Doing Your Best and Tips on Continuous Improvement - <AUTHOR> http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/05/doing-your-best-8-tips-on-continuous.html

<comment><USER2> Memorize an awesome passage. It will make you eloquent.

Just last morning, I memorized the Carl Sagan story on our pale blue dot, and already I have subconsciously borrowed phrases from it twice in writing and conversation.

 _"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."_

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

<comment><USER3> Not to pale upon one of my favorite PBS series' hosts (Carl Sagan), and here are two of my favorites. One serious, one brillig.

Act 5 Scene 5: Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow (Spoken by Macbeth)

      Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
      Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
      To the last syllable of recorded time,
      And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
      The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
      Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
      That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
      And then is heard no more: it is a tale
      Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
      Signifying nothing.

Jabberwocky

      `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
      All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

      "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
      Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!"

      He took his vorpal sword in hand:
      Long time the manxome foe he sought --
      So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
      And stood awhile in thought.

      And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
      Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

      One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
      He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

      "And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
      O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
      He chortled in his joy.

      `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
      All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Going along with the buy the best tool thinking I have labored for a while to find the best mechanical pencil that I could find. The 0.3mm Alvin draft/matic pencil has so much to like. Cheap, balanced to the grip, substantial feel, not too thin, cushion tip (like the expensive cross ones) and best of all it leads to an incredible precision in writing.

I LOVE this pencil.

See a review of it here: [http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1318182/review_alvi...](http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1318182/review_alvin_draftmatic_dm03_03mm_automatic.html?cat=15)

<comment><USER5> I've been looking to replace a lost Koh I Noor Rapidomatic about which I had (have) similar feelings. (The older, brass barrel ones are no longer available, even on eBay.) I'll give this a try, albeit perhaps in the 0.5 mm format.

<comment><USER4> I have the complete set from 0.3 to 0.9 and they are all equally well made. I got mine on amazon with prime and it was free shipping / no tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _This is a very sound advice, probably the best in terms of where to spend your money. Don't get a cheap laptop, lousy pen or bad-looking notebook. If you follow this rule, you will be always using the best tools._

Good article, but the best tools to get started are the tools that you have at hand regardless of cost.

<comment><USER7> Seconded. Chase Jarvis (professional photographer) says much the same, and it's made me carry my camera around all the time. He even made a site for it- <http://thebestcamera.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > 6\. Draw something you see on TV: If you want to improve your drawing, you > have to draw daily. Just while you are idling in front of the TV, draw some > scene that catches your eye. Repeat.

I have entertained fantasies of being able to setup in the city park and do caricatures or portraits for free. I will start doing this!

My art-school trained friends have tried explaining to me that art school is about learning to look. Anyone can draw squiggles. But you have to be trained (sometimes methodically, sometimes painfully, sometimes by rote) to see, to look, to observe.

Before you can do something like: [http://freekhand.blogspot.com/2010/12/barcelona- sketchcrawl-...](http://freekhand.blogspot.com/2010/12/barcelona- sketchcrawl-29-12.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> "2. Learn one or two words of a new (or old) language, translate a phrase:"

I wish more people did this. You'd amazed at what you could learn with such a small effort.</comment>


Show HN: Xstatic docs – like Google Docs inside an S3 bucket - <AUTHOR> http://public.docs.xstatic.site/ <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, and for the record, this is my 2016 summer of code project. Experimental obviously.

There is some additional info in the about page: [http://public.docs.xstatic.site/about.html](http://public.docs.xstatic.site/about.html)

And in this doc: [http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d5...](http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d59e9dc06b0d.html)

<comment><USER2> so how does it deal with eventually consistency.

updating a document in S3 is bad idea... that said the tech is interesting.

<comment><USER3> I just opened a document in two different browser windows.

Started editing in one. Changes did not appear in the other.

Pressed Ctrl+S in both windows, and it seems the last one wins. So basically the first one loses their work.

<comment><USER2> That's concurrency, which isn't really surprising :)

But probably when S3 is busy, you can edit, refresh and not see your changes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Judge Rejects Settlement in Hiring Suit Against Google, Apple and Intel - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/technology/settlement-rejected-in-silicon-valley-hiring-case.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article

<comment><USER2> I'm really glad to see the judge has rejected the settlement. People seemed very surprised with it.

I see three main perspectives here. The members of the class want compensation and justice. The lawyers want to be paid. And a larger group, ranging from engineers who are not part of the class to the public in general, wants to be sure that a small group of powerful CEOs and other inside players don't collude illegally against the workforce.

The lawyers are obviously very risk averse. They have a crack at a huge amount of money, virtually guaranteed as long as they settle. It's so much money that the would rationally accept a small fraction of the possible win at trial.

The class wants compensation, but the individual cut is small enough that there is probably more incentive to go to trial. If someone offered me 50 million or a 70% chance at 300 million, I'd hesitate. Really. Because there isn't that big a difference in my life between those two numbers - in a way, it's a choice between a life guaranteed free from any financial worry, or merely a good chance of it. But remove a bunch of zeroes, offer me 5,000 or a 70% chance at 30,000, and I'd take the latter. This, I think, represents the difference between the lawyers and the class (and it's why so many people think the whole approach is broken and should be handled by a federal or state prosecutor).

Lastly, of course, there is the use of litigation as a way to pry information out of companies that would prefer to keep it quiet. While the public may in general not have a specific stake in this, everyone has an interest in preventing collusion. This class, as it stands to gain nothing but information, would probably take the highest risk approach. They'd like to see a heavy penalty, but most important to them is the litigation itself and the information that comes to light.

I'm in the third group, so obviously I'm happy to see this. But my guess is that a lot of the engineers in the class would prefer a higher risk strategy as well. Money in compensation is nice, but most of the engineers affected here are probably reasonably successful financially, but they must be pretty angry, with the companies and with this settlement.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is getting good. Finally. I love Steve and menu other top execs, but even prison fits rasonably here.</comment>


Psychostimulant-Involved Deaths Increasing Across the United States - <AUTHOR> https://cesar.umd.edu/sites/cesar.umd.edu/files/pubs/NDEWS-Psychostimulant-Involved-Deaths-Increasing-Across-the-United-States.pdf8pages <comment> non-entity Link appears to be broken.</comment>


Mildly interesting rant about Linux and Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2008/10/29/T20_34_21/

<comment><USER2> > Even new version of these operating systems still do not offer such a > fundamental feature as working hibernate or other form of session saving.

Funny, on September 27th I closed the lid on my oversize-no-way-it's-going-to- travel-with-me Dell 9300, which now serves as my media center, running Ubuntu, and I left for a month. I came back, opened it up this morning, and it woke right up and asked for my password.

</comment><comment><USER3> (1) Linux != Gnome or KDE

(2) Options = Freedom

And X is loosely coupled (hence no single point of failure). MS Windows is tightly coupled architecture (hence single point of failure) for your computer.

<comment><USER4> _Linux != Gnome or KDE_

That's precisely his complaint. New features are being created that aren't accessible from the command line (e.g. NetworkManager). You have to use GNOME/KDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Between this, Fedora's "who moved my X server?", and yet-another-Phonon- flamewar, this wasn't a good week for the Linux Hater to retire.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just when we were contemplating the loss of our beloved linux hater...comes this one. Let's give the guy a warm welcome, shall we? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy should look into OpenBSD, I get the sense he would either appreciate it's aesthetic or get into an argument with Theo.</comment>


RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next - <AUTHOR> https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-joins-linux-foundation? <comment><AUTHOR> Bryan Cantrill posted his thoughts on the CNCF's decision to donate RethinkDB to The Linux Foundation here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13579544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13579544)

We wanted to share RethinkDB's next steps in our new home with The Linux Foundation.

We've also had a lot of folks ask if they can donate to support the project. Stripe has generously offered to match up to $25k in donations (which will help fund server costs and future development.) You can learn how to contribute to the project with OSS contributions or donations here: [https://rethinkdb.com/contribute](https://rethinkdb.com/contribute)

<comment><USER2> I don't have much to add, but as someone who has a lot of projects dependent on RethinkDB and also _loves_ using it:

Thank you to everyone involved!

<comment><USER3> Do you/would you use for anything other than something that needs live updates ASAP?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I use it in my upcoming project, which is just a regular, (no real-time sensitive) webapp and RDB is perfectly usable as a regular NoSQL database.

I really like the fact that you query the database by calling methods on an object rather than passing strings to it, feels more like actual programming and protects you from injection attacks.

The WebUI and easy scalability are great features as well.

It and CockroachDB, (for more traditional SQL, same scaleability benefits), are the databases I am most excited about, but I seem to prefer ReQL to SQL despite being vastly more familiar with SQL :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stayed away from Rethink in the past few years due to its uncertain future. Now I'm seriously interested. Looking forward to the next chapter of RethinkDB.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this. Then again, maybe the board would have balked at that as a sign of no confidence.

<comment><USER7> You generally have to move carefully to get proprietary software to an open source model. One typical customer reaction to rumors you are open sourcing is "Great! We'll wait until you do that to try it out." The result is that [already not good] sales may tank completely.

<comment><USER8> Also known as the Obsborne effect ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The team behind RethinkDB has been a class act. Thank you for creating a fantastic product and doing what's right by your users even as you were winding down.

<comment><USER10> It's really true. I was looking at RethinkDB for a project a while back, but decided to go another way, but I've been following it from a distance ever since. At all steps of this process, it's been clear that the core developers have been doing their utmost to do right by their users, even in the face of unfortunate business developments. It's really heartening to see this news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always been fond of Rethinkdb, but never actually used it. Perhaps if I came across pragmatic examples of how to do x with y, like you typically see with Redis, I could have convinced my team/s otherwise.

One of the aspects of Rethinkdb I admire most is the tooling. I find myself often trying out something new with React, Postgres, ASP.NET Core, Elm, Go, Kotlin or what not and biasing my experience getting started with preference to use.

I recond Rethink as Pied Piper in Silicon Valley; a great product ultimately being misunderstood. I'm relieved to hear Rethinkdb will live on under the Linux Foundation (and applaud them for doing so) and earnestly hope it re- establishes itself in a niche, such as that of Firebase/Parse, with partnerships and a legacy to rival that of Postgres one day.

</comment><comment><USER12> The news in the article is that CNCF spent good money to wipe out a copyleft license. They think history has shown a more permissive license without copyleft or a patent grab (just a patent _notice_ ) - namely ASLv2 - is a far superior choice and paid to get that in place. Their very recent explanation is well worth reading: [https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends- aslv2](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2)

I'll explain what I mean by patent notice since those are my words, quick version: If you don't declare that you have patent rights affecting a portion of code you have contributed, you've given those patent rights.

<comment><USER13> 25K to be exact

[https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/06/cncf-purchases- rethinkdb...](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/06/cncf-purchases-rethinkdb- source-code-contributes-linux-foundation-apache-license)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ironic that this will be the move that actually propels rethinkdb...

it's my feeling that _software licensing_ day's are over for the little guys. If you are Oracle or Microsoft and have that brand recognition great.

Coupled with commoditization of developers, I think it'd be great if we had a kickstarter site where you could request a commercial project to be open- sourced, pitch in some money to support the developer.

For instance if somebody released an open source version of Hootsuite I think that would put a severe dent in Vancouver's tech scene-Hootsuite customers wouldn't even think twice about switching to a zero cost solution, as it's not a pain killer but a vitamin. Free vitamin is always better than an expensive one. Pain killers on the other hand are less flexible because it's an emotional buy.

<comment><USER15> I'd love to be able to pitch in some money to turn Datomic into an open-source project. As much as I'd love to use it for my own projects, commercial licenses tend to causes huge pains for deployment, and poses as an insurmountable philosophical barrier for use in my own open-source projects.

<comment><USER14> I worked with Datomic but it was such a turn off to use because of it's limiting license plans. I'm also worried that they might not be around in the future and what then?

An open source Datomic would be wonderful. I worked with Datomic last year and while I enjoyed clojure and datalog, it was also a big pain in the butt to be googling "how do I do X in clojure/datomic/datalog".

A really sharp developer might be able to master it (I'm not) given ample time but it's very expensive both to ramp new developer's up and pay clojure devs which aren't cheap due to their limited supply.

If there was a website like Kickstarter that had a way for people to vote (with money) on open-sourcifying an existing commercial project, would people come?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Honestly what needs to happen next is a serious effort to explain why or when rethink is better than mongo, cassandra, arango, aerospike, memsql, mysql, riak, or postgres, ++, not to mention all the TSDBs. On the event pushes I am unconvinced that message queues/computation graphs arent superior and that's another crowded space. When I last looked at it the advantages struck me as mostly incremental on the query language and decremental on performance. There are many excellent competitors in this space, most of which are well funded, and moving targets. Rethink doesn't seem to have a USP, or none that has been effectively communicated at least, IMO.

<comment><USER17> Comes down to jenkins for me. RethinkDB aced the jenkins tests.

Mongo has failed every jenkins test it's been put through, dunno about the status now though. Last I checked Mongo's default durability level was "data loss on power outage". Aerospike failed jenkins too, and not on small edge cases like Mongo, but with major dataloss.

Going by the problems Gitlab has recently with Postgres I wouldn't use that for a distributed database. Likely true for MySQL too.

* Yep. I meant to write Jepsen :)

<comment><USER18> I think you mean Jepsen? It's a slight exaggeration to say that RethinkDB aced it -- but they did very well[1] and (more importantly to me, honestly) Jepsen was used to find a subtle and nasty issue that was subsequently fixed.[2]

[1] [https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen- rethinkdb-2-1-5](https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5)

[2] [https://aphyr.com/posts/330-jepsen- rethinkdb-2-2-3-reconfigu...](https://aphyr.com/posts/330-jepsen- rethinkdb-2-2-3-reconfiguration)

<comment><USER17> I've been having a lot of trouble with Jenkins at work today. So when I though Jepsen, I wrote Jenkins.

Still feel they aced it. No one passes Jepsen on their first try. But RethinkDB is the first to immediately fix the issue.

I wouldn't go as far as to call it a nasty issue. It would only happen if you got node failures while reconfiguring your cluster. And reconfiguring the cluster must be initiated by the admin and it's something that happens very often.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, clarification: by "nasty" I just meant "subtle", not "debilitating" \-- and agreed that they did really well on Jepsen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Linux foundation are collecting quite a lot "failed" projects and turn them to gold these days? I sometimes feel it is acting like a software goodwill store partially. Whatever that is, hope RethinkDB will do well in the future.

<comment><USER20> IMO the ASF is better at collecting abandoned failed software while LF has more openwashed corporate code dumps. CNCF is actually legit though because they generally accept technically sound software that is already successful.

<comment><USER21> RethinkDB is quite a bit more than an openwashed code dump though. It seems like a natural fit to some of the rest of the CNCF work, and probably why they had an interest... though not a direct fit, hense being under LF proper instead of CNCF.

I think it's an appropriate home though. ASF always seems like a minefield when I look into some of their projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry if this should be obvious but what is/are the killer feature/s of RethinkDB, what differentiates it from something like Redis or even CockroachDB?

<comment><USER23> Only RethinkDB gets you a) working changefeeds, where you can receive real- time changefeed updates to your queries, b) a well-implemented and Jepsen- proven distributed database.

As far as I know, there is no other solution which gets both things right.

I use it in PartsBox ([https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)), a solution for keeping track of electronic components.

I am surprised more people aren't interested in changefeeds — the way I see it, it's the only way to implement multi-user webapps which update in real- time (as in: a change is made in one session and all other open sessions get the update immediately).

<comment><USER24> Well a) is provided by Mongo and is literally the reason why Meteor can do exactly what you described: multi-user webapps which update in real-time.

<comment><USER17> I couldn't find any documentation on change feeds for Mongo after a quick google search.

Could you post a link please?

<comment><USER25> It's call the "oplog": [https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/replica-set- oplog/](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/replica-set-oplog/)

<comment><USER26> While the oplog does provide some semblance of RethinkDB's changefeed, it's not nearly as powerful. With Rethink, you say you want a query, and rethink will let you know about changes to _that query_. Mongo just says "hey, here are operations that were done", and leaves the reconstruction to you".

So I guess Mongo+Meteor match up with RethinkDB... sort of.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also worth noting that changefeeds are highly scalable: you can run tens of thousands of them on a single node, and scale them out linearly from there (even as they're scoped to specific queries.)

Obviously the performance characteristics will be impacted by the volume of changes that arrive to the database, but the architecture to support this is highly parallelized (all the way down to cores on the CPU.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is fantastic news. My current project would not have been possible if it wasn't for RethinkDB. Very glad to see it moving forward!

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish some company (apart from compose.io) would create a RethinkDB as a service (DBaaS).

I would totally love a dynamodb or firebase kind of payment structure!

I specifically excluded compose not because their service is not great (from what I've heard - it's excellent) but more so because they charge a premium for it.

<comment><USER28> There are a couple of community members seriously considering this with the license change.

<comment><USER27> If there is any way I can help (anything from building, or even just documentation or support), I'd love to get involved.

I am very passionate about XaaS (X as a service) think that we need a lot more DBaaS and we just don't seem to have that many options to choose from which is sad considering almost all software projects out there - especially the hobby ones would benefit so much from such a service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My weird and unrelated question is: if I donate software to an open source group like the Linux Foundation, can I write it off my taxes? And if so, how do I assess the value of it? RethinkDB probably has some legitimate market value...can the founders reflect that on their taxes?

<comment><USER30> Not likely, since the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)6 organization, and donations are not tax-deductible.

<comment><USER28> This is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had a question about this passage:

"The company behind RethinkDB shut down last year after struggling to build a sustainable business around the product. Many former RethinkDB employees currently work for Stripe, where they help build infrastructure for developers around the world."

Is Stripe a big RethinkDB shop or is there another connection between the two?

<comment><USER32> Stripe hired most of the Rethink engineering team after the shutdown. They're no longer working on Rethink professionally, but many are still contributing in their own time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any news about the future of horizon?

I played with rethinkdb and horizon and it looked like the the way to go to me.

When you see that with a few easy lines of code, any change in state in the browser of your computer it's updated in the browser of your mobile, without practically doing anything in the server, it feels like the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Horizon will be joining under RethinkDB's aegis at The Linux Foundation: a new community-driven release is in the works.

<comment><USER34> Any chance this release will include custom auth support?

The lack of that was our main reason for staying away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Incredible news. I was certain this kind of relicensing would be impossible. Congrats to the community.

</comment><comment><USER36> I just donated. Thanks to the original RethinkDB team for your amazing efforts... I meetup with Michael Glukhovsky briefly over coffee here in SF and was immensely impressed then, and I am still immensely impressed now.

Fantastic to hear RethinkDB lives on. Long live RethinkDB. ;-)

<comment><USER37> The rethinkDB team are truly the best. I wouldn't hesitate to work with them in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just donated! We have an app in production using Rethinkdb. This needs to live on!

</comment><comment><USER39> Is this one of the first companies that has made the transition from business to fully open-source? If so this could set an interesting president for others to follow suite under similar circumstances.

<comment><USER40> Blender would seem to be another example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_\(software\)#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is great news! Rethink is NoSql DB done properly, I know many others such as Cassandra often get mentioned as alternatives to Mongo but they aren't really.

I just hope the rigor and correctness that have characterized RethinkDB continue moving forward as a community project. Part of me feels sad it never caught on and will never be a commercial success like Mongo, but that's in the past.

Horizon is another exciting project I hope gets traction.

<comment><USER21> RethinkDB is in my mind firstly Mongo done right... Cassandra is a very different beast, but seems to be the better option when you need massive (100+ node clusters) scaling, but that comes with a lot of work in terms of development.

While RethinkDB is probably most comparable to Mongo, it's worth noting that the sharding/replication/fail-over support and model is much better than Mongo's. Beyond that, the update notifications (streams) are in the box, where with mongo it's bolt-on. Also, rethink supports joins at the server (though best to avoid a lot of the time).

The admin ux is pretty awesome, and the dev team has been very cool to follow.

<comment><USER31> >"Also, rethink supports joins at the server (though best to avoid a lot of the time)."

Does RethinkDB have distributed joins then? These sort of notoriously difficult to implement well no? I see you say its best to avoid. I would curious to hear you experience with them.

<comment><USER21> They are difficult, and costly, performance-wise. I wouldnt use them for a large expected result-set... maybe sub-items against a single parent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm not too familiar with RethinkDB. Can someone explain why it's so popular on HN? The wiki page shows that it's not that popular overall and the comparison to other DBs makes it sound pretty bad.[1]

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

<comment><USER43> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581872)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is awesome news! Good to see Cloud Native Foundation growing to address the needs in Cloud Computing space.

</comment><comment><USER45> What kind of workload RethinkDB is suitable for ?

1\. Transactional

2\. Analytical

3\. Operational

<comment><USER46> The tagline on the site describes the most obvious use case: _" RethinkDB pushes JSON to your apps in realtime. When your app polls for data, it becomes slow, unscalable, and cumbersome to maintain."_

In their FAQ, they call out these types of applications: Collaborative web and mobile apps, Streaming analytics apps, Multiplayer games, Realtime marketplaces, Connected devices

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is this the best possible outcome given the circumstances?

<comment><USER48> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I see Slava has no comment :-)

</comment><comment><USER50> They should have stuck with AGPL.</comment>


Visualising the impact SXSW is having on various buzzwords on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.sxswtracker.com/

<comment><USER2> Selfies. That sounds about right :)</comment>


Weave.in shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://weave.in/ <comment><AUTHOR> Context:

Originally "Tinder for Linkedin" ([http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/weave-is- a-tinder-for-link...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/weave-is-a-tinder-for- linkedin-minus-the-sexy-parts/)), Weave pivoted to its current incarnation of "Professional Introductions" (unsure when).

Received this email at 1:15 AM EDT:

"Hello,

We started Weave to make expanding your professional network easy, productive, and enjoyable. In the last 3 years we've created hundreds of thousands of new professional connections. Connections that became co-founders, investors, mentors, co-workers, and friends. Your stories were what made working on Weave so fun and fulfilling.

While Weave became the primary source of new professional connections for many people, we were unable to make it financially viable. As of next Monday, we will be shutting Weave down.

Thank you so much for being part of our community. You made time to meet and help complete strangers. You were what made Weave great.

The Weave Team"

</comment><comment><USER2> I really wish these projects would post a Show HN or something a month or so before announcing their shutdown.

So many times I hear of something new and interesting I'd like to give a go through a shutdown message on HN.

<comment><USER3> They didn't seem to have a monetisation strategy, so would more interest help?

From their FAQ:

> How much does Weave cost?

> The service is absolutely free. We're venture-funded and will monetize in > the future via premium (even better!) services for our members.

<comment><USER4> They had two monetization strategies. I was a premium user - paying for features like being able to pick who I met with and setting a meeting point.

They also explored enterprise - helping companies create new connections throughout the organization.

I got a ton of value out of it. Never used the premium features but met a ton of great people that was worth the price of admission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sad to hear this is shutting down. I had a few Weave meetings in SF and enjoyed everyone. I was really pulling for expansion into markets like Portland where this would have been very well received.

</comment><comment><USER6> Weave was a truly useful service. It's sad it's shutting down. Far being elitist, it helped a completely outsider like me to meet & build connections in the Valley

</comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed the few times I connected on Weave to meet other folks who were interested in networking with me as well. Brian, the founder, had worked with some of my colleagues at a previous startup and was gracious to offer advice and feedback when I was applying to YC a few years back.

</comment><comment><USER8> After having read the whole FAQ, I still don't know what the product is. Where are these "meetings" held? Who attends the meetings? Why should I care? Why do I have to "apply"? How do they plan to make money?

<comment><USER9> I thought the product was pretty cool. It "automated" networking with other professionals who might be good hires or potential co-founders in the future. You'd sign up for a specific time (e.g. Friday at 9am) and once a week get an email with someone to meet and a location to grab coffee.

I went on a few of these meetings and thought there were some interesting people in the network. Sad to see it shut down :( That being said, the service was free and I don't know if I would've been willing to pay Weave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used Weave a few times when it was still "Tinder for Networking" and it was pretty clear it'd always be a niche product without a clear monetization strategy.

These are the kinds of startups that make me think twice about becoming a founder myself i.e. raising VC money and hiring a bunch of people only to become trapped into working on an idea for 3-4+ years that you know is not working after year 1-2 because you still have money to burn.

</comment><comment><USER11> Since the title links only to the homepage where I didn't find an announcement (at this time), here's an article that shows the email they send out:

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/12/weave-shutting-down- profes...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/12/weave-shutting-down-professional- matchmaking-service-says-wasnt-financially-viable/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - when I posted, all I had was the email (noted in another comment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given it's domain name, was this an india thing?

<comment><USER13> No. I know it was available in the Bay Area but I'm not sure if it was in other cities.

<comment><USER14> Also available in London.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a bummer. I was just looking forward to being able to take more Weave meetings next month...

</comment><comment><USER16> > Weave had previously raised $2 million in funding from Y Combinator, Index > Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Eastlink Ventures, and others.

Does anyone know if they had a solid business model when they raised? Or was it valued on mostly hype?

<comment><USER17> $2mm isn't actually a huge amount to test out a potentially valuable idea without having more than a vague business model -- if successful, this would be directly hard cash valuable to a lot of people, so it's not unreasonable to hand-wave "find a way to charge people later". I've heard of plenty of projects (inside larger companies) that probably cost more than that and were unceremoniously shut down when they didn't work out.

1: at $100k, it's 20 engineers for a year, and that's without office space, desks, computers or servers

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Loved weave and sad to see it go.

</comment><comment><USER18> Such a nice domain name.

</comment><comment><USER19> First I'd heard of it, but seems like a really effective way to apply bias filters for elitist tech folks to meet and advance careers of other elitist tech folks. Glad it's shutting down.

<comment><USER20> That's a really horrible thing to say. They presumably worked hard to help people connect. I'm sorry if you don't like their selection criteria, but people meeting and interacting in the real world is better than them not, no?

If you would like to start a competitor which helps bridge 'elitist' to 'non- elitist' please do, until then, please don't hate on someone's attempt to make their part of the world better.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for your comment. Lots of people work hard on things but that doesn't magically make them any good. Working hard has no value just by itself.

<comment><USER21> They were trying to make people meet over shared professional interests.

And anyway, for your assertion you would have to prove it produced elitism, not only "that you feel like it would".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prague: A European capital cobbled with Jewish gravestones - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-46845131 <comment><USER2> Berlin has 10cm^2 brass memorials set into the pavements where (mostly) Jewish people, sometimes whole families, were killed during the Third Reich. Look down and you will see them everywhere there. It's a touching and present reminder, to give pause for perspective in everyday life. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein)

[edited for accuracy]

<comment><USER3> I'm never sure how appropriate memorials are on the ground, where people will walk on them, will be sick on them, dogs will go to the toilet on them, etc. I guess they also get worn down much more quickly.

<comment><USER4> Now that you mention it, it's kind of thought-provoking. These same streets where people now live their lives, walk the dog, party get drunk and puke on the streets, just "yesterday" there were _horryfing_ things happening there. It's easy to forget, and we do forget, that those living nightmares can and did happen, when we today live so free and safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coincidentally just minutes ago I came out of a "parents learning session" at my synagogue about the Czech Torah scrolls, ehich I didn't know about previously.

During he Holocaust, thousands of Czech scrolls taken from scattered synagogues, to a main synagogue in Prague. An old rumour, though now thought to be inaccurate, was that Hitler wanted to document the culture of the race he eliminated.

Many of these scrolls have deterioated, some have been restored, and they are now distributed on-loan to many Jewish communities around the world, not just as working Torah's but as part of the living story of persecution and perseverance.

<comment><USER5> Really confused why someone felt the need to downvote that comment.

<comment><USER6> I feel a bit irritated by the fact that it gives us explicitly outdated information ("an old rumor now thought to be inacurrate") without mentioning the current thoughts behind it.

<comment><USER5> The latest idea to replace the "old rumour", according the rabbi, is that some of the initial collecting of Torah scrolls came from Jews hoping to preserve the scrolls from their synagogues that were vandalised or destroyed by the nazis.

But after a collection of Jewish artefacts and treasures was started (which includes things like silver scroll crowns and plates and Yad pointers), the nazis themselves became interested in gathering the relics hoping to extract precious metals. So much of the silver is gone today, but amazingly the collection of scrolls themselves remained relatively intact.

My synagogue has one of the scrolls, very badly damaged, which the rabbi showed us this morning. There is something very powerful about seeing and feeling a religious artifact hundreds of years old, originally from a Czech Jewish community now destroyed and practically forgotten. Yet this Torah lives on a living and breathing Jewish community today, where some of the Bar and Bat Mitzvah students actually read from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Czech people don't have a lot of respect for graveyards in general, se this one in Turnov

[https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Turnov-%C5%BEidovsk%C...](https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Turnov-%C5%BEidovsk%C3%BD-h%C5%99bitov2008a.jpg)

<comment><USER8> I am not surprised this monstrosity was build only one year after the Velvet Revolution (meani g it must was planned and approved during the communism era). Still, there was a very bitter public debate recently, before a Roma concentration camp was expropriated and turned into a memorial ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lety_concentration_camp](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lety_concentration_camp)).

Needless to say, since the outbreak of Russia sponsored fake news and propaganda, the Czech society is increasingly divided, with racism and xenophobia on the raise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Thessaloniki, second largest Greek city, one can still find entire tombstones embedded in houses' yards:

[http://valiacaldadog.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog- post_3356.htm...](http://valiacaldadog.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog- post_3356.html)

The blog post above explains that the Jewish year 5676 on one of the stones is ~1915 AD.

Thessaloniki was once the city with the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the one with the largest Jewish cemetary (300,000 - 500,000 tombs) in the world [1].

During the Nazi occupation, after the Nazis abducted the members of the community and sent them to Auschwitz (with the collusion of the puppet authorities and the Greek Orthodox church), the people of the city took the tombstones from the cemetary and used them in their houses. They were also used to line the cobbled streets of the city, but I couldn't find any pictures online showing this clearly. Worse, it seems like the city's Aristoteleion university was built on top of the cemetary grounds [1].

The story of the Jewish community's treatment by the Greek citizens of Thessaloniki during the occupation fills me with shame, as a Greek woman. I prefer to remember the actions of the Archbishop of Zakynthos, Chrystostome: asked by the Nazis, in 1943, to provide a list with the names of all the Jewish Zakynthians, the archbishop delivered a list with only two names: his own and that of the mayor of the city. The two men had previously worked together to help the Jewish inhabitants to escape, by providing them with forged papers, etc [2,3].

________

[1] [https://abravanel.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/jewish- cemetery-o...](https://abravanel.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/jewish-cemetery-of- salonica-vandalized/)

From the English version:

 _Of course the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) has a long tradition in desecrating Jewish tombs – one needs only to visit many of its churches and public squares which are paved with looted tombstones by the old Jewish Cemetery. That particular cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world with an area over 350 acres and tombs from the 2nd century CE, was destroyed by the Municipality of Salonica in 1942 while his Jewish citizens were rounded in the Baron Hirsch Ghetto before being sent to Auschwitz to be murdered there. Or one can dig inside the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to find the bones of 300 /500.000 Jews who are still buried there in the grounds the University desecrated to build its buildings._

[2] [http://www.kathimerini.gr/832170/article/politismos/vivlio/t...](http://www.kathimerini.gr/832170/article/politismos/vivlio/to-8ayma- ths-zakyn8oy) (Greek)

[3] [http://www.aish.com/ho/p/The-Jews-of- Zakynthos.html](http://www.aish.com/ho/p/The-Jews-of-Zakynthos.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can the Czech afford to have decency and replace the stones? How much could it possibly cost? How are they not disgusted walking on those streets?

It's funny how stories like this are cause for some to be upset at being reminded of the Holocaust. Yet the headstones are walked on daily. They Jews are certainly reminded every day.

<comment><USER11> There aren't that many Jews left there to be reminded.

<comment><USER10> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Modern people spend so little time thinking about death that they often are incensed when they hear stories like these. For example, graveyard real estate is at a premium. More people die than can be fit in them. When you die, your corpse lies in the ground for a few years up to a decade at best. Then the gravedigger digs up your remains, put them in the trash and the next corpse is put in the hole. This is why grave digging requires a strong stomach -- it is far from certain that the corpse has fully decomposed. The trash is hopefully incinerated, providing energy for the living. Literally from Dust to Dust.

Same thing with tombstones which are recycled all the time. All larger cemeteries have huge stacks of stones waiting to get crushed into gravel. I cannot say if the practice in Communist countries specifically targeted Jewish cemeteries and if it was therefore antisemitic. Now whether the antisemitic part is not scrubbing the stones clean from inscriptions. Perhaps a large number of Jewish cemeteries were derelict due to the dwindling number of communities and it was easier to take stones from these?

<comment><USER13> > When you die, your corpse lies in the ground for a few years up to a decade > at best.

This isn't true for anyone I know of.

Those that can afford it have effectively permanent plots (until the descendents die off, at least).

Those that can't, or choose not to, opt for cremation.

<comment><USER12> Mea culpa. Apparently it depends a lot on the jurisdiction with more densely populated countries offering shorter leases than sparsely populated ones. In Europe, one to two decades seem common with options for relatives to extend the lease. [http://www.talkdeath.com/cemetery-overcrowding-leading- europ...](http://www.talkdeath.com/cemetery-overcrowding-leading-europe- recycle-burial-plots/)</comment></comment></comment>


Sweet treat innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/done-drinking-your-kfc-coffee-eat-the-cup/

<comment><AUTHOR> "a coffee cup that's fashioned out of a cookie wrapped in edible sugar paper and fortified with a layer of heat-resistant white chocolate that helps keep the cookie crispy and your coffee hot. " It's just amazing what human can invent ...</comment>


My Facebook Interview - <AUTHOR> http://220.127.116.11/search?q=cache:MwcxYG4je_EJ:reza.lotun.name/entries/12052007a.html+reza+facebook+interview&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 <comment><USER2> My Google interview a few years ago was very similar. No matter how confident you are, it's amazing how nerves can cause you to stand there at the whiteboard babbling like a newborn.

Google actually had me do two on-site interviews (one in my hometown and one in Mountain View). The first one went very well. I had a great rapport with the (single) interviewer, and had fun solving the (single) problem he gave me.

The Mountain View interview went more or less like the one described in the article. Marathon style. Had good rapport with some of the interviewers, less so with others. Once you start stumbling your confidence starts to fall apart, and it can really hurt you for the rest of the day (the interview lasted all day).

I also didn't exactly end up with the job. They offered me a testing position with "fast-track" promotion to engineering. I passed on that.

Good advice in the article though: practice problems on a whiteboard at home or with friends. Especially fundamental problems that you learned in your first algorithms class and the like.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, when was the last time you wrote code on a whiteboard when you WEREN'T in an interview? Definitely good advice, but I would caution that it's just an interview skill, and only serves to improve your performance rather than your content.

Also, you should remember from your test-taking skills that time asleep is more valuable than time studying. Thus, as pointed out, you should really make sure you're well-rested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the technical questions made me realize how crappy a programmer I am, algorithms-wise.

<comment><USER5> "Reading the technical questions made me realize how crappy a programmer I am, algorithms-wise"

The good news is that this is very fixable.

I could answer the questions in the article without effort but this is a very different situation from about 3 years ago when I wouldn't have been able to answer even one of these.

I really started hitting the Algorithm books(Skiena, Cormen, if anyone is interested ) about three years ago and am now comfortable with thinking "algorithmically" - at least for sequential algorithms.

Studying algorithms to a fair degree of competence is very feasible even for non CS folks - I have no degree in CS and am entirely self taught. The tough part was working through proofs - As I was reading about unit tests for the answers , either in the original article or the reddit comments, I forget which - I was thinking it might be better to write down a formal proof that the algorithm works.

If I face tough questions on parallel/concurrent algorithm, I'd probably take a while to answer or fail completely - I need to look into parallel/concurrent algorithms in the coming year.

</comment></comment><comment> tsetse-fly Here's the discussion from the last time this was submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795>

</comment><comment><USER6> With all the institution name dropping, somehow I suspect a weaker candidate from a big(ger) brand name university would be hired over him and his main chance was to measurably prove he was better at programming, which sadly he failed to do. We all have our bad days.

Also, I really dislike the fact that FaceBook have yet to reimburse him, even after having >1year to do so and especially considering they have $MM and he was a student at the time! It reminds me of an interview I had at MXTelecom years ago, a company with ~40 employees that generated >$120M each year, which refused to reimburse interview expenses until "after" the interview process _for them_ (read several weeks) was complete and which never did. Moral of the story: always be clear about payment of expenses before attending interview (especially if you are a student - do not be afraid to clarify and if need be force the matter), and chase up what you are entitled to.

</comment><comment><USER7> _didn't at first want to work for facebook because he thought it was a toy, but was eventually persuaded and now loves it_

...

 _Apparently he's responsible for the "Gift" feature in facebook (you know, the hole-in-a-box/heart/pantie/etc. little graphic you can gift to people?). He was the sole person responsible for that._

Fight fiercely, Harvard. It amazes me that code-up-a-copycat-in-a-weekend websites like facebook think that they need 1st rate engineers.

"It was either the little graphic gift heart, or control systems for helicopters..."

<comment><USER8> Facebook scalability is quite impressive. I think you do need first rate engineers for that.

<comment><USER7> It's a glorified CRUD app. If they had written the DBMS or Apache or Memcached, then I'd give them credit for the scaling.

<comment><USER9> They're actually responsible for a lot of improvements to Memcached.

Here's a list of things you should give them credit for: <http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really good read. Only thing, I hate excuses...

White board problems are killers, no matter how well you know your stuff. I definitely advocate this too.

I'm interested if anyone else here has interviewed at fb, I'd love to hear more about this as I'm working out solutions to their programming puzzles too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Facebook definitely sounds like a decent place to work. Them and Google are places I hope to take influence from if I ever make it to having an actual physical office space :P

</comment><comment><USER12> BTW Worio returns decent results for search queries.</comment>


Toshiba announces 2560x1600 6.1" display - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/5002/toshiba-releases-61-display-with-resolution-of-2560x1600

<comment><USER2> I always feel bad for companies trying to show off a higher resolution screen -- if my screen has a lower resolution, by definition it's kind of hard for my screen to accurately portray its quality; at best I can only see what my screen can deliver.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Sharp acknowledged this limitation when they introduced their four-color Quattron TVs <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k>

<comment><USER4> But AFAIK, profiling of the Quattron shows that it's no better than RGB LCDs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can we squish it down to 1" so I can have my VR goggles now. I've been waiting 15 years.

<comment><USER6> Turn it on its side, and put two pieces of glass in front, and you have two times 1600 X 1280. It might be a bit heavy, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why aren't there any higher-resolution desktop displays? If they can make a 6.1" panel like this, why can't they make a 24" 4K panel?

<comment><USER8> Two answers, biggest is yield (number of 'good' screens made for a given run) and the second is bandwidth.

Assuming a 16:10 display a 4096 wide display would be 2560 lines 'tall' and have a total of 31,457,280 pixel elements (r,g,b). Each of those would include a transistor as well so another 31.5M transistors, coming out to driver logic at the edge of the screen. At 498 ppi that would be about an 8" x 5" screen.

To drive that screen at 60hz you would have to push out 31.5M * 60 bytes of pixel data (that is for 8 bits per color, higher fidelity 10 bits per color would be more. At 60hz that is a bandwidth of 1.8 GBps or 18 Gbit/sec. This is faster than the current DVI spec is rated for, although I believe dual-channel can get there.

The yield rate inversely increases the cost per good screen, so a yield rate of 50% doubles the cost, and a more likely yield of 25% quadruples the cost. This can be offset somewhat by bigger glass (more chances to succeed, semiconductor manufacturing is in many ways a game of statistics) but bigger glass may require different factory layouts (they might have to build a factory just for this type of display).

So Nvidia helped make some progress when they announced the Tegra-3 could drive 2560 x 1600 displays. That's more than halfway to your 4K display. And this will be the 'killer' display technology in the next gen 10" tablets.

If the tablets can keep up the ship rate then they will give manufacturers a better feeling about being able to sell enough even higher resolution displays to offset their costs and that is when we'll see something like this demo come out in a larger size.

<comment><USER9> I have a 30" Dell with 2560x1600 at work. It's about $1000. I wish there was a 24" with the same amount of pixels, but there aren't any..

<comment><USER10> 30" @ 2560x1600 translates to 101 ppi [1]. Apple's Thunderbolt Display is 27" @ 2560x1440 (109 ppi) and costs the same. A 24" screen @ 1560x1600 would be 126 ppi, the same pixel density as the screen of a 13" MacBook Air. [2]

All of those are a far cry from Toshiba's prototype (495 ppi) or the screen Apple uses in its iPhone and iPod touch (330 ppi).

[1] <http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html>

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_densi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density#Apple_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very impressive technology, but I agree with the conclusion in the article: 6.1" seems like an odd niche. Too large to fit in most pockets, so it doesn't work for a smartphone, but a bit on the small side for a tablet.

The same 494.9 DPI would allow for a ~4.5" 1080p display, or ~3" 720p display, both of which seem far more practical for smartphones. For a tablet, the 2560x1600 10.1" screen from Samsung seems sensible, and personally I'd settle for a 10" 1080p display to reduce cost.

(All of this and still no 12" laptop displays with better than 1366x768 or so.)

<comment><USER12> I found myself wondering if it was for a vehicular application.

I've never had a car with a built-in LCD info/nav/etc system to play with them, but I can imagine 6" being a plausible size for some given other standard sizes. Because it's bundled as part of a much, much larger whole than with a phone it's likely able to support a potentially higher price point and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a high-end car brand felt a 500DPI screen would be a good differentiating factor from competitor 100DPI screens. 'Read as easily as paper' is a compelling selling point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I imagine that this display is merely a proof of concept. There aren't many electronic devices that use displays of that size, but perhaps 6.1" was the smallest that Toshiba could scale a 1600p display.

Or perhaps the electronics required to produce such dense pixels are still quite large, and whose rectangular dimensions wouldn't allow for displays of the same density without a wide bezel.

<comment><USER14> What's the proof of concept with high res screens, they've been around for some time, just not in any consumer products. I saw some 1280*1024 2" screens several years ago. From texas instruments, i think its main use was in projectors, i don't know if it could have been used for displays but from the demo it looked exatly as an lcd but semi-transparent.

6" sounds pretty optimal for e-books i would say. ipad is too big and smartphones are too small. This is also where there is good reason to have such high res.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know, maybe the extra resolution is perceivable in the precise ends of strokes of ideographic Japanese, Chinese and related writing systems? If so, it is a huge market. (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.) Also, 500 ppi is just unbelievably awesome - useful or not.

<comment><USER16> > (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.)

Possibly. But operating systems have to go to great lengths to display text well, with subpixel antialiased rendering and all sorts of clever tricks to make the most out of the limited resolution. This often doesn't work well, leading to complaints like these:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html> [http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not- All...](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm)

If we get up to 500 ppi, that's well into inkjet-printer quality text without any antialiasing at all. Text would look rather nice. (Although I may be alone in peering at laser-printed text just to admire how smooth it is.)

<comment><USER11> I do agree that with a sufficiently high DPI, we can stop worrying so much about anti-aliasing and especially sub-pixel anti-aliasing

The articles you mention don't so much represent cases of "doesn't work well" as "no one solution satisfies everyone"; that problem does indeed go away when you have enough DPI.

(We still have to care about hinting, though, because among other things we want character boxes to overlap to avoid excessive whitespace in strings like "AV" or "Tr".)

<comment><USER17> That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.

<comment><USER11> As far as I know, the hinting instructions embedded in a font also includes information about how to do kerning for that font, as well as replacement glyphs for particular sets of adjacent characters (such as ff).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the whole point of the "Retina display" is that it reaches the threshold of pixel density where you can't see pixels anymore (at that distance from the screen).

6.1" seems more the size of a small tablet than anything fit for a phone. Assuming people hold a tablet about the same distance away from their eyes as a phone, perhaps even farther, what's the point of having an even higher pixel density? Isn't this going to cause more design problems than it provides marketing benefits?

<comment><USER19> Higher resolutions will still be needed for implementing autostereoscopic 3D displays[1], where multiple angles of a scene are displayed at the same time.

Unlike 3D displays that use active glasses to time-division multiplex the viewing angles for each eye, autostereoscopic displays use parallax barriers or lenticular lenses to multiplex the images inside a single 2D image, reducing the effective resolution per angle/eye.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopic_display>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> the real question is:

why is there still no ppi independent OS?

i'd love to have +300ppi with OSX

<comment><USER21> It's sad that both Windows and OS/X laid the groundwork for that sort of thing years ago and yet neither have really made good on it yet.

<comment><USER22> Last I checked, KDE 4 already supports SVG pretty much everywhere, making it work with high-resolution screens without problems (in theory).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how these high-res tablets would affect HTML5 media queries. Right now, many of us do something like "screen and (max-device-width: 480px)". That's going to get rather awkward if pixel density varies a lot between devices. We won't be able to fool ourselves forever by implicitly multiplying that by 2 (or some other factor).

Perhaps we'll need to standardize on a unit that is independent of screen resolution. But it won't do to convert everything to millimeters, because different devices are also meant to be used from different distances. 2mm on a smartphone is OK. 2mm on a cinema display is virtually invisible.

<comment><USER24> A CSS px is not necessarily defined as a pixel -- The reference pixel defined in the CSS spec is the length crossed by a 0.0213 degree arc at the typical viewing distance (which works out as 96 DPI at arm's length).</comment></comment>


Guide to Low Cost, High-Impact Websites - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wajsbrem.com/index.php/guide-to-low-cost-high-impact-websites/ 15 tips for kickstarting your web project. Almost 40 shopping sites listed at bottom. <comment><USER2> "work with and offer equity to a development partner who already has a team, management processes, track record and infrastructure in place. Lowers some risks and shortens time-to-market."

Has anyone here done this? Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a hell of a list. Thank you. May the internet gods grant you good pagerank.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Digg took the article out of the upcoming queue...

[http://digg.com/design/How_to_kickstart_a_low_cost_but_high_...](http://digg.com/design/How_to_kickstart_a_low_cost_but_high_impact_web_site)

Kevin Rose dug it so I messaged him on Facebook and await a reply. I doubt this could be a site bug. Has it been censored and why...

<comment><USER3> I doubt it is explicit censorship, you just got buried too many times...

<comment><AUTHOR> shame - although the 'internet gods' have so far given it about 5500 page views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ha, inbred are we? First link I clicked at random even had PG's photo!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great article!</comment>


Ask HN: Late cofounder - <AUTHOR> Hey, I'm about to join a startup as a late cofounder and would appreciate any thoughts on the situation. It's a 3 years old startup with a "working" product that needs clients. They lost all the team except the CEO when they were out of money. The investors have about 3/4 of the company, and say they will put money on the company when they see paying clients. The rest 1/4 equity are going to be split to the CEO and me as tech lead. I've been working with them for a month with the promise of an ok salary when the company gets money and about 10% equity vested over 3 or 4 years. The legacy tech will need a lot of work, but that's not really a problem.
On the other hand I have an very generous salary offer as an lead dev on another startup.
The generous offer is time-limited, so I can't really wait and see how the risky startup goes. Any ideas on how to evaluate?
Any feedback is really appreciated, thank you <comment><USER2> Take the generous salary offer.

A startup takes years to build and from the looks of it you're jumping into an already failing mess for not much gain. 10% after another round or two of funding will turn into not much for all the effort you will put in. If you're not getting a salary "at first" on top of this then you should run even faster in the other direction. Never work for free unless it's something you have complete control over and is something you're very passionate about. This has all the red flags of a bad situation and one you will more than likely get screwed over on down the road.

If you want to found a startup I would suggest taking the lead dev job while you find something you are really passionate about to build.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks to me the entire deals favors the investors. They have 75% ownership (and hence full control) of a risky startup, which sort of failed in the first run - failed to take off, and people left. Now there is one committed CEO, and you are a new guy. Both key people to the success, but with only 25% stake.

CEO may have some other things at stake like relationships, and his reputation etc. But you have no such thing. So decide carefully.

You may have a strong bargaining position. But I don't see any value in bargaining hard for the unknown (i.e future value of a Startup).

Finally, you should take a decision on how much you yourself believe in this Startup. Also the trust other people CEO and the board inspire in you. Not an easy decision.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are they going to pay you _now_ with money (the green money that you can use in the supermarket)? Or you are going to get only equity?

I think that there are a few red flags:

* no clients after 3 years

* no initial team (can the CEO program?)

* investors have 75% of the company

Also, get everything in writing: "An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."

(Actually, oral contracts are valid, but it's much more difficult deal with.)

<comment><USER2> These are exactly the red flags. Just the investors having 75% part is more than enough reason to not do it. Especially if they aren't industry experts and aren't working on it full-time with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why are you joining as a "late co-founder"? Was the team that was lost included the first co-founder? How well do you know the CEO? Have you worked with him/her before? There are so many red flags that I'd flee the sinking ship and go with the other start-up.</comment>


Npm's real problem wasn't the code, but how it's developed, deployed and used - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/show-stopping-bug-appears-in-npm-node-js-package-manager/ <comment><USER2> I feel like the development and deployment issues mentioned are more endemic to webdev (or maybe webdev+javascript) than NPM, if it's even useful to separate "code" and "culture" in the way the article attempts to. Developers will be pulling and deploying to production regardless of the package manager being used. But if they don't, the package manager destroying their test servers is still something that should never happen.

But... clearly NPM's real problem _is the code._

</comment><comment><USER3> > Still, others point out that the npm blog announcing 5.7.0 certainly reads > like an official release announcement.

Ok, granted, this much is true. But so far as I know, you'd have to be using npm@next to have gotten 5.7.0, not just the regular npm package. I'll fully agree that npm should not have introduced a bug like this, but how great of an idea is it to run bleeding edge versions in production?

</comment><comment><USER4> running npm as sudo seems to be the real problem here. why is the article not talking about this?

</comment><comment><USER5> sudo never did seem like it added much other than opportunity for mischief like this to occur.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I love going to a website and immediately being presented with an autoplaying video playing techno music.

<comment><USER7> Weird, no autoplaying video for me

<comment><USER8> Auto-played for me, too.</comment></comment></comment>


Docverse bought by Google - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docverse.com/2010/03/05/googled/ <comment><USER2> One would have thought that MS would have been the obvious acquirer. Congrats on Google though. I have used GDocs for all my school papers recently and use Office 2007 only just before hand in to get the proper formatting of the document. I think with this acquisition, they will get even closer to eating Microsoft's office suite cake.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats to our officemates :)</comment>


Ask HN: How you manage with Update? - <AUTHOR> Here is little description of what I mean:
I have dual OS laptop. I occasionally login with both OS based on work that I have to do. But, each time I login I get some update. Update such as Editor, Plugin, OS patch or just a language/frameworks update.
I hate this, because it is time consuming to get update for me (specially with slow Internet connection ) and frustrating because whenever I get update it reminds me that I have to learn now more thing. Also, sometime I fill that it may  break something in my pc.
You may suggest to turn of update. But then I fear that, If i do not get update then I might behind in road. <comment><USER2> You don't really need all these newest shiny plugins that display Nyancat. Really. What you need is stability and predictability. Stick to an OS with long release lifetime (e.g. Debian) and use what it supplies, unless you have _really_ good argument to do otherwise.</comment>


How interest-free banking works: The case of JAK - <AUTHOR> http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/carrie2.htm <comment><USER3> The title is misleading, but subtly so: Interest is most definitely charged, just in a far more indirect method than most banks. To take a loan you are required to have kept a proportionate amount of money in the bank,without being paid interest on it either.

Therefore, they demand as their fee that you pay the opportunity cost of the interest you would have earned by keeping your money in another bank.

I don't really see the point. All banks do need to charge interest, true, but the least they can do is charge you it in a fair and straightforward manner. Normal banks charge you, but at least they are explicit about what they are charging you, whereas this one charges you in an abstruse way that you need training as an economist in order to understand fully.

<comment><USER4> It is true that you are losing money by having it tied up in an interest free account(+Inflation).

However I think the real interest rate for your loan is much lower in this type of bank. There is no profit.

Could anyone work out the exact rate.

P.s Most current accounts in U.K/Ireland pay abysmal rates of interest

<comment><USER5> "There is no profit"

I unbanked many years ago (a decade now?) and the only practical local difference between a bank and my credit union is the CU is non profit and unsurprisingly the related fees and interest rates are microscopically more consumer friendly, and arguably less of a "screw the customer to earn your paycheck" attitude exists so in a fluffy and subjective manner customer service seems a lot better. Thats it. They still pay and charge interest, just better rates than a for profit bank, etc. No fooling around with a fake currency of "points".

I have no idea why any locals do business with a for profit bank, other than maybe some conspicuous consumption thing to prove the can afford to make the bank shareholders richer. "In the old days" CUs had strict membership requirements like "military veteran" or "holder of teachers license" (no kidding). My local CU membership requirement is "mailing address at time of account opening within same county as CU branch". That's it.

There are two interesting aspects of "points". Not being legal currency I imagine the tax implications are bizarre, probably more of a pain than bitcoins. And the article didn't touch on "points" being inheritable or taxable. So assuming old people live in apartments and forfeit their point collection at death, that is an income stream situation that was not discussed.

<comment><USER6> Not surprisingly I've found customer service at CUs to be much better as well. Before I switched to a CU, my bank had about a dozen _paper_ forms and things to be filled out and notarized, with a branch manager or higher present as a witness in order to do something as mundane as open a CD.

When I switched to my CU I asked about opening a CD with some funds from my account and 30 seconds later it was done. I switched all of my business over to the CU that week and closed my account with my bank and never looked back or regretted it. All the dumb little nonsense I had to deal with with my bank is all gone _poof_ and banking with my CU has been more or less a pleasure.

<comment><USER7> How is your CUs website? My biggest observation that smaller CUs have a low IT budget, so even though the Chase's of the world have very annoying websites, CU's tend to be even worse. I guess for most people just checking balance and transactions online is enough, but I do enjoy some fancy stuff from the bank like deposit check via smartphone.

<comment><USER5> Several local CUs obviously partner for IT. Locally there are special CUs for teachers union members (aka K-12) and a state U CU and many other company based CUs, along with location based CUs like the one I'm in (must have a mailing list in county, or be employed by some industrial conveyor belt company or something like that to qualify). I can use the ATM at the teachers union CU for free, just as they can use "my" CU ATM for free. My former bank wants a mere $3 per transaction at an ATM, I don't miss them very much at all.

IT as a service is not unusual in finance. More than two decades ago I worked at a stock trading outsourcer, based in the USA believe it or not, who for a fee, would do absolutely everything computer related for a small brokerage office from trades to research to even printing payroll checks (so I'm told, maybe it was just calculating commission checks?)

Another example is supposedly the majority of direct stock investment plans are outsourced to one provider (compushare?) That's the deal where if you live at an address that pays an electric company bill, you're auto-qualified to buy shares in the electric company directly without paying commission or going thru a brokerage. I've been in the that ownership plan since I was 12 or 14 or so, which reminds me to sign my kids up soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's really a myth that banks fund their loans through the savings accounts of customers. The 'liquidity' section of the article is misleading. See the bank of England's explanation:

[http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily. It depends on the institution. Some loans ARE made out of deposits. Those that aren't need to be funded in the money markets - <USER2> borrow from another financial institution to cover the amount lent out. Not sure the BoE paper makes that clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seem similar to the prohibition of interest or fees for loans of money within Islam. Medieval chrisianity prohibited it as well. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury)

<comment><USER11> The same applied to ancient Jews, I believe. Asking for interests for borrowed money was forbidden by the Laws of God. And then there was a Jubilee once every 7*7=49 years, when existing debts were condoned, and a man could return in possession of his house if he (or his parents) somehow had lost it. It was a system promoting mercy and hope even for those who lost everything, rather than creating oppression and exploiting the poor.

<comment><USER12> > And then there was a Jubilee once every 7*7=49 years

In modern Sweden, you are debt free in 5 years only, not seven, by invoking "skuldsanering".

Paraphrasing you, modern Sweden has a system promoting mercy and hope even for those who lost everything and the Jubilee law meant creating oppression and exploiting the poor.

<comment><USER13> Besides the Jubilee, there was a 'release' every 7 years, where 'every creditor that lends unto his neighbour shall release it'.

In ancient Israel, real estate was forbidden to be permanently 'sold'. You could lease it out for 50 years, but at the Jubilee, it would return back to the family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is good because it solves a problem for small borrowers/lenders in a nice way, just like micro lending does, but this would not work for larger amounts. Over the last 10 years, inflation in the US has ranged from 1.5%-4%. So if you are putting a large amount into a zero interest (or, low interest) Savings account, you are basically losing money.

Unrelated side note: If you have any more than 3-months expenses in your Savings account, take them out and put them in a NASDAQ or S&P index fund with low fund expenses.

<comment><USER15> You can also get 5% APY in FDIC-insured accounts if you're willing to do a bit of work. Rewards checking accounts and prepaid card savings accounts (Mango is offering like 6% on up to $5k).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So they change (and pay) interest in "points" rather than cash. But it's still there, and it works the same way (e.g. you get higher interest on an account where you need to give notice of withdrawals than you do on an account where you can withdraw immediately). I guess this is a clever wheeze to extract money from savers - rather than paying them money you pay them points that they may not cash in immediately or at all - but I don't see the advantage for the user.

<comment><USER7> No taxes on your interest like at a normal bank.. but this is pretty small for most people especially with the current rates on savings and CDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> JAK is actually misleading in their marketing, in reality you pay a "loan fee" which corresponds to 3-4.5%/year, which goes to salaries etc. The only real advantage to a "normal" bank is that this rate isn't (directly) market controlled.</comment>


A general-purpose probabilistic programming system with programmable inference - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/probcomp/Gen <comment><USER2> Sounds spiffy. Also, I must find time to learn Julia. One problem with these 'out of a box' cookbook systems is that you only know approximately what you are doing. If it works, that may be fine, but for statistical systems the outcome depends heavily on the formulation, is strongly influence by random or irrational correlations and is more art than science. If you remove the element of experience that animates the "art", you get nonsense. Big box programming tools can make it hard to know what correlations are being established, and this is true with even simple neural networks. By the time they have many layers and filters in them, all hope is fled. You buy the result or you don't: simple as that.

<comment><USER3> I have nowhere experienced more looking under the hood feeling then when I am using Julia.

The source code of the packages sit on my computer, I can (and sometimes do) modify it, and I can still compile the same function to SIMD or GPU.

<comment><USER4> Although I have never used Julia, this is something that is possible in Ruby, and I think this feature is seriously underrated – i.e. to be able to jump quickly to the definition of external code, modify it and run it. When you work with multiple libraries/repo this is very valuable when debugging, saves a lot of time.

It should also be possible with Node.js I think (node_modules).

<comment><USER3> Don't get me wrong, I love Ruby, and my code was originally in Ruby, but the 20x speedup and better math libraries in Julia without sacrificing the speed of development too much made the switch for me very easy.

Actually translating Ruby code to Julia was much easier than I thought (the only real difference is the indexing).

The 1 based indexing really sucks in the PTX assembly output of Julia as well, I see a lot of useless increment and decrement operations when I don't expect it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Makes sense to write it in Julia. Pretty much the only non commercial language that deals natively with mathematical objects in a way that makes sense to non CS people doing statistics. Plus, it is fast out of the box.

Like, when I first saw how you work with matrices in Python, I had a stroke.

I dont really get why we use Python for everything. The matlab style syntaxt is infinitly better for ML, stats and math.

<comment><USER6> > The matlab style syntaxt is infinitly better for ML, stats and math.

Syntax is a secondary concern for all but short-term, small-scale programming.

When it comes to making scalable software systems (scalable in every sense of the term, not just performance but also feature growth etc.), syntax is really not the biggest concern; as such, optimizing for syntax can be detrimental to other more important aspects (e.g composability, reusability, programmability), and focusing on syntax means you're not paying attention to the really critical stuff.

I mostly work in Clojure where _all_ operations use prefix syntax (e.g you write (+ A B C) instead of (A + B + C) for addition, and + is just a function). Trust me, it's unfamiliar at first, but it makes reasoning about the program MUCH saner than all the special cases and irregularities that language designer bake into the language just to make some operations infix.

<comment><USER7> RPN FTW. Good ol' LISP. :)

In Haskell, you can turn any function into an infix operator with backquotes. As a qualitative, nonfunctional stylistic, ergonomic opinion, I find Haskell much more flexible and beautiful than the ugliness of most brace-, paren- and prolixity-heavy languages. It can present too many features for pragmatic use, orthogonal to something in another domain like Rust or Go for effective software production where features are intentionally constrained or disallowed.

<comment><USER8> > RPN FTW. Good ol' LISP. :)

Actually Lisp uses ordinary old polish notation. Reverse Polish Notation is used by stack-oriented systems like HP calculators and Forth.

<comment><USER9> Not really; the motivating point of Łukasiewicz's notation was specifically to eliminate parentheses.

<comment><USER10> Well choosing between

(- (+ 1 2 3 4 5) 1)

and

\- + + + + 1 2 3 4 5 1

The first one seems much more readable to me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be a Julia lib unless I'm missing something?

<comment><USER12> Github says it is

        Julia 100.0%

(click colored bar at the top of a repo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with frameworks like this is when you try to do something which isn't strictly standard, or lack understanding on whatever the framework is actually doing. Things will no doubt break, and then you have a 15 layered framework stack trace to try to debug.

You can't dodge knowledge with frameworks, only use frameworks to effectivize your knowledge.

<comment><USER14> This is exactly the premise of the paper, which isn't presenting a framework, rather a language for general open ended computation for ML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm excited for the probabilistic programming symposium at JuliaCon :). We had so many submissions around PP languages and approaches that we decided to bunch them all together to get people talking about the pros/cons of various approaches and find out what kinds of problems to collectively tackle. PP seems like a very promising field.

</comment><comment><USER16> Could anyone point me in the direction of resources to learn more about probabilistic programming?

(e.g.: text books, practical applications, introductory articles)

<comment><AUTHOR> MIT Probabilistic Computing Project [http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/](http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/)

The Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages ([https://dippl.org](https://dippl.org)) by Noah D. Goodman [https://cocolab.stanford.edu/ndg.html](https://cocolab.stanford.edu/ndg.html)

Stanford CS 228: Probabilistic Graphical Models [https://cs228.stanford.edu](https://cs228.stanford.edu) and book by Daphne Koller [http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...](http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=ProbabilisticGraphicalModels)

ProbTorch: Library for deep generative models that extends PyTorch [https://github.com/probtorch/probtorch](https://github.com/probtorch/probtorch)

Anglican: Probabilistic programming language integrated with Clojure and ClojureScript [https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html](https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585465)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is an exciting time for programming language designers. As we can see in blockchain space, on which there are new programming languages like Solidity and Vyper, I believe there will be new programming languages to make it easier for the programmers to express themselves (something different compared to Julia, R, Swift, or Python) in AI.

Right now people solve the problem with frameworks like Keras so the programmers have easier time to express themselves (for example designing neural networks). Imagine you have a new programming language on which it is much clearer and easier to create a neural network (in Deep Learning).

</comment><comment><USER18> There is a missing piece in the Julia subsystem - first class support for GNN (Graph Neural Networks). So if someone wants to help - he can take an issue[1] at the GitHub repository of FluxML[2].

[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/625](https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/625)

[2] [https://fluxml.ai/](https://fluxml.ai/)

<comment><USER15> There's a JSoC developing this IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There seems to be an opportunity for a language to fill the data science/AI space for people who want something more performant and safe (ie, statically typed) than Python. I see people coming into /r/Haskell and other forums all the time looking for something that fits this category but there's never a really good answer that is better than the compromise that is Python with some C or whatever based optimizations.

<comment><USER20> Do you know how raw Julia and Nim stack up on those fronts?

<comment><USER19> No I don't sorry I'm only a spectator to those threads.

I'd personally at a minimum try out Julia if I was doing data science often. Don't know enough about Nim enough yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Video abstract: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DImI6l_0yiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DImI6l_0yiM)

</comment><comment><USER22> Github repo [https://github.com/probcomp/Gen](https://github.com/probcomp/Gen)

<comment><USER23> Bunch of tutorials using the language: [https://probcomp.github.io/Gen/tutorials.html](https://probcomp.github.io/Gen/tutorials.html)

Paper: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3314221.3314642](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3314221.3314642) (is this article paywalled? I'm on my university's network so I don't have a paywall)

The syntax doesn't seem to be changed compared to Julia (so is it actually a new language or just a library? Not sure, haven't seen Julia code in a while.)

<comment><USER24> >The syntax doesn't seem to be changed compared to Julia (so is it actually a new language or just a library?

And the semantics are the same with some additions. This is a good thing as it allow interop with Julia code, low mental overhead and shows the power of Julia :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very exciting; I've found using STAN really hard, I really struggle to model real problems, perhaps this will make it easier - and I far prefer Julia to R in project work (not analytics or episodic data science; but when developing systems I find it hard to structure and decompose).

I wonder if the HN crowd think this system is AI ?

<comment><USER25> Random comment : by episodic data science I mean one of question answering quests. These are often created by incidents or by new stakeholders asking unexpected questions. Basically - collect, curate, explore, answer, explain, dump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty clickbaity, this looks like another probabilistic programming framework. Others include Pyro (pyro.ai) and Edward ([http://edwardlib.org/](http://edwardlib.org/)).

<comment><USER27> Maybe the title's clickbaity, but steps forward in probabilistic programming are great. From the paper, it looks interesting. [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3314221.3314642](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3314221.3314642)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This press release is super weird. They are trying really really hard to not mention Julia.

A "new language" versus "a DSL built on Julia".

"Swift for Tensorflow" is still Swift.

I wonder why.

<comment><USER29> Maybe the link has changed, but now one can read:

"Building off concepts used in their earlier probabilistic-programming system, Church, the researchers incorporate several custom modeling languages into Julia, a general-purpose programming language that was also developed at MIT."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Typical MIT press release balognia; their publicist really should get a job in industry and stop misleading the scientific community.

What they really mean is "new probabilistic graphical model language." Yet another BUGS/JAGS/Stan like system.

<comment><USER31> It's not a PGM package. It's designed to work with arbitrary Julia programs and can be used for program induction etc. In that regard it's more like WebPPL or Church than Stan.

<comment><USER30> OP originally linked it to some breathy MIT press release which said

"New AI programming language goes beyond deep learning General-purpose language works for computer vision, robotics, statistics, and more" [https://news.mit.edu/2019/ai-programming- gen-0626](https://news.mit.edu/2019/ai-programming-gen-0626)

I'm pretty sure most sane people agree this is a giant pile of meaningless marketing horse pookey, which is par for the course with MIT these days. That's what I was responding to. And characterizing it as "like stan" is a lot closer to descriptive than anything in that article. I picture whoever writes this stuff for MIT as wearing tap out t-shirts with neck tattoos.

<comment><USER31> Sure, the article is largely meaningless. But I've spent a couple months playing with this package and it is a lot more general than Stan etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The title is confusing. Can anyone please explain if this is Julia or a new programming language?

<comment><USER33> It's a set of macros and helper functions build on top of Julia to provide a sort of probabilistic programming DSL. The actual project describes themselves as a "programming system" rather that a programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The only place were they make it clear this is a Julia package is in the installation instructions:

"The, install the Gen package with the Julia package manager. From the Julia REPL, type ] to enter the Pkg REPL mode and then run: pkg> add [https://github.com/probcomp/Gen"](https://github.com/probcomp/Gen")

[https://probcomp.github.io/Gen/](https://probcomp.github.io/Gen/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Less-clickbait dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302158)

</comment><comment><USER36> I was really looking forward to probabilistic programming but then I saw this project is based on Julia. Not to keen on leaning Julia as I already know Python/C++/Java/Scala/R. Wish it was based on c++/python to at least get started with. Please let me know if there are other interesting probabilistic programming frameworks available or tutorials to get started with.

Edit: [https://medium.com/tensorflow/an-introduction-to- probabilist...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/an-introduction-to- probabilistic-programming-now-available-in-tensorflow- probability-6dcc003ca29e) There is support in tensorflow for probabilistic programming. How is this any different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Julia is fast becoming one of the great programming languages of our era. Julia is not going away, its usage is only becoming more pervasive. Imagine if you had learned Python 20 years ago. Julia's founding sponsor is Dr. Jeremy Kepner [1] who is the founder of MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center [2] and the founder of GraphBLAS [3]. Kepner's got a good eye for things, he knows what's coming down the pipe and what will be important in a language of the future. Learning Julia now means you'll be ahead of the curve for years to come. Your time will not be wasted.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)#S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_\(programming_language\)#Sponsors)

[2] [http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/](http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/)

[3] [http://graphblas.org](http://graphblas.org)

<comment><USER17> Julia needs something like PyTorch or Tensorflow equivalents.

<comment><USER15> [https://fluxml.ai/](https://fluxml.ai/) ?

<comment><USER37> And also

[https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl](https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl)

[https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl](https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 7th Underhanded C Contest is now Open - <AUTHOR> http://underhanded-c.org/

<comment><USER2> "If your bug works specifically under GNU/Linux, don't worry about it. If it works specifically under x86, no problem. If it only works on BeOS R5 on a dual G3 box when all four MIDI ports are active, then no."

I had Dr. Craver as both a professor and project advisor last year, and his brilliance and sense of humor are second to none.

</comment><comment><USER3> Projects like this shows that OSS is not a safe haven for security despite how many eyeballs may be on it at any given time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great. But where it is? *pointer points to itself..</comment>