Google Squared is Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/squared/

<comment><USER3> "Religion" is entertaining. Christianity is written by CS Lewis and published by the Oxford University Press, which in fact publishes most religions. The canonical image of Islam is the guy holding the sign "behead those who insult islam". Slavic mythology (the 27th result) is located in the country of Afghanistan. The distinctive image of Humanism is a bus advertisement (I think) saying "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake."

Adding the column "adherents" reveals that there are 4,400 Jews in the world to Islam's 300, to Christianity's 1.9 billion. Adding the column "Leader" reveals that the leader of Christianity is Chris Argabright, complete with a phone number I won't reproduce here.

Actually I have to admit this isn't too bad for a computer algorithm, it's just the better the algorithm gets, the more entertaining the wrongness gets.

Ah, and poking "science" in gives you a phone number for each science. Nice.

Further edit: Poke in "X-Men Origins" as a column for almost any query. It's like magic. A coworker tried something like the following and discovered the column showing up, then we couldn't resist poking it into many other queries: [http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=square&items=tria...](http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=square&items=triangle&items=hexagon&items=regular+hexagon&items=what+happens+when+I+go+to+the+gym&items=rhombus)

Further, further edit: Add "Rating" (not "ratings") to religion! It's so great that we have Google to sort through the difficult problem of rating religions for us.

<comment><USER4> Adding "Star Trek" as an additional column is pretty enlightening as well. Apparently Islam has a Star Trek value of "Set Phasers on Awesome!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. I searched for four scenarios. Apparently, one can train the engine, as discovered in the 4th scenario. In that, it said that it couldn't automatically build a square about the topic and asked me to enter up to 5 examples. I entered Alan Turing, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Donald E. Knuth, C.A.R. Hoare. I was delighted to see that Google Squared built the square and added names of Norbert Weiner and Claude Shanon to it.

This is a good application of machine learning.

      Scenario 1: "renaissance artists" florence
        Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence
        Web Search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

      Scenario 2: "open source" "cryptographically strong" "random number generators"
        Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22
        Web search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

      Scenario 3: "string theory" problems
        Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22string+theory%22+problems
        Web search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22string+theory%22+problems&aq=&oq=&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

      Scenario 4: "mathematicians" "computer scientists"
        Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=mathematicians+%22computer+scientists%22
        Web Search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=mathematicians+%22computer+scientists%22&aq=f&oq=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&

<comment><USER6> Google Sets (<http://labs.google.com/sets>) was one of the earlier things available in Google Labs, back when it was just a dumping ground for weird stuff (as opposed to one for non-mainstream features). I'd guess this is where the technology used to generate the square from the samples comes from.

I also wouldn't call it training, for what it's worth. I punched in the same query, and was asked (like you were) to provide some samples - shouldn't (ideally) it know that it's not known this before, and use the samples you suggested?

<comment><USER7> Would you trust a single input for immediate future use?

If so, Google Square has some Viagra to sell you...

In other words: A single user can never be trusted when they know nothing else about you - if they did, the spammers would be out in force as soon as it got any traction at all.

<comment><USER8> Yea but like for the "wiki search" they can trust you know what you want to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like that they show you the source pages, confidence, and alternative sources for the data.

However, it suffers the classic Google app problem; it does interesting stuff, but just looks ugly, and is generally unappealing. Hard for me to explain why, but despite my interest in the technology I just didn't enjoy using it at all.

But it is interesting stuff, I'd been wondering when something like this would emerge since watching this Norving talk from 2007 [<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4>].

</comment><comment><USER10> Once you wrapped your mind around how to use this, I can see this being really useful - perhaps even more useful than Wolfram Alpha.

It still gives you lots of garbage results at the moment (try a search for religion - it's hard to get relevant data when you add columns or religions), but the ability to do a structured search on a whole array of similar items at once? That's cool! With countries, although you get some obscure nations to begin with, you can add rows and columns (like GDP, population, area, etc...) very easily, and get very useful comparisons.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it bad that I just don't get this?

<comment><USER12> I think it's one of google's answers to wolfram alpha

<comment><USER13> And Yahoo YQL

<comment><USER14> There is no relationship at all. YQL is just a way to query disparate Yahoo data sources with a relational-like language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This doesn't seem to be consistent in the way it is trying to help me; for example, a search for "tympanuchus cupido" (the genus and species name of the greater prairie chicken) returns only phasianidae, the family to which prairie chickens belong. Meanwhile, a search for just "tympanuchus" (the genus, which includes more than just prairie chickens) returns Attwater's Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, which seems only tangentially related. Terms with multiple meanings (which is precisely what structured search is supposed to help with) don't seem to recognize this multiplicity--consider a search for "peripatetic", which is both the name of a school of ancient Greek philosophy (which is recognized in the results), and a term meaning wandering or itinerant (which is not recognized, even when the search is changed to "peripatetic definition"). Even the most straightforwardly categorical queries don't seem to work that well ("dungeons and dragons classes" returns a list that is neither complete, nor correct). Speaking of neither completeness nor correctness, if you think my query choices were a little too farfetched, consider the query "search engines"--it returns none of bing, Duck Duck Go, and cuil in the first 50 results (although, somewhat entertainingly, Yahoo is the first result and Google is the second).

Is there something I'm missing that this engine actually does well?

<comment><USER16> <http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=abba+albums>

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure how this is superior (or how anything along this line would ever make it superior) to getting the information via classical search...particularly since it is readily available, more complete, and more organized via wiki (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA_discography>). Can you think of any advantage this has?

<comment><USER17> Now you can find any kind of lists in one place, with any columns you want. For example, add a column for length. Much easier than navigating to each album's Wikipedia page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stunningly bad. Are they desparate to show they're not standing still and you shouldn't start using other services or something?

First thing I did, I clicked on one of their examples "US Presidents" - <USER2> one would assume would probably produce the best they've got to offer right? The result I guess would've been kind of cool circa 1999, but now.. no:

Google^2: <http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=US%20presidents> Result: _7_ , seemingly random presidents, in no apparent order or with rhyme or reason as to why they were selected.. Washington - OK, Jefferson - OK, Obama - Sure, he's current. Rutherford B. Hayes... WTF?

Wolfram Alpha: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+presidents> Result: Basic stats in Barack Obama - current president of the united states, a brief list of the past couple predecessors and their effective start and end months in office, and an AJAX link to expand it to a complete list.

Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_presidents> Result: --> List of Presidents of the United States.. Awfully nice summary of what that means, notable highlights, and a color-coded complete table with pictures of the presidents, in order, including their full dates and vice presidents.

I don't foresee ever going back until I hear news they've dramatically improved, but based on my past recollection of Google's habits.. it'll sit and suck for a very long time with perhaps small incremental improvements.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=programming+languages>

Scheme comes out on top. Awesome.

<comment><USER20> Try adding these columns: Paradigm, Typing Discipline, Designed By, Major Implementations

Impressive.

<comment><USER21> Not really -- those are all categories in the Wikipedia sidebar. The data is already structured for easy consumption.

Try something like a "Version" column and it starts to break down. It makes decent guesses overall, but they're not current (e.g. Python says 2.4, where 2.6.2 or 3.0.1 would be better).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My search for "freedom fighters" turned up Indians exclusively. I wasn't signed in. Strange. Are they not called "freedom fighters" in other cultures? It _is_ a semantically dubious phrase.

<http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=freedom+fighters>

<comment><USER23> The Indian freedom fighters are unusual, in that most freedom fighters offer violent, armed revolt. Even Wikipedia singles them out in the second paragraph: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fighter>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The results rarely make any sense. This kind of thing still needs to have some human intelligence mixed in; compare to <http://www.noodlesquares.com>.

 _Search engines_

<http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=search+engines>

<http://noodlesquares.com/SearchEngines.html>

 _Cameras_

<http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=cameras>

<http://noodlesquares.com/Cameras.html>

[disclaimer: associated with noodlesquares]

<comment><USER25> Ugh, I clicked your link. I want the 15 seconds you took from my life back.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, we're just getting going. Is it because it's slow or because the content sucks? We want to try a hybrid human/automated approach.

<comment><USER26> I liked it. I cannot enter queries there though, it's a pity since I really wanted to test that engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Australian States" is probably the perfect query for this. result set should fit on a page, easily structured data, etc, etc..

Area worked for every state Population worked for some (NSW, QLD) When I added "Capital" it worked for all of them

I love the idea - still has a while to go

</comment><comment><USER28> And it's really quite good: I got meaningful results on a wide range of topics of varying obscurity. A few outright failures, mostly on complex terms; eg 'california TV stations' gives me CA city information.

I sent my list of 12 suggestions to the labs team: highest priority were share/export to docs|base, and entering search terms or [sublist search] in individual fields. If they can make it social and create 'trusted tables' there's the possibility of having users curate a lot of data for them a la Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Google Squared couldn't automatically build a Square about Hacker News."

That's odd. It built a square around my personal name, the name of my personal website, and the name of my nonprofit, the last of which I would think would have to be less famous than Hacker News. Richness of semantic associations appears to be key here. My nonprofit's name has more words in it.

<comment><USER27> I added it as a row - and it could pick it up... (With the info from yesterdays hack post)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well, it's good for a laugh.

</comment><comment><USER31> A few months ago I attended a talk by Alon Halevy (of Google) on the algorithms behind this. There are several papers with more details for those who are curious. Check his publications listed at <http://alonhalevy.googlepages.com/>, specifically those about WebTables and dataspaces.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Porn stars" is resultful, but not in any order of notoriety. "Measurements" is, surprisingly, an available column, and "Sexual Orientation" worked, although not suggested until I started typing it. (I wouldn't recommend searching for this at work, obviously, although the Image column seems to be keeping things PG-13.)

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems pretty useless right now as far as the actual data is concerned, but I like the interface and the idea.

<comment><USER34> Much like Wolfram Alpha. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This reminded me of Google Sets, which has been in Labs forever: <http://labs.google.com/sets>

Sure enough, if you ask it to build a Square and it can't figure it out, it uses a Sets-like interface to ask you for five examples.

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting. Try starting with an empty square. Add a few items, and then add a few custom columns.

</comment><comment><USER36> It took me a while to figure out what I wasn't seeing on these results pages.

SEO spam.

So I searched for "SEO spam" and it asked me to build a Square for it. No thanks >:(

</comment><comment><USER37> Needs some work: <http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=famous+hackers>

</comment><comment><USER38> Searching for "java xml binding frameworks" says that XMLBeans is required. I guess the other frameworks just aren't worth using. :-D

</comment><comment><USER39> No damn VIM in "text editors", infuriating.

<comment><USER40> Well, emacs costs $39.95, and XEmacs costs $74.99, so maybe that's just as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 'Squirrel' returns a good search square, but no red or grey squirrels.

</comment><comment><USER42> fail: <http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=programming+languages></comment>


A BitCoin Miner Video Review by Barbara - <AUTHOR> http://capption.tv/post/6722135313/bitpit-a-js-bitcoin-miner

<comment><USER2> Thoughts? Feedback? What do you think about the series?</comment>


Coding Horror: Thirteen Blog Cliches - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000834.html <comment><USER2> Ah darn. The tag cloud in #6 is my own. massive fail on my part.</comment>


Trading Game - <AUTHOR> http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/?m=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Any one want to play? I will start. I have a match stick, want to trade it for something?</comment>


Ask HN: what is your experience with Python/django and Google App Engine? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of using Python/Django on Google App Engine and would like the hive mind's feedback. How is the app engine platfrom? Any problems? What about relying on Google's platform? Does App Engine offer any special support for Django? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I love it. I am only using the Django templates (included by google). It is a great platform and even better if you don't want to be a sys admin.

There have been a couple threads on here about the good and bad of the platform. I have only had a good experience. You will need to embrace the way they do things to get the most from it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been reading up on GAE+Django and it doesn't seem to support RDMBs or installation of libraries. Has this hindered you in your coding?

<comment><USER2> This hasn't been a problem for me. Their datastore is very fast if you take the time read about it. The documentation is great: <http://code.google.com/appengine>

The project you are working on should determine the technology stack, for most things I prefer GAE instead of EC2 (I have projects on both). Feel free to use my template/example from github.

<https://github.com/mcotton/GAE-template> <https://github.com/mcotton/GAE- blog>

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of thanks for the feedback and templates!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a site up using Django-nonrel on GAE and it's working fine ( but not many users yet ). Because it abstracts the Google datastore django works the same as always. Getting this to work took much left effort than I expected.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of limitations. We went with rackspace cloud. The startup is www.quoteroller.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Any reason you choice rackspace over linode or aws?</comment></comment>


World's first fully autonomous mining operation - <AUTHOR> http://www.constructionweekonline.com/article-34020-adani-orders-55-super-large-komatsu-dump-trucks/ <comment><USER2> 1\. Should be marked (2015).

2\. The title is poorly editorialized. This mine only has ordered autonomous Komatsu trucks (just like BHP and Fortescue got autonomous Caterpillar trucks way back when [1]). This doesn't make the mine fully autonomous. It has a potential to become fully autonomous when every vehicle becomes autonomous, but when this press release was issued at best it was an aspiration.

[1] [https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/fortescue- install-a...](https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/fortescue-install- automated-trucks-at-its-solomon-hub-kings-mine/)</comment>


Isnt it time we hit panic mode on fukushima? - <AUTHOR>

Isnt it time we hit panic mode on fukushima?
First they said reactor is heating but it's under control. Then things started failing one by one. Every time the report says it's under control, but the radiation level doubles. Now the rods in reactors 4, 5, 6 are exposed without sheilding in cooling ponds. If all the rods are exposed, what is the probability of starting a self sustaining chain reaction?
My point it this. If you knew that the batteries would last only 8 hours - ask for batteries from south korea, or us or some other place if you dont have any. if your diesel generators have failed ask for diesel generators to be flown in from some other place  - doesnt matter how much they would cost you.
Another news update says:
"Authorities now hope to use a police water cannon truck to fire water into the pool, NHK television said. The operation could begin tonight."
Are you crazy - this should have started hours ago. Hit the panic button now and throw everything at it. Use fire brigades to pump water. if you dont have fire brigades have them flown in from some other country. ask for 1000s for fire brigades if necessary. I dont want to be sitting reading a news article which says this could have been prevented if only ...
The Columbian airline crash could have been prevented if the pilots had told the control tower that they were low on fuel. But they didnt do that.
Maybe the US and Europe should intervene, and to hell with diplomatic policy. Throw everything at it now - anything is better than having the facility blow up and release nuclear waste into the atmosphere. I generally sit quiet on hacker news - just reading stuff. But today I think it's time to panic <comment><USER2> No.

I suggest you do some reading on exactly what sort of worst-case failures can occur there. <http://mitnse.com/> has good information.</comment>


Snapchat Went From Frat Boy Dream to Tech World Darling. But Will it Last? - <AUTHOR> http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel/full/

<comment><USER2> It will only last if they can work out with advertising, expand their functionalities and be more cross platform.

Besides this, release new indirect or direct related products under SnapChat.

Also release open source platform for their API. (I want this )</comment>


Apple's new multitouch patent - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20073461-264/apples-new-multitouch-patent-faq/

<comment><AUTHOR> Snippet from the article:

"It covers the basic user interface concept of moving touch-screen content with multitouch gestures--not just one particular way to programmatically recognize one particular gesture for this purpose, but any or all ways to do so," Mueller said. "This patent describes the solution at such a high level that it effectively lays an exclusive claim to the problem itself, and any solutions to it."

</comment><comment><USER2> So wouldn't Apple essentially be able to sue any smart phone company with this?</comment>


Ask HN: What interesting tech videos have you watched recently (3 – 6 months)? - <AUTHOR> If the question seems too broad, I can narrow it down by specifying some tech topics. But for this first cut, I thought of leaving it open, just qualifed by "tech". One reason for that is because that there is often cross-pollination of ideas when you read or watch topics from other fields than your own (main ones). But also because it's fun to read/watch stuff outside your own areas anyway, regardless of the benefits ... <comment><USER2> I watched some past talks from Scott Myers in the last few months. I can always learn things listening to his talks, even ones I have already heard. He is always a good resource to learn more if you are into C/C++ work.

I also keep up with AWS video's that are released for product and use cases to see/learn how/what other people are doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Mark, then you might like Scott Meyers' talk: The Last Thing D Needs, at DConf 2014:

[https://youtu.be/48kP_Ssg2eY](https://youtu.be/48kP_Ssg2eY)

<comment><USER2> Just wanted to say thanks again for that link. I watched it today and was reminded of some rules and found some I didn't know, so awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool, and welcome! I liked it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link.

Couple of points:

\- it goes into a loop for me, after a few minutes, and back to the start, or so it seems.

\- I get put off by overhyped self-acclamations (if that's the right word), like: "This is the most important programming video you will ever watch" \- which occurs in it.

\- it even stays on that above claim, for a lot longer than it takes to read it.

Some amount of claims is fine (without that, no one might bother checking it out), but after that they should let us check out and judge for ourselves.

Edit: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Real world security by Alex Stamos

[https://www.facebook.com/alex.stamos/videos/1015411529299792...](https://www.facebook.com/alex.stamos/videos/10154115292997929/?ref=notif&notif_t=live_video&notif_id=1460665898108866)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will check that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is another great resource: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg)

<comment><USER6> Crockford on JS

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW, thanks to all those who answer(ed).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is one I saw recently:

Why I love D: Erich Gubler at DConf 2015:

[https://youtu.be/jNQF3m5e2l0](https://youtu.be/jNQF3m5e2l0)

<comment><AUTHOR> That video is actually part of a series on D, seems to be associated with UVU - Utah Valley University - in some way. There are other videos in the series, such as by Walter Bright (creator of D), Andrei Alexandrescu and Adam Ruppe. Checking them out over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Robert Harper Type Theory you can find it on YouTube

</comment><comment><USER7> Adam Biens series about JavaEE.</comment>


Facebook anticipates an FTC privacy fine of up to $5B - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/facebook-takes-3b-charge-ftc-investigation-1q-62608671 <comment><USER2> 300 comments on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742270)</comment>


Why I love text files - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthias-endler.de/2010/why-i-love-text-files/ <comment><USER3> I'm sorry, I know one shouldn't criticise if it's not constructive, but this must be the piece with the largest text/content ratio I've ever read, and I've read a Stephen King novel.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the author just loves text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He uses a text file for his TODO list so that mankind will be able to read it in 1000 years! I wish my work were that important.

When I was younger and first using a computer, I would "Open with Notepad" all sorts of files to see if anything about the structure was readable. That's why I liked text files then, these days I like them because they are often indicators of the mindset of simplicity.

<comment><USER6> Actually he uses it, I imagine, so that he will be able to read it next year.

I haven't even tried to use any todo apps, (the text file has always served me well) but what experience I have with proprietary formats is that they're a poor choice for storing data, since either they're poorly designed or the designer is constantly redesigning them and invalidating your data.

<comment><USER5> That's why the statement was doubly odd, because todos are pretty transient.

I like Things for Mac myself because it automates repeating and scheduled todo items, and has a distinction between completable projects and areas of upkeep. A programmer can leave any time they want by processing its XML file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a great chapter in The Pragmatic Programmer on why you should stick with text files for everything possible. Section 3 / Chapter 14 "The Power of Plain Text". It argues that as programmers, our base material as craftspeople isn't wood or metal, but knowledge, and with plain text we have the ability to manipulate knowledge with virtually every tool at our disposal.

[http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Master...](http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Master/dp/020161622X)

This blog post doesn't express things nearly so well as the book, but the argument has validity.

<comment><USER8> Interesting higher level questions arise from this -

Is it because we've built so many tools around text that text seems so powerful, or is it because text is powerful that we've built all these tools?

Knowledge is of the mind+brain+body+environs. Text is just data. Just as machine code is "just data" if you don't have a processor that "understands" it. Remember - it took 20 years to decipher the hieroglyphics on the rosetta stone. Also, good luck with storing images in plain text.

Moral of the story - don't get too attached to anything :)

If you can't and are paranoid about losing your digital stuff, maybe DSpace will help - <http://www.dspace.org/>

<comment><USER9> The blog post and his comment have nothing to do with backups. They point out the flexibility and human readability of text files, as they are used in numerous different formats (xml, yaml, html, ics, csv, sql, etc etc etc) which can be easily parsed.

Binary data isn't as easily human readable or parsable. Images can be stored in text when base64 encoded, or when a text-based image format is used, such as XPM (old hackers may remember using vi as their X11 image editor of choice, back in the day) and SVG.

<comment><USER8> DSpace is not about backups indeed. Its about problems like this one -

An acquaintance of mine has a true blue 5.25 inch "floppy" disk with text data of his research that he can't recover - 'cos the disk's format is inaccessible, the text is not in ASCII (probably EBCDIC), drives that read it aren't available now, the OS that knows the file system (CP/M I think) isn't available, the cpu that the OS ran on isn't available now .

I'll grant that you _can_ recover it, but only with _great_ difficulty - <USER2> of a Rosetta problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I look forward to his next post, "Why I love bits."

<comment><USER11> I think bytes are next. Then bits. Then the glory of square waves.

Seriously, I can understand the fascination with something so fundamental to programming. I'm just surprised the favorite editor wasn't mentioned.

<comment><USER12> Have I told you guys how much i love electrons lately?

<comment><USER13> Square waves and electrons are seriously some of the most beautiful, incredible things.

But for my money, how about logic? Why the hell do logical operators make sense, how have ideas with absolutely no physical basis taken a life of their own and woven all this magic around us?

<comment><USER10> You ought to read Stephenson's Anathem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Text became what it is to me today after my first revelatory experiences with Linux/bash--something like being six years old and realizing the alphabet is all I ever need to describe anything and everything.

Indescribable feeling.

</comment><comment><USER15> Go ahead and use text files, but make sure you specify exactly what encoding is used. Saying it's "just plain text" is not enough. UTF-8 is fine and convenient, just make sure your code actually encodes/decodes it when it should.

</comment><comment><USER16> From the quote at the end of the article: "The continued dominance of the command line among experts [...]" -- is that even true anymore? I certainly live in the shell, but looking at my younger co-workers who are in their 20's, they hardly ever use the command line.

The IDE is the new command line, it seems.

<comment><USER17> As a young 20-something (20, actually, to be exact), I'd say that the best programmers I know still use the command line to a significant degree. Though we are small in number compared to the number of people who live in some IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The concept seems obvious, but it hasn't stopped a slow sapping of functionality and permutability of data in the face of 'easy to use' solely GUI based tools. To say nothing of the rather difficult task of automating software without a CLI component...

</comment><comment><USER19> i run my life off my todo.txt file as well. i also recently discovered the plaintext iphone app that syncs this to my dropbox - highly recommend it if you run your life out of txt docs too.

</comment><comment><USER20> well you couldn't fit _all_ of human knowledge in a text file like he claims, not to mention how hard it'd be to give it a proper filename.

<comment><USER5> Space Ruler Xzorganax, I present to you: misc.txt

<comment><USER21> and if you run out of space in misc.txt, there's always stuff.txt too.

<comment><USER22> You just named two of the files i currently have on my desktop.

<comment><USER23> I think we have the same desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Love the design of that website.</comment>


The "Restaurant Wine" Pricing Model & Why We Doubled Subscription Prices at Ryze - <AUTHOR> http://www.adrianscott.org/the-restaurant-wine-pricing-model-and-why-we

<comment><USER2> Interesting! As an aside, did you have any feeling about $9.95 v $10?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We started out w/ $9.95, which I personally preferred... At some point we moved to $10, but didn't really A/B test back then like I am more into these days. My expectation is that $9.95 was a better match for our offering/branding etc. I think the $0.05 difference is large psychologically, especially for a monthly subscription. We also had many subscribers supporting the site more for social benefits than purely business value, so I think that'd be consistent with that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> a few years back I increased my pricing from $15 a year to $140 at ImageDeposit.com, I never looked back. Happier people and more revenue. Celebrating 10 years this month.</comment>


BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/01/05/bittorrent-share-app/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time, before "p2p" was even a term and when Napster ruled the rose, there was a system called Mojo Nation. It was a distributed storage system that broke a file into distinct pieces identified by a hash and then spread those pieces out to peer nodes that would return them when asked and the map of what pieces were needed to rebuild the file was stored in a service called a tracker, which existed as public services and which you could run yourself for private files. To incentivise people to keep their agent running and serving disk space you would get credits for serving data chunks or acting as a relay node (NAT traversal was still in its infancy and so other peers would act as supernodes to forward traffic for you.) This system used what was called "Paris Metro Pricing" which basically means you could spend your credits to move to the front of the line when it came time to pull data. It was complicated. Strong crypto end-to-end, stacking relay nodes enabled you to do Tor-like onion routing, centralized servers that would provide a persistent backing store for the peer storage when there was not a sufficient critical mass of peers for a part of the storage grid, etc. A real hairball of complexity that wheezed and groaned but somehow managed to deliver bits.

"But people just want to share music and movies." said one engineer. "All of this complexity is silly. Let's cut out the persistence and make it easy for someone to just share a file." And he was right. "No." said the people running the company, "that would end up getting us sued into oblivion." After seeing what happened to others in the space at the time it appears they were right too.

So our diligent engineer took an axe to the open source code. He stripped out the crypto, streamlined the payments to eliminate a central broker and just operate between two peers (e.g. tit for tat) and eliminated the persistence. Each "file" became its own distinct peer network. He created a true MVP for the system before anyone knew what that term meant. He called the system BitTorrent.

And now we just need to add back the crypto and the circle will be complete...

[The unfortunate reality is that the math just does not work out. It works well for ephemeral, popular data where you can maintain the peer grid, but not for a lot of files that have only a small set of peers that are interested in any particulare file. We are not talking about long-tail torrents with a few people who might be downloading at any particular time; you and your family might have a short-term interest in video's of juniors little league game but after a few weeks no one will continue to participate in that particular peer group nor are they likely to rejoin, but the service must still maintain the backing store.

Perhaps this makes sense as a pivot to try to re-capture a large set of peers for some other, more valuable, distribution service, but I honestly don't see this particular product going very far.]

</comment><comment><USER3> does it work this way?

user shares file > the system stores the file on S3 > the system distributes the shared file through torrent > "enough" torrent peers are reached > the system REMOVES the file from S3 > a week goes by and the file loses momentum > available peers drop > the file is lost.

<comment><USER4> The file isn't lost, it's just not seeded from S3 anymore. It's not a backup service, it's a way to transfer large items to family/friends. If it had existed at the time, I'd have used it to send my wedding photos and videos, for instance, instead of burning them to a dvd and mailing them.

<comment><USER3> ok but you can't present it as a true dropbox alternative then

<comment><USER4> Interestingly enough, we don't present it as a true dropbox alternative. It's a different use case: share, not sync. The dropbox comparison seems to be pure editorializing.

It's been _enlightening_ to see the difference between what I work on, and what the articles say. Like a game of telephone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not sync. If u are looking for p2p sync tonidosync is probably the best one out there. Tonidosync is cross platform and it has mobile apps for all the leading mobile platforms.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ignoring the technical aspect, I really like the aesthetics of the UI. It's a nice break from the usual 3D mac-style apps that try to emulate shelving or books.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone actually bother to try this? it seems to be uTorrent.

</comment><comment><USER8> Under the assumption that it uses something like BitTorrent as its underlying protocol, how does it take into account different versions of the same file, and which of the versions will win? While multiple clients are updating their version of the same file?

I can think of some ways for this to work, but I wonder about how it's officially done. Does anyone have insight?

<comment><USER4> It's solving for this problem: <http://xkcd.com/949/>

It operates at the torrent level, not the file level, so while you certainly can create a new torrent with updated content, it'll show up as a new entry instead of an update.

As a quick technical sketch, it streamlines torrent creation, transferring torrent references to others, torrent downloading (you either get a link your client understands, or a pre-built, quick-start client with the torrent already installed), and provides temporary cloud backed seeding.

Disclaimer: I work on the project as an engineer. These comments are my own, and have nothing to do with Bittorrent the company.

<comment><USER9> So despite the post title, it's not really a direct Dropbox competitor, since it won't support realtime syncing, right?

Btw, since one "donates" disk space in exchange for free service, I assume that will contain data from other people; is that protected (encrypted) or could I just peruse through your photos if I happened to be a peer chosen to seed them?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure how this is implemented, but I can imagine a case in which this would work out.

First, let's assume the data is encrypted with some strong encryption algorithm and similarly strong encryption key. This provides some security, but a lot less than you might think. Because data is being stored _locally_ for a potential attacker, it is very easy for them (hypothetically) to make a large number of copies of that data and then distribute it for brute-forcing. This dramatically decreases the amount of time it would take to crack the encryption, even by brute force. [1]

However, this assumes that they have the entire data at their disposal. In a torrent, you oftentimes only have chunks (say 1 MB each), and everyone doesn't download the entire torrent. So someone may only have a few megabytes worth of data. Still that's potentially enough data to contain sensitive information, even a few pictures.

However, now let's assume that the data is scrambled. This means that the data is divided into 1 MB chunks of data _that are not necessarily contiguous_. So a 1 GB torrent would have 1000 chunks of 1 MB each, but each chunk of size 1 MB would have data from various parts of the torrent. The scrambling mechanism could be randomized and sent (securely) to the second party so that they are the only ones able to fit the pieces of data together correctly.

The protocol could enforce that individuals cannot host more than _____ chunks/MB of the same file, or even that a file has to be distributed among IP addresses from different IP blocks (allocated geographically), thus reducing the chance that a single attacker has access to large parts of the same file. It does not rule out the possibility of a coordinated attack over a large geographic region, but it reduces the risk, and it would probably suffice for most use cases.

Heck, people send public Dropbox links over plaintext, so it's not like we're talking about people who place a high value on security anyway (or, at least, people who think that their data is valuable enough to be worth the effort to crack).

[1] There's a nice website that illustrates the advantage of having local copies of the encrypted data, but I can't find it now. It was basically a password strength-checking website that tells you how long it would take to crack your password by various methods.

<comment><USER9> Oh, I'm sure it can be protected, no doubt. And you probably don't even need scrambling, just generate a random AES key for each torrent and distribute it only to the people who you shared the torrent with - passwords aren't needed.

I was just looking if it was actually protected or assumed public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _The system isn't up and running yet, but the idea is that users will > receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and > bandwidth with other users._

This is how Wuala works, if I understand correctly. And let's not forget AeroFS. While these products are somewhat similar, I absolutely love seeing apps of this nature (syncing distributed P2P) proliferate.

<comment><USER12> Is AeroFS even alive? Waiting a few weeks or months for an early product to be perfected is fine, but it's been more than a year. This is ridiculous.

AeroFS want users to invite their friends to put themselves higher on an invite list... For a product that will use MY hard drive space and bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> Agreed - I loved the concept, but couldn't get it to work the way I needed it to, even with the main dev's help. (It took weeks to sync a 50GB folder over a gigabit lan, it wouldn't properly recognize the folder if I rsync'd it first - it duplicated everything)

So I abandoned it for now, until such time that it got more mature and worked for me -- but I just visited the site a few days ago, and saw its still private beta. Though looking again just now, I found the changelogs: [http://support.aerofs.com/customer/portal/articles/240198-ae...](http://support.aerofs.com/customer/portal/articles/240198-aerofs- ea29-1-update)

and it looks very relevant to my issue, so I may have to give it a try again!

<comment><USER12> I'm complaining that I never got an invite, even after an entire year! I emailed the devs a few weeks back and never got a response.

I want to use their product! If their product is good, I'll tell my friends. Not before I've even tried it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Learning by doing : Hadoop  - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I picked up a Hadoop couple of months back and am finding different ways to use it so as to apply what I have learned so far (MapReduce, Hive, Pig, etc).
As Hadoop is really used in environments where the data to be queried is large, I started looking around for such kind of data. I came across the Wikipedia data (available for download).
Now I am trying to list out the questions that I could as this data.
What are the questions that you want answered from the data available in the Wikipedia data?
This will help me write some useful MapReduce code , Hive quries or Pig scripts to improve my skills.
I just feel that learning by doing is the best form of learning.
Thanks. <comment><USER3> You could replicate <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English> using Wikipedia as your Corpus

<comment><USER4> More stuff to find: 1\. - Most referenced wikipedia articles. 2\. - <USER2> referenced websites in wikipedia. 3\. - Calculate the deegrees of separation from Kevin Bacon (that's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Bacon ) for a given wikipedia article.

#1 is interesting. #2 is valuable for SEO. #3 makes a good post on HN and will get you hired somewhere.</comment></comment>


Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ <comment><USER2> If you like these country maps, you'll probably also appreciate: [https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city- generator](https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator)

> This application generates a random medieval city layout of a requested > size.

Likewise, it is web-based and interactive

<comment><USER3> Even better, the cities on Azgaar's maps link to Oleg's (watabou's) maps! Click on a city name and then click the "folded map" icon. It will create a city that matches the environment on Azgaar's maps (e.g. port city vs inland, rivers, etc.).

<comment><USER4> Where is this "folded map" icon? I don't see it anywhere.

<comment><USER4> nvm. I found it. in fantasy map generator click on a burg name, & the folded map icon is the third icon in the row at the bottom. You can click "overworld" in the bottom-right corner of Watabou's map to open the corresponding Azgaar map. I don't remember seeing that before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the maps this generates. For me, plausibility is really important when creating any fictional map, because it's possible to create a map that looks beautiful but depicts a place that doesn't really make sense even with fantasy elements incorporated.

The color scheme of the political map is highly distinctive but feels cohesive. There's a decent phonetic/orthographic consistency in the naming within a state. The religions layer doesn't feel particularly integrated with the political one, for instance I found a theocracy without an organized religion.

The geography is also pretty good. Rivers are one of the telltale signs of poor fantasy map building, but this makes pretty believable rivers, though I did find a case of an inland sea draining into itself. It's good the mountains form ranges, but it would be interesting to have some more evidence of volcanism. I found one map with a huge area filled with mountains in an unrealistic way but I had a fun time imagining how it may have gotten that way in a fantasy world.

I really like that it has some climate generation and I'd love to see more, things like prevailing winds, winter/summer variation, and more of a Köppen climate classification[0] than the biomes currently listed, but I know this is a fantasy map generator and those require parameterizing more the nature of the planet being mapped.

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

<comment><USER6> > an inland river draining into itself

Like this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_River)

<comment><USER5> You've misquoted me. I was talking about a large body of water that had a river leaving it, looping around and draining back into it. That's a very peculiar behavior for a river.

The Jordan river flows through the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea before proceeding on south. Nothing strange there. The situation I'm talking about would be like if a river left the Dead Sea from the south, looped around and immediately flowed back into the Dead Sea from the north.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the explanation, but I did not misquote you, I misunderstood you. I didn't see the same random map you saw, so I asked a question and quoted you verbatim.

<comment><USER5> Didn't mean for it to come off as hostile— I meant that your misunderstanding may have come from misreading what I had written, as I don't think I wrote about an "inland river." But even as I wrote it, it's not particularity clear unless you are already familiar with that kind of map making mistake, so happy to explain. Either way, hope this clears up any confusion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This blog is amazing as well:

[https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/](https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/)

The latest entry is about the mentioned map generator by the way. Make sure to check earlier ones!

<comment><USER3> That amazing blog is one of the inspirations for Azgaar's map generator: [https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first- post/](https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first-post/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone help me understand our facination with fantasy maps ? Why do I feel inspired or awesome when looking at them ?

Is it because of the anticipated dopamine hit from the expected discovery of the complexity of the terrains, stories, cultures, races etc ? Is it because of the endless possibilities that an open map presents ?

Is it why I was crazy about skyrim, Baldur's, Fallout & open worlds back in the days ?

<comment><USER9> I think it is that feeing of discovering the unknown.

Somewhat related I've been reading the original Mt. Everest reconnaissance journals, and it's just so fascinating reading someone describing their awe, joy, and disappointments as they try to find a path to Everest, not even a summit route.

I never thought I would get so engrossed in reading this kind of thing.

[https://archive.org/stream/mounteverestreco00howa#page/n10/m...](https://archive.org/stream/mounteverestreco00howa#page/n10/mode/2up)

<comment><USER10> I believe it. Arc'teryx had a photo essay a few years ago about a journey up a previously unnamed peak [https://blog.arcteryx.com/greenland-photo- essay/](https://blog.arcteryx.com/greenland-photo-essay/)

Oh, I get chills reading it again. It's slightly different with a nice good fantasy world though so there's a little bit more there than the feeling of that discovery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like this one more: [https://ui2.worldspinner.com/](https://ui2.worldspinner.com/)

The process can seem a bit lengthy but you can skip most parts (e.g.: culture generation) and just get to the map bit.

Here is a map I made last night: [https://i.imgur.com/HYMrbjx.png](https://i.imgur.com/HYMrbjx.png)

I turned off all cities, roads, rivers, etc, as I just wanted a plain map.

</comment><comment><USER12> Are there any modern/future/sci-fi map generators out there? All the ones I've seen have been fantasy-focused. Something that generates modern sounding names, vehicle roads, airports/seaports/spaceports, that kind of thing?

</comment><comment><USER13> In addition to the awesomeness of this tool, it links to several other tools as part of its flow.

One of those is my heraldry generator, visible directly here: [https://ironarachne.com/heraldry](https://ironarachne.com/heraldry)

<comment><USER14> BTW, silly question -- do you by any chance have the opposite of this tool? I.e. something that would parse a blazon and produce an image? Thank you!

<comment><USER13> I'm afraid not. That is a MUCH harder problem, since parsing blazon of any complexity has more than a little nuance to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is excellent! I'll be using this for my OSR sandbox campaign for sure!

Note that if you want to use this for a hexcrawl, the hexes it generates are 50mi on their short diagonal - this means they fit five (four and two halves) 6 mile hexes on their short diagonal, if we go by [https://www.welshpiper.com/hex-templates/](https://www.welshpiper.com/hex- templates/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Pops up this error on Safari 12.1.2:

firstname.lastname@example.com?version=1.0:1103:10 email@example.com?version=1.0:593:17 firstname.lastname@example.com?version=1.0:198:11 firstname.lastname@example.com?version=1.0:170:20 global firstname.lastname@example.com?version=1.0:171:2

Console says: TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'religCells.sort((a,b) => b.pop - a.pop)[0]')

</comment><comment><USER17> I love it! Has anyone built something on top of one these maps?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've seen maybe a dozen similar map generators, however this is probably the most customize-able one I've seen; an impressive toolset. Even more impressive that the entire tool seems to be built without any templating or view framework. jQuery is used to some extent but for the most part the entire app is built with plain old vanilla DOM manipulation.

The codebase could use a few comments and cleaner structure, but overall it's quite easy to poke through.

</comment><comment><USER19> Slightly related - I needed a generator for maps of encounters in the wilderness for my d&d campaign, and the ones I found weren't working well for me, so I made my own - very unpolished version, but maybe someone will find it useful:

[https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/](https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Oddly hitting F5 doesn't regenerate the map on ff/windows for me. Have to do a full reload with ctrl+shift+r.

<comment><USER21> You can also regenerate without reloading the page by pressing F2 (there is also a button in toolbox).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very inspirational. Actually I think I'll send it to a fantasy author friend of mine!

</comment><comment><USER23> Very impressive. What does it use?

<comment><USER3> Code-wise, it's mostly using d3.js to generate SVG. You can browse it at [https://github.com/Azgaar/Fantasy-Map- Generator](https://github.com/Azgaar/Fantasy-Map-Generator) .

Algorithm-wise, it's built on Delaunay+Voronoi: [https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/voronoi- graph/](https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/voronoi-graph/)

The project started after Azgaar was inspired by Mewo2's map article and Scott Turner's amazing map blog: [https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first- post/](https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first-post/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for a detailed response.</comment></comment></comment>


The Spectacle of Tragedy - <AUTHOR> http://thecollegecritics.com/2012/07/23/the-aurora-massacre-party-time-excellent/

<comment><USER2> Reading this I'm reminded of the movie Network. A major network producer sees the value of producing original "disaster porn" (my term, not from the film) for public consumption in a television news magazine. Only here we see that a one-hour news magazine hardly begins to strain the attention span of the average consumer. Rather the author of this blog post seems to recognize that the public is desirous of far more, and that they may be led so easily by piecing out details bit-by-bit. How often does real life deliver on--and even exceed--it's own satire?

On a related note, the author is listed as Edward O'Neil, which just happens to be the name of the actor who portrayed Stan Mikita in the referenced film. Color me intrigued...

<comment><AUTHOR> I am continually amazed by how insatiable consumers are for redundant media. The current coverage of Aurora is simply rehashing known details, but readers are lured on by the promise of even the smallest tidbit of new information.

Was it Stan Mikita or Glenn?

<comment><USER2> You're right. It was Glenn, the manager of the shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That ending, "And I still know how to party." That's so haunting, and messed up. That we read about lives and tragedies like watching a movie.

<comment><USER4> I read that more as an indication of psychopathy on the part of the killer.</comment></comment>


Google.ai - <AUTHOR> https://google.ai <comment><USER2> .ai is not one of the ccTLDs that Google considers generic[0].

It would be interesting to know if Google will be making .ai generic, or if they will make a special exception for themselves considering they do not allow others to change the geographical targeting of domains registered to a ccTLD.

[0]: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en&ref...](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en&ref_topic=6002454)

<comment><USER3> Have they made a special exception for themselves? They don't even appear to be indexed yet? [https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ai&oq=google+ai&aqs=c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ai&oq=google+ai&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.988j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=google.ai)

<comment><USER4> You can find it with a direct search.. it comes in second. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:google.ai](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:google.ai)

<comment><USER5> 2nd out of 2 results. That's pretty funny.

<comment><USER6> the first result is an ad (not sure why my ad blocker decided to let it through)

<comment><USER7> If it's adblock plus they let ads through for which they receive money.

<comment><USER6> it's uBlock Origin and they aren't supposed to do this as far as I know... hopefully their filter is just outdated.

<comment><USER8> holy cow, that ad looks _exactly_ like a normal result with a very low contrast small link on the upper-right.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if you could buy an ad that looks like that from Google or if only Google is allowed to use them...

<comment><USER9> It says google promoted so I doubt it. the ones that are ads say Ad in a little box near where you click.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The potential use of TPUs for training is very exciting. They say that they train floating point, but I don't see any indication to the FP precision they're capable of; perhaps I'm missing it. At any rate, I'm really excited to see resources being piled into their Cloud ML Engine product at this high rate.

I've made this comment in a couple of other threads, which subsequently veered off into other territory, so forgive the repetition, but it's a really interesting topic to me. The open-source distributed tensorflow stuff is pretty nice, but it still requires a huge amount of hand coding and tuning the machinery, reminding me quite a lot of just rolling the damn thing in MPI yourself. I'm very excited to see where distributed tf will be in a year or two, but it's a chore today.

Depending on how much these TPUs and other Cloud ML Engine developments help, I'd gladly abandon the attempt to roll it myself with the distributed tf.

The hope is that using Google's secret sauce to auto-distribute the execution graphs and associated data ingestion makes things "just work". At the moment, the documentation and examples for that are a bit all over the place and require writing models to conform to the newish tf.contrib.learn.Experiment API, which is also a bit underdocumented and underexampled. Using it for very large datasets (say >tens of TB) seems to be pretty challenging at this moment (to me at least). For a lot of use cases, BigTable seems to be the ideal ingestion engine for Cloud ML tf jobs, but there's no C native API. You can use BigTable, but you can only dump complete tables into tensorflow rather than querying for relevant data (since the queries cost money, a 5000-core jobs with just a few queries per core would cost you a fortune, so the ability to query BigTable in the tensorflow reader is disabled.

At any rate, I've been banging around on it for a few weeks and am really hopeful. I will follow Cloud ML Engine's career with considerable interest.

<comment><USER11> Guaranteed to be fp16.

<comment><USER12> Or even lower, companies are experimenting with ternary, fp8, etc. for inference tasks.

<comment><USER11> This is explicitly for training, their first generation was for inference and used INT8 math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not comfortable with Google having and sharing my data.

Very excited about the NVidia chips though. Would be happy to run TensorFlow with them on my own hardware - though I'm more excited about the day when client software and hardware make that easy and cheap.

<comment><USER14> I share a similar discomfort. However, between Gmail and Google search, they already have all of my data.

<comment><USER15> You could pay for Google apps for work and don't have your data indexed. So it's really more a question how much money / work to switch to another provider is your data worth to you?

<comment><USER16> What exactly is so scary about indexing and so comforting about the lack thereof that makes all the difference to you and everyone else? The index is derived from the data... if you have the data you're minutes away from the index. And an index isn't even necessary to search data. Why are people okay with giving away their data as long as it's not indexed?

<comment><USER17> Minutes away, if Google would illegally access your data in violation with their terms of service, which does not make sense.

<comment><USER16> Is violating a contract a crime?

And what's the _privacy_ issue with indexing, and heck, still showing ads? As long as they're not sharing your data, where is your privacy being violated by _indexing_ and _being shown ads_ when they already have the same data? That makes no sense.

<comment><USER18> Violating a contract is a breach of the civil code in my country, exposing you to financial compensation. It is very similar in the rest of the EU. So while not a crime, thankfully some countries still take that seriously.

The issue is "fuck you, I am paying you to use your service without having you getting your greedy paws on my data." If they start indexing data from actual customers, then they're reading it. That's a breach of privacy and contract, plain and simple. And at that point, well, you might as well not pay for their service if it doesn't bring you anything more than a free tier plan.

If I'm paying you to keep my private journal safe yet accessible, you bet I'm going to be pissed if you start telling me at which page something is. Maybe you just remembered a content -> page mapping, but you still read my damn private journal.

<comment><USER16> I was bringing up the contract issue somewhat separately to point out that it's not a criminal issue like the parent claimed, as far as I know. I wasn't saying breaching your contract is OK, sorry if that was confusing.

My main beef is with what we do and don't call a privacy violation. If your issue was that use of your information or identity by someone else (especially to make money) entitled your to fair compensation (or otherwise it shouldn't be done simply because of unfairness), I would agree with you. If your claim was that a PERSON (or their machine) obtaining any new information about you is a privacy violation, I would get that too. But you're claiming a _machine_ that can violate your _privacy_ merely by indexing and displaying things back to YOURSELF that it already knew. That makes no sense to me. No one is gaining any extra information about you when a computer indexes information it already has, so while it might be unfair, it simply cannot be a privacy violation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pet peeve: the Google AI effort is the product of ${LARGE_NUMBER} of engineers. This marketing page highlights a half-dozen luminaries. Not only do these luminaries also get comped ($$) one or more orders of magnitude more than rank-and-file, but now they get the glory as well. Sigh.

<comment><USER20> This is true in all endeavors. There will always be leaders who get the majority of credit and grunts who do most of the actual work and don't get any. See a cool building? The architect gets all the credit but the people who actually built it get none.

<comment><USER21> This is why I'm happy most of all the iterative improvement and breakthroughs in ML are happening at research labs, public or private. When papers get published, you usually know who contributed to the endeavor.

<comment><USER22> I'm curious how you would even know? If Google is making ML breakthroughs, I think it's quite obvious they won't be immediately publishing them if they are actually commercially useful.

<comment><USER23> On the contrary, Google has a very large number of publications every year at top AI conferences.

<comment><USER22> Right, but I'm saying once they actually hit commercially useful breakthroughs (e.g. AI game changer/black swan) they certainly won't be sharing them any longer.

Or put another way, they could currently be holding back 90% of their current research and only releasing 10%.

I'm not saying that is the case, it's just I think private research into some fields is much more opaque than folks (myself) realize. Relying on Google (or any other private company) to publish findings is likely not a path for long- term success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly off topic, but this may be one of the first cases of a reversible domain.

[https://google.ai/](https://google.ai/) and [https://ai.google/](https://ai.google/) both point to the same page.

<comment><USER25> Yes but google.ai is the canonical version: <link rel="canonical" href="[https://google.ai/">](https://google.ai/">)

<comment><USER26> For some reasons, both homepages currently show as <link rel="canonical" href="[http://localhost/">](http://localhost/">)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> AutoML is a huge step to bring ML to the developers out there. Kudos for that!

<comment><USER28> u talking about automl, the scikit extension?

<comment><USER27> I hope its a bit more than that!

They recently published very novel approaches: [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkpACe1lx](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkpACe1lx) [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=r1Ue8Hcxg](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=r1Ue8Hcxg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device.."

Does anyone else find it odd that we're so far through the looking glass this past year that Richard Hendricks' latest venture seems not only plausible but a bit mundane by comparison?

<comment><USER30> You're right, our fascination with machine learning surpasses any caricature.

<comment><USER31> It's pretty fascinating though; it's one of the branches of AI that has covered the most practical-application ground in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Let's be honest, who the hell wakes up asking "What should I do today?". This tech is just so awkward..

<comment><USER33> Everyone in a society whose jobs have all been automated away. What would you do with your time if you were free to do anything with it?

<comment><USER34> In fantasy world, we'd all be renaissance men, making beautiful art, building useful products, etc.

In the real world, 99% of us would be bored out of our minds with rapidly- declining health, rapidly-declining self-esteem brought on by our unexpectedly poor handling of time, and a continuing unfulfilled search for stimulation that will mostly get filled by more mindless "entertainment" and consumerism/shopping.

Our social lives would decay as there'd be no in-built workplace community, and this is exacerbated by today's convention of small or totally childless families. We'd lose respect for one another. Productivity would plummet as few people would have any incentive to work cooperatively anymore (and if you can't imperil someone's paycheck, they will usually not contribute; for all of the open-source developers, how many are only in it because their paycheck and/or job prospects are somehow tied to it, and even including that number, how many more closed-source developers are there?). Volunteers don't take firm direction well, and that kind of direction is necessary to keep a successful, efficient enterprise running.

There are plenty of windows into this imaginary world without obligatory labor today, and they do not make it look like a pleasant place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was sorta hoping with the announcement of Google.ai that they would add the .ai extension to Google Domains. Right now there are so few, and very terrible, registers that handle .ai. Like 101domain.com who can only make nameserver changes for you during their 9am to 5pm business hours on weekdays.

<comment><USER36> .ai is a ccTLD that is run by, I believe, a single person in Anguilla. I do not think it is run on a platform that supports EPP, the standard protocol that is used by registries and registrars to handle automated purchasing of domain names. Given that, it would not be possible to handle .ai domain names on Google Domains. 101domain.com is likely doing a manual process for registering .ai domain names that goes through [https://whois.ai/](https://whois.ai/)

(Source: I am the eng lead of Google Registry, which run's Google's TLDs.)

<comment><USER37> in the late 90's, I knew the guy that had somehow secured and was running the .so ccTLD single-handedly. In the age of $70/year register.com bills, it seemed insane that a single person could be responsible for an entire TLD. I'm glad to hear that some things on the internet are still run by people.

<comment><USER36> A large number of ccTLDs are still run by a single random person deep in the bowels of an IT department at some university. I was just at an ICANN meeting in Madrid last week and met some of them.

Also, we (Charleston Road Registry) are definitely not a small company, but we run ~45 TLDs with a team of engineers much smaller than 45, so we have a ratio of TLDs to engineers significantly higher than 1:1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Implied here is the emergence of a new business model: developer powerful custom hardware that you do _not_ sell, but only make available as a service in the cloud. This way you get multiple layers of lock-in.

<comment><USER39> I think the main reason to push TensorFlow as open source was to be able sell the TPU cloud without a total lock-in.

<comment><USER38> I suspect it's the opposite. TensorFlow in source will never be as fast as the TPU cloud with custom processors, so it won't be as suitable for serious high volume production stuff. It's more like a hook into the TPU ecosystem.

<comment><USER40> If TensorFlow is open source then there's nothing stopping AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, etc. from making chips that can integrate with TensorFlow. Other than the fact that it's hard, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now, what was that quote again? " _We have only bits and pieces of information. But what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificance as we gave birth to AI._ "

Google seems to be more and more appropriate for _The Matrix_ quotes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780632)

<comment><USER42> This is because Google is really pushing the _image_ of being the "place AI is happening." They're doing the same amount of ML stuff they've always been, but it looks bigger because they're focused much of their marketing on it and attempting to associate their work in people's minds with the kind of "AI" that's just futurism for now.

I think the reason they're pushing so hard, actually, is that they're in a dogfight with IBM (i.e. Watson) over who enterprises will call if some VP gets the idea that they want to "solve problem X with AI."

<comment><USER43> The timeline is more they hired Hinton, got a bunch of neural network street cred as a result, and then hired a bunch of Hinton's acolytes, and then acquired Deepmind. From the outside, it seems Dean or some other higher up had the foresight / luck to bet big on neural architecture research just as the engineering started becoming practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If Google's AI is so great, why is it that Google search results seem to get worse and worse every year?

So many searches I do are so "SEO'ed", I feel like it's 1999 again.

<comment><USER45> In my experience, Google is getting better at finding more general information and worse in finding specific information.

It also tries to "help" too much with fuzzy matching which starts to make it useless if you are looking for less common thing. For example, if you search for "nmake tabs vs spaces" it returns a bunch of results for GNU make and flame wars about tabs vs spaces instead of nmake specific info regarding usage of tabs or spaces in nmake makefiles.

<comment><USER46> Yes, they seem to be dropping keywords that overly restrict results which is ironic since those keywords are oftentimes the most important due to their specificity.

I find myself preemptively using quotes more and more with Google. I kind of which their logic was segmented by user-type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be for me, even though I'm really interested in AI and I'm currently working on an AI project (look at my profile if you are interested). I wish I could run my own AI algorithm rather than just using their own. It would probably be cheaper to just buy my own Xeon computers. Training is really what takes most of the computer power.

<comment><USER48> We just bought a used Xeon HP workstation for a build server. It is 7 years old. But a 24-core new workstation would be much more expensive. We're putting in some SSDs to speed up build times, and it came with 24GB of RAM, which is enough for our use cases. The price? $400 or so. It even came with a Quadro 5000 video card, though we weren't planning on GPU compute for this particular box.

<comment><USER47> >>The price? $400 or so

Wow. The price is quite good. Is there some website you bought this from? How many cores?

>>But a 24-core new workstation would be much more expensive

Tell me about it. I've been checking the prices of a dual 24 core workstation and it is around $7K.

<comment><USER48> It's also a 24-core, dual-socket (12-cores per socket). There's a couple left on ebay:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2x-Xeon-x5670-2-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2x-Xeon-x5670-2-93GHz-24GB-900GB- HDD-15K-Quadro-5000-No- OS-/381874764533?hash=item58e9827af5:g:saoAAOSw44BYJQoa)

The one downside of this box is that the power supply is totally proprietary to HP. Well, the motherboard too. So if one of those craps out, you're done, unless you can locate a spare cheaply.

It's also reeeeaaally heavy and draws a lot of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Slightly O/T: What is that insane heatsink sitting on? TPU? Is it that stacked up because it's passive?

<comment><USER50> Typically those sit in the airstream that a bunch of fan cartridges pull through the enclosure. So they run from the bottom of the case all the way to the top otherwise the air would flow around them instead of through them.

<comment><USER49> That makes sense. Thank you for explaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is there any pricing data available?

<comment><USER52> It's all available on their price list under Machine Learning.

[https://cloud.google.com/pricing/list](https://cloud.google.com/pricing/list)

<comment><USER51> I can't find an entry for TPUs, only regular machines and GPUs. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> NVidia announces they are building new generation TPU's and two days later Google announces that they have them in Google Cloud. God Speed!

<comment><USER54> they're not talking about the same TPU

<comment><USER53> The comment is a fun poke. Please don't take it literally! NVidia's new Volta GPU has Tensor cores that I think are very similar to what was in first generation TPU. I read the TPU papers and blogs published recently and I am seriously impressed by TPUs!

<comment><USER55> The Volta is 16-bit floating point, so closer to second-gen TPU. The first-gen TPU was integer only and used for prediction, not training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I feel like there have been a series of announcements about AI toolkits and work in the last week. Is there some collaboration, is this a special week?

<comment><USER23> Google I/O is this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> "We're currently testing Federated Learning in Gboard on Android, the Google Keyboard"

Thank-you for reminding me why I don't use Gboard and instead the BlackBerry Priv's fine keyboard instead. The obsession of prediction in our culture is absurd.

<comment><USER58> Why is prediction absurd?

Doing something myself is one thing, having it done for me is convenient, having it done for me before I asked is even better (I do not mean in all situations, only in some, and only for some things, etc...)

<comment><USER57> Its absurd in what you sacrifice (the data you're typing into your device) for the pay-out: a few milliseconds saved.

<comment><USER59> Federated learning leaves the data on the device, only communicating updates to abstract models. See [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated- learning-c...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning- collaborative.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I might be skeptical, but every single AI experiment or showcase I see either online or on google experiments list is nothing that impressive. The whole AI thing is so overhyped these days...

<comment><USER61> You don't think AlphaGo or self driving cars are impressive?

<comment><USER62> Yes and no. I mean the demo is great, but can I actually have one? No? Well then I can only be so impressed.

I know, they're coming soon, but I've been waiting for years and at some point the enthusiasm wanes when it's been right around the corner for several years.

Hey, maybe they're trying to solve a problem that's harder than anyone expected.

Anyways, I'll be impressed when I can have one.

<comment><USER63> You can't have a nuclear bomb either. Are they unimpressive?

<comment><USER62> Not at all the same. They're way past demo and have proven effectiveness repeatedly.

Comparing pre-alpha with fielded is no comparison. Nuclear weapons haven't been going on and on about how great they'll eventually be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Sorry but I'm new and I read the "approach to comments": [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

I'd love a place where I can grok and find only useful info. Comments like this don't help.

> The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but > shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or > videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto > a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to > be quieter.

<comment><USER65> It's true that the comment was a bit fluffy, but it's also the sort of whimsical tangent that is in the spirit of this site, which is intellectual curiosity.

Intellectual curiosity often takes up seemingly trivial details and plays with them for no particular reason. Mostly nothing important comes of it, but sometimes something really does. In any case it would be a big mistake to try to push that kind of thing out of here—it's well within the scope of what HN exists for.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14361923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14361923) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER66> It would be one thing if that was the only fluffy comment. The entire collection of top level comments is nothing but fluff, with only one or two exceptions. The vast majority of comments on this page are completely off topic. There is practically zero technical merit to any of the threads, even the on topic ones.

I think it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen as the golden submission and other more specific and more technical submissions (such as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360653)) were duped off the front page. If a more specific article had been chosen instead, we might have had a more focused technical discussion rather than domain name commentary and the same old non-specific privacy concerns discussed ad nauseam every day.

<comment><USER65> > _it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen_

You know what, you're exactly right. Generic pages lead to generic discussion and that is uninteresting. We're well aware of that effect, so usually make a point of penalizing generic portal-style pages or changing the HN URLs to more substantive ones. For some reason we missed this case.

It's interesting as yet another demonstration of how reliable that effect is, I guess. Initial conditions have a huge impact on HN threads. First comment is another.

<comment><USER66> Cheers, and thanks for keeping HN the best technical news discussion site around :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Holy shit

</comment><comment><USER68> Looks like Google is trying marketing spin to make what it does sound less evil.

<comment><USER69> I've seen this viewpoint a few times around here and I'm undecided on this topic myself. Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful..."

As good a time as any for a reminder of how this philosophy actually plays out at Google: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the- tragedy-of-google-books/523320/)

</comment><comment><USER71> Bringing the benefits of AI to everyone... even if its against your will... this will be used for evil. Mark my words. Totaliatrian governments of the future will leverage this technology, combined with controlling the populations' political discourse. Don't believe me? It's already happened on a massive scale both last election and recently before that: Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook- manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/#5e96cfc0197c)

<comment><USER72> But if it's really AI for everyone, then it can be used by the people against their government as well.

<comment><USER73> _In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread._

There's no comparing the incentives, resources, and potential for harm between the state and citizens.

<comment><USER72> I think you seriously underestimate the people, and seriously overestimate the government.

The point being, the harm the government is doing right now is obscured from the people, but with AI trawling all public data, these issues can be revealed much sooner.

<comment><USER74> I find this naive. One day every 2-4years the govt answers to the people. Every other days is story after story of the govt bending to the will of powerful/wealthy special interests.

Giving each side force multipliers doesn't even the playing field, it makes the absolute gap even larger.

<comment><USER72> Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

Secondly, your point would be valid if the force multipliers applied equally. This likely isn't true.

So which side gains more advantage? If the government could sufficiently obscure their actions such that the data weren't available to analyze, that would give it the advantage. However, the government is constrained by certain transparency requirements that don't apply to citizens, so by default, citizens know more about their representatives than their representatives know about their citizens.

<comment><USER74> > Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on > elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

The executive branch losing a court case isn't answering to the people. It's answering to the judicial branch. Being granted explicit permission as a citizen to do something you legally should be allowed to do isn't gaining anything at all. An innocent person being allowed to remain innocent again isn't giving anything to citizens. Those are basic rights..

> If the government could sufficiently obscure their actions such that the > data weren't available to analyze, that would give it the advantage

The govt already does this across the board. I'm not certain how you could argue otherwise. Taking a issue in the news recently, we still don't have national rates on use of force by the police across the country. As in literally no-one knows what the police is doing because centralized records aren't kept, and every area does it differently. Police departments have fought body cameras. Fought enabling citizens to even see how they are executing their jobs.

It was a sliver of data available under Obama (although to his credit, his admin tried to improve it), and yet: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/14/trump-admin-killing- open...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/14/trump-admin-killing-open-data- portal/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: New site tells you which brands advertised on Instagram are the best - <AUTHOR> https://www.nexttbrand.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just launched. Would love your feedback: [https://rb.gy/vwt4mp](https://rb.gy/vwt4mp)</comment>


Rejection.  Done right this time. - <AUTHOR> http://kerr.io/rejection-done-right/

<comment><USER2> I think congratulating the kid would have had a positive impact. That is reason enough to do it.

This is meta-contrarian bullshit. As long as people don't feel entitled to other congratulating them, everything is fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> _What we need instead are people with drive determined to continue to climb until they finally do something worthy of recognition._

But where does that drive come from? It comes from being applauded along the way for the "mundane" tasks usually by parents and teachers. The same incentives this author feels are useless.

</comment><comment><USER4> <https://twitter.com/hopelarson/status/232515218046062592>

"The other day I was remembering being a teen and that certainty that the world would fall at my feet every time I drew something."</comment>


E-Bikes Are All the Rage. Should They Be? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/well/move/e-bike-safety-exercise.html <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/ndmhY](http://archive.is/ndmhY)</comment>


Is Your ID Approved for Travel? These Are the Latest Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/travel/is-your-id-approved-for-travel-these-are-the-latest-rules.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> "Travelers won't be able to pass through security without this acceptable identification."

Right now, travelers who left their id at home are able to fly, albeit with more stringent checks - [https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security- screening/identification](https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security- screening/identification) .

Will this policy disappear? Otherwise, it seems a lot of people may "forget" their non-compliant ids.</comment>


Etsy's Culture Of Continuous Experimentation and A/B Testing - <AUTHOR> http://apptimize.com/blog/2014/01/etsy-continuous-innovation-ab-testing/

<comment><USER2> If you are in New York, you should subscribe for the Etsy Code as Craft speaker series, and not just because they always have free beer [http://codeascraft.com/etsy-speaker-series/](http://codeascraft.com/etsy- speaker-series/)

Dan McKinley's talk on continuous experimentation of design is a must-watch [http://mcfunley.com/design-for-continuous- experimentation](http://mcfunley.com/design-for-continuous-experimentation)

The last one I went to was a sparsely attended talk on using multiple CDN providers...sparse only because of the specific and technical nature of the talk, but it epitomized the scale and methodology of Etsy's testing operation...most non-massive techs are probably satisfied with moving to a reliable CDN...Etsy seemingly puts as much effort in testing CDN performance as smaller firms would in overall A/B testing. But I still found it to have some valuable insights for us small-operators, such as where the humans are involved in the monitoring process (given the investment they've made in automated systems)

[http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2013/public/schedule/detai...](http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2013/public/schedule/detail/31536)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for these resources.</comment></comment>