Male birth control study cut short as some participants experience side effects - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/11/03/500549503/male-birth-control-study-killed-after-men-complain-about-side-effects <comment><AUTHOR> Also important to note that permanent infertility is quite a strong side effect

> Eight participants had not recovered to meet the criteria of return to > fertility after 52 weeks in recovery phase, the last visit according to the > study protocol. These participants were followed on a case by case basis > until they regained normal sperm counts (n 5, up to 74 wk of recovery) or > declined further follow-up (n 2). One volunteer did not recover within 4 > years since his last injections.

[http://press.endocrine.org/doi/pdf/10.1210/jc.2016-2141](http://press.endocrine.org/doi/pdf/10.1210/jc.2016-2141)

<comment><USER2> > One volunteer did not recover within 4 years since his last injections.

That's a really STEEP Price to Pay for an "experiment". Anyone know how much the participants were compensated for taking part in the study? No amount of money would make me do something like this. But that's just me.

<comment><USER3> To answer you question, I do not know what they were compensated. But I suppose if you already had the amount of children you wanted and were considering the ole snip snip, this might have been a considerable option. Maybe it's what they wanted? I do agree though that if this were a young man, I sincerely hope they made some frozen samples before committing to this study.

<comment><USER4> There's also the risk that the drug is not as efficient as expected, and you end up with an unwanted pregnancy, so participating in this trial is never a no-brainer.

<comment><USER5> Presumably they were strongly advised to use a second method of birth control.

<comment><USER6> in that case they wouldn't really test whether it works or not..

<comment><USER7> I don't think they were measuring the efficacy on the basis of whether or not the participants conceived - that measure is affected by too many variables. Sperm count is the more reliable metric with reasonable granularity for measuring the effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why they didn't mention vaselgel [1]. When I first heard about it a couple years ago it was pitched as an injection of $0.10 of chemicals into the vas deferens that would block sperm from traveling through it. They were hoping it would last 10 years, be reversible with another small injection, and be available in the U.S. in half a decade. A non-profit is funding the research and their goal is for it to be affordable even in developing countries.

[1]: [https://www.parsemusfoundation.org/projects/vasalgel/vasalge...](https://www.parsemusfoundation.org/projects/vasalgel/vasalgel- faqs/)

<comment><USER9> >I wonder why they didn't mention vaselgel [1]. When I first heard about it a couple years ago it was pitched as an injection of $0.10 of chemicals into the vas deferens that would block sperm from traveling through it.

Because how are pharmaceutical companies going to make billions from selling $0.10 of chemicals?

<comment><USER10> With a patent on a formulation and delivery method. Most patented drugs sell at huge multiples of production cost.

<comment><USER11> They can't patent it very easily if someone else invented it. Otherwise you'd see people trying to patent 'formulations' of their competitors' drugs all the time.

Even if they could patent a formulation, someone else can always jump in with a slightly different formulation at half the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The rates of serious side effects were much higher than any female birth control currently on the market [1]:

> Nearly a quarter of participants experienced pain at the injection site, > nearly half got acne, more than 20 percent had a mood disorder, 38 percent > experienced an increased sexual drive, and 15 percent reported muscle pain. > Other, rarer side effects included testicular pain, night sweats, and > confusion. One study participant died by suicide, though the researchers > determined it wasn't related to the birth control. Twenty men dropped out of > the study because of the side effects.

[1] [http://www.vox.com/2016/11/2/13494126/male-birth-control- stu...](http://www.vox.com/2016/11/2/13494126/male-birth-control-study)

<comment><USER13> I think thats the point a lot of people miss. Yes, standards are far more stringent today and we take better care of individuals during clinical trials. That doesn't change the fact though the bulk of responsibility for birth control falls on women and the history of birth control is particularly nasty and cruel.

<comment><USER14> Personally, I think if there was a birth control option for men that was even remotely in the same ballpark as the pill in terms of effectiveness, reversibility and pre-plannability it would easily equal or surpass the pill's usage rate.

<comment><USER15> if they came out with a monthly pill or a 90 day shot in the arm for men, the birthrate in this country would plummet nearly overnight. Right now men really only have 3 non-permanent birth control options and all of them suck:

1) Bag over the dick - makes sex less enjoyable

2) Fully trust your partner to not "forget" to take her birthcontrol or lie about being on it in the first place.

3) Abstinence.

I'm not suggesting all women or even a significant percentage of women are evil liars. However, there have been many studies & surveys that have indicated nearly half of all women are willing to lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of their partners wishes, and fully half have said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby's real father.

I'd much rather know for sure by taking personal ownership of birth control myself.

<comment><USER16> But would you take a 90 day shot if it meant experiencing depression, serious cramps, and genital bleeding for long periods of time?

I don't know a single woman who has been happy on a single form of BC for a long time. My fiancee was on the implant until she started bleeding and didn't stop for _five months_.

<comment><USER15> In my case I went full bore and got a vasectomy. I literally let someone take a scalpel to by boys so yeah.. cramps? sure.

Genital bleeding is really a very gender specific thing. Women already bleed from their genitals the issue is that it is now prolonged. If a man started bleeding from the penis that'd probably be a fairly serious condition lol. I get your point though. That said discomfort is a perfectly reasonable trade to avoid 18+ years of responsibility and a financial cost currently estimated at $250K per child (not including opportunity cost mind you)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _But these are healthy men — they 're not going to suffer any risks if they get somebody else pregnant._

I don't believe what I'm reading. Give up your life as you know it or live with the guilt of "not being there", + the social and financial stigma that comes with it?

No risks? You must be joking.

<comment><USER18> I read it as "health risks"... because of the context of the paragraph

<comment><USER19> What does "but these are healthy men" have to do with it? That paragraph is just poorly worded.

<comment><USER20> Clinical trials typically have something called a Data and Safety Monitoring Board, which periodically reviews safety (and, occasionally efficacy) data to decide if the trial should be halted prematurely. The DSMB is supposed to consider the potential benefits to the individual subjects and the population from which they're drawn, and weigh that against possible risks from the drug and the trial (e.g., complications from biopsies).

Since the subjects here are otherwise healthy men, who have other options for avoiding pregnancy, the DSMB should be fairly risk adverse and willing to kill the trial (as happened here). If, on the other hand, the trial were testing a new kind of anti-cancer therapy on patients with terminal cancer, the Board might be willing to tolerate a few more adverse events because the pay-off s are much higher.

The article seems to be saying, in a ham-fisted way, that the DSMB would have tolerated _slightly_ more risk to women because pregnancy also carries its own risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Removing the comment since it was misleading - I was under the impression that testosterone supplements increased aggression, but apparently the study that I linked [1] had some flaws. See crimsonpowder's comment as it has more to date studies on this.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693622/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693622/)

<comment><USER22> Since steroids are demonized, I had to make a throwaway account. Testosterone does not increase aggression, even when given in doses far above natural limits. [1] [2]

When I'm not programming, my hobby is bodybuilding. To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids. With a sample size of ~30 (fellow lifters and me), I can tell you that more testosterone makes you calmer, leaner, and bigger. My stress and anxiety on steroid cycles vanishes and all that's left is confidence, even with powerful steroids like trenbolone.

This study was designed by some of the most incompetent people around. Athletes inject long esters every 3-5 days and these guys were doing a shot every 8 weeks. Athletes take additional drugs to control the conversion of testosterone into estrogen (the hormone behind acne and mood swings). If I had designed this protocol, it would've looked like standard Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) plus an injection of nandrolone decanoate every week (which is great because it heals your joints). Of course, good luck selling bi-weekly injections.

For decades we shouted about reefer madness from the rooftops, arrested millions of people and threw them in jail, and expanded corrupt government agencies because marijuana was "dangerous". It seems like we're learning our lesson on that front and I hope we get our act together when it comes to hormones.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8855834](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8855834)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12062320](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12062320)

<comment><USER23> > To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids.

Does this not disqualify you? Or is everyone just cheating like in cycling?

<comment><USER22> There are divisions that are tested--monthly polygraphs and urine/blood. You've never heard of them. When people think about bodybuilding, they imagine freaks, which is not a natural state.

In software, we say: good, fast, cheap; pick two. In bodybuilding: big, lean, natural; pick two.

You can have a lot of mass and if you carry extra fat, or you can be shredded to the bone and carry a lot less lean mass. Naturally, the lower fat reserves run, the higher the chance that catabolic hormones break down lean mass. If you want to be big, lean, and win shows, you need to take the growth and steroid hormones to flip some bits on the config files in your muscular/adipose tissue to allow it.

Your DNA is the software for your body. Hormones bind to receptors on cells, get transported into the cell, bind to internal receptors, and then this complete structure moves into the nucleus where it transcribes certain DNA sequences into RNA chains that will be fed through ribosomes to produce proteins (your hardware).

Steroids/hormones (everything from vitamin D to testosterone) is the body's mechanism of editing /etc/* and calling kill -HUP on select daemons. Steroids evolved as the process for doing this because it's biologically impractical to grow a nerve ending to every single cell in the body.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Compare to "RISUG" (Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance). Which _appears_ to be completely safe and 100% effective. Requires a single, out- patient procedure (two injections, not counting anesthetic). And is easily- reversible.

Article: [https://www.wired.com/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/](https://www.wired.com/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2602785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2602785)

</comment><comment><USER25> Meanwhile social networks are all atwitter with women relentlessly mocking the study because the side-effects sound familiar to women, because the articles vaguely phrase it as "sexual side-effects, emotional changes, cramps" and the like, not "one of the participants comitted suicide and another is infertile".

<comment><USER26> And side effects of birth control options for women commonly include severe depression (yanno, the kind that induces suicide) and more rarely complications that can cause permanent infertility (septic infections due to punctured uterus).

<comment><USER25> Yes, but a suicide an infertility in a sample of 300? In a 1-year trial?

It's a matter of degrees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Vox has more info on this: [http://www.vox.com/2016/11/2/13494126/male-birth- control-stu...](http://www.vox.com/2016/11/2/13494126/male-birth-control- study)

The study was terminated after serious safety concerns. Over half of participants reported adverse effects.

</comment><comment><USER28> I previously posted about taking out my sperm production using 'the old heat methods':

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934396)

That post was 137 days ago was... June 19, 2016. I had verified on about May 15, 2016 that I was azoospermic, and stopped the aggressive heat treatments on that date. I had used a variety of testicle-heating interventions for about 4 months. My sperm were completely gone for 2 months, then slowly started to return.

I intend to get a professional sperm analysis at the six month mark (November 15th), then redo the heat protocol, collecting more data this time... I suppose I need some better slides.

<comment><USER29> Is there a way to follow your experiments ? What heating method are you using ? Have you developed a technique to evaluate your spermcount yourself ?

would be very interested to discuss more, send a mail if you like hn(a)tokiop(dot)com

<comment><USER28> > Is there a way to follow your experiments ?

not yet... I'll have to figure something out I guess.

> Have you developed a technique to evaluate your spermcount yourself ?

there's a new centrifugal sperm count device... ahh, here: [https://trakfertility.com/shop/trak-male-fertility- testing-s...](https://trakfertility.com/shop/trak-male-fertility-testing- system/) (oh my, those 'refills' are expensive...) Thanks for the jogging my memory about that.

This device is new to the market - it launched some time this fall, iirc. I bought a microscope: "yup, no sperm".

I'll send you an email tomorrow.

<comment><USER29> great, thanks for your reply, trak looks expensive indeed.

I am considering using a microscope too, interesting to know that the difference is clearly visible. Do you use any coloring ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can we agree that birth control of all kinds has a long way to go? Both men & women should have the option to be in control of their reproductive rights. Neither men nor women deserve to experience serious side effects from the exercise of those rights.

Some lucky folks can take hormones with very little effects. I (F) have had very negative experiences with hormonal birth control, I'd be bummed for anyone else to go through it.

<comment><USER31> > Some lucky folks can take hormones with very little effects.

There aren't any actual 'hormones' in birth control. These drugs are supposedly hormone-analogues, but they are only partial replacements for genuine ("bio-identical") hormones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A big missing point in this story: acceptance criteria for medicine in general is stricter now than when hormonal birth control for women was approved for use.

<comment><USER33> Also the word complain in the title should be report the whole point of a study is to identify side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > But these are healthy men — they're not going to suffer any risks if they > get somebody else pregnant.

This assumes that healthy men don't give damn. Which, I don't think is entirely true.

<comment><USER35> It's also stupid given that men are on the hook for child support in the event of an accidental pregnancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The side effects experienced by the men in this study are not to be taken lightly. They're scary and dangerous.

They're also no worse than the side effects (from depression severe enough to cause suicide to life-threatening complications and yes, permanent infertility) that women on various forms of birth control have put up with for the past several decades. And continue to endure.

And even in studies not about birth control, women's medical complaints and concerns about side effects have been shown to be taken less seriously by medical professionals than men's similar concerns.

Your sister, girlfriend, date. That woman you saw on line at Starbucks. They may not all be experiencing those side effects (neither did all the men in the study). But they're all risking a LOT to avoid pregnancy. Today. Right this moment.

Ask yourself why those side effects and risks are OK for them to bear but not for you. Ask where the research is on female birth control without those risks.

I'm not saying this study should necessarily have continued. Just that there's very good reason for the bitterness.

If you want to understand the female perspective on this news, try the below opinion piece:

[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5818f13fe4b0922c570bd335](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5818f13fe4b0922c570bd335)

<comment><USER36> Jesus christ, how about if women dont like it, they can stop taking it? There are plenty of alternatives, none perfect as Im sure you are eager to point out.

<comment><USER37> Most women only take birth control when they're in an active relationship.

Men seem to ignore that.

<comment><USER38> Though, from a planned parenthood rep

> Birth control can have non-contraceptive benefits as well, so plenty of > people use it regardless of their level of sexual activity or pregnancy > risk. For example, my dermatologist prescribed birth control pills when I > was a teenager to help clear up my torturous pizza face – the pregnancy > prevention part was a total bonus when I became sexually active later. Other > methods, like the hormonal IUD, can reduce and sometimes even stop menstrual > bleeding and/or cramps, a side effect that lots of folks appreciate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Seeing this and other stories like this posted on other forms of social media are frustrating since many females were voicing opinions that males are "weak/afraid/not able to deal with" birth control like they can.

>There's been a lot of eye rolling on the Internet about these side effects, because women have been experiencing things like mood swings and weight gain for decades with hormonal birth control.

</comment><comment><USER40> This piece by Dr Jen Gunter provides some better perspective on this study I think: [https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/new-study- doesn...](https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/new-study-doesnt-show- men-are-wimps-about-contraception-side-effects-low-vasectomy-rate-might/)

Short version: The study is interesting but the early termination is largely ethics review working as intended and does not mean that all research into this method is terminated or that the results weren't promising.

</comment><comment><USER41> lol the headline doesn't clickbait hard enough. Some participants became sterile... that's a bit more serious than simply quitting because of some "side effects".

</comment><comment><USER42> My wife was on birth control the first nine years of our marriage (excluding the gaps when our kids were born) and I've been responsible for the birth control for the last twenty years. That seems like a pretty fair distribution of the responsibility to me.

<comment><USER10> Years is a strange unit of responsibility. What were the methods, how do they compare?

Some methods are ongoing maintenance with side effects, some are permanent with varying short-term side effects.

<comment><USER43> I'm assuming his wife was on hormonal birth control while they were starting their family and once they were done he had a vasectomy.

Someone sane pointed out that the problem isn't the men in the study being wimps. Or that frankly there isn't any good drug target for male hormonal birth control. But that vasectomy rates are much lower than they should be. Because if you want something cheap, extremely safe and reliable, and you don't mind it being permanent, vasectomies are what you want.

<comment><USER42> I purposely left the "means" ambiguous but you're 100% correct. It was also my intention to point out that BC is a concern of a couple ... If you're talking about avoiding pregnancy during anonymous sex then the only logical stance is that both should be on BC since they can't really trust the motivations and diligence of their partners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> They injected test without an AI to control the side effects.

<comment><USER45> Context for those who are unaware of what an AI is: AI is an aromatase inhibitor that stops the aromatization of testosterone into estrogen.

<comment><USER43> What bothers me about this far as I understand the drug doing the 'work' has bad side effects when given to men. Not as in some percentage of men, but 100% of the men will have unacceptable side effects.

So they're also adding other drugs to try and compensate for those. And of course that doesn't work very well.

<comment><USER45> Which part? Letrozole, anastrozole, and exemestane (the three biggest AIs) are all incredibly effective at keeping estrogen levels within range given a knowledgable doctor providing supervision.

The biggest problem is that there is a lot of taboo with testosterone treatments and finding a doctor that keeps up to date with the research is incredibly difficult depending on where you are located.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have been thinking about it lately.

I am not including my judgement, as I do not have any, well, at least not a well reasoned one.

Disclaimer: I am man.

I try to list some of the possible fears related to this kind of drugs. Then it would be possible to discuss these.

1) Loosing control of emotions.

2) Permanent infertility.

3) Impotence (temporal or permanent).

4) Unknown risks.

Now these are simple straightforward issues that possibly could be resolved with additional research.

What will remain are more subtle issues. Nonetheless these could considerably affect the fabric of our society.

For example consider the situation where most women are fertile, most of the men have disabled themselves, some of men have kept themselves fertile.

</comment><comment><USER47> >

<comment><USER48> I believe there were two suicide attempts, one successful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Ow

</comment><comment><USER50> This headline is horribly editorialized. Can we have it changed to "Male Birth Control Study terminated due to safety concerns"?

Of note, 75% of the trial participants reported that they would have continued with this treatment if it were available, even after being informed that it was being terminated due to safety concerns, and the (male) study participants reported being more satisfied with the treatment than their (female) partners did.

Conversely, the adverse events extremely high rates of changed (mostly increased) libido, mood disorders, and pain (both at the injection site and elsewhere); and out of 320 trial participants there were two attempted suicides (one successful -- which the researchers attributed to academic pressure, but suicides rarely have a just a single cause). If the female birth control pill had the same safety profile, it would be _the leading cause of death in 20-45 year old women_.

<comment><USER51> the original was worse:

> Male Birth Control Study Killed After Men Complain About Side Effects

because... a man literally killing himself is complaining.

edit: "original" meaning TFA. the submission title here was a slight improvement, something like "Male Birth Control Study Ended Due To Side Effects"

<comment><USER52> There's your "feminists" for you.

If the pill had any sort of side effects like what these drugs had, they'd be the leading cause of death for women 20-45. But no, it's "weak willed men". meh.

And even after the study was cancelled due to safety, 75% of the men wanted to continue taking it. I guess its worth personal safety and health versus the risk of having a pregnancy with a woman when you don't want one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In this day in age of PC, you'd think NPR would pick a less offensive title for this article. It screams feminism.

</comment><comment><USER54> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom) have no side effects

<comment><USER55> Problem solved then!</comment></comment>


Top risks of outsourcing and how to mitigate them - <AUTHOR> https://www.mindk.com/blog/risks-of-outsourcing/ <comment><USER2> I've been outsourcing all my life, 19 years of career. I have a firm belief that outsourcing is an evil and should not exist.</comment>


Ask HN:  Should CS depts. reject creative applicants? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe CS depts should tell such applicants to apply instead to entrepreneurship or game design schools where they can better exercise their creativity? <comment><USER2> Programmers - good ones - _are_ creative people. Creative people sometimes make poor entrepreneurs. Maybe you should let them decide for themselves what they want to pursue?

<comment><AUTHOR> But why would they want to burry their creativity in the code where few people will see it?

<comment><USER3> Programmers don't have to code all the time. They could also do product design if so inclined.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to code with a broken wrist? - <AUTHOR>

"Snowmageddon" in DC has broken my wrist. (At least I think it has but it is impossible to find a non-emergency doctor right now.) Has anyone who had a similar experience found a way to code effectively with one hand? <comment><USER2> Didn't xkcd have a perl based hack that mirrored a keyboard so you only needed to type on one side and it guessed when you meant the actual key or the mirror one.

[http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed- key...](http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard- layout-for-the-lazy/)

Reading it now, the mirror shift is manually activated, probably a good job for a foot pedal, he only suggests automating the switching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly what i need. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello. Go get the wrist taken care of. You are risking permanent damage to your hands. Coding can wait.

<comment><USER4> Seriously. You think you've broken your wrist but want to go to a non- emergency doctor? Huh?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was a sprain on sat. DC hospitals are in a bad state still. 12-18 hour wait for wrists. I have an appointment at two set up yesterday morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Broke my wrist a week ago. I'm using one-handed Dvorak. Probably goo enough but slow learning. Thinking my wrist will be fine by the time I learn it. ;) Also use Windows sticky keys. If you don't already, now is a good time for using hotkeys and snippets / bundles

</comment><comment><USER6> Use dvorak. I know it sounds ridiculously simple but it works. And also it will help you learn new something for the rest of life. I say take this opportunity and at least try.

My second advice would be to really type with one hand (if your regular hand, right or left, is not broken). I did my high school CS project this way. Was fun.

Coding is more about thinking than typing anyway. (In that spirit you can try pair programming.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did dvorak for two years. I enjoyed. I agree regarding coding is not typing, but moving so slow is very frustrating.</comment></comment>


Why Start-up Lawyers Frustrate Me? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonmendelson.com/blog/archives/2008/06/why-startup-law.php.php <comment><USER2> Is there any place where lawyers (or investment bankers) are rated? It seems like this would be a nice addition to TheFunded.com.

<comment><USER3> It's an area where personal contacts can really help. I have a carefully husbanded (and very short) list of people who will work for equity + insurance cover.

If the list was longer I would be willing to share, but sadly there are very few people like that and they are already very busy :/ But drinking in lawyer/banker hangouts might net you a few good people - especially ones who want to get out of a mega firm and have enough secondary skills to make them valuable to a start up.</comment></comment>


How to Analyze Every Reddit Submission and Comment, in Seconds, for Free - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/ <comment><USER2> Question: why the hell do people use CSVs? Use tabs, goddammit. Documents are littered with commas. It's trivial to parse a TSV with awk - not so a CSV. There is literally no reason to prefer CSV to TSV, and yet it seems the former is the default for many people. Why? As a guy who parses text files all day, I never ever want to see a CSV again. End rant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much every programming language in existence has a utility for parsing CSVs into tabular data while handling commas sanely. (using awk for processing is not a typical pipeline)

More importantly, CSVs are handled natively by statistical programs such as Excel and R (you can change the expected delimiter while importing, but in my experience that leads to unexpected results)

<comment><USER3> Microsoft often fails with CSVs actually. I've found I can't copy/paste from Sql Server Management Studio into Excel if you have a mismatched double-quote in a cell - it fails silently and garbles your data.

That was embarrassing.

The CSV format is so messy that even big corporate implementations will have subtle bugs like that. Do not trust it.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft excel has the worst CSV defaults. The separating character is even locale-specific! Many locales use semicolon ";" instead of "," as a separator. Great stuff when creating web app exporters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To figure out what's the best time to post to reddit you want the number of successful submissions divided by the total number of submissions in that time period, not just the count of successful submissions. Otherwise you may just be measuring which time slot has the most submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The normalization constraint is enforced by the limited size of the front page (30 entries).

<comment><USER6> But the front page can churn a lot more during the busy times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool analysis. It's especially fascinating to see how BigQuery is so simple to parse and query and can easily give you access to powerful information like "What's the best time to post this on reddiy?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Man those charts are beautiful, and this coming from someone who knows R graphics and ggplot pretty well. Please may I ask a) what platform (OS/X / Windows / Linux?) and b) what are the axis and title fonts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a separate post on how the ggplot2 charts are generally done: [http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot- tutorial/](http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot-tutorial/)

Platform is OSX, title font is Source Sans Pro, axis numeric fonts are Open Sans Condensed Bold (the same fonts used on the web page itself; synergy!)

<comment><USER9> This is great, thank you. One note, though: I've yet to try it, but according to this stackoverflow-post:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1898101/qplot-and-anti- al...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1898101/qplot-and-anti-aliasing- in-r)

it should now be possible to get AA on both Windows and Linux via the Cairo- library.

I'll be playing a bit with R notebooks for my stats intro class, if I find the time I'll try to see if a) I get AA out of the box, or b) I can get AA easily by setting some parameters.

[ed: And if I do, I suppose pr to [https://github.com/minimaxir/ggplot- tutorial](https://github.com/minimaxir/ggplot-tutorial) will be in order]

<comment><USER8> Funny you should mention a subject which is close to my heart :-). [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6023179/anti-aliasing- in-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6023179/anti-aliasing-in-r- graphics-under-windows-as-per-mac)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To get back to the point of the article, is 130MM rows past the point where you should start reaching for "big data" tools? I recently did an ad-hoc analysis of a 50MM row, 3GB dataset and saw similar performance to the OP with a local postgres database. Is it worth using specialized analysis tools for exploring these types of datasets? I ended up writing a script to slice the data, but with `wc -l` taking 2 minutes on my SSD, it wasn't a great interactive experience. What do other people use for this stuff?

<comment><USER9> With "just" 3GB of data, did you try just working on a copy located on a tmpfs/ramdisk?

<comment><USER10> Wow, on my desktop with 16GB of cheap, 4 year old ram and a Samsung SSD I bought this year, I'm getting 30x faster io on the ramdisk. Clever solution.

<comment><USER11> Even old DDR-200 (aka PC-1600, 1600 MB/s)[1] is faster than the theoretical maximum of SATA III (600 MB/s). Wikipedia says SATA 3.2 can reach 1,969 MB/s, but the more recent DDR3-1600 is 12,800 MB/s and some DDR4 reach 21,300 MB/s [2] ... SSDs aren't even close.

DDR4 also theoretically supports 512 GB sticks [3] Can't wait.

1) [http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-memory-speeds- compatab...](http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-memory-speeds- compatability)

2) [http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/memory-ballistix- elite](http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/memory-ballistix-elite)

3) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note that part of the beauty of BigQuery is how it allows you to go deeper into any dimension without pre-planning (AKA defining partitions or indexes).

Case in point, many comments in this page point at the "best time to post" chart. But what if that time varies by subreddit?

The answer at [https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3neghj/qotd_best_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3neghj/qotd_best_time_to_post_for_success_on_each/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly OT but BigQuery has another fascinating and useful public dataset: the HTTP Archive. [https://www.igvita.com/2013/06/20/http-archive-bigquery- web-...](https://www.igvita.com/2013/06/20/http-archive-bigquery-web- performance-answers/)

<comment><USER14> Great link. Just ran Ilya's first query--median time to first render--against September Pages:

"median": "2389", "seventy_fifth": "3543", "ninetieth": "5191"

How did the Internet page renders get slower since 2013?

2.2s median, 3.3s for 75th percentile, and 4.7s for 90th percentile in httparchive:runs.2013_06_01_pages]

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know what "R tricks" was used to generate the graph depicting when the best time to post?

I quite like that visualization and would like to use it for something else.

"2.5 seconds, 2.39 GB processed, and a few R tricks results in this:" [http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-bigquery/reddit- bigquery-2.p...](http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-bigquery/reddit- bigquery-2.png)

<comment><USER16> He put a link to his R code in the blog post: [https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit- bigquery/blob/master/red...](https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit- bigquery/blob/master/reddit_bigquery.ipynb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amazing how the 1000Gb can suffice. Kudos!</comment>


Off the Grid: The Challenges of Offline in Mobile Development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/outsystems-engineering/off-the-grid-the-challenges-of-offline-in-mobile-development-9c468b206a61 <comment><USER2> data synchronization turmoil described well here - hoped for more solutions to challenge, tho</comment>


Pirates Are Increasingly 'Going Legal' in France – TorrentFreak - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-increasingly-going-legal-in-france-180707/ <comment><USER2> I don't pirate TV or movies because nothing's really worth the effort to bother watching any more. I like to pay for music because I buy it usually directly from the people that make it or some service where they directly receive profit from it.</comment>


How do founders create mobile apps fast for their startup? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Sahaj & have been working on a project so I was wondering if there is any platform to create an extensive mobile app without getting to much in coding.<p>P.S: Already tried Thunkable: It was too restricted to build an actual app. <comment><USER2> There's two ways to build faster: more people or cut scope. For startups with limited resources, cutting scope is usually the answer.

When you say "extensive app", that is a red flag for me.

I would focus on cutting scope and having the app do one simple thing really well. You don't need an extensive app - you should build something smallerish quickly and iterate on it.

To answer your specific question about the platforms without code, I'm not sure.

Hopefully cutting scope can help you launch quicker (maybe on thunkable) to give you a product to help convince mobile engineers to join your team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that makes sense and due to all these reasons, I thought why not make a flexible app-building platform which could help founders as well as tech engineers to build a mobile app fast so that they can iterate in less amount of time. [https://blup.in/](https://blup.in/) What do you think?

<comment><USER3> Asking a Ask HN question only to tell us about your product in the answer is not nice. If you think you have an interest product submit it without the deception.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh sorry about that. Didn't mean to do so, We were in a very early phase right now so, I just wanted to know if you guys are also facing similar kind of problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What kind of app are you looking to build?

If it is a general purpose application, I'd look at learning rails (this book was great for me: [https://www.railstutorial.org/book](https://www.railstutorial.org/book) ) and host on heroku.

If it is an API driven application, I'd look at using a tool like Zapier: [https://zapier.com/](https://zapier.com/) or Transposit: [https://www.transposit.com/](https://www.transposit.com/) (full disclosure, I work at Transposit).

There may be some low code/no code solutions for mobile apps, but I'm not in that space so not familiar with them.

Frankly, depending on your app, you could do a lot with google forms/typeform and some manual behind the scenes work: [http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

Again, it all depends on what kind of application you are trying to build.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, so I have been working on this project ([https://blup.in/](https://blup.in/)) to help founders to build native mobile apps for their startup on their own and was wondering if this makes sense for you!

And if you could give some feedback regarding this that would be great. and I just stumbled on this idea as I wasn't able to find any decent mobile app- building platform which can make things work.

<comment><USER4> Heya, as someone who hasn't seriously touched a mobile app codebase in years, I am not your target market :). Maybe there's a subreddit on mobile development where you can get informed feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, will give it a try!:)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best computer for programmers? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I think that you'll need to be more specific to get the answer that's right for you. Are you talking about the hardware, OS, or both? What languages do you program in? Are you planning on developing for mobile devices and if so what sorts? Are you going to use it in an office setting or on the go? This information is all very relevant.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this is a very arbitrary question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To each's own. But you will pry my ThinkPad running Archlinux from my cold dead hands and the first eight of you to try will be bludgeoned to death with it. The ninth will have a perfectly functional, if cracked, laptop.

</comment><comment><USER5> Terminal into a remote server and use the remote install of VIM then pretty much any computer will do.</comment>


How the banks ignored the lessons of the crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/30/how-the-banks-ignored-lessons-of-crash <comment><USER2> From the article: _" The problem with today's banks is that those who accept the risks are no longer those who get stuck with the bill._"

Much of the trouble comes from financial deregulation. There used to be laws in the US which forced considerable isolation between different parts of the financial system. There was the Glass-Stegall Act (1933-1999), which kept banks and brokerages separate. There used to be a separation between savings and loan companies and commercial banks. Savings and loan companies used to have to lend locally, and actually send people to building sites to see how construction was coming along before advancing more money. There was the Utility Holding Company Act, which limited public utilities to a tree depth of 3 in stock ownership, just so they could be regulated more easily.

With all that separation, parts of the economy could get into trouble without cascading. A stock market crash didn't affect banks much. The savings and loan mess of the 1980s didn't clobber the stock market.

2008 might have played out very differently if the former head of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, hadn't been Secretary of the Treasury. President Bush was prepared to let banks and brokerages go bust, in keeping with his conservative principles of letting the market decide. Paulson was the one who pushed for a bailout. At the point Lehman went bust, Goldman Sachs was about a month from going bust, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've thought for a long time - it doesn't matter if these banks broke the law - they tried to fly to high and broke a lot of citizens. I'm not a fan of government bailouts. But if it happens, they should split the bank up into smaller pieces; ban the management from working in the industry as management again, and give the new remaining company a bit of support to get going again.

Bailouts shouldn't come without a price to pay to the people involved.

<comment><USER4> That's basically how Sweden responded to their banking crisis.

<comment><USER5> "This Scandinavian nation of 9 million people has accomplished what the United States, Britain and Japan can only dream of: Growing rapidly, creating jobs and gaining a competitive edge. The banks are lending, the housing market booming. The budget is balanced." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/five- economic...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/five-economic- lessons-from-sweden-the-rock-star-of-the- recovery/2011/06/21/AGyuJ3iH_story.html)

Do you have any other suggested reading on how Sweden go about doing this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The last sentence practically says it all:

> The big banks have surely drawn a lesson from the crash and its aftermath: > that in the end there is very little they will not get away with.

and it tells the story of our societies failure and the total failure of our political systems.

Maybe in the history books of the future, it will be written as the beginning of the downfall of our societies.

But one thing is sure, the next crash will not leave us behind with a blue eye only, because the western countries have nothing left, to back-up the gambling losses of the banks.

The wealth of our nations already have been wasted to those, which did not earn it and either a total crash will follow, or revolution or they (those that we let gamble with our money) will be the new aristocrats (or "oligarchs") of a new era of slavery.

<comment><USER7> And when the big crash comes, there will be enough time between the 2008 crisis and the next one for the general public to have no understanding of the context and causes. They will be unable to connect the dots. And in their confusion they will give the politicians carte blanche to solve it. The politicians will turn to those who gave them the most money, the banks and their lobbyists, the very people who are behind the crisis, and give them complete power. Then these people will squeeze even more wealth from the system to line their pockets. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. After the 2ndWW the system had a chance to reboot and the previous governments have turned the rudder to more equality for all people -- thus we had two or three decades of wealth. But than the problems came and the politicians turned to the same old solutions and to the big money for advice.

Today, the money has the power and the politicians are mere puppets of the money. And we are all busy to survive ourselves and don't see how humanity and the whole planet is killed by greed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article doesn't mention a single time the word bail-in, which is the single most important change in banking regulation and what is likely to make bail out (i.e. tax payers recapitalizing a bank) unlikely.

A bail in is the power of the regulator to declare a bank non viable and to force losses on debt holders over a week end. This effectively auto- recapitalizes a bank without having the messy consequences of a bankruptcy, by forcing losses on creditors in the same fashion as a bankruptcy.

The article doesn't mention either that banks have more twice the amount of capital they held before the crisis and are required to hold massive amounts of liquid assets.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article. At the risk of fear mongering, the point about supermarkets was very powerful. "Greed is good" is fine until the money controls the entire infrastructure of society.

I live in Argentina, where so many factories were abandoned in our 2001 crisis that workers decided to re-open many of them. Would American workers have it in them if there were a serious liquidity crisis?

<comment><USER10> The problem with this is that a factory making stuff is useless if people don't want or can't afford the product. The Marxist labor theory of value asserts that value s created when something is made rather than sold, but 1000 pairs of shoes sitting in a warehouse miles away from any consumers who might want to wear them aren't making anyone better off.

<comment><USER11> More accurately its that the value is set by the labor required.

Beyond that for most people in a capitalist system, the basic process was one of commodity > money > commodity. Meaning that people made stuff to earn money, to buy more stuff.

But for the capitalists instead it was money > commodity > money+. Putting money into the production of stuff so as to earn even more money on sales.

Now where Marx went off the rails was with factory machines. He was sadly working under the preconception that workers were being exploited, and so ended up badly muddling the impact machinery has on the value definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ignored? The lesson was pretty clear: fuck up on a grand scale, and we'll soak the tax slaves to bail you out. I'd say they learned that lesson well.

<comment><USER13> It's a mistake to treat banks like a monolith. The banks making the worst choices really did pay the price. Three of the five biggest investment banks in the USA either went bankrupt or were sold off for pennies on their previous value. Fannie and Freddie were essentially bankrupted.

These companies share holders were wiped out. That's exactly what happens with other businesses in bankruptcy. Well, other than Bear and Merrill stockholders getting a small percent instead of zero. That was a necessity because an investment bank really can't operate through a traditional Chaper 11 bankruptcy.

So if you own a bank, you can't be confident that you'll get bailed out when you fuck up on a grand scale.

But there is an issue of industry wide fuck ups and their effect on everyone else. Banks have a very unique feature in that when their competitors falter, they falter with them. In 2008, you have banks with no exposure to the toxic assets having huge issues with liquidity.

The bail outs may cause moral hazard for that sort of counter-party risk. For example, if you are Goldman Sachs maybe you don't ask too many questions about AIG insurance because you figure the government will make good on it either way.

This is a very complicated issue.

<comment><USER14> Who went to jail for breaking the law?

<comment><USER15> In general, banks that break regulations don't result in people going to jail because individuals take action to avoid personal responsibility for anything. There are literally hundreds of thousands of pagers of them, nobody really understands them, and regulators decide which ones to take seriously according to the political winds of the day.

At top banks a major purpose of the regulatory department is to make sure nobody can be blamed for anything. Banks would rather pay billions of fines because no executive is going into engage in a more coherent compliance regime if it means risking jail for something nobody understands. It is common at certain commercial banks to deliberately engage in ignorance, at the risk of being find very large sums, simply to avoid the discovery risk--of regulators being able to pin blame on someone who raised some concern.

Recently the regulators have been hinting executives will be held responsible for systemic failures in their bank. Bankers have been responding by ensuring full compliance with regulations. Just kidding, nobody knows how to fully comply with bank regulations. Bankers have generally responded by ceasing high-risk activity completely. For example, there are tens of thousands of Somali refugees in the US. To my knowledge there is no commercial bank that will help them send money home to their families. Somalia is simply too high risk.

<comment><USER16> _> literally hundreds of thousands of pagers of them, nobody really understands them_

BaselII[+] and friends are relatively clearcut and are designed to prevent credit meltdown. The rules and reporting requirements are baked into Bank software and dataflow. Auditors will spank you with fines, and will revoke your accreditation for serial offences. This can force an involuntary acquisition.

 _> there are tens of thousands of Somali refugees in the US. To my knowledge there is no commercial bank that will help them send money home to their families._

That is the result of draconian anti-terrorism laws and has nothing to do with regulations around credit reserves.

You seem to be concerned around over-regulation, however the article is clearly arguing the opposite: _" Deregulation has allowed perverse incentives into the very fabric of global finance."_

<comment><USER15> I was replying to the poster who was wondering why people don't go to jail when banks break the law.

I was making the charitable assumption he was talking about banks that were breaking laws. Most of the significant regulatory actions taken against banks do not involve Basel capital requirements. With regards to the financial crisis, simply being bad at running a bank isn't a crime.

While we're on the subject, political leaders and voters do not really understand the distinction here either. Capital requirements are separate from, for example, anti money-laundering, but in the eyes of voters it's all more regulation against the evil banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone correct me if I'm way off, but I've been thinking that leveraged markets and margin trading have more of a negative effect than just creating risk of a domino effect. They also resist change (change that is sometimes needed).

If tons of huge banks have tons of money on the line in leveraged crude oil futures, then there would be resistance to global movement away from fossil fuels. Larger financial markets should in theory provide oil to the gears of the economy, but I think that if the industry becomes so bloated it will actually cause additional friction.

Please point me in the right direction if there is anything written on this topic.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an excellent article that gets to the crux of the issue: other people's money.

And, I can't help but delve one level deeper.

Who's money were the banks playing with? Pension funds, mutual funds... in other words, funds in which the ordinary taxpayer had his/her money.

Whom did the taxpayer bail out? His/her own money - which they "invested" in these funds/banks for safekeeping without sufficient knowledge of the risks.

Unfortunately, we haven't learned our lesson either. We still like to allow others to manage our money and risks for us.

</comment><comment><USER18> The lessons of the crash were: absolutely no one went to jail, and every banker involved made nearly as much money during the worst years of the crash as during any other year.

So, what's the problem?

<comment><USER19> Ultimately so did the taxpayer. Those bailout loans everyone likes to complain about were some of the best investments the federal government has ever made.

<comment><USER20> I doubt those loans had anywhere near the ROI of, say, the land grants for the transcontinental railroad, the Louisiana Purchase, or the Alaska Purchase.

<comment><USER21> Actually, the government did very well considering that the loans (especially the AIG loan) were short term and fully repaid. The government made $5.6 billion on $67.8 billion loaned, the Federal Reserve made a profit of $17.7 billion.

[http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/entities/8-aig](http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/entities/8-aig)

The Louisiana and Alaska purchases didn't turn a profit for years, and took a substantial amount of additional capital. AIG is back to relative stability and pays taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not so much that they ignored it. It has been positive reinforcement for them that no matter what they do, they will never be held accountable.</comment>


How Does the Brain Represent the Objects We Touch? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/articles/how-does-the-brain-represent-the-objects-we-touch-307051 <comment><USER2> It's more complicated than that - other senses such as sight are also part of the representation. Blind people who regain their sight do not recognise cubes and spheres that they would recognise by touch.

[https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured- blindne...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-blindness- see)

<comment><USER3> True. Also have to factor in the proprioceptive sense, EG, index finger in neurologically mapped space pressing on the arm of a chair. But what about the condition where an index finger is pressing against an adjacent thumb? Here percepts involve two conjoined sensors reporting as both sensors and objects being sensed. What's the priority source of the sensation?

<comment><USER4> Why should there be any? Advanced neural networks can easily take in such ambiguous inputs. Heck, even contradictory, explaining a few illusions in the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating approach. To evolve the current AI methods more study is required on how the human brain works and doing studies on the very early stages of the human brain at its infancy has the most potential to move us forward. What comes after Deep Learning? Probably a version of biotech, a synthetic capability that can learn based on the external sensory input.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. My sense of touch has gotten messed up for week or so a few times and those experience really made me appreciate how the brain integrates the senses to create the feeling of "normal" existence. You don't even realize this until the system breaks down. The closest thing I compare my experiences to is: imagine interacting with the world using a pair of super awesome VR gloves. Not muted exactly, just somehow unreal feeling.

Even though my muscles worked just fine, the differentness of sensation made it very to manipulate objects without concentration. This was especially true for fabrics and soft objects, which my brain found fascinating to play with but utterly incomprehensible. The unreal sensation slowly faded throughout the week but certain experiences—like trying to use pockets—would make the feeling of unreality come roaring back. I don't know if this fading was just my brain returning to normal or if it was my brain re-leaning and adjusting to what normal is.

<comment><USER7> > The closest thing I compare my experiences to is: imagine interacting with > the world using a pair of super awesome VR gloves. Not muted exactly, just > somehow unreal feeling.

Wow, this is really interesting because one of the side effects of excessive VR usage that I've read about is "hands not feeling real". Otherwise 'normal' people spend a ton of time in VR (where your hands are represented by largely immobile mitts at the location of your controllers) and start to feel like their actual hands 'aren't real'.

If you don't mind saying, how did your perception of touch get affected in this way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's very unlikely we will ever concretely define how the brain represents reality in its intrior model.

Given that I can conceptualize the existence of the letter "A" on the back face of a red square box sitting on a black floor and hypothetically view it face on,reflected in a mirror behind, through the box backwards if it's translucent, and _the box doesn 't even have to exist_ ... And then intrude being asked to put my hand into some three-space simulating feedback environment and "feel" the box which isn't there, or add VR glasses and "see" the box which isn't there...

Now consider a classic nuclear hot box, and put a real cube inside it and interact through the remote sensor waldoes.

Is that feeling any different? Is the brain model any different?

</comment><comment><USER9> It would make sense that any information is stored as a key-value pair in the brain. In this case, the key is the sensory input, and the value is the type of surface that is being touched.

Could the simplistic key-value pair work in creating more complex systems? perhaps it does, if keys are complex input structures which be divided into more keys in a tree-like fashion.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's established that either "keys" or "values" exist in the brain. It's more "stimulus-response", where similar stimulus produces similar response. There's a nonlinear classifier going on which tends to create categories for us, but it's definitely possible to produce cross-category stimulus.

<comment><USER11> There isn't a classifier in the brain, and there _certainly_ isn't a key-value store. The brain mostly runs the sensorimotor systems based on top-down Bayesian prediction, not bottom-up classification or regression.

<comment><USER9> The way living organisms behave certainly points towards a simple key-value store, where key is the current experience and value is the response.

<comment><USER11> Scientifically speaking, no, that's not even remotely true. What on _Earth_ gave you that impression?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shunning Amazon, Booksellers Resist a Transformation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/technology/shunning-amazon-booksellers-resist-a-transformation.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> Why do we tolerate the middle men at all? There are actually a number of easy ways to sell digital books online without an Amazon or anyone else.

For example, <http://pulleyapp.com/> is $6 a month. That's it. You can price your ebook whatever you want. You don't have to give another company a cut of each purchase.

There's also <http://www.shopify.com/>

There are open source solutions like <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-digital-downloads/>

The architecture of the internet is actually outdated. I mean, it may take a few years for people to realize this, but the fact that we have to go to a specific web domain, which is tied to specific hardware or private network, in order to search for things like Kindle books (or Google for practically everything else), is creating monopolies that aren't beneficial to consumers or retailers.

What we want is a content-centric internet that works more like peer-to-peer networking. Wikipedia has one variation of the idea <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking>

Usually people dismiss that idea out of hand in the context of e-commerce because they don't understand how peer-to-peer networking can be secure or private. But in fact it can be, it has to be, and it will be. Its going to take everyone a little while to figure that out though.

<comment><USER3> We tolerate middle men because it's easier for a single human with a singular vision to create an easily searchable marketplace of creators' content than it is for the creators themselves to come together in a cooperative and form it themselves.

TLDR; Humans are good at following leaders and complaining about results rather than working together and leading themselves.

 _(Presidential elections are a perfect example of this)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With Amazon playing the game of undercutting the entire market until everyone else is dead, the only way to win is not to play.

Every single purchase from Amazon — book or otherwise — is a vote for Bezos' monopoly over your culture.

<comment><USER5> In what world is pricing a digital version of a book slightly below its dead- tree variant "undercutting"?

This is not publishers shutting out Amazon, this is publishers shutting out digital books, and they have been doing so all along, consistently pricing ebooks at the same or higher price of print copies and colluding with Apple in a price fixing scheme.

<comment><USER6> Why would an ebook be cheaper? Is it not more convenient? Price comes from value, not what it costs to make so being easier to produce has nothing to do with the price (well, except the price floor).

<comment><USER7> Are you seriously suggesting that the cost of the physical book, and it's construction has nothing to do with the price of the book at the bookstore?

<comment><USER6> It has one thing to do with it: it sets the price floor. If the market value of that book is not past the price floor then there's no point in making it.

But some people who don't get how markets work think prices are: how_much_work_I_did+how_much_materials_cost+profit_amount_I_want. It's not. The item is priced based on the value it is perceived to provide.

<comment><USER7> The equation you just posted is the seller's value equasion. That's how the seller measures value in order to price the goods.

Things are priced by the buyer according to perceived value also, but using a different equation. a sale occur when the two points close enough that either or both parties are willing to adjust their price point to make the sale.

The seller "prices" the goods at marginal cost + profit. The buyer decides if there is enough values at that price for her to make the purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon is definitely changing the game. It's forcing the likes of Tim Ferriss to reach out aggressively non-traditional online outlets to promote the book, leading up to the release date on the 20th. Like he says, if this little experiment works, it can be disruptive - that is, publishers and booksellers alike will have to rethink their current distribution channels.

Thing can only lead to one thing from a macro perspective - a "land grab" of online distribution channels in the upcoming years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why everyone seems to hate amazon?</comment>


Ask HN: How can a software engineer contribute fighting Coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> Not only in respect of social distancing and giving money to research and science companies, but I just wondered how I can contribute fighting against Coronavirus especially as a software engineer?
I'm work for a software company for a living, but I also like to spend spare time on open source projects which I put on GitHub. Are there some open source projects in science where people even without master degree can contribute?
What was the most challenging time in your live?

  - My Grandparents: WW 1 & 2
  - My Parents: Rebuilding everything from scratch which my parents lost in War.
  - Me: The first two days after Pokemon Go launched I was not able to play it. And one day YouTube was not working properly in full super extra hyper resolution.
 Our grandparents (probably) were the World War 1 & 2. Our parents rebuild everything which was gone in the World Wars. Since Coronavirus will probably not the last disease of its kind, it almost seems that this our designation now. <comment><USER2> About a week ago there was the #WirVsVirus ("Us vs. the virus") hackathon organised be the German federal government, which saw a massive turnout (~43k people): [https://wirvsvirushackathon.org/](https://wirvsvirushackathon.org/)

It still remains to be seen if any of the ideas developed during this event will make a significant contribution towards fighting the pandemic but many of the proposals look quite promising already. The creative energy and the networking alone probably were already worth it.

According to the German federal government similar efforts in other countries (such as Argentina, Belgium, Canada or India) are currently being organised.

All of the projects are open source and many of them are still ongoing: [https://wirvsvirushackathon.devpost.com/](https://wirvsvirushackathon.devpost.com/) So, you can still contribute even though the main event is over.

There are many other hackathons currently listed on Devpost that attempt to address the various issues around the pandemic, too: [https://devpost.com/hackathons?challenge_type=online](https://devpost.com/hackathons?challenge_type=online)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest [https://foldingathome.org/](https://foldingathome.org/) If you have a good GPU your PC can run mathematical calculations to help beat COVID-19. There is more on their website

</comment><comment><USER4> You can help MoveOn to develop free campaigning software. [https://opensource.moveon.org/](https://opensource.moveon.org/) Perhaps not the most technically challenging work but it makes a ton of real life difference. The software is used by, among others, Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Right now it is used to raise funds for charities that help people affected by the Corona virus.</comment>


Show HN: Product Substitutes - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Search for the top alternatives for over 40k B2B software products.

We're doing a couple of things here that this community might find interesting:

A) Actually tracking when companies start and stop using a piece of software

B) Using this "switch" data to calculate a probability that the switches are a true substitution and then rank the top substitutes for reach product - <USER2> on actual switching behavior. We use a weighted average where the switches are weighted according to how much the product's categories overlap (every product is tagged with 1-5 tags). For example, Intercom and Drift are closely related so when a company stops using Intercom and starts using Drift that's heavily weighted. However, a percentage of the companies who stop using Intercom and then start using Zendesk are effectively substituting Intercom with Zendesk.

\- You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below:

[https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives](https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives](https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives](https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives](https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives](https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives ](https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives

)

Note: There's switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)</comment>


We May First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-forget-earth_likewell-first-find-aliens-on-eyeball-planets <comment><USER2> The background for the article is 'tilt erosion time' and the large number of tidally locked planets in the habitable zones of numerous low-mass stars. Many new discovered planets are tidally locked: Kepler-438b, Kepler-442b, K2-3d, K2-155d. It was previously assumed that tidally locked planets would not be habitable. New climate modeling seems to change this view.

No snowball on habitable tidally locked planets [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08904](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08904)

Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Dramatically Expands the Habitable Zone of Tidally Locked Planets [https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0515](https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0515)

Tidal obliquity evolution of potentially habitable planet s [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2156.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2156.pdf)

<comment><USER3> "New climate modeling seems to change this view."

And this modeling was confirmed to be accurate... how, exactly?

This strikes me as a classic case of goosing the model until it says what you want it to say, and then getting in the news. We have no reason to believe these models. We have no reason to believe prior models, either. We have no reason to have any confidence in our ability to model a tidally locked planet, of unknown and arbitrary chemistry, around an unknown star, for unknown periods of time, with unknown orbital characteristics across geological time, with zero data points. We particularly have no reason to believe in any estimates of how long such a system could last; it doesn't seem to do life much good if there's a place for it to exist for a couple of million years, followed by freezing. The simulation is almost certainly unstable here; very small changes in the stability of this configuration will have massive changes to the result over even a few million years.

There's also more to life than just a comfortable temperature. Life is possible on Earth in part because we have a moon and plate tectonics keeping this stirred up, so some of our vital nutrients don't just sequester themselves somewhere chemically convenient after a couple of million years and then hang out there for the rest of the planet's existence. Do these types of planets have a solution for that? We have no idea. (One advantage of the Earthlike planets is that we do in fact have an idea... we know it's at least possible once.)

<comment><USER2> >We have no reason to believe these models ....

What is your level of expertise or knowledge of planetary astrophysics and climate modeling?

<comment><USER3> Sufficient to know our data point count is zero, and the model can not possibly have been verified against anything.

This does not require extensive study.

Furthermore, as a bona fide, credentialed expert in computer science, I observe with the full power of my credentials that other fields frequently abuse modeling to get into the news, and that as I said, this shows all the hallmarks of being one of those. There is a profound, mathematical way in which models simply spit back out at you what you put in. This profound mathematical understanding seems to be broadly lacking, and it makes people grant _wildly_ excessive credence to unverified models. As just a single _for instance_ , I expect you have _no idea_ how many models they ran that produced lifeless planets until they finally found one that yielded a result conducive to life. Given the almost-certainty that these systems are deeply, deeply unstable, I expect it is almost certainly the case that they had a large number of runs where the system simply ran away in one direction or another.

Edit: I challenge the downmodders to produce a single data point about an eyeball planet in a habitable zone and demonstrate a model that correctly represents it. "We have to have data before we can verify a model" is not some sort of wild anti-scientific statement; the belief that a model _can_ be trusted without validation is the wildly anti-scientific position!

If some of you are mistaking this for a position on the climate debate, note that we _do_ have data for Earth's climate. Not as much as we might like (could always use more!), but it's certainly much greater than zero. You can literally get more than zero data just by walking outside and observing the temperature right where you are. This point has nothing to do with the climate debate on Earth.

<comment><USER4> I mean, you're not wrong, despite the hivemind's disapproval. Math and CS are our fields, and that's what these other fields are using and abusing, and many of us have significant cross-disciplinary expertise and experience that gives us good intuition about bullshit. The lack of skepticism is why the replication crisis is such an issue... your first reaction to any publication should be doubt.

<comment><USER5> A bunch of programmers talking crap on astronomers because "Math and CS are our fields"... Oh geez.

Somewhere in an alternative universe, there must be an astronomers' forum talking crap on developers because Heartbleed and Spectre show they all misunderstood Goedel's theorem, and believe me, I totally know what I'm talking about, I use computer every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most interesting thing that came to my mind reading this was how different life would be without any distinction between night and day. If the amount of sunlight reaching the planet were consistent at all times, would life (assuming it followed an evolutionary path like earth's) still evolve to have frequent sleep or rest periods?

<comment><USER7> This is so intriguing indeed.

Maybe most creatures on such planets would evolve towards unihemispheric sleep, as some Earth species did (eg. dolphins).

Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS) is sleep with one half of the brain while the other half remains alert.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow- wave_sleep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep)

<comment><USER8> I was wondering if such creatures would sleep at all with 24 hour daylight. They might evolve other mechanisms to get the same benefits.

<comment><USER9> Lions sleep 22 hours/day, even though it is light during many of those hours.

Light/dark is only one factor in sleep, there are others.

<comment><USER10> Evolution on earth is heavily influenced on dark/light cycles through its entire history. No evolutionary path that has received this influence can tell us anything about what would happen, on things that are highly correlated to it, for one that has never received this influence.

<comment><USER9> of course, but the reasons lions sleep far more than the day/night cycle requires are a factor that applies elsewhere, and thus might result in something similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imagine if such a planet had a small residual rotation left - any civilization on it would be constantly rediscovering millennia-old sites as previously abandoned regions rotated back under the inhabitable region.

<comment><USER12> This is a beautiful idea, would love to read a novel based on this premise.

The sort of forced nomadism from "only" having ~1000 years before a location becomes uninhabitable would make for some interesting dynamics. Real estate at the leading edge would be very valuable, potentially with some kind of homesteading dynamic for claiming the land (as nobody has lived there for thousands of years). Also value of land would depreciate over time because it would have an 'expiration date'.

<comment><USER13> I think its doubtful a society like that would adopt a capitalist land rights system.

<comment><USER14> First opportunity is always something to capitalize on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I agree with most of the other comments that there's little evidence for the argument of the article, it is refreshing to see a different take on the whole "earth-like planets" topic.

I am regularly shocked by how little imagination commentators in the popular science press seem to have on this subject. Even highly-respected scientists frequently refer to "requirements" for extra-terrestrial life such as carbon- based chemistry, the requirement for water, a mechanism of natural selection, etc, etc. (Actually I consider the last one, posited by Dawkins, to be probably the closest to the truth.)

I guess it's simply the anthropic principle at work, but even the nature we see on our own planet far surpasses our imagination often (especially at the microbial level), so why should we be placing any constraints on the rest of the universe?

<comment><USER16> Carbon-based chemistry isn't the worst requirement to throw in there, since the only plausible analogue - silicon - for example doesn't form stable analogues of the usual amino acids at room-temperature.

Now it would be reasonable to say "well what about extreme environments" but we are specifically looking for planets with temperatures and "ambient energies" similar to ours - so it's reasonable to think that whatever chemistry is there probably has to follow Earth to a large degree.

If instead we were talking about high-pressure hot Jupiters or something, then it gets more interesting - but that's going to be something so different we're unlikely to recognize it at all (what consciousness does sentient life which evolved in a gas-environment have?)

<comment><USER17> Well carbon based compounds are significantly more stable when they grow in size than any other atom.

That bond stability had to play a gigantic role over the last billion years of evolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a third option besides tidal lock and night/day cycle.

Some moons in the outer Solar System have Chaotic Rotation[1]. These bodies don't have a fixed rotation axis or period.

There could still be such a Moon orbiting a planet in the habitable zone, or even a small planet in a belt like structure orbiting close to a red dwarf.

I wonder what lifeforms could evolve when the amount of light/energy received is unpredictable and varies constantly?

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

<comment><USER19> Chaotic rotation occurs primarily in bodies that are not spherical. These tend to be smaller, because gravity forces larger bodies into spheres, and would have a thinner atmosphere if any due to the small gravity.

Not saying life is impossible on such a moon, but it would be even weirder than just strange day night suggests.

<comment><USER17> But wont millions of years of chaotic rotation cause a large body to become round?

Thousands of years this sounds realistic, but remember the scale of things is in billions of years.

<comment><USER20> I believe the chaotic rotation would stop as soon as the body became round, to conserve angular momentum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sun in a fixed position in the sky, impassible ice and desert barriers on all 'sides'. These planets must be full of flat 'earthers'.

<comment><USER22> Two of their most memorable technological milestones might be:

1\. First crossing of the hot side, passing through the point where "sun" is directly overhead. (Having the sun directly overhead would probably seem very profound and unusual to them.)

2\. First crossing of the cold side, passing through the opposite point.

Both would have unique challenges. Crossing the hot side would require an amazing ability to keep cool. You can keep warm by burning stuff and using lots of insulation, but how do you do the opposite?

Crossing the cold side would have temperature challenges and also very difficult navigation because of the continuous darkness. Maybe there would be moon(s) and stars for some light, though.

In both cases, I wouldn't be surprised if the first crossing had to wait until the invention of the airplane. You definitely aren't doing it by sea the first time like we did here on Earth.

<comment><USER23> IIRC from various articles, there might also be hefty storms around the terminator where the thermal difference between hot and cold plays out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow this brings back memories!

When I was 18, a group of friends and me were going to create a computer game based on this tidally locked concept. The story went as follows: An explosion would occur in a huge spaceship close to such a planet. Both parts of this ship would make an emergency landing on this planet. One part on the cold ice side, one on the hot desert side. Both teams would work their way towards the habitable ring, in a true real-time-strategy (Command & Conquer) fashion.

Needles to say, the game never went further than this concept phase.

Although we did visit a small local game developer here in Belgium called Larian, to get a feel of running a game development company (must be back in 1998). Larian is now known for the critically acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin.

<comment><USER25> I like it! And you could make sequels where they each develop into a different civilization with different technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article explains in length what Eyeball Planets are but gives little arguments why life should be more abundant there compared to other planets apart from a vague number argument.

<comment><USER27> Here are some reasons:

Pro:

\- Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way, at least in the neighbourhood of the Sun

\- Red dwarfs exist for a long time (longer than ten billion years) which gives life a long time to spring into existence (or start via panspermia) and evolve

\- Planets in the habitable zone of a red dwarf are tidally locked ("eyeball planets") due to their small distance to the star

So there is very likely to be a huge number of these types of planets with stable conditions over a long period of time.

Con:

Flares by the red dwarfs (which are not so rare) could destroy life on these planets

<comment><USER28> >Flares by the red dwarfs (which are not so rare) could destroy life on these planets

As a layperson, I'm curious how "bad" those flares are. Is it in the realm of possibility that life that develops on these planets could "hide" from these flares when they happen, or evolve defenses against them for when they happen? Or is it more "turn the surface into lava" kinds of events?

<comment><USER29> ~100 times the intensity required to kill even the hardiest microorganisms, bad.

[https://phys.org/news/2018-04-proxima-centauri-flare- powerfu...](https://phys.org/news/2018-04-proxima-centauri-flare-powerful- visible.html)

<comment><USER30> In the places that are exposed to the UV light.

You could have life that's 100m deep underwater, or living in protected structures (caves, etc). Life could evolve more protections against UV (e.g. some kind of carapace that the organism resides within).

Maybe the hard part is figuring out a way to use UV-heavy light to generate energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It has been said that the equators of eyeball planets are the most romantic places in the universe, as they are in a perpetual never ending sunset. Great place for a honeymoon.

<comment><USER12> Would be interesting to see how a real estate market would develop on a planet like this. My guess:

\- Side of planet closest to sun would be great for solar, agriculture.

\- Equator would be great for retail, recreation - constant sunset makes everything look beautiful.

\- Just further than the equator might be an idea place for housing - it's always dark, but short commute to light.

\- Further away from the equator would be cold, which could be useful for heavy industry (particularly exothermic processes)

I wonder how a society's 'clock' would work without the day/night cycle. Would people coalesce around a certain common "day" cycle or would everyone be on different schedules so society operates in shifts?

<comment><USER31> It's clear that the equator would be the playgrounds of the rich, where grass is always green and the lighting always perfect. Properties facing the sunset would fetch a premium over those facing the dark empty sky.

Going away from the center, properties would get cheaper due to harsher conditions, the poorest of people living in increasingly hotter and colder conditions. But they would also live closer to the factories that lie toward the poles of the planet, making for faster commutes.

Somewhere in the very hottest and coldest extremes, would be a good place to keep prisons.

<comment><USER12> If enough capital is available, I'd expect the rich to grade the equator so it slopes towards the sun, allowing for more real estate to get sunny views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This kind of reminds me of Norwegian mythology where, as far as I can remember, there was an icy world in the North and a fire in the South, and as the fire melted the ice, a thin strip of life began forming.

</comment><comment><USER33> Man, living on an eyeball planet sure would be convenient for producing solar energy.

<comment><USER34> I wonder whether you'd ever achieve the level of technology required to take advantage of it, though. Mining would be brutally difficult outside the habitable zone.

<comment><USER35> On a planet the size of Earth, or a few Earths, it seems the habitable zone should be large enough to develop a major civilization, no?

<comment><USER34> No idea. It just seems based on our own experience that resources aren't likely to be evenly distributed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article reminds me of another[1] HN article... this one says such a planet might be covered in oceans. I wonder what kind of life develops on an ocean planet? :)

(This is all idle speculation but it's fun to think about)

[1] "Group of scientists suggest that octopuses might actually be aliens " [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874)

</comment><comment><USER37> I find that it completely unlikely that 'eyeball' planets would have a life- supporting zone.

Over geological time period, the zone is likely to suffer unpredictable and novel variability which is not conducive to developing life.

<comment><USER38> Geological-timescale variability is VERY conducive to evolution.

<comment><USER16> We also don't have timescales for abiogenesis in a sterile environment - i.e. given the right ingredients and energy input, no existing life forms...how long does life take to appear? There's no particular reason that timescale has to be very long - and we know life on earth got started pretty damn quick after the planet cooled off enough (EDIT: in the sense that the planet is ~4 billion years old, the earliest life is dated to 3.5 billion years old, so the number is somewhere between a little over 0 and 500 million years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A pretty good short story set on a tidally locked planet is "Weep For Day" by Indrapramit Das.

</comment><comment><USER40> True thing. In "Another World" it looked totally different, both in fauna and flora.

</comment><comment><USER41> If only Hal Clement were around to write hard science fiction set on an eyeball planet...

</comment><comment><USER42> Life, at least it's origination, requires cycling - this is what allows for the original buildup and release of entropy gradients which follow spacetime trajectories different from the ones of the dead matter. For example you get cells (and especially precells) to get divided by temperature cycling.

</comment><comment><USER43> This would make for a great blockbuster movie. Something mad max-esque

</comment><comment><USER44> I would have added "maybe" at the end of the title :-)

</comment><comment><USER45> Would this eyeball planet structure affect geography? I.e. would the terrain be flatter? Would there be more or less volcanoes? No blanket statements could be made because it would depend more on composition?

</comment><comment><USER46> That's a lot of assumptions based on top of other assumptions. All asserted as the truth. I'd be more willing to listen if the author was aware of this potential for error.

<comment><USER47> The argument seems to stand on the greater risk to life on a planet with relative axial rotation. So one without is more likely to have "sweet spots."

As an earthling this is probably the first thing you think about when you read about Mars - too hot for life in the day, too cold for life at night. But that makes way too many assumptions relative to _human_ life. It assumes nothing could be rigid enough to adapt to day and night extremes greater than Earth's.

It seems to me the greatest challenge to thinking about potential life outside this planet is being mentally bound to the constraints of life on this planet.

<comment><USER48> >It seems to me the greatest challenge to thinking about potential life outside this planet is being mentally bound to the constraints of life on this planet.

I always felt the same way about astronomers linking liquid water with life but then again where do you start if you don't use the only known instances of life in the universe as a template? Maybe it happens that there's a viable evolutionary path for sentient Nitrogen clouds but how would we know that?

Furthermore it doesn't sound too absurd that the very complex chemical constructs necessary for life would have a greater chance to stabilize in less extreme environments with a smaller temperature amplitude. Especially if you're looking for complex life and not merely microbes (which tend to be a lot more resilient).

<comment><USER49> The rationale is because carbon chemistry is the richest chemistry out there. Other elements are not nearly as flexible to sustain complex molecules while maintaining the possibility of reversability in chemical reactions. Thats actually a very sound argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Akka 2.2.0 released – distributed, concurrent applications on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://letitcrash.com/post/54995640292/akka-2-2-0-released <comment><USER2> Thanks for the hard work! One of my favorite libs!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking forward to typed channels. I always found it very unfortunate that a scala library would throw away the language's wonderful type safety.

<comment><USER4> This wasn't really possible until the addition of the Macro and enhanced reflection systems in the most recent versions of Scala. Type information isn't stable across all runtime environments. They had to come up with a way to generate proper types for distribution on the fly.

Someone correct me if I'm mischaracterizing this please. I'm only a little familiar with the new typed channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So what's the advantage of Akka compared to Remote Stateless Session Beans?

<comment><USER6> Akka's Actors are different from EJB's remote session beans. There is some usage overlap, as both Akka and EJB provide a way to do remote procedure calls, however there are differences in the approaches used. For me the Actor model [1] is saner.

Also, Actors aren't only about RPC. All my actors are in the same process, being a capable multi-threading model. And Akka isn't only about Actors anymore. Scala's Future/Promise interfaces were nurtured in Akka and Akka 2.2.0 includes a cool foundation for asynchronous I/O [2], being an alternative to Netty and Mina.

It's an awesome library.

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

[2] [http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.0/scala/io- tcp.html](http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.0/scala/io-tcp.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm _very_ excited about Akka cluster. The company I work for plans on leveraging this in a big way. Most of our backend is already running on Akka and we've had terrific success with it so far.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is Akka supposed to do what OTP is doing for Erlang?

<comment><USER9> Near as I can tell, Akka is supposed to be Erlang for Java/Scala. OTP would be a layer on top of Akka.

<comment><USER10> It looks like they've got OTP-like functionality: [http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.0/scala/fault- tolerance.htm...](http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.0/scala/fault- tolerance.html)</comment></comment></comment>