Ask HN: Why are flash memory prices going down so much faster than RAM? - <AUTHOR> You can now buy 128gb USB sticks or SD cards for around $20. Meanwhile, 16 gb RAM sticks still are $100+.<p>Are the performance specifications for RAM that much more stringent? Is the demand for SD cards and USB sticks that much greater that there's more economies of scale? <comment><USER2> The obvious answer: flash can hold multiple bits per cell and ram can't.

MLC is half as expensive as SLC. TLC is 33% less expensive than MLC. QLC is 25% less expensive than TLC and 75% cheaper than SLC. Not to mention transparent compression algos. As the controllers improve you can get more bits of storage from the same amount of flash for free. Longevity and reliability suffers, but hey, cheap SSDs!

Ram only gets cheaper by improvements to semiconductor processes, which also can be applied to make flash cheaper. (Big fat asterisk, those processes are very different.) While improvements to flash that allow more levels per cell can't be applied to ram. The price difference between flash and ram will only continue to grow.

Modern flash is quite "analog". The first company to figure out how to reliably store 32 voltage levels per cell (Five bits. PLC?) will make a quick billion.

<comment><USER3> Two other factors:

Flash connection protocols (sata, ide) allows much faster evolution independent what's on the other side of interface.

If you have a new flash tech that's 2,3x better in density/speed, you can easily deploy it in current generation of high end server in the next few months.

RAM protocols (DDR2,3,4) must be developed 100% in sync with the CPU vendors. If the major cpu vendors (Intel, AMD, ARM Soc, Qualcomm) decide they don't want your new 2,3x better interface speed/density, you have zero chance to deploy it. It takes years for JEDEC to agree on new memory interface standard. Your new 2,5,10x better tech's deployment is actually depend on your competitors agree to allow it to be the new standard.

Flash can have higher latency as trade off if needed. DDR interface's latency has high impact on the CPU/system benchmark.

<comment><USER4> CPUs typically support larger DIMM sizes than exist at launch. Having to wait on CPU manufacturers to support larger sizes is probably not an issue. Having an incredibly small market for those larger sizes probably is more of an issue. The Things stored in RAM are replaced all the time. The things stored in flash typically are not replaced, but appended, creating a demand for more.

<comment><USER5> I think more what the parent post was getting at is perhaps better visualized:

For flash storage, the hierarchy looks like this:

CPU -> standardized interface (PCIe, SATA) -> Controller Chip -> NAND

For DRAM, it looks like this: CPU -> DRAM

The DRAM controller is (these days[0]) built directly into the CPU, whereas for flash storage, the NAND controller communicates with the CPU (indirectly) over a standardized interface. So for flash storage, the designers have control over which controller chip they use, and as such can change the NAND technology used at will. They aren't even limited to NAND, if something better comes along. Whereas with RAM, you can't just plug DDR4 into a CPU that only "speaks" DDR3. I think that flexibility is the important distinction.

[0] It used to be that the DRAM controller was on the northbridge, which was a separate chip from the CPU. But for the purposes of performance and power consumption, the tradeoff with flexibility was made (The Athlon 64 was the first [consumer?] CPU to put the memory controller directly on-die, and that was a large part of the reason it crushed the Pentium 4.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DRAM type memory uses a completely different process than flash even if they're both a form of "memory". The performance of DDR-type memory is well beyond anything in the Flash world.

Today 2GB/s is considered very good for an SSD but that would be brutally slow for system memory. DDR4 memory is typically 30-60GB/s per bank with the low end being two-channel, the high end being four.

DRAM has also been the subject of aggressive research and development for many, many decades while large-scale production of flash is a relatively recent phenomenon. It's the widespread adoption of smart phones, thinner notebooks, and ubiquitous USB keychain type devices that as pushed it to the volumes it's at now.

There's also the concern that DDR memory must have a very high level of data integrity, bit-flip errors are severely problematic, and it can't wear out even after trillions of cycles. Flash has more pervasive error correction, and while wear is a minor concern, it's still possible to exhaust it if you really, really try.

I'd say the reason flash memory prices are steeply down is the new "3D" process used by Intel and Samsung has been a big game-changer, allowing for much higher density. DRAM has seen more gradual evolution through the last few generations.

<comment><USER7> > There's also the concern that DDR memory must have a very high level of data > integrity, bit-flip errors are severely problematic, and it can't wear out > even after trillions of cycles. Flash has more pervasive error correction, > and while wear is a minor concern, it's still possible to exhaust it if you > really, really try.

The reason why we can't do the pervasive and extremely aggressive error correction [1] that is used in flash storage to increase usable densities with DRAM is that forward error correction (FEC) is based on blocks, so to read a couple bytes from a block you will have to read the entire block [2], decode it and then you can have your bytes.

This does not work well for RAM ®

Memory fetching is fundamentally based on cache lines; but the overhead in both bandwidth and latency(!) to fetch-and-decode, say, 64K instead of 64 _bytes_ would be completely unacceptable in most applications.

[1] It's one of the major factors contributing to device endurance. [2] Simplification: Practical FEC is multi-tiered, ie. there are different block sizes involved and multiple layers of EC at these block sizes.

<comment><USER8> I think you're only half-right here.

You cannot do this kind of error correction it like ECC checking in the CPU because it would require multiple clocks or too many pins.

You cannot do this kind of error correction across multiple DRAM chips on board because it would require too many pins.

But you could do this kind of error correction on-chip because you could just read 1024 bits (or more) in parallel from multiple areas (or even mutliple stacked silicon slices).

One problem, however, is that each small read would induce a high energy cost due to the many bits fed into the extensive error correction circuitry. While it shouldn't be a problem for consecutive reads, random-access would indeed lead to a high power consumption which in most cases would not be acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For some historical context this is worth remembering:

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

<comment><USER10> This should be top.

I purchased 64GB of DDR3 for <$100 a year ago. Now I the prices are >$100 for 32GB of DDR3. DDR4 prices are idiotic ~$100 for 16GB

<comment><USER11> >I purchased 64GB of DDR3 for <$100 a year ago.

I don't think it was ever this cheap

<comment><USER12> Looking back on my prior receipts, a stick of 8GB DDR3-1600MHz a year ago was about $12. Currently, lowest price I see is sitting at $21 on pricewatch.com with Newegg being the seller offering the deal (my receipt is from Portatech.)

<comment><USER13> >Looking back on my prior receipts, a stick of 8GB DDR3-1600MHz a year ago was about $12.

This would make a 4Gbit DDR3 chip cost less than a dollar, and I don't think that DRAMeXchange prices has ever been that low

<comment><USER14> You are responding to somebody who claims to have a receipt with a "I think". The best way to respond to an anecdote is data, not opinion.

<comment><USER12> I'm the kind of person that keeps receipts for tax purposes, as all parts I buy are for business purposes (repairs, fresh builds, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is not the speed, reliability, or processes.

There are numerous flash manufacturers all racing each other to build out capacity and increase density because they want to eat the HDD market.

DRAM is controlled by a small cabal, all of whom have multiple convictions for price fixing and collusion. I believe Hynix shipped some sacrificial C-suite execs to do prison time in the US over it. To a large degree no one is building out DRAM fab capacity as well.

DRAM prices have stayed high because the manufacturers want it to stay high and are colluding (either explicitly or implicitly) to keep prices up. The capital cost to compete is enormous: many billions before you can make your first sale. The day you break ground memory prices will mysteriously drop so low as to make your venture unprofitable, meaning your commercial loans get called in and you go bankrupt. Everyone understands this and avoids attempting to compete.

<comment><USER16> This is quite controversial and sounds more than a little conspiracy theory- esque.

While I'm sure this sort of thing goes on, if you could back your statements up with some evidence it would be really helpful.

What you're suggesting here allows for the possibility that at some point some tech firm finds creates a way for us to ditch traditional DRAM and use the cheaper flash storage instead.

My gut tells me there is more to it than politics and capitalism.

<comment><USER17> I mean, 5 different companies have pleaded guilty to price-fixing in the DRAM market, so I don't think what is suggested here is _too_ controversial.

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

<comment><USER16> Wow. Thanks for surfacing this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I had to wager an uneducated guess, I would propose that the recent mainstream acceptance of Solid State Drives as a viable, affordable alternative to spinning disk drives, has created a sudden demand in Flash memory that's caused that industry to thrive.

At least at the retail level in the Best Buy where I worked until recently, I watched Solid State drives transition from something only high end computers had to something that was standard even among the lower priced value machines. We had customers complaining about the smaller drive sizes because they were so accustomed to the gigantic storage offered by the spinning disk media at its height in popularity.

I'd love someone with more industry knowledge to chime in though, as my own experience here is pretty limited. This is simply what I've observed in my own corner of the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> RAM is only capable of storing one bit per cell. FLASH didn't really take off until MLC technology came around giving the ability to store multiple bits per cell which vastly increased the density.

Theoretically RAM could be built that way but it would be much slower. Every cell read/write would need to go through an ADC/DAC, and the noise is much higher due to leakage. This slowness isn't much of a problem for FLASH because its competition was spinning disks that were slow as molasses anyways.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this works by providing a second application for older chip manufacturing facilities. For SD chip designs, speed and size effectively do not matter (the controller will matter a hell of a lot more for final speed than actual storage chips speed). So they're using the chip fabs that everyone else is abandoning.

As a second bonus, even on old systems SD card circuits are relatively small (compared to a 5-60" LCD they certainly are). Wafers are round and old wafers are used to manufacture LCD displays, so small chips can be placed around them in the manufacturing process and get really good economics by having lots of manufacturing options.

So same reasons displays are getting cheap, except they're even better. So the race to the bottom is happening pretty fast for SD cards.

Not entirely sure about this. Might be entirely wrong, but I'm not sure how to confirm this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Slow SSDs have gone down in price, but fast SSDs are still expensive. For example, you can get a 500GB Samsung 850 for about $130 but a Samsung 960 evo costs $250, and then another $100 on top of that for the 960 pro. Those 3 drives range from 600MB/sec to 2222MB/sec linear reads, the fastest costing the same as a 600MB/sec SSD did 3 years ago.

The demand for slow RAM drops precipitously after the whatever Intel chipsets use it stop being used in new systems (not sure if the same is true in the embedded market). For example, nobody's buying DDR2 these days. So the economies of scale dissipate and fabs retool faster.

So while both devices have economies of scale, SSDs have an extra dimension to their demand curve for performance that allows for slower higher density chips to still be profitable.

</comment><comment><USER22> A question that seems related: what the heck is up with memristors? The Wikipedia page ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor)) says that memristors are estimated for commercial viability in 2018, and have been built in prototype, but _also_ says that there are serious doubts about whether memristors can possibly exist in physical reality! What gives?

<comment><USER23> Perhaps find better sources than Wikipedia? You can buy Memristors now, but it's going to be many many years before they get up to densities you'd expect in modern computing systems. (See sites like [http://www.bioinspired.net/products-1.html](http://www.bioinspired.net/products-1.html) or [http://knowm.org/product/](http://knowm.org/product/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1\. There little demand for more memory. 2\. There are only a few Memory makers left on the market. 3\. Moore's Law no longer applicable, smaller transistor isn't necessarily cheaper any more. 4\. You can have a Bad NAND, you dont want a Bad memory.

China has decided to pour in 10s of Billions into the NAND and DRAM industry by 2020, until then the price should very much stable / predictable.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why does the OP imply that there is some relation between the two products? It's true that both use litho and si, but they are dramatically different, internally.

Think of flash as a consumable media - it is, since each cell can only be erased a few hundred times. After all, that's what it means when the vendor says "200TBW for 256G device": you can expect 7-800 cycles per cell. This is also why vendors are pushing capacity so hard: it lets them push down the price while at the same time not needing to improve endurance.

So in some sense, the answer is "endurance", since the physics of flash erasure necessitate high capacity, and no one would buy the extra capacity unless it were also relatively cheaper. Whereas DRAM doesn't wear out...

<comment><USER26> OP is simply asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After reading through the answers here, I don't think the real answer has been given.

Is it the technology?

* Flash cells can store more data an be produced cheaper per cell. But they are more complex to read out and slower.

This can explain some factor, but the factor of 40 given by OP probably not.

* Flash and DRAM probably use different processes.

This could explain a bit but look at the next point...

* DRAM has a much longer history and (at least in the beginning) much higher capital investment.

...which means that DRAM should have the technological advantage. At least through economies of scale.

Is the cumulative investment in flash research already much bigger compared to DRAM research?

Is the process used to produce flash memory so much easier?

Is it the market?

* Obviously people pay the price.

* With DRAM people are hungry for performance more than they are for size.

* We already have more than enough DRAM. The latest MacBookPro demonstrates that 16 GB DRAM is enough for just about everybody but flash storage goes up to 1 TB.

* Of those 16 GB DRAM the speed and power consumption are much more important than the raw size.

Coming back to the cumulative investment. I think that the primary pain point for flash has been the price per GB. Flash could be stronger, faster, more reliable, less power consuming but those are all secondary. It is fast and reliable enough by using very complex RAID controllers. The power consumption is not as bad as HDDs already use a lot and the data mostly just sits around. The main driving point is the price per GB. This is where the money goes in flash development.

On the other hand for DRAM, after some point, it is mostly speed and power driven. Reliability has to be comparatively high as every cell must work over years. Size is mostly increased by improving semiconductor processes where flash probably uses a lot of the same technology. Using the layer stacking technologies of flash is probably not yet applicable because it is not reliable enough and not compatible with the cell layout, maybe it never will.

If we really were hungry for so much RAM we would probably get it. But we aren't. It's good enough. Progress slows down.

<comment><USER27> You're thinking like an MBA and dismissing the biggest factors

Writing to DRAM is much, much faster than writing to SSD, also reliability (in the sense that you can use chips with defective cells in SSDs).

You mentioned those factors but you're not giving them enough importance. Market factors are important, but the price is not going to be less than cost.

<comment><USER8> I'm thinking like an MBA here because that's how you have to think in order to reason about the price something has.

Yes, those factors are important! But are they also the main driver of cost? I don't know.

Could we have speed, reliabaility and size? That is a technological question. I don't have the answer to that.

Would enough people care to pay for speed, reliability and size? That's more of an MBA question and the answer probably is no.

The example given is: People pay extra to have 1 TB of flash in their machine but they are OK with only having 16 GB of RAM. The priority is even to have a lower power consumption instead of having 32 GB of RAM.

While you are right that we maybe cannot deliver the technology on a pure technological stance, you kind of miss the point. Even if we could, we wouldn't do it because of the MBAs driving the fincances in a certain direction based on (perceived) market forces.

<comment><USER27> The question was: "Why are flash memory prices going down so much faster than RAM?"

Answer: because there are (technological) ways of making it cheaper (and probably slower/less reliable, but not much), as well as economy of scale factors

Why DRAM doesn't get cheaper: because it has to follow much stricter requirements.

The question itself is naive. It thinks "megabytes of memory" are the same thing regardless of form factor

> Would enough people care to pay for speed, reliability and size? That's more > of an MBA question and the answer probably is no.

Yes, probably not. Not the masses at least. Unless they buy Apple, they (still) care about this mostly, apart from adapter shenanigans

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looking at Hynix's financials, they're making enough money to reduce the cost of RAM quite a bit. Looks like it's just them maximizing their profit as one would expect. I assume it's similar for the rest. As always with for-profit firms selling hardware or I.P..

<comment><USER29> Unless you're suggesting collusion, that doesn't seem to make sense. Prices should fall in a competitive market, regardless of what profit a manufacturer would ideally like to maximize.

<comment><USER28> Collusion has already happened in this market. I don't need that, though. I've observed a pattern in a lot of markets where big players, esp wielding patents, will turn into cartels (intentional or emergent) that act in both individual self-interest and collective self-interest. A race to the bottom wouldn't benefit any of them. So, they compete in little ways to fight for market share but make sure the business models keep the profits up.

The telecoms, both cellular and ISP's, are where this is most obvious where the compete in the most incremental way saying its impossible to do anything else. Then, a small play comes in doing what they're doing... sometimes the same way... with more benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. Suddenly, they can afford to do the same with their existing infrastructure. Real competition would've brought in unlimited plans in cell phones or gigabit in broadband much sooner for similar or lower prices.

The largest vendors of RAM are likely a cartel in practice. It's the best outcome for each of them to not race to the bottom. They don't even need to talk to know that. That they can reinforce it with patents they're more likely to have than the smaller players is icing on the cake.

<comment><USER13> Objective Analysis has an entire report on this: [http://objective- analysis.com/Reports.html#Consolidation](http://objective- analysis.com/Reports.html#Consolidation)

<comment><USER28> Appreciate it. Going by abstracts, it looks like there's a cost advantage to NAND, the DRAM people are greedy cartels, and might have to merge to reduce costs. Looks like the greed is backfiring but we must remember CEO's and boards focus on short-term due to incentives. They might still "win" even if the firms start losing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> An additional point: People don't know the quality of the flash they are buying. You're seeing bottom-bin crappy parts made to look better than they are with ECC. You're also NOT seeing data retention; that cheap USB stick may develop unreadable blocks sooner (this is much more likely with TLC and QLC, where the difference between two bit values can be measured in the hundreds or even dozens of trapped electrons).

</comment><comment><USER31> RAM is written to faster than any other component other than the onboard processor cache.

</comment><comment><USER32> Read/write speeds for DRAM are much faster than flash (although the gap is closing and the day may soon come where computers are sold with flash storage but no DRAM, and the distinction between memory and storage is done away with).

DRAM is also a much more mature technology than flash is, so more of the low- hanging fruit for improvement has already been taken advantage of.

</comment><comment><USER33> RAM is more expensive to produce in general (more transistors, more stringent specs as you mentioned), but as to rate of change, that seems more likely to be due to competitive pressures and maybe more rapidly increasing demand for flash in recent years versus RAM.

</comment><comment><USER34> All technical reasons aside, it has got to be mostly demand. I can't see computers coming pre-configured with more than 64gb, but for storage there is increasingly more demand as the price reaches parity with spinning disks. One thing that is true is we are as storage-hungry as ever. High res photos created by every phone, companies logging every minute process in hopes of using it for analysis later... Our need for storage vastly outstrips our need for RAM.

</comment><comment><USER4> The market for DRAM is relatively mature while the market for flash is still developing as it canabalizes the hard drive market. Consequently, you see flash taking advantage of newer processes and techniques first as flash manufacturers aim for ever greater volumes in pursuit of profits.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think NAND flash is more flexible in terms of design than DRAM is, for example 3D NAND. NAND flash generally communicate through a separate controller that uses for example the SATA or USB buses, while the DRAM controller is built into the CPU or chipset.

</comment><comment><USER35> And here I am with 24gb ecc ram for 40 bucks on eBay. Workstation PCs ftw!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is the relevant chart:

[http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm)

DIMM seems to go down slower lately.</comment>


Auditing passwords on password store - <AUTHOR> https://kdecherf.com/blog/2017/11/01/auditing-passwords-on-password-store/ <comment><USER2> That's a cool idea, but it leaves everything pretty manual. LastPass already offers the ability to automatically update your passwords for a large number of the biggest/most used sites that seems to work pretty well: [https://blog.lastpass.com/2014/12/introducing-auto- password-...](https://blog.lastpass.com/2014/12/introducing-auto-password- changing-with.html/)</comment>


Minimalistic Wikipedia in "real pages" - <AUTHOR> http://buk.io/@en/Einstein/0.00001

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, but I think it would be better if the sections were sectioned off properly. That and better navigation (arrows or hjkl)

Many sections flow into the wrong title by too large a degree. For example, Section 2.14 gets cut off in the middle of the first sentence and the rest is included in Section 2.15. This makes it more annoying to read, rather than easier to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Try to use arrows(they should work) and spacebar. For the sections, will try to figure out how to keep them in more logical way. Regards.</comment></comment>


Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/harassment-of-our-authors-is-not-ok-f0266d21f460#.sw8x46v1e <comment><USER3> Being a person who worked to attain an English degree, I like to think I take the meaning of words with a bit of seriousness that might otherwise be considered going overboard. It's natural to be a critic, and, in turn, be open minded to other people's thoughts, positions, and logic.

What the linked article describes, in linguistic terms, is not harassment. At least not without examples. Harassment is a specific type of human interaction - it's negative, very much so. While there may have been actual harassment of the young author, what was quoted is not a description of harassment.

In plain English, the quote says "I received contacts by people I'm not comfortable being in contact with" and that is, to me, a worthwhile concern to have as a young person engaging in the online realm. Be it social, professional, or otherwise. When I had a dating profile that said "Not interested in under XX age or if you have children" and I got contacted by people who were in one of those categories, that's not really harassment - <USER2> could've potentially gotten to that point if I had responded or said some kind of derogatory comment - but it's a social interaction.

Writing online or in any public forum is a form of attention seeking. The internet is, after all, a communications platform at its root. However, this article frames unsolicited contact on open internet platforms as harassment, and that is not fair to the English language.

I'm not clamoring for specifics, nor disputing that the interaction(s) may have been uncomfortable. If there was legitimate harassment, that's a valid point and should not be cheapened, and an example, or "comments of a ____ nature" would simply be helpful. I've had my fair share in real life and online. What I am a stickler about is using loaded words inappropriately, because it does a disservice to everyone involved: It misleads readers and it brings the author's motive for such word selection into question. It hurts an otherwise constructive dialog.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. What is clear is that the young person did not want the attention. So for Dinah Davis to write another article grinding her axe seems rather insensitive.

And then to jump to "I am beyond angry and disgusted that this has happened."?!? Based on what?!?

Could it be that her parents saw the posts and asked their daughter to put a stop to it? Would you still be "angry and disgusted"?

Maybe she's from a culture where its not OK?

Or, maybe she just didn't feel comfortable with it and very politely asked to delete it. And instead it was turned into something more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did consider that and thought about whether or not I should post. I knew that posting would bring more attention to it, but I also felt that by not posting I was allowing things like this to continue and that is not ok. I felt there was value in standing up for someone who decided to write for our publication, and was approached in an unwanted way. At least this way there are thousands more people that are aware that situations like this happen.In the future, we will try to protect our young posters against this by anonymizing their content.

<comment><USER3> That last sentence is a really good, solution-oriented and reasonable approach. In reflecting on this post-post I recalled how ZeroHedge would use a 'default' name (Tyler Durden) for posts. If one could be used for "Voice From A Young Person" or something to that extent, I think that can be a good outlet and ring-fencing of personal information. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe the article is missing some information, but why wouldn't older people be allowed to talk to young people? I'm relatively young (24) and for my entire life, I've been talking with old people to gain knowledge. Why wouldn't this be ok?

<comment><USER6> The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.

It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.

I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to younger people.

<comment><USER5> There is no mention of "sexual assault" or even "sexual" in the submitted story, not sure where you get that from.

"unwanted attention" simply means (for me at least) that someone gave you attention, that you didn't expect. I would assume that people expect that to happen when you write in a public place and also submitting it to places like HN and elsewhere.

If this really is about "sexual harassment" and not saying "Hi, cool story" via Twitter, then I can understand the frustration and it's obviously not ok.

But the article doesn't make this clear and I don't want to make the assumption either...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Creepy guys send unsolicited messages to girls on the internet... How is this worthy of a blog post or an upvote?

<comment><USER8> Yeah. It's bad. I feel sorry for her. I can't say I'm surprised. But what am I supposed to do with this information?

<comment><USER9> The implication is that HN is to blame, since there were some "negative comments" on here. (Un)fortunately the majority of those comments seem to have been deleted[1] so there is no opportunity for us to review the facts and form our own opinion.

Without that context, the author's message seems only to be that HN is a bad place that fosters negativity and sexism.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112888)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No it's not ok, but you're publishing to a worldwide audience and I'm sorry if this is a tired argument that pro women (myself included) people are tired of hearing, but there are ALWAYS going to be a certain subset of creeps you have to deal with. Believe me it's a privilege to be male that the vast majority of males don't fully appreciate, myself included until very recently, that we don't generally have to deal with this kind of garbage, but I genuinely can't envision a future where this isn't the case.

That does suck too because I'd love to see more women getting into STEM, especially coding.

<comment><USER11> Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15, 20 years ago. I've spent literally decades in some of these Internet communities, and the level of disrespect women receive on the Internet has skyrocketed in the past 10 years. Used to be that shit like doxing was incredibly rare; now it's an everyday occurrence and has to be factored into most women's social media.

There's also a lot to be said for standing up and saying, "hey, this isn't okay behavior." Because it won't change unless this kind of behavior is brought into the spotlight and their perpetrators left to scurry like roaches.

<comment><USER10> > Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15, > 20 years ago.

That I will definitely agree with, but the demographics were much different. Back then the Internet was almost entirely professional companies and university students. Now it's literally everyone, and that means you get roughly the same ratio of shitty people to normal people, amplified by the fact that all you need to start a twitter account is an email address.

I get that a lot of people have issues with Facebooks real name policy, but forgetting the problems than transgender folk have with getting Facebook to let them use the name they want, it has done a great deal to curb harassment on that platform.

IMHO you can have a good community, you can have an anonymous community, but with regular people in the mix you can't have both.</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome's Most Visited. What does it mean for WebMynd, Iterasi, or even Rescutime? - <AUTHOR>

TheChrome's Most Visited paired with its own Search feature. What does it mean for WebMynd and Iterasi, even Rescuetime? <comment><USER2> It gives Rescuetime a sales pitch: "Don't you wish Chrome's 'Most Visited' feature was more than a top-ten list?"

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think Rescuetime has anything to be worried about since they're focus is not on search, but on showing you exactly where you spend, which is not what google chrome shows you.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about WebMynd, Iterasi?

<comment><USER3> Its kinda of hard to say. I wouldn't worry about chrome toomuch yet since browser adoption seems to happen very slowly. I'd be a lot more worried if FF3 copies these features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is one of those worrying-about-buggy-whip-manufacturer type problems.

Sometimes new things make old things obsolete. Sometimes the old thing is given a new use. Oh no.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please elaborate?

<comment><USER4> Sorry I read this as a very "oh no there are services I like that are being supplanted by Google ahhh!"

Simply, there are lots of things I would consider relatively obvious shoe-ins for inclusion in browsers. Searchable web archives seem one of those (its easy to say "I remember seeing a site about it", but sometimes hard to remember exact details) and the obvious response is that some services will die off if they fail to provide compelling new functionality, and some will live on.

In the same way, Google or Yahoo search results are way different from what they used to be. I remember people worrying about technorati as search engines began getting better at returning blogs as search results when in the end I think its good that I don't have a different search engine for each source of information. This progression is natural and healthy, and worrying about one product over another is rather needless.

Love products for the functionality or the possibilities they allow, not the logo on them. If something better comes along then by all means switch instead of worrying about the health of the old thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i dont see the link with rescuetime</comment>


Irish Company Locates Office In Ireland - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tito.io/posts/irish-company-locates-office-in-ireland/ <comment><AUTHOR> No doubt, they've done so in order to take advantage of Ireland's lax tax laws and asleep-at-the-wheel regulators.

It's a disgrace.

Down with this sort of thing. Careful now.

<comment><USER2> Yes, every company should move to wherever it is they can pay the most taxes. Perhaps instead of criticizing Ireland for low taxes, perhaps the ire should be forces on jurisdictions with confiscatory taxes and burdensome regulation. I moved from New York City because I was not only paying higher prices for everything but things like rent control, exceptionally high state and local taxes, plus the added bonus of paying insanity rates for health insurance, not to mention a public school system that results in your kid having to travel across town even though there's a perfectly good school a block away. I would never again start a company in New York.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work guys. This is great news for Ireland's economy which not too long ago was decimated and has recovered exceptionally well. I think other parts of the world with bad economies need to learn from Ireland and attract startup and technology companies with incentives.

The one thing that doesn't sit well with me in this situation is the PR speak from the founder and lead members masking the real reason they've decided to open an office in Ireland: tax incentives and very loose regulations.

> "It just seemed to make sense"

This translates too: we'd pay more tax somewhere else, so it makes sense to open an office in Ireland and tax advantage of the perks.

>"Dublin is great. There's something really familiar about it that I can't quite put my finger on."

Dublin is definitely a great place, especially when you're not paying much tax.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, Ireland have played it smart luring the likes of Apple and Linkedin to their corner of the world repairing their economy quite quickly, but lets cut to the chase: tech startups aren't moving their offices to Ireland because of the weather. Can't we all just be honest with one another?

<comment><USER4> You don't think it's at all likely that they are _from Dublin_ and were _here already_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to Tito on raising a round - by their description it sounds like they got excellent terms.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pfft.. I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even paying his Ma proper digg money.

<comment><USER7> Yeah but I wonder if his Ma even reddit...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to assume this post was dripping with irony, clever sarcasm, and wit that I missed due to not being Irish.

That said, good going Tito. I think. I'm not really sure if the news is good or if there really is any news, but I'm assuming this is both news and good news.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this the onion? "Irish Company Locates Office in Ireland"

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah sure tis a very Irish thing to be doin now, sure don't ya know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's rumored that Oscar Wilde's favorite color was green.

</comment><comment><USER11> _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, fiddle dee dee, potatos!

<comment><AUTHOR> What are ye like?</comment></comment>


Russia reportedly stole NSA secrets with help of Kaspersky–what we know now - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/the-cases-for-and-against-claims-kaspersky-helped-steal-secret-nsa-secrets/ <comment><USER2> Do anybody have stats, how much USA is stealing from other countries?</comment>


Why Ansible 1.8 is the new immutable deployment killer - <AUTHOR> https://t37.net/why-ansible-1-8-is-the-new-immutable-deployment-killer.html

<comment><USER2> Ansible is awesome.</comment>


Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/2/ <comment><USER2> Substantial discussion from an earlier submission is here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734480></comment>


Scientists can now tweak DNA molecules to store data - <AUTHOR> https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/smoke-on-the-water-data-in-the-dna <comment><USER2> The title suggests that this is an entirely new achievement. But (as also mentioned in the article), this has been possible for several years, since 2012 [1]. Steady progress is being made at decreasing the cost. But the procedure itself isn't new.

Furthermore, the title suggests that existing DNA molecules are "tweaked" to encode arbitrary information. While that's possible [2], the procedures in question don't tweak existing DNA, they synthesise new DNA molecules, which is vastly more efficient.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11875](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11875)

[2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23017](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23017)

<comment><USER3> Exactly, this DNA does not get to live inside a cell.

The next evolution is to craft viruses that carry the payload and use a (human) host to carry the information around.

<comment><USER4> I hope they put some DEP in there. I guess that your liver "running" some vacation videos won't be good for your health :)

<comment><USER5> Random DNA data, or densely-encoded data that is effectively random at the symbol level, will be very likely to have a stop codon very early in the sequence: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_codon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_codon) Deliberately constructed sequences can have stop codons added on purpose, although it would be extreme paranoia, since AFAIK there isn't a pathway for DNA to just wander into a cell and get incorporated, as that would be an extreme hazard to the cell. As it is they put a lot of work into making it a lot more difficult than that, and you need something at least as sophisticated as a virus to get in.

<comment><USER2> For stop codons to be relevant the first step would have to be to transcribe the synthetic DNA into RNA, which would require the presence of adequate promoter sequences. Given their complexity and spacing, this would already be quite unlikely — so most of that DNA would never produce RNA. But actual gene expression isn't the only side-effect of introducing random sequences (although it would be by far the most severe): The synthetic sequences might also contain spurious regulatory motifs, or destroy the spacing of existing regulatory regions (not to mention that altogether random insertions would potentially destroy existing coding sequences).

At any rate, this is all purely academic since it makes very little sense to inject synthetic data DNA in living cells: Living cells have a very xenophobic attitude towards foreign DNA (as they see it as potentially viral) and try to destroy it. Once that's solved, the synthetic data DNA now sits in a cell. Wet, and full of enzymes. These are actually not very good conditions for DNA molecules to persist. Cells age and die, and fragment their own DNA in the process. Or if they don't, they copy the DNA and, while doing so, introduce errors.

No; DNA as a storage medium for data makes most sense when it is dried up and frozen. Better yet, vitrified (but so far there's no way of undoing DNA vitrification without damaging it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "River of Gods" by Ian MacDonald (narrated by Jonathan Keeble), one of my favorite audiobooks in recent years, was my first exposure to this idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> A startup called Catalog Technologies has been already demonstrated DNA storage. For their demo they encoded Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in DNA.

[https://youtu.be/ESGVJBXR4KE](https://youtu.be/ESGVJBXR4KE)

<comment><USER8> Very cool. Long road to get to commercialization. Can you imagine a 2.5" HDD that has some crazy DNA reading mechanism in it?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good article however can't say that for all the articles on Cosmos Magazine. Think many articles are highly speculative and border on Pseudo Science.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe one day they'll remove the latent virus code in our DNA and use those areas up for DNA Storage. Imagine if every human that went into space to colonize, had a library of information in their finger tips.

<comment><USER11> Question: with latent virus code removed, does the cell use less energy to replicate or is able to replicate faster?

<comment><USER2> In theory it should, and substantially, since DNA replication is a highly energy dependent process. In practice we can't just nilly-willy remove genetic material from our chromosomes, even if it ostensibly has no useful function. That said, scientists have attempted long-range deletions in mouse and some of those show no phenotype (within the highly limited study!). But as far as I know they didn't look at energy expenditure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Next steps are: write all internet contents into DNA spirals and engineer organism carrying them. The long term goal is to provide an access from brain to this information somehow. Hopefully it will be possible.

<comment><USER13> Shades of Johnny Mnemonic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Next Steps : Engineer a virus to mine bitcoin using the brain power.

<comment><USER15> Then it would just become CheapCoin, wouldn't it?</comment></comment>


All the Western companies you'd have to combine to get something like Alibaba - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/206283/all-the-western-companies-youd-have-to-combine-to-get-something-like-alibaba/?source=HackerNews&referrer=Anuj+Adhiya <comment><USER2> I love this article. Despite the multitudes of news sources telling us about how commerce is now global and business is no longer tied to a place and the internet is changing the world, there is still an _ocean_ of enterprises of which we US-based-or-english-speaking technologists are ignorant.

Take a moment to think about this: Alibaba is a huge company, growing in an absolutely enormous market, providing a pile of services, and most American technologists know nothing about it. Expand this thinking to countries: there are markets that are only just beginning to enjoy the degree of technological luxury the US and Europe enjoys. Who will serve them? These are people just like us, they have needs and desires much like ours. Who will satisfy them?

If you're an entrepreneur, there are millions if not billions of people who are on the cusp of becoming your target market, and the dominant technological discourse and journalistic coverage gives you no insight into the market they occupy. Not the languages they speak, not the companies who would be your competitors, not the cultural differences that would make selling difficult. Nothing.

I hope this article opens peoples' eyes to the fact that the US-based-or- english-speaking countries are soon going to be a relatively small portion of the world. We need news sources like this to practice the globalization sermon they all preach.

<comment><USER3> It's not exactly purely an aspect of Western companies ignoring China or localizing property for China that is the culprit here. The Chinese government also makes it difficult, especially in the realm of internet services, for Western companies to play.

I know plenty of American technologists who are well aware of Chinese internet properties, how could they not, when disproportionately many American technologists are of Asian descent, but many of them have made the decision that it is preferable to run your startup in the relative unfettered chaos of Silicon Valley than to navigate the maze and minefield of considerations of running an internet service in China.

I'm pretty sure Google would love to have another billion Gmail users or Google search users, or to have Google Play store available (for paid apps) in China. Do you think the fact that these services are blocked are because of ignorance?

<comment><USER4> "The Chinese government also makes it difficult ..."

The biggest internet companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu are mostly foreign owned and initially funded by foreign venture capital. The real difference is that they are operated by Chinese nationals who don't have a Western headquarter to report to. McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks etc., on the other hand, succeeded probably because they didn't have to face a fast evolving market and could adapt their business models to China at their own pace.

<comment><USER5> Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu were all founded by Chinese and are based in China. The Chinese government welcomes foreign investment as long as ownership remains Chinese. KFC, McDonalds and Starbucks have succeeded because the majority of their managers, owners and workers are Chinese.

<comment><USER4> Alibaba was at one time 40% owned by Yahoo and close to 40% by Softbank, with significant stakes by investors like Silver Lake and Digital Sky. Tencent was 46% owned by South African Naspers, which still owns 34%. Baidu was funded by Silicon Valley venture capital. Google actually contributed $5 million to Baidu's third round and offered to buy the whole for $1.6B (and allegedly could have cinched the deal if they had offered $2B).

Google China was led by a Chinese American academic from Taiwan (though well liked by the Chinese) and staffed with managers recruited from Google's Chinese American employees, who had cushy US jobs to go back to and did not want to lose career opportunities in the US. The managers of their local competitors didn't have such luxuries.

<comment><USER3> Come now, Google China had onerous censorship provisions placed on it that it did not want to adhere to, and Google simply can't be a den of piracy like Baidu was.

<comment><USER4> Yes Google is a rather special case. It clearly has technological advantages and may have succeeded despite its clumsiness if Chinese regulations were different. However that does not explain how others failed, like EBay or Yahoo. I showed clearly ownership restriction wasn't the reason. Local operational control was, in my opinion. I don't even see how this could be controversial. Jack Ma is one of China's richest man. So are the other Ma (of Tencent) and Li (of Baidu). Does anyone think hypothetical resounding successes of EBay/Google/Amazon etc could have similarly minted local billionaires? Why would the same incentives work in the US to create successful entrepreneurs but not in China?

Tactically it may be true that stricter ethics rules make things harder. But that didn't stop businesses like Starbucks from succeeding eventually, because their business model can be transplanted.

Alibaba didn't have success handed to it. Its initial B2B model was ho hum. It had to or did recreate itself, multiple times. Its Taobao was initially a loss leader with free listings. TMall was also not given a high chance of success. It had ferocious competitors. It created its own business models and executed well to ensure their success.

<comment><USER6> Out of all the companies you listed, NONE have American born founders: Ebay (Iranian), Yahoo (Taiwan), Google (Russia, ok Page is born in Michigan). How many people who aren't born in China have been minted as billionaires at Chinese companies?

Starbucks had plenty of problems with their Chinese partners; they worked hard to get to the point where they were actually allowed to run stores by themselves without a parasitic local partners, and I think this is only true in second tier cities right now.

<comment><USER4> "NONE have American born founders"

Neither were they divisions of some foreign conglomerates. I think that is more relevant than the fact the founders were foreign born. Certainly you would think of Jerry Yang or Sergey Brin or Pierre Omidyar as American as any other. They are not foreigners just because they are foreign born.

<comment><USER4> "Also, China doesn't support dual citizenship like the states does. So becoming a Chinese citizen means renouncing your US citizenship."

That is incorrect. Becoming a US citizen means renouncing your native citizenship as well. The only exception is if you were born into dual citizenships in which case you don't need naturalization at all.

<comment><USER7> The United States allows dual citizenship if you naturalize to a non-hostile foreign country without renouncing your US citizenship, but only because of a supreme court decision over US citizens who became Israel citizens. I am dual US/Australian via this route.

<comment><USER4> What do you make of the naturalization oath? Namely: "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; ..." It doesn't have anything to do with which country you are from.

<comment><USER6> In general, supreme court > oath writers.

<comment><USER4> I think there is a certain amount of cross-talk here. I get what you are saying about the oath but it is administered by Federal court judges so it is apparently not in conflict with the Supreme Court ruling. Secondly it is not what the Supreme Court said that matters here. By asking the naturalized citizens to take the oath it is entirely reasonable that their native governments construe the action as renouncing their original citizenship. It is literally what the oath says. I get that with the Supreme Court ruling it is possible for American citizens to obtain another citizenship without losing their US citizenship. I think that is a good thing in this increasingly globalized world and hopefully one day national borders will mean a lot less as it is in Europe today. However we were discussing what you said: "So becoming a Chinese citizen means renouncing your US citizenship." Does China actually enforce it by demanding proof or also just make you take an oath? I understand there may be little data to tell at this point. And when I said that US does the same I meant that the US make you take the oath to renounce your native citizenship.

<comment><USER6> US is a country ruled strictly by law. Sign any contract, or take any oath, cannot discharge rights given to is by law. In the us, this means dual citizenship is accepted and even respected even if the politicians wished otherwise...they cannot deny constitutional rights without changing the constitution. Contrast this with China's "freedom of speech" that is enshrined in its constitution but not respected by the CCP, who don't need to grant those rights to the people since there is no check on their power in the Chinese system.

No one has naturalized into Chinese citizenship, but china has consistently refused to acknowledge dual citizenship for anyone younger than 18 or not born into it. It has nothing to do with oaths.

<comment><USER4> I was saying that US requires people who naturalize into US citizenship to take an oath to renounce their original citizenship. This is just a fact and the Supreme Court did not say this is unconstitutional.

Plenty of people have been naturalized into Chinese citizenship, at least in Hongkong. Here is the requirement [http://www.gov.hk/en/residents/immigration/chinese/naturalis...](http://www.gov.hk/en/residents/immigration/chinese/naturalisation.htm) and I do see that it requires abandonment of foreign citizenship although it does not say what level of documentation is needed, if any. If it were an oath then it would be symmetric with US. With China ruled by the CCP it is also understandable that the demand for naturalization may not be that high in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although Alibaba is a huge company that does a ton of different things, I feel like this article went out of the way to avoid mentioning that companies like Google and Amazon (as well as Microsoft and Apple to a lesser extent) come close to checking all of these boxes. The other thing to point out is that Alibaba owns stakes in many of these companies and doesn't really own them outright.

As others have already pointed out how Google compares, take Amazon for instance:

Online Payments - Amazon Payments

Cloud Services - Amazon Web Services

Mobile Apps - Amazon AppStore

Mobile OS - Amazon FireOS

Maps and Navigation - Amazon Maps API

Retail Outlets - N/A

Group Buying - Amazon Local

Cloud Storage - Amazon CloudDrive / Amazon S3

Mobile Messaging - N/A

Car Service, Ride Sharing - N/A

C2C e-commerice - Amazon Services/Amazon WebStore (not quite the same, but close)

Online Travel Booking - N/A

B2C e-commerce - Amazon.com

E-Learning - [http://www.tenmarks.com/](http://www.tenmarks.com/) (owned by Amazon)

Microblogging - N/A

Music Streaming - Amazon Cloud Player

Streaming Video - Amazon Prime Instant Streaming

Money-market funds - N/A

12/18 isn't bad.

<comment><USER9> Also Amazon and Google does a lot of stuff Alibaba does not do.

* Self-service warehousing and distribution (Fulfillment by Amazon)

* Package Delivery (Google Shopping Express, AmazonFresh) TV setup box (Amazon FireTV)

* Search Engine (Google Search) Web Browser (Chrome)

* Laptop/Desktop OS (Chrome OS)

* Wearable Tech (Android Wear, Google Glass) etc.

Also for many offerings like Aliyun and Aliyun OS pale in comparison in the features offered by AWS or Android.

I went to an Alibaba presentation in the US awhile ago. They want to pursue the same strategy as Google and focus deep on big data and Machine Learning rather than building out huge logistic infrastructure like Amazon. This is probably a good idea since the margins are better.

<comment><USER10> Alibaba owns UCWeb is top 1 mobile browser since Windows Mobile ages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> online payments ---- google wallet

cloud services ---- google cloud platform

mobile apps ---- google play

mobile OS ---- android

maps and nav ---- google maps

physical retail ---- ? no google product

shopping deals ---- google offers

cloud storage ---- google drive

instant messaging ---- google hangouts

car service ---- uber (via google ventures)

c2c ecommerce ---- ? no google product

travel booking ---- google flights

b2c ecommerce ---- ? no google product

e-learning ---- ? no google product

social media ---- google+

music streaming ---- google play music (all access)

video streaming ---- youtube / google play movies

money market ---- ? no google product

all the western companies you'd have to combine to cover alibaba's markets would seem to me to be google, and maybe one or two others. i included uber because i know about that one, you could probably fill in a few more gaps with other google ventures companies.

<comment><USER12> It's also about the scale. Most of their services are top competitors in the market. For example, Alipay, or 支付宝, is the de facto online payment service in China. As far as I know, I cannot imagine another company which provides similar service in China. Part of the reason is the government regulation.

<comment><USER13> The thing I wonder about their status as a top competitor: how different would their status be in a less restrictive market?

How does Alipay's user experience compare to Paypal's? Is it the lack of competition that has enabled them to expand their reach so widely (by not having to focus so much effort on each venture)? For example, the experience of shopping on AliExpress is (imo) sub-par when compared to most Western online shopping experiences I've had (Amazon, Zappos, and even smaller retailers).

I don't know a whole ton about the Eastern market to be honest, so I'm open to being educated.

<comment><USER14> My experience: using paypal is so confusing for me, compared to alipay. And ebay makes you uncomfortable and doubting your purchase decision more than taobao.

I think it partially explains Alibaba's success in China. how you do shopping and paying is very much dependent on the "tradition" and regulation environment, and a local company can optimize that better than a global one.

Aliexpress is a mess though, i agree with that. But I think the language barrier faced by the shop owners there may be the biggest problem.

<comment><USER15> Fraud is so rampant, that all of Paypal's competitors were either more worrisome or got defrauded to death. Paypal found the very narrow area where you can be careful enough to be profitable without chasing away all of your customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's not clear to me how it's good for me as a consumer to have one company providing me everything. That seems to go wrong more often than it goes well.

As an investor, I can see how a monopolistic behemoth might be good, assuming we ignore possible legal problems. But I'd also worry that a huge company like that would not be able to focus effectively on the probably hundreds or thousands of products and markets in which they must be involved. Huge companies like Exxon, say, are at least focused primarily on energy needs; Amazon on online retailing; Apple or Sony on consumer electronics and software. What is Alibaba focused on? (And yes, the same question could be asked about Google, although search and ads are probably the biggest things.)

What is Alibaba currently really world-class at, OTHER than owning the Chinese market from top to bottom? Owning the Chinese market is probably caused as much by cronyism as by being really good at anything.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pity its not Alibaba that is for sale in the "IPO" then, just a Cayman Islands company which holds a "profit participation" right which may or may not be legal in China. The article also points out that much of Alibaba is not actually owned by the company but by Jack Ma personally, so no participation in that.

<comment><USER11> This is an interesting fact that none of the articles i've seen so far have mentioned. Do you know how Yahoo fits into this? is their stake in the holding company as well, or in Alibaba proper?

<comment><USER17> I think they own it more directly, as the holding company is new. But they have had issues in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen a lot of articles talking about how huge Alibaba is, but they all seem to focus only on transaction volume, e.g 'Alibaba has more sales than Amazon and eBay combined!'. I was really surprised when I read their filing, $4.7B in total revenue last financial year, $5.7B in the first 9 months of this financial year. Amazon + eBay in 2013 pulled in $33B in revenue. They seem to be processing a lot of transactions, but charging very little for it.

<comment><USER19> I agree. Every article I've come across goes out of the way to avoid ever talking about Alibaba's actual revenue. It's clear there's an immense amount of pumping going on leading up to the IPO.

Fact is, Alibaba isn't all that large at all. And 57% revenue growth on ~$8 billion in annual sales, while excellent, is not earth shattering. A lot of US tech companies have pulled off that kind of growth, Amazon included.

<comment><USER20> A lot? Care to cite? You may be correct but my gut says _a few_ have done it. A "lot" seems like overstatement.

And you say "Amazon included." Have you ever seen Amazon's sales growth charted? It's the definition of hockey stick growth. Of course they're included, but who else is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You could never combine Western companies to do what Alibaba did because of anticompetive, protectionist, nationalist, and corrupt policies in China. The chart can be read in reverse, describing what Alibaba knocked-off.

</comment><comment><USER22> Amazing how big of a company they are. This list is missing [http://www.1688.com/](http://www.1688.com/) and [http://www.alibaba.com/](http://www.alibaba.com/) which are B2B wholesaling.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think many large tech companies have me-too platforms in a wide range of services -- just because Alibaba has a fork of Android does not make it comparable to Android. A better comparison would be yielded if the userbase/usage of these services were included.

This is not to say that Alibaba is not an incredible company, just that this is an incomplete comparison.

</comment><comment><USER24> I haven't heard of Aliyun OS before. It appears to be a forked version of AOSP. Does it add anything significant on top of it?

<comment><USER10> They had their own Dalvik-like JVM implementation, other than that, UI stuff and meh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So who's buying the IPO? Seems much better investment than SV companies with little or no profit.

I wonder how it will affect YHOO -- Probably worth buying Jan 2015 $40 calls since Yahoo owns 24% stake, maybe even short AMZN on day of IPO.

<comment><USER19> If you didn't catch Amazon short at, say, $390+ when it was obviously really crazy, why would you bother after they've already plunged? Don't bother at this point, it's down 30%, _most_ of the gains are over on the Amazon short ride. There are still other excellent short candidates given the market is near an all time high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It might "be the Amazon of China", but I don't trust most of the companies. I really wanted to like this company, but the communication is terrible(which is understandable), and the quotes I get from suppliers are for the wrong request, or appear to be counterfit goods? There's a huge need for an independent verification system for Alibaba sellers; maybe located in a western democratic country? Right now-- trust is really my problem with their site, and their suppliers.

</comment><comment><USER27> While the article was interesting, as I didn't know much about Alibaba to begin with, the site could use some design work. I didn't realize I was onto the next article with some type of ad in-between. Nothing was making sense till I got to the kidnapped girls of Nigeria article and realized what was happening.

</comment><comment><USER28> Although it's not directly related to the tech side, I would love to have your feedback on alibaba.

It suddenly appeared in my search results last month when looking to buy something, with a lot of results - from alibaba itself and from aliexpress. As with any website I don't know of, I queried trustpilot for them.

It's not good at all[1][2]. Most reviews talk about scams. We may praise them for being a very tech heavy company and being about to make their IPO, but let's not forget the actual service value provided to customer.

Does anyone has insight on how those reviews may be misleading ?

* [1] [http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.alibaba.com](http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.alibaba.com)

* [2] [http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.aliexpress.com](http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.aliexpress.com)

<comment><USER29> Those two sites are not meant for inexperienced people. You can certainly find a scams there, but they're fairly easy to spot: unbelievable prices, payment only by western union, sellers with no/little reputation...

Personally, I've mostly had mostly good experiences with those two sites - almost all of the items I ordered arrived and worked well. The two exceptions was when I bought a very low price product, but I got a refund for it, and another example was when I bought a large lot of items at almost a 5th of their price, and paid by Western Union... it was my fault for not knowing better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For some reason this article seems flawed, am I crazy or does Google already do most of this stuff?

</comment><comment><USER31> I like how this site compares companies with international market to Alibaba. Alibaba is only there to serve the Chinese. Anyone else would never use any of Alibaba's services.Chinese has over one billion in population, they are very strict with foreign company. Of course Alibaba is going to seem like a great investment... for a short term. However is a horrible investment in long short term. The Chinese population will decline, as they do so will profit of this company.

</comment><comment><USER32> > Alibaba, which filed for its IPO on May 6, isn't just the "Amazon of > China"—it's also the Dropbox, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, ING Direct, and more.

Hulu is a Chinese company.

Edit:

I was mistaken by the fact that it has a Chinese name and a pretty big Chinese subdivision... Hulu is an American company. _facepalm_

</comment><comment><USER33> Yandex, on a smaller scale, can get you a similar list of its services.

</comment><comment><USER34> Let's say the business environement for foreign tech gets less hostile or even totally open, has anyone calculated how Alibabas valuation would deflate ?

</comment><comment><USER35> alipay is not part of Alibaba now.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ok now do Craigslist.

<comment><USER37> Nice, so many companies trying to chop up Craigslist into pieces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Or Apple?

</comment><comment><USER39> It is like the GE of chinese tech.</comment>


Ask HN: Cheap cloud providers with GPUs? - <AUTHOR> AWS and Azure have GPU instances and soon Google cloud will join them. Wondering if there are any other providers who have cheaper GPU instances? <comment><USER2> If you need to spawn 10-100+ instances for heavy computation tasks - then AWS and alikes are the only choice.

@$2k/mo+/instance - for smaller scale research it is way cheaper to buy high performance GPU card(s) yourself and use them without unpredictable recurring cost issues. Computers are cheap.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/45vepw/cho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/45vepw/choose_a_good_cuda_card_looking_for_your_advice/)

[http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html](http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> If your want GPU's for machine learning, I recommend [http://rescale.com](http://rescale.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> SoftLayer, an IBM company, seems to be in that space, although I won't call them cheap.</comment>


Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Jul09/07-20LinuxQA.mspx

<comment><USER2> Well... Now we know what Linux code is covered by Microsoft's patents ;-)

Seriously: this is something that should be expected. This is the only license they would use to license Linux kernel drivers that allow Linux to run better under Hyper-V. It's not out of kindness but of forcedly enlightened self- interest.

It's likely a response to some heavyweight clients saying: "Look... We use Windows here, but those Linux servers won't go away and they run like crap under your Hyper-V thing. Fix it or we will run VMWare, Xen or something else"

<comment><USER3> I think this is more of an indicator that Microsoft finally has the business sense to realize that GPL'ed software isn't just some fad for tree-hugging hippies. That also means that they _may_ be starting to realize that they can't control the market just based on the fact that Windows is on 90% of all desktops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tentative Opinion: If Microsoft would just completely loosen up and willfully co-exist that they could increase their popularity and sales.

Idealistic fantasy? I have no sense of what % of the market are dual- booters/VM users. Businesses that use MS – they won't, IMO, switch to Linux any time soon. From the trial of windows 7, it seems like a promising OS. With me, avoiding MS is more a matter of not wanting to support their controlling business practices.

This seems viable to me. Anyone agree?

</comment><comment><USER5> They didn't mention the word "GNU" once. Is it a deliberate snub? They said "General Public License" and "GPL," leaving out any mention of Stallman, GNU or the FSF. Seems like they're targeting this release more toward corporate IT that view "Linux" as another platform like "Windows" rather than the free crowd.

<comment><USER6> There are a lot of people in the ESR/open source crowd who never mention GNU, FSF, or RMS. MS is hardly unusual in that respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft? GPL? wow! I never imagined I'd live to hear this.

<comment><USER8> The drivers allow Linux to run atop Microsoft's new virtualization platform, and don't do anything if you're running Linux any other way.

They're giving themselves a lot of credit for releasing drivers that only support their product.

<comment><USER9> As a former MS employee (with quite a few friends who still work there) it definitely surprises me to see them releasing GPL code at all. MS is terrified of the GPL -- I don't mean as an enemy in the marketplace (although there too) -- but mortally afraid of GPL code tainting any of their proprietary code bases causing them to need to give up the source to Windows or Office.

I can imagine a team within LCA (the MSFT legal department) worked long and hard on this project -- quite possibly more work as a legal exercise than as a development one.

<comment><USER10> The GPL cannot force you to open your source: <http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851>

<comment><USER11> That was interesting, thanks for posting that. But (going slightly off-topic), it left me with a question:

"Because there are no further agreed-upon promises, no reciprocal obligations. It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch. In that scenario, each of us has voluntarily entered into a kind of promise. We each give the other something of value, so if I get the license and then I don't give over half of all my catch of the day, the pond owner can sue me for not living up to the terms of the contract."

This makes no sense to me. Why is it "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch." and not "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you ten bucks." ??

<comment><USER12> What you're doing there is not a contract, it's an _invitation to bargain_ (aka invitation to treat). You make an offer, the counterparty can accept, reject, or negotiate, and once you have reached mutually agreeable terms you conduct an exchange and your business is over. There may be an implied contract (eg that the pond has not since dried up) but not necessarily.

A contract, on the other hand, is a forward looking document. It's based on the idea that you'll reach an agreement and something of value will be exchanged to seal the deal (which is why you hear of contracts for $1), but that the exchange will be incomplete until some time later.

For example, if you buy a concert ticket, your transaction with the vendor ends as soon as you receive the ticket, but the ticket itself is (typically) a kind of contract between the holder and the promoter, who promises to stage the event and provide admission to all ticket holders or refund the face value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic, but I just read an article regarding how Nissan Plants used MS's Hyper V visualization to consolidate 159 servers down to 28 via combining apps & stacking multiple VM's per rack server (avg of 8 VM's per server).

Tangentially related to the release of the drivers I suppose, but the article was fresh in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's the job ad, though the site is extremely slow right now: <https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=5072>

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=714668>

</comment><comment><USER16> Its a trap!</comment>


Try the Stylus CSS engine in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/try

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. What do you see the use case of using this vs. SASS? Just wondering what the background/inspiration was for this. Thanks and nice job.

<comment><USER3> The original inspiration certainly was sass, but we didn't have similar for nodejs and I knew we could make the language even more powerful

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. I am thinking about dropping less for Stylus. Is there a library of common things like text-shadow, box shadow, gradients and the like?

<comment><USER3> sure is! <https://github.com/visionmedia/nib> your styles will be 100% more sexy I guarantee you that :) the stuff nib provides looks just like regular CSS

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice one - the more I use Stylus, the more I love it.</comment>


Algol 60 at 60: The grandaddy of the programming family tree - open-source-ux https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/15/algol_60_at_60/ <comment><AUTHOR> >"ALGOL 58 had introduced the concept of _code blocks (replete with begin and end delimiting pairs)_ , but ALGOL 60 took these starting points of structured programming and ran with them, giving rise to familiar faces such as Pascal and C, as well as the likes of B and Simula."

Is Algol 58 the first known programming language with code blocks (begin..end AKA '{'..'}' ), or was there an earlier language where we see this concept first introduced?

We'd see this concept in Assembler... but was there a computer language that was not Assembler, that was an actual language, that existed prior to Algol 58 where the concept first manifests, or is Algol 58 the language where it does so?

Anyone know?

</comment><comment> open-source-ux Here is a PDF link to the complete Algol 60 language definition (published originally in 1963):

[http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/cliff.jones/publications/OCRd/...](http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/cliff.jones/publications/OCRd/BBG63.pdf)</comment>


'Silicon Beach': Google's plea for Australia's future  - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/silicon-beach-googles-plea-for-australias-future-20120529-1zfyr.html

<comment><USER2> Seems as though things are hotting up in Sydney (and Australia generally?).

As an Australian who has been working for startups in UK/US/Canada for the last 15 years, i'm interested to hear reports from the ground from those currently in Sydney. Is there a perceptible shift in attitudes around startups/the tech scene of late?

</comment><comment><USER3> There seems to be a strange media campaign going on in Australia pushing for more investments in I.T.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out and what the motives/who the players are.</comment>


Show HN: An Atari Breakout Clone in an Observable Notebook - <AUTHOR> https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/breakout <comment><USER2> In one episode of That '70s show Kelso and Red complained that the pong game is too easy because the pad is too wide. They opened the console, used the welding gun and successfully shrank the pad and made it harder:

Red: this is the future

Kelso: yeah, computers...

Red: no dumbass, welding!</comment>


(2013) George W. Bush is smarter than you - <AUTHOR> http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/?1 <comment><USER2> My brother in law, a classmate of Bush's at HBS, said he seemed of pretty average intellect for that group.

HBS students in those days were, as a group, pretty smart.

Bush's real intellectual shame as president was his ignorance. He didn't think hard about most public policy issues until he decided to run in 1999. His debate statements were pretty obvious bluffs. I referred to him as "evil" for running despite being so ignorant and hence unqualified.

None of that precludes him having figured most of it out by the time he'd been president 4-6 years.

I really, really, really, really wish our current President-Elect had 1/3 the understanding Bush took office with. :(

<comment><USER3> I'm not American, so I try to not chime in with an opinion on this topic because I don't feel like its any of my business.

Now that you've raised it though, I think it's worth considering that GWB at least understood the office he was taking (setting aside how I or others feel about the actual decisions taken). I don't feel like your next president understands this at all, and certainly I don't think even his supporters see any reverence for the office.

I see no evidence, even now, that he has any grasp of the situation he is in, which is incredibly dangerous for global stability.

The point I'm trying to make is that I think there's a very good chance that history will remember GWB more favourably after the next 4/8 years are behind us.

<comment><USER2> I am very much in line with your general thinking.

I thought both that Bush was one of the very worst presidents in US history AND that he compared favorably (above average) to other world leaders in his time.

Before Trump, we could take it for granted the US president was a serious person who cared about having the country do well and wasn't interested in anything resembling an authoritarian takeover. (Even Richard Nixon had plenty of lines he wouldn't cross, some of which Trump already has.)

Trump is incomparably worse than Bush as a choice for President.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This paean does not address the litany of massive strategic blunders which happened on Bush's watch, the consequences of which are still plaguing the US today.

\- Discouraging counter-terrorism investigations prior to 9/11 [0,1]

\- The famous ignorance of government warnings of the coming attack which arose despite that discouragement

\- Decision to invade Iraq

\- Initially laissez-faire approach to the housing and financial crises. You didn't have to be smart to see those coming, you just had to be paying attention and apply basic economic principles.

These are all executive decisions for which he was responsible as President.

If this is smart, I'd hate to see dumb.

[0] [http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=thomas_picka...](http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=thomas_pickard)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9.2F11_Commi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9.2F11_Commission)

<comment><USER5> > _If this is smart, I 'd hate to see dumb._

Well, 2017 is right around the corner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spoken like a true, loyal lapdog. Well done!

Meanwhile, he only got into Yale because of legacy, did terribly in school, he got everything handed to him afterwards, and fucked up everything he touched, including the entire world by entering in the Iraq War. Afterwards, the entire Middle East was destabilized, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead.

<comment><USER7> Is moratorium on politics on HN over now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Estimates online suggest that GWB has an IQ of 120-125, making him smarter than the average college grad, perhaps slightly less intelligent than the average person with an advanced degree.

It's also worth noting that IQ is not a particularly good predictor of presidential success, and only a partial measure of intelligence.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax#ci...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax#cite_note-8)

[http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/](http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> _One of my students asked "How involved was President Bush with what was going on?" I smiled and responded, "What you really mean is, 'Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,' right?"_

I'm probably just missing context here (details on what _exactly_ was being discussed at that moment, tone of voice of the asker, etc), but the question as asked seems perfectly sensible. How closely _did_ the head of the executive involve himself vs letting the experts it should have been delegated to deal with it?

I know I'd probably have been torn between protest and silently wtfing if I'd had a professor put words in my mouth like that when I was in college.

</comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't Hanlon's razor makes a post like that really uncomfortable?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why this was flagged/removed without comment, there was interesting discussion going on. Resubmitted.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for both your original and resubmission. This really made me think about "my own opinions", which I've started to realize are often just other people's opinions (often that of the elite press) hoisted upon me and tricked into thinking are my own.

With much of modern intellectualism simply being an adoption of other people's ideas and beliefs without actual independent consideration, this was a refreshing perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it. I think people should really spend more time challenging their deepest held beliefs to find out the truth, or lack thereof behind them.</comment></comment></comment>


CAN: Generating Art by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068 <comment><USER2> Art is the soul embedded in the medium but it's not the medium itself. So art could be anything digital if it has some human touch. But is art produced by "generating [...] by learning about styles and deviating from them" really art? I think it is but a new kind of art. Nature can produce art but algorithms are not nature. It is very interesting to observe where this is going. So far generated art had some kind of wow moment but people quickly got bored of it until a new formula is discovered, has its moment then fades. This type of generated art through learning about styles has a lot of potential to change what we see as art. End of rant.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am surprised there are not more "GANs-as-a-service" startups. I only know of runwayml.com. GANs seem like there are ripe opportunities for collaborations with artists. But, inaccessible to artists without easier tools.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by GANs-as-a-service here? I'm not sure that our understanding of GANs is refined enough to offer something like "a framework for letting non-experts train a GAN to do cool things" outside of a very limited scope - there are lots of issues with things like making sure that the generator/discriminator converge and avoiding oscillations back and forth between either winning, that can unexpectedly ruin your training.

On the other hand, if you mean "startups that use GANs to build cool systems, such as manipulable latent spaces for interesting data" then I totally agree! For example, we're using GANs to train voice conversion systems, which let you manipulate a space of voice representations to make new voices, which you can then sound like. I definitely expect to see a lot of startups doing interesting things like that popping up!

<comment><USER5> > there are lots of issues with things like making sure that the > generator/discriminator converge and avoiding oscillations back and forth > between either winning, that can unexpectedly ruin your training.

I think the situation has been gradually improved. I've been messing around with GANs since Soumith first released his DCGAN and I've tried out DCGAN, WGAN (in several variants), SAGAN, MSG-GAN, ProGAN etc, and GANs increasingly 'just work'. ProGAN especially: I've yet to see any of my ProGANs diverge or have serious instability, and I've been doing things like retraining the CelebHQ-A faces model with anime faces, and it's worked just fine (better than any other GAN so far, actually). ProGAN is _slow_ but the progressive training works wonders for stability and image generation quality. I haven't had to tweak the learning rate or mess with filters or any of the things necessary with earlier GANs.

It might be expensive to offer as a service because you are still talking weeks of training on a GPU with >=10GB VRAM (so a 1080ti or P100 instance), but I think you could offer it as a service where the artist merely uploads a tarball of images and gets out a trained model and samples without much more expertise.

<comment><USER3> Can I ask, what are you using to play with these GANs? An online playground like colab from Google? Or, your own hardware? Are you using a shared notebook, or building them up yourself? I glanced at your blog/site so sorry if I missed a description of your research playground already. Thank you for the rich comment.

<comment><USER5> I didn't have a GPU when I started; I started with a borrowed GTX 980 I sshed into, but concluded that DCGAN/WGAN were inadequate to generate decent anime faces, much less anime images in general.

So I took a very long break to work on creating a large anime image corpus ( [https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2017](https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2017) ), with the idea that the rich tagging information could fix the GAN problems. StackGAN impressed me a great deal by generating high-quality images quickly by feeding in a text embedding of the image description and then doing progressive training, so I figured that Danbooru tags would be almost as good. (I couldn't get StackGAN itself to work even though I had tags downloaded for preliminary versions of Danbooru2017: it uses an old pre-generated set of text embeddings and I wasn't good enough at Python/Tensorflow to either fix the original embedding code to generate a new set, or create a new embedding & edit StackGAN to use that.)

Two months ago or so, I finished building my desktop with 2x1080ti, and I've been using a spot P100 AWS instance as well to run 2 or 3 instances of MSG- GAN/ProGAN/SAGAN/Glow simultaneously. The upshot there so far is: MSG-GAN works well but simply requires too much RAM since it doesn't use progressive growing; SAGAN works nicely but the self-attention mechanism means it has a hard time scaling past 128px; Glow has very impressive results in OpenAI's paper but the memory consumption is enormous (reversible gradients or no) and the paper doesn't make clear that it requires several GPU-months and is much slower than ProGAN, so I never got beyond 'cool textures' before I began to wonder if I had a bug and checked the paper/README much more carefully; ProGAN works well but is still relatively slow (1-2 GPU-weeks for anime faces from scratch of decent quality, ~3 GPU-days if initializing from CelebHQ-A for transfer learning) and can handle faces easily but handling anime images in general may require several GPU-months of training, I'm not sure, since I only gave it about a month before moving on.

I post samples from various runs occasionally on my Twitter thread: [https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1040323921961213957](https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1040323921961213957)

I mostly work in the terminal, no fancy notebook stuff. I should probably write it all up, but you know how it is, it's a pain to figure out what you were doing years ago and figure out what samples survive etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Voyager team reactivates 37 year old hardware by reverse engg - <AUTHOR> https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=108 <comment><AUTHOR> > "The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software > that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could > safely test the thrusters," said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.

Pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER2> "These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet."

Does anyone know whats the fuel inside those thrusters is?

<comment><USER3> hydrazine ([http://www.astronautix.com/m/mr-103.html](http://www.astronautix.com/m/mr-103.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> recently, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369)</comment>


The failed promise of deep links - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/the-failed-promise-of-deep-links-aa307b3abaa5

<comment><USER2> The narrative in this post doesn't jive with my experience. Deep links on the web have been deep links on the web for a long time, nobody ever forgot about them. "Mobile deep linking" is the phrase that belongs in quotation marks, as it is a new and confusing appropriation of the phrase "deep link" to extend beyond the web into native (non-web) mobile apps. To anyone paying attention to trends in the web and in non-web apps, the conclusion that "mobile deep links" (perhaps "app links" is more descriptive, but it seems to have been taken by a specific implementation [0]) will never deliver on the promise of the web is obvious.

[0] [http://applinks.org/](http://applinks.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Solution: Stop building apps for your content. That's what the web is for. If deep-linking is a requirement, it's probably not well-suited to an app.

<comment><USER4> I agree with this conceptually.

Unfortunately mobile web pages can't run background processes, can't launch AJAX requests to arbitrary domains, speak UDP, do file I/O, and numerous other things, which is why people end up writing apps.

Also mobile web browsers still suck, unfortunately. Safari still hasn't gotten its act together with simple stings like scrolling, and is riddled with CSS bugs of sorts if you try to do anything advanced with HTML5 (e.g. pull to refresh, swipe gestures). It's almost like Apple is deliberately refusing.

<comment><USER5> _Unfortunately mobile web pages can 't run background processes, can't launch AJAX requests to arbitrary domains, speak UDP, do file I/O_

Background processes, cross-domain AJAX and file I/O actually _are_ possible now, at least to certain extents. It's getting a lot better, but as you say, Apple drag their feet at every opportunity.

<comment><USER6> Apple gets a 30% cut of all money made on apps, and they don't get this cut for web pages. No wonder they're dragging their feet.

<comment><USER7> I'm far from an Apple fan, but this statement is so intellectually lazy I have to counter it. The honest fact is that 30% of zero is zero. If having a webpage would be an option, it's overwhelmingly likely that the webpage would be free to access. And if an app is simply a more enabled replacement for the webpage, then the app is also overwhelmingly likely to be free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deep linking between apps on Android almost works for the kind of apps that are really just specialized browsers. For example if I am in a Reddit app and click a link to an HN comment thread, it can open the thread in the HN app. In practice it may fail for various reasons:

* The HN app has no registered to be opened for HN URLs.

* The HN app opens, but ignores the URL and just shows the front page.

* The Reddit app is using a built-in browser that does not (or cannot) check URL hooks for other apps.

<comment><USER9> For app developers, deep linking works perfectly in Android. It doesn't work 100% for end users because of the problems you listed, but reading this article is hilarious because Android has had this functionality.. forever?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (slightly off-topic)

I believe that part of the problem is that links do not work so well for that initial intent; and that is (IMHO) because of the coarse granularity of that that can be linked; while theoretically you can link to anything with a URI, effectively they usually just point to documents and anchors of some of their parts. And that capability must be provided by the author, so, as the problems with the semantic web, most of the authors do not have incentives. So you are precluded from slicing and dicing content from others and, as Ted Nelson wanted, transcluding that part of another person's train of thought into your own document.

So we repurposed the "link" tool to _just_ navigation.

Perhaps if we could add linkable annotations on pages of other people then we could play easier with other people's ideas...

<comment><USER11> Extend Link syntax with CSS selectors (or something similar/lighter weight).

Although you then gain problem of people changing layout of content. Still a lot of content is pretty static.

<comment><USER12> [http://hyperscope.org/](http://hyperscope.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand what the article is actually criticising. Today's "deep links" aren't really about the links at all - after all they're just URLs, nothing special there. No, today's deep links are about _publishing_ those links in a way that allows 3rd parties to find them easily. So, if you're working in television for example, you might be interested in having a standardised way of publishing URLs in your program guide data, such that someone can access your catchup service directly from their television's program guide application, without having to first load your catchup application.

Or in another domain, Yelp might publish an "API" describing how to construct a URL for a restaurant, using eg the restaurant's name plus post code plus street name. It might look something like this: [http://yelp.com/The_Olive_Tree/92100/Canal_St](http://yelp.com/The_Olive_Tree/92100/Canal_St) (I haven't looked, maybe Yelp really does do something like this....)

Knowing this, a mapping application can now open the Yelp page for a restaurant directly from inside the mapping app. Great! Or maybe you're a serious foodie - enough that you use a restaurant journal app. This app can automatically extract the Yelp data to round out your entry, or alternatively, post your thoughts on the restaurant. If there is a backend to this journalling app, it could even automatically insert deep links to your other journal entries so that other users can see what you thought about other restaurants. There is power in this idea, and it joins up with other ideas such as the semantic web. At any rate I personally see deep links as a positive development.

</comment><comment><USER14> Scott's piece is great, but like all works of art, there are always counter arguments or viewpoints. Mobile deeplinking is a complicated space...

[https://medium.com/@AustinHay/hi- scott-8fd0e4584347](https://medium.com/@AustinHay/hi-scott-8fd0e4584347)

</comment><comment><USER15> Partially unrelated to both meanings of "deep link" the author identifies, the term is very much used today in the world of affilliate marketing.

If you have a blog and want to send your reader directly to a specific product on a ecommerce store, you create a "deeplink". A link, directly to a product page, containing your affiliate id and all the stuff that the Affiliate Network tracks.

<comment><USER16> That is the standard meaning, and is identified in the article: "bypass a site's home page, whisking you straight to some specific location or product"

(It would still be a deep link without the affiliate tracking info.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't even realize that "deep link" got a new meaning.</comment>