Backpropagation algorithm visual explanation - <AUTHOR> https://google-developers.appspot.com/machine-learning/crash-course/backprop-scroll/ <comment><USER2> I find explanations like these are great for people who understand mathematical notation, sigmoid functions, derivitives, etc. These people however typically understand whats going on from a simple text description of the process.

For those without a math background, the notation is very opaque. A far better explanation is to explain it numerically with simple examples.

For example, have two bits of training data:

input -> output

1 -> 0

0 -> 1

And a simple network with zero hidden nodes and train it. By hand...

Then add another bit of training data:

0.5 -> 1.5

Notice that it is now impossible to fit the training data exactly, however many training iterations we do. Now add a hidden layer with one or two nodes. Now we can perfectly fit the data, but show that depending on initialization weights we might never get there through gradient descent. Nows the time to mention different types of optimizers, momentum, etc.

<comment><USER3> You don't need 'math backround' to understand the notation. This is high school math. Maybe check some basics you have forgotten from Wikipedia.

I'm relatively sure that they teach basics derivatives, functions etc. in high school in every country.

<comment><USER4> In the US it varies by state and even city, but they did not teach calculus in high school in Philadelphia at least. Students could chose whether to take statistics or pre-calculus. Pre-calc was just basically trigonometry.

<comment><USER3> You learn something new every day.

Here in Finland the students are divided into "long" and "short" math. Both will learn basics of calculus and derivatives at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is only me who gets frustrated by networks drawn upside-down (i.e. data flowing from down to up? IMHO it is a poor convetion, mindlessly repeated.

In English we read from top to bottom. Data flows (be it equations or flow charts) typically follow the same convention, so we can read articles in in a coherent way. Even trees (both data structures and decision trees), grow from their roots downwards (so, against their original biological metaphor). At least most of researchers write neural networks from left to right, consistent with English.

More of this point: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6j28t9/d_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6j28t9/d_why_do_people_draw_neural_networks_upside_down/)

<comment><USER6> forward and back usually refer to right- and leftwards in 2D so it should probably be drawn left-to-right

<comment><USER5> It's not clear what you mean.

\- top->bottom is not compatible with left->right \- "back" propagation is "back" for a reason, so it should go against the normal (forward) direction

<comment><USER6> E.g. in Feynman diagrams time flows forwards from left to right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While we're at this, I found the explainations by 3Brown1Blue to be very intuitive when it comes to neural networks, especially for folks who're new and don't necessarily grasp concepts when explained primarily through math.

What is backpropagation really doing? [https://youtu.be/Ilg3gGewQ5U](https://youtu.be/Ilg3gGewQ5U)

His other videos on this topic are just as good.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately there is no attribution, but this tool was created by Daniel Smilkov, who also built TensorFlow Playground and who is a cocreator of TensorFlow.js.

[https://twitter.com/dsmilkov](https://twitter.com/dsmilkov)

<comment><USER9> Also, going back one on the URL leads you to the Google ML crash course, which I guess this is part of:

[https://google-developers.appspot.com/machine- learning/crash...](https://google-developers.appspot.com/machine- learning/crash-course/)

Definitely worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, this is not "visual explanation", this is "math heavy explanation with some drawings next to it".

</comment><comment><USER11> Love the animation and the math explanation.

Only one, I hope constructive, criticism: Too many formulas without numbers. It will help the explanation if you include numbers and how the results are calculated. Not everybody is comfortable with the chain rule to distribute the error across the individual weights

<comment><USER12> Agree. Although I've been putting effort into learning more Calculus (former art student!), Linear Algebra, and the like, a version of this with actual numbers would go a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice demonstration, but misses to explain the bias value in the forward propagation step. While quite important, this value is often left out when demonstrating the propagation function. So having it in warrants a short description in my opinion.

It also skips over the bias value in the back propagation step.

<comment><USER14> The bias is just another input node whose value happens to be constant (granted with full connectivity), right? So the motivating idea/derivation of backpropogation doesn't change.

<comment><USER13> The bias is often updated/corrected in the back propagation step as well. The purpose of the value is to shift the activation function along the x-axis basically. While the weights define the slope of the activation function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great Viz. Although my favorite is still the video of Andrej Karpathy's Stanford lecture explaining it.

He sort of goes through some other implications which, from an intuition massaging pov, is great.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94OvYb6noo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94OvYb6noo)

For those who are impressed by such things -- as I am -- he is now head of AI or ML or something at Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER16> What a nice website. No weird flashy banners, no external scripts, zoomable, no ads, no tracking.

Just text accompanied by great visualisations.

Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER17> I found in firefox scrolling down left a lot of thing greyed out, I had to highlight and unhighlight things to get them to show properly.

</comment><comment><USER18> question about this part:

> f(x) has to be a non-linear function, otherwise the neural network will only > be able to learn linear models.

I thought one of the most common functions was relu, which is linear (but cuts off to 0 for x values below 0)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier_(neural_networks)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier_\(neural_networks\))

<comment><USER19> It's exactly the cutoff at zero that puts the "kink" into the function which makes ReLU nonlinear. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one who starts seeing some LaTeX creep in halfway through instead of the rendered formulas?

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if there is a tool that helps to create these kind of presentations?

<comment><USER22> This just uses [http://scrollerjs.com](http://scrollerjs.com) and [https://d3js.org](https://d3js.org).

Any tool that combines these things is by necessity going to limit your creativity with them. Using the tools themselves is your best bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> this is so freaking cool.

</comment><comment><USER24> underwhelming

<comment><USER25> You don't need to sign your comments on HN.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Is HN Moderated? - <AUTHOR> How is Hacker News moderated? I noticed that dang acts on certain comments from new accounts immediately. Does he have a feed of comments from the new accounts, from karma 1 accounts, and is this feed a public API? <comment><USER2> If you click the "Lists" link at the bottom of this page, you'll see that there are feeds of submissions and comments by new accounts. You can also see all newly submitted articles using the "new" link at the top of the page (which is how I found this one).

But not all moderation is done by the official moderators (dang and sctb). Users (who have enough karma points) can also flag articles and comments. If an article/comment is marked as "[flagged]", that means it was killed by users flagging it.

<comment><USER3> I have seen articles with "flagged" but do not understand what this actually means in practice, as those articles are not removed from view. Does it mean that comments are closed?

<comment><USER2> Sometimes an article gets killed by flagging, but later gets revived by somebody "vouching" for it. In this situation, the article keeps the [flagged] designation, but is alive again (and comments are reopened).

If an article is dead due to flagging, you won't see it anymore (unless you have "showdead" set in your profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have all kinds of software that you could call feeds, but they're mostly not public. [https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories](https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments) are, though.</comment>


Kyber adds a layer of productivity on top of Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slack.com/apps/A0EP69E58-kyber-to-do-calendar-on-slack <comment><USER2> How many people are using Slack in this way? I like the idea of this but haven't developed the habit of using the slack in chat commands yet. Anyone who is using slack in this way comment on how it helps them vs just switching to the app and using it directly?</comment>


Ask HN: How can I initiate communication from IPv6 - <AUTHOR> We need to debug an issue with IPv6 in our platform.
Although cloud platforms we use fully supporting incoming IPv6 traffic, so there is no issue on this part.
However, for debugging purposes, I could not find a way to communicate over IPv6. That is forcing a client side to communicate over IPv6.
Tried AWS and GCP for this purpose.
Do you know of a VPS that allows this? <comment><USER2> Use a client on a dualstack enabled mobile platform? Tmo for instance. Native 6 with significant speed advantage compared to 464xlat.

Use a 3g or 4g modem on a laptop and use ipfilter to block 4.

Linode is dual stack. Curl from a linode instance? Or, build an x11 enabled platform on linode and run an x11 display back home to run chromium client or similar?

</comment><comment><USER3> Add only v6 destination ip to /etc/hosts so when you program talks to host.domain.name it instantly resolves to a single v6 ip?

<comment><AUTHOR> I need the client side to be IPv6. Not the server side.

Source IP.

<comment><USER4> Do that on the client? Turn off IPv4 entirely on the client?</comment></comment></comment>


I have Crichton Amnesia - <AUTHOR> http://www.iannaccone.org/2012/12/26/crichton-amnesi

<comment><USER3> Critical thinking (and reading and listening) is a state of mind. Its not so much disbelieving everything you hear, so much as looking at what is communicated as a set of data points and one of perhaps many conclusions.

I don't take credit for this insight, I believe I first heard it from Don Knuth when we were discussing a research paper. The process is to try to ascertain what is the _data_ in the communication, which of the pieces of information were observed or came from unbiased sources. Next is to think about what data might be missing, so if you're reading a paper that says "all of the people in our study could explain complexity theory" what other things about those people might have been considered and weren't? Their course of study? Their interests? How they were chosen?

Once you have an idea of what data is present, and perhaps a guess at what isn't, look at the conclusion or assertion in the paper. One flag to look for is if some missing data that should have been available would materially change the conclusion. An example of this was watching a news story of a single mother of two who had been unemployed for over a year. The story concluded that unemployment benefits needed to be extended because people "like this" were out of work. And yet they never mentioned her job although they did mention where she lived. So a bit of web searching we can turn up other bits of information about this person. She was unemployed, had filed and lost several workmens compensation claims against her former employer, had no additional training or schooling past high school, and was terminated from her previous job under a cloud of poor accounting records keeping. Of course adding in all of the information to the news story would not have made her a sympathetic figure so it wasn't included. I don't doubt the news producer, if pressed, would simply call her "an example" of the problem rather than a specific problem.

So critical reading and listening begins with "What is this person trying to communicate?" and the second is "How hard or honest are they being in making their argument?"

Fair warning here, if you are in a conversation with someone and start probing around the data question they _will_ get mad at you. (I won't, I'll just jump into my reasoning, but I have found that isn't the common response)

The risk of being a critical thinker/reader/listener is that you risk rampant cynicism. This is especially true around sources which have a long history of shading the data to make their point. If you are not careful you throw out good data. I find it is useful and fun to deconstruct a news story with my wife. As she and I think differently about things we always find questions the other person missed (not that we always agree that they are the right questions, but they do keep the discussion interesting)

</comment><comment><USER4> What I've found interesting is reading these tomes by people that pile up stuff from all sorts of various fields, e.g. Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, Steel).

I'll read along happily, completely convinced, being amazed and thrilled at the depth and scope of his knowledge ... and then I'll happen across some _little_ tidbit that's in a field I know about—and he screws it up, saying something silly/wrong in an authoritative tone.

It suddenly makes the entire thing come crashing down. I suddenly feel like I can't really trust anything he's said, because his obvious skill at _sounding_ authoritative and confident, and the wide scope of his pronouncements, make it pretty obvious that there are probably other silly/wrong things in the book that I _didn't_ get.

So I don't read Jared Diamond books anymore, entertaining may they be. Worse than that, I really can't read _any_ of these sorts of books anymore. I can suspend my disbelief for fiction, but that doesn't work so well for non- fiction...

</comment><comment><USER5> Every time I've had traditional media coverage of a project I've worked on, I've made this resolution. I'm not at all ungrateful for the coverage - <USER2> time, it made a difference, and it's lovely to be noticed - but even Wired, which should be pretty good at this, got major details wrong. (To their credit, TechCrunch, RWW et al have always reported accurately.)

Journalism is really important, but it's rare to see it done well. I really like long-form journalism outlets like the New Yorker for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess the only way to combat this in fields where you aren't knowledgeable is to read many sources and synthesize your own conclusions? Alternately, you could accept that there are good and bad journalists, and trust some of them?

<comment><USER7> I have tried to treat information I gather from news sources as preliminary. When I relay information I've learned from these sources, I try to say "I read in the new york times" instead of repeating the information as fact. There's a lot of information that I know I'll never get around to researching thoroughly, but it still is good to be able to use as a working base of knowledge until what seems to be better info can replace it.

<comment><USER8> I have not noticed that the New York Times is any more reliable than other sources on subjects that I actually know about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, what about Gary Taubes?

What do the experts on insulin can say about his books?

</comment><comment> d--b I have something related: \- I read an article on hacker news \- I realize that the article is useless and/or completely undocumented \- I decide not to go to hacker news \- I read another article on hacker news</comment>


CakePHP Website Returning HTTP Error 502 - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone else having problems accessing the site? <comment><USER2> Time to learn a new framework! Down for me also</comment>


Xkcd: Collector's Edition - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2288/#-2021,2265 <comment><USER2> I know and appreciate XKCD but I'm in no way an adept. What exactly a, I looking at?

Warning; on Mobile Safari I succeeded in zooming in by enlarging part of the surrounding page and recentering, but then I couldn't zoom out.</comment>


Daylight Savings Time and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.cozi.com/tech/2008/03/daylight-saving.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The JavaScript engines in Firefox 2 (Windows) and IE6 can't handle the new Daylight Savings Time rules in the U.S. The Date() function returns a value that is off by an hour if the system time is between the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of April.</comment>


Make distributed programming great again: Microservices with Distributed Actors - <AUTHOR> https://www.juptr.io/juptrblogs/c7839e9a-da8b-4a60-bc66-94558c30c4da.html <comment><USER2> umh</comment>


Next generation programming language - <AUTHOR> Hi All,
As a dev everyone dream is to write a language which helps others and themselves but to do that will you start writing a new language?? If you say yes you have to take all responsibilities.
Actually, you don't need to do that, you can be part of growing community. It is time to do that.
Finally, I want to say that I am going to start writing a language based on experience taken from many devs who worked on different languages.Do you want to be part of it you can join the slack channel using below link
jua http://jua-slack.herokuapp.com/
This chance for you to became compiler guru. <comment><USER2> As a suggestion, add the name of the project to the title of the submission.

When I visit the page I get a email signup form and no information.

What are the central ideas of your language?

Does it look like C or LISP?

With or without GC? A borrow checker like Rust?

Everything is an object like Java or C#?

Mutable or immutable data types?</comment>


Evidence-based programming language design (PhD thesis) - <AUTHOR> https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/47698# <comment><USER2> I don't know that I would associate "evidence" with "coder agreement".

The point of evidenced-based X (medicine, teaching, etc.) is improvement and change, things that people are often hostile to: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex)

Research found that the number one cause of errors in learning Python was its case-sensitivity, and you can guess what people's reactions were when it was suggested that python support a case-insensitive option: (NIMPY - not in my python) [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-May/03710...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-May/037102.html)

<comment><USER3> I find the fact that Guido was considering making Python case insensitive in 2000 very fascinating. 15 years later and case insensitivity is still viewed as being "wrong". I only know one "new" language that is brave enough to be case insensitive and that is Nim, funnily enough its syntax is very much inspired by Python.

<comment><USER4> By now I think case insensitivity is probably good (back then I don't think I did), but the idea of introducing it into an existing language, breaking much more than Python 3 eventually did doesn't sound great.

And as an option? I can't remember what the actual proposal was, but having case insensitive code trying to use a case sensitive library sounds like lots of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR the thesis researches how evidence-based programming language design could be conducted, but it does not actually goes into what such a design would be given the available evidence.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to read some of this thesis. If this piques your interest, Andreas Stefik has a fascinating Strange Loop talk (~40 minutes) where he talks about 1) the history of evidence-based endeavors 2) the curious lack of evidence- based programming language design 3) a programming language informed by evidence, quorum.

It's here[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFrE6cgVNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFrE6cgVNY)

Short note upon skimming this thesis: Matthias Felleisen, of How to Design Programs and the Little Schemer series, is a reviewer.

An awesome paragraph from the introduction:

 _The genesis of this dissertation is a question I asked myself over a decade ago. How can I, as an aspiring programming language designer, improve upon existing languages instead of simply making another variation of a well understood theme? The well established research paradigm in language design would have me identify a deficiency in the expressiveness of some class of languages and then propose an alteration of these languages which arguably removes the defi- ciency. However, there already is several decades' worth of such contributions, suggesting two much more pressing questions. How does one compare design alternatives that are present in the literature? And the question I focus on in this dissertation: How does one use the existing literature to aid in language design?_

I cannot overemphasize the importance of being able to compare the merits of programming languages _without taking sides_. Philip Wadler's Why Calculating is Better than Scheming ( [http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.p...](http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf) ) is wonderful. The problem appears when _I_ tell _you_ , "It'll make a Haskeller out of ya." Switching teams is an unscientific way to think about it.

Evidence keeps us sober. Like another commenter said the point of evidence is improvement and change. To extend that, by contrast the point of team-behavior is improvement mixed with identity-formation and group-cohesion, which often interfere with improvement and change.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, that's a bit too long to read all. I would however be interested in seeing a language resulting from this methodology, if there is any.

Otherwise, good work advancing.

<comment><USER8> [http://quorumlanguage.com/](http://quorumlanguage.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Calculate Server Needs - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I am newbie in HN, I need help about my own project. Any advice will be appreciated.
1. how many co-founder to start my own project? I knew some people tell me to find a partner, but some successful site has been created by a single creator. Well, any comment?
2. how to estimate the server needs to start my own project? any points I need to consider? like how many RAM, how powerful CPU and how to determine those? any reference?
Thanks all, any idea will be great. I really appreciated. <comment><USER2> 1\. Most articles around start-ups, including Y Combinator, suggest that having more than 1 founder greatly improves the chance of success.

2\. It's impossible to answer that without a lot more information. Capacity estimation can be a black art... Unless you're using novel technologies, I'd focus on making sure you have scalable application first (you can always start out small).

<comment><AUTHOR> ok thx guys, refer to point no 2, I understand about how hard we have to determine the specification.

I just wondering, for example : how do we know how far MySQL can handle concurrent query, and how much time ffmpeg need to transcode a single movie and how many request nginx can handle a request, I already googling for those kind of information, but not enough information on internet. Could you guys give me some clue or reference? any site has been discuss those problem? tomshardware (I don't think so)?

thx in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For server specs it really depends on technologies you're using. Java, PHP, Rails, etc. Each will need a different amount of resources. It's probably easiest to get an entry level container from a place like Joyent and scale up as you need it.</comment>


Facebook suspends five accounts, including that of a social media researcher - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/22/facebook-suspends-five-accounts-including-social-media-researcher-misleading-tactics-alabama-election <comment><AUTHOR> Not mentioned is that Jonathon Morgan is _CEO and Co-Founder of New Knowledge_ ‡ which in his own words, "For the past six months @NewKnowledgeAI led an investigation into Russian interference on behalf of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI). This was the first comprehensive look into data provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter, and Google.[…]"†

So a U.S. citizen (and ex-Special Advisor to the State Department) who has been a key figure in peddling the story that Russia interfered with US elections via social media has been found to have interfered with recent U.S. elections via social media. Priceless! Find out more here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqLIJznUNVw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqLIJznUNVw)

‡ [https://www.newknowledge.com/our-company](https://www.newknowledge.com/our- company)

† [https://twitter.com/jonathonmorganhttps://twitter.com/jonath...](https://twitter.com/jonathonmorganhttps://twitter.com/jonathonmorgan/status/1074734322102480896)

<comment><USER2> It's hard to say, does this legitimize or de-legitimize his investigation?

Either way, that information should definitely be included in the WaPo story.

<comment><AUTHOR> Legitimize it in a it-takes-one-to-know-one kind of way, you mean?

Or de-legitimize it in a boy-who-cries-wolf-turns-out-to-be-wolf kind of way?

I really couldn't say, all I know is that my incredulity meter broke and has been sent to the repair shop.</comment></comment></comment>


Morocco abruptly drops clock change - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634 <comment><USER3> I'm glad they decided to keep summer time. I live in fear that we'll decide to abolish DST but keep the darker evenings all year round.

<comment><USER4> Your timezone does not dictate how dark your evenings are. The days have exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what numbers you choose to label the hours with.

<comment><USER5> Quite a few people work relative to market trading hours and customary times to hold earnings calls and roadshows. Sales people work around their store business hours. Schools have fixed schedules. Hours sadly dictate schedules for most people

<comment><USER6> Tangent: what's the purpose of closing the financial markets overnight? Why not just have them open all the time?

<comment><USER7> Surely thats a regulation thing, not an actual desire by the market.

<comment><USER6> That just shifts the question around. Why, as king, would you want to make sure that there's a period every day when no one is supposed to trade financial instruments?

<comment><USER7> Because the king doesn't want to take the responsiblity of overlooking the transactions everyday: just when he feels like it.

<comment><USER6> How does the one relate to the other?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The assertion that the countries which do not use DST are "mostly in Africa and Asia" is an odd way to put it. The countries that DO use DST are more of the exception now: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:DST_Countries_Map.png)

<comment><USER9> Almost all of Europe will abolish DST this year.

<comment><USER10> Very unlikely. Next year perhaps, seems a fairly popular proposal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assume a out-of-band Windows update will be imminent then. Half of out-of- band Windows updates are zero-days, the other half are frantic attempts to cope with countries changing their time zones on short notice.

</comment><comment><USER12> Brazil abruptly decided to delay the start of daylight savings time by a few weeks due to elections and a number of (unpatched?) Android phones showed the wrong time: [https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change- inadvertentl...](https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change- inadvertently-affects-millions-of-android-phones-20181022/)

<comment><USER13> It wasn't abrupt, tzdata 2018c from January already had that change: [https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2018:0232](https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2018:0232)

What was abrupt was that this month they decided to delay it even more due to the ENEM ([https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exame_Nacional_do_Ensino_M%C3%...](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exame_Nacional_do_Ensino_M%C3%A9dio)), and a few days later went back on that, keeping only the previous delay due to the elections.

What happened with smartphones is that most are configured to automatically track the timezone from the carrier, and some carriers didn't set it up correctly. So when the normal date for DST arrived this Sunday, these phones entered daylight savings time, even though this should happen only two weeks later.

(And of course, there's always the servers with unpatched software from 2016, and the servers with the Oracle JVM which for some reason uses its own copy of the tzdata database...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd also like to see New England move to Atlantic Standard Time. I was there last winter and it got dark before 5pm!

<comment><USER15> Youd love Seattle, where sunset is at roughly 4:20 in late December.

Otoh, it doesn't get truly dark until 10 in June.

<comment><USER16> I absolutely fucking love it. It makes up for the lack of snow or cold and dry days.

Four months where the sun is under 30°, where the color temp from daylight casts everything with a golden evening glow. A glance outside feels timeless as your brain tells you that it should be 2pm, but it looks like evening. It's even more magical in the winter with that rare snowfall. The colors shift to a purple and grey when the sky is dark and filled with ice. When it clears, the spectrum shifts to thousands of shades of blues over a hundred minutes after sunset. There is an added bit of splendor when the world is awake and continues with its work but the sun is down.

I just moved back from 40° north to 48°, and those early sunsets, colorful days, and summer twilights were sorely missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe a few months heads up would be nice. You know the world is integrated now: flights, trains, shipments etc. etc..

<comment><USER18> I think that's the only real objection to this move. Any country is entitled to do what it wants regarding DST, but transitions should be orderly and planned well in advance, not imposed from one day to the next.

I guess it shows how Morocco is not exactly a democratic country, so you get the classic tyrant-style decision-making here and there.

<comment><USER17> I think it has nothing to do with Democracy. Frankly, central authority should make this kind of stuff easier because a central entity can take into consideration all of the bureaucracies and do what needs to be done.

In Democracies, pushing through such changes has to be a nightmare - so many competing interests, populism, you have to find the right legislative window, legislation is burdened with irrelevant stuff, bureaucracies are resistant to change etc..

<comment><USER19> Its crazy to me that this style of thinking is re-surging.

Between this and recent nationalist movements, I'm concerned that our generation will be responsible for a regression in progress.

<comment><USER17> What's 'crazy' is that people would think this is crazy. Or even a new idea or an idea that ever went away.

And what does this have to do with Nationalism? Nothing.

Someone suggests something not normative and people yell 'Trump'?

Consider how South Korea, Japan, France, UK, Germany, Poland, Belgium were re- built after the war?

It was mostly centrally planned management by powers, taking a lot of orders from Washington. 'post war' is a great opportunity for central power as most of the value creating enterprises are obvious, and very low hanging fruit: i.e. 'we need schools, and roads, and electricity where all that has been undone'.

Nobody is suggesting totalitarianism, some people just point out that in many cases, a well organized and efficient control system is much better than bureaucratic kludge.

<comment><USER18> For Italy, it's actually the opposite: centrally-managed efforts have typically failed, while grassroots-led initiatives are pretty solid. We did get tons of money after the war, but reconstruction was not a coherent effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can't we keep the link with solar noon?

Morocco should be on UTC, most of the cities fit neatly in that timezone. They could have made this decision on Monday

<comment><USER21> I'm curious to know, what is the point of linking to solar time? What advantage is there to the Sun reaching its highest point at 12 'o clock?

Most people are awake for about 6 hours before noon, and about 10 hours after. Most social events also happen after the work day. So our day is already shifted from what would logically follow from our clock. Being on +2 already feels like a compromise between the two.

I'd love it if getting up at 4am and going to bed at 8pm was the norm, and solar noon was the exact midpoint of the day, but as I am not a recluse I cannot start that trend, and therefore shifting the timezones seems more reasonable.

<comment><USER22> As I presume you know, Solar noon represents the highest point of the Sun in the day. It seems fitting that the 'work hours' should be 4 hrs either side of that (8am-4pm).

Being a 'sunlover' I'm regularly up before dawn so that I can catch the first rays of Sun as it crosses the horizon. To me it's the most beautiful part of the day. Unfortunately, we have semi-arbitrarily defined 'zones' that fluctuate 1hr because of the propagandist notion that extra daylight at the end of the day means more people will be outside enjoying the Sun. This DST causes my work day to suddenly shift so that I'm forced to go to work earlier than normal, & I miss a lot of sunrises as a result.

I like this idea of solar noon for times... Especially for overseas communications too... because we'd just need to know the longitude of the person to know their exact time. (Currently, I'm forced to use timeanddate.com to work out relative overseas times).

Where I am, the state to the North of me doesn't follow DST (Qld), whereas mine does (nsw) and it creates havoc around the beginning/end of DST.

So, at least for me, there are three reasons to use solar noon based time rather than the current system. I'm sure I could come up with more.

That said, I go to bed early too, and acknowledge that isn't the way most people live.

<comment><USER23> Most working professionals I know are working 9 to 5, not 8 to 4.

<comment><USER24> This is country dependent. Across the Nordics for example 8 to 4 is very common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And here we are still putting this to vote in California [https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...](https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_Daylight_Saving_Time_Measure_\(2018\))

<comment><USER26> It's silly to worry about the 1949 law now, given that we've been violating it for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Obligatory link to the tireless volunteers who maintain the timezone databases and cope with the last minute, sometimes even retrospective timezone changes.

[https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027099.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027099.html)

<comment><USER28> example retroactive change: [https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027092.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027092.html)

this stuff really is fascinating

<comment><USER29> "El Pasoans were time rebels" :)

Oh that Johnny Yuma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can't imagine any part of Africa would benefit from daylight savings changes. Morocco only fluctuates between 10h and 14h of daylight at its extremes.

<comment><USER31> Morocco in particular would benefit from synchronizing time changes with Spain as a major trade partner.

<comment><USER18> Spain will likely drop DST in a year or two, like most EU countries, but it's not clear which side it will "land". In this context, maybe Morocco is using this leap forward as a lobbying effort to nudge Spain towards the timezone it prefers.

<comment><USER9> Aren't they dropping it tomorrow?

<comment><USER18> Not afaik - the EU recommended to stop switching at some point, it did not mandate when or how. Spain will switch as usual this weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember when Tunisia went off DST in 2008, phones struggled for a few years after.

</comment><comment><USER33> My old iPad 4 (iOS 10.3.3) just asked for a reboot in order to apply timezone changes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Türkiye did this a few years ago. Working remotely from here for a California company has been less than fun during the winter as my work day now ends at 21:00, severely hampering evening social / music outings.

<comment><USER35> You are working remotely, I'm sure you will find the flexibility to adjust your working hours by at least 1-2 hours?

By the way, is there a reason you called it Türkiye instead of Turkey?

<comment><USER18> It's the native spelling, a bit like Beijing vs Peking. I reckon he's a Turk and so he's entitled to call his homeland what he wants :)

<comment><USER36> No, the native spelling is 北京. Beijing and Peking are two different foreign spellings.

The commenter who called it Türkiye claims to be from the USA in his or her bio.

<comment><USER18> Beijing is the transliteration preferred by Chinese authorities [1], not just "a foreign spelling".

[1] [https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/11/11/beijing-or- peki...](https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/11/11/beijing-or-peking)

<comment><USER36> Okay. Regardless, it is the commonly accepted English spelling (whereas Peking is not), and is not used in Chinese (except in unusual situations). So comparing it to Türkiye vs Turkey makes no sense, which was my point.

<comment><USER18> It is the word the Chinese would like non-Chinese to use when talking about the city. It's a classic example of modern cultural re-appropriation, because Peking _was_ the widely-accepted transliteration - until attitudes (and power) changed and the Chinese asked the world to use Beijing instead. It wouldn't be particularly far-fetched to imagine Turks might also ask the world, eventually, to use their own spelling to refer to the country - <USER2> considering the unfortunate overlap of the word "turkey" in English.

<comment><USER37> Still "Peking" in german.

<comment><USER38> Same in France, it's still "Pékin", I suspect Beijing will never take off since it's harder to pronounce.

<comment><USER39> You could spell it "Beijing" and keep pronouncing it "Pékin" :). I remember hearing "Bé-ying" and "Bé-jing" once on french radio/TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> PROGRAMMERS:

We have timezone homework to do again :/

<comment><USER41> No you don't. Only the maintainer of tzdata. All we have to do is make sure we use an up-to-date version of tzdata, which all modern operating systems do automatically (although probably not quite before tomorrow).

<comment><USER40> I know, but you ruined my joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't like DST and think that instead the time zone offset should be set so that 12:00 is at approximately solar noon, and then count the seconds without changing for DST or anything else.

<comment><USER43> Where I live, solar noon is around 11:30am. The sun rising at 4:30am and setting at 6:30pm in the summer is sad. It's even worse in the winter when the sun sets at 4:30pm.

(And I come from a country where solar noon is 2pm in the summer, making evenings quite enjoyable)

<comment><USER42> My opinion is, if you do not want to have dinner when it is dark, then have dinner when it is not dark. It is dark or light depending on what season, and what location, rather than the clock, anyways, whether you use DST or not.

The clock is good can tell you the time and how much time is passed and to synchronize the schedule for TV shows and cron events on computer and whatever, but is dark independently from that. If solar noon is at approximately 12:00 then the time doesn't jump (causing many problems with appointments and complications with other stuff that it doesn't need), and it will match with a sundial approximately and closely enough, but also that between for example 01:00 and 13:00 is going to be twelve hours, without needing to deal with DST.

(Avoiding DST is simplifying the computer programming too, as well as many other stuff too, so that is also good.)

<comment><USER44> That's not how real life works. For most people it's exactly the clock on the wall that determines when they go home and have dinner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well it didn't live long. We were always at GMT and now ten years later of ever using DST we are stuck with it. Not complaining. I hate having to fix the microwave clock.

</comment><comment><USER46> Good. They had 4 yearly DST changes previously, two during summer/winter and two during Ramadan. Must be exhausting. Algeria dropped DST since 1980.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there a service where you can pull constantly updated info about time zones etc? Like a library?

<comment><USER48> I believe you want [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) or something that uses it as a source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Right now, this DST discussion will hang low on the front page, but a few months from now when we reverse it, you can bet that once again a discussion about DST will be the top story for at least a day and linger in our minds for two weeks until we promptly forget it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Good, please everyone do this, time, date, and life are chaotic enough without DST.

And now drop the leap second crap and insert a leap hour every 7200 years, OK?

</comment><comment><USER51> Aren't enough clocks connected to the internet that the clock change could happen gradually rather than abruptly?

<comment><USER11> You could do something like Google has done with the Leap Smear on a larger scale, but the better question is why does the clock change need to happen at all? There's really no reason for it.

It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.

Also, you'd be surprised how many clocks are not Internet-connected, as a lot of people still rely on clocks on their microwave, oven, car radio, etc. And in my case, I am absolutely reliant on one (or, often, like three) completely dumb alarm clocks, because they aren't subject to the whims of my phone doing dumb things like not ringing when it should.

<comment><USER52> > It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees > out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few > months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.

Actually it wouldn't, because businesses have their hours set based upon the entirety of society's sense of time.

<comment><USER53> This only really matters for customer-facing roles in specific-hours businesses. Anyone working in the background, in admin, or on project work likely doesn't need to be available in person 100% of the working hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I love Morocco that much more.

</comment><comment><USER55> Moroccan web developers right now: AAaAAAAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAaaaAAaaAAAaAAAhhhHHHHHHH!!!!!

<comment><USER56> The developers I least envy are any that are tasked with maintaining a library that has anything to do with dates and time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> US should do the same. Drop DST please! but not abruptly with a Trumpy Tweet.

<comment><USER36> Time zones in the US are a matter for the sovereign states, not the federal government.

There already exists at least one US member state that doesn't practice DST: Arizona.

<comment><USER58> Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though.

Edit:

[http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313](http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313)

The bottom line here is that a state (or other political subdivision — see the Wayne County, KY reference below) can only:

\- Opt out of DST

\- If not opted out of DST, you must advance an hour starting on the second Sunday of March and ending on the first Sunday in November.

\- Petition the Secretary of the Department of Transportation and request a change of time zone designation.

<comment><USER59> Can't they just move to the neighboring time zone and not adopt DST? (i.e. If California wants permanent summer time, they can switch to MST and sync up with Arizona ("America/Phoenix"))

<comment><USER58> See my edit, they have to petition to change their time zone.

<comment><USER10> Bit confusing as you open the post with "States can choose their timezone"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Why can't we just get rid of time zones altogether and just use UTC exclusivsly? The amount of productivity lost to dealing with them is immeasurably high. I proposed this over dinner with some friends recently and they thought it was nuts, but within 20 minutes of discussion I think I had convinced most of them (or they just wanted me to shut up). Maybe once we colonise Mars and the meaning of a day becomes more vague, this will become the de facto way of communicating time.

<comment><USER61> Because that still doesn't solve the problem of having to know the local offset to know if a proposed time is reasonable for them, for say a meeting.

It also makes it easier to talk to others, if they say "6pm" you think "dinner time" or "just off work" without having to know the location of the person, at the time they're talking about, which may not even be where they are.

<comment><USER60> Surely people would just start using some sort of utility that tells them 'people in X are usually awake between these hours'. It replaces an existing problem with a slightly different problem but the net gain is you remove all the annoying edge cases people currently have to deal with when converting between time zones. For example, no longer being confused about how long your flight lasts that traverses time zones.

<comment><USER59> And you introduce weird edge cases because days now change while you're eating lunch or driving home.

The phrase "Dinner on Thursday" would become really confusing. ("Do you mean after work on Wednesday? Or before the football game on Friday?")</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Recovering China's Past on Kenya's Coast - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646752730959466.html

<comment><USER2> The treasure fleets were going to be the subject of my thesis, had I stayed in school. I find the idea of finding fourteenth century artifacts from China on (say) Zanzibar one of the coolest things imaginable.

I also really like that the ships were abandoned. The cultural turn and dynastic politics required are also really fascinating. The treasure fleets play a role in Kim Stanley Robinson's _Years Of Rice And Salt_ , which is a counterfactual history book that was right in my wheelhouse, much more interesting than German Zombie Nazis take over Mars or what have you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Studying Zheng He and the reasons for China's deliberate withdrawal from exploration and the outer world seem particularly relevent at this time, especially in the USA.

The USA is apparently giving up on manned space flight, we haven't put a human outside earth orbit since 1972, and we're trying to lock down the current economic status quo with copyrights, patents, and "intellectual property". The USA, or at least its current economic elite, has given up on the future.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good neighborhoods in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

I currently live in Ozone Park, NYC, but I'm pretty sick of it. I'm looking for a neighborhood where I can get a 1 bedroom for around $1150. I live with my girlfriend and need to be able to commute to Manhattan (lower) in 1 hr or less. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Check on craigslist. You'll find some decent deals for 1br along the 7/r lines in Queens. (I looked myself last month.) Just ignore all the spam, which is about 60% of them now unfortunately. Don't open any links from the post, it's sure to be spam or scam.

I haven't been in Ozone Park before, but since it's further away I assume the space is also larger for the price.

Here's the craigslist link I visited almost daily last month during my search. [http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/nfa/que?query=&srch...](http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/nfa/que?query=&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=1200&bedrooms=1&hasPic=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a tough price to get much closer to Manhattan. Stick with Queens neighborhoods - you'll be equally closer to your work, but in a better quality neighborhood compared to your Brooklyn options at that price. Astoria would be my choice, even if it's just to move closer and see what it's like - the N should get you to work in about an hour.

But, be aware that you may be more comfortable in a different situation than me, so you might enjoy a rougher neighborhood or an older apartment in Brooklyn as a trade-off for living within a certain distance from work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Astoria is definitely awesome, it can be a little pricier though, no?

<comment><USER3> Looks doable to me - [http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/hhh?query=astoria&s...](http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/hhh?query=astoria&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=1200&bedrooms=1) The good thing is that most places that could be listed as "Astoria" will be in a nice location, so you can concentrate on checking out the apartments instead of worrying that you'll get stuck in a bad neighborhood. Woodside, Sunnyside, and the other surrounding neighborhoods are nice, also.

Astoria has a lot of small, local real estate offices, so always check with them for some options, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Greenpoint is pretty affordable, and it's just on the other side of the Willamsburg Bridge, so it's very close to lower Manhattan.

[http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/aap/brk?query=greenpoin...](http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/aap/brk?query=greenpoint&srchType=A&minAsk=800&maxAsk=1200&bedrooms=1)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint,_Brooklyn>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks cool, I never even heard of it. Gratzi

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know you said NYC, but I have to add Hoboken. I absolutely loved living there 2007-2008. The Path subway was nice and reliable and terminated at World Trade and as far as Maceys on 33rd. Here's some trivia. Hoboken has more bars per square mile than anywhere in the US.. result!

<comment><AUTHOR> Food for thought, thanks! Off the top of your head, what's rent like?

<comment><USER5> We stayed at apartment block 333 River Street which was right on the Hudson, next to the 'W'. Luckily for us the company paid for it as the rent for a massive two bedroom apartment was about $3000 a month (2008) However, Hoboken is a big place so I would imagine more sensible rentals further away from the river front. It's certainly worth considering.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Make your grocery list with less typing - <AUTHOR> https://grocerylistmaker.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, This is a simple side project I made to prepare grocery lists. Just pick the items and your shopping list appears on the right (on smartphones, you will have to scroll all the way down to get the list). You could then print, copy or e-mail the list.

Tech: It is a static site built with vue.js, bootstrap. There is no database or webserver. I bought the domain name for 88 cents and am hosting it on firebase for free.

Why I built this: I have trouble focussing on my side projects. My past 4 side projects never finished because they were too big or I lost interest. So, I picked a simple pain point I myself had and built this.

Let me know what you guys think.

<comment><USER2> > My past 4 side projects never finished because they were too big or I lost > interest. So, I picked a simple pain point I myself had and built this.

As I don't need to do groceries that often, this is probably the biggest takeaway for me. An inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm. "Jin" as a beverage? Did you mean the alcoholic drink known as "gin"? ;)

Oh, and I suspect people might want to split non-alcoholic drinks from the alcoholic stuff. Myself, I would use the word "beverage" to cover only non- alcoholic stuff, while alcoholic drinks would go in a separate category of "alcoholic drinks".

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you considered letting people alter the order of categories? Or adding or deleting categories?

For example, I would want Fruit first, then Vegetables, then Seafood, etc....

And what about saving different versions of the list with different names, so that I could have one order for one store and then a different order for a different store?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Few people have asked me to open source this and they were keen to add some features like the one you mention i.e being able to save the lists, editing categories. I will clean up the code and release it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if this is something you can control but the little chat box in the bottom right just says "Offline". I assumed this would allow me to enable some kind of offline capabilities, not that it indicated that the support team is currently offline.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops...it actually means support is offline. Thanks for reporting it. I have changed it to a more intuitive chat icon instead of text like "Offline". I was a bit lazy to add a custom form to submit feedback, ended up using tawk app. I can understand the confusion it might have caused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice site!

It would be great if you could keep track of what people Add with the "Add your own!" box, that way you include those basic things without having people type them in each time. For instance, I noticed plain Cheese and Eggs are missing and I suppose others would want those as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I was thinking of localstorage to store those "Add your own" items. I have added cheese & eggs for now as defaults.

<comment><USER6> Seeing all the defaults you're adding, I recommend having a way for users to remove default entries and/or ones they've added but aren't likely to need to purchase again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there needs to be a way to save "removed" and "added" items. I will add this feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool type of Grocery list is the communal one on Goodneighbor Delivery

</comment><comment><USER6> I love that one of the baking ingredients you can put on your list is "Cake"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I have fixed this. Should have been cake mix :-).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The site was broken for safari. I have fixed it, hopefully should work now.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks great! You should add water (bottled) :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added it under beverages section for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe make added items default selected?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good idea.I don't have to start over for my next time shopping. Thanks for the feedback. I will try to add this feature when time permits.

<comment><USER9> That is a good idea, however not what I actually meant.

I meant that when you add a new item to the lists (by entering in the text box) it could be selected automatically - because if you add it, you probably wanted to tick it but found it was not in the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> I added this feature yesterda i.e after adding new custom item its checked and in the shopping list. I talked with another user (off HN) about this yesterday, maybe it was you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best place online to learn building web apps? - <AUTHOR>

I am sick of having a great idea for a web app, yet no way to execute a simple version to try to get funding or help with it.  Can anyone give recommendations on the best entry level language and where I can learn it online?  I am thinking Ruby on Rails would be a good place to start.<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> The Django Book is a great way to start with the Python Framework "Django" - Like Ruby on Rails but in Python (and thus with more awesome) - <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/>

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in Rails, try this: <http://guides.rails.info/>, based on Rails 3.0 which is in final beta.</comment>


Ask HN: Theoretical innovation to actual company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
For stuff more general than the usual web startup flow chart (i.e. come up with an idea and implement!), what is the process to from theoretical innovation to actual product? A friend has come up with a theoretical innovation that arose out of his PhD thesis that has potential for several software projects of varying scope. He believes that he can write an application that utilizes this innovation in ~6months to a year.
What is the next step? Is there a series of steps we should go thru? Like draw up a business plan, identify user base, etc? What kind of stuff should we be thinking about? <comment><USER2> Talk to prospective customers, see what they would pay for which capabilities before you write any code. The risk is not whether you can write the application, but whether you write an application folks want to use and pay for.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure about this one. You can't always talk to prospective customers because they may or may not see the application of the technology until it hits them in the face. Sometimes talking to prospective customers is the right thing to do and other times you're better off building the prototype/demo and seeing what impact it has.

I don't know - maybe the OP should ask prospective customers... I don't know enough about the idea to guesstimate whether this is a good strategy or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you a geek too or are you the business person?

Advice #1: Be wary of what you read on these boards. A lot of folks will tell you that you need to do "x". Well, what they aren't telling is that they think "x" will work for you but what do they really know about your idea? Zilch. "x" might have worked for them or for a friend and now they pass it along to you. They are trying to be helpful yet that doesn't mean they are helpful. Be wary.

Advice #2 - Decide whether you and your friend actually want to be the implementers or you want to sell the idea for someone else to implement.

Advice #3 - Consider talking to a patent attorney if it is an interesting enough model.

Finally, the process to go from idea to product varies too widely for me to offer specific advice. If your friend can code it in 6-12 months, here's what you have to consider:

* If it can be coded in such a short period of time, how quickly can it be copied?

* If he can code it by himself in 6-12 months, how realistic are his timelines? It's often that I find my project estimates to be wildly optimistic...

* If he can code it by himself in 6-12 months, how much faster could he do it with a team of four other people who are very talented working alongside him 60 hours a week?

* Assuming that a team of 5 can code it inside of 90 days, is there an opportunity cost lost by waiting the extra 90 days (for your friend to code it alone)?

* How long will it take to raise financing (to fund the 5 person team)?

etc

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Do.

Stop talking and theorizing and just do.</comment>


"I can't really go into the details that would support it" (about Google) - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44078779

<comment><AUTHOR> swillden is a Googler FYI, and what I would like to see is the kinds of monitors the studies/tests was conducted on because it matters a lot.</comment>


If Logged into Facebook, Oculus VR Data Will Now Be Used for Ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/303310-facebook-oculus-vr-data-advertising <comment><USER3> FB ads engineer here.

Every time I read these threads, I'm 1\. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago) 2\. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)

Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn't provide marketing scale and is extremely expensive. The goal is to have the biggest possible audience, while still applying one or two critical filters. You could hit all 1000 people in a pool for $100 each, or you can hit 1000 people in a pool of 1 million for 50 cents each.

The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting. This means that people selling VR-adjacent services, products, and content can reliably advertise to their core market without wasting money on non-users. Or maybe they can filter out that segment to show different ads to non-users that convince them to buy their first device. I know most on HN hate any level of targeting, but this has a massive benefit to the VR ecosystem because it allows VR companies to reach their customers much more effectively and sell more products.

FB is actually stripping away features from our targeting system and removing inputs because we spend too much compute power ($$) driving optimizations that don't have any material impact on delivery value. Basic is better. There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home. Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - <USER2> just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.

<comment><USER4> Your systems are sophisticated enough to make people believe their phones are listening to them in the background even when that's not the case. So even if _you_ think they are primitive, a lot of people thinks they're more than sophisticated enough to be creepy.

<comment><USER5> Facebook's not helping this conspiracy theory with their "why did I see this ad?" dialog. I'll see a _clearly_ hyper-targeted ad (for example, a psoriasis medication) and click that button and it'll say "they wanted to reach people in the United States between 18-65!"

I _know_ I was targeted by that ad. I _know_ they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.

The dialog even obnoxiously says "There could also be more factors not listed here." Yes, I know, that's fairly obvious. I clicked the dialog to figure out what those were.

<comment><USER6> I am a professional FB advertiser.

The advertisers are probably choosing to target everyone on FB in that age range, but asking FB to optimize for conversions. Then the FB algorithm finds more people who look like people who are clicking and converting.

<comment><USER7> Ok, so dumb question. Why _wouldn't_ you optimize for conversions then? Unless you want some immeasurable branding value type lift.

Sorry for the dumb question but if you're implying one particular bidding mechanism benefits from FB algorithmic experience in a way that's meaningfully more accurate (serving the ad to the guy or girl with the condition), why would anyone do anything different?

<comment><USER6> Almost everyone who cares about performance does bid for conversions. Sometimes companies add extra layers of targeting on top of it though.

<comment><USER8> Because they are idiots.

Non conversion optimised ads can work for small audiences of really high value, but that's a pretty niche use-case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sure, after spending hundreds of dollars on a device, it only seems fair that the vendor exploit your personal information so that credit companies and anyone willing and able to buy the data can compile a dossier on you.

<comment><USER10> Facebook does not sell data.

<comment><USER11> Mostly because they find it more profitable to maintain their exclusivity on the data itself and sell only ad placements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A surprise to exactly nobody.

When are people going to stop rewarding the exploitative behavior of Facebook and its offspring?

<comment><USER13> Yes. However, it is not apparent which inferences are possible to make with this kind of sensor data. How invasive might this become?

<comment><USER14> > How invasive might this become?

Brain-wave-scanning kind of invasive. FB (and advertising in general) will continue to become ever more invasive until it meets a limiting factor. That limiting factor will possibly be legislation (just not in the US because worshiping the Dollar overrides anything and everything else).

<comment><USER15> Do we know the first thing about how brain waves correlate to any real world properties of a person? If Facebook or anyone else can crack brain waves, ie in a sense "read your mind", it seems like serving ads is the least of our worries, but also pretty exciting in terms of the potential positive applications.

<comment><USER16> We've already got "EEG to categorised-eyeball-images" technology; in fact, that was a relatively primitive application of neural nets. [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/787101v2.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/787101v2.full)

No, I don't think it unlikely that the next-gen Oculus might do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And this is the reason I never touch anything that has a connection to Facebook.

No surprise really but it irks me as I wanted the rift some time ago but then Facebook bought it.

Luckily it seems like Valve Index will be a good alternative.

<comment><USER18> Valve won't collect data?

<comment><USER17> They might, but they don't have facebooks apparatus or motivation for turning it into ads on unrelated web pages.

<comment><USER15> Do they need to own the apparatus? I search for a product on Google, I click on a search result, navigating to a retailer's site. That site knows not only what I'm looking at but what I was searching for. By way of third party cookies it knows who I am and it sends that info back to FB and the next time I'm on Instagram I'm getting ads from that category. The retailer I visited didn't have to own the FB ad network to play a role.

<comment><USER19> I don't think valve does any of that, and even if it did it has access to way less data then FB (which owns instagram and whatsapp) which basically know your location, who you talk to and when, your centers of interest, political orientation, &c. Valve, at least for now, is mostly concerned about selling games. Collecting data in itself isn't bad, imho the issue is the centralisation and what the data is used for. I'd feel much more confident giving a little data to Valve than enlarging the humongous dataset of facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://outline.com/Fur6Bq](https://outline.com/Fur6Bq) for those of us who don't like looking at a blank black page.

</comment><comment><USER21> Eye tracking is adtech's wet dream for a long time. It's like heatmaps on steroids. And VR glasses are the perfect platform for it.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's Facebook's service, what did you expect. Also, recommending products based on your past experiences is something pretty much every service provides.

<comment><USER23> > recommending products based on your past experiences

I've recommended music and movies to people without any prior compensation from the companies that put those products out.

What Facebook is doing is advertising. "Personalized recommendations" is marketing doublespeak for "pay to play".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At first I read it as "will not be used". "Yet" I thought to myself. Then I reread the title. "Oh" I though to myself.

</comment><comment><USER25> We changed the url from [https://uploadvr.com/facebook-ads- vr/](https://uploadvr.com/facebook-ads-vr/) to an article that links to the relevant announcement.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am not sure what is the big deal here.

When WhatsApp improved its popularity by claiming "privacy is important, no ads" etc and then did a U turn it was actually noteworthy and newsworthy.

I don't think Oculus ever made such claims. They were happy to "sell out" [1]. If anything, they seem to be proud members of the Facebook cult [2].

If you bought the Oculus, you knew exactly what you were getting.

Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2014/3/25/11624928/facebook-buys- oculus-...](https://www.vox.com/2014/3/25/11624928/facebook-buys-oculus-vr- for-2-billion)

[2] [https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/facebook-oculus- privacy...](https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/facebook-oculus-privacy- messages-controllers-1203188863/)

<comment><USER27> > Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at > this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, > FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and > automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.

I was gonna upvote you, but this was unnecessary. It's possible for someone to be positive towards something _you_ see as a negative. People hate Trump and he has supporters. Whether you agree with them or not, not all of them are benefiting from the Trump Administration

<comment><USER28> Yeah, not to mention that you can benefit from FB without being one of their employees or close partners. Just buy some stock next time it crashes bc they get caught using data they weren't supposed to!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> John Carmack steps down from being CTO, and a month later this happens.

<comment><USER30> Now which one was the cause, and which was the effect?

<comment><USER29> I mean I don't remember him being loudly against this. It could be more of a difference of priorities. But it's still interesting. Even if they're not directly connected, two big changes in a row could mean there are more to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well you have the option of not signing in with your facebook account. Good thing about this market is that there are other options out there and presumably more coming in the future.

<comment><USER32> Yes, I have to give credit there for allowing it to be an option at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When I bought an Oculus Quest, the fact that Oculus is owned by Facebook was slightly bothersome, but I honestly don't care a whole lot about this particular data at this particular time (basically just game playing).

It's Facebook Horizon[1] that's the worrisome thing. I'm pretty sure they're trying to build the OASIS from Ready Player One.

[1]: [https://www.oculus.com/facebookhorizon/](https://www.oculus.com/facebookhorizon/)

<comment><USER34> It's interesting that you say the only data being collected is what you play and when.

Why do you think that? They have a lot of lose and movement data from you I bet theyve been spending a lot of time trying to develop inferences you can make from it.

<comment><USER33> Sure. They know I play Beat Saber and move pretty quickly while doing so. Maybe they'll try to sell me exercise stuff (though I rarely interact with Facebook and my browser setup is kind of aggressive when it comes to them).

They also know I'm shorter than Darth Vader. They know the size of a couple of our rooms.

I acknowledge there is data they can attempt to extract value from, but that data just doesn't concern me. As VR expands, particularly with Horizon, I will be a lot more wary.

<comment><USER34> >I acknowledge there is data they can attempt to extract value from, but that data just doesn't concern me

This feels like a weird non computer person answer of "I don't understand why I should be worried about metadata it doesn't concern me"

<comment><USER33> Let me put it another way: there are many things we choose to do which generate data and provide that data to various entities. We have to decide which data we're willing to share with whom and for what benefits.

I know some people who, at least as of a couple of years ago, had dumbphones from which they'd remove the batteries when not in use so that their location couldn't be tracked.

I have an iPhone. I've got Comcast internet at home and don't use a VPN. I have a Facebook account (which I access in Firefox only using the facebook container). I don't use gmail, and my primary browser isn't logged into Google and has various bits of tracking protection.

So it's a pretty conscious choice. Maybe it's misguided, but I just think the data Facebook is getting from my Oculus Quest is pretty low value. Lower value than Likes, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So... is anyone actually _surprised_ by this?

<comment><USER36> Does it count that I _want_ to be surprised by it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Amazing how invasive such an expensive product is. I sold mine 2-3 years ago and still feel icky about when I read the privacy policy

</comment><comment><USER38> But the it would be used for FB ads? So, what's the difference really?</comment>


The latest unemployment numbers are great if you're not black - <AUTHOR> http://thegrio.com/2015/03/07/latest-unemployment-numbers-blacks-african-american/

<comment><USER2> I started reading the article but had to stop because of how awful that website is and how difficult it was to read on my phone. Ads that shift the content as they get swapped out for other ads? Whoever thought that up is out of their mind</comment>


Recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ipo.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2018/03/Helms-Closed-Loop-Recycling-Nature-Materials.pdf <comment><USER2> The idea is to construct plastics using reversible polymerization "click" reactions. Polymerize the monomers under mild conditions. Recover them again through acid degradation. Build entirely new kinds polymers (if you want) with the monomers you recover.

Notable features include:

1\. synthesis involves ball-milling the starting materials, which eliminates the need for solvent

2\. decomposition in sulfuric acid (0.5-5 M) gives one component of the pair of monomers (triketone) cleanly, but amine recovery is less clear. Quantitative recovery wasn't clear from my reading.

3\. the mechanical properties of the small set of possible polymers produced from this system appear consistent with at least certain kinds of industrial use.

4\. the chemistry lends itself to the production of a wide range of different polymer structures, but the sensitivity of the key bond forming/breaking step to starting monomer modification remains to be shown.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me do a tl;dr because that's an important subject that could cange plastic from environmentally problematic material to a highly renewable one.

Recycling plastic is hard because we have different types of plastic for different uses. If you mix them in a trash, it is hard to take them apart and recycling them together leads to very poor materials.

Nowadays, there is active research in making a more intensive recycling that retransforms plastics into their precursors, which are basically the same even for different types of plastic, so this is a process that do not require to sort plastics by type.

Only scanning through the article, it looks like this is a solution to separate these precursors from the remaining impurities (coatings, ink, colorant) and get pure monomers. That's an important step in the process.

<comment><USER4> Because that institution also seems to be heavily engaged in the area of "Intellectual Property" I would like to mention:

one big reason for the problems with plastic recycling is the fact that producing companies do want to "protect" their "intellectual property" and do not provide a list of ingredients.

This is an area where IP does have a very big impact in the global contamination process.

<comment><USER5> _one big reason for the problems with plastic recycling is the fact that producing companies do want to "protect" their "intellectual property" and do not provide a list of ingredients._

That has to do with the additives, not the base --- and you are correct that separating these otherwise contaminants from the base material is important for recycling. On the other hand, everyone knows what the base materials for Teflon and polyethylene are, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using the big searchbox it is not possible to find this document, you need to use the small searchbox on top.

Then you can find this post that seems to be related.

[https://foundry.lbl.gov/2019/06/05/new-polymers-close-the- lo...](https://foundry.lbl.gov/2019/06/05/new-polymers-close-the-loop-in- plastics-recycling/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Bunch of interesting stuff being done to turn plastic into diesel: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/sustane- technolog...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/sustane-technologies- plastic-fuel-diesel-environment-1.4735539)</comment>


Show HN: CoreOS, a Linux distro for containers - <AUTHOR> http://coreos.com/ <comment><USER2> The combination of service discovery and containerization is incredibly powerful for distributed applications. I love the idea that I can simply start a Docker container, and it can then discover its configuration and self- configure, rather than having to use Chef/Puppet/whatever.

To my mind, this is the missing answer to "how do I actually use Docker?"

I'm particularly excited by the idea of having a cluster of machines self- configure; normally this is incredibly painful, relying on multicast (not normally available on the cloud) or some ugly hacks (like using S3).

<comment><USER3> for example.. if i m deploying a rails apps, how would coreos make it possible to install web servers, databases and rubygems? all through dockerfile descriptions? an app level getting started would be great..

<comment> jon-wood I just threw together a really simple proof of concept which uses a shell script to spin up a Docker instance running NGinx, and then register the port that instance is listening on with Etcd. Because it's quite so simple, here it is:

`INSTANCE=$(docker run jonwood/nginx-node) && curl [http://127.0.0.1:4001/v1/keys/nginx- nodes/$INSTANCE](http://127.0.0.1:4001/v1/keys/nginx-nodes/$INSTANCE) -d $(docker port $INSTANCE 80)`

You'd then use Etcd's tree listing interface to grab the JSON fragments for each of those NGinx nodes, and configure Varnish or HAProxy or something to hit those backends.

Obviously this isn't anywhere near production ready (for example if one of your NGinx instances goes down there's nothing to remove it from the pool), but so far I'm impressed with what CoreOS is doing.

<comment><USER4> "for example if one of your NGinx instances goes down there's nothing to remove it from the pool" For now, you can set up a node with TTL and update it. If the server goes down, the node will disappear. We are going to provide a client that will keep long connection with the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those utterly confused by this story, CoreOS is for running Containers.

Containers can be thought of as way of packaging an entire runtime environment which is more lightweight and more universally deployable than creating a virtual machine image.

This one slide explains it well: [http://www.docker.io/static/img/about/docker_vm.jpg](http://www.docker.io/static/img/about/docker_vm.jpg)

<comment><USER6> How does the "appropriate" sharing of bins / libs take place?

<comment><USER7> The containers can share a file system layer which is mounted read only. Without write access the containers can't interfere with each other and there only needs to be one copy of these shared files on the host.

With something like AUFS (like what docker does) a R/W layer can be placed on top of this allowing the guest container to modify its own files without impacting the underlying shared read only layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Brandon from CoreOS here. Check out the ec2 docs here: [http://coreos.com/docs/ec2/](http://coreos.com/docs/ec2/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Geez, the rabbit hole gets even deeper. This is all great. Docker has been moving at "ludicrous speed" from the beginning and the ecosystem developing around it has been doing the same.

I'm itching to play with etcd also and hopefully it can gain more momentum than Zookeeper or Doozer did.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it kind of like SmartOS but with Linux instead of Illumos and without DTrace and ZFS?

<comment><USER11> I think so. However I don't know if this is meant to be used on bare metal.

<comment><USER8> We would like to run on bear metal eventually.

Targeting virtualized hardware keeps our testing matrix small right now and makes it easy for people to try it out.

<comment><USER12> Being unfamiliar with how one creates a Linux distro, can you go into a little more detail as to the difference between targeting virtual hardware over physical hardware?

<comment><USER8> Sure! There are a few differences:

1) Installation: On physical hardware you need to provide a way for people to initially boot and then install the software on disk. Sophisticated people want something they can boot over the network and script. Everyone that is just trying it out wants a GUI; which means you have to build something that finds disks, helps the user partition them and installs the software.

On virtual hardware there is usually no install step: you just get a VM image and run it. This lowers the barrier to people trying something out.

2) Hardware support complexity: Physical hardware has hundreds of different devices that come in thousands of different combinations. Some of it requires 3rd party drivers and custom configuration at boot time. Supporting everything ever made adds a lot of complexity.

I think it is a bit comparable to the complexity that ORMs have of running on top of 20 different databases and still providing a useable interface that doesn't break.

In the virtual hardware space there are only about 4 sets of Kernel drivers that you need to support all of them and they are generally well tested.

3) Test cycles: It is easy to turn on and off virtual machines for testing and the developer feedback loop is tight for even the tricky bits like our boot code (>60s). However, on physical gear it can take 5+ minutes to test out a single iteration because of copying over the new binaries, slow booting disks, etc.

4) Customer debug cycles: Without easy access to the same physical hardware a user has I have to build a debug image, have them install it, then give me the debug output. This cycle can take days.

Something like the Open Compute hardware can reduce a lot of these pain points. Also, in a given year a majority of servers have similar hardware so you can work on a lot of gear with minimal additions if you curate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone please explain what a container is? Googling 'container' doesn't seem to give me useful or relevant results.

<comment><USER8> A Linux machine has the Kernel which deals with the hardware and then a filesystem with everything required to run applications. A container is a Linux machine without the Kernel.

As an example: with containers you can run a database that needs a CentOS environment on the same physical machine that is running an application server that expects a Debian looking environment. All without the performance hit you would take from VMs.

<comment><USER14> So... it's a chroot jail?

<comment><USER8> In a way. However, you can run a full machine from init on down and fully isolate networking, process namespaces and resources like memory or CPU.

<comment><USER15> Like VPS in FreeBSD 10

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So the Linux crowd now reinvents SmartOS... Good, I guess.

<comment><USER17> Enjoy(ent) the Saab of computing, while it's still around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am using docker on my startup. It's a very useful technology. I hope that coreos is as good as docker.

I think that anyone interested on this should check [http://smartos.org/](http://smartos.org/). Coreos and Smartos have many things in common. I don't know if the creators of docker/coreos have tried smartos. I think they should. It's always good to check and learn from similar projects.

</comment><comment><USER18> This could use some big-picture documentation. Does this run inside or outside the containers?

<comment><USER8> It runs directly under KVM/Xen/Virtualbox/etc. Essentially it is a Linux Kernel, root filesystem and minimal set of services to be able to launch and manage containers.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why there's so much emphasis on "yo dawg" double virtualization. I'd be more interested in PXE booting this thing on bare metal.

<comment><USER19> Containers aren't virtualized, they're just isolated from each other. That's why they're cool.

Instead of working at the IaaS level for each app, you can have IaaS provide a cluster for containers to run in, and then put up a personal PaaS built out of containers - have more flexibility, spend less money, app folks don't have to worry about infra as much.

And in the case that you're at a scale that you can use real hardware (or a hybrid approach), it's easy to move without the containers having to worry about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And it uses Docker as the package format. Awesome :)

<comment><USER3> does it mean docker includes linux package manager function?

<comment><USER20> Docker includes facilities for building, versioning, discovery, distribution and updates. So although it's very different from traditional package managers, yes, you can use it to distribute software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh look, irc channel, docs, etc.. oh and you can't get access to it without registering to something, with full details, and maybe get elected.

I would think that this is not that hard to make something similar from any existing distro, with actual build steps, etc.

Ie the "open source way", and not something with probable financial interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion, you don't need to register for anything.

SDK (roll your own) docs here: [http://coreos.com/docs/sdk/](http://coreos.com/docs/sdk/) Our EC2 images: [http://coreos.com/docs/ec2/](http://coreos.com/docs/ec2/) 46 repos worth of source here: [https://github.com/coreos](https://github.com/coreos)

The form is mainly to send t-shirts to the people that try it out for us. We do have a profit motive, because we want this project to be sustainable. Similar to Ubuntu and Redhat.

<comment><USER22> Is there a way to receive news updates w/o registering or subscribing via e-mail? I don't see a Twitter feed, or even an RSS feed for the blog.

<comment><USER23> That issue was much discussed on IRC and someone even filed a bug: [https://github.com/coreos/coreos- marketing/issues/1](https://github.com/coreos/coreos-marketing/issues/1)

We will have an RSS/Atom feed soon. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like a distro with ZFS/BTRFS, LXC and KVM, with a user friendly configuration layer on top. Not necessarily a GUI.

Really, a Linux version of SmartOS. I really like SmartOS but I like to get as much running in Zones as possible and there would be less friction doing this with a Linux kernel.

<comment><USER25> This isn't what you wanted to hear, but it gets you really close: Install ubuntu, lxc, virt-manager gui, and zfsonlinux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very interesting; can this complement Flynn? ([https://flynn.io/](https://flynn.io/)) or is it in lieu of? Also, can it run on Open Stack?

<comment><USER8> It is a complement to Flynn. CoreOS with "git push to deploy" will be a great combination.

CoreOS runs fine on top of Xen, VMWare and KVM today. So, a CoreOS image should boot fine under OpenStack. Send me an email[1] if you want to try running it under a local OpenStack.

[1] email@example.com

<comment><USER26> Fantastic! I will use this alongside Flynn, on RackSpace public cloud servers. Appreciate the email address, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In these embedded and HPC like applications there is a significant advantage gained by having the right kernel flags (Preemption, etc).

I would like to see this distro build its kernel from source for most or every installation.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you like the idea of CoreOS but don't like the idea of using Docker containers, check out bedrocklinux.org.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yowza, I keep being impressed by the alacrity with which Docker based ecosystem components keep popping up.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am super excited about this as I am doing OpenStack deployment automation. With this - I can automatedly deploy all the way out to the app on bare metal at scale extremely leanly.

</comment><comment><USER31> Has anybody tried to get this running on Linode?

Sorry if that's a n00b question, I'm still fumbling my way around the (ever- growing) virtualization / devops landscape.

</comment><comment><USER32> This looks awesome; any info on the _who_ s behind this?

</comment><comment><USER33> Security-wise is containerization safer than standard operating systems? (besides being relatively new and unexploited)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is docker required/prepackaged? I'd prefer to use vanilla lxc/dhcpcd.

<comment><USER35> From documentation looks like it is only prepackaged, you can use it or not. Also you can build CoreOS without Docker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ah, yet another awesome thing built on top of Gentoo.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're based on the ChromeOS SDKs... which use emerge to build the binaries required to assemble the distro. You can think of emerge/gentoo as the toolchain used to build all the binaries. We also pull base system packages from upstream portage, then compile them all together in out image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has this got anything to do with Tiny Core?

</comment><comment><USER38> if you're core (totally stripped down os) why do you provide a discovery service I'm going to override?

</comment><comment><USER39> Ready meals, yeah?)

I do remember times when there were essentially two choices - Debian or RH. There was also Suse, but the madness of making everything look like Netware, with standard, classiesc UNIX tools replaced by some home-brew programs with dozens of parameters nobody knew. It died long ago, thank god.

The advantage of Debian was that it was de-facto standard academia linux. Which means more-or-less stable and well tested, while some designs were (and still) lame. apt is such a lousy mess compared to RPM.)

Then the wave of migration from proprietary UNIXes to cheap Linux systems began, and RHEL flourished, being the OS of choice if you wish to run Oracle or Informix (the second was very impressive and still is). RHEL at that time was actively developed, well-tested, and even went through a painful transition to NTPL.

Then good people made CentOS from RHEL's sources and nowadays it is still default choice for some stable, but little bit lagging behind the popular distros Linux (it is still on 2.6.x kernels)

Then was the raise of Ubuntu. Well, it is popular, which almost never mean good.) Nevertheless for the wast majority Linux = Ubuntu. Leaving aside the crazy habit of incorporation of any new shinny crap invented by freedesktop guys, such as various init, management and settings "services" it is quite stable, and well-tested, indeed. Btw, comparing to the glorious days of 2.4 to 2.6 migration, or that NTPL stuff, there are almost no problem with core libraries and tools.

So, does anyone need a new distro? My answer is NO. It is quite easy to reduce CentOS or even Ubuntu (or Fedora, which is also infected by systemd madness) to a minimal and stable set of packages. All you need to do is exclude all Gnome-related stuff with dependencies, keeping image and fonts manipulation libraries, and X11 libs to be able to recompile popular packages.

The key idea here is begin with already many times tested sources, such as CentOS .srpm (got through tests by two separate teams) or Ubuntu's packages, cutting off unnecessary dependencies. Then you will have compatible and well- tested OS for containers or whatever else sales people call the banal para- virtualization.

Setting up your own yum repository is a matter of few hours, Debian packaging is more messy, but manageable. This is what sysadmin's job all about.

Btw, vendors such as Amazon already have done this job, so if you hate system administration (which is a sign that shopping might be a better future ,) just re-use these images - it is much better than some new "core OS".

The so-called "minimal install" of Ubuntu is also fine, and all you need to do is re-compile important packages, such as MySQL the way you like it and place them to your local repo.

<comment><USER40> I think it is worth mentioning that not even Ubuntu is its own distro in the sense you seem to be talking about it; it is a derivative of Debian, and the majority of the packages are still maintained upstream.

There is also alot of room for new types of operating systems. CoreOS seems to be a operating system design that is not present in any other distro that I am aware of, and definantly not stripped down Ubuntu.

Another interesting OS design I am aware of is NixOS[1], which features a purely functional package management system.

For the typical use cases, the answer is, as always, stick with the tried and tested. However there is still plenty of unexplored space that may be superior for specific domains, and might even become superior (or more likely influence) the common case solution.

[1] [http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

<comment><USER39> If vendors does not support your os and do not maintain packages for your os (which means compile-test-release cycle) it is the same as if it does not exist.

The curse of FreeBSD is that so-called Linux vendors doesn't take trouble to support it. There are, for example, no support for Android SDK for FreeBSD, while, being mostly Java-based it is not that difficult. The emulator and driver for debugging seems like a complicated thing, but it is not _that_ complicated.

So, when Google or even Percona will do packaging for you, then one could say that an OS makes some sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Changing the game with μTP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bittorrent.com/2009/10/05/changing-the-game-with-%ce%bctp/

<comment><USER2> What's unsaid here is that uTP is an undocumented protocol that isn't available to other BitTorrent implementations like Azureus/Vuze, potentially making them second-class citizens.

<comment><USER3> from the bittorrent.com comments, a quote from a high-up at BT:

Simon Morris

Posted October 8, 2009 at 5:52 pm

As a matter of fact µTP is indeed a replacement for TCP, so we think the name is appropriate. _You can check out standardization work which we're chairing at the IETF called the LEDBAT working group_

<comment><USER2> LEDBAT is only standardizing a small subset of uTP:

"Framing is not on the WG's charter."

[http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ledbat/current/msg00117...](http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ledbat/current/msg00117.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This new protocol uses packet latency based throttling instead of the packet loss based throttling of TCP.

I don't think the article documents any details. Maybe I missed a link.

<comment><USER3> Latency based congestion control already exists for TCP[1].

So my question is, why wouldn't you get the same effect by running BT on top of a network stack using Vegas?

Someone flash the tptacek signal!

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Vegas>

<comment><USER4> It appears to me that if you use Vegas on your Linux machine then all of your TCP connections use Vegas, which will make you a second class citizen to all the Reno folk out there on the internet.

If you assume that your own uplink is the only bottleneck to be dealt with (say you are serving torrents over a DSL line) then this is reasonable, but I don't think I'd want to yield to all TCP users everywhere with all of my outgoing traffic.

There are also some scary comments in the notes from before it was rolled into the kernel, like the code doesn't handle route changes.

I can see why a vendor would choose something over which they have control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/costa/papers/s...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/costa/papers/slot09zeroday.pdf) might be an interesting alternative/complement.

<comment><USER2> OTOH, [http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2009/papers/hotnets20...](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2009/papers/hotnets2009-final115.pdf) suggests that localization doesn't help that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol> better than uTP?</comment>