unless regular drivers want to be informed that others are robot driven, then it will be road side signs.

EOM

[1] I drove south through Nevada at 70+mph on a ruler straight road for 90 minutes without encountering another vehicle, human, or cow. Start there, expand as experience with the systems is gained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I am super excited for the future of auto-driving auto-motives, does this patent really prove anything novel and non obvious? QR codes are already used for orientation by many systems, and it seems quite obvious that an autonomous car would need orientation sensors and a computer with at least one line of code relating the operation of an autonomous vehicle. I think google has made some real patent-worthy innovations with their driver-less vehicles but this seems to be of the overly broad progress stifling type of patent.

</comment><comment><USER17> The most amazing thing about this patent is this:

Filed: May 11, 2011 Issued: December 13, 2011

<comment><USER18> I noticed that too. I was actually patenting after I published my post on this earlier today because I thought such a quick turnaround was impossible and the patent was not in fact granted. But it was! Really mind-blowing considering we've seen some take four or five years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google is one of the few companies that legitimately has me excited for the future.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here is a concept video from Google that indirectly shows some context for how the landing strip and QR codes might be used: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWhu_aa9kM>

</comment><comment><USER21> When those cars make into our roads, I expect them to have way less accidents than us, humans. Therefore, more and more the human driving insurance will start to spike to levels that make it not cheap to drive your own car.

<comment><USER22> Huh? I would expect insurance discounts for every mile you drive under automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What about prior art - DARPA grand challenge (2004-2007)?

<comment><USER24> This patent is about switching between manual and automatic driving, not the autonomous driving in itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When the issue is music or software people pirate, patents are scorned and declared the enemy of progress. When the issue is driverless cars, the attitudes seem much more relaxed.

<comment><USER26> Music and software piracy are not patent violations. They are copyright violations. It's a completely different issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fuck patents of all sorts. They do nothing but stifle innovation.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. The entire patent departments of all world governments should be abolished. There is no reason the human race should be putting these restrictions on ourselves. It's completely absurd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Keep in mind that they probably submitted this to the patent office 3 years ago

</comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't KITT from Knight Rider count as prior art? :)

(I didn't read the patent!)

</comment><comment><USER31> Prior art: trains.

Seriously, though, this is a complete waste of time. Mass transit has been solving the problem of getting people from point A to point B without them having to do the piloting for a hundred years. What we really need to be spending our money on is rebuilding the streetcar and intercity rail systems that used to connect nearly every town in the country and electrifying them. This will drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (because oil is the only portable energy source cheap and powerful enough for automobiles) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Instead, we're talking about an overly complex solution involving creation of an automated driving system on all our highways and compelling thousands of users to upgrade to driverless cars, which may or may not be electric.

In other words, Google's driverless car is to transportation as Dart is to DOM scripting.

<comment><USER32> Do trains use QR codes to park? I can't find a good source.

<comment><USER31> Yes, I know that patent is actually more specific than "driverless car." I was just being snarky.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand why you would do that when patents are a legitimate concern and are a problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Los Angeles Makerspace - <AUTHOR>

From time to time I see posts about makerspaces or family/kid friendly hackerspaces and just thought I would mention that we now have 2100 sq feet in Downtown LA dedicated to supporting makers of all ages.<p>http://lamakerspace.com <comment><USER2> Here is hoping this gets to the front page. LA most certainly needs more spaces like this and less retail space :)

I will definitely swing by in Jan when you open!

<comment><USER3> You can count me there as well.. just moved back here after years of being in Denver/Boulder and before that Atlanta...

And this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes me happy I moved back. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickable: <http://lamakerspace.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Clickable is good. :)</comment></comment>


Zero Trust approach to network security - <AUTHOR> http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=18521

<comment><USER2> Nothing to see unless you surrender your privacy (name, email, phone, etc) in exchange for a pig-in-a-poke download.

Not to be trusted.

Also not appropriate as a post to HN. This is shameless and unsophisticated marketing without any content.</comment>


Names and Signs for Logical Lonnectives - <AUTHOR> http://flickr.com/photos/hexadecimal_time/2254800793/in/pool-diagrams

<comment><USER2> It's a bad idea to use mirroring and rotation when creating glyphs. The reason is that it ties the correct interpretation of a string to its position and orientation in space. Generally we want meaning to be absolute. The meaning of a string shouldn't change depending on your position relative to it: if you fire a Latin 'b' into space, it's impossible to tell whether you meant 'b','q','p', or 'd'. The problem is worse with the alphabet in the article.

In case you were wondering, the symmetry of the shapes does not allow any interesting logical operations to be performed by reorienting the string in space, except as it happens by accident.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating diagram and layout, but damn that's got to be tough on dyslexics.</comment>


Access Local Environment Variables Using Webpack – Netlify - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Brian, question about using the built-in env variables from a netlify deploy. I am trying to access COMMIT_REF from within webpack using process.env.COMMIT_REF but it's just blank. Works locally in dev. Do I need to do something to enable those default env variables in netlify? Thanks!</comment>


Google and Audi plot new front in Android vs. iOS war - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/30/5255912/google-and-audi-collaborate-on-in-car-infotainment-to-rival-apple

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this entire article with the 'war' analysis is a pretty big stretch. So what, Google is working directly with a car manufacturer comes seven months after Apple announced iOS in the Car. It doesn't matter who comes first or second. As long as it works with all mobile major OSs through established Bluetooth standards is what matters. Build a car system which only operates with certain mobile platform is not acceptable as it locks down to one type of consumer group. No splitting please at least on this front. We already have "fandriod" v/s "iSheeple" war going. The whole 'war' angle was completely unnecessary.</comment>


Tell HN: I did it (thank you) - <AUTHOR>

Two years ago I submitted an 'ask HN' asking for advice from parents working from home (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536213). I was having doubts about my childcare and wondered how feasible it was to work around an 18 month old.
Long story short I didn't jump ship, I stuck with the job, but ended up pregnant with #2 who was born in May 2012. I realised that I'd be returning to work to pay for childcare and so took the leap into self-employment.
I now work from home around 2 kids(!) - a 3.5yr old and nearly 1yr old - and am coming up to the end of my first year in business. It's hard, REALLY hard at times, but I am booked up solid months in advance and have made more in the past few months than I did in my job despite working around 8-12 hours less per week on average. My partner has been able to go down to part time hours so that he can spend more time with the kids which is benefiting us both.
I have launched a website for other UK work at home parents offering advice and support, and this is growing steadily month on month.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. I would not have had the guts to go through with this or indeed known the realities of what to expect if I'd not got such a fantastic range of responses to that original thread. <comment><USER2> I've been a work from home dad for the past 10 months taking care of my 11 month old. The older she gets the less she naps, and unfortunately I really only get to work when she is asleep. I'm worried within the next year I am going to have to stay up all night just to keep my 30 hr/week schedule up.

I actually did this backwards from the OP where I was doing freelance work but now I have a salaried job. My wife also has a full time job.

I just had to get that out there as lots of the time I feel very alone and think no one else is in my situation.

Thanks for sharing your story. I will check out your website later when my daughter is napping :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my son is about to drop down to 1 nap so I totally get it!

If it weren't for my partner going part time to help in the afternoons I'd be working all night long anyway, which is obviously not a feasible long term solution & can really take a toll on your sanity after a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That is great, Jem. My husband and I are considering starting a family soon. I have been debating between just taking a break from work or self employment. It is good to hear that you have been successful in working from home with your kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't get me wrong, if I could afford it I'd have certainly taken time off work (so if you can afford to do so, do it!) but I know I'd have got bored quickly if I'd just completely given up work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you have a link to your site?

<comment><AUTHOR> The support site? It's <http://wahmweb.co.uk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing your story. As someone who will start a family in the next year or so, reading that somebody has accomplished something that I aspire to (more independence and family time) is very inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot :)</comment></comment>


ZFS from a MySQL perspective - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/11/15/zfs-from-a-mysql-perspective/?utm_campaign=2017%20Q4%20Blogs&utm_content=63170561&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> Clarification on the deduplication section: ZFS doesn't automatically hardlink files (at least not in the sense you'll ever see a link count increase on your files), instead it checksums blocks and if two blocks are identical, it'll point both references to the same on-disk block.

It might sound like a small difference, but it does keep the files independent on the VFS layer. You can modify a file without fear of unwantingly modifying other files at the same time, which would happen if they were hard linked.

</comment><comment><USER3> We use MySQL on ZFS pretty extensively on my current team for both "hot" application database servers and warm storage / reporting / archival systems. Easy expansion, free snapshotting, great IO performance, and self-healing, first-class monitoring from within the OS, etc made it a logical choice for us when we were designing new database servers. We also use ZFS-on-linux extensively on a large storage cluster for multimedia, so it fit into our existing ecosystem and we wanted to standardize as much as possible.

Through our own research and experimentation we settled on a few critical tweaks to make InnoDB and MySQL play nicely together... the highlights are:

\- disable the innodb doublewrite buffer, ZFS protects against partial page writes

\- tune the ARC aggressively: we size it waaay down on our db servers and let innodb's buffer pool handle in-memory caching, and disable the arc prefetch. On our application databases, our core tables fit entirely into the innodb buffer pool

\- particularly important on spinning-platter systems, give the zpool scrub jobs higher IO priority... the default settings for zpool scrub delay scan_min_time are extremely conservative and safe, but on high-IO slaves we found that there was essentially never enough idle time for the scrub to complete. we sacrifice some IO overhead to allow scrubs to finish regularly.

I'm really curious to see some more detailed writing on MySQL/ZFS from the Percona team... their benchmarks are usually pretty well thought out, and they certainly understand InnoDB better than we do. What we've got works well, but I'd be surprised if a truly ideal setup down to the kind of detail that they dig into.

</comment><comment><USER4> Biggest hurdle in using zfs is that it consumes a huge amount of ram and uses considerable CPU cycles when compared with xfs or ext4. It's like running a massive MySQL server on top of another MySQL server if ever that was possible. Follow Reddit datahorders subreddit people speak all the time about how powerful freenas machine must be just to give decent transfer speeds over samba. Yes freenas will run without lot of CPU speed and ram but performance will suffer greatly.

<comment><USER5> ZFS uses lot of RAM only if you enable deduplication (and once you enable it, you cannot disable it). Without it, the RAM and CPU time requirements are very modest.

<comment><USER6> That's not at all correct, without deduplication enabled I have observed massive memory usage across BSD, Linux and ZFS on macOS.

<comment><USER7> That's the ARC. The ARC max size will default to (at least on FreeBSD) total ram -1GB[1]. Because the ARC is read cache it will shrink if the system needs more memory. Unused ram is wasted ram.

[1][https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs- advanced.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-advanced.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Frankly I don't think ZFS code complexity should be touted as an advantage.

<comment><USER9> The complexity comparison itself is not correct - new generation "file systems" are actually both volume managers and file systems (which also implies other features that live at the intersection).

<comment><USER10> The article properly points this out too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had a question about the mention of this under the RAID section:

>"ZFS is not affected by the RAID-5 write hole."

The "write hole" can exists in other RAID configurations such as RAID 10, RAID 1, RAID 6 etc. Is ZFS only insulated from these "write holes" in RAID 5 or all ZFS supported RAID configurations?

<comment><USER12> ZFS doesn't use actual RAID. It uses independent writes to each disk, so there are no write holes possible.

<comment><USER11> But that's exactly what RAID is - independent writes to each disk.

ZFS's stripe-mirror vdev is mirrored pair with a stripe written across those mirrors. How is that not actual RAID? Is that not RAID 10 with the ZFS addition of checksumming?

<comment><USER12> True RAID depends on not-at-all-independent writes to each disk. The whole thing needs to be atomic to be safe, which is impossible without a battery backup. With ZFS each write to each disk is independently atomic, which is what avoids the write hole. You always know if the write succeeded on each disk.

But I was to some extent conflating the different redundancy methods ZFS has. Some of them use the same sectors on each disk (I think) but some definitely don't. The writes are _completely_ independent of each other under some settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought databases needed O_DIRECT, which isn't implemented yet in ZoL.

<comment><USER14> O_DIRECT is not required, as evidenced by many open source databases not using it, but it does enable substantial gains in performance that are not otherwise possible. The caveat is that taking advantage of the O_DIRECT flag, or the equivalent functionality on non-Linux operating systems, requires a couple thousand lines of additional non-trivial code, a subset of which is not particularly portable.

The return on investment is definitely worth it from a performance perspective. However, it makes portability a hassle and implementation requires a high degree of specialized skill, so open source generally avoids it for the sake of easy maintainability.

<comment><USER15> >The return on investment is definitely worth it from a performance perspective.

Do you have hard evidence for that? I know in "theory" it sounds good and Oracle and DB2 docs continually act like it is a requirement.

My personal experience is only with DB2. Its storage was mounted on NFS (yea I know..) and due to many other app issues we were having DB performance issues (or that is what everyone though). Since it was mounted on NFS I could just sniff the wire and see what was going on. To my horror it was reading and writing in individual 4k blocks (which was the current page size). The overall network throughput was only about 2-4mbs at tops.

I managed to convince the DBA to turn off O_DIRECT in the DB2 config. I didn't get much of a chance to benchmark (since so much other stuff was going on at the time and the DBA insisted that my idea was a complete was of time) but what I did see was that without O_DIRECT, the OS has taken over and was batching up the reads and writes into larger blocks on the wire (sometimes as high as 64k) and overall throughput at max on the wire was now 20-30mbs. But I only had a few minutes with this config before it was reverted and never revisited. But nonetheless, using postgresql or mysql with the same schema and data would yield reads and writes of much larger blocks and it would allow the network throughput max peaks of up to 200mbs.

<comment><USER14> I've measured it in the past. The challenge is isolating the effect for the purpose of measurement, since so many other ancillary algorithm and architecture choices influence performance when using O_DIRECT e.g. the quality of cache replacement implementation and the design of the operation scheduler. O_DIRECT by itself is a pessimization.

Six or seven years ago I built a testbed to measure this directly, using a full O_DIRECT implementation (io_submit, sophisticated user space cache, etc) and a fully hinted mmap() implementation (so no double buffering). The rest of the storage and database implementation was otherwise identical, a fairly conventional B-tree style design. As I recall, the difference in throughput was 2-3x depending on the workload, mostly due to the caching behavior being dramatically more effective and predictable; the kernel cache makes poor choices from the perspective of a database execution schedule, and the knobs it provides for controlling behavior and inspecting cache state are much too limited. You get some of this control back if you double buffer like PostgreSQL does, but that introduces a different set of inefficiencies that kind of leave you where you started.

The secret is that to really take advantage of what O_DIRECT offers, you have to continuously intertwine and adaptively coordinate the query execution schedule and I/O schedule at a very fine-grained level. Most database implementations do not take this level of control of query execution, instead letting the OS control which query execution context gets to run when. In clever architectures, you can dynamically reschedule query execution to be nearly optimal for the I/O schedule and vice versa, while balancing for other tradeoffs (like query latency). Nonetheless, even if you don't do this, you can see substantial performance lift from a competent O_DIRECT based architecture. That said, you can't introduce O_DIRECT incrementally and expect great results, it is a bit of an all or nothing proposition.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like you were really trying to optimize for the top 0.1% :) I think you have hinted that you can't simply "turn on" O_DIRECT and have magic happen and if O_DIRECT is not used with a proper tune, you will be in more trouble. The irony with my story is that even with the horrible DB2 config our "guru" DBA's left us with, all the issues were from the software team. There were many stupid things going on in the ORM that were causing the issues (like grabbing an entire table and then calling a method on each row that in turn got a aggregate sum of a column on the same table... doing that for each row).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the performance impact of running MySQL on ZFS would be?

<comment><USER17> Correctly tuned, it could be faster on some workloads and hardware (block- level compression really saves on disk I/O).

<comment><USER18> My understanding is that ZFS compresses to multiples of the sector size, so it's the same ratio as innodb page compression gives but ought be much faster and transparent.

My own experiments put tokudb far far ahead:

[https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/160628887798/com...](https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/160628887798/compressing- mysql-databases)

Unfortunately tokudb has taken a massive performance hit recently - it was so fast when tokutek integrated it into 5.6 but the percona and Mariadb packaging in 5.7 is much slower than innodb - not sure what they haven't done but wish they'd profile and fix it - you'd think that percona, having brought tokutek - would have noticed and benchmarked and care :(

<comment><USER19> > not sure what they haven't done but wish they'd profile and fix it

Sometimes a slowdown comes because somebody noticed a problem and fixed it, such as the default compile options including a nasty bug that makes it unsafe. I don't have any specific knowledge of this case, but it the kind of thing I've seem happen multiple times in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know of any commercial Appliances that ship with ZoL as an active part of the software stack?

<comment><USER21> Why would an appliance vendor prefer Linux over FreeBSD or Illumos?

<comment><USER21> But there are a few — [http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies](http://open- zfs.org/wiki/Companies) lists some that mention Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if it would be possible to put InnoDB to a kernel mode filesystem driver to create a new database filesystem. (BeFS/WinFS-style)

<comment><USER23> Amazon Aurora does something similar in the sense that it decouples InnoDB functions including buffer cache and storage access from the overlying MySQL engine. The decoupled InnoDB lives on separate VM(s) and includes optimized data replication to support DBMS high availability. For example, with Aurora you can failover a large DBMS in seconds to a new site and have it come up with a heated buffer cache since that replicates too.

This approach makes sense for Aurora because it leverages cloud storage to provide data high availability across availability zones. Just putting InnoDB in a file system seems less interesting unless you add features that are strikingly different from what it does now.

See [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pd...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pdf) for a full description.

<comment><USER24> Sounds overly complicated and obscure.

<comment><USER25> The results are a massive gain in performance, availability, and durability, that seems worth added complexity.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel unveils tiny $99 MinnowBoard Max open single-board computer - <AUTHOR> http://linuxgizmos.com/intel-unveils-tiny-x86-minnowboard-max-open-sbc/ <comment><USER3> This looks neat for people that want a cheap board to hack on embedded Linux. However for serious control of signal generation, acquisition, PWM, servos, etc. you really don't want to be running a multitasking OS. Something like the Beaglebone Black, with its dedicated 200mhz programmable units in addition to embedded Linux, is much more interesting for hackers and makers IMHO.

<comment><USER4> Agreed - we used the PRUs for high speed data acquisition (~3.4msps.). What would have normally required a lot of outboard logic ended up being almost all software. Very much an underrated feature, although the Learning curve is not so great though for anything non-trivial.

<comment> TD-Linux I kind of wish the PRU's were Cortex-M0 or something that can be targeted with GCC. That said, they are a very nice idea.

I'm currently using the Zynq for a project and it's basically the extreme of the idea. FPGA's are kind of horrible in other ways though, such as the 30 minute build times and power inefficiency.

<comment><USER5> I considered writing a LLVM backend for the PRUs, but put it aside while I wait to see if the rumors of a TI provided compiler pan out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially relevant, I'd love to follow more news from MirrowBoard on this project (and similar projects), but all they seem to have is a Google+ page, and I refuse to sign up for that for a handful of reasons, none which I can be talked out of.

What happened to good old RSS? I'd subscribe to that in an _instant_ , but every time I'm directed to a Google+ feed I close the tab and forget about the company.

I'm pretty sure that for quite a few techies, looking to try out new gadgets and technology, a Google+ requirement is a deal-killer.

<comment><USER7> Use a throwaway account.

<comment><USER8> Eh. If you use the same browser, Google can just associate the two accounts. Also, it's more of a hassle than just saying "forget it."

It's entirely possible that if I went to a non-G+ page, I could be convinced to drop $60-100 on a whim. If you make me do stupid little things like remember credentials for a "throw-away account," then you lose the chance to capitalize on that impulse.

<comment><USER9> You shouldn't need to really remember any individual credentials for websites. Use something like KeePass.

<comment><USER10> mjolk: KeePass is a local password storage solution.

<comment><USER8> Whoops -- I was thinking lastpass. Thanks for correcting me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like the ideal home server solution - powerful enough to run backup solutions / media server for couple people, small enough to fit wherever you want it to.

I recently went with a mini-itx BayTrail-D solution as my BTSync / Plex server - a breath of fresh air after year of fighting with ARM board in the same role. This would have been even better, as it would allow me to maintain the same form factor, instead of making way for comparatively bulky mITX case.

The only thing I'd like to know is how would you power a SATA drive attached to this?

<comment><USER12> There are external power supplies available that connect directly to a disk. I would be more skeptical regarding I/O-performance. As far as I can see, there are only two SATA-ports available.

<comment><USER13> For a cheap x86 NAS, you might want to look out for the Asrock Q1900DC which was presented at CeBit this year and is supposed to come out soon.

It has 4x2ghz Intel Celeron J1900, 4 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 ports and 19V DC input, so no more need for a bulky ATX power supply (though for a NAS you need to find a way to power those hard disks).

Judging from the prices that similarly specced boards are fetching (between 50-70€), this one should be below 100€ as well.

Here is a slide from the Asrock CeBit presentation with the specs: [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1wOiaMWiiXw/Ux7HGzZAl6I/AAAAAAAAHQ...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1wOiaMWiiXw/Ux7HGzZAl6I/AAAAAAAAHQ4/fRiF1XFwOUs/s1600/Q1900DC.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Original site is not working for me.

You can find board specs on the minnowboard official website: [http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard- max/](http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/)

\--update (it's working again now, slow but working) contains a lot of useful information, the link I posted contains just the specs.

<comment><USER15> Original site not working for me either. Something interesting like this gotta get a lot of traffic.

<comment><USER14> Intel News announcement (still shown at EELive in San Jose till April 3rd): [http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014...](http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014/03/31/chip- shot-intel-based-minnowboard-max-to-further-embedded-open-source-design)

Other sites reporting the same news: [http://liliputing.com/2014/03/minnowboard-max-99-intel- atom-...](http://liliputing.com/2014/03/minnowboard-max-99-intel-atom-powered- single-board-computer.html)

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/04/01/0051224/intel- up...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/04/01/0051224/intel-upgrades- minnowboard-baytrail-cpu-nearly-halves-price-to-99)

[http://www.bit- tech.net/news/hardware/2014/04/01/minnowboard...](http://www.bit- tech.net/news/hardware/2014/04/01/minnowboard-max/1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice... I'm glad we're finally getting into the 64-bit age on microcontrollers so 4+ GB of RAM isn't too far off... I've been using the latest Cubieboard ([http://www.cubietruck.com/collections/frontpage/products/cub...](http://www.cubietruck.com/collections/frontpage/products/cubietruck- cubieboard3-cortex-a7-dual-core-2gb-ram-8gb-flash-with-wifi-bt)) for a project and it's been performing pretty well, but having more RAM and x86_64 would be great.

<comment><USER17> I think we are getting 64-bit microcontrollers because everything else is 64-bit, so 64-bit has become the natural/cost-effective choice. Rather than because uC's are regularly utilizing 4+ GB. It seems unlikely that 4+ GB of RAM will be common just yet.

<comment> ah- I wouldn't call the minnowboard a microcontroller, it's more similar to other single board computers like the Pandaboard and the odroid boards. And 2GB are already common for such boards, so 4GB are really not far off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are the chip docs open? Does linux need binary blobs on this board?

<comment><USER19> Apparently the UEFI implementation it requires to boot is not open source :-(

<comment> mark-r Any way to replace it with a BIOS, e.g. Coreboot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does this compare to a Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER21> Comparing the $99 version to the B ($35):

      - Double the clock speed (1.46GHz vs. 700MHz)
      - Double the RAM (1GB vs 512MB)
      - 8GB of on-board flash
      - Gigabit ethernet instead of 10/100
      - A USB 3.0 port
      - A SATA II port
      - A PCIe 2.0 lane
      - <USER2>
      - x86 architecture

Overall, probably worth the extra cost if you need the power and features. The question is, who does? I'm considering this for no other reason than I want a board in this form factor and power class that has SATA and PCIe.

<comment><USER22> Small correction: The MinnowBoard MAX only has 8MB of on-board flash, not 8GB. (It's an SPI chip to hold the firmware)

<comment><USER21> Whoops, you are right. Reading comprehension fail on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know how the performance on something like this stacks up to something like the Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER24> A 1.4 GHz Silvermont must be many times faster than a 700 MHz ARM11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Intel also has the Galileo board which is hardware and software pin-compatible with shields designed for the Arduino Uno* R3.

[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/g...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/galileo/galileo-overview.html)

<comment><USER3> Be careful though, the Galileo emulates AVR code and is orders of magnitude slower than a real Arduino. Don't expect to pick up any shield and make it work, unfortunately.

<comment><USER26> The Galileo actually only emulates a subset of the Arduino libraries. The AVR libraries themselves are, for the most part, not supported. This makes many popular libraries unusable even when hardware is not an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It has an Atom E3800 processor. How does power consumption/heating of this Atom processor compare to its competitors?

</comment><comment><USER28> Google cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hLPlk9M...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hLPlk9MjDewJ:linuxgizmos.com/intel- unveils-tiny-x86-minnowboard-max-open-sbc/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER29> IMHO what we need is not more powerful boards but more affordable ones.

At $99 it's too expensive for small projects.

<comment><USER30> The big advantage is x86 compatibility.

I'd pay a premium for that.

<comment><USER31> Just curious why you view that as an advantage, unless you mean to run commercial, closed-source applications on it?

<comment><USER32> Because trying to run open source on almost all ARM SoCs is a massive pain in the arse. Is there a single modern ARM SoC for which you can download a Linux install image with a mainline kernel and everything `just works'?

<comment><USER33> Freescale i.MX. Here's their git repository:

[http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/](http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/)

<comment><USER32> That's not mainline.

The almost universal lack of Mainline support is what makes ARM so frustrating. If it is not mainline, I don't want to know. Get a Minnowboard MAX and I suspect all the SoC functions will be available with a mainline kernel.

Get any ARM SoC and you are stuck with choosing between a mainline kernel with incomplete functionality OR a custom kernel that might have more functionality (if you are lucky). iMX6 might be the closest SoC to getting kernel sources for full functionality (but still stuck with blobs for Vivante GPU), but how much of that has made it to mainline (genuine question)?

<comment><USER33> If it's mainline, then you're probably not an experienced SoC developer because we've been dealing with off-track drivers and chip-level craziness for decades. We're happy to get a kernel that exposes 75% of the chip's blocks, at best.

Not sure what you mean by "full functionality" other than GPU driver source, and most of us using these for production purposes don't really care about that at this point.

Does it _need_ to be mainline to make your product functional?

<comment><USER32> I am most definitely not an experienced SoC developer, and I am not trying to make products.

Rather my experience is merely playing around trying to use ARM-based devices as general purpose computing devices in the same way you would use an x86 device, e.g. Allwinner A10 set top box as a low power server and the Samsung ARM chromebook. In that context, I think mainline support is important. Otherwise, as someone who is not a developer, getting even simple things to work requires so much more screwing around than anything x86.

As for "full functionality", look at an SoC like the Allwinner A10/A20 and see how much of the functionality they built into the SoC can actually be used in linux, despite the excellent efforts of the Linux sunxi team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This could be excellent as Plex client if it does support HDMI CEC. Raspbery Pi is too slow for this

</comment><comment><USER35> Okay, this is _perfect_ for my low-cost Haiku box project. I'm definitely getting one to hack on. Well done, Intel, and the whole "launching with Android and Linux" thing seems to be indicating an interesting shift...

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know what would be a reasonable network throughput to expect on this device? I see it has a 1Gbps port, but whether or not the CPU can saturate that is not obvious.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to see it announced with _Linux and Android_ support.

If this doesn't signal a shift from a Microsoft-oriented (Intel) world to a new era, I don't know what does.

<comment><USER37> I think it signals diversification for Intel; not necessarily a shift away from Windows. Running Windows on ultra-low-end boards like this makes no sense; the license would cost more than the board itself and the board isn't powerful enough to run anything approximating a modern version of Windows. It's an order of magnitude slower than your cell phone.

Ultimately though, the x86 PC (aka Windows) market is not a significant growth market for Intel. They'll keep pumping money into it as long as they get their 3-5% growth, but if Intel wants to move the needle for the company, they need to find new markets.

<comment> mark-r > It's an order of magnitude slower than your cell phone.

Really? I'd like to see some evidence of that. I'd assumed they were roughly the same ballpark.

<comment><USER37> The base $99 model is a single core 1.4 gHz E3815. The graphics core is significantly slower than a cell phone SoC as well. Intel is not an inferior company or anything; just this product at this price point is slower than a 3 year old cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd love to see a small, low power board (ARM or Intel) with Dual SATA ports, ethernet and preferably a serial console instead of the HDMI port.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dual SATA seems to be the sticking point. I'm still using a GlobalScale Dreamplug [1], but you'd be insane to pay retail (~250US) for it now. It's an 800mhz ARMv5 with 512mb of RAM and a single SATA port. It's well supported by the mainline kernel (with an upgrade to uBoot).

The FreeScale iMX6 would seem to have enough I/O for two SATA ports (apparently it even has PCIe!) but I've never seen this in a retail board.

At this stage you might be better off going for an off the shelf NAS, something that can run FreeBSD and ZFS.

[1]: [http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.as...](http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> HD4000...hmm can we play Diablo III on it?

<comment><USER40> It's not HD Graphics 4000. It's just HD Graphics, with no numbering. It only has 6 execution units (compared to 16 on HD 4000) and is clocked much lower.

<comment><USER21> Actually, per the datasheet[1] it has 4 EUs. I could not find any information about clocking the core, but I didn't search the entire 5100(!) page document.

[1] [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/atom-e3800-family- datasheet.pdf)

<comment><USER41> I can see this being big with the media-art crowd for installations if it has any sort of real graphics oomph. From what I've heard the pi is just barely capable of hd video, anyone able to divine these tech specs into a comparison with the pi's graphics capability?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hmmm... can it run Windows 7? Serious question, I'm after a cheap base system for a HTPC and this looks quite like a fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you built a UEFI stick (basically drop the contents of a Windows 7 DVD onto a FAT32 (not NTFS) drive) then maybe. XBMC will run on this, but I'm not sure if it can decode 1080p H264.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> can you connect a bunch of these in parallel and run, like, map-reduce or something ?

<comment><USER24> Sure, that's called microservers. It's not a good idea, but you can do it.

<comment><USER44> Why is it not a good idea? Genuinely curious

<comment><USER45> If I had to guess, probably because you could get equivalent performance cheaper with standard servers. Plus, there's a good chance that your distributed solution could fit on a single server, removing the overhead.

<comment><USER24> Yep. If you compare a $1,000 Xeon E3 server with a $1,000 cluster of ten Minnowboards, the E3 will deliver more performance. Likewise, a $10,000 E5 server beats a cluster of E3s in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> what sort of devices it would support mobile or laptop?

<comment><USER47> Neither, its really designed for general purpose hacking, connecting to external electronics, sensors, motors, etc. just like the Raspberry Pi ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is there any way of upgrading the RAM on this so that it can run SteamOS?

<comment><USER49> I don't think an Atom SoC would be adequate in terms of processing power. This is for more modest chores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I had hoped to use BeagleBoneBlack for a mobile low-powered application, but the overhead of the different architecture was too much hassle, and I ended up using an Intel NUC.

With NUC I can use the same OS as our high-end servers, same 64-bit apt-get repos, and Docker.

MinnowBoard looks like what I've been waiting for - fingers crossed...

</comment><comment><USER51> Well the Pi had a good run, honestly longer than I thought it would but the big boys have entered the arena now.

Also imagine what the prices on services like kimsufi and online.net will look like once these guys have hundreds of thousands of them rack mounted. Good times to come.

<comment><USER52> The PI is still a third of the price, depending on you want to do with it, it might be amply enough.

<comment> ah- There's also the ODROID-U3, which is roughly comparable to the Minnowboard, and it's just 59$.

[http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php](http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php)

<comment><USER53> But do note that it is a "community price, one for customer" only offer. I doubt they are losing money on it, but I suspect you'd have to buy a few hundreds (or maybe thousands) to get that price if you actually want to build something around it.

<comment><USER54> The regular price is $65.

[http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...](http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G138745696275)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>