Roger Penrose's Gravitonic Brains (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1994/941219.penrose.2.review.html <comment><USER2> Worth noting this Socratic review of Sir Penrose's theory of quantum minds is by Dr Hans Moravec, an important roboticist and AI theorist, widely known for Moravec's Paradox :

"it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."[1]

which began the shift in paradigms exemplified by the behaviour based & embodied robotics movements.

      [1] Dr Hans Moravec, snipped from http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2014/10/13/moravecs-paradox-and-self-driving-cars

<comment><USER3> Playing checkers seems like a well-defined task to accomplish. A computer that has "the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." is not defined at all. Mobility? Perceiving what?

<comment><USER4> Im reminded of the multimillion dollar AI-based image recognition system the military developed, in the 80s or 90s to analyze images looking for tanks. When the system was tested on photos, that were not from their pool of stock test photos used to train the systems, it got almost 100% wrong. Why? Because they stock photos had well-composed shots on a sunny day with some clouds (usually the spots tanks are hidden in are overcast or very cloudy). The "real" shots were all cloudy (as expected) and the system had actually been trained to recognize discrete clouds rather than Tanks.

Perception is about distinguishing, imagining physical properties (this can be disassembled or just casually appears composite due to perspective), judging and guessing at unseen properties. I figure an pool ball has a curved 3d spherical shape, because I've seen one before and felt it. At the same time I imagine that there is no "top" or differing feature anywhere on the ball, based on the appearance of what portion I can see (it looks clear and flat white? i expect the rest to be so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is only tangentially related but I hope it provokes discussion. One thing that I don't understand is why Platonism remains extremely popular throughout Mathematics departments the world over and Finitism/Ultra-finitism is so unpopular with them. Combinatorics and Discrete topics are often very unpopular topics to work on in my experience.

Finitism in an analogous way to functional programming seems like the best way to move the field forward, but it is rarely used by Mathematicians in practice. Why on earth is this? (My understanding of mathematics is lacking, so I hope this doesn't come off as a silly comment)

<comment><USER6> I'm having a hard time understanding this comment. Are you talking about mathematics or philosophy?

I don't understand why finitism would ever be expected to lead to new mathematical insights, since it basically amounts to closing off research directions because they don't have some nebulous quality of "real-ness". I also don't see how finitism has any connection to functional programming.

<comment><USER7> Ultra-finitist logic is a perfectly rigorous field of study in its own right. I think OP is making a point that this logic and us related branches are quite understudied.

It's encouraging to note that with things like Homotopty Type Theory, we're finally starting to come to grips with Fundamentals that aren't tied to the ZFC implementation.

<comment><USER8> But ultrafinitism isn't actually interesting as a mathematical theory. As the previous poster said, its appeal lies in its "realness". Intuitionistic and linear logic are substantially more interesting.

<comment><USER5> But this was why I posed it as a question, everyone says this is somehow 'more interesting' but is that because it is actually qualitatively more interesting or are more interesting things coming out of it simply due to the fact that it is more popular quantitatively with researchers? If it is qualitatively more interesting, what about it makes it so?

I likened it to functional programming because finitism makes things interesting via its purity and restriction in an analogous way.

<comment><USER8> But it's not similarly interesting, linear and intuitionistic logic are. Finitism is just kind of stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py hmm -- most unrealistic piece of this conversation if it's really from the future is the lack of interstitial product ads in the chat.</comment>


Irish beach washed away 33 years ago reappears overnight after freak tide (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/08/irish-beach-washed-away-reappears-freak-tide <comment><USER2> What I'd like to know - is the beach still there or did it get washed away again in the last year?

<comment><USER3> Still there -- would be news again here in Ireland if that happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's probably not the same sand, or at least not very much of it.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)

<comment><USER6> Every seven years (or 10, depending on which story you hear) we become essentially new people, because in that time, every cell in your body has been replaced by a new cell. (Including the Brain)

[https://www.livescience.com/33179-does-human-body-replace- ce...](https://www.livescience.com/33179-does-human-body-replace-cells-seven- years.html)

Same person, or new person??

<comment><USER7> Why would you post a link to an article that disproves your own comment?

Both the 7 years portion and the brain cells being replaced?

I don't get it.

<comment><USER8> Give him a break, he only uses 10% of his brain, you know.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-people-only- us...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-people-only- use-10-percent-of-their-brains/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NTSB Release Initial Report on Atlas Air Crash - <AUTHOR> https://airwaysmag.com/airlines/ntsb-release-initial-report-on-atlas-air-crash/ <comment><USER2> It's very poor reporting that they don't mention what model plane was involved (Boeing 767-375), especially given all the focus on the 737 Max8.

<comment><USER3> Here's a link to the NTSB report that appears to be the source for this article:

[https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA19MA086.aspx](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA19MA086.aspx)

There's more information in the original report, including the type of aircraft.</comment></comment>


NASA Just Discovered an Asteroid Will Fly Annoyingly Close to Earth on Halloween - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nasa-just-discovered-an-asteroid-will-fly-annoyingly-close-to-earth-on-halloween?trk_source=popular <comment><AUTHOR> More science: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-spots-the-great-pumpkin- ha...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-spots-the-great-pumpkin-halloween- asteroid-a-treat-for-radar-astronomers)</comment>


Pregenerate bootable RPi .imgs in the cloud, from recipes (Public Lab) - <AUTHOR> https://publiclab.org/notes/icarito/10-21-2018/introducing-pi-builder <comment><AUTHOR> ^ based on Hypriot project, each pull request against our repository generates a prebuilt SD card image based on vanilla Raspbian: [https://github.com/publiclab/pi- builder/pulls/](https://github.com/publiclab/pi-builder/pulls/)

Reproducible SD card images: downloads and boots Raspbian, runs recipe, re- generates .img file in about 10m. Recipes welcome!</comment>


Address Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.ramov.com/abook

<comment><USER2> Shared it with the old link, as I found it really to be a great idea, one that I will incorporate at home.

Thanks for sharing this tip.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, we crossed paths, by the time I deleted the original yours was already posted.

Glad to hear you like the idea. It was an eureka moment for me :)</comment></comment>


New, Undeletable, Web Cookie used by Kissmetrics - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/new_undeletable.html <comment><USER2> Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2891369>

Same story also submitted

here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886256> (some comments)

and here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889938> (no comments)</comment>


Opinions I have formed about the "geospatial industry" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison/status/1265635034939248640 <comment><USER4> Two geography degrees meant I saw a lot of ESRI. In fact I won a national award and was flown out by them to meet Jack in San Diego. Everyone at ESRI I interacted with were all wonderful people. But their software is just brutally corporate and slow to respond to market changes.

FOSS GIS software is pretty good but suffers from the usual lack of budget. Nevertheless, I've been able to push robotics + GIS packages for QGIS with ease. Reaching out to my ESRI contacts about "where's your indoor and outdoor robotics suite offerings" received a response of only crickets.

As for Google Maps. The biggest tell is that there's almost no geospatial capability in the software. They don't want you to analyze and understand. They just want you to consume "where is X". It's a standard Google vector for ads approach.

I'm going to rant for a long time if I don't stop here so I'll leave it at: stop teaching so damn much ESRI and start teaching way more programming. The biggest regret of my education was that I was mostly taught how to use Geospatial tools rather than how to make my own.

<comment><USER5> > FOSS GIS software is pretty good but suffers from the usual lack of budget.

FOSS GIS is incredible these days. You can do everything in open source - <USER2> just sometimes requires a bit of work. Between qGIS (+SAGA/Grass/etc.), postGIS, python tooling like GeoPandas, leaflet/cesium, etc. there's plenty of tools for different things outside the ESRI ecosystem, you just have to learn to use them. This is a long way from the dark ages 10+ years ago when much of this capability was closed source or via some ridiculously complex text interface of GRASS.

ESRI's market dominance on GIS _analysis_ is still a big thing though but only really a hangover from the days when ArcGIS had much more capability and lock in coroporate training was a thing. Now qGIS has essentially most of the same capability, but ESRI's corporate training structures etc. are still there to some extent. It is losing its stranglehold though, especially amongst GIS 'dabblers' who don't want to sign up and lock in to a massive corporate account for whom the ESRI older-style value proposition isn't really there. qGIS is even an accepted option for local government these days in many places.

Geospatial is both complex and diverse though. There's a lot of industries there and while there's big easy simple 2d GIS markets in mining, government zoning and military, there's also a lot of other stuff going on and its all moving fast. 3d, temporal data, drone photography, lidar and satellite etc. There's lots of innovation happening there right now and new ESRI monoliths being built.

<comment><USER6> What does FOSS GIS software have to do in order to compete against ESRI? Or which packages have the best chance to?

For example, few consider going with Oracle anymore now that you have PostgreSQL but that took a long time. So, looking perhaps as far as 10 years, which FOSS GIS software might even have a shot to start displacing ESRI in the future?

<comment><USER5> From my perspective at least theres a few main sides. From least to most ESRI- dominant:

\- Web - ESRI never had a major horse in this race. Google Maps is still there but more common now is Leaflet and Cesium for 3D is basically the only option. Both Leaflet and Cesium are FOSS.

\- Server - As you say postGIS is now the industry standard

\- Programming - There's some people using ArcPy if you are in the ESRI ecosystem but the plethora of FOSS libraries out there are probably bigger in scope and fit together better than ESRI. PyQGIS is another option but in my experience not as heavily used as other open source libraries (all of which are based on GDAL, OGC standards and the Java Topology Suite)

\- Desktop analysis - This is ESRI's core stranglehold and I think qGIS is now a competitive option for most users (certainly it has most of the core functionality) however there's a lot of inertia to move from big companies especially those that want ongoing external support/training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey, this is Joe from twitter thread linked. I didn't post this to HN but it's nice to see it on here. I was wondering why a weeks-old tweet suddenly started popping off...

One thing I'd like to note—-I have learned a tremendous amount from other people responding to the opinions enumerated in that thread. Some things I've even started to question. So I'd love to hear your ideas—-especially if you disagree with me. Just please do it constructively. Sometimes seeing your ideas thrust onto HN without being prepared for it can be a harrowing experience and I'd rather this time around be a productive one.

Much love to the brilliant minds of HN -Joe

<comment><USER8> The take that I had the most curiosity about was #4.

I get where it comes from, but what I observed when I was in the military was if you asked staff in the operations center about data they would say, something like "we've got two drone feeds, GPS trackers, field reports.. we're drowning in all this data we can't look at it all..." Okay, great we got some money from the theater, we can get anything you want, what do you want? "Another drone feed." It seems that even if you can't use all your data right now, the long run answer to today's unanswered questions is usually more data, or did I not understand something about that take?

<comment><USER9> Some problems people don't try to solve because they don't realise there's a solution available - or don't conceive of the fact that, if they spent enough, one could be developed.

If you take a time machine back to the year 2000 and talk to people who collaborate on documents and ask them what would make their lives easier, very few of them will say "invent an online browser-based real time collaborative document editing system" \- many will just want more time, and consistent file naming when e-mailing back and forth modified word documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started my career as a GIS analyst and was steeped in the "geospatial industry" for a few years. As I grew my career into software development, I found an entire world of innovative practices and technologies that had been largely hidden from view. Linux, Databases, HTTP, legit programming languages, software best practices... these things are largely absent from the GIS curriculum. In their place are bespoke, proprietary systems that solve the Geographic part well but are painfully isolated from the Information Systems that the rest of the world are working on.

My biggest realizations came using tools like PostGIS, GeoPandas, Rasterio, and Numpy where geography is just another data type (albeit with some specialized functions to work with them) and well integrated with the rest of the software ecosystem.

You can see it reflected in the salaries - A "GIS Programmer" will often make a fraction of what a "Software Engineer" makes. There's a reason for that - for most use cases, geospatial isn't unique enough to warrant a walled garden of technology.

<comment><USER11> R also has some decent spatial libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone deep into the cutting edge parts of the geospatial industry that few ever see, I'd quibble on some of the points but it is a broadly accurate description of the current state. The industry has been comfortably stagnant for many years.

A critical distinction that explains much of what we see today is that geospatial analytics has almost no relationship to making maps at a technical level. There is a superficial similarity because they sometimes share presentation layer. All of the popular infrastructure and tooling was designed, either implicitly or explicitly, for making maps.

If you want to analyze some physical world behavior using multimodal sensor data, the paucity of viable data infrastructure is insurmountable for most companies. Unfortunately, this is what most organizations want to do these days.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd argue another point; satellites are a major bottleneck to GIS as we're familiar with. With only ~300 or so commercial imaging satellites in orbit, current revisit rates are sufficient for most use cases. Maybe one or two images/day for X point depending on weather. Low earth orbit is getting crowded, fuel to raise and lower orbit is limited onboard, expensive maintenance cycles, etc.

I'm working on a startup trying to solve this problem now. The idea is to "crowdsource" aerial imagery using a network of camera arrays on 80,000 commercial flights/day. We stream the video feed back to earth using in-flight wifi and overlay the visual diff to create a map that shows minute-level changes. There are huge built-in cost savings that come with not having to develop, launch and maintain a satellite constellation, and with a vastly higher revisit rate (as high as 4,532/day in some areas). We're at notasatellite.com

<comment><USER14> Streaming the video feed using the onbord wifi? I think you are overestimating the quality of the Internet connections available on flights.

<comment><USER15> Having worked on inflight connectivity apps and Earth Observation respectively, for a couple of startups I'm inclined to agree overall. Workarounds would be:

[i] ground sync, which would be fine for a lot of use cases where higher revisit rate and sometimes less cloud cover is sufficient to make the imagery valuable, and open up non-wifi flights. Ground sync can be over regular 4G or even swapping flash drives [some W-IFE boxes update this way, though infrequently].

[ii] Getting dedicated bandwidth from the satellite/a2g internet provider, who can potentially allow you a lot more than is made available to an individual consumer, but obviously at a hefty charge.

[iii] using streaming codecs designed for low kbps rates - though this is obviously lossy, and pixel perfection matters for a lot of EO use cases.

<comment><USER13> Great points! We're incorporating aspects of all three workarounds. Ground sync is already possible (wifi isn't available on many regional short-hop flights so we eat the latency), and we're discussing dedicated bandwidth with in-flight wifi providers. We've been paying the $14.99 market rate for customers testing the MVP who receive free in-flight wifi for their efforts, so the resulting cost would be much cheaper. To your last point, we load the last-known tiles expected to be captured on the flight in order to take a visual diff in the air, and then send that diff back down to earth instead of the entire image. This results in a roughly 80% savings in data but requires more hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The most successful and ambitious mapping project of all time, Google Maps

Google map is indeed a commercial success, but it's far from "the most successful and ambitious" when it comes to mapping itself, quite the opposite. State projects (even those developed before satellites where a thing[1]) are way better, and even openstreetmap achieves a better coverage and higher maps quality.

It's the "most successful and ambitious" _commercial_ project, which is coherent with the rest of the thread.

[1]: for instance: [https://www.sovietmaps.com/](https://www.sovietmaps.com/)

<comment><USER17> Do you have a citation for OSM? My experience in first world countries especially where Google had ground truth project are still much better in Google than osm.

<comment><USER18> Casually browsing OSM in my area, I see individual park benches, garbage cans including type, road surface material, doorways to buildings, power lines, location of springs. And that's just what Osmand is rendering, I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface.

Google doesn't even attempt to map most or all of these things here, much less expose this information. OSM attempts to build a much better map, and for my region, easily succeeds.

That's not to discredit Google Maps. Almost all of the time, I don't need the best map, I need the kind of yellow pages, yelp, sightseeing guide, live traffic and transport, navigation mashup Google is projecting onto their map with great skill. I think it's their best product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a mid-career software engineer who would be interested in getting into the "geospatial industry",

A) What technologies should I learn to allow me to get my foot into the industry? I have historically focused on being a UX focused web engineer. I'm sure that experience could surely transfer, but am interested in learning the technologies and/or understanding that is more core to geospatial problems.

B) As someone who loves maps and imagery, but does not want to work for the military industrial complex, how do I avoid point #3. "In geo, you either die a hero or live long enough to make the majority of your revenue from defense and intelligence."

<comment><USER7> A: Break it into two parts, vector and raster. For the former, focus on Mapbox and associated libraries/standards (VectorTiles, Leaflet, GeoJSON, etc.). JS is the name of the game in vector land—it's amazing what you can do all on the front end now. For backend/DB tech, look at PostGIS.

For the latter, I'd focus on Python to start. Look at GDAL (and it's various Python interfaces/wrappers like rasterio), Cloud Optimized Geotiffs, and the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog spec.

In both cases, watch what the leading companies are putting out (Mapbox, Azavea where I work, Development Seed, etc.) and not what OGC is doing. One is a leading indicator, the other is a lagging one. Sorry OGC, I still love you and you play an important role.

B: Get comfortable with the idea of working with Defense. For better or worse, they're the ones with the budget to take on humanitarian work, disaster response work, even climate change adaptation work. That's my advice. Possible to avoid it altogether, but only if you work on an app that is domain-focused (eg Trulia) and incidentally geospatial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree to all points. For point 6. Mapbox is a big contender for ESRI's current position.

For 8. Openstreetmap, GDAL and associated open source ecosystem offers a solution to proprietary format and API of the month problem to a degree. It is not surprising that there is no money flowing if mapping is not a core business of the users.

Aerial and satellite imagery is the heavily regulated and lucrative part of any mapping solution. If you are allowed and able to obtain that, you can probably get by just selling the raw imagery without geospatial processing.

<comment><USER21> Mapbox tries to replace Google maps, ESRI is different category which is only slowly challenged by enterprise vendors (Azure and other clouds) and FOSS: PostGIS and other sptially enabled databases which have more and more geo features, making specialized GiS to a niche.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I used to be heavily involved in geospatial and a whiz with the esri toolset. I worked at a software company that made a custom GIS tool for visualization. The problem is that it's underpaid and underappreciated. I had little transferrable experience and most GIS related jobs don't pay that much.

For me my GIS job was mostly a time to learn programming and get a real it job

</comment><comment><USER23> I entered college to get a Human Geography B.A. and go on to get my PhD. After realizing this meant I must leave my home area and my family(I live in a major US Metro but not one of the biiiig ones) AND the only jobs were Professor or Think Tank(very cool, very walled garden and I went to a state school) I decided to switch to Physical Geography B.S. My curriculum had 3 GIS classes and a Remote sensing class among other physical geo classes. After almost finishing this degree I realized it would leave me with only GIS Tech and hopefully GIS analyst positions to have which is a smallish market and might get "automated away". Also it doesn't pay super great and I was worried about my prospects if I didn't like it. So I dug bag in and also got my B.S. in Computer Science.

I wanted to be that Geospatially focused programmer. So I graduate with my B.S. in Geography and another in CS. I get interviews with a couple of random defense contracts and directly for federal government, but I turn them down because honestly I don't want my work going to wars I might not agree with _and_ I would need to leave my family. I also happened to get an interview at ESRI for fun when I still was deciding if I should leave my metro or not and they laughed at me because I didn't have an internship--something that is very common in Toronto, LA, NYC, but not common in my mid-US metro CS scene.

So I now have a nice programming career solving "big data" problems completely away from geospatial, because the industry is tiny. I don't really know where I was going with this but this industry lacks opportunities for programmers compared to all the other stuff they could be doing. I'm someone who put years into wanting to break into the industry and do the tech work, if I wasn't the prime candidate for a junior geospatial programmer role then I don't know who is and the industry still couldn't get me in it.

<comment><USER24> The disconnect is from one of the beliefs listed in the Twitter thread: "There is no 'geospatial industry,' only industries with spatial problems."

I'm a statistician with a state health department and do some GIS work. If I were more skilled with geospatial analysis, there's no doubt the decision makers I work with would be delighted.

If somebody wants to use GIS skills, they should keep an eye on IT or analysis roles. They might not specifically ask for it, but you can still sell it in the interview if it'll help solve their problems.

If you're hoping to make the big bucks or work on cutting edge problems, then staying local will be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> ESRI is essentially the Oracle of GIS. To big to fail and to powerful to be wiped away. On the sweet spot of acceptably behind the trends. Yet nobody go ever fired because of acquiring ESRI Software.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've enjoyed working on an enterprise, GIS-focused application over the past few years (with no prior, formal geographic background) and one of the take- aways I always enjoy sharing with family and friends is the "point in polygon" question [0] and it's simplicity. I'm fun at parties. I have certainly learned how much more intuitive data is for users to explore when you offer (if you can) spatially.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon#Ray_casting_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon#Ray_casting_algorithm)

<comment><USER27> Are you really doing the test in the wikipedia article over and over? Why not convert a complex polygon to triangles? Things like this were established in computer graphics in the 70s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I mostly work on desktop programming, and I've dabbled in web stuff...

And I don't know what GIS is. I see it talked about _a lot_ but I don't understand how there can be so much money and interest in geography.

I understand web stuff being huge, because I'm online almost all day. But what _is_ GIS? Is it something businesses do and consumers don't see?

<comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS)

GIS is everything location. From modelling pandemics to rainforest loss, to logistics, to Tinder and Pokemon Go.

<comment><USER30> Uber, Lyft, etc are other useful examples.

I think some of the sort-of-obscurity/confusion comes from the fact that, as the OP tweet gets at, you don't really see a very visible "GIS Industry"/products most of the time, you just see tools that happen to have maps embedded in them, and those often require a lot of backend GIS work to power them.

Finding a rideshare and planning your next oil well don't, at first, seem to have a lot in common, but on the backend there may be a surprising amount of overlap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have spent a fair amount of time learning GIS in undergraduate (urban studies program) and applying those skills in local government/real estate development. I have to agree with a lot of what he is saying. Many of the GIS skills I learned in ESRI during University pigeonholed me into the same few glorified data entry/basic spatial analysis roles. There are also a lot of people with this niche skill set, which makes getting these positions really challenging. There is an emerging field called Civic Technology that focuses more on building out geospatial applications for the public good. I hope more public policy/urban studies degree programs shift in this direction of building out tools for social change rather than learning the same few applications of ESRI ArcGIS.

</comment><comment><USER32> During my academic history with GIS/remote sensing/Geospatial (and still going on), I have seen how the same tools around the various fields in got plugged to in, mostly for the data pre-processing, processing and analyst.

The sacro-saint trilogy, for me at leat, is GDAL/OGR, PROJ and GEOS. They are the building blocks behind QGIS, PostGIS and most of spatial libraries in various programming languages (Rasterio and Fiona in Python for example).

On a more GIS analyst perspective, most of it can be done with ESRI or QGIS and if you can get you hand dirty PostGIS is an amazing tool that I which I had the time to invest way more (or even Spatialite, sqlite flavour of GIS in database). I really which than Shapefiles goes away for good and be superseded by GeoPackage coupled with GeoJSON.

The web had a hard time to be a proper tool for visualisation on GIS/remote sensing due to the big size of the various files but Cloud-optimized GeoTiff and Vector Tiles are the game changers but came too late.

Commercial vendors tends to go for the cloud and platform lock down as Planet and their super-powered jupyter notebook and access to the catalog. Same for Google Eart Engine.

We see also stuff like CartoDB and the Database As A Service for geodata.

In a world when Geodata are highly available with better resolution than never, they are so big to store somewhere than it can be crazy. Working on time series at country scale (or even world scale) require now a lot of store space and calculation power for high resolution images (Even just Sentinel or Landsat at 10m and 30m resolution respectively). Small-scale is easier than ever and lower resolution can be managed on a laptop. I remember when I had to work with time series dataset of Sentinel-1 and -2 images when we were preprocessing 10-12 Tb of data with a pretty long chain of operations to do before handing it out to another team for furter data analysis. Some academic lab are storing Petabytes of remote sensing data gather during the time.

"Geospatial Industry" is way more than looking at ESRI or Google Maps/Earth. A lot of things can be and are done with various research and industry projects than require high integration with the spatial field and the temporal analysis. And the quality of what you have as tools vary highly between field, actually I am working for a PhD on a Bayesian spatio-temporal modelling with lattice data. It is the wild west and you need to cure a lot of R libraries to get what you need. I don't know how much you can do in Python because we had to avoid any MCMC method due to constraints on processing power available : low in fund and no easy access to calculator, we settled for R-INLA who is very interesting on its own.

</comment><comment><USER33> This seems to have been written by someone unfamiliar with real estate, local government, natural resources, or any other traditional line of business that depends heavily on GIS. I don't know what my county pays for ArcGIS but it's probably substantial, and I suspect there are multiple IT employees devoted to maintaining the system.

Replicate that across nearly every single political locality in the US, probably the world. The industry is huge.

Also, "long form twitter" is dumb.

<comment><USER7> Hi stickfigure, this is Joe from the dumb long form twitter thread you just wrote five sentences critiquing. Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My academic and work history is with GIS, but I've spent the last 4 years in fintech. What does the cutting edge of GIS look like in tech nowadays?

<comment><USER35> Take a look at what OGC are working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I really wish this trend of writing blog posts in 240 character chunks on Twitter would pass. It's so damb frustrating to read them.

<comment><USER37> Weirdly I found I really like them.

The thread format forces people to break their thoughts up into chunks - <USER3> little like bullet points on slides but 280 characters makes the chunks much more information-full than just a bullet.

I can like or retweet specific interesting points as I read them.

Individual tweets in a thread can include images or link previews or link to other tweets.

What platform are you reading them on? I find them fine to read in the Twitter iPhone app - almost indistinguishable from a article elsewhere. Is that not the case outside of the app?</comment></comment>


Basil.js – Smart persistence layer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Wisembly/basil.js <comment><USER2> I would recommend Mozilla's localforage [https://github.com/mozilla/localForage](https://github.com/mozilla/localForage). Basil.js takes care of abstracting cookie, session, memory, and localstorage storage options, but localforage provides an abstraction for localStorage, WebSQL, or IndexedDB. With modern applications I find that I often want more storage available. Cookie storage is limited at 4Kb, localStorage (5Mb), sessionStorage (same as localStorage), IndexedDB (50Mb), and WebSQL (50Mb). Localforage will automatically select the best available storage system for the browser. While WebSQL and IndexedDB allow for advanced queries, localforage must cater to the lowest common denominator, localStorage key value pairs. While being restricted to key value pair storage, this is often not a big concern considering how different the WebSQL and IndexedDB APIs are.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for breaking it down like this. I never saw it layed out ~specifically like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Synchronous persistence APIs should be considered dangerous. Often they solve the immediate problem, but when you eventually need to move to an async storage solution (and in JavaScript any significantly complex task eventually becomes async) you are left with code that presumes sync behavior. This makes it difficult to refactor.

Providing an API with callbacks or better yet promises forces you to write future-safe code.

<comment><USER5> This. I recently moved to localForage[1] and have been mostly satisfied so far. Thanks Mozilla!

[1]: [http://mozilla.github.io/localForage/](http://mozilla.github.io/localForage/)

<comment><USER6> It might be a little bit "overkill" when you just want to perform storage only on client device no? (Basil aim is not to override backend storage like REST APIs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about lawnchair?

[http://brian.io/lawnchair/](http://brian.io/lawnchair/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Lol, I made a library a while back that does the same thing ([https://github.com/rectangletangle/jSave](https://github.com/rectangletangle/jSave)). Maybe it's a sign that a larger project needs to be started?

</comment><comment><USER9> So is this wrapper over cookie and localStorage that takes care of browser differences and idiosyncrasies for you? Or is it more than that?

<comment><USER6> It also ensure you that your usage of localstorage won't ever throw exceptions and break all your thread in the case of cookie-less anonymized sessions

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a project with the same name out there: [http://basiljs.ch/](http://basiljs.ch/) This made me wonder: how to deal with similar named open source projects? Although the goals of both projects aren't related in any sense it could cause for some confusion...

<comment><USER11> Do lots of searching before naming your projects, I suppose. Surely he could have used Rosemary.js, or Herb.js, or Bayleaf.js?

<comment><USER12> or something even remotely related to ... who knows... data storage?

<comment><USER11> Bah, ridiculous! Clearly you haven't received the memo, all Javascript libraries are named exclusively by dart-board now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That seems promising. Would be great to have FIFO and LIFO storage mechanism here like in redis!

<comment><USER13> Why do you need a mechanism for that instead of using arrays?

<comment><USER6> Instead of getting an array from storage, pushing a new item inside and then storing it again, it could be nice to have directly this small mechaniam built in to avoid this logic in the application.

<comment><USER13> Hmm, that's true. The library could monkey patch .push (etc.), but it wouldn't support setting the property directly with [index] (until Object.observe is mainstream enough).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the name. (For those that don't get the joke, basil is an extremely persistent, almost weedlike plant.) That said, I think an async solution would be better, like localforage.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great idea. The next progression would be cross browser benchmarks, and perhaps something suitable for browser extensions (unless this already works for that use case).

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe I'm being dumb, but I think this could benefit from the inclusion of a _Why?_ section.

</comment><comment><USER17> looks great!</comment>


The New State of Digital Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://spinnakr.com/blog/ideas/2012/06/the-state-of-digital-marketing/

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of potential with personalization in marketing, helping customers find information and content that fits their specific interests.

Another marketing trend that also relates to creating dynamic, rich websites and the information/data explosion, is content curation. Content marketing has been around for a long time, in the form of white-papers, branded research reports, and so on, however marketers are now starting to use content curation to build rich, timely sites/pages for prospects and customers.

Two interesting examples are CMO.com, an Adobe initiative, and IQ by Intel (iq.intel.com). These follow other successes in content curation, from TechMeme to Daring Fireball. Yes, John Gruber presents a lot of original content, but curated articles and quotes are major components of the Daring Fireball experience.

If you combine content curation with personalization, you end up with something that's very interesting. Content curation yields enough content to serve the needs of a diverse audience, while personalization ensures the content you serve is uniquely relevant and valuable to each visitor.

We're working on a content curation platform at Intigi.com. And this article has me thinking that we need to find ways to personalize the curated content for different types of traffic. Food for thought...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm biased but I loved this post, and glad to see some traction here. There's been some discussion of HTML5/relevancy giving way to an appified website experience, but I really appreciate considering how that changes the most basic job-profile of the digital marketer.

Social media marketing seems like the only thing that even resembles this job, where your audience is differentiated and requires a real-time, context-driven approach, though the tools that surround it are still quite young (and in the long-tail mostly relate to group collaboration).

If that's true, I wonder if the role of "social media manager" looks a lot like the future of all digital marketing?

</comment><comment><USER4> Maximizing relevance is the thing that most sites fail at. You'll still need traditional marketing to attract eyeballs to a site (or service, product, etc.) but this is more about tailoring the product itself to the specific needs of that particular customer at a single point in time.

There will of course always be limits to this approach in that you cannot know what a customer wants, especially if the customer doesn't know that either. It's certainly easier to aim for retention since a customer has already demonstrated a desire for the product and a usage pattern.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I visit a random website and they already know who I am, just call me Ted Kaczynski. I'll be in my cabin in the woods.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article just seems like a lot of buzzwords and unrelated points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. What are the points in your opinion and how are they unrelated? I'd like to see something more substantive than pure trolling.</comment></comment>


Mark the Spot: Tell AT&T where the iPhone sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/12/07/mark-the-spot-tell-att-where-the-iphone-sucks/

<comment><USER2> This is completely unnecessary. AT&T already has a very good idea where calls are dropped by looking through their logfiles. Plus, these logfiles encompass every phone, not just the iPhone. Plus, these logfiles reach back to 10+ years.

And, 1 incident amounts to nothing. As a cell network, you want lots and lots of data before you add a new tower. The iPhone app is unlikely to give you that data. But your logfile give it to you, and have for many years already.

This is like a city adding push buttons at signaled pedestrian crossings without connecting them: a band-aid, created to make them look active witout fixing anything.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the value is that AT&T can be shamed into fixing its network by publishing info on chronically bad areas. Of course they know where they have issues, but there's no way to show the public how inattentive they're being without independent data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a cool idea--crowdsourcing weak spots. So if you are disconnected, how does the iphone send this info off? Presumably stores it for later?</comment>


The forever recession - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/the-forever-recession.html

<comment><USER2> I like Seth's phrase 'the forever recession' versus using the term 'secular' - much easier to explain to laypeople.</comment>


Show HN: Cross-post between Twitter and Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://2FB.me <comment><USER2> Uh oh. A closed source browser plugin "offered by 2fb.me"

Posted to HN for the 7th time.

No indication why the author made this. No link to their profile as a developer or anything. Suspicious.

I would never hand over control of my browser to a third party unless they have a very strong history of trustworthiness.

If this is genuine, a self contained bookmarklet would be a better solution. Then people could look at the code (probably a small oneliner) and see it does what it says it does.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you WayBackMachine, [https://web.archive.org/web/20140315082440/https://www.makeu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140315082440/https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/2fbme- tweet-on-facebook/)

This app has a long and storied history. And I'm releasing it once more given that it solves the issue of connecting Twitter and Facebook.

Literally every other solution doesn't work. Including every IFTT recipe for example. I already reached out to IFTT and am hoping to work with them on a solution.

Happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Three years of Identi.ca/StatusNet - <AUTHOR> http://status.net/2011/07/02/third-anniversary-of-identi-ca

<comment><USER2> I'm unable to read that post, the font is terrible: <http://i.imgur.com/6jrjt.png>

<comment><USER3> Even on OS X it doesn't look great, but I'm guessing you're using Windows? Windows is notoriously bad at rendering custom fonts on Web pages for some reason. Enough so that some people stop custom fonts rendering on it using a JavaScript check.</comment></comment>


Statue of Liberty-sized ASTEROID on collision course to hit EARTH, experts fear - <AUTHOR> http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/570239/Asteroid-collision-course-earth

<comment><USER2> UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

</comment><comment><USER3> > NASA's Asteroid Watch has assured there is no chance this asteroid will hit > our planet</comment>


Smartcar – Nest for your Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://smartcar.io <comment><USER2> It almost seems like this company is in existence to get acquired by Tesla, which I'm not sure will happen. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla itself implemented everything seen in the video in the Model S's next infotainment/firmware upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER3> smart car is a well known brand (at least in the UK) of tiny, very efficient cars. They also make a few electric ones too.

[http://smart.com/](http://smart.com/)

<comment> jack-r-abbit In the US too. I think this is a bad naming choice for this project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that Tesla doesn't let you grant 3rd party apps access to the API (or that no API yet exists and all this is reverse engineered from the phone app).

So to use this, you would have to hand them your username and password.

<comment><USER5> My friend works on Tesla's engineering team. He mentioned a while back that they are introducing oAuth. Also, Smartcar has some relationship with Tesla they had meetings or something. Don't know much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's very cool, but I don't know if I'd like to have this feature as a monthly service.

It would be cool if Tesla bought the company and offered the software and support (eve as an extra).

Possibilities are endless and generally speaking, I liked it - very smart project.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure about all the predictive stuff. How does the car know when it has to cool the car? I suppose it records at which hours you 'usually' use the car so it turns the air conditioning on. What if I change my schedule one day or I have to stay working until late? The car would be wasting power all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> What if I change my schedule one day or I have to stay working until late?

That's where our value comes in. By processing large chunks of information we can determine that your habits on Mondays AM are different from habits on Saturdays at 9AM. And by adding additional layers such as your Google Calendar, we can make those interactions even more accurate.

I've been very inspired by what Nest has done and we're trying to something similar for automotive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've got a 2 line cronfile on my raspberry pi that uses Tesla's web API to do roughly the same.

<comment><USER9> This reminds me of a comment I saw on Drew Houston's ShowHN of Dropbox a few years back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224). The hobbyist coders will always be able to build some hacky solution on their own. The difference here is its building a convenient product everyone can use, not just selling some curl commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think they're probably going to get sued by mercedez benz who own the trademark on smart car

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if you'll be able to do this kind of stuff with CarPlay

<comment><USER12> No</comment></comment>


Show HN: We built our startup in 100 days - <AUTHOR> https://giveit100.com/@100

<comment><USER2> I've been burned before by startups that got hacked and spammed all my twitter friends. Sorry, normal signup or I'm not doing it.

Love the project though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're definitely open to implementing our own login/accounts system and I'm sure we'll do this sooner or later.

<comment><USER3> Please do! The idea is awesome and I too am one to not use fb/twitter for signing up. Call it being stubborn, but there's plenty of us out there. In the meantime, is there a mailing list that people can join to stay up to date?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is not currently a list unfortunately. Would be happy to let you know when we release non social login - ping me at finbarr[]giveit100[]com :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fantastic work. I really hope pg has accepted your application to ycombinator. You clearly have a talent for hard work, perseverance and knowing how to market your product well. Even if pg doesn't like the idea, he should realise the team is very capable.

I have a question though Karen, did you know you were going to do this project before you created this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w) ? (I originally saw it on r/GetMotivated when it went viral originally) or did you decide to build it due to the popularity that the video got and the requests from people wanting to achieve similar?

(Just curious from a marketing point of view whether you planned for the dance video to go viral to boost your idea or whether you saw an untapped market due to the popularity of the video and decided to fill it)

\----

[EDIT] - Just got my question answered by watching this : [http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s](http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s) \- I'm glad that it was an idea that came out of the viral consequence of the original video, rather than the original plan all along.

Also just realised that the woman learning to walk video I saw today on r/GetMotivated was submitted by you / part of the same project.

I can see pg's mind turning over in the office hours video, trying to understand the concept and how big it can grow - I think he's right in the fact that you should see how people use it and allow yourselves to pivot if another idea emerges out of where you're at so far.

I guess the issue is that one of the reasons for the successful popularity of your original dancing video was that it had a nice balance of unique story, being told in a short enough manner that the viewer keeps watching, combined with the final scene coming together perfectly with the music / train / nailing the dance which in my opinion was the 're share' moment - where the user thinks 'I must re share this!'.

The problem is in the 10 second videos it's unlikely I'll want to 're share a single video' \- so it's the compiled story at the end which becomes the thing I want to share as a user - but that's not automated / easy to produce. That said, I did enjoy watching the journey of you guys producing the product in 100 days (10 second clip at a time) so, in a world of transparency and people wanting free publicity it does seem to work. (infact I would happily continue watching the journey for 10 seconds a day, to continue the journey past launch out of interest to see what happens next).

Either way, both you and Finbarr have produced, marketed and launched a cool product in 100 days which is a pretty amazing feat in itself.

<comment><USER5> Thank you so much, Paul. Your excitement is contagious. Our YC interview is on Thursday. Fingers crossed we get in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is such a cool idea. What's the reasoning behind limiting the video length? Quite a few people appear to get cut off in their videos before they have a chance to document their progress.

This one is good, 60+ days of coding: [https://giveit100.com/@joanne](https://giveit100.com/@joanne)

<comment><USER5> Thank you! We restricted it to 10 seconds to help keep the videos interesting. We definitely need a better way to trim the videos though. We'd like to build a mobile app that makes it very easy to select which 10s of the video you'd like. For now, it just uses the first 10s.

<comment><USER7> Though this will tie you onto a different platform at least initially, have you considered integrating with vine/instagram in any way? Could be a good way to acquire more users.

Best of luck helping people achieve more.

<comment><USER5> That's a great idea, we'd love to do some importing from vine/instagram, e.g. with #giveit100 hashtags

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh yeah... these guys did office hours on stage for Startup School 2013: [http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s](http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s)

<comment><USER5> Yeah! I'll post that video into our meta 100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some people on here are probably going to flame this idea because it glorifies someone showing off what they are doing, but I think they are missing the point: this is just a tool to keep yourself accountable (a la the Seinfeld calendar).

Feature suggestion (that is probably already in your pipeline): Add the ability for friends to join groups and do something together for 100 days and keep count of their friends who also keep on doing X for 100 days. If I just stumbled on this site, I would probably say "Cool" and then I would never come back bc I don't have anything right now that I would dedicate 100 days to. It seems like the tricky part for y'all will be to get people to realize that your platform is broad, but they are specific and they can find use in this platform right now.

Oh yeah, Congratulations on launching and good luck!

<comment><USER10> >> it glorifies someone showing off what they are doing.

Yes. You, Sir, are EXACTLY Right. I think it's called Narcissism, and there's plenty of that going around with this Generation obsessed with Instagram (taking #selfies and posting it for the whole world to see), Facebook (showing off how awesome their fake life is) etc.

<comment><USER11> How about if you get a real life of your own instead of worrying about others fake lives?

I believe the concept is called live and let live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love everything about this. It was fun watching your videos and how far you progressed over the 100 days. Even more fun to see that made the last video about the post right here on HN.

Okay, I just went to your front page and as soon as I saw your subway shot, I remembered your dance [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w). Nicely done!

Congrats!

<comment><USER13> That was the first thought I had. "She looks familiar" check the front page and instantly knew who it was.

I love this idea and the implementation is pretty slick. Hope the exposure from the dance video helps push this along. Best of luck.

BTW I would sign up, but I won't do it via facebook or twitter. If you add a normal email password I will be in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since this does seem to have roots in the Seinfeld calendar methodology, are there plans to have a before/after of the 100 days? It would probably be more quantifiable and inspirational to see the ends as well as the spectrum.

This will be a great social and personal tool for keeping people (hopefully myself) more accountable for my commitment to learn. Wonderful work.

<comment><USER5> Finbarr's co-founder here. I personally love the Seinfeld method and use Lift to help with that. We want to make videos of before/after, but with the whole journey. We've made a video of one of our users, who is re-learning how to walk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHSMUq0bDLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHSMUq0bDLg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic! Such a good idea, and a very clever way to launch it. As I was browsing through the videos (very intuitive interface), I was wondering why I hadn't heard of this "giveit100" site before. Hit me midway through that these were videos of you developing the site I was looking at, and by then I was already on board.

A few things:

* There were details in some of the videos that I wish I could've full-screened to see, but I don't know of a good way to do that from a UX perspective. Keeping video transition delay to a minimum I think would be key.

* This method of auto-playing videos onmouseover is brilliant. Good job Finbarr.

* I think at its core, this is a video Seinfeld calendar. I want to feel some kind of social pressure for skipping a day.

Again, great job, and congrats on the launch! It looks like you had an excellent time making it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love the concept, and I dig the "no-click" style of watching. Makes for a very nice UX.

I hope there can be some good stories that come from it.. but what happens if someone starts being inconsistent with their project? I wonder how many people will fully complete the 100 days

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out. Missing days is fine, in fact lots of people have gaps. We've only been running the project for a few months and already have a few people who have reached 100 days. Lots more are fast approaching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any chance I can use this with OpenId or sign up for an individual account some time soon? I really hate using my social accounts to sign in. I know it's probably super low priority.

I think it's a pretty neat idea :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the hover to play video! Simplicity of a gif without the horrible loading of everything at once.

Small heads up: many of the avatars are not loading on the front page.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yea AFAIK twitter doesn't provide a uniform endpoint anymore just for retrieving profile image url. I need to write a script that will periodically fetch the "fully hydrated" user and update the profile.

Unless there's another way...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mouseover video playback its kinda crappy when your scrolling, if your mouse cursor is crossing over several videos you just keep hearing too many random sounds. Also since everything is recorded at different volumes it makes my ears bleed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry the experience has been sub-par. What browser and OS are you using? It works best on Chrome and Safari and the scrolling is typically smooth in those environments.

<comment><USER19> I'm running chrome. Scrolling speed isn't the issue. When you have the mouse cursor on the page and you start scrolling down, if your cursor crosses through a video it will start playing. As you keep scrolling down you'll be moving in and out of videos causing less the a second of playback to occur.

Now since these videos are user generated they are all recorded with various levels of quality. If your mouse moving through ones that are poorly recorded that split second of playback sounds horrible.

You can simulate the effect if you visit [https://giveit100.com/@Benjamin](https://giveit100.com/@Benjamin) and goto the day 18. If your move your mouse past it you'll hear some really bad static for a split second. Now imagine if all the videos are like that while scrolling down the page, it's a pretty horrible experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok got it. Thanks for the feedback. I think I can probably do something to prevent playback triggered by scroll events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It looks pretty weird on Safari - "html5: Video file not found" on all videos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm that's really weird - sorry about that. What version of Safari and OSX are you using?

<comment><USER20> I have Safari Version 7.0 (9537.71) on Mavericks. I don't think I have strange config/filters...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love this idea so much and you two really owned those clips! It's so rare to get a glimpse of how a startup went from day 1 to day 100 on this level. And it looks like you had fun! :)

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's like you took all the best parts of Evr.st, but stripped away all the pretentious bullshit because you're genuinely into the idea.

So yeah. It's awesome. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a great idea. However, I'd like to see a follow up. I'd like to see how they do in their first year, first 5 years, etc. Wish them luck!

</comment><comment><USER24> One critique of your site design, I don't know if it's just me, but infinite scrolling can be frustrating. I was trying to get to the "About" section in the footer but it kept running away from me.

[http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/03/infinite- scr...](http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/03/infinite-scrolling- get-bottom/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, I meant to remove the footer from the pages with infinite scroll - sorry about that and thanks for reminding me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Such a cool idea, congrats on your early traction. It reminds me of that video I recently saw of the dude who filmed a few seconds of each day for xdays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thankyou! Yea I've seen a few things like that recently. One other interesting one is the 1 second every day app[1].

[1] [http://1secondeveryday.com/](http://1secondeveryday.com/)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, to say everything I was sceptic. Then I saw your video of you learning to dance - you should definitely look at that if you didn't already. After one year your progresses are absolutely awesome. That's what worked for me with the video and what might worked too with giveit100: see people starting from scratch and then become awesome into something. Good luck, that's pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very cool idea. I would change the functionality of the commenting system. I'd like to see the comments on the same page as all the videos, rather than clicking through to a new page. I think it would have the nice side-effect of more engagement with the comments. They're also not super obvious at first as I found myself looking around for a comment button of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER28> Small bit of feedback: If the browser window is big enough to not have to scroll on the first load, the infinite scroll doesn't kick in at all. I looked around for a solid minute trying to find a "next" button. Came back here and saw an "infinite scroll" comment, resized my browser, and loaded again. which solved it for me.

Other than that, very cool!

<comment><USER29> That was the only thing I came back to comment about. I wanted to keep browsing and couldn't figure out how until I resized the window and infinite scroll kicked in.

I think this is an awesome idea, grats on launching!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah no way - good catch! I'll code up a fix - thanks for bringing this to my attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any infrastructure or implementation details for HN userbase? Like where do you store videos (S3?), approximate costs, etc...

</comment><comment><USER31> I like this idea. I started around week ago, recording short movies (5-20 sec) from every day of work on my latest project. It help me stay focus. That's why I think your app may help people like me to record their projects. But I won't create account because I won't login with Twitter/Facebook...

</comment><comment><USER32> I love the idea, the design is simple and it's really nice to go through the videos of people, really inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER33> The @ in the url kills twitter's url shortener (on OSX desktop app) when deep- linking to a specific day…

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright I managed to fix this. Had to write some pretty dirty route hacks in rails to get around the problem, but such is life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The videos loading all at once crashed my ubuntu computer with the newest version of firefox :/

It also totally bogged down my subpar internet connection since I would hover over a video to check it out, then scroll down, but the video would still be loading.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is cute, but I don't understand how it's going to make money.

<comment><USER36> I don't know what they're thinking, but in general with an aspirational product like this I don't think it should be too hard. They could very easily market classes, books, all kinds of stuff to their users to help them reach their goals.

... as opposed to something like Facebook or Twitter, where people are mostly just looking for entertainment or inf0. To me the monetizeability here is a lot easier to trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Good job Finbar+crew. :)

</comment><comment><USER38> That's awesome! :D

</comment><comment><USER39> This is awesome and I love the idea. I tend to document what I am working on, dating sketches looking back at old projects. This is perfect. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome - hope to see you on the site soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Grattis Finbarr!

/Steven from Videoplaza

<comment><AUTHOR> Tack Steven! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great idea!

What do you think about the possibility to have several projects for the same account?

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER42> Congrats on the launch guys, looking great! Hope that we see you in this YC batch!

</comment><comment><USER43> This is AWESOME!Good hacking

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It has been a blast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'd like a RSS feed of people I follow :D

</comment><comment><USER45> How did you seed the site with so many videos?

<comment><USER5> I got a bunch of emails from people who had seen my dance video, and invited them to do the 100-day challenge. The earliest version of 100 was people sharing videos with us via dropbox folders.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w)

<comment><USER13> Classic case of increasing your luck surface area [http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck- surf...](http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Mouseover playing videos. Not cool man.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is this generation so obsessed with "documenting" everything instead of actually "doing"?

STOP Documenting. START DO-ing!

<comment><USER47> Wow, you made a new account just for this?

I think what Give It 100 does is that they take away a lot of the overhead from documenting so that you can focus more on the doing. Like, it lets you be publicly accountable for your progress in a simple and enjoyable way, without needing like... a youtube account?

<comment><USER10> Recording, editing and posting the video takes as much (if not more time) than the activity. No?

<comment><USER47> Did you even watch any of the videos? They're like 10 seconds and not edited. If you're not spending more than 10 seconds on your actual activity... I... don't even.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move Yet: Supporting Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/technology/peter-thiel-defends-his-most-contrarian-move-yet-supporting-trump.html <comment><USER2> Here we go again. Another Peter Thiel story on HN gets flagged and removed. For a discussion on why Peter Thiel stories are getting flagged and removed, see this thread (which, ironically, has also been flagged and removed lol) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716662)

<comment><USER3> I flag anything related to the election. That topic consistently brings out the worst in hacker news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Title should be change to "plans to defend".

> On Monday, Mr. Thiel plans to defend his position in a speech and then a > question-and-answer session with reporters at the National Press Club in > Washington.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, defended the company's association with Mr. Thiel, emphasizing that it did not endorse his views — and much less Mr. Trump's — but was striving to be inclusive toward those whose values differed from its own. Critics noted that if diversity was such a cherished value in Silicon Valley, why wasn't there more of it?

What an awful argument by the critics; I'm not sure that it should even be called an argument. Zuckerburg did the right thing.

<comment><USER6> > What an awful argument by the critics; I'm not sure that it should even be > called an argument.

How is it a bad argument? At least in the U.S., the places that consider themselves the most tolerant tend to be the most segregated. E.g. the majority of the most segregated cities in the U.S. are in the northeast, the midwest, and the west coast.[1]

It's been especially noticeable this election, where many Clinton supporters have been attacking Bernie for being racist because he lives in a state where minorities aren't kept in special ghettos to be used as de facto slave labor. (E.g. if you go to any gas station or restaurant in Vermont then you're likely to be served by a white person, as opposed to in NYC where these places are almost entirely staffed by minorities who are payed less than a living wage and live in segregated neighborhoods.)

[1] [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the- avenue/2015/12/08/census-...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the- avenue/2015/12/08/census-shows-modest-declines-in-black-white-segregation/)

<comment><USER7> I'm white and used to live in the Bronx around Valentine Ave. I don't think anybody I knew felt like we lived in a segregated neighborhood. Also, plenty of people who do retail or food service work in NYC make good money, and plenty make enough to live a good life in the outer burroughs. NYC is accommodating of those that don't. I certainly never spoke to anybody who felt like we were defacto enslaved. Just one person's experience...

<comment><USER6> > I'm white and used to live in the Bronx around Valentine Ave.

That's funny, I'm also white and currently live a few blocks from there. The point though is that you'd need a ton of hispanic people from the Bronx to move to SoHo in order to make it reflect the overall demographics of the city.

> I certainly never spoke to anybody who felt like we were defacto enslaved.

I mean there are tens of thousands of homeless people in NYC, many of whom have jobs. Many folks forced to live in apartments with stachybotrys, the subways are littered with folks whose skin is literally rotting off from a combination of never showering and heroin-related infections, etc.

<comment><USER8> Yea, you make quite a leap from ethnic neighborhoods to "kept in special ghettoes," but apparently only perfect geographic-racial balance disproves the existence of these ghettos. Also you equate mental illness and homelessness with _slavery_. I want some of what you're smoking! But seriously, if you want a white dude pumping your gas, there is Vermont as you noted, and it isn't very far from you!

<comment><USER6> > you make quite a leap from ethnic neighborhoods to "kept in special > ghettoes"

[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/100-bronx- gang...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/100-bronx-gang-members- busted-largest-takedown-nyc-history-article-1.2615933)

87 people got arrested in a single bust about 12 blocks from where I live, for a combination of selling crack and murder. They're all from the same housing projects.

Yet despite being right around the corner, my neighborhood has one of the lowest violent crime rates in NYC. If that's not an example of ghettoization, I don't know what is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The disconnect for me is Palantir. Thiel's company provides the infrastructure for some of the gravest privacy violations done by our government.

If Thiel is rooting for Tech in the race vs Politics, why is he investing his resources in a company that converts Tech advances to personal freedom limiting Political power?

</comment><comment><USER10> For those wondering whether to read the article -- it has no content, just says he will explain himself on Monday.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you'd like to learn a little more about Thiel's politics and why this is of public interest, I recommend checking out his short manifesto "Education of a libertarian"

[https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter- thiel/educatio...](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter- thiel/education-libertarian)

<comment><USER12> sounds a little demagogue and vague. did he close the first paragraph by stating a belief in immortality? i can't even tell i got the first paragraph right...

<comment><USER5> >sounds a little demagogue and vague

It's almost as if you didn't even read his essay before commenting on it. Thiel explicitly states "Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

How could you possibly interpret that as demagogic? He's specifically against tyranny by the masses.

<comment><USER12> understood that part. then he moves to say, in the same phrase you quoted, that he also no longer believe in mortality.

i did stop reading at around 60%... you are correct on that.

<comment><USER5> >understood that part. then he moves to say, in the same phrase you quoted, that he also no longer believe in mortality.

Nowhere in that paragraph does he mention anything about mortality.

"But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today."

<comment><USER13> Previous paragraph: "I stand against ... the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> TL DR: he doesn't really defend it in the article linked. The article says he will give a speech Monday.</comment>


Chemical exposure and brain health - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-toxins-that-threaten-our-brains/284466/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > I found that the real issue was not this particular group of 12 chemicals. > Most of them are already being heavily restricted. This dozen is meant to > illuminate something bigger: a broken system that allows industrial > chemicals to be used without any significant testing for safety.

I think this is the real take-away. How many times have we found a particular Chemical X to be harmful, only to have it replaced by something whose hazards are _less known_ rather than _known to be lower_ just so that things could be marked "Chemical X-free"? Look at the replacement of saturated fats with trans fats, for example.

<comment><USER3> BPA-free also comes to mind: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa- replacement-a...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-replacement- also-alters-hormones/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paragraph 9 (grr...):

 _The chemicals they called out as developmental neurotoxins in 2006 were methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, ethanol, lead, arsenic, and toluene. The additional chemicals they've since found to be toxins to the developing brains of fetuses—and I hope you'll trust me that these all are indeed words—are manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, tetrachloroethylene, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane._

</comment><comment><USER5> This image alone is the scariest graphic I've seen in a while:

[https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/a...](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/all_icons/578acfc36.png)

While concentrated hydrofluoric acid is well-known as a nightmare mode poison, it's still scary to see a toothpaste icon make the same list as the rest. Chalk it up to industrial accidents though, which is certainly a reasonable argument against municipal flouridation.

Bags like these are loaded into the potable water supply as part of a routine program:

[https://organicolivia.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/Screen-...](https://organicolivia.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/Screen- Shot-2016-02-16-at-4.48.01-PM-1-e1455660564956-500x480.png)

It seems like a pretty low-tech operation, and trivial errors involving accidental concentration foul-ups (maybe two bags of mix in the water supply, instead of one) probably fly under the radar, and the dynamic changes during a hot summer when everyone's using more ice cubes and drinking more iced tea. Decades later bones are more brittle and everyone's senile.

Meanwhile, growing up, I think I must have inhaled kilograms of toluene vapor, given all the airplane model kits I built.

I avoid dry cleaning simply because it costs too much, takes too long, and those sorts of expensive clothes just feel generally wasteful.

Mercury is probably the most threatening item on the list, given that I enjoy lots of seafood, but I feel guilty enough already, given the rampant destruction of the oceans my appetite contributes to.

Pesticides and other persistent bioaccumulative toxins, I pretty much feel powerless to control, and so I try not to think about them.

It's amazing my brain works at all.

</comment><comment><USER6> The sensationalist tone and hand waving at "top scientists" ended my interest during paragraph one.

<comment><USER7> It's my general opinion that if anybody feels the need to write "top" before scientists, it's because they want people to believe it more.

And once you know that, then you have to ask why do they want people to believe that more than anything else.

And then I close the article and move on :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The moment I saw flouride, I was done.

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/why- por...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/why-portland-is- wrong-about-water-fluoridation/)

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

<comment><USER9> In the article Landrigan says that fluoridation is a good thing in small doses. He agrees with what you've posted. He doesn't appear to be particularly concerned about water fluoridation at all, but says in HIGH doses it can cause problems, which is true.

<comment><USER8> I believe the science shows this as well. However, putting it on the same level as heavy metals in an infographic...is just fear mongering.</comment></comment></comment>


How Airplanes Fly: A Physical Description of Lift - <AUTHOR> http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/airflylvl3.htm

<comment><USER2> From Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche, page 9, published 1944:

The main fact of all heavier-than-air flight is this: the wing keeps the airplane up by pushing the air down.

It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important. But the really important thing to understand is that the wing, in whatever fashion, makes the air go down. In exerting a downward force upon the air, the wing receives an upward counterforce--by the same principle, known as Newton's law of action and reaction, which makes a gun recoil as it shoves the bullet out forward; and which makes the nozzle of a fire hose press backward heavily against the fireman as it shoots out a stream of water forward. Air is heavy; sea-level air weights about 2 pounds per cubic yard; thus, as your wings give a downward push to a cubic yard after cubic yard of that heavy stuff, they get upward reactions that are equally hefty.

That's what keeps an airplane up. Newton's law says that, if the wing pushes the air down, the air must push the wing up. It also puts the same thing the other way 'round: if the wing is to hold the airplane up in the fluid, ever- yielding air, it can do so only by pushing the air down. All the fancy physics of Bernoulli's Theorem, all the highbrow math of the circulation theory, all the diagrams showing the airflow on a wing--all that is only an elaboration and more detailed description of just how Newton's law fulfills itself--for instance, the rather interesting but (for the pilot) really quite useless observation that the wing does most of its downwashing work by suction, with its top surface. ...

Thus, if you will forget some of this excessive erudition, a wing becomes much easier to understand; it is in the last analysis nothing but an air deflector. It is an inclined plane, cleverly curved, to be sure, and elaborately streamlined, but still essentially an inclined plane. That's, after all, why that whole fascinating contraption of ours is called an air-plane.

<comment><USER3> Great description. But then I read the XKCD mentioned in another commend, and started wondering how plains fly upside down then? When inverted the "top" of the wing would push the plane down, no?

<comment><USER4> Planes that often fly upside down typically have low camber wings. Some of them have almost symmetrical wings. Those wings have less lift in upright flight than a more highly cambered wing would, so (and for other reasons too) the manufacturers compensate with bigger engines.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_EA-300>

and an engineer's question about wing design for aerobatic flight with some good answers:

<http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=183605>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't miss their updated PDF version: <http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/Flightrevisited.pdf>

\---

Important but somewhat complicated point: flight in a 2D world is a venturi effect, and regardless of altitude, a two-dimensional airfoil remains trapped in "ground effect mode." The circulation extends outwards indefinitely, and so an instant force-pair connects the wing with the surface of the Earth.

In 2D, the airfoil circulation creates lift upon the moving airfoil, but it also creates an equal down-force against the ground. If the airfoil was flying higher, the force pattern on the ground grows wider, but the net downforce doesn't change. As a result, 2D airfoil diagrams do not describe normal flight. They describe a sort of "Flatland flight" where no net work needs be done to accelerate mass downwards. As an explanation of aircraft, they've been simplified until they cross the line into actual error.

In the 3D world we can launch a vortex downward and experience a reaction force upward. Or perhaps launch a vortex sideways (during turns.) No instant- force upon the Earth is needed. The Newtonian force-pair arises between the mass-bearing aircraft and the mass-bearing air entrained by the shed vortex. Hovering rockets have an exhaust plume, and flying airplanes have a descending vortex-pair, and both are essential to any explanation. Real world 3D flight is "vortex-shedding flight," and the explanations based on 2D airfoil diagrams leads to no end of confusion.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also, the awesome Amasci site discussion of this:

<http://amasci.com/wing/airfoil.html>

<http://amasci.com/wing/rotbal.html>

<http://amasci.com/wing/whyhard.html>

 _edit:_ Another interesting fact is that the flawed description of how airplanes fly is so pervasive that Albert Einstein once proposed how to improve the airfoil based on his understanding of it and it was a huge flop.

See the end of this article:

<http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath258/kmath258.htm>

<comment><USER7> I also highly recommend John S. Denker's "See How It Flies" (<http://www.av8n.com/how/>), which along with more "aviating" tips has a good discussion about circulation, the Kutta condition and the Kutta-Zhukovsky theorem. The Wikipedia page on the Kutta condition (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta_condition>) is also quite informative.

I especially like this part from See How It Flies:

      We have seen that several physical principles are involved in producing lift.
      Each of the following statements is correct as far as it goes:

      * The wing produces lift "because" it is flying at an angle of attack.
      * The wing produces lift "because" of circulation.
      * The wing produces lift "because" of Bernoulli's principle.
      * The wing produces lift "because" of Newton's law of action and reaction.

      ... Do we get a little bit of lift because of Bernoulli, and a little bit more
      because of Newton? No, the laws of physics are not cumulative in this way.
      There is only one lift-producing process. Each of the explanations itemized
      above concentrates on a different aspect of this one process.

I think this is the crux of the matter. It's sort the same story as in the recent HN post about the hazards of determining cause and effect in medical research. The laws of physics set up a situation where the solution satisfying all the constraints is that the wing produces lift. But just like you can't pull out one equation out of a linear system and say that the solution is X=13 _because_ of this one equation, one can't say that a wing produces lift _because_ of any one physical effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://xkcd.com/803/>

(obligatory mention)

<comment><USER9> Is there one describing the truth?

Is there any way of searching xkcd by subject matter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of this stuff also applies to sailing, a great website that I've been preaching for years that focuses on the Coanda Effect is <http://sailtheory.com> I highly recommend

<comment><USER11> Nice one, that I wasn't familiar with. Another great site for sailing theory is Arvel Gentry's page. His Origins of Lift piece was the first reference that made the process clear to me. <http://www.arvelgentry.com/origins_of_lift.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is great.

I usually tell people that planes fly by pushing air down and backward: down so the airplane doesn't fall and backward so the airplane moves forward. I tell them this because otherwise they completely forget, and jump into assertions about implementation details like laminar airflow.

Now I know to _first_ talk about air going backward and down and _then_ to point them at the conclusions section of this article, referring them to the body of the article for detail. A-and then I'll get back to my work so I can get home at a decent hour.

<comment><USER13> Assuming the plane is not accelerating it's only pushing air back to offset the air it's drag is pushing forward with the next effect being zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a largely correct article debunking one of the main atrocities in aerodynamics education today. I approve heartily!

</comment><comment><USER15> NASA's explanation of how the "Longer Path", or "Equal Transit Time" theory is incorrect.

<http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/wrong1.html>

The page contains a simulator of a symmetrical airfoil that you can tweek, angle of attack, particle flow, velocity, and pressure - as well as instructions for experiments proving this theory incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER9> A couple of recent blog posts linked to the fiu.edu article. They may also be interesting reading:

Kevin Drum: The Problem With Science: <http://motherjones.com/kevin- drum/2011/12/problem-science>

Modeled Behavior: Of Science and Scientism: [http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/12/21/of-science-and- scienti...](http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/12/21/of-science-and-scientism/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Can we not easily test the equal-transit-time explanation by a smoke test in wind tunnel where the the smoke is not released continuously but only at uniform time-intervals in a vertical profile? A picture of the smoke profile (as opposed to streamlines) downstream of the wing would immediately capture the fact that transit times are NOT equal.

</comment><comment><USER17> FIU on HN? Ha, go golden panthers!</comment>


Secure Passwords sans SSL - <AUTHOR> http://terrbear.org/?p=210 <comment><USER2> This is security FAIL. I repeat, DO NOT DO THIS.

Without SSL, you have no guarantee that the login form has not been tampered with; instead of hashing the password and sending the hash to the real server, an attacker can substitute a page which doesn't do any hashing and sends the password to the attacker.

(Technically there's a slight benefit, in that this will protect you from purely passive attacks. But the odds of that distinction mattering are approximately zero.)

</comment><comment><USER3> how is this different from http digest authentication?</comment>


How We Run BGP on Top of OpenFlow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datapath.io/how-we-run-bgp-on-top-of-openflow <comment><USER2> > _(do not waste time trying J)_

The Wingdings J strikes again!

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103)

[http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem- and-...](http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-and-fix/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be more, how to get bgp packets to an open flow server to do stuff...

I'd be interested as a network techy to see how they actually do the rest of bgp on openflow/sdn, like holding multiple full tables on the server and how the switch has enough memory to deal with that amount of information...

<comment><USER4> Actually, each tenant has just a view of the full table. There is no need to save the same routes for each customer over and over again. Furthermore, there is aggregation done before a route is installed on the switch.

<comment><USER5> Can you talk more about how your product works? For instance this reminds me of an Internap product:

[http://www.internap.com/network-services/miro- controller/](http://www.internap.com/network-services/miro-controller/)

Their strategy I believe was that if you were optimizing for latency(as opposed to price if you had multiple transit providers), was that it would do traceroutes out to your TOP 100 destination AS and find the AS path with the lowest latency and set the route preference within your AS to prefer a certain transit provider outbound.

How does your product work given that you don't have any control or interaction with the AWS AS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your front page needs a much better description of what it is you actually do. I run networks/servers/routers and spent 15 minutes on your site and still don't get it...

</comment><comment><USER7> Really cool! I would like to play with this, but not specially BGP. Is there a toolkit or code that I could use to get the PACKET_IN/PACKET_OUT <-> TAP behaviour?</comment>