Facebook IPO - Overpriced or Undervalued? - <AUTHOR> http://charanjit.posterous.com/facebook-ipo-overpriced-or-undervalued

<comment><USER2> 11% comes from credit and (as we know) 12% comes from Zynga.</comment>


Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions - <AUTHOR> http://www.bailis.org/blog/scalable-atomic-visibility-with-ramp-transactions/

<comment><AUTHOR> The new paper the blog post introduces: [http://www.bailis.org/papers/ramp- sigmod2014.pdf](http://www.bailis.org/papers/ramp-sigmod2014.pdf)</comment>


Google: 'We all have to invent the wheel' - the state and future of Web security - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/Google+We+all+have+to+invent+the+wheel/2009-1002_3-6189397.html <comment><USER2> FTA: "One benefit of Web applications is that patching is much easier than traditional PC or server applications. Fixes don't need to be tested on multiple versions of an operating system, as Google knows exactly what its infrastructure is."

Isn't testing fixes on multiple JavaScript engines essentially the same thing?</comment>


Dear Devs, please stop using Medium for your contents - <AUTHOR> Having a hard time to reading without the annoying popup for your sign up, please, let me know which other platforms do you use? <comment><USER2> This comes up again and again, but a personal solution until things move is to disable Javascript on Medium. Then, you are presented with a fully working page, without any distraction. Just disable JS on Medium. It "gracefully improves".

<comment><USER3> I've reached my article limit and it won't show me the full text even with js disabled.

Do people realise that interested readers aren't getting to their content because they chose Medium?

<comment><USER4> In chrome, open developer tools then in "Application" tab, "Clear Storage" subtab, click "clear site data"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get why devs work so hard on their project/tutorial, only to be lazy on the last step (publishing/announcement) and give away their content to be published on Medium.

It's very easy to roll out a Hugo/Jekyll/Zola static blog published for free on Github/Gitlab/Netlify. Then point it to your own domain name so you own your content and don't have to worry about what some 3rd party site does on top of your writing.

<comment><USER6> It's not laziness. Medium comes with an audience and rolling your own likely doesn't.

It's a question of do you get more people from medium than people you lose from other sources because your post is on medium?

<comment><USER7> What audience? All the medium articles i read, i found here, in reddit or Twitter

<comment><USER8> You just described three link aggregators, sites whose purpose is to spread third party content. The audience is the people posting Medium articles, and the people who follow them back to Medium.

<comment><USER7> shocking i know, but i don't follow anyone on medium (i dont even have an account)

<comment><USER8> Neither do I, but that isn't really relevant. Medium has an audience of readers who don't sign up for the service, but that's still an audience.

<comment><USER9> If the responses on their site to articles posted there are any indicator they don't even have a built-in audience any more. Even articles that make it to the front page here, the hn comments are half or more people complaining (rightly so imho) about medium.

Medium used to be good, people published good content there. but as they increased their gatekeeping it seemed like there was a sharp decline in quality and quantity.

<comment><USER8> I'm not disagreeing, but it doesn't really matter how high the quality of the content is on any site, more people on HN are going to complain about the presence of javascript and attempts at monetization than will ever bother to read the article.

It only happens more often with Medium because Medium articles are posted more often. I don't think it's an objective indicator of much, beyond HN's generally cantankerous attitude towards the modern web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Medium hate comes up again and again here, and I get it to a degree. But, Medium delivers an audience that hosting your own rarely does.

Fair enough if all you want to do is post to HN, but if posting to HN is only one delivery channel, you're giving up a huge audience just to placate techie UI sensibilities on this site.

Posting on my own blog gets me single digit views, because I don't have an audience of my own. Sure, I could and probably should work on that, but working on that is a long term plan. Posting to Medium via an established publication such as The Startup, HackerNoon or The Mission has delivered 5k to 50k reads (not views) for me in the past.

I think a sanity check is required here. Annoy a few techie users or have your work read by many thousands who would not otherwise read it. To me that's a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I tried dev.to but the signal to noise ratio was much worse than Medium. It combines the worst parts of Medium with the worst parts of Twitter. I had high hopes for it though and hope it can improve.

Medium seems to strike a good a balance as I have been able to find with regards to quality albeit with a little searching.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, the quality of content on there isn't poor in itself but is aimed at getting low hanging fruit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I self-host two blogs [0][1]. I even made the static site generator I wrote for the second one available [2].

Each time I visit a Medium page I wonder why people are still using it.

[0] [http://johnbokma.com/blog/](http://johnbokma.com/blog/)

[1] [https://plurrrr.com/](https://plurrrr.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)

</comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug: I created Glyph, a static site generator utilizing Github Issues and Github Pages. It should be great for developers because 99% of the time you will use Github anyways and you don't need any other accounts to publish. (hn link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776047))

Checkout the following resources if you are interested:

[https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph](https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph)

[https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-zero](https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph- zero)

As an example have a look at my blog (not very active):

[https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/](https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/)

You can click on the "Discuss" button to go to the "original" markdown as a Github issue.

<comment><USER15> I quickly looked over your GH pages for examples and didn't see anything beyond the link to your personal blog, which you note hasn't been updated in a year and a half.

Maybe making a post on that blog about how you use your own software would make more people interested in your project? Plus it can act as documentation.

It would greatly reduce the friction people have trying out something new to see it being actively used.

<comment><USER14> The blog I linked was created with Glyph. There is also a blog post about it:

[https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/2-introducing-glyph- static-...](https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/2-introducing-glyph-static-site- generator-powered-by-github-issues-and-pages.html)

In fact that is the reason why I linked it because as you said I am not writing any blog posts these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I host a simple Hugo blog on GitHub pages. The only cost for me is the domain name. Highly recommend Hugo, since it makes everything outside of writing easy.

The downside is that discoverability is lower, but my goal for it is writing for myself rather than getting page views.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://github.com/fnune/nay](https://github.com/fnune/nay)

A Chrome/Mozilla extension to help you avoid clicking on links from websites you don't like. I use it to block medium.com links.

<comment><USER18> Been wanting something like this, will try it on FF desktop.

Mobile support would be a big attraction for users with low-powered devices. Accidental taps on slow links to fatty content e.g. news sites can trigger some pain.

<comment><USER17> It supports mobile I think. I'm the maintainer, so please open an issue if it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I moved off medium to self-host my blog via Gatsby and Netlify. It's a far nicer experience and I wouldn't go back!

</comment><comment><USER20> For a personal domain, own your own domain or be owned by someone else.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if there is space for a web-ring type solution. Have a discovery service that an author plugs at the bottom/footer of their posts that can link to similar labeled articles. Now you have discoverability and control of your content. For monitization, you could go with ads and/or subscription.

</comment><comment><USER22> gitlab.com/pages provides many example blog engines they will host for free

</comment><comment><USER23> I use Medium to direct traffic to my personal blog. This is what 3rd party publishing channels are for, be it Medium, LinkedIn or FB groups/pages.

<comment><USER24> Exactly my thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I setup this alternative for Medium, [https://bun4.com](https://bun4.com). Make a Pull Request on [https://github.com/pinehq/bun4](https://github.com/pinehq/bun4) and it automatically compiles. Stop complaining and start writing ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> Fully agree with you, best option is to start your own blog using either Blogger.com or a statically hosted site at Github.com (they allow static- hosting). And if you can spend some money on it, why not register your own domain and go for your own Wordpress or Drupal hosted site? Own your content and be your own master if you call yourself a developer!

</comment><comment><USER27> It might not work for everyone, but you can answer your own question on stackoverflow. If you want to write a blog post about how to setup e.g.: a Webserver on a raspberry pi, you could formulate it as a question on stackoverflow, and answer your own question. I personally really like this approach.

</comment><comment><USER28> I post to my own blog and cross-post to Medium. I get a lot more views on my Medium cross posts - that's why I continue to post there. I've found job freelance opportunities via people visiting my Github, which they said they found from Medium.

</comment><comment><USER29> I use jekyll since ages, since it was easy to set up && publish, and lately started syncing the content to dev.to in order to try to amplify the audience (although most of what I write, are just oneliners, so that I don't forget)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the best way is in the middle. It is called POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You own your stuff by first posting it on your own page and then syndicate it to other places for visibility.

</comment><comment><USER30> Publish on medium?

I instantly close your post.

<comment><USER31> The reason people publish on Medium is that it comes with a large, eager to read, audience.

People see numbers of visitors in Medium that they don't see when they post on their personal websites...

So, unless you also come and check people's personally hosted blogs, and convince millions to do the same, don't let the door hit you on your way out when you "instantly close" Medium posts...

<comment><USER32> Not sure why but I expect a big storm when Medium does something "outrageous"/"politically incorrect" and then people would move in mass. We need to calculate teh cost of a possible migration in the future, what happens if you delete your account in protest or they will delete it for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I agree for a number of reasons. I strongly dislike Medium, and avoid it unless there's something specific of exceptional interest that is only there (which is reasonably rare).

</comment><comment><USER34> I automatically follow any developer's blog I come across with an RSS feed. Just putting it out there for anyone who has a blog and wants to share :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Someone should start a personal/company dev blog aggregator. Don't allow any medium.com URL's.

</comment><comment><USER36> As usual whenever this comes up, no alternatives recommended. And the truth is, all alternatives are worse currently. They either require way more out-of- scope effort, or draw in a lot less potential readers.

</comment><comment><USER37> jesus get a MySpace account and be done with it ;-)

</comment><comment><USER38> Medium is more of a traffic generator for me. I post articles on my blog and then simply _Import_ them on Medium. Almost 99.9% of my articles are free without any paywall.

</comment><comment> dr-detroit Those articles aren't for you they are to impress potential employers who can afford to pay for Medium.</comment>


Sign In with Apple JS - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/signinwithapplejs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/signinwithapplejs <comment><AUTHOR> This submission was a misfire. Can a moderator please kill it?</comment>


Today's Google Doodle: Grace Hopper - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2013/grace-hoppers-107th-birthday-5447077240766464.3-hp.gif <comment><USER2> Grace Hopper on Nanoseconds: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Her appearance on Letterman was impressive. Relevant part: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ#t=304](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ#t=304)

<comment><USER3> Wow... amazing person!

<comment><USER4> Yes! I particularly liked:

"So you worked on the first ever computer in the U.S.?"

"Yes."

"And how did you know so much about computers back then?"

"I didn't. It was the first one."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hands up who was expecting some kind of univac emulator in javascript?

Still, a nice bit of pixel art.

<comment><USER6> I think they found a nice balance between honoring her life and creating something that is pleasing to look at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ha, glad they included the "bug".

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I missed that

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first C++ book, 'A Computer Science Tapestry', had a page dedicated to her that has stuck with me since I read it in highschool.

Grace Hopper "was a proponent of innovative thinking and kept a clock on her desk that ran counterclockwise to show that things could be done differently. Although very proud of her career in the Navy, Hopper had little tolerance for bureaucracies, saying:

It's better to show that something can be done and apologize for not asking permission, than to try to persuade the powers that be at the beginning."

</comment><comment><USER10> The reason I became a programmer. Grace -> COBOL -> My father -> Me. In the basement, pecking away at tiny green monochrome screen and loading 8" floppy drives on Cromemco Systems-3, COBOL was the first language I tried to learn, wee age of 12. Although, honestly I don't think I ever grokked it as much as the simpler language put forth in thy little white book on my father's bookshelf by fellows K&R.

</comment><comment><USER11> Slightly off topic, but has anyone read "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age"[1]? It's been on my wishlist for ages, but I've not got round to buying/reading it yet.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Information-Lemelson- Studi...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Information-Lemelson-Studies- Innovation/dp/0262517264)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hot-linking to the gif omits the caption:

"Be a maker, a creator, an innovator. Get started now with an Hour of Code."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw)

</comment><comment><USER13> The mother of all Grace Hopper biographies (very long):

[http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm](http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm)

</comment><comment><USER14> She was back from the era when most computer programmers were female. Until late 1940s, the word "computer" meant a clerk who used did long clculations by hand or adding machine. These were mainly mathematical tables or military operations. Some of these women transitioned into programing jobs when the first programmable digital computers began in the late 1940s. Programming was either switchboard rewiring or punch cards/tape then.

<comment><USER15> Then the men realized there was money in it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you just subtract the birth year from the current year, you would have a birthday every day.

<comment><USER17> That's true, and I'm sure they're well aware of the maths, but doing it this way makes it really simple for people who aren't programmers to understand what is going on.

<comment><USER18> Also demostrates how easy COBOL is, once you move past the stigma of it not being flavour of the month.

As an educated guess I'd say it is also the longest serving programming language still in use today, but I'm sure somebody with a weaving loom would argue that.

<comment><USER19> Really? I didn't know it was Cobol. Looked a bit SQL'ly to me :)

But yeah, it does look easy to read

<comment><USER20> COBOL predates SQL by about 15 years. In the 60s and early 70s, there was a school of thought that programming languages could be made more like written languages, and that this would make it easier for the programmer to reason about programs, especially in the business context where companies were starving for programmers, companies who saw the university system as focusing too narrowly on academic theory. We get BASIC in the interim between COBOL and SQL as well. COBOL, BASIC, and SQL were all designed with non-Computer Scientists in mind, for "practical" applications.

<comment><USER21> > more like written languages, and that this would make it easier for the > programmer to reason about programs,

It's also said that it was intended to help non-programmers:

1\. Help managers better understand what the heck their employees were doing.

2\. Enable other non-technical stakeholders to participate in reviewing the business logic.

As you can imagine that didn't actually help very much.

(I've heard people express similar skepticism about natural language testing frameworks, although I don't know if that's fair or not.)

<comment><USER20> At the very least, I think it's an unnecessary context-switch. Why introduce yet another language in your toolchain? The boss isn't going to be able to understand the natural language tests, because s/he will be introducing their own assumptions to the ambiguous nature of human language. Like how non- programmers tend to use "or" to mean "exclusive-or". Or the plethora of issues that come up when assuming N-based indexing when you actually have (1 - N)-based indexing (for values of N that are either 0 or 1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> SUBTRACT BirthYear FROM CurrentYear GIVING Age

Isn't that off-by-one, for half the year (on average)?

<comment><USER23> If you're born on January 1, you get the right answer all year long. If you're born on December 31, you get a new value on New Year's day and it'll be wrong all year.

EDIT: After re-reading you, yes, it's off-by-one for someone in the population for half the year on average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the vein of the Letterman clip. I also saw this talk she gave: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra2kt1Mpg8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra2kt1Mpg8)

</comment><comment><USER24> mother of debugging. should have worked on that.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is the bug in that code snippet intentional?

</comment><comment><USER26> Cute, but please fix your massive privacy and data violations before pissing about with "Doodles".

I will not be fooled into trusting Google without massive transparency changes to how they operate.

<comment><USER27> Your whole comment is off topic for this thread. There are numerous other threads on HN dealing with NSA snooping that you can troll in.

<comment><USER26> Drawing attention to massive privacy violations is not irrelevant whenever Google are mentioned. We should not be forgetting who we're dealing with.

If you were thinking of visiting North Korea for a holiday would it be "off topic" to mention human rights issues?

<comment><USER28> Nobody give this person any more coffee

<comment><USER29> > Nobody give this person any more coffee

.. not quite a human rights violation, but man, that's pretty harsh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ah google, still using GIFs in 2013... can't use APNG because it's "not invented here".

<comment><USER31> Why should they use APNG? It's an unnecessary complication with no benefits for the aesthetics they are going for.

<comment><USER30> This doodle as GIF: 97 864 bytes Converted into APNG: 77 472 bytes

<comment><USER32> Browser share that supports APNG: ~25%

Browser share that supports GIF: ~99.9%

<comment><USER30> Google is not just posting doodles on the front page. Last time I heard they also have a browser. So they can shift those percentages, and by helping APNG, they can help themselves: their front-page will load faster. It's a win-win.

<comment><USER31> Chrome probably should support APNG. But I'm not sure it would be wise to use APNG even if Chrome did support it.

<comment><USER30> This site doesn't seem to have any problems serving better-looking APNGs for Firefox users, and plain old GIFs to all others: [http://www.rw- designer.com/cursor-set/icq-flower](http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-set/icq- flower)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ASUS EeeKeyboard with capacitative screen as mousepad - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/01/asus-eeekeyboard-gets-really-really-official?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_engadget <comment><USER2> What's capacitative ?

The original title is "ASUS EeeKeyboard gets really, really official".</comment>


Clickbait in the Physical World: A Social Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.anishathalye.com/2015/02/20/clickbait-in-the-physical-world/ <comment><USER2> Fun stuff :)

IMHO the fact that "mocha" got the highest engagement also shows that it's the most easy word to type, as opposed to, say, "macchiato"

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm wondering if "mocha" was just most guessed.

Also, didn't anyone at CSAIL write a simple bot to try all the coffee types (eg the list here - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_drinks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_drinks))? Or perhaps the most prolific link follower did but just disguised it well??

In order to rule out _simple_ guesses you could have used a code after the coffee name - "/mocha64", "/espresso42", etc.. Without that any analysis of the geographic preference is immediately muddied. Could have chalked the entire board as a giant QR code .. obviously you'll need to design a chalk board plotter first.

<comment><USER4> QR was also a first thought that came to my head. You could also use simple, popular and _unrelated_ words, i.e.: sock, mind, late etc. as well as provide hints that it's actually Chalk (!) Chase not guessing game.

It all boils down to the fact the you "didn't really have any concrete hypotheses".

However it's interesting. It would be great to find out the conditions in which people will be most engaged in looking for the next info. But there would be sooo many variables to control ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, in hindsight, it would have been a good idea to have hard-to-guess URLs to help with controls. I like the idea of using URLs like "/mocha64" \-- could have kept the theme of coffee while filtering out some noise in the data.

There are so many variables to control, things that I hadn't thought about before writing the URLs. The guessable URL part was perhaps one that I should have caught, but there were so many other things. I know that people did things like taking pictures of the boards and sending them to social group chats that they were part of, which is something I never thought of before seeing/hearing about it happening on Friday.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Found CUDA, Or: Rewriting the Tag Engine - <AUTHOR> http://blog.marcgravell.com/2016/05/how-i-found-cuda-or-rewriting-tag_9.html <comment><USER2> This post suggests that Stack Overflow has about 30,000 distinct tags, which seems like a good fit for a bitmap index:

[https://mattwarren.org/2015/08/19/the-stack-overflow-tag- eng...](https://mattwarren.org/2015/08/19/the-stack-overflow-tag-engine- part-2/)

Not that that's the whole solution, but certainly something I'd look into before digging into CUDA.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can tell that you wanted a clear distinction between implementations for comparisons sake. And I don't doubt that you could probably achieve higher performance in each respective branch with Cuda and c++ for GPU and CPU branches.

I get why you'd choose Cuda over opencl for pure gpgpu code, but when faced with the requirement of having both a CPU and a GPU version why not use openCL to keep both code paths as close as possible? Did you write it so both branches live in a single build and can select the optimal path at runtime and looking at the hardware and seeing what is available? Or do you maintain two separate builds that are deployed to different servers?

<comment><USER4> You can actually go the other route too. There's a library called Thrust that provides a STL-like interface to CUDA, as well as "glue" functions that go between the finely-tuned stuff.

One of the things Thrust supports is an OpenMP backend, so it can emit code that runs on a CPU instead of a GPU. I've never tried it so I don't know how good it is, particularly on the collective operations. But I assume if what you want is a "#pragma omp parallel for 1-to-N" then it's probably great. Construct your operation as a functor and use a thrust::for_each from 1 to N.

<comment><USER5> Works reasonably well, but it absolutely ruins your compile times.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I totally agree. It's not just the OpenMP backend, it's Thrust in general. I had a project that was probably 5-10k LOC and it took like 2 minutes to compile with Thrust. I'm pretty sure nvcc doesn't handle the templating very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couple comments here: GPGPU programming is really good if you can construct your problem as a sorting problem (eg "sort results so interesting tags are at the start of the array"). From what I've seen this is reliably the most successful approach.

One problem can be when the number of output items from a given input item is unpredictable. You typically want to run a prefix-scan within a block to compact the block's output into a single chunk until your shared-memory buffer is full, or you've reached the end of the data set. Then, you do an ATOMIC increment on a global "slots-used" counter for your output buffer, and write as a big chunk. This is a lot more complex than sorting, but reasonably fast.

If you want to guarantee that your output will fit in the buffer, you need to run the operation twice. The first run is a "dummy" that writes no output, just figures out the last input element that can write data without the output buffer overflowing. In some cases it may be preferential to just allocate a reasonable guesstimate of the 95% case and not write past the end if a true worst-case scenario happens.

Try like hell to keep everything in registers or shared-memory and avoid writing intermediate data. High utilization of memory (order complexity) kills performance, both directly (hitting global memory incurs lots of latency) and indirectly (GPUs have the greatest speedup when working on the largest possible working set).

</comment><comment><USER6> Surprised people are still using CUDA, is OpenCL still not as good? Or is the vendor lockin not a problem?

<comment><USER7> > is the vendor lockin not a problem?

It so happened that almost nobody in the (previously tiny) industry specialized for using GPU cards for computation had used any cards other than NVIDIA early on. NVIDIA had listened to that niche market by releasing increasingly performant hardware for compute needs, while other manufacturers kept ignoring the niche and focusing on graphics. As a result, very few on the software side have a burning desire to do free work to support cards made by anyone other than the Big Green, even if they had equivalent performance (they likely don't).

This may seems strange to web devs who remember the hard-fought war against Microsoft's lock-in on the Internet via IE. But NVIDIA is seen in a different light---it is seen as a benevolent company without which the GPU-for-compute platform wouldn't even exist.

<comment><USER8> AMD GPUs have consistenly had higher compute performance than Nvidia. The Fury X, for example, consistently outperforms the Titan X for half the price.[1] That's why AMD has completely dominated the bitcoin / cryptohashing scene: money is involved, so people are willing to spend time optimizing for different hardware.

Nvidia captured this market using typical vendor lock-in tactics: they didn't support OpenCL 1.2 until many years after it was released, and they still don't support OpenCL 2.0+.

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd- radeon-r9-fury-x-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd- radeon-r9-fury-x-review/24)

<comment><USER7> I should have qualified "compute". I meant single- and double-precision floating-point operations that are not graphics. Yes, AMD GPUs outperform NVIDIA on cryptohashing benchmarks which require high integer performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> && / ?: may not be "branching operations", the compiler could determine that the operands have no side effects (q->score is used in both branches and q must be a valid or invalid pointer in both) and collapse that down to just register select operations and math internally. Or, it may involve predication, with only the assignment of i to a register previously filled with 0 being predicated. The compiler has heuristics internally to determine what it should accomplish via math only versus predication versus branching, based on how long code sequences are, whether it can determine if the predicates are warp-uniform or not, etc. You would need to look at the SASS to see what is really going on. Furthermore, there may be more or less functional units in the HW for each kind of operation that you think of substituting for the original; let the compiler choose first.

However, this is not the level of optimization one should be concerned with first (or even fifth) in a problem like this in CUDA. This kind of algorithm should be global memory bandwidth bound only. Concentrate on scanning through the data once and compacting as you go, so you touch as little memory as possible.</comment>


Indian startups have raised a record $11.3B this year - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/india-tech-startups-fundraise/ <comment><USER3> I think the current situation of India is similar and can be compared to the DotCom bubble of '90s (in US). In Bengaluru it is said that, in almost every home you will find one CEO of a startup.

I might be wrong but just thinking out loud.

For example: PhonePe app - It's just a payment transfer app by Flipkart (although it is much better than GPay, in terms of usage speed) - its current valuation is around 7-8B+ USD. I don't get the much reason. There are no intermediary charges as PhonePe uses UPI Payment Interface ([https://www.npci.org.in/product-overview/upi-product- overvie...](https://www.npci.org.in/product-overview/upi-product-overview))

<comment><USER4> I have always suspected the beefed up valuations of payment apps in India related to lack of regulations in place for use data protection and privacy. Most of these apps seem to be making money on some sort of data driven business models.

If that is true, the valuations do make sense. If you can provide purchase power metrics for half a billion users, a $7B valuation might start to seem modest.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this perspective.

I think CRED is also doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really really hope the Indian "startups" aren't closet selling $2 for $1. Given the slew of discounts, cashbacks, and offers, I am left to wonder if at the cost of growth, the fund management has gone to the wolves.

The Indian consumer is very fickle and always shops for cheapest alternatives and looks for the best deals. I'm yet to see any kind of loyal behaviour, though, I must say, they prefer to trust only the bigger brands (in terms of presence) when they do occasionally spend big.

Another symptom is a lot of businesses acting like software startups riding the wave, when in reality, as a reductionist argument, could be simply classified as companies that _get_ mobile and internet.

It also isn't uncommon for the business to exploit the low income wage structure to improve margins. Worker rights, contractor rights, in this gig economy is absent.

That's not to say some of these startups aren't delivering real value. They are... but race to the bottom seldom ends well for countries plagued with corruption, income inequality, and unemployment; and burderned with looming humanitarian crisis.

In my personal opinion, businesses serving other starups / enterprises (Zscaler, Cloudflare, Brex, Stripe, GitHub, slack, aws et al) remain the most secure of the current lot.

I don't think this disproportionate infusion of captial is going to end well: There do exist super valuable businesses but I highly doubt if they can justify their hype when they do go public. The investors are usually smart, but I hope they don't get dragged into hopeless optimism or become desperate.

Some engs and mgrs arguing the Indian market is better than Canada are overestimating their monetary gains and grossly underestimating the environmental, political, and societal benefits, imho.

PS Indian startup scene investments tracker: [https://trak.in/india-startup- funding-investment-2015/](https://trak.in/india-startup-funding- investment-2015/)

<comment><USER6> I love this argument, there's a lot of nuance to unwrap here. I see a lot of India startup cofounders who are really smart but fail to understand the challenges (often out of their control) that are in their way of making their businesses sustainable. Aside from the political, regulatory and socioeconomic challenges, India has a huge void to fill in terms of energy needs, manufactured goods, labor productivity and infrastructure before the economy becomes efficient enough to support high level services. The startup ecosystem, barring a few companies in logistics, is not focused on making any tangible improvements in productivity in the larger economy, for example, to start moving people away from agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really impressive: "It's fascinating turnaround for the nation, which just 10 years ago had a very small startup ecosystem. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma recounted the early days of One97, the parent firm of Paytm, and how difficult it was for him to raise a few hundred thousand dollars."

</comment><comment><USER8> The USA took literally all of India's top engineering talent for the past ~25 years, but thankfully that trend is reversing now. While improvements in standard of living, more urbanization, emergence of a real middle class, more local opportunities etc. are definitely all valid reasons for this, I believe the biggest one is that there is no path to US residency or citizenship for an Indian today. Even those educated at top universities there have to eventually come back (and that is great!).

<comment><USER9> Not sure that it's necessarily great. I love my home country and all but I hate that I don't have the same freedom of movement other Nationals seem to have just by birth no matter how hard I work for it.

<comment><USER10> I stay in Canada. My parents are from India and my in-laws are European. My in-laws basically pack their suitcase and turn up to visit us. Meanwhile my parents had their visa rejected twice, we spent close to $10k on legal fees and lost couple of flight tickets (can't apply for visa unless you show flight tickets but visa is not guaranteed) and my brother was never ever allowed to visit us. And it's extremely common for other skilled immigrants (even if they are citizens) in Canada as well to have their family visit visa refused.

Paradoxically, US tourist visa was the easiest for all of us.

When I hear people complain about how the "Government prioritizes immigrants over the local people", it's just mind boggling how they come to this conclusion?

<comment><USER9> I wasn't aware that tourist visas for parents in Canada can be very difficult. I was planning on applying for PR to Canada precisely because I thought it'd be easier to have parents over there (what is this thing called a Super Visa?) - does this change if you have a PR?

<comment><USER10> It doesn't change even if you are a citizen. Super Visa takes a very long time and is for longer duration. All in all its a draw of the luck, give it a shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Zomato, Swiggy and Paytm alone are expected to close rounds worth as much as $3 billion in the coming months - wonder where the other $8bn is going

<comment><AUTHOR> Indian tech startups have already raised $11.3B -- the new financing rounds of Swiggy, Zomato, and Paytm if they happen this year and if it is indeed of $3B size would make Indian tech startup's raise this year to over $14.3B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We're currently having issues hiring in Bangalore. We've been looking for a ML Infra person to help during non-US hours. Unfortunately hiring for such a position is bimodal in that market, you've got people with substantial experience really know their stuff, most of whom are getting snapped up by startups who pay much better, and then you've got the people who just threw ML on their LinkedIn to get into your search and can't tell you what a linear regression is.

<comment><USER13> Then you'd have to pay more.

<comment><USER14> Exactly! I have lost count of how many times people on HN rant about quality of "Indian software engineers" when they are paying so less that they get bottom of the barrel. And they make quick stereotype out of that experience without any introspection.

<comment><USER15> That's a component and a big component of it is the non-technical managers and wannabe founders that are working with the indian software engineerings and failing to articulate anything in anyway for any engineer to accurately deliver upon.

<comment><USER16> That's part of the software engineers job too is it not? They're the hired expert.

When I was consulting I spent half my being a product development/manager person because I needed to be.

<comment><USER17> This skill is likely what enabled you to do consulting. Understanding and critiquing what your building is a really important part of being an engineer, but it's relatively rare - which is a shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That is very encouraging. Given that we Indians are such foodies, it is not surprising that Swiggy and Zomato are doing so well.

I am trying to keep tabs on electric two-wheeler startup industry in India. Ather energy is emerging as a big name. Anyone knows how they are doing?

<comment><USER19> I always found the term "Foodies" strange. Given that we are hardwired to enjoy food and literally need it to survive, something is terribly wrong with the person's health if they're not a "Foodie". Have you met someone who says they hate food and they only have it because their bodies need it to survive?

Indians are no more foodies than the Americans or the Italians or the Japanese. Food is a central aspect of basically all cultures.

<comment><USER20> Being a foodie isn't about liking to eat, foodie is about enjoying different cuisines and having a discerning taste. Some people are okay with pizza/fries/burgers of any style, while a foodie would seek out specific characteristics and generally want more than just carbs/salt/sugar.

I've met people that go to a big city and stick with eating from the chains they know from home. They like eating, but they wouldn't fall under foodie, as opposed to someone who is researching different types of food or cooking them and using various spices and ingredients to add flavor.

<comment><USER19> I feel like this is a very narrow, elitist view of the world. Even folks who are not "foodie" in this definition given the opportunity to try new foods, they will.

There is something about the term "Foodie" that bothers me because it's such a general thing that applies to 7 billion people in the world.

I can understand if a person is a musician or a doctor or something substantial they'd have to do to attain that title. What do you think of the term "Chef" or a "Cook" or a "Restaurant critic"? There is definitely more specificity.

Foodie is a bullshit term for people that like to eat good food - <USER2> all 7 billion people. It bothers me because I am an air-breathing enthusiast or as they say it a "Breathie". I have a discerning smell for breathing air from various countries.

<comment><USER21> >> Even folks who are not "foodie" in this definition given the opportunity to try new foods, they will.

Not to be argumentative, but I fail to understand how you think this applies to everyone. For example, recently me and some friends were looking for a place to eat. Search turned up an Ethiopian restaurant that sounded interesting (none of us had any familiarity w/ the cuisine). Most of the group wanted to go to try it, but one friend flatly refused- he would rather just go to a chain place. Which is fine, not everyone enjoys trying new things and would prefer comfort foods.

Me and another of the group ended up going to the Ethiopian place later, and while it was excellent if we had drug the reluctant friend along it wouldn't have been fun for him (no silverware, just the flatbread).

I get that you find the term irratating, as I think it is almost as annoying as 'maker', but foodie connotes more than just 'someone who enjoys food'. Foodie describes someone who makes a partial hobby out of the act of consuming food. I hate the term b/c English already has an appropriated term that describes this better- gourmand. There is a difference between enjoying eating and being discerning about what one eats and being able to critique what is wrong/right with a dish.

<comment><USER19> "Maker" bugs me as well! You have some good points and I get that "Foodie" is a term for enthusiasts of various foods. The way it's used is not in a good way - Where I live (Silicon Valley), there are so many kinds of restaurants and cuisines to be had that being a "Foodie" is a dull hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm afraid given the lack of awareness on what exactly UPI is (without considering usage) and the ability of politicians to kill projects for bribes, it may be eventually replaced by the wallet model. Corruption is a huge issue in India which contributes to loyal users eventually leaving the platform. Zomato, Swiggy and UberEats have had huge growth over the last year but I see a lot of regular users (office goers, bachelors living alone or with other bachelors...) thinking hard before ordering food. The number of quality restaurants are in less ratio and there is only a subset of them being consistent. A huge portion of this quality restaurants offer cuisines not Indian (Thai, Chinese, Italian, American..) which is not preferred routinely. My guess would be, growing up most are accustomed to Indian cuisine and the cost factor. Majority of the restaurants cater to offers and provide cheap food and lack basic hygiene and food preparation standards. This "restaurants" (most of them have now converted to takeaway only) should have been closed after inspection(s) but bribe and stay alive. This startups have enabled this restaurants to thrive and profit just by providing cheap food and cutting costs (waiters, restaurant space...). Most of this "quality restaurants" have always had delivery options and so this startups are not providing much value to them or consumers. Unless better food preparation standards are followed along with it being transparent loyal customers will be a tiny minority and majority will try to exploit the offers and leave. This is amplified (anecdotal, not verified statistically) by health issues of frequent users due to poor quality food.

<comment><USER23> Providing cheap daal, rice and butter chicken is a recipe for a race to the bottom. I can see why, as a restaurant owner, you might not want to cater to that market. There's more profit in going after the customers who are looking for a new experience and will pay for quality and exoticness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> IMO the biggest Indian startups are dramatically reducing the cost of urban living. The fact that India's cities are heavily disorganised counter intuitively helps in this.

The other sectors which is mostly overlooked but just getting started are military startups. IMO this should also scale dramatically over the next decade.

This number might be a record but my prediction is that it would rapidly climb higher over the next decade or so.

</comment><comment><USER25> What's incredible is that once you factor in PPP, this is equivalent to $200B in local purchasing power.

Imagine how much new economic activity that is for a country whose GDP is only $2.5T

<comment><USER26> More like $30-$40 billion not $200 billion. The current PPP multiplier is somewhere between 3 and 4.

PPP is most useful when looking at domestically manufactured items and services. When looking at anything that needs to be imported, normal exchange rates are a much better tool. In fact due to import duties in India, many international goods are more expensive in India that in most of the west.

<comment><USER25> I literally used the multiplier here: [https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power- parities-p...](https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities- ppp.htm)

As shocking as it sounds, PPP multiple is really 18x

<comment><USER27> If you compare just the house rents in all the major Indian metros then PPP is around 4 5.

<comment><USER25> Then compare it with major US metros only and not entire US.

The multiplier again becomes 18x

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everything speculated here is VC money and financial bubble with unrelaible financial values. Zomato, uber, paytm, flipkart throw discounts at the rate of losses. May be few can survive at the end. This hurts a lot for SMB too.

<comment><USER29> Flipkart has already had a successful exit. Though if I'm honest, I don't see a path to profitability for PayTM and Ola.

<comment><USER30> Paytm will be one of the leaders with the new Ecomm model. I am sure they will be a huge player in ecomm also dont forget they would be the largest bank in India.

<comment><USER29> Their losses increased from some ~1300cr to ~3000+cr while their revenue grew by 8%

Not sure where you can draw a path to profitability from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm really hoping for India, the world's largest democracy, to overtake China as an industrial and tech powerhouse of Asia in the next 10-20 years.

<comment><USER32> I'm no expert, but I'd imagine that India being the world's largest democracy is not guaranteed to be a good thing given that only 33% of Indian citizens get through high school (and 8% graduate college). Many politicians are themselves uneducated, and it's easy to sway the opinions of the masses using religion and hatred as leverage.

<comment><USER33> Education is a bad indicator for the health of a democracy. Looks like the US isn't doing any better with democracy despite having higher education levels.

<comment><USER32> Can you tell me exactly what you mean by this? It's a different thing to compare public sentiment (which seems to be vastly different between the two countries), and it's different to compare standard of living and economical factors (which are again vastly different between the two countries). It seems like you are picking one and comparing it to the other, is that correct?

<comment><USER32> Nice, good job - you downvoted me rather than having a good faith discussion. If the denizens of this site operate in bad faith, I'll go elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _growth. growth. growth. growth._

we chant as we march to our death.

India is starting to boom now that climate crisis is getting worse.

<comment><USER35> Yes we should freeze everyone's growth and maintain the status quo. Clearly only the Western nations deserve a high standard of living. The others need to make sacrifices for the greater good.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My iPhone app to help you learn and improve every day - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8

<comment><USER2> You should definitely capitalize on the time of year and get your name out right around New Years resolution time (as in, now). Maybe put together a short write-up on a few similar apps in the space (including yours) and shoot it over to TC, Mashable, etc. and see if they'll do a New Years resolution app post. I was going to suggest cutting the price in half if you had priced it anything over $1, but perhaps you could offer it for free over the next few days just to increase adoption and capture the New Years resolution crowd. I can see this app going in several different directions (leaderboards for popular commits, holding friends accountable for commits, etc) and really like the concept! Kudos and good luck!

<comment><USER2> Also just saw that you did OneVoice; I remember reading about that not too long ago. Keep up the good work!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a page with more details and explanations: <http://thinklegend.com/commit></comment>


Mailgun is now charging for email validation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailgun.com/mailgun-rolls-out-changes-to-email-validation-api-including-new-pricing-model-and-features/ <comment><USER2> This really sucks and very expensive, ridiculous</comment>


I've never sent an email, never will - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/biztech/i8217ve-never-sent-an-email-never-will8217-mlb-commissioner-bud-selig/story-fn5lic6c-1226680137526

<comment><USER2> "This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?" \- Paul Graham, _Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas_

Maybe email isn't as immovable as we all seem to think it is.

<comment><USER3> The worrying thing however is that so many of the touted replacements are proprietary systems like Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

For all their problems, www and smtp are standards - you can use them with a whole range of different browsers/clients, from kludgy bash scripts to the fanciest commercial GUI offering - and they just work. (Well 99.9% of the time).

There was a time when IBM SNA, DECnet, CompuServe battled it out - and all lost to the OPEN, and Free (both ways) Internet and it's protocols.

Let's not go back.</comment></comment>


Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/oracle-is-said-to-lead-anti-amazon-lobby-on-pentagon-cloud-bid <comment><USER2> I currently work as a solutions engineer on Oracle Cloud. The product is absolute garbage and I'm miserable. If anyone has any good leads on other positions please let me know!

<comment><USER3> Are you able to share any specific complaints, gripes or issues? This entire thread is an Oracle bash fest without much specific data or information.

Don't get me wrong, not a huge fan of Oracle but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance.

<comment><USER2> Given that my comment blew up and has high visibility I feel I probably shouldn't share anything specific. It was a pretty much throw away comment that I didn't expect to get as much attention as it did. The best I can say is that after working for the company I think that the general news.ycombinator.com beliefs on the performance of Oracle are entirely justified. I thought going in that it may have been overblown, like you say some sort of "startups are cool, big corps are evil boo" kind of thing, but it is not. I love the people I work with in my section! Just, not the overall firm.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if there will be a management witch hunt against the Solutions Engineering team on Monday provoked by your post.

<comment><USER5> Well the joke would be on management. I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems.

<comment><USER6> _I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems._

On the other hand, without the problems, the solution engineers might not exist...

...which is, in one sentence, the reason why Oracle consultants exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit against Google. Fuck em.

<comment><USER8> Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing.

<comment><USER9> > Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is > doing.

Could you elaborate on why this is a good thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's sad that these politics might win because the Oracle cloud is one of the worst products I've ever used, especially from such a massive company that could easily put out something better if it wasn't the epitome of misery in customer relations led by clueless management.

<comment><USER11> Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to hear what issues you ran into with it.

<comment><USER10> \- Several slow disjointed UI consoles that will log you out when switching. The services dashboard has permanent warning that it might not show everything and you should just "retry the operation". The nav menu doesn't fit the names of the menu choices so you dont know what to click on. Same things are named differently depending on which console you're in. There is no categorization or organization of what is where. Would be 1000x improved if they just remembered your current tenant name in a damn cookie.

\- Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books.

\- There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use.

\- Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account.

\- There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes.

\- Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products.

<comment><USER12> a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by DOD standards

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was a time when Oracle's database product was kind of like IBM mainframes. If you could afford it, and really needed its capabilities, there was no substitute.

As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts.

Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community.

<comment><USER14> Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to use the product?

<comment><USER13> Well, I used Oracle rdbms for a number of years and quite liked it.

Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible.

<comment><USER15> They indeed are horrible. What is worse is that, out of the box, they don't do much, and the stuff they do is guaranteed to not fit your business. So you end up needing customization, and that's when shit gets _real_ expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? That sounds like about half the stuff you get with politics and lawyers. I thought you'd get something more factual with technology, but I guess Oracle is more like a lawyer-lobby business that just happens to make or resell software.

<comment><USER17> > So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better > deal?

How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid.

> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than > one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion- > dollar deal.

<comment><USER18> They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone.

> _The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department's technology needs > -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the > massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary > Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all > contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, > with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September._

What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".

<comment><USER19> What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective.

<comment><USER20> Anytime that the main proficiency of this large organization is not data center management. Which is most of the time.

<comment><USER19> This has to be willful ignorance designed to pretend its just about managing hardware while ignoring the elephant in the room of compromising your business's (and client's) privacy.

You might not like data center management, but the trade you are making is giving hypervisor control to a third party with 10s of thousands of employees outside of your oversight which also happens to be one of the most valuable targets for hackers in the world. You could easily have AWS employees (or hackers who have compromised the control network) dumping everything interesting from your HD images to the highest bidder and you have no means to detect this.

AWS is okay if you are only collecting relatively innocuous consumer account info, but it's completely unacceptable for any companies holding data/executing processes that can have a major impact on society when it leaks/fails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post?

Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.

<comment><USER10> And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.

<comment><USER22> Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.

<comment><USER10> It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest.

Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority.

They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think it's a terrible idea for the DoD (of all departments) to move all their infrastructure to any commercial cloud, Amazon or Oracle. So much critical infrastructure in the hands of a single company. What could possibly go wrong? They get hacked, experience significant outages, or worse, go out of business, and _poof_ there goes all of the DoD's infrastructure... Whoever wins the bid will definitely become "too big to fail".

<comment><USER24> It kind of shocks me that the DoD isn't looking for a vendor-agnostic implementation and then using the resources of multiple vendors. Not only is it key for resiliency from failure, but also it guarantees price competition, whereas being dependent on one vendor lets them jack up the price for all future transactions.

<comment><USER25> Vendor agnostic solutions come with overhead. Check out the PCF sizing tool. Running just the EC2 instances required to _manage_ a production environment starts at $30k/year per region using 1 year RIs. That doesn't include the Diego compute nodes that actually run your workload.

What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS.

All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry you are a true POS <3

</comment><comment><USER27> Cheap, but let's all enjoy Larry Ellison on "the cloud"

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

</comment><comment><USER28> Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc?

I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.

<comment><USER29> Should they build their own planes, too? Just hire some engineers and make it happen, right?

Governments outsource because the best people in various industries aren't working for the government (for lots of different reasons).

<comment><USER30> datacenter construction and management is not exactly rocket science in 2018.

<comment><USER10> It absolutely is not as simple as you seem to make it sound though... a poorly experienced team will end up costing more in time and money than the markup of an outsourced but scaled efficient team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to embrace open source in this sector.

</comment><comment><USER32> Worth considering the anti-amazon lobby's position (I really would not want Oracle to get a single slice of the pie though).

Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider?

AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud.

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now.

</comment><comment><USER34> If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not an efficient use of money.

</comment><comment><USER35> Amazon is definitely the current leader but in order to to make it a monopoly, competetion in cloud should be encouraged that will improve offereing and bring prices down for majority of the users.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm calling it now. Oracle will succeed and be the primary benefactor of these efforts. We've already seen that they're in bed with Trump: [https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant- bankr...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankrolling- devin-nunes). The only things Trump understands are money and favors.

</comment><comment><USER37> Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends.

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh, _of course_ Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oracle, I have a proposition for you. Why don't you release Java and then curl up and die? There is not a reason for you to exist. Your mojo was 20 years ago, why prolong the agony. Save us all trouble and go home.

<comment><USER40> I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested to hear some informed discussion on the topic.

<comment><USER25> GLWT. Oracle's legal department aggressively prevents the publishing of benchmarks. The EULA for any version of the Oracle RDBMS specifically prohibits releasing benchmarks.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, they came up with the "DeWitt Clause" and it has made its way into other database EULAs as well. Benchmarks aren't everything though, and they do have their limitations anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER42> Drain the swamp indeed.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than > one company

sounds reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER44> People hate Oracle because they hate competition.

</comment><comment><USER19> About the only good thing that could come from this is destroying the ability for the DoD to move anything to the cloud. Huge SaaS and IaaS companies are squids wrapping their tentacles around everyone's data and sucking the autonomy out of organizations.

An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.</comment>


'How Google Works,' by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/how-google-works-by-eric-schmidt-and-jonathan-rosenberg.html?mabReward=RI%3A12&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0

<comment><USER2> I bought this book, started to read it, then returned it because it was so bad. It reads like an advertisement and it seems to be aimed at old ladies who occasionally use "the googles". People in the industry will find it to be a lot of information that you already know.

If you want to read about the war between Google & Microsoft, I'd suggest this one:

[http://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Wars-Google-Microsoft- Internet/...](http://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Wars-Google-Microsoft- Internet/dp/0749464135)

<comment><USER3> Honestly to me, this book is great because there are so many fucking clueless managers and executives out there and they make work miserable. Thinking 10X bigger is something that rarely happens in a typical company. The recruitment process is shit as well, we have at our company an inexperienced inhouse recruiter and tech interviewers who are basically looking for bare minimum skills, fresh out of university people who can't find jobs elsewhere. Pumping out projects as fast as possible with inexperienced people is great for short- term profit but horrible for any longevity. This book would turn around and give them evidence and proof that the new world is _smart_ people who want to work on _hard_ problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't like these kind of MBA driven business advice books because they all suffer from survivorship bias.

But I think the NYTimes review at the end imparts its own bias over the Gundotra story. I don't have any information but speculation, but I don't think either Gundotra or Marissa Mayer left because of 'failure', I think they simply had risen as far as they could and had no internal political opportunity for advancement. At one point, Gundotra was apparently in the running to be Microsoft's CEO (Gundotra was an ex-MS VP), and with Sundar taking over everything, Vic may have just decided to do other things.

Besides, Google Plus didn't fail, no matter how often this is repeated. It failed only if you assume the goal was to beat Facebook's news feed. However, if you consider the other things it does, it achieved a lot: Unified login, G+ now has 34% of logins across mobile and the web compared to Facebook connect at 46%. G+ photos became Google's photo hosting service. Even the G+ "stream" has hundreds of millions of active users posting. It's nothing compared to Facebook, but if it is not #2, it is #3, and who wouldn't want a business with a few hundred million people posting to it every day?

Google doesn't fire people for trying something bold and then failing, especially not execs. If Gundotra was "let go", it wasn't because G+ wasn't a roaring success.

<comment><USER5> Yes I think people often mistake that the goal of G+ was to compete or replace FB in people's daily lives. I think it was to make sure that Google has enough data to provide socially relevant targeting that FB claimed only they could provide at that time. And another was to establish a beachhead in social space as a contender should FB make a privacy or any other faux pas as they grow.

I think Google has largely succeeded in doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty critical review - although I already discount "how to" books written by widely successful people as often their new-found business _wisdom_ cannot be tied directly to their success.</comment>


Opening a 2GB PDF in 7 Seconds on a Standard 10 Mbps Connection - <AUTHOR> https://www.pdftron.com/blog/guide/how-to-display-2-gb-files/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is made possible by PDF linearization ([https://www.pdftron.com/blog/pdf- format/what-is-pdf-lineariz...](https://www.pdftron.com/blog/pdf-format/what- is-pdf-linearization/))</comment>


Show HN: Dollar and Cent – A functional tool belt for Swift - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankurp/Dollar.swift?hn

<comment><USER2> _first Returns the first element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _second Returns the second element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _third Returns the third element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _fourth Returns the fourth element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _fifth Returns the fifth element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _sixth Returns the sixth element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _seventh Returns the seventh element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _eighth Returns the eighth element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _ninth Returns the ninth element in the array and terminated the chain_

 _tenth Returns the tenth element in the array and terminated the chain_

... is this a joke?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Rail's ActiveSupport a joke?

[https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/a31277011814b7bdb6be41a8...](https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/a31277011814b7bdb6be41a807e14d6bf2852620/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/array/access.rb#L57)

<comment><USER3> I think the specific example you gave actually is a joke.

[http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Array-forty_two-called-the- reddi...](http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Array-forty_two-called-the-reddit-in- Ruby-on-Rails)

<comment><USER4> Yes it is :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dollar is a Swift library that provides useful functional programming helper methods without extending any built in objects. It is similar to Lo-Dash or Underscore in Javascript.

Cent is a library that extends certain Swift object types using the extension feature like ActiceSupport in ruby and gives its two cents to Swift language.

</comment><comment><USER5> its unfortunate that it repeats the same mistakes that underscore and lodash does (imo) and makes it very hard to do composition (data comes in first instead of the predicate/function)

<comment><USER4> The plan is to implement extensions as well.

<comment><USER5> that is awesome to hear!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not so much functional as just useful methods for working with arrays / maps. It would be functional to include a compose method... also currying is going to be painful because of how the arguments are structured (data first).

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand why every result is stored into the same class-level variable. What's the aim behind that? It just seems like it would introduce unexpected behaviour without any gain, but I don't really know swift yet so maybe there's something I'm missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Static methods are defined using class keywork.

<comment><USER7> Ah I see I read the code too quickly - I didn't notice that not all of the functions were static. Thanks, I've learnt a bit about Swift by reading your code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hate this stuff, Swift != Javascript.

<comment><USER9> It's not Objective C also. Move on. The new world awaits.

Though dollar swift is a little bit cheesy for my taste.

<comment><USER8> A little bit cheesy?

People should file Apple radars if they there's functionality missing in a Beta Language. Not just try to catch attention and stars in Github with useless (at least in this stage) projects.

PS: I insist, an expressive language like Swift doesn't need '$.'

Cheers.

<comment><USER4> MrGando I felt '$.' was needed to avoid less typing for developers while at the same time introducing a namespace that doesn't conflict with anything in the developers project. Namespace is needed to avoid conflicts with function names as those same functions could be defined inside another function or class causing compiler errors when building.

Before calling this project useless please consider the alternative which is none. Apple will take its time even if you tell them to implement these. You can either implement these helper methods yourself or you can use this or another library.

Out of the thousands of people who saw this and liked it I expect few haters like you cause "If people don't hate then it won't be right"

<comment><USER9> I have a feeling MRGando means the library doesn't look idiomatic enough. Though this meaning is lost behind the tone of the message.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Before the Web, Hearts Grew Silent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/fashion/before-the-web-hearts-grew-silent.html?ref=fashion <comment><USER2> As a counter to the author's own romantic example: my wife and I probably would never have gotten together without modern social networking. When my wife and I met, she was living in Oregon and I was living in Chicago. We met while she was in town to interview at the law school I was attending. She was in professional mode and I was a stressed out first year student, and we never would have pursued a relationship in the days before gchat. But instant messaging is a very unique medium. The lack of visual feedback tends to encourage frank conversations, and the "who else is up at this hour?" aspect tends to encourage reaching out to people you wouldn't necessarily call up on the phone. By the time of our "first date" months later, we had met each other exactly twice but already knew a tremendous amount about each other.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll bet life was more romantic before spoken language. People weren't busy talking or thinking in anything but emotion and memories of senses. Let's long for those days.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if your post is entirely serious, but I like it.

<comment><USER5> Imagine falling in love with someone in perfect silence, knowing them entirely through their actions, having only the feeling of their presence.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0AKJMGxwpE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0AKJMGxwpE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes I think I was lucky to be one of the last people ever to experience "love in the time of snailmail" and one of the first to experience love at the dawn of IM.

I know exactly what its like to write those "long, heartfelt missives" and check a mailbox like a crack addict and I also know the thousand tiny thrills one got from that new "ICQ" client's happy little " _uh-oh!_ ".

Which is better? More "real and heartfelt"? I've got only selection bias to offer. I lost "heartfelt missive" and married " _uh-oh!_ ". Modern technology rocks like an old man on his porch.

<comment><USER7> I'm a little to young to have known love in a time of snail mail, but I agree with the point of your comment: some mystery and romance my have disappeared, but romance is still to be found in other places, even in the new technologies that obsoleted the old.

Generations before us also felt like they were missing out on life and love because they were born decades to late, this is nothing new. People will feel the same about life at the advent of the Internet in 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Road trips with multiple cars were down right dangerous. Cars weren't as reliable back then, and you could never tell if one car had disappeared from a flat or car trouble. Meeting points, pulling over, middle men for pay phone tag. The CB radio did change things -- watch movies from the CB era and you see the rise of information exchange.

Today you can still have a car chase on the I-70 in the middle of Utah and the cell phone won't matter to your plot, no reception, no gas either. Just need to change your setting.

<comment><USER9> But when we get self-driving cars this avenue will disappear as well. Technology will de-dramatize our lives.

<comment><USER10> I experienced plenty of drama when my rear wheel began to tear itself apart riding out of Cambria, CA, or when a rear flat turned out to be the sidewall disintegrating 60 miles out of San Francisco. Bicycle touring will give you all the drama you could desire. Meanwhile, I'd love the predictability of entirely automated transport in my daily life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "In my day, we lived and loved with so much more depth of feeling. Not like these kids today with their [x]'s and their [y]'s."

<comment><USER12> I know what you're talking about but where does it end? Are all comparisons to the past that are anything but glowing about the present invalid?

<comment><USER13> They're not invalid, but lacking backing data they may have a high probability of being wrong.

<comment><USER14> This article is just one guys opinion. Why does it need backing data? He's not making policy recommendations.

<comment><USER13> Opinions can also be wrong, depending on what they're about. As far as I can tell from the article, this is not one of those cases. He is simply relaying a story about one supposed advantage of the radio communication dark ages. But if you go from there to "Things (universal qualifier) were better before cell phones," then you have a problem. That often does happen in articles like this, although not this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmm,

Book plots, movie plots and real-life drama in many ways revolve around missed connections.

TV shows where everyone has a cell phone now have to use the device of turned- off, missing etc phones.

A world of perfect connections would theoretically have no drama but since connections are never perfect, we would never have that. On the other hand, in the technologically connected world, missed connections become tech failures. But someone, the richness of "a passionate glance in a crowded room" seems much greater than "a pic I saw just before hard drive crashed".

<comment><USER16> I think missed connections are just a crutch, a plot-writing cliche that was popular just because it was so easy. But I don't think it's necessary for great story writing.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that guy William Shakespeare was quite a hack for using the missed connections device in Romeo and Juliette as well as most of his comedies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Consider the ending of "Doctor Zhivago," when a chance sighting of Lara on a city street leads Yuri's heart to rupture as she disappears before he can reach her. Had the Internet been around during the Bolshevik Revolution, Yuri and Lara never would have lost each other. They would have been Facebook "comrades," boring each other to death with snapshots of food ("Borscht!") and ironic observations of proletariat struggle."

I've sadly not watched "Doctor Zhivago" \-- but I do know that tweeting your every move while being part of a revolution is a great way to be put against the wall and shot before it is over.

I'm also a bit puzzled about the premise of the article -- while distance relationships may have been made more bearable than before, trying to maintain contact across continents is still a dreary proposition. You might walk around historical sites, tweeting images of what you see -- it's still not anywhere near the same as being able to truly share that experience with someone you care deeply for.

Other than that, good on the author for not letting go of his wife-to-be.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whenever I watch a movie or TV show more than a decade old, I can't help but think: that would never happen now, they'd be too busy tweeting/facebooking/instagramming it

Like, "Hamsterdam" in "The Wire"...as if a drug free zone could last two minutes before someone uploaded footage to YouTube and Buzzfeed got a hold of it.

<comment><USER19> I always thought Hamsterdam was too farfetched to start with. I really couldn't see that working for more than 5 minutes with all the parties that were there to observe it.

<comment><USER14> Look at (online, NOT in person) Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia. It's a tragic real-life Hamsterdam. Police only get involved for violent crimes there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ha. Same deal, except we were using usenet, in the 80s.

I got an email from a sysadmin saying, "Hey, you've got all this mail queued up for her and she left this job a couple of months ago, should I just delete it?"

Didn't marry her, that one didn't have a happy ending. :-/

</comment><comment><USER21> I was watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles the other day and much of the whole plot would not exist with modern tech.

Also, horror movies have a hard time now as well. For some reason they have to be so far away as to get no reception or in some sort of zone that won't allow it.

I think Under the Dome highlights this a bit as well.

But there are new plot lines and possibilities. At least flip phones have been removed from modern tv and movies, and computers/devices are at least more accurately represented.

<comment><USER22> "No signal"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0)

...I actually wonder why they don't just pretend cell phones don't exist. I mean, if you can imagine ghosts and zombies, etc, _do_ exist, why not?

<comment><USER23> I actually see that pretty often. When the movie requires it, people forget that they have cell phones. It's the same way the horror movie universe apparently doesn't have horror movies, or people would know not to split up or have sex while camping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yes! I watched the movie "Bullitt" a few years ago and noticed that half the action wouldn't have happened if the participants had had cell phones.

</comment><comment><USER25> > "The outside world fell away, and it became just us slowly unlocking each > other's secrets, dreams and opinions, which in those days were not posted on > "walls" for anybody to casually scroll through. We felt we were the only two > people in the world."

My partner and didn't put our relationship on fb for maybe six months or so... but even if we did, how would that have made it any less meaningful? I like the general 'what if' vibe of this, I'm (just) old enough to have some missed connections, but the superior tone is just a bit comical.

I think what they've forgotten is that the biggest reason things don't come together is the personalities of the people involved, or not even speaking out at all - which will happen regardless of the comms tech available.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not only is this still a thing, but it's something you help with:

[http://www.redcross.org.uk/Get- involved/Volunteer/Migration-...](http://www.redcross.org.uk/Get- involved/Volunteer/Migration-services-volunteering/International-family- tracing-volunteering)

"When families are separated by war or disaster, our volunteers search for lost loved ones and put them back in contact."

Or, outside the UK:

[http://www.redcross.org/what-we-do/international- services/re...](http://www.redcross.org/what-we-do/international- services/reconnecting-families)

</comment><comment><USER27> Now it becomes possible to have meaningful transcontinental relationships, with cheap passenger jet flights and instant free pocket to pocket messaging and video calls.

Let us not romanticize the past. Nightly facetime calls are much less drama- inducing than last minute emergency one-way flights.

<comment><USER28> But, wasn't the drama exactly the point of the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2B9F-GPm0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2B9F-GPm0)</comment>


Ask HN: YCombinator.com down for everyone? - <AUTHOR> Getting a redirect loop on different devices. <comment><USER2> yes, since 12h ago or so..</comment>