Landlord: Per-Tenant Stats in Postgres with Citus - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/07/31/introducing-landlord-per-tenant-stats/ <comment><USER2> Love Citus's technology, but once again $99/month is ridiculous for a "dev" plan. Small startups want to use the same database from the pre-MVP dorm room phase all the way through their Series A, and while your technology would theoretically allow that, your pricing closes a lot of doors. No one wants to switch databases once their product is doing well enough to warrant $99/month for a database, so you are scaring away a lot of potential customers such as myself.

Once again I implore you to consider adding a "starter" or "hobbyist" tier for $20/month or even $5/month. If you want to really be competitive, your product should be free to use until you have more than 200mb of data stored in your database, at which point usage-based pricing kicks in based off of the number of rows used.

<comment><USER3> It's helpful feedback, and something we'd love to work towards some day. The short of it is because of Citus architecture it does require multiple underlying nodes and there is some overhead that until you get to a larger scale Citus doesn't necessarily make sense. If you've only got 10 GB of data a single node instance on RDS should suit you just fine.

We understand some of the costs of switching and have actively been working to build tools for you to plan to use something like Citus, but then migrate when the time comes. Libraries like activerecord-multi-tenant or django-multi- tenant ensure you're ready for Citus and work perfectly well on a single node Postgres database.

Then when the time comes, which could be at $100 of RDS or $500 of RDS or larger, we have Citus warp [1] that allows you in a fully online way to replicate from RDS directly into a Citus cluster. Using it we've had customers with > 4 TB of data cutover with less than a minute of impact to their database.

I know that's not as simple as starting on Citus and continuing to scale, so hopefully we can address this better in the future, but for now it's the best answer we have at the moment.

[1]. [https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain- fr...](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain-free- migrations/)

<comment><USER2> You could, for example, offer a plan that starts out extremely cheap, uses usage-based pricing, and only has Citus technology kick in when you reach the relevant scale. So < 10 GB it would just be a normal PostgreSQL node. I would use this for everything if it was like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I respect Citus for the way they consistently praise the PostgreSQL community when promoting themselves.

</comment><comment><USER5> Heh I thought this was for landlords to track tenant data. I was excited for a second!

<comment><USER6> Just curious - what sort of data would you want to track on tenants?

<comment><USER7> Noise levels would be good. When I am moving this noise is a total wildcard and luck. I would pay a premium to move in with less noise neighbours and possibly quite tenants can be rewarded with that premium.

<comment><USER8> I know I'd pay extra not to have to live next to neighbors with small children or yappy dogs. Still annoyed that it's illegal for there to be childless apartment communities.

<comment><USER9> > Still annoyed that it's illegal for there to be childless apartment > communities.

It's not, you are just probably not old enough for the ones that are legal.

<comment><USER10> Who doesn't love a session of bingo at the afternoom? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to know if anyone here has done a deep eval of Citus vs CockroachDB. They seem to be the two most promising solutions for horizontal scale-out Postgres and both are under very active development.

<comment><USER12> ?? outside of CockroachDB using PostgreSQL wire protocol they focus on very different use cases it seams. from CocroachDB website: "When is CockroachDB not a good choice? CockroachDB is not a good choice when very low latency reads and writes are critical; use an in-memory database instead.

Also, CockroachDB is not yet suitable for:

Heavy analytics / OLAP"

I think Citus is actually very well suited for Heavy analytics / OLAP

<comment><USER3> At Citus we tend to focus on two use cases:

1\. Analytical, but less data warehousing and more of a HTAP (hybrid transactional/analytical processing). In this case you're often ingesting a lot of data, often times sensor or log data from many endpoints, and then providing analytics across that data. The analytics needs to be up to date within minutes, and responsiveness of reports within seconds. You can see how Algolia (which powers the search for HN) uses Citus for this in their blog post - [https://blog.algolia.com/building-real-time-analytics- apis/](https://blog.algolia.com/building-real-time-analytics-apis/)

2\. Transactional. For a couple of years now Citus has had full transactional support when targeting a single node. Single node transactions can actually cover a breadth of use cases because it can span across tables as long as tables are co-located within the same node. We often see this is the case for multi-tenant/SaaS applications. In recent releases we also added support for distributed transactions. These transactions do have a higher overhead, but can often be hard to detangle from an existing application, thus us building support for distributed deadlock detection then adding distributed transactions.

Generally we're continuing to improve and support both of those use cases and have our usage base actually pretty evenly split between the two.

<comment><USER11> Can you say anything to help understand the differences between cockroach and Citus?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if/when Citus will have a GCP option?

<comment><USER3> Hi, Craig from Citus here. We're always continuing to explore other platforms beyond Citus Cloud on AWS. Stay tuned for the future as we'll add support for others. The input and feedback on which platforms people prefer is very helpful, so always feel free to drop us a note directly on that.

<comment><USER13> +100 for GCP

<comment><USER14> Why? Yes, AWS can be expensive for performance, but it scales well and is automatable. I 'get' why no Azure for greenfield, but why do you love GCP?

<comment><USER15> when the rest of your infrastructure is already on GCP, running the database on the same cloud would reduce latency and bandwidth cost

<comment><USER14> Well, sure.

I guess the broader question would be: Why use GCP? I like them well enough, but I find it easier to prototype on AWS. Why would a developer develop the MVP on GCP vs AWS and then go to scale there? (I realized that K8S has made this, recently, a moot point, and it comes down to cost ... but beside that is there anything?)

EDIT: I realize that as a neo-Luddite, I just might be used to AWS, and would be open (mostly) to arguments to move to GCP if it is better (I'm not not talking about $/Gbps)

EDIT2: As a (mostly) fan of Google - I probably would have gotten myself acclimatized to their platform if it was any good 10 years ago, but it wasn't, so I didn't, and I guess I'm asking: is there a good reason to learn how to switch?

<comment><USER13> That's a broad question for a side topic...

GCP has better performance (especially raw storage, compute and network), cheaper and simpler pricing, and more consistent experience. The raw primitives to build with are better designed and integrated, and scale without any tuning.

We're not building MVPs (which are just as easy) but have a working product and only use GKE and VMs. If you need all the managed services then AWS is the right choice, but K8S has made that a non-issue for us and allows us to use VMs (which are the most reliable part of any cloud), along with spot/preemptible pricing and better colocation for efficiency.

<comment><USER14> I don't use managed services, because I want portability, but you are right (and as I think I said upstream) K8S has made many of the issues in production moot.

You say that you find that prototyping is as easy with GCP as with AWS? Do you believe it is because you are familiar with GCP? Or do you believe that they are truly at par with prototyping productivity?

(And yes - we've gone far afar of the upstream topic - but I do appreciate your feedback)

<comment><USER13> I dont know what you consider as prototyping, but yes they both can run a basic app with minimal effort.

Look into AppEngine which is a few CLI commands for deploying. Same with Firebase which is widely considered a great mobile platform with everything you need. You can also use the Serverless.com framework to build apps on Cloud Functions, and they recently announced running any container in a serverless fashion (similar to Azure's ACI).

If you still want to run servers, then they have the best VM platform around.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Botmakers Who Rule the Obsessive World of Streetware - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/05/using-bots-to-buy-supreme-limited-edition-streetwear/ <comment><USER2> Not that any of these "peek into the subculture" style articles ever get all the details just right but this:

 _Then, in the spring of 2014, the company announced a collaboration with Nike on a basketball sneaker called the Foamposite. Supreme had collaborated with sneaker companies for years, but Foamposites were especially prized by sneakerheads. All of a sudden, Supreme had a whole new audience—one already accustomed to limited releases and camping out to get them._

is a glaring error. Supreme has never not been a favored brand of sneakerheads, and that relationship surely didn't start with Odd Future or some recent Nike collaboration. It goes all the way back to the 90s/early 00s when everybody on Niketalk was pairing box logo tees with their vintage Air Maxes and, contrary to the assertions in the article, all these brands (Supreme, Stussy, Freshjive, etc) were transitioning away from being purely skate/surf focused and starting down the streetwear path they've been on ever since.

<comment><USER3> Supreme wasn't a sneaker brand though was it? Was this their first big collab with Nike which brought the full brunt of the sneakerhead culture into Supreme's streetwear one? Even though there is a lot of crossover between the two it may not be as 1-to-1 as it seems, and brought in a lot of new buyers to their niche.

<comment><USER2> There have been numerous Supreme x Nike collaborations, starting (I believe) with this Nike SB Dunk in 2002: [https://www.flightclub.com/nike-dunk-low-pro- sb-black-black-...](https://www.flightclub.com/nike-dunk-low-pro-sb-black- black-cement-grey-080033) which at the time were arguably the most sought after sneakers in the world, and still command over a thousand dollars a pair.

And while Supreme never produced any shoes themselves, for many years neither did A Bathing Ape (and the BAPEsta's and their collabs with Adidas were hardly a core part of their business). Nevertheless BAPE is also a brand that utilized the same hype+scarcity model and has always been associated with sneakerhead culture.

The fact remains that anyone who self-identifies as a sneakerhead has known about and most likely worn Supreme for a decade or two. This is not a new development. The new buyers (and the fact that you tend to see more and more Supreme out in the world and on social media) aren't a result of the subculture finding a new obsession. Rather, what was once a niche has gone way mainstream, and tons of people who were never associated with sneaker culture have become interested in the trend.

To wit, by the time the Supreme Foamposites mentioned in the article were released in 2014, many dedicated sneakerheads would have argued that Supreme was completely played out, usurped by herbs, normals and— _shudder_ —teenagers. (Then in 2015 they all went out and bought the camo Jordan 5 collab anyway.)

<comment> at-fates-hands > There have been numerous Supreme x Nike collaborations, starting (I believe) > with this Nike SB Dunk in 2002

I've been a skater most of my life. I was completely perplexed when a bunch of the guys I skate with regularly suddenly became sneakerheads almost overnight.

This explains a LOT.

<comment><USER2> This is actually a really interesting footnote in the history of Nike's evolution and expansion into different markets. They (as well as Adidas and the other big brands) had been trying like hell to entice skaters to wear Nikes with little success. Much of what they released was really techy looking (like: [http://skately.com/library/shoes/nike-sb-zoom- tre](http://skately.com/library/shoes/nike-sb-zoom-tre) or: [http://skately.com/library/shoes/nike-sb- url](http://skately.com/library/shoes/nike-sb-url) ) and you would have been mocked for wearing them.

But there was a history of some of skateboarding's most iconic figures wearing Nikes, particularly Jordan 1s but also Blazers and Dunks, in the 80s and early 90s. And it turned out that if you took a Dunk Low, overstuffed the tongue, and added some Nike cushioning tech (bonus points for stitching a Chocolate logo on the heel: [https://www.kicksonfire.com/nike-sb-skateboarding- releases/n...](https://www.kicksonfire.com/nike-sb-skateboarding- releases/nike-sb-skateboarding-2002-releases/06-2002-june-releases/nike-dunk- low-pro-sb-chocolate-anthracite-black/) ), it fit in just fine with the Osirises of the world that were popular at that time, or classics like the eS Koston, and performed at least as well, if not better (while, critically, not appearing to be built for performance at all).

To your point, Nike quickly leveraged that "vintage cool" aspect that only they could offer, plus collaborations with artists like Geoff McFetridge who had credibility among skaters (and maybe more importantly, among photographers and videographers who shot them), to finally convince skaters that they could wear Nikes without turning into a jock or a dork.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> And it turned out that if you took a Dunk Low, overstuffed the tongue, and added some Nike cushioning tech

This is so funny. I remember loving those shoes, but every manufacturer thought super cushy tongues were the way to go in that era. Every time we got a new pair, my buddies and I would take a few hours and razorblade them open, pull out all nearly all the stuffing and then sew them back up.

Apparently they finally caught on and stopped making those horrendously huge tongues.

<comment><USER2> I always wondered about whether that was meant to have any practical function. (Protective cushioning at the expense of board feel? Shoes stay on better while untied?)

Now the pendulum has swung all the back in the other direction. All these years later, Koston is signed to Nike, and his pro-model basically just looks like a running shoe: [http://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pd/sb-koston-max-mens- skatebo...](http://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pd/sb-koston-max-mens- skateboarding-shoe/pid-11236858/pgid-12086626)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was interviewed for a similar article.

tldr; smart young people who happen to discover a very Luddite community and applied tech to buy up product and re-sell.

Can't be shut down cause brands will lose face if they "care."

Most scripts are either headless chrome instances using phantom is or selenium.

The one I built years ago was just a chrome extension with some options.

Some are iOS apps with a web view and objected JavaScript.

<comment><USER5> > Most scripts are either headless chrome instances using phantom is or > selenium.

I would think that using regular HTTP requests is better/more popular then running a headless browser for this kind of work. cUrl, Python Requests, etc.

<comment><USER6> That is more desirable, but with more js rendering on the front end and anti- botting measures by retailers, it's not reliable anymore.

<comment><USER7> JS rendering on the front end surely doesn't impact calls to the back-end that much (HTTP POST, REST API, GraphQL etc.)?

These don't need a headless browser.

<comment><USER8> When a store is selling 20 pairs of a shoe, they will literally look at how the person who bough the pair did their web execution. Using a something like python requests is faster sure, but most of the time looking more "real" is more important. I've written a few of these and do both depending on the company (size etc.), their website, their security etc. Some of these companies have gone as far as setting up a web game people play and the highest scores get a pair of the shoe (slamjamsocialism).

<comment><USER9> Can you go into more detail about this game? First I've heard of it, and it clearly isn't a popular choice as opposed to say, a splash screen or other methods of deterring bots.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. At first is was pong. People figure out how to send fake scores really easily, myself included. It was just an packed js file and you could deobfuscate it, pull in the score generating js and send fake http response to their server. This time, sjs did some type of side scrolled with a dinosaur jumping over buildings. Link here: [http://www.slamjamsocialism.com/arcad- ism/](http://www.slamjamsocialism.com/arcad-ism/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These guys need to take it to the next level - defeat the bots by burning them and drop web presence entirely. This is a brand that would benefit from stealing the popup idea - random times and places only insiders know about, so dropping web sales despite being anathema on HN might actually _build_ the exclusivity of their brand.

That or take it back out of band in a way bots can't easily overcome like 2fa tied to a device the customer can't or won't give up. I.E. Sell a supreme watch that generates FIDO codes from an enclaved 2fa seed. I suppose you'll need to manually trigger inputs as well just to prevent someone parking a webcam on their watch. At some point you'll add enough delay the quoted 19 seconds for 38 orders will become impossible. You don't need to add too much complexity; just enough to make it impractical for the bots to compete with customers.

You could also add randomness by making people accept one use codes for grab bags of items. They'd have to preregister for whatever items they might want but then it's accept or reject the offer in a timed window. Up the risk factor enough and perhaps a human will want to make a decision rather than leave it to a bot.

And one more idea: co-opt and co-brand: sell a line of botmaker branded gear sold by the winner of a botting contest. Take input from botters on how to raise the bar.

<comment><USER11> > _This is a brand that would benefit from stealing the popup idea_

The brand is already hyper-exclusive and doing extremely well, and I didn't get the impression from the article that there is any concern about the bots.

Perhaps these people are fine doing what they're doing, and don't need to grow, grow, grow the brand. Perhaps it's Silicon Valley that should be learning some lessons here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Street _wear_ , not ware; interesting typo there.

The whole thing is extremely William Gibson: limited edition almost-secret branded products plus high-tech. Even the use of Futura is something Gibson would put in as a detail.

<comment><USER13> You're totally right. I had no idea this headline had anything to do with clothing. All I could picture was back alley merchants and the shady deckers coming and going beneath a gray sky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reading about this stuff makes me wish I could trade my engineering ability in for business acumen.

Maybe I could create a bot that actually buys from knockoffs from a site that I run.

<comment><USER15> Yeah sucks when you can build stuff but don't know what to build. "Delegate the rest" they say... to the entrepreneurs that hire developers to build the dream as a contractor/percentage.

I think there is also the "following passion and money is an after thought"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never understood why this is so complicated. Just do a week-long auction, hide bids on the last day (blind auction) to prevent bid sniping, and charge around the 80th percentile of bids to prevent winner's curse and ensure resale value. No bots, no problems, pretty much completely transparent.

The offline equivalent with e.g. Black Friday is similar, except you pay with time by waiting in line instead of with money.

<comment><USER2> Hypebeasts trying desperately to get the hot new whatever and coming up empty handed, thereby increasing anticipation for the next drop, is a feature not a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nothing makes a guy feel old as reading about fashion...

<comment><USER18> GenXer checking in to confirm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> These types of bots run rampant in the live event ticketing ecosystem. Ticketmaster and others constantly fight bots with turing tests and other defenses to prevent electronic scalping.

<comment><USER20> I'm surprised that Ticketmaster hasn't already captured the delta between what individuals will pay a scalper and what the scalper pays.

<comment><USER19> louis ck has been vocal about this issue. if ticketmaster/artists sold tickets at the "market " value, then a significant percentage of fans would be locked out the market.

<comment><USER21> ...and what's the problem with that? I'm a big fan of Porsches, but I can tell you that Porsche doesn't lower the price of their cars below market value so that all of their fans can afford one. Is there any other industry that deliberately sells their products way below market value where the purpose is something other than undercutting competition?

<comment><USER22> Event tickets are just a small fraction of the money to be made. They want ordinary people to be able to go to events because that helps their brand.

If Porsche made most of their money from branded apparel, they'd probably have a different pricing strategy.

<comment><USER23> Ferrari make lots/most of their money from branded <stuff>, and it certainly hasn't affected their pricing strategy.

Quite the opposite, if anything; the exclusivity of the halo product increases the (perceived) value of the merch.

<comment><USER22> They don't make anywhere near most of their money from branded products. The last year I can find easily is 2014. They made less than $500 million in revenue from merchandise and sponsorship, and $2.2 billion in car and part sales.

Margin is very high on their cars, so there is no way they're making anywhere close to most of their money through branded merchandise.

Contrast that with the Music industry. They did about $15 billion in music sales, and only about $8 billion in concert revenue in 2015.

Musicians do make a significant portion of their money from concert revenue, but musicians aren't the primary drivers of ticket prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > If you have no idea why someone would pay $100 just to get a crack at > spending another $200 on a pair of sneakers, that's OK: Supreme isn't meant > for you anyway.

Anyone know how stop yourself from mis-valuating companies and products just because you yourself doesn't find value in it?

<comment><USER12> A bit Buddhist, but: teach yourself there is no such thing as value.

At least in market economies, it's literally what someone will pay for a thing, which depends on a whole confluence of taste, feeling, circumstance, and Maslow's pyramid.

In this case, unavailability is part of the pricing. Not only is it expensive, but it's difficult to buy at all!

(The related question of "how do I find people who want to spend lots of money on shoes" is much harder)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm kind of pissed off to this see this article. I was working on something for DEFCON & my CFP got denied because it wasn't "technical" enough, yet here it's all everyone is talking about.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, can someone TL;DR this? I can't read the content unless I disable my Ad- Blocker.

Thanks,

<comment><USER14> A couple of guys write a bot to buy clothes from a "hip" NYC clothing company because people are apparently willing to pay $800 for a $150 black hoodie with a poorly sown on "patch" that says "supreme".

<comment><USER26> s/$150/$15/

<comment><USER14> I double checked:

Box logo hooded sweatshirt, black

Retail: $148

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Streetwear</comment>


Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/26/digg-is-working-on-a-toolbar-to-go-after-stumbleupon-tinyurl-and-all-the-rest/ <comment><USER2> Kevin Rose confirmed this during the Digg Townhall, and Jay Adelson said "we're not going after stumbleupon" to which Kevin replied "we kinda are."

Still doesn't interest me that much though, rarely use digg - just every now and then when I'm bored.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't StubleUpon doing pretty poorly now a days anyway?

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on that, please?

I'm not challenging, just curious. It seems to be pretty widely accepted that news aggregators have, in general, deteriorated; particularly digg & reddit, too new to hackernews to have an opinion. I hadn't noticed the same phenomenon with stumble ...

<comment><USER3> I actually quit using stumbleupon but I had heard that it wasn't getting updates that frequently and that their growth rate has been slowing down a lot. Doing a quick search I didn't see anyone stating bad things about it, so I don't have anything to point to but I recall hearing it discussed.</comment></comment></comment>


Tech insiders dumped shares ahead of slide - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/185b0220-c321-11e3-94e0-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Could you share a link of the same story which is not behind a paywall?

<comment><USER3> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KJGUfS1...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KJGUfS1FMvcJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/185b0220-c321-11e3-94e0-00144feabdc0.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#axzz2ypyqgHU7)</comment></comment>


China has 8 cities with bigger bike share systems than all of America - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6069821/bike-share-china-world-data/in/5579561

<comment><USER2> This shouldn't come as a surprise -- there are more people learning English in China, than there are English speakers in the U.S..

Also I suspect the Chinese don't try to steal or destroy the free bikes, a common problem elsewhere.</comment>


You need to use error-correcting memory  - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory <comment><USER2> > _So the probability of having at least one bit error in 4 gigabytes of > memory at sea level on planet Earth in 72 hours is over 95% ._

This is misleading. A flaky machine will indeed see bit errors, and it will probably be visible as random crashes, but that's not even necessarily the case for the average machine. If you look at the quantitative study from Google, which the author links to:

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf>

... you can see that in terms of errors per DIMM:

 _"Across the entire fleet, 8.2% of all DIMMs are affected by correctable errors and an average DIMM experiences nearly 4000 correctable errors per year. These numbers vary greatly by platform. Around 20% of DIMMs in Platform A and B are affected by correctable errors per year, compared to less than 4% of DIMMs in Platform C and D. Only 0.05-0.08% of the DIMMs in Platform A and Platform E see an uncorrectable error per year compared to nearly 0.3% of the DIMMs in Platform C and Platform D. The mean number of correctable errors per DIMM are more comparable, ranging from 3351-4530 correctable errors per year."_

So the mean rate of correctable errors is high, but the variance is also very high: depending on the manufacturer, 80 to 96% of DIMMs see out a whole year _without a single correctable error_. If the original statistics of 95% chance of error in 3 days were correct, a single-DIMM machine ought to have approximately 0% (astronomically close to 0%) of living out a whole year without errors - but we can see here that you seem to have between 80 and 96% of single-DIMM machines doing just that.

The moral here is to test your memory for a while - preferably a few days - before trusting the DIMMs. But once you know you have good DIMMs, it doesn't look like you need to be quite so paranoid about bit errors.

<comment><USER3> > But once you know you have good DIMMs, it doesn't look like you need to be > quite so paranoid about bit errors.

Assuming that only the one-error-per-year cases were due to random bit flips, and all the multiple-errors-per-year cases were due to bad DIMMs, I came up with about a 1/5 chance of getting a _single_ random bit-flip over a 6 year lifespan. But there also seems to be about a 1/3 chance of having a DIMM randomly go bad after a couple years, which of course without ECC would manifest as random crashes and lost (or _maybe_ corrupted) work.

<comment><USER4> Seems like running memtest every six months or so would be a good policy.

It would be nice if there were a way to test the memory while a machine is running.

<comment><USER5> The errors we're talking about here are _transient_. The memory location itself is still usable, the contents get changed _when_ a cosmic ray hits. After the hit, the corrupted value is held without a problem.

Memtest checks if the memory location has a gross fault which prevents it from storing values correctly.

Doesn't seem like memtest will help.

<comment><USER4> Good point. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article contains a fundamental flaw. It estimates the upset rate in memory due to cosmic ray flux as upsets/bits/hour, but this is an incorrect unit. Upsets depend on the total _physical_ size of the memory (and thus the total neutron flux) and the sensitivity of each memory cell (bit) to cosmic rays. Sensitivity may increase as you decrease the size of memory cells, but not in lock-step with the change in size. A room full of 4 Mbit memory chips will almost certainly have a higher rate of upsets per bit than will a single 2GB DIMM. The figures quoted in the article are from studies of computer systems in the 1980s, so upsets/bits rates are much higher than would be expected with modern RAM (which has 3 orders of magnitude more bits in the same volume).

This error is probably why the article's theorized SEU event rate for modern systems is about 3 orders of magnitude higher than experimental evidence suggests (such as from this Google study): <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf>

<comment><USER7> I don't understand your first paragraph. Shouldn't the cosmic ray flux through each bit be the same for each bit, and unchanged as you increase the total amount of memory? If I'm a given bit, should having a second stick of RAM 10 inches away affect whether I flip during a given time period?

<comment><USER6> _Shouldn't the cosmic ray flux through each bit be the same for each bit, and unchanged as you increase the total amount of memory?_

For identically manufactured ram, generally yes. The total number of upsets you'll see from a collection of 10 sticks of RAM will be roughly 10x higher than from 1 stick of RAM. However, there are huge variations in RAM, especially when you're comparing modern RAM to RAM manufactured in, say, 1988. The main figure used in the article (1.3e-12 upsets/bit/hour) comes from a study of a Cray Y-MP 8 system that had a main memory system containing approximately 32,000 SRAM chips. This amount of memory is measured in cubic meters, yet today the same number of bits of RAM fits on half or a quarter of a single DIMM.

Suffice it to say, the cosmic ray flux through the Cray Y-MP 8's main memory system and through half of a 2GB DIMM is significantly different, by orders of magnitude. At the same time, the memory cell in the Y-MP 8 and the memory cell in a 2GB DDR2 DIMM will have a different rate of sensitivity to cosmic ray flux, translating to a different rate of upsets for the same rate of neutron flux per memory cell. However, these two factors don't balance each other out, modern memory cells aren't thousands of times more sensitive to cosmic rays even though they take up thousands of times less space. The result is that a figure of upsets/bits/year can only be taken to be constant so long as the memory technology remains constant. That is most decidedly not the case here. If one were using 4GB of Cray Y-MP ram (which would likely fill an entire server rack, and more) perhaps you'd see the SEU rates the author calculates. However, most folks these days are using 4GB of RAM in 2 tiny DIMMs which may have, at most, a combined cross-sectional area (of the actual memory chips) of at most maybe 16 cm^2. This has non-trivial effects on the SEU rate.

<comment><USER7> Oh, OK. I guess then I wouldn't say that upsets/bit/hour is an incorrect unit. (It's clearly what you want to know to calculate the chance of error for a given piece of RAM.) It's just that this parameter varies across time and manufacturers. Using the value from a particular model of RAM manufactured in 1988 is sure to lead to wrong conclusions.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love ECC as much as the next guy, but the reality is that the entry overstates the importance of bit-flips by assuming the bits always flip in something that matters.

The simple fact is that most bit flips occur in portions of memory no one cares about. If the error even manifests a lot of the time it'll just manifest as one pixel in some image somewhere changing color by one bit.

With the author's estimate of 1,000 bit flips over the lifetime of a computer, maybe 10 of them cause crashes. Most of those crashes are likely to be a web browser on most people's desktops anyways, so if you just imagine you have the previous version of the flash player, you can simulate an increased SEU rate pretty nicely.

ECC is standard on servers because we assume the data they carry matters the large majority of the time. We assume that server's typically have a larger portion of their memory devoted to "important" things. (I.E. not images, video or stuff a javascript interpreter forgot to free().) On desktops, it is still probably reasonable to purchase non-ECC hardware for the time being.

I agree with the author though, that this is only getting worse. The trends are all in directions where this is going to start affecting consumer-level stuff at some point, but I'm not sure we're there yet.

As always, it's a matter of your workload combined with good risk analysis.

</comment><comment><USER9> Last year I shopped around for a quad-core 8GB box _with_ ECC RAM. The RAM itself is not much more expensive, the problem is CPU/chipset support. I went with an AMD Phenom - I think that with Intel CPUs, you only get ECC in the Xeon server line.

(Note that besides bunging in the ECC RAM DIMMs, you may have to turn on ECC support in the BIOS.)

Just using increasing amounts of RAM, storage and bandwidth, without adding data-integrity checks, is really asking for trouble ...

<comment><USER10> The increasing storage problem applies to hard drives, too, and the increasing need for something like RAID6 over RAID5.

<comment><USER11> Neither RAID5 nor RAID6 give you integrity checks. Each block of data is only read from /one/ disk, unless that disk is failed (in which case parity & data is read from the remaining disks to calculate that block).

If the disk recognizes the sector as bad (through its own, internal redundancy checks), then (depending on RAID implementation) either that one block will be read from parity or the entire disk will be dropped from the array.

But, if the disk silently corrupts data, RAID5/6 will not protect you. In fact, it makes the problem worse; silent corruption is more likely the more disks you have)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _the probability of having at least one bit error in 4 gigabytes of memory at sea level on planet Earth in 72 hours is over 95% ._

This metric is only relevant if you read all 4 GB of your memory every second and use the data for something that can't stand a flipped bit. Then you'll have one problem for every 72 hours of constant use of all of your memory.

How much of your memory do you use on average? How many flipped bits will be read, before being overwritten? How many bit flips cause a real problem? If one of the gray background dots of HN turns blue, I don't really care. The likelihood of an actual problem for an average user is vastly lower because of these factors.

The average comment on the blog of this guy and on Reddit is just sad: it's all fine and well that anecdotal evidence and the Google paper tell you he's wrong, but his math makes sense. Doesn't anyone feel the need to get to the root of the error in his assertion?

<comment><USER13> The "metric" is always relevant. Your confusion comes from the fact that you're thinking about whether those errors are reflected in a user's experience. If you think about the concept of RAM coupled with the fact that desktops are most likely running every little piece of software available (OS, a browser with several windows/tabs open, IM programs, a game, etc.) you'll see why this is a big deal. And let's not even mention servers and machines where actually significant work is being carried out..

<comment><USER12> I'm responsible for a handful of servers where 'actually significant work' is being carried out. My reasoning applies to those machines just as much:

\- how much memory is in use?

\- how large is the chance that a flipped bit is read (as opposed to being overwritten before being read)?

\- What are the consequences of the flipped bit?

Apart from that: there are quite a few desktops in the world where 'actually significant work' is being carried out.

<comment><USER14> The author touches on the "how much memory is in use" question: all major OSes use unallocated RAM as a file cache (or equivalent), so no matter _where_ the error happens, it is almost certain to hit something. Whether that "something" is actually relevant is another matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sidenote: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris have the ability to not only monitor ECC memory errors, but when detecting that the errors go over a certain threshold will automatically mark those pages "bad" and force the operating system to no longer use that range of memory.

I have an 8GB dual-Opteron system with a DIMM that is in production and should not be taken down - about 4MB on one DIMM has been marked bad and removed from use by the OS.

</comment><comment><USER16> In four years of reading Cassini updates, they have never once mentioned worrying about software errors due to cosmic rays. And this is without any atmospheric protection at all; we have 100 miles of atmosphere.

They have mentioned that their solid state relays trip 2 or 3 times a year due to cosmic rays. I'm not sure how comparable those are to DIMMs, but it does suggest that the author's claim of one error per day is a bit off...

<comment><USER17> Pretty much anything launched into space uses radiation-hardened electronics. I don't know what Cassini has on board, but this is popular: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > First, let's assume you have a system with no error-correction nor parity. > The probability that you'll experience a bit error during the time T will be > 1-(1-p)^m .

OK, let's assume that.

> For T=1 hour , p = 1.3e-12 and m = 4 _2^30_ 8 that gives 0.044 or 4.4% .

WTF? Where did those figures come from?

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps a good thing for "mission critical" software to do might be to implement software "hash checks" where the software keeps a running series of hashes of what it thinks it has written to disk, and then compares that against the actual stored bytes at the end of the operation. Or, if that is impractical, have a "safe mode" intended for kernel builds, software releases, etc, where it will compile and build twice, then compare the two for differences. That would solve a lot of the problems the author is postulating, however unlikely they might be.</comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't phones being used as local private servers? - <AUTHOR> Phones nowaday have the processing power to do any kind of private server work.
A private server phone is similar to a home-server, as it can be used as a media server, file host, file share, git server, web server (acting as an interface to any of the other utilities).
It can even serve as a configuration server, as many people are struggling with keeping their program configurations the same between several OS'es and or devices.
I can imagine that people don't want to do it because of battery issues, or that most people aren't even aware that you can use your phone as a local server. <comment><USER2> I used an old Android phone for my garage door server: [https://plus.google.com/+BobLee/posts/7LyfdV3PC5X](https://plus.google.com/+BobLee/posts/7LyfdV3PC5X)

It runs the Jetty web server. When I was the core library lead for the Android platform ('06-'09), we ran Jetty's test suite as part of Android's acceptance tests, so it works great!

Why don't people use phones as servers more often? They're overkill when you can get a Raspberry Pi for ~$50. You typically don't need an LCD, touch screen, accelerometer, cell radio, etc. for a home server.

Also, Android runs a heavily stripped down version of Linux, so running off- the-shelf server software can be tricky.

<comment><USER3> But you can get a low-spec Jelly Bean phone for $20, with charger, wifi, bluetooth, camera, and battery. I love my Raspberry Pi's (and PogoPlugs) but cheap Android phones are pretty attractive devices too, especially ones that can be rooted without much trouble.

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-whirl-2-no-contract- ce...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-whirl-2-no-contract-cell-phone- black/8728026.p?id=1219362861847&skuId=8728026&productCategoryId=)

<comment><USER2> That's news to me. Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would if I had an Ubuntu Edge

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge)

</comment><comment><USER5> The reason I don't is battery life. Running a server of any kind kills my phone in record time. I could leave it plugged in, but then it becomes a very expensive and underpowered server. I prefer to use old laptops because the cost/power ratio is more favorable (and those old IBM thinkpads are like the energizer bunny. they keep going and going...)

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a related question.

If I get into a car (especially one loaned for a day), shouldn't I be able to connect to the car with Bluetooth, and then have car settings for at least the radio come up on the phone? So for example if I want button1 to be station 123, all I'd have to do is sync those settings against phone.

I guess the question is, if I have a smart phone, why do I still need to use car-interface to set up buttons for radio? Why can't there be apps that remember settings and update them automatically. With such apps, you could configure your car to play kid-friendly radio when you drive kids to school, and your favorite channel on your way to work. You wouldn't have issues switching between your and spouse's car (different settings, and maybe they reset radio or dealer changed battery and reset radio).

(or maybe this is all available on better cars than I own)

<comment><USER7> This would require the phone/app to know and be able to reconcile all the different configuration and communication schemas for all the different makes/models of cars AND for the cars themselves to publish what amounts to an API to allow for this sort of interaction.

Nobody wants to do that sort of work on the phone side, and the car manufacturers really have no incentive to provide an API especially since they use their interfaces as selling points (BMW's iDrive, Tesla's 60" screen, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> * Storage space/attachment is an issue

* Local lan speed sucks - some phones still only have 2.4Ghz 802.11n

* Cost is an issue - If I have a spare phone sitting around I'd probably be better off selling it and buying a small ARM board with ethernet that I can run Linux on and a USB drive.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, you can certainly get web servers running on Android (I've used Bit Web Server before, and there are free alternatives... [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andi.serve...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andi.serverweb&hl=en) ). The only question is whether you'd be able to install something like OwnCloud on it... [https://owncloud.org/install/](https://owncloud.org/install/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I would say storage space is still the issue. Most phones still come with 8/16 gigs where as on PCs a terabyte or more is common.

</comment><comment><USER11> Branching on this, why not an app to enable a Tor server only when wifi is available? And for those scared to allow it on their own network, allow the user to disable it on a certain SSID or somethin.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if hidden services behave better if they are actually jumping around between different access networks, or if they can actually hide more safely by staying at a single point (single set of guards). That would be something you would want to know before trying this :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because that would be you exercising the freedom to use your phones as you wish rather than being locked into the walled garden by the OS manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER14> My phone is my media server. It has a light webserver with streaming and when I'm home this is how I listen to music or watch shows.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's only a matter of time before somebody does it, but at the moment I can't get the damn LXC working on Android :)</comment>


Why Do People Try So Hard to Avoid Paying Taxes? - <AUTHOR> https://common-form.com/blog/people-try-hard-avoid-paying-taxes/

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's that people HATE paying taxes, its that a large portion of their lively hood will be taken if they do not maximize their deductions.

As an employer, about 10% of my salary is paid to Fed, State, and local taxes. As a W-2 Employee of my company, about 25% of my income is taken out of my paycheck if I claim to deductions. This means the government is getting 35% of my salary for doing, what I consider, very little. This is money I could use to boost salary, pay for additional or better benefits, or hire additional employee's.

My father-in law would have to pay about 70% of his income if you include Federal, State, and city taxes with no deductions. Throw in Tithe for the church and you can imagine why one would do all they can to put money away into pre-tax accounts and claim everything you can.

I don't hate taxes, they are necessary, but I do not agree with the way they are spent in most instances. The USA should be a union of states collectively working together, but the country is increasingly moving towards a single state, with a one size fits all policy. As it stands now, each state is incredibly different and policies made for California are in no way fit for Alaska or New York. Federal taxes should be significantly lower then they are now and lower then state taxes, and should be spend on defense, and inter state mediation. State taxes should get a small boost and provide services to its residents inside the state only. Reduce the scope of where tax dollars are spent and what they are spent on, and efficiency will go up, citizens will have more money in their pockets to fuel the consuming engine of America, and huge government programs that sweep up everyone's communications in the country will be harder to fund. Not to mention people will get to vote with their bodies(By moving to a new state), which is far more effective then voting for the president.

</comment><comment><USER3> I view taxes like stamps, don't like to pay for them. Perhaps I am taking it for granted, but seems like they take a large chunk. I want to get as much back as possible, especially if I am not ever able to take advantage of any special programs and gov't assistance, and may never see my social security. In my mind, I am paying for other people is my simplified answer.

</comment><comment><USER4> A thought just struck me. The phrase 'death and taxes' must have been coined by a wealthy or upper class individual (Daniel Defoe it turns out)

If your well-off these will be the only hardships you will certainly face. Defoes less well-off contemporaries would probably rate the inevitable struggles to attain adequate food, clothes and shelter as more relevant certainties.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depending on the tax it can be complicated and time consuming. If you do not put in the effort then you might overpay or pay more than your fellow tax payer. You face stiff penalties if you make a mistake in the complicated forms. Give the government everything and the national debt still goes up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know this is a bit OT, but the startup world has a fairly strong libertarian ethos, so I'm particularity interested in getting your feedback. Why do most Americans hate paying their taxes and go to such extreme measures to minimize the amount of tax they pay?

<comment><USER6> The theory I've created since being an expat is:

The United States government spends an extraordinary amount of money on stuff that's not really tangible, everything from gargantuan military to corporate level subsidies and interest payments on debt. The ways taxes are now collected have shuffled the obvious burden to individuals earning more than about $640K per year in real wages. The United States has, for decades, ignored & postponed maintenance, repair, and upgrades to infrastructure like Water, Sewer, Roads, Bridges, Rail, Power, and Communication and public facilities like schools, parks, and libraries. The United States _is not_ number one. Not in any of the important metrics about societies that actually matter to regular people.

So, thinking about the average Joe who's paying way more than his parents did in taxes and what does he get for it in return? Not a lot that is visible or even desirable (after all, he's not yet retired and receiving any benefits from Social Security or Medicare) and meanwhile all those things that are desirable and/or visible are in a state of disarray, disrepair, or disrepute. Even the phrase "Good enough enough for government work" has been twisted into its opposite at this point.

Overlay all that on to how obviously disconnected the American political system is from regular Americans and the end result is an alienation which manifested itself in folks not liking to pay taxes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Feeling disconnected from how one's taxes are spent is an excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think much about it. Lots of people are like me. They pay somebody to do their taxes, and never think about it again. Is that 'trying so hard'? Doesn't seem like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there are lots of people like you, but I don't think you're the majority. And although you are not trying hard, presumably your accountant is on your behalf and you're paying him/her good $ to do so.</comment></comment>


I Redesigned The Website of The Guy Who Bearhugged President Obama - <AUTHOR>

If you've been following the news lately, you may have heard about Scott Van Duzer, a man who owns a pizza restaurant in Florida and is known for his philanthropic and charitable works.  This past Sunday he received a surprise visit from President Obama, and warmly embraced the President in a 'bear hug' that became a popular story. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/09/barack-gets-a-bear-hug/)
I heard about Scott Van Duzer's philanthropy foundation on the radio yesterday and was motivated to donate.  However I visited his web site to donate, and was struck by how "1997 Geocities" his site looked like.
So beyond donating just money, I thought I would volunteer to re-design his site and offer my services as a "webmaster."  I also noticed he hadn't registered his .com and .net domains, so I thought I'd register them with the intent to transfer ownership to him.
Old site: http://thevanduzerfoundation.org/
New site (doesn't have every page up yet): http://thevanduzerfoundation.com/
The thing is -- I can't get in touch with him.  I've tried to reach him at his e-mail address on his site and call his phone number, but to no avail.  I'm sure he's still pretty busy with the media cycle and at this point I figured I'd just wait until it dies down a bit before trying to reach out to him again, but I thought as a last-ditch effort, maybe someone on HN would actually know some way to get in touch with this guy. <comment><USER2> You could try calling Big Apple Pizza in Fort Pierce florida and try to get in touch with him that way. Frame it that you want to talk to him about a donation to his charity but have been unable to contact him, then once you get a hold of him, explain what the actual donation is.

If you try to go through his employees by saying you want to redo his website, they'd probably be less susceptible.

Just a thought - good luck, that's a rather noble endeavor of yours.

</comment><comment><USER3> He's getting spammed pretty hard right now by the right wing.

They posted a few thousand one star reviews on his Yelp page, an I imagine they've been calling him nonstop.

I would wait a couple of weeks for this whole thing to calm down and try again.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've tried to visit <http://thevanduzerfoundation.com/> but it actually redirects me to the old site

<comment><USER5> Same :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That was a bearhug? I was hoping he was going for a suplex :-)

Mr Van Duzer sounds like a cool guy though.

Also for me the .com is redirecting to the .org.</comment>


What StarCraft Can Teach You about Being Productive - <AUTHOR> http://francogments.com/?p=193

<comment><USER2> I have one problem with this, Starcraft 2 has taken up 4 – 5 hours per day of my "minerals" (freetime).

I even created a "pylon" (social network) around Starcraft. You can check it out at <http://zealotrush.com> (Heh, yeah I'm a protoss player too!)

Nice article though. : )</comment>


R Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/10/05/r-notebooks/ <comment><USER2> I have been using these in Pre-View version and I am really happy where they are sitting.

The difference between Jupyter and R Notebooks is the execution of the code and I actually prefer the R version better since I am making the notebooks for communication and not for programming.

These also work better in Git then the Juypter notebooks.</comment>


"Overreacting" considered harmful - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/overreacting-considered-harmful <comment><USER3> I used to think that words were just words, logical things with defined meanings. I have come to understand that there really are "poisonous" words; words, phrases, attitudes that absolutely have impacts well beyond their dictionary definitions and the speaker's likely intent. If you include these things when conversations are tense or critical, the situation is likely to destabilize and get worse. Making the conversation "safe" and non-threatening is very important. Steering away from emotional arguments and focusing on facts is also key. All of this is harder to do in any text message or email as well, as body language and other social cues are unavailable.

Added:

This comes up a lot in employer - employee conversations. If you want your team to function efficiently, you really have to create a safe environment for comments and discussion.

<comment><USER4> > I used to think that words were just words, logical things with defined > meanings.

Well, they are! But those defined meanings are different for everybody who has a history with the word, and oftentimes you don't know that history going in. The problem with "straight white male" privilege, speaking as a straight white male myself, is that there are words which have _enormous_ baggage for one group or another, yet I've simply never had to deal with such baggage myself.

That's where the overreacting canard comes from, and I don't think raganwald fully empathizes with this in his post. Some people simply don't understand why somebody might have a reason to be worked up about a particular issue _because they've never had to care about that issue in their life_. I don't just hear "you're overreacting" from people who can't comprehend that people have bad days sometimes. In fact, assuming that the only reason a situation might be personally charged is because somebody had a bad day can be just as frustrating: it really sucks, I've learned, to be "forgiven" for your bad mood when the forgiver has said something truly offensive. What's difficult, but also truly necessary, is to be able to understand _why_ somebody's reacted the way they have – to be willing to admit to yourself that even if something you said didn't seem egregious to _you_ , that you might have crossed a line somehow that you simply haven't learned to notice.

A lot of people forget that in any human-to-human interaction, the logical endpoints are the humans. Language, as all aspects of communication, is human- oriented; using it like it's a logical end unto itself is like trying to use Python phrases in a C script.

<comment><USER5> Excellent, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with the assertion that it's impossible to overreact without "deliberately" exaggerating for effect. People overreact all the time without meaning to. Anyone who works with children can tell you that putting things into perspective is a learned skill: we are born overreactors, every one of us. Going too far is, as it turns out, the natural thing to do.

<comment><USER5> I have two children. My five year-old recently was tired and hungry, and had a fit when presented with a croissant to eat because it was slightly crushed where I held it too tightly.

Overreacting? Well, that is what I would call an inappropriate reaction, and of course it's part of my job as a parent to provide some guidance.

But it's still 100% the genuine emotion of the moment, and for that reason I'm not going to use the word "overreacting" with a child or an adult. I'm going to say (as I said, roughly) "I understand this isn't what you'd like, however..."

Which is roughly what I'd say to an adult too.

<comment><USER6> This holds that "genuine" emotional reactions are all equally valid. What makes rage over a slightly-crushed croissant a valid emotional response?

There is also a question of what makes the "genuine" qualifier necessary. It presupposes the idea of an emotional response that is not genuine: what would this mean? What would a "false" emotional response look like, to the one feeling it (and are they truly feeling it at all?) or to others?

<comment><USER7> > This holds that "genuine" emotional reactions are all equally valid. What > makes rage over a slightly-crushed croissant a valid emotional response?

It was from a five year old. Children haven't learnt how to regulate their emotions. That's part of the job of parenting.

<comment><USER6> That makes it genuine, certainly. Maybe even understandable. But does that mean it's valid?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a post about word-usage, specifically saying that the word "overreacting" is not a good word to use in conversation, because it carries a lot of emotional baggage and doesn't foster productive conversations.

Funny enough for a post about word-usage, I only understood this point after reading half of it. I think this post should've started with this sentence (from the OP, posted as a comment in this thread): "Let me get the thesis of the post out of the way first. The post asserts that the word 'overreacting' is unproductive to discussion."

Having said that, I agree with the post and think it makes a very good point.

<comment><USER5> Overly clever author is overly clever. Thank you.

<comment><USER8> I was just about to edit my comment to make sure you'd take it in the right spirit (constructive feedback). I should never have doubted you raganwald.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another really unhelpful thing to say in these situations is the variant "Calm down".

<comment><USER5> You're being too sensitive about this.

<comment><USER10> What about when a guy has problems checking things into source control and starts throwing things around the office?

What about the a guy gets a call from his home monitoring system and starts yelling that his house has burned to the ground?

What about a guy who shouts "you aren't my manager and you never will be" to a coworker?

I made none of those up. They all happened, from 3 different people. (At the same company, for that matter.) Some people really do overreact and really do need to calm down.

The failure for those people to be removed led everyone else to leave.

<comment><USER11> Did telling them so ever help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You're ignoring the subtext of the hypothetical tweet.

By asking "where are the caramel colored men?", you are implying that there SHOULD be men, which further implies that it's the organizer's fault that there are not.

I'd be pretty surprised if such a tactless comment did not offend.

<comment><USER5> In my hypothetical story, she was offended (I used the word "pissed"). And if you agree that this is reasonable, I think this make smy point stronger, that the word "overreacting" is not helpful in having a productive discussion.

The end-goal of a productive discussion doesn't have to be me convincing her that there should have been a tall, handsome Canadian on the podium. Perhaps the end-goal could have been her convincing me that I need to see this from a new perspective.

Either way, the word "overreacting" is not a good start. That's my thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A million times yes!

I find the "overreacting" word incredibly annoying. What it basically amounts to is: "I don't care about you, your feelings or your opinion; I know better and I'm not going to have a rational conversation about it". It's an ugly thing to say, it changes the conversation from discussing objective reality to discussing the validity of someone's emotions. It's a very nasty and saddening kind of dismissal. I can't help but to think less of a person who uses this in a conversation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Your sentiments on overreacting aside, why does it matter what gender or skin colour the speakers have? If they are qualified and best of class then they should be the ones speaking, no? Should we also invite granite rocks to presentations so that they are equally represented?

<comment><USER5> It may not matter at all. Why should there be "Tall, Canadian, Caramel Privilege?"

<comment><USER14> I don't really understand where you're going with this. If the best speakers happen to be Asian females then what is the problem, exactly?

There is not one caucasian person in the top 10 fastest 100m sprinters (<http://www.toptens.com/sports-track-sprinters/>). Do you believe that this is somehow problematic?

Genes and gene expression affect neurotransmitter levels and neurotrophic factors which, in turn, affect cognitive performance - just as Jamaicans and Africans are on average better at sprinting than English and French natives. Particular genetic groupings are going to fare better at task X, not too badly at task Y and terribly at task Z.

This is not privilege, it is reality.

[http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110809/genes-play- big-...](http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110809/genes-play-big-role-in- intelligence)

<comment><USER15> Are you suggesting that the genetic grouping of white males is scientifically accepted as being a better ruby conference speaker than non-white or non-male people?

<comment><USER14> I believe that we're talking about Asian women being at the top of whatever field the conference referenced in the blog post was about.

<comment><USER15> right, I was thinking of the actual incidents that (I assume) prompted this blog post. So you can re-state my question as, "are you arguing that it is likely that Asian women are genetically superior to non-Asian or male people in that field?".

<comment><USER14> Well yeah, that's what I'm arguing. Asian women are going to, on average, do better in field X than individuals from other genetic groupings - just as Jamaican men excel at sprinting.

Another example:

> Different studies have found different results, but most have found above- > average verbal and mathematical intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, along with > below-average spatial intelligence. Some studies have found IQ scores > amongst Ashkenazi Jews to be a fifth to one full standard deviation above > average in mathematical and verbal tests.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#Does_a_group_difference_in_intelligence_exist.3F)

<comment><USER15> ok. So to tie this back to the real world examples that came up recently - <USER2> there similar evidence for white guys in Ruby?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "At last, the conference drama overshadowed the Rails drama and everybody lived happily ever after."</comment>


DataStax reconnects with Apache Cassandra - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/datastax-reconnects-with-apache-cassandra/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Postscript: Comments in the Twitter sphere after this post was published indicate that time has not yet healed all in the Apache Cassandra community. The community now has a choice -- compete against itself or direct its energy toward building a common platform that stands up in a landscape with powerful competition from cloud platform providers. It's a strategic choice that will impact the long-term viability of the Cassandra platform." — Ouch!

One axis is the FOSS folks using Cassandra, and the proprietary folks using DSE. Another axis is running it on-prem, in hybrid environments, on public cloud, or on managed cloud services.

Beyond that, not mentioned in the article, is a third axis: choice to run on Cassandra API-compliant options.

This includes the re-written-from-the-ground-up-in-C++ Scylla, which is API compliant to Cassandra. (Disclosure: I work at ScyllaDB).

But there are also cloud offerings like CosmosDB, which allows you to make CQL queries.

Competition is natural in the world. But there is healthy, lively and fair competition which results in advancements for all, and, on the other hand, forms of competition which are acrimonious, toxic, noxious. That only results in a lose-lose for all.

I, for one, hope to see more cooperation in the true spirit of open source. "Coopertition" as some deem it, where you both compete and cooperate in tandem.</comment>


Impact of the New Show HN Section on Show HN Submissions - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/show-hn/

<comment><USER2> These statistics were very interesting to see, and definitely not what I expected.

On average, I expected the number of "Show HN" submissions to increase dramatically, but it does not seem to be that way.

Possible reasons:

1\. The "Show" section on the header bar adds too much- people want a simplistic view and the show section hasn't caught on as much as the "ask".

2\. People are wary of submitting "Show HN" posts and sharing their work due to criticism

3\. The guidelines set are restrictive

Personally, I think it will just take time to catch on. It would definitely be interesting to see these statistics with "Ask HN" for comparison.

</comment><comment><USER3> It might be nice to put the summary at the top of the page.

I tried it after the special "show" section was added. Nothing really happened; a few people clicked, 1 person upvoted.

</comment><comment><USER4> As the poster is also the author, the title should be "Show HN: Impact of the New Show HN Section on Show HN Submissions"</comment>


Startup: an emotional roller coaster ride - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-roller-coaster-ride.htm

<comment><USER2> Do you find that the larger companies that typically want webex demos also want SLAs or a custom contract of some sort?

My company is launching a commercial API soon, and one of the potentially high-paying customers has mentioned wanting to meet to discuss contracts. I was thinking more along the lines of standard terms and conditions and a big "click here to sign up" button, and am not sure we want to consider SLAs or custom agreements. So I'm curious as to whether you're finding that the larger companies often expect them, or whether a great service and standard T&C are enough.

BTW I think I might be able to improve your conversion rate :) The "Terms" links from your sign-up pages go straight to a 404.

<comment><USER3> (Ouch! Thanks for the heads up. We recently did an A/B test on signup page -- looks like one of the links got mixed up. Fixed it now. Though did not notice any drop in conversions, probably people don't read or care about terms. Sad, especially because our terms are quite simple).

Regarding your other point, yes, some companies have elaborate custom contracts involving different teams: lawyers, procurement and what not. One of the prospective customers sent us 100 page document on Vendor Assessment with stuff like this - 'Do you keep your laptops in an open car?' and 'Do you install anti-virus software and keep it updated'. I was quite surprised but they said it was their "standard" procedure.

Though, we do not offer SLAs and I don't think companies are adamant about it if you convince them that historically your uptime has been in 99.9% range.

<comment><USER2> Thank you Paras :)

Focusing on historical uptime sounds like a good plan to me, and it's pleasing to hear that the companies don't tend insist on an SLA if you can demonstrate that.

Custom contracts are frightening. On the plus side they give you a good reason to charge more. But on the minus side they give the other company a good reason to take you to court if something goes wrong and you're unable to deliver as expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its interesting to know that you have to do a webex demo for your products. I assumed that for Saas, demos are a thing of the past. Other people have experienced the same too?

<comment><USER3> Yes, big companies usually need webex demo. I'd be curious to know if other people experience the same (or VWO is an exception).

<comment><USER5> Yes, webex is par for the course, but it helps you negotiate better $. Charge a "pain premium".

<comment><USER3> Excellent point. However, we have transparent per-visitor pricing (also displayed on website) so it is impossible to negotiate better $ since it is linked to traffic customer wants to test.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you could modify your offering to be either "Self-serve" with transparent pricing but no demos or "Hands on" with Webex demo, dedicated support etc. In my experience customers that insist on Webex demos make up for the pain in price insensitivity once convinced, but you need to be able to exploit that somehow.

<comment><USER7> One interesting thing about this customer type: they will pay you just to promise to do things that you were going to do anyway. (Like, say, respond to all inquiries within 24 hours.) They will also pay you to promise not to do things you have no intention of doing. (Like, say, closing in the next twelve months.)

You can _charge through the nose_ for things like that. (A week of my time costs $X. Two consecutive weeks costs a little less than $2X. A week of my time now and a week of guaranteed availability in Q4 costs about $8X, because if you need that particular combo you can find $6X in your sofa.)

<comment><USER3> Patrick, I think I need to learn about this from you. Right now: all I say is that tell me your traffic requirement and we will give a quote. No strings attached!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> excellent product, and excellent story! from the video introduction, the user interface seems to be a little antiquated, what are you using for the right click menu? it reminds me of solaris CDE menus :)

how did you guys get started? the idea is really novel.

<comment><USER3> I started programming a platform which had everything from segmentation to analytics to targeting and test. Here's that platform: <http://www.wingify.com/labs.php>

I did a Show HN, had beta users and got feedback (notably including patio11) that I need to focus on one aspect and make it as easy as possible. So, I focussed on A/B testing (because existing popular Google's tool was not easy to use for non technical folks) and coded Visual Website Optimizer.

<comment><USER7> Amazing that that was only a year and three months ago. It feels like forever. (Oh yeah, that was midway through the final deathmarch at work. That's why.)

I just found my emails about Wingify/VWO to Paras and a friend of mine. Notably, I told Paras to raise the price (the proposed prices topped at the lowest price now) and told my SEO buddy that VWO was going to make millions.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I remember that you once mentioned that you would have loved to code VWO yourself and then make millions out of it. You can't imagine how powerful and motivating that was (and still is) to me.

Also, Patrick, notably you dedicated a full post on your blog on VWO [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/09/bringing-ab-testing- to-t...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/09/bringing-ab-testing-to-the- fortune-5-million/) and it brought bootload of beta testers. That was AMAZING! I iterated through every piece of feedback and refined it.

It's hard to imagine VWO existing in form it exists today had you not helped initially. Thanks for all of this! I owe you a lot :)

<comment><USER9> A personal recommendation from Patrick or someone else as high profile here on HN must be like gold dust in the early stages. It's just the sort of recommendation and publicity that I'd love to get for my new startup when I launch the private beta soon.

I've been playing about with a competitors A/B testing free trial but their site seems to be having problems today as I can't access my experiments. May be related to Google app engine I think. Anyway they don't provide heat maps like VWO and some other stuff and so VWO will definitely be next on my list to test drive. Thanks for the insight into the day in the life of a startup too.

<comment><USER7> As much as I treasure the image of sprinkling off magic startup pixie dust with every twitch of my shimmering wings, the hard-nosed metrics junkie in me notes that you can expect only a few hundred clickthroughs from the most popular links on my blog ever. Paras got a few more signups than that would suggest slightly because I banged down doors to give away VWO accounts to SEOs I knew but mostly because VWO is VWO's pixie dust: the product's quality and take on the space is disruptively better than what Google managed with infinite money.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many of you take care of what you are eating? - <AUTHOR> How many of you guys really bother about counting calories and then defining a system on consuming those calories in a better way.
I am aware of applications to track your calorie count based on your food intake. But I couldn't stick to it.
Soi wanted to know does anybody has come up with a system which really works for them?
If yes please let me know... !! <comment><USER2> Using calories to define your diet? That doesn't sound like a good idea. I would much rather focus on what I eat than bother keeping up with imaginary numbers.

Nutrients and micronutrients are a real thing you can track and experiment with. There's nothing like finding a new food that gives your entire body a "high".

And no, Burger King won't do that, ever.</comment>


Facebook Has Been Profiting from Boogaloo Ads Promoting Civil War and Unrest - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-profit-boogaloo-ads <comment><USER2> Is it me or does the design for the "Hoplite Armor"[1] look like the hong kong flag[2]? I did some digging and it looks even closer to the variant that the hong kong protesters are using[3]. Why would "anti-government extremists" (as described by the article) in America use this design?

[1] [https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2020-06/30/2...](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2020-06/30/22/asset/7dc93c7d4da5/sub-buzz-8164-1593556127-1.png)

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

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

<comment><USER3> A lot of boogaloo boys have a hardon for the hong kong protests, viewing it as a right wing militia standing up to a communist government.

<comment><USER2> >right wing "militia"

>no weapons

???

<comment><USER3> I didn't say they were correct in their assessment.

<comment><USER4> but the problem with that statement is that a lot of boogaloo boys don't think the same way because that's the idea of the movement, freethinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Buzfeednews.com has been profiting from Boogaloo articles promoting Boogaloo.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't this whole boogaloo thing some 4chan meme?

<comment><USER7> Yes, and like the OK hand thing it started as trolling and became both semi- serious and still very much trolling.

<comment><USER8> The thing about communication, whether in speech, written word, or symbols, is that there is no practical difference between pretending to be hateful and actually being hateful. Using a common gesture to communicate white supremacy as a form of trolling and doing it sincerely both have the same effect. In fact, I think the people "trolling" understand this to some degree (it would require some intense self-deception to not understand this), which blurs the line between "trolling" and sincerity on these kinds of topics into perhaps non-existence.

<comment><USER4> the vast majority of boogaloo boys are not white supremacists and show no support or sympathy to the idea of white supremacy,there was an organized group that formed under the idea of the boogaloo movement, our first rule was that you must disavow prejudices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nobody's actually surprised, are they?

<comment><USER10> At this point, it's more about the extent to which Facebook is all in for the militant extreme right.

<comment><USER11> I thought Facebook was all in for the militant extreme _left_ that controlled all social media. Which is it? Which conspiracy do I believe? Help me, Hacker News!

<comment><USER12> Facebook is behind all extremists, wake up, sheeple.

<comment><USER4> in recent days facebook has banned many boogaloo accounts and groups, it is true that facebook lets hate grow but the boogaloo boys are not it, far from it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. So some people in Hawaiian shirts are fomenting unrest and trying to bring about a second civil war, whilst some other people in much more sober clothing are fighting for righteousness and justice by smashing up neighbourhoods and businesses and forcibly occupying parts of a major city.

<comment><USER14> Interesting that your only takeway from the protest movement is "smashing up neighborhoods and businesses"

<comment><USER13> Hmm, well that's not what I said at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is investment taxed? - <AUTHOR>

Is venture, angel, or friends and family investment taxed? Does the company receiving investment pay the tax or does the investor? Are there investment tax credits? I'm in the United States, but it would be interesting to see how it works elsewhere. <comment><USER2> Proceeds from investors (debt or equity) are not profits, and the company receiving the investment will not pay taxes on the amount.

The investor will have to pay taxes on any capital gains / dividends / interest she receives.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the rates are in US, but I suspect here in Canada we would pay more tax per capital gains.

In Ontario All capital gains and Canadian dividends are taxed at lower rates than other income.

Interest income and dividend income are received or accrued each year, and are _taxable in the year_ you receive or accrue the income. You have no control over which year the income is paid. You are not taxed on capital gains _until your investment is sold_ , so you have some control over which year you receive the income, because you can choose when to sell your investments.

The tax paid on capital gains is low, because _only 50% of capital gains is taxed_ , and the gains are not taxed until the investments are sold, except in situations where there is a deemed disposition

</comment><comment><USER4> How it works 'elsewhere' depends greatly on where elsewhere is. In some countries you can write off your investments when they tank, but in those places you can expect to pay a healthy tax if they appreciate. In others both the losses and the gains are not part of your taxes.

It also depends on what you qualify as an investment, for instance, investing in real estate or antiques can be tax free but a business investment might be taxed.

You can't really answer this question in a general way without at least specifying locality and the specific kind of investment.

So the 'how it works elsewhere' portion of your question is not easy to answer without a long list of examples and localities.

</comment><comment><USER5> The profit you make on investment is taxed as capital gains. The law makes a distinction between short-term and long-term gains: if there's less than a year between when you invest and when you cash out, you pay the same tax rate as for ordinary income. If there's a year or longer, then you pay the more favorable tax rate of 15%. If you lose money investing, you can claim the loses on your tax return and use them to offset gains in future years.

<comment><USER6> This is roughly how it works in Australia, except that the discounted capital gains tax rate is 50% of the normal rate for investments held for over 12 months, and the discount is only available to individuals (and, I think, trusts) but not companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In California the assets of a corporation are taxed I believe, so the stuff you buy with the investment has a liability.</comment>