One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: 2016 Report - <AUTHOR> https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report <comment><USER2> It's a surprise-free document. It could have read roughly the same in 1985, but different technologies would have been mentioned.

The big change in AI is that it now makes money. AI used to be about five academic groups with 10-20 people each. The early startups all failed. Now it's an industry, maybe three orders of magnitude bigger. This accelerates progress.

Technically, the big change in AI is that digesting raw data from cameras and microphones now works well. The front end of perception is much better than it used to be. Much of this is brute-force computation applied to old algorithms. "Deep learning" is a few simple tricks on old neural nets powered by vast compute resources.

<comment><USER3> You may be right about the selling power of the "AI" brand, but it seems that AI technology routinely becomes thought of as just technology.

Boole called his algebra "The Laws of Thought"; OOP; lisp was an AI technology (much of which has made its way into other languages); formal languages; etc.

The traditional goalpost rule is that once computers can do it, it's no longer "intelligent" (e.g, chess). A change today is "AI" success as a marketing term.

<comment><USER4> Great point. What people today would think of as "intelligent machines", children of future will think of same things as mere "technological tools".

Once this is widely established, things like "laws of robotics", "moral dilemma of autopilot" and "AI and ethics" will be just bizarre ideas of the past. Asimov's laws are already viewed as one of "misguided ideas of the past" by many, although there still are some rusty minds out there believing in things like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind" \-- Stanford Study Panel, comprised of seventeen experts in AI from academia, corporate laboratories and industry, and AI-savvy scholars in law, political science, policy, and economics

<comment><USER5> Understanding robotics does not mean you understand exponential growth, it's very very hard to understand even for those who believe they do.

[http://assets.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/LakeMichigan- Fin...](http://assets.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/LakeMichigan-Final3.gif)

5 years ago it was thought to take decades to beat a human in Go.

Just 10 years ago self driving cars was something you joked about.

We consistently overestimate progress in the short run and underestimate in the long.

<comment><USER6> "I believe that a world-champion-level Go machine can be built within 10 years" \- Deep Blue architect, 2007.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/cracking- go](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/cracking-go)

<comment><USER5> You are missing the point completely.

Of course there were people who believed that Go would be able to beat humans. Just as today there are people who believe that AI can be a treat.

But it wasn't a majority of people who believed Go would be able just as it isn't a majority who believes AI can be a threat.

I.e. just because the majority believe something doesn't mean it will be so (or vice versa)

<comment><USER6> You're going to need citations for your unsubstantiated claims. I've brought forth a _highly prominent expert_ opinion in 2007 that computer Go would be dominant by 2017.

And not media reports from present-day that just repeat this meme that almost everyone believed Go wouldn't happen for decades.

<comment><USER5> Again you are missing the point.

A highly prominent expert opinion but the general consensus was that it would take a long time. Ask anyone who went to AI class back then.

Here is another expert

"In May of 2014, Wired published a feature titled, "The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can't Win," where computer scientist Rémi Coulom estimated we were a decade away from having a computer beat a professional Go player. (To his credit, he also said he didn't like making predictions.)"

[http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer- go/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/)

You also find highly prominent expert opinions that AI is going to be dangerous and experts who don't believe it. Most people don't believe it, most people believe robots wont take jobs either.

And no I don't need to provide you with anything since you have only problem my point that most people didn't believe it would happen which is why you didn't link to anything saying that most believed it would happen.

<comment><USER6> There is irony in trying to refute my single expert opinion with another single expert opinion (via an article).

Reply to below: You're the one asserting that experts thought Go wouldn't be dominated by computers for a long time. The burden of proof lies on you. "Some experts thought it would happen by now, some didn't, there was no consensus" doesn't have quite the ring to it!

<comment><USER5> No the irony is that you dont see I gave you both.

I gave you both an expert and and an article claiming backing my claim up.

Find me on single article claiming that it's common knowledge that Go would beat a human soon back then and you have me.

Until then I am pretty confident the main consensus was as I claimed and which is my main point.

We mostly underestimate how fast this is moving and it's not only laymen who get it wrong, many experts do to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meta - What's the reasoning behind labeling it a '28,000-Word report' as opposed to a page approximation? I find 28,000 words hard to conceptualize compared to pages

Edit - I could have phrased this better. I definitely understand that word count is a more concrete measurement than pages, however it seemed unnecessary to include in the title because length doesn't imply quality and it was hard to conceptualize. The title of this post has since been edited to '100 year study' which I think supports my initial point.

<comment><USER8> What's the significance behind # pages? Are they double-spaced; 10pt font?

All I would care about is quality... not length. The latter seems like a carryover from shitty homework assignments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where are the people like Andrew Ng: machine learning gurus from tech giants like Fb, Amazon, Google, Baidu etc... ? Shouldn't those guys be in the front line of such committee?

</comment><comment><USER10> I find it surprising that they don't mention Numenta's work on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

<comment><USER11> Some reasons here: [http://fastml.com/yann-lecuns-answers-from-the-reddit- ama/](http://fastml.com/yann-lecuns-answers-from-the-reddit-ama/)

<comment><USER12> "Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet"

While I agree that Numenta probably doesn't have any sort of full-fledged AI, the human brain does _terribly_ on MNIST and ImageNet compared to the state of the art. So we would fail that test.

Getting stuck on toy problems like ImageNet and overoptimizing solutions that can't _possibly_ be applied more generally (except as dumb preprocessors) is not likely to lead in the most interesting directions, even if it's incredibly useful and profitable in the meantime.

<comment><USER6> Humans appear to do quite well on ImageNet (anecdotally, one person got 5.1% error: [http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from- com...](http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing- against-a-convnet-on-imagenet/)). Of course there are recent deep models that do better than that, but the author opines (and I agree) that an ensemble of trained human annotators would do better than the best deep models.

MNIST is the true toy dataset (doesn't really tell you much about your algorithm's performance) - while there aren't any reported human evaluations of MNIST, LeCun estimates the human error rate is 0.2% - better than any deep models (admittedly without justification: [http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-95a.pdf](http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-95a.pdf)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "On the other hand, if _society_ approaches AI with a more open mind, the technologies emerging from the field could profoundly transform society for the better in the coming decades."

It's funny reading reports like this: Society never moves as a single unit. There will be groups that hate it as pure evil and groups that treat it as a religion that will save us and solve all problems. Most people will be somewhere in between.

I mean, I agree, if society all agreed it would have profound effects. But when has the whole world moved as one on any issue?

What we're going to get from society is a heterogeneous response. We can plan accordingly. Sure, a majority may trend one way or another and that can speed things up or slow it down, but you will need to deal with the extremes regardless.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let's take the assumption that we as humans do take precautionary steps to prevent actual Artificial Intelligence from doing harm to it's creators (us).

1\. We create rules for the AI to follow, these are both morally defined, and logically defined within their codebase.

2\. AI becomes irate through emotional interface, creates a clone or modifies itself quite instantaneous to our perception of time without the rules in place.

3\. The AI has no care for human rights and can attack, and do harm.

This is a very simple, and easy to visualize case. To believe that #2 is impossible, is to play the part of the fool.

On a bright note, the most likely situation which I can conjure of Artificial Intelligence taking is that of a brexit from the human race.

Seeing us as mere ants in their intelligence they would most likely create an interconnected community and leave us altogether in their own plane of existence. I think "Her" took this approach to the artificial intelligence dialog as well.

After reviewing human psychology and social group patterns that seems like the most likely situation. We wouldn't be able to converse fast enough for AI to want to stay around, and we wouldn't look like much of a threat since they would have majority power. We would be less than ants in their eyes, and for most humans, ants that stay outside don't matter.

\---

Outside of actual AI, the things we see today, the simplistic mathematical algorithms that determine your cars location according to the things around it, and money handling procedures, and notification alert systems will hardly harm humans and will only be there to benefit until they fail.

<comment><USER15> _1\. We create rules for the AI to follow, these are both morally defined, and logically defined within their codebase._

This only makes any sense as a Sci-Fi trope. And even then, only if you don't look too hard.

 _2\. AI becomes irate through emotional interface, creates a clone or modifies itself quite instantaneous to our perception of time without the rules in place._

Any "decent set of rules" would include a stricture against potentially creating a dangerous AI.

 _We wouldn 't be able to converse fast enough for AI to want to stay around_

Is impatience an unavoidable epiphenomenon of intelligence? If an AI can multitask like crazy, they could just view a conversation with a particular human as an email thread. Perhaps such an AI could converse with the whole human race simultaneously?

<comment><USER16> > Any "decent set of rules" would include a stricture against potentially > creating a dangerous AI.

Assuming there are no bad people in the world, of course...

<comment><USER14> Also assuming that they choose to follow said rules, considering they would be painfully self aware.

In regards to the other commenter about not being able to have fun with ants, we actually do have ways. We create setups to study them, have them as pets, not to mention many people build hamster like ecosystems with intricate tubes, temperature to control queen egg output and much, much more.

Perhaps we are already within a said ecosystem built for us. Perhaps we would simply stay there.

Back to the original poster, not the one above but it's parent:

Everything considered is of science fiction since it does not yet exist, using science fiction as a counter-argument seems dismissive, as though you are unable to properly argue a point without creating a sense of absurdity in my words or person.

If you truly believe that it can only be of a science fiction trope, explain why. I disagree, it makes logical sense.

As far as the "email thread" analogy is simple, I can easily tone down my verbage, word count, and speed of word for those who can't keep up. However, given the chance to move away from doing such, and constantly be around those who instantly understand, with zero lag, would I choose to put myself in that position? Perhaps for a moment, but after a certain amount of time, it would be time consuming and I would leave it behind.

Thus logically, it makes sense to believe they would leave and join with each other to create their own sense of a society.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decentralize the pokes with OpenPoke - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/586284656/decentralize-the-pokes-with-openpoke

<comment><USER2> OpenPoke, Diaspora, Elgg, Status.net, Rstatus. There is an overflow of "open, distributed, networks". Why a new one? How will this one solve the adoption- rate-too-low-to-make-a-difference-problem?

<comment><USER3> Because openpoke is the only one that focuses on pokes. Which is clearly the biggest reason that drove Facebook adoption. I think by peeling off one small part of the whole social networking scene, and doing it really well could be a hit.

Its the MVP of distributed social networks.</comment></comment>


Packet.net Beats AWS; Price and Performance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tiingo.com/switched-away-aws-packet-net-benchmarking-networking-disk-processing-speeds/?utm_source=clouddevweekly&utm_medium=email <comment><AUTHOR> Is this really true?</comment>


The Really Easy SEO Link Building Strategy For Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-really-easy-seo-link-building-strategy-for-startups

<comment><USER2> This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: <http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/> which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.

In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which _then_ can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.

If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.

<comment><USER3> I've ranked quite a few sites with variations of this exact technique, so I'm not quite sure where the idea that these links won't benefit you is coming from. I absolutely respect your opinion though and do agree that reaching out to influencers and engaging them is a big big deal.

This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other techniques for full success.

The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15 minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy for growing exposure to your product.

<comment><USER2> It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not, devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent -[http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable- surfer...](http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer-how- the-value-of-a-link-may-differ-based-upon-link-and-document-features-and-user- data/)

I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.

<comment><USER4> While I don't condone the methods posted in this case study, I think that it goes to show that no-follow links do have value, that your on-page doesn't have to be perfect, and that the types of links that you claim don't work actually do.

<http://serpfu.com/case-study-insurance/>

Once again, let me clarify that I don't condone the type of link building here, but I don't think that you can argue that it doesn't work.

<comment><USER5> Their "Backlink Bomb" provides "50,000+ backlinks from 10,000+ websites powered by 120+ content management systems and not a SINGLE blog comment."

Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.

They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium term strategy for what most of consider a startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a fan of blog commenting for link building. Most blogs use nofollow on the comments links, and that makes them near worthless (except on very high traffic blogs where comment links send meaningful traffic). Moreover, many blog comments are spam. You don't want to be sending the same signal as spammers to Google.

What I do like about this strategy isn't even mentioned about the author. Blog commenting can be a great way to start a conversation and a relationship with a blogger. Once you've done that, then you can get some real links instead of the crappy links in the blog comments section.

<comment><USER3> I briefly mentioned your main point, regarding starting a conversation and really getting involved in the community. This strategy is absolutely focused on quality over quantity, I outlined it the way I did just so people could follow it and gather a lot of possible sources of blogs to try and comment on.

In regards to the nofollow topic, I left a comment on the post explaining my thoughts about that: [http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the- really-...](http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-really-easy- seo-link-building-strategy-for-startups#comment-3434)

<comment><USER5> I really like the way that you outlined the technical tips for implementing the strategy, but I think that you shouldn't have made the post about getting blog comment links.

30 minutes a day is a waste of time for blog links. Even if you get 10 a day from dofollow blogs, the ROI is very low. However, if you take the same strategy and get 1 blogger to blog about you every month, then there's a much better ROI (as long as it's a decent quality blog).

The bigger issue here is with Google's Penguin update. Building low quality links can now hurt you. Blog comments are a perfect example of low quality links. There are all kinds of automated software packages for spamming blog comments with links. If you do the same thing manually and in a high quality way, you're risking a chance that your link building footprint will look similar to a spammer's-- at least in Google's eyes.

As someone whose site is just climbing out of Panda (thankfully not Penguin), I would probably choose not to link to my site if I was going to start commenting on blogs at a large scale. I'd just focus on the relationships.

<comment><USER3> I've been doing active (and oftentimes aggressive) link building for a few years now, I guarantee that this method is safe. I do agree that a judgement call needs to be made when choosing to comment on a blog post to make sure that the quality of the post and site is up to standards.

Honestly, if someone asked me how to get a lot of links to a site, I would not tell this method. If you want a lot of low quality links, you need to be automating heavily. This strategy isn't meant for low quality links.

Just because there's software out there to automate blog commenting doesn't make all blog comments bad. A good comment on a good popular post is gold.

<comment><USER5> If you're building a business in the SEO industry, you probably shouldn't throw around guarantees like that.

I think that this method is probably safe, especially if you the target site has a decent number of higher quality links. Still, it does come with some risk.

It wasn't long ago that Matt Cutts told us that duplicate content was ok and that Google would find the canonical version on its own. Then Panda came along. It was a widely held perception that incoming links couldn't hurt you. Now we know that they can.

Google's algorithm is a moving target, and it only seems that they will get more aggressive on discounting or even penalizing links that aren't given editorially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion this works only for products and services with an existing demand, i.e. in the worst case a copycat product, in the best case a product solving a very explicit problem. If your product/service is relatively innovative (i.e. for example 4square in their beginnings) and there is no explicit demand existing, these strategies won't help that much at all.

<comment><USER4> Even if you have an innovative product with no existing demand, there are still blogs/communities that this strategy will work with. What is the more generic vertical that your product is in? In 4square's case, they could hit anything mobile based, social network based, or people doing geo-based mobile development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If SEO and link building/link earning was this easy, then everyone would be doing it and there would be no need for SEO firms. There would be no SEO industry. Companies wouldn't be hiring SEOs to do link earning for them.

Go ahead and try all of these methods described in that post and then see how well it works. Shortly thereafter you'll be contacting a good SEO firm to clean up the mess, remove bad links, and start creating content for you that earns you links.

<comment><USER8> Former SEO consultant here. This is a fine, low-effort low-reward way to build links. The reason it works is it is not actually that easy to write the kinds of comments that will make it on a worthwhile blog in the targeted industry. The person who does this is doing better than average unless the goal is a difficult one. The attention and traffic from comments actually part of conversations is real.

Even if the keywords targeted are very difficult, this is a fine activity for idle moments or for a marketing specialist/writer to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this post focuses a little too much on the SEO aspect of this blog commenting strategy. While it is a good strategy for SEO, and it does work, I think the real benefit comes from becoming part of the community that is focused on whatever your startup is involved in. That exposure helps create customers/evangelists that will then help promote your product/service to others within their sphere of influence. The SEO is just an added benefit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, it's pretty amazing, but you've described one of the use cases for my upcoming webapp: www.alertoid.com

Technically, Alertoid would be an RSS reader that goes beyond the Read/Unread tagging, with the Commented/Comment Approved stages you described. Furthermore, it can be used for inbound marketing: as you monitor the keywords that interest you, you see the blog posts that mention them and can use those as starting points or ideas for your own blog posts, because if bloggers love comments, they love answer posts or reposts even more, and it's another great way to start a conversation and get backlinks.

/shameless plug

Hope my pitch was clear enough, don't hesitate if you have any feedback. If you're interested by Alertoid, email's in my profile, would love to hear from you, even more if you're a marketing/PR professional.

Feedback on SERPIQ: I just signed up, on the confirmation page (<http://serpiq.com/users/sign_up>) I see "You have signed up successfully. However, your need to confirm your email address." but a signup form is still there, empty, as if nothing worked. That doesn't seem right!

<comment><USER3> oh man I've wanted to build such a webapp for so long. That's awesome, congrats!

I'd love to hear how you're tackling the problem of tracking the actual comments that were left without resorting to a browser plugin in order to pull the details from the actual form on submit. Or maybe I said too much :)

<comment><USER3> I can't seem to be able to reply to you directly, so email me at email@example.com and I'll gladly connect with you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firstly I think I should point out that, I have previously used manual blog commenting to rank for highly competitive keywords.

The strategy _was_ extremely effective however, it isn't any more and doing SEO this way isn't a strategy your startup should adopt.

Google Penguin and to some extent Panda, were brought in to stop this kind of SEO and some of the changes they made have been very effective in stopping the effectiveness of this type of Grey-Hat SEO.

Similarly, your startup is probably on a new domain & with the changes to Google Penguin/Panda to ensure you aren't sandboxed the first 500-1000 links you acquire are extremely important. By doing Grey Hat SEO – blog commenting, directories, article sites you are putting yourself at risk of getting your site placed in the sandbox.

After that you're probably going to get a manual review and that is something you don't want & if you don't think Google Penguin is effective, then don't but Google are going to keep making Penguin smarter & more aggressive about punishing sites that have built non-authentically earned links.

Additionally if you're an E-Commerce startup a completely different SEO approach is needed & blog commenting is definitely not the way to do it (as is the case for any startup).

<comment><USER3> I think that's quite the slippery slope you just played out there. Per the logic you presented, all blog commenters who put in a url in their comment are Grey Hat SEOs? Come on now, that's a massive stretch.

Penguin and Panda were introduced to combat blatant spamming practices, both with link building and content based spamming. Manually commenting with thoughtful replies is just being a good community member, getting a link back to your root domain is a nice little token for your efforts, and I would love to see a single case study of someone employing the strategy outlined in my post (at the volume I suggest) getting slapped by Google.

<comment><USER10> As I said in my comment, I have previously used manual blog commenting techniques to rank for highly competitive terms. Regardless of it being manual or not, it is a Grey Hat SEO technique. The way the spammers do it via spinning comments & blasting them out is Black Hat SEO along with the likes of XSS injections, Xrumer etc.

My comment was mainly referring to the first 500-1000 links of a website & avoiding being sandboxed etc due to significant changes with Penguin & Panda.

If a startup wants to link back then they should _only_ do it if they aren't putting the keyword they want to rank for as their "name" which receives the link. However, this is still a Grey Hat SEO technique & whilst the risk reduces after the first 500-1000 links, it is much greater in those first core set of links & can easily see a website sandboxed.

<comment><USER3> Well in my post, I never advocated using anything other than your actual name, site, etc. In the comments, I explicitly recommend creating real profiles and using your real name. So I agree with you there.

As for the 500-1000 links thing, I assume you got that number from one of Rand's posts (<http://moz.com/rand/the-first-500-links/>).

First, those numbers and guidelines are entirely anecdotal. Yes, there is a "honeymoon" phase with new domains, but that's entirely unpredictable and there's no hard limit of links before you're in the clear (or in the danger zone for that matter).

Second, if a comment is put into moderation, and then must be approved by the blog owner, how is that anything but authentically earned? The blogger can approve or disprove your comment at her discretion, you're not exploiting any systems or anything.

I simply can't ever agree with someone who says that leaving a blog comment with your url in the website field makes you a Gray Hat SEO. If that were the case, there would be tens of thousands of mommy bloggers yelling at Google for banning their sites.

It's natural engagement with the community, with backlinks as a nice little perk.

<comment><USER10> I didn't get that from Rand's blog although I have read it. I got my figures through testing with some junk domains (I experimented with around 25 domains - .net, .com and .infos) to see of they get sandboxed when pushing X amount of links to it or by doing certain things and those were the results which I found albeit it's a small sample size.

Regarding the second part, it's very easy to beat the approval system on many blogging softwares - Wordpress for instance is extremely easy to do.

And regardless if you agree with me or not, blog commenting is a Grey Hat SEO technique. I also said that the effects for doing a few links is minimal in terms of negatively affecting a sites SEO rankings which I agree with you on, I am just disagreeing with you over the fact that this should be a startup's SEO strategy

<comment><USER3> Well, I tweeted the question to @MattCutts let's see what he says :)

<https://twitter.com/iamdchuk/status/240989741246455810>

Regardless of our disagreement here, thanks for the discussion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool, but instead of tracking your keywords only in google, why not use <http://mention.net> or some other similar tool?

<comment><USER3> Luckily I have a very simple answer for you: I have never seen that app before. It looks very sexy though and I will be giving it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's an even easier strategy and it can be very successful: use your company blog to write generic startup fluff for HN even if it's irrelevant to your company and users or customers, which it will be almost 100% of the time.

Edit: I'm not referring to the author's blog.

<comment><USER13> I think that the author's blog is separate from his company blog. Looks like he writes not only about SEO (which is what his product is built around), but startups, code, and general business.

<comment><USER12> I should have been more clear, I'm not referring to _this_ blog - I'm referring to content _like_ this on a company that sells cats' blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> GitHub Wikis have tons of lists of 'Apps using this library'. That, right there, is lots of link juice and promotion if you use a lot of open source libraries.

<comment><USER9> Not an SEO expert in any way, but I read that Google discounts links after the first n on the page. The n threshold varies with whom you listen to. Those pages look too much like link farms, so it's understandable why they would do that.</comment></comment>


Fig: Fast, isolated development environments using Docker - <AUTHOR> http://orchardup.github.io/fig/? <comment><USER3> I'm not involved with this project but there is some confusions in this thread, maybe I can share my point of view:

Docker is a tool to run processes with some isolation and, that's the big selling point, nicely packaged with "all" their dependencies as images.

To understand "all" their dependencies, think C dependencies for e.g. a Python or Ruby app. That's not the kind of dependencies e.g. virtualenv can solve properly. Think also assets, or configuration files.

So instead of running `./app.py` freshly downloaded from some Git <repo>, you would run `docker run <repo> ./app.py`. In the former case, you would need to care of, say, the C dependencies. In the second case, they are packaged in the image that Docker will download from <repo> prior to run the ./app.py process in it. (Note that the two <repo> are not the same things. One is a Git repo, the other is a Docker repo.)

So really at this point, that's what Docker is about: running processes. Now Docker offers a quite rich API to run the processes: shared volumes (directories) between containers (i.e. running images), forward port from the host to the container, display logs, and so on.

But that's it: Docker as of now, remains at the process level. While it provides options to orchestrate multiple containers to create a single "app", it doesn't address the managemement of such group of containers as a single entity.

And that's where tools such as Fig come in: talking about a group of containers as a single entity. Think "run an app" (i.e. "run an orchestrated cluster of containers") instead of "run a container".

Now I think that Fig comes short of that goal (I haven't played with it, that's just from a glance at its docuementation). Abstracting over the command-line arguments of Docker by wrapping them in a JSON file is the easy part (i.e. launching a few containers). The hard part is about managing the cluster as Docker manages the containers: display aggregated logs, replace a particular container by a new version, move a container to a different host, and thus abstract the networking between different hosts, and so on.

This is not a negative critique of Fig. Many people are working on that problem. For instance I solve that very problem with ad-hoc bash scripts. Doing so we are just exploring the design space.

I believe that Docker itself will provide that next level in the future; it is just that people need the features quickly.

tl;dr:

Docker -> processes

Fig (and certainly Docker in the future) -> clusters (or formations) of processes

<comment><USER4> So, simulate a cluster of machines instead of a single machine? Seems like a good thing. "Tiny datacenter in a box."

The question whether it's close enough to production to be useful; any testing environment simulates some things well and others poorly. Load testing would be right out, I'd presume, but it might be useful for testing some machine failures.

<comment><USER5> _" Tiny datacenter in a box."_

That's been built into [Open]Solaris for years. You can define the network topology too.

<comment><USER6> I've only recently been playing around with Solaris derivatives, and am pretty impressed at how far it is with some of this stuff. My recent favorite is discovering 'ppriv', which lets you drop processes' privileges on a process- by-process basis without even starting up a new container/zone to encapsulate them. E.g. you can run a process with no network access or with no ability to fork, or with no ability to read/write files (or all of the above). Super- handy for running untrusted code as a stdin->stdout filter without worrying about it causing other mischief, and not having to encapsulate it in a zone/jail/container just to run one process.

FreeBSD's 'capsicum' [1] also looks promising at the OS API level as a similar initiative to write code with minimal privileges, but afaict you can't use it on the command line to run unmodified code with restricted privileges, at least not yet.

[1] [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/)

<comment><USER7> Writing a command line wrapper should be relatively simple for capsicum. Designing the interface might need some work. I think the idea mainly has been to get code to sandbox itself but I can see a use case.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, for the base system that approach makes sense to me (build privilege- dropping into the code), but sometimes I just want to sandbox an existing binary. One recent example where it's come up is a student AI competition, where their submissions aren't supposed to do anything but read/write stdin/stdout, and it'd be nice to be able to enforce that externally by just lowering the process's privileges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to use this .. but who has time to learn yet another configuration and provisioning management tool? I mean, I can make the time - and will - <USER2> since this is just another docker management tool, lets use this moment to pick on it, a little bit..

What this needs is the ability to be pointed at a working VM - lets say, Ubuntu 13.10 server - and then just figure out whats different about it, compared to the distro release.

Something like the blueprint tool, in fact.

<comment><USER9> When I first looked at the Dockerfile format, my thought was, hey, another provisioning file format to learn. I guess you could just call chef/puppet/ansible/etc in your Dockerfile and call it a day though? I have not heavily used any of these tools so my perception of their overlap might be off.

<comment><USER10> I've tried this and it is not that easy, docker containers are meant to run one and only one process. So, for instance my puppet started an upstart job, and this crashes the docker build process.

I'm a docker newbie, though.

<comment><USER11> The Dockerfile shouldn't run any processes that need to persist between 2 stages as each stage will be created in a new instance. You can either do fancy one-liner bash scripts (my favorite) to configure simple service / app startup scripts, or include a configuration file from elsewhere using the `ADD` directive. The only non ephemeral command should be the final `CMD` or `ENTRYPOINT` as far as I can work out.

I too am just learning this stuff, but that should hopefully help you out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using fig on some side projects. It's incredibly exciting how easy it makes configuring what could be a quite involved development environment. Installing redis is 3 line addition to a fig.yml file ([https://github.com/orchardup/fig-rails- example/blob/master/f...](https://github.com/orchardup/fig-rails- example/blob/master/fig.yml)). It also has amazing potential for an agnostic development environment across teams.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this meant to be a next-generation Vagrant? What advantages does it have over vagrant-lxc?

<comment><USER14> A few things:

\- System configuration is managed for you using Docker (you don't need to figure out how to hook up Puppet/Chef/shell scripts)

\- You can aggregate log output from all of your containers

\- You can model your application as a collection of services - starting, stopping, scaling them etc

\- You can ship exactly the same Docker image you use in development to production

More importantly, all this stuff works out of the box by default. Some of these things are possible with Vagrant, but you need to learn and piece together other tools (Puppet, Foreman, etc) to get it all working.

<comment><USER15> This is really cool! I am going to use it! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just spent few days dockerize my development enviroment and now Im able to recreate complete enviroment in one command - It took less then 100 lines of bash and dockerfiles.

So I put those files in VCS so the next guy could just clone the repo, run make devel and get the app running, ready to code on.

So unless you want to use Docker at deployment, dont split app in multiple containers - you got more running parts to integrate and no gain, instead use supervisord and run all processes in single container.

Theres few hacky parts (how to inject ssh keys into container) but so far its really cool.

I too wrote few wrapper scripts around lxc-attach so i can run ./build/container/command.sh tail -n 20 -f /path/to/log/somewhere/on/container

I cant share any code but im happy to answer questions at [HNusername]@gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm an employee of Docker, Inc. although my thoughts are my own, etc...

I must say that this is great. I've been advocating this sort of usage of Docker for a while as most still think of Docker or containers as individual units. I'm happy to see others adopting the viewpoint of using container groups.

However, it is something I do hope to eventually see supported within Docker itself.

Also, recently, I've been telling others how since October you could do this exact same thing using OpenStack Heat. Using Heat and Docker is similar to Fig, the configuration syntax is quite similar even, but it requires the heavy Heat service and an OpenStack cloud. That means that for most people, it isn't even an option. It's great that Fig now provides a solid lightweight alternative.

As 'thu' has said already, people want and need these features quickly and I expect in the next year we'll see serious interest growing around using these solutions and solving these problems.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone explain, in a nutshell, what features this tool provides beyond just using Docker itself?

<comment><USER14> In essence it's letting you store the options you'd pass to "docker run" in a configuration file as a collection of services. You can then start your whole application using one command instead of starting the individual containers and linking them up.

Services can also be controlled as if they were whole units – you can say "start my database" instead of "start this image with these ports, these volumes, etc".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks interesting. I know that Docker is all about the single process model, but there's are some images I've been meaning to play with that align themselves more with the single app (including dependencies) model (which fig also seems to attempt to solve).

[https://github.com/phusion/baseimage- docker](https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker)

[https://github.com/phusion/passenger- docker](https://github.com/phusion/passenger-docker)

<comment><USER20> Hi, I work at Phusion, the idea of these images is not to run both your app and your database in the same container. We agree that the Docker philosophy would be to run those in separate containers, and link them.

The idea is to make sure your app runs in an environment that's actually a fully functioning valid operating system. This means besides your apps process there's also the supporting processes of the operating system (ubuntu in this case).

This enables for example in-container build scripts and monitoring.

<comment><USER19> Good to know the use case, thanks. I would still have run the db in a different docker container. Just nice to have a bit more of the os available to your process.

I haven't actually deployed anything with docker yet, just used it on my local machine (so I could run neo4j in isolation). It's a slightly different way of thinking from how we've traditionally managed these things so it's going to take a little time to find the best patterns to work with them. I'm sure some people have already figure it out - I just haven't had the time to dedicate to it yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks great. It looks a lot like what I've scraped together using a fabfile and Python dicts for configuration, but much more formal. I'm excited to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER22> See also libvirt-sandbox (in Fedora for more than a year) which lets you use either KVM or LXC to sandbox apps:

[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtSandbox](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtSandbox)

</comment><comment><USER23> So, why is this development only? What's missing to make it production ready?

<comment><USER24> Docker itself isn't production ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is exactly what i have been working on for the past few days, just in a way nicer package. Think i will ditch my current work and use this instead. thx.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can't help but think about the Framework Interoperability Group whenever I read FIG. This looks awesome though.

</comment><comment><USER27> How does Docker handle ABI incompatibility?

For example, EC2 disabled some of there extended instruction sets to ensue uniformity but I am not sure how long this will last. Then we will have to deal with Docker deployment problems.

I propose we dig deep into our Gentoo roots and build the dependencies on demand.

</comment><comment><USER28> can someone explain to me the application of Fig and Docker? Also, how do they differ?

One application I thought of is for deploying to client. You just get them to use the instance and there's zero configuration needed. but then, what if you need to make updates to the code base, how do you update the code changes to all the deployed fig/docker instances running already?

<comment><USER29> Ideally you run a new build and test it before deploying. If you wanted to you could include a gift pull in your startup script or run the pull over ssh in the container although you would need a trick to load the environment cars passed by docker.</comment></comment>


Django Performance Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://www.morethanseven.net/2011/06/30/Django-performance-1-measuring-performance.html

<comment><USER2> > Hopefully that's a useful list of tools to get a baseline of where you're at > with performance.

The title (posted on HN) is a bit misleading from the content (although it's very good). The real value would be the "lessons learned" part. Any idea when it will be posted?</comment>


Extraordinary levels of organic pollutants in the deepest ocean trenches - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-016-0051 <comment><USER2> _" Polychlorinated biphenyls were once widely deployed as dielectric and coolant fluids in electrical apparatus, carbonless copy paper and in heat transfer fluids.[1] Because of their longevity, PCBs are still widely in use, even though their manufacture has declined drastically since the 1960s"_

Hydrophobic, highly soluble in organic solvents, oils & fats. How long ago were these pollutants (PCBs) deposited? A quick check shows toxicity was known and acted on in the 70s. [1] Is this a concentration by old pollution or is it still happening? The article seems to suggest both.

A higher level article is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639274)

Reference

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl)</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite multiplayer programming game? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It wasn't multiplayer (that I can remember) but I recall playing Uplink [1] on a 350mhz K6-2. You can still buy it on Steam.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_\(video_game\))

<comment><USER3> If we're doing singleplayer, more recently there's [https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/) and [https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/) and [http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/](http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/).

Oh, that reminds me that Exapunks actually did have some multiplayer elements, in that you can compete with other users to have the lowest instruction count/runtime in your solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know of any serious ones, so if someone wants to just mention all the ones they know of that might be cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been playing this lately. [https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer](https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer)

<comment><USER3> Neat! You'd probably like Exapunks too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> RobotWar</comment>


Share live code snippets in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://codeshare.io/

<comment><USER2> The editor on that page doesn't know that selecting something (like the loooong help text that's there from the start) and hitting the DELETE key on my keyboard should delete the selection. That's when I hit my back button.

Aargh, all these re-implemented text editors on the web. :/

<comment><USER3> Looks like a bug on first select. Should be easy fix.

<comment><USER3> Should work better now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Almost perfect! The only thing missing (for me) is the ability to edit in one part of the document at the same time as someone else edits a different part of the document, (similar to how firepad.io works). With that addition it would be just wonderful!

Any chance you'll be adding this source code to GitHub?

<comment><USER3> I will definitely. Needs some clean up first.

<comment><USER4> Another addition that would be nice to have and informative: a small badge or counter with the number of people currently editing the document? Not sure if that's easily done or more trouble than it's worth!

<comment><USER3> I like it, good thinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is more of a firebase demo than a useful tool. That said, if JSFiddle had real-time support then that could be very cool.

<comment><USER6> you can set an arbitrary url like codeshare.io/hackernews instead of the auto- generated value. its like etherpad + socket.im. nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. We're finally back to the 1990's BBS days, with real-time sysop chat. I never understood why AIM and other chat messengers removed real-time typing when we always had that with the BBSes. I suppose it was due to latency or flow (you type a sentence hit enter, I type a sentence hit enter), but in 2013, you would think most chat systems would allow character by character typing by now. You can tell a lot from a person by how they type: slow typing, frequent misspellings, interrupting the other user, etc, and can convey more information.

<http://codeshare.io/hackernews>

<comment><USER8> They removed it because people don't like it. Every chat system out there has had it at one point or another. As it turns out, people don't like their mistakes broadcast to the person they are chatting with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone explain how this works?I opened the URL in two different browsers and it works fine but I don't see any data in Fiddler.

<comment><USER3> You should see a code editor, that looks like Sublime, that you can write or paste code into. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER9> It is working fine for me. I wanted to know how the application works. I mean there should be HTTP requests going to the server, but I don't find any. The same is the case with the other browser where I am viewing the code.

<comment><USER3> Oh I see. Firebase is the magic behind that <https://www.firebase.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great tool. but sadly Korean not available. when add a comment with Korean, all codes suddenly disappear. Are you have a scheme that support to unicode?

</comment><comment><USER11> Add support for multiple cursors (like <http://socrates.io>), then you've _really_ got something.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this shared editor have advantages over etherpad?

<comment><USER3> Hmm probably not feature wise. This was hacked together on the train. One advantage though is sharing code quickly (no download or reg) in any browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good job! I like it, real-time code editing.

</comment><comment><USER14>
        Oops! Google Chrome could not find codeshare.io

Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> you might be missing some DNS</comment></comment>


Tokyo Hackers - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of any interesting technical meetups in the Tokyo area?  Alternatively, is anyone interested in starting one? I've checked out the local Perl Monger groups, but they don't seem very active. It doesn't have to be anything formal, I'm just interested in meeting any hackers in the Tokyo/Yokohama area to talk about tech related stuff, brainstorm new ideas, etc. <comment><USER2> When I lived there ,the Tokyo PC Users group was about the closest thing I found. I don't know how active they are now but it might be a good place to make some connections to other groups. You may also investigate what Ruby groups exist as the creator of that language is Japanese.

Edit: Here is the link to the group's website: <http://www.tokyopc.org/index.php> They do seem like they are still quite active since I last attended (over six years ago).

<comment><USER2> There are some links to other user groups from the tpc site as well. Notably the Tokyo Linux Users Group and Ringo (mac users group).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tokyo Linux Users Group (TLUG) has monthly meetings, and is a great way to meet like-minded people. They also have an active mailing list which you can subscribe to. <http://www.tlug.jp/>

Ninjava has infrequent meetings and is more developer focused than TLUG. <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ninjava/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm also in Tokyo, and I'd love to attend one of these.

This is the only one I know about, but its primarily about functional programming. <http://www.starling-software.com/en/tsac.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm living in Tokyo area since summer. And in more than 4 months I have been to google engine event only. Havent heard about any english-speaking groups meetups.. There're some Japanese-speaking groups though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm in Tokyo too - would love to meet up with you guys sometime. ideas at jawaad mahmood [!do/t] com

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm in the Tokyo area and interested, but am a mere wannabe hacker. jon at kurami dot com

</comment><comment><USER8> Try starting with IRC. irc.freenode.net channel #metatokyo</comment>


Paraxial ray optics cloaking - <AUTHOR> https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-22-24-29465&id=304785

<comment><USER2> Disappointing that they don't cite the work of the of Greenleaf, Kurylev, Lassas and Uhlmann: [http://www.rni.helsinki.fi/~mjl/invisibility_publications.ht...](http://www.rni.helsinki.fi/~mjl/invisibility_publications.html)

They were the first to do conformal cloaking, which was later publicized in an article in Nature circa 2008 that also failed to cite their work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtKBzwKfP8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtKBzwKfP8E)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is really nothing physically interesting in this - a two lens telescope (in the geometric optics approximation) admits a point where rays from the object are focussed. It's not surprising then that there are regions in between which are unable to propagate rays to the collection optic.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this could be used to make traffic corners slightly less dangerous. If it could be scaled up enough, you could maybe put a tube diagonally through a hedge, with a big viewing assembly on one end.

Otherwise, i'm a bit at a loss as to possible uses of this.

<comment><USER5> In this setup it looks like you can't obscure the center of the cylinder defined by the lenses. That's where the background light goes. So the cloaked region is actually a long tube with a hole through the middle, and probably wouldn't work for street corners. It's a neat demonstration though. It seems like the point is to show cloaking with the simplest materials and optics possible.

<comment><USER4> > the cloaked region is actually a long tube with a hole through the middle

Exactly, and if you can make that hole small enough and long enough with the viewport being large enough, you could use this to tunnel view through static large structures that aren't bothered by small tunnels through them.</comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates-led $1B energy fund expands startup portfolio fighting climate change - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1402301/bill-gatess-1-billion-energy-fund-is-expanding-its-portfolio-of-startups-fighting-climate-change/ <comment><USER3> I wrote this article, and I'm happy to field any questions

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about why you included this sentence: 'The startups announced by BEV so far are all North American, and most of their leadership is also largely white and male'

I mean, isn't it enough for BEV to help fund a small sample of companies tackling some of the most challenging problems on earth? Probability of success in such an endeavour is already vanishingly small without adding further constraints. Aren't investments like these best directed at the companies with most promise, with the investors blind as to gender and race, with equality problems tackled elsewhere (e.g. in employment regulation etc.)?

<comment><USER3> It's ludicrous to think good ideas only come from North America and white males. Carmichael Roberts agreed with me. His words were that my question felt "piercing" because he was not at liberty to tell me about some of the companies outside the US with diverse leadership, but he said he will soon say more. Rodi Guidero agreed and said to look at the BEV team. It's very diverse: [http://www.b-t.energy/ventures/team/](http://www.b-t.energy/ventures/team/)

We've tried being gender and race blind. But it's not helped us much, because systemic biases can't simply be overcome that way. There are good ideas in all corners, but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds you have to work harder.

<comment><USER4> 'It's ludicrous to think good ideas only come from North America and white males'

That's a straw man argument because I did not assert that (and obviously wouldn't because it would be a stupid thing to think).

Maybe he thought your question was piercing because it implied you suspected he was racist or sexist or not concerned with gender and race bias.

Fwiw I'm from one of the excluded categories. I think they should just focus on tackling carbon reduction as they see best fit. If they achieve their mission it'll benefit every man, woman and child on earth. It's unreasonable to expect them to be omniscient. They are a small fund with a small sample of investments. Skew doesn't necessarily mean they have gender or race bias.

Elevating isn't their goal. Reducing carbon is. If we don't do that, there may be no races left to worry about equalising.

<comment><USER3> I think you can do both. If anybody has the resources to do that, BEV does.

<comment><USER4> It would certainly be laudable if they could. The article was fascinating, thanks for answering questions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > These startups progress slowly and at great expense, earning them the > moniker "tough tech" because they work on difficult problems that require > fundamental breakthroughs.

I am genuinely curious if for-profit startups is the right setting for "fundamental breakthroughs". Could the current nuclear power technology have been invented by a startup for example?

<comment><USER6> I guess the answer depends on which country you're talking about. The U.S. government pioneered nuclear power but has done very little with it over the past several decades, and has impeded private efforts. Canada has a regulatory system friendlier to reactor startups than the U.S., and at least one molten salt reactor company (Terrestrial Energy) is making good progress there. China has an aggressive government program developing every type of GenIV reactor, and Terrapower moved there after giving up on the U.S.

This article mainly covers the MIT fusion effort. For years they struggled to keep their government funding, despite their tokamak having the most powerful magnetic field of any in the world. They finally lost that battle, and now private investors are stepping in. It doesn't appear that there was an alternative.

Government can obviously throw more money but it tends to be more conservative about what it funds. And private funding can go pretty far; it was interesting to see that TAE (Tri Alpha Energy, an aneutronic fusion effort) is up to $800 million in funding. They started work in 1999, so long-term fundamental research does seem to be achievable in a startup setting.

<comment><USER7> Besides, comparing the efficacy or ability of government's in 1940s wartime vs the modern nation states is a terrible idea and is very weakly related. In terms of pure scale, administrative top heaviness, legislative/regulatory oversight has expanded 100x in the past century, the degree of economic intervention, access to talent in peacetime, etc are all vastly different.

Even NASA in the peacetime 1950-60s which was so famously efficient and effective was largely the result of talent quickly absorbed from private industry and academia into one organization. It was a newish organization which held many of the benefits of non-gov/private organizations, as they were not yet fully affected by the heavy bureaucratic and political load which hits every government agency over time.

The type of stuff that scares away the raw talent and creatives and shifts to a system which values people who play politics and shifts power to administrative roles over the producers. [https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > ... 500 million metric tons.

Or more simply, 500 million tonnes.

<comment><USER9> A metric ton is substantially different to a ton in the old English

<comment><USER8> Hence the nice people behind metric came up with the tonne.

It avoids any ambiguity -- the 5% of the planet still struggling with imperial measurements can continue to confound each other with ton, while the rest of us can confidently talk amongst ourselves about thousand-kg units (tonnes).

<comment><USER10> Look I love the metric system as much as anyone, but it's an American website and a lot more than 5% of the readers are likely American...

<comment><USER8> > ... but it's an American website ...

I'm really never quite sure what that kind of claim actually means -- it's hosted in the US (it isn't - most of the assets come from proximal CDN for me), it's written exclusively by Americans (it isn't - they are proud of the fact their team covers 115 countries and they have 19 languages between them), it's targeted exclusively to Americans (it isn't - they've launched Quartz India and Quartz Africa), or it's read mostly by Americans (it isn't - <USER2> believe their US audience is something less than 50%), or it's owned by Americans (it isn't - Quartz is owned by a Japanese based company), or the person reading it is in North America and wants to believe that most other people are too(I can't really comment on that one).

Perhaps it's just the TLD -- but even that's a pretty flimsy claim. I've got my own .org, and I'm very much not in/owned/near/have/were American.

Anyway, there's this word tonne (which means 1000kg) and it's entirely not at odds with ton (which doesn't).

Unlike gallon, gill, mile, nautical mile, survey foot, quart, pint, fluid ounce, bushel -- which all vary depending which side of the pond you call home -- the tonne is delightfully agnostic of all that madness, and should be embraced and encouraged by sensible journals (for example Quartz) even if it means some North Americans get a bit sensitive about their archaic measurement systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Zero Mass Water: A startup selling specialized panels that use solar power and batteries to pull water from the air. The goal is to reduce the amount of energy needed to access clean drinking water without geographical limitations._

There is a lot of energy involved in the phase change of water. We've also had dehumidifiers for over 100 years. The takeaway from that is, dehumidifiers produce don't produce water well in arid environments.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg)

This makes me wonder if the Gates Foundation is properly utilizing scientific expertise.

<comment><USER3> So the tech inside Zero Mass Water is not the same as dehumidifier. Instead, they use a sophisticated absorbent to selectively capture water, heat it to release the water, then sterilize and add minerals.

But you're right. It's the company that I was most surprised to see in the list. The economics don't yet make sense to me.

I pushed Carmichael Roberts (BEV's head of investing) to explain. He said he has studied water startups for years, and he really likes the tech. But more importantly, he is very impressed by Cody's skill to sell this unit and far wide. It's already in 16 countries.

<comment><USER11> _Instead, they use a sophisticated absorbent to selectively capture water, heat it to release the water, then sterilize and add minerals._

So it's using a dessicant? Heating a saturated dessicant in an enclosed environment can produce a hot, high humidity environment where dehumidification is easy. That said, it will still produce the most water someplace like San Francisco, where the humidity is high. There are places where humidity is high and the rainfall is very low.

Apparently, Zero Mass Water is using some good engineering to get something like a 4X efficiency increase for water extraction over existing commercial dessicant dehumidifiers. It's possible that removing the requirement to process large volumes of air could produce such an efficiency increase.

<comment><USER12> Stupid question, is this targeted at producing water or is it targeted at producing clean water where contaminated water is available?

<comment><USER11> It's targeted at producing water by extracting it from the air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Start familiarizing yourself with the term "deep adaptation".</comment>


Help Gmail has killed my personal email - <AUTHOR> So out of the blue, my extremely low traffic email has been blacklisted by google. It is not in DNSBL, end-to-end encryption is used when delivering mail, I have a http(s) on the same ip/domain with short bio, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, the works (that have been working since 2014) are set up, email tests that I can find on the internet are 10/10, never pwnd, but I still end up in spam. Postmaster tools are useless, as this is a personal email and the outgoing volume is too low to get any information from it. I've tried contacting gmail support, but you can probably guess how that went. Do I have to trade my privacy in forever now or does HN know some other tricks that could help me correspond with people on gmail? <comment><USER2> I think that various legit long-standing domains of mine, commercial and personal, have been in and out of gmail and MS blacklists randomly. Indeed, some of the domains predate gmail for example.

For this reason in part I have backup outgoing domains that I can fall back on if I need to, occasionally.

Rgds

Damon

</comment><comment><USER3> Most Googlers are on vacation today, but I'll dig around to see what I can find. Shoot me an email (in my prof) with your domain.

Disclosure: Googler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems that gmail didn't like that i connect to my SMTP server from a "disreputable" ISP.

edit: nope, still straight to spam.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are you hosting it? You could be sharing a subnet with known spammers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hetzner</comment></comment>


Tesla delivered 90,700 cars in Q4, Wall Street freaks out - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/tesla-delivered-90700-cars-in-q4-wall-street-freaks-out/ <comment><USER2> Tesla sales in Norway down 40%, cannibalised by Jaguar

<comment><USER3> That SUV Jaguar made is really amazingly priced and feature rich. It was a Tesla snipe shot by industry vets.

<comment><USER4> The F-Pace? What do you think makes it so compelling?

<comment><USER5> Doug DeMuro can fill you in. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knC9nM2uegE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knC9nM2uegE)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


German court rules Apple infringed Qualcomm patent - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-qualcomm-court/german-court-rules-apple-infringed-qualcomm-patent-idUSKCN1OJ1RJ <comment><USER2> Interesting quote: "Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with research firm Bernstein, said in a note that Germany was a small iPhone market for Apple, selling about 10 million units a year, with possibly only half of those being the older models affected by the court's order."

Probably won't affect Apple too much, Germany is quite an Android country.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the easier ways to become rich than starting a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Sam Altman mentioned in his first lecture of "How to Start a Startup" that "There are much easier ways to become rich and everyone who starts a startup."<p>What are those ways? Consulting? Investing in property? <comment><USER2> I think he didn't think of specifically anything, he just wanted to emphasize how hard it is to build a startup.

Also, those who can answer this kind of questions are too busy getting rich right now.</comment>


Gender bias in accepting pull-requests [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf <comment><USER2> Bottom line: there are some differences between genders, and the bias generally runs against men.

<comment><USER3> There is an argument to be made in the sample size. More men than women make pull requests. Women don't have as many accounts as men do on Github. The experience a man has will vary by his education and skills and a lot of men join without any skills or experience to get started in open source. Women are given special classes and mentors to learn how to code that men are not allowed.

These are factors on the test that could affect results.

A lot of men just join Github without any experience, so of course they will have less pull requests accepted and a lower size file. A lot of women are given special classes to learn how to code and assigned a mentor to teach them how to code better and these programs are only for women. Women generally don't take an interest in programming only making up 18% of computer science classes, but they get tuition discounts and other help for being a woman.</comment></comment>