CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant Strides - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/2-dot-0-perf-strides/ <comment><USER3> Looks very promising! We've looked at Cockroach for a particular project, and we've been concerned that performance wasn't good enough.

Cockroach performance seems to scale linearly, but single-connection performance, especially for small transactions, seems rather dismal. Some casual stress testing against a 3-node cluster on Kubernetes showed that small transactions modifying a single row could take as much as 7-8 seconds, where Postgres would take just a few milliseconds.

The documentation recommends that you batch as many updates as possible, but obviously that doesn't work for low-latency applications like web frontends that need to be able to do small, fine-grained modifications.

<comment><USER4> > low-latency applications like web frontends

...

<comment><USER3> We have a collaborative, Google Docs-like application that currently issues a write every time someone types into a text field. Now, clearly it's suboptimal and something that should be optimized to batch the updates, but on the other hand, with Postgres we've had zero incentive to make such an optimization, because it's able to handle thousands of writes per node in real time with no queuing happening on the client. I don't expect this from Cockroach, but I would definitely want low latency.

<comment><USER5> Lordy, relational databases are not the way to go for that problem... With a single shared resource (document), you're going to be encountering write conflicts left and right.

Have you explored implementing a CRDT based solution like WOOT instead?

<comment><USER6> Why write conflicts? Contention, sure, but contention isn't an issue until you have literal tons of it.

<comment><USER5> From OP's description

      > issues a write every time someone types into a text field

With more than a handful of people, this is getting into conflict territory pretty rapidly, especially if the document is structured as a single row (hopefully it's more granular than that). Time for some back of the envelope maths:

Assuming that an average person types at around 200 words per minute (number pulled from [https://www.livechatinc.com/typing-speed- test/#/](https://www.livechatinc.com/typing-speed-test/#/)), that's a character every 300ms on average. With 10 people editing the document, that's a character every 30ms on average, which can easily lead to conflicts if they're all trying to update the same resource.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it's event sourcing based. Every time someone types into a field it writes a row that something was typed which is a record of what was typed. Play it back and you have the full document with no conflicts.

<comment><USER8> With the caveat that the stored events are not conflicting with each other. So a central instance needs to check each event for validity before allowing it into the log. The check cannot be parallelized easily without introducing races between event insertions.

<comment><USER7> No event sourcing architecture I know of advocates that at all.

One of the strengths of event sourcing is that you can fix things after the fact. Say you got a wrong event like you suggested that conflicts. You don't check it at the time before allowing it in log. You notice the wrong event, delete it, and replay the log.

You can always replay the log to get you current point of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like what Cockroach is doing, I'm rooting for them to grow and survive. Unfortunately the only time I hear about it is when they post blogs. I never hear about it from other people.

<comment><USER10> _raises hand_ we're using them extensively. They're our database of choice that we've paired with Nakama[1] which is an open-source, distributed server. Have nothing but great things to say about the database itself in terms of growing performance and the team behind it :). They've been great to us since day-1.

[1] github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

<comment><USER11> What kind of workload are you using it for? What's been your biggest win while using it?

<comment><USER10> A couple of our use-cases include: good KV access (stored user data etc.) and listing blocks of data that has been pre-sorted on disk at insert time (leaderboard records, chat message history etc.). As well, the clustering technology is particularly useful at scale. We work in the games space with some very large games in production, which allows us to spread the load across multiple database nodes and offers us peace of mind regarding redundancy.

<comment><USER12> What do you mean by KV access isn't it a relational data store? do you store the value as a blog? json? if so how do you then do queries on that value's values?

<comment><USER13> IIRC it's a KV store which offer a relational data store interface for usability/compability

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing I really don't get is why CockroachDB is avoid benchmarking with it's rival tidb ([https://github.com/cockroachdb/docs/issues/1412](https://github.com/cockroachdb/docs/issues/1412)). tidb already pretty mature, used in many big companies (Let's say, Didi, which on the similar scale data with Uber, and banks).

Even if I like CockroachDB's pg sql more, it would be helpful to have the comparison/benchmark to show something more.

<comment><USER3> TiDB looks promising, but it doesn't have serializable transactions at all, which makes it something of an apples-to-oranges comparison at the moment when it comes to OLTP.

TiDB has a weird kind of variation on "read committed" where you get phantom reads (though they're not called that in the documentation, which is actually ambiguous on this point). This is a problem for apps that expect consistency.

<comment><USER15> Siddon Tang from TiDB here. Thanks for your interest in TiDB! TiDB uses Snapshot Isolation ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation)), which is similar to Repeated Read in MySQL. It doesn't allow Read Phantom but can't avoid Write Skew. IMO, this can work well for OLTP in most of the cases. If you really care about serializability, you can use `select for update` to promote the Read as Write explicitly like other databases do.

TiDB supports READ COMMITTED isolation which is not the same as MySQL, but it is just designed for some special cases for TiDB itself and it is not recommended for external users.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that's helpful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Project idea: globally hosted / managed CockroachDB that lets developers quickly start building small apps cheaply or free using this database.

This database has the potential to dethrone Spanner in a major way.

<comment><USER17> That's on their roadmap: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently- asked-q...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/frequently-asked- questions.html#does-cockroach-labs-offer-a-cloud-database-as-a-service)

<comment><USER18> My Org/team is too conservative to use this is they have to hire ops and too froogle to use spanner.

<comment><USER19> Why do you think that hosted cochroachdb would be cheaper then hosted spanner? Google has been optimizing spanner performance for years so I would expect that it will be cheaper to run for quite a while. Of course the markup can be different but I wouldn't expect it to make a huge difference.

<comment><USER20> Maybe training? Spanner's lack of UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE requires a team that's trained pretty specifically on how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How is this meaningful without detailed setup description? [http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false...](http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false&orderby=tpm&sortby=desc) Looking at this list of results one wonders what those results actually mean?

<comment><USER22> I think you can still drive some insights. I clicked on the TPC-C results you shared and read their executive summaries.

The Oracle on SPARC cluster (at the top, 2010) performs 30.2M qualified tx/min vs the 16K tx/min in this blog post. The Oracle cluster also costs $30M, which is clearly higher than the Cockroach cluster's cost.

That said, the TPC-C benchmark is new to me. Happy to update this comment if I'm misreading the numbers.

(Edited to incorporate the reply below.)

<comment><USER23> A short note that the total cost of that SPARC cluster was $30 million. You're not misreading those numbers, but it requires a little context.

We're focusing today on our improvements over CockroachDB 1.1, using a small- ish cluster. We'll be showing some more scalability with larger clusters in the coming weeks. If you've found CockroachDB performance slow in the past, you will be pleasantly surprised with this release!

<comment><USER22> Sure thing. I was primarily answering the question above - in terms of how the numbers in the TPC-C benchmark fit in. I updated my comment to reflect the cost.

I think what's interesting with TPC-C is that you can sort the results based on performance or price/performance. On the price/performance metric, SPARC looks expensive. Dell has a $20K SQL Anywhere cluster that can do 113K tx/min.

I wonder if anyone tried to run these benchmarks on the cloud and how one would calculate total cost of ownership there now.

<comment><USER21> you do realize it's ancient hardware thats $300-400 USD on ebay now.

<comment><USER20> [http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=11...](http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=110120201)

Yeah, but 1700 cores worth. That's still a lot of $300 boxes. Like qty 53 Sparc T3-2's for example. Which seem to be $1200 to $2k on eBay. And unsupported, end of life, etc.

I'd compare CockroachDB's number to some more recent result with a similar number of cores. (If you can find one)

<comment><USER24> Minor correction: They used 54 SPARC T3-2. You can see exactly which components they used in [http://c970058.r58.cf2.rackcdn.com/fdr/tpcc/Oracle_SPARC_Sup...](http://c970058.r58.cf2.rackcdn.com/fdr/tpcc/Oracle_SPARC_SuperCluster_with_T3-4s_TPC- C_FDR_120210.pdf)

<comment><USER20> Not feeling too bad about my back of the napkin guess being off by one server at 53 vs 54. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How much and what kind of memory and storage (SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, HDD?) is included in the 3 nodes used for testing? This benchmarking is really interesting but the next level is to understand the cost per tmpC measured. Memory especially and storage is a big component of cost these days.

<comment><USER23> Short answer: 3 n1-highcpu-16 GCE VMs with Local SSDs attached. We're working on a complete disclosure document, with comprehensive reproduction steps to replicate all our numbers. This document should be out in a couple of weeks. We want to walk you through, command by command, on how to reproduce these numbers, and verify the results for yourself.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the short answer. Would be good to know how many local SSDs are attached though for the 850 warehouse scenario. The TPC-C documentation says each warehouse maintains 100,000 items in their stock, but I can't surmise from that how much storage is required to hold 850 warehouses' worth of data. I'm impatient though so let me try to work through the #s myself. I'm using GCP's monthly reserved pricing in the US-Iowa region as a reference as of today's pricing.

A n1-highcpu-16 GCE VM costs $289.84/month. Local SSDs are added at 375GB per drive, and they cost $30/month at $0.08 per GB. I highly doubt you could fit the ~1250 warehouses (what got you the peak TPM-C) on 375GB local SSD, but I have to make assumptions here! So, now you're paying $319.84 per instance per month, or $949.52 for 3 of these instances.

At 16,150 TPC-C, you're paying roughly $0.06 per TPC-C, or, looking at it the other way, you're getting 16.83 TPC-C per dollar spent each month. Is that good? I don't know!

Now, the really interesting question is, is that TPC-C/$ on CRDB 2.0 actually better than TPC-C/$ on CRDB 1.1? The answer lies in how many local SSDs you have to provision to reach that peak throughput. Peak is at ~1300 warehouses on CRDB 2.0, and ~800 warehouses on CRDB 1.1.

Does anyone with more knowledge here know how much storage you need per warehouse in the TPC-C test?

<comment><USER26> Each warehouse requires about 80 megabytes of storage, unreplicated. 1250 warehouses * 80 MB * 3-way replication = 300 GB, which comfortably fits in a 3-node cluster with 1 local SSD each.

<comment><USER25> Thank you! My Google-fu couldn't find me the answer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd love to hear from someone who has implemented this in production. Seems like really cool tech, but haven't had a chance to use it on a project yet.

<comment><USER28> Using it in production currently with dual-write and dual-read to compare perf. I'll do a write-up showing how Cockroach performs to Citus and Cassandra for my use case.

<comment><USER29> We use Citus and Memsql (big data analytics use cases). How does Cockroach handle joins and other OLAP style queries?

<comment><USER30> You're not going to get better performance for OLAP than MemSQL's columnstore and in-memory rowstore for reference tables to join.

Citus is great if you want the Postgres interface but is still using standard rowstore tables. CockroachDB is similar with rowstore performance but with added distributed consensus overhead. They are both much better for OLTP and sharding. CockroachDB also provides easy high-availability and replication.

<comment><USER31> MemSQL is one of those "ask for a quote" products. What are some rule of thumb estimates for what it costs?

<comment><USER30> Licensed by total RAM of all nodes. $25k/year minimum license now, but you should still talk to them if you're a small company. Regardless of price, I highly recommend the product as one of the most polished data warehouses available for on-prem/self-managed operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great stuff. I appreciated being educated about TPC-C, and the whole spirit of not focusing on vanity benchmarks!

<comment><USER33> Same here, but in educating myself more I found that TPC-C seems to be a somewhat obsolete metric compared to TPC-E (see [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9246939/what-is-the- diff...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9246939/what-is-the-difference- between-tpc-c-tpc-e-and-tpc-h-benchmark)). Why use the old one here?

edit: Looking into it even further, I agree with the co-author's response here that TPC-C is still an appropriate metric. TPC-E is different and newer but still not as widely used.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's true to claim that TPC-C is obsolete and subsumed by TPC-E. They are both different OLTP benchmarks, with different characteristics. TPC-C is more write heavy, TPC-E is far more read heavy. It's true that TPC-E is newer, but doesn't deprecate TPC-C (the way TPC-A, for instance, is now deprecated).

We chose TPC-C because it's far more understood than TPC-E in 2018. We wanted to provide understandable benchmarks that can be put into context with other databases. Other databases report TPC-C numbers, so we choose to do so as well.

<comment><USER20> It seems not used much anymore. Follow that link ([http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false...](http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false&orderby=tpm&sortby=desc)) and sort by either score, or price performance. The vast majority of top results are a decade old or more. I couldnt find anything less than 5 years old without going to second/third pages.

And the top results are usually crazy high number of cores clusters. The Sun example was over 1700 cores.

<comment><USER34> The problem is that I think it costs money and red tape to submit results and vendors run their own, and you kinda have to take their word on it or reproduce them yourself.

<comment><USER20> That makes sense. Probably TPC-C died after Oracle basically killed off Sybase and Informix. No more well funded competition to keep up the pace. And no multitude of RISC vendors trying to fend off Linux/X86.

The open source databases didn't play that game, so TPC-C became irrelevant.

Too bad there isn't a good way to directly compare the healthy survivors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I dont like when companies are not transparent about the pricing of their product. If you have a price page, show the price, so that Í can decide if this is relevant for me or not ...

<comment><USER36> The only thing the Enterprise offering gives you is priority access.

<comment><USER37> Enterprise allows access to various features like distributed backup and restore.

<comment><USER36> Ah, my mistake. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how far apart those three nodes are and how much the latency between them matters?

</comment><comment><USER39> Hadn't heard of Cockroach but based on the article, this thread and the rest of their site it sounds at least worth installing on a few hobby nodes if only to get familiar with the behavior and configuration should a need arise - <USER2> Cassandra was years ago when I had already on my own learned the gist of it, sort of a road not taken relative to my then-firm's usual prescriptions (MySQL and Mongo), it turned out to be perfect for my team's needs (paperwork to get permission to use it notwithstanding). Thanks for posting and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice pun there. Cockroaches do indeed have a habit of making significant strides.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does someone have more information about how they implemented serializable in such a way that, as they claim, performance isn't negatively impacted? Seems pretty hard to achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER42> Since you only have 3 nodes, doesn't that mean every range is replicated to every node? Doesn't that make joins trivial (i.e. no different from non- distributed joins)?

<comment><USER43> Yeah, though from what I understand this benchmark is measuring both transactional read and write performance rather than just join performance.

Transactional writes are likely the slowest thing since they need to talk to all replicas.

<comment><USER42> Actually hmm, do reads need to talk to all replicas in this case (serializable isolation)?

<comment><USER44> As I understand it, reads only need to talk to the lease owner, which in turn bypasses raft since write consensus guarantees atomicity of after completion of write intents. Cockroach tries best-effort to have the lease owner and the raft leader be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congratulations to the cockroach team for putting out an awesome product :)

Would be great to see how it compares against postgres in similar scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER46> Before clicking the comments link, I always know what to expect in HN comment section for a CDB post announcing their latest milestone or feature:

A lot of congrats and excitement, questions about who uses it in a production environment, very specific use-case questions, and of course the name.

Weird how predictable the response to one company/tech always is.

<comment><USER47> People complaining about the name and how they are never going to be able to use it in production because of how gross cockroaches are is definitely the most recurring point. I think it worked well for them, since everyone remembers the name, specially with all the distributed stores coming out lately.

<comment><USER48> Sometimes i wonder the evolution of cockcroaches' grossness has something to do with its high survivability?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Great stuff but this name really doesn't work. Make it a name with positive connotations.

<comment><USER50> I think it's a great name once you get the.. uh.. pun behind it.

<comment><USER51> What is the pun?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What drug was the person who drew that graphic on?

<comment><USER32> Heavy doses of Hieronymous Bosch? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I will not use this product based on it's name alone, it give me jeepers. Petty? Damn straight it's petty. Doesn't make it less real though.</comment>


Have coffee with PG, PB, David Lee + others via this charity fundraiser. - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaww.org/venture.html

<comment><USER2> This coffee better be damn good! I just shelled out 1200 bucks to meet with PG :-)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. The writers <3 you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who is PB?

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul></comment></comment>


SourceForge.net chooses Python, TurboGears and MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebitsource.com/software-engineering/python/sourceforgenet-chooses-python-turbogears-and-mongodb-to-redesign-their-web-site/ <comment><USER2> Does it really matter what technology they use?

I think they have a much more fundamental problem.

* Compared to github or bitbucket or any of the way more modern alternatives (even the SVN based ones) SF.net has terrible collaboration tools.

* It is riddled with banner ads.

* It times out most of the time on basic services

There was a time when SF.net was the best, but it has been made completely irrelevant by much much better alternatives.

<comment><USER3> Of course it matters - migration of a site of this scale to a new set of technologies is interesting, regardless of the trendiness of Sourceforge. Sourceforge is still a much, much larger operation than github, to boot.

<comment><USER4> Much larger in what sense exactly? By our count we host twice as many repositories as they do.

<comment><USER3> The common sense sense.

[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=github.com%2C+sourceforg...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=github.com%2C+sourceforge.net&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Python++ MongoDB, sure. Turbogears?

<comment><USER6> Mark Ramm (maintainer) works for SF. It's not like it's a bad framework.</comment></comment>


I learned to code, build a web app and launch it on Product Hunt in 2 months - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AndreyAzimov/i-learned-to-code-and-build-a-web-app-in-2-months-da8f2932c139 <comment><USER2> I usually would say it is ok to do everything wrong while learning. But the example of peter you brought is the exact sample why this is still a bad idea. You will have a way harder time to learn it if you are doing it wrong from the beginning. Not to mention that you will probably never will be able to fix your old code.</comment>


You only get asylum if you strip and… - <AUTHOR> http://stefaniezobus.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/asylum-stri/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/czech- republic/101209/hom...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/czech- republic/101209/homosexuality-test-gay-asylum-seekers)

the article's source.

</comment><comment><USER3> Canada just stopped doing this to juvenile offenders this year!

Although it did stop doing it to RCMP recruits in the 70s</comment>


John Oliver on the ugly state of credit reporting and background checks - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRrDsbUdY_k <comment><USER2> Until ~2015 the databases holding your credit file at EQ and TU were so shoddy that you could easily remove "hard" inquiries on your credit report (those that other people see for 2 years, and which affect your fico score for 1 year). The "trick" was to sign up for several services that let you pull your own credit every day. Pulling your own credit, a "soft" inquiry, does not affect on your score. Their databases could hold only the last 100 or so inquiries, so you just pull your credit a few times every day and you overflow the field. They had a monthly batching process to consolidate these soft inquiries, so it did take a bit of persistence, but it's an alarming look at the tech underlying this critical piece of our credit economy.

<comment><USER3> Wow, this is incredible. How has it changed since 2015?

<comment><USER4> yup, they figured this out and stopped it mid 2015 iirc.

The above process occasionally lead to split credit reports as well, which could be a nightmare to resolve.

<comment><USER5> Was this technical detail made public? I'd be surprised to see them admit to something like that.

<comment><USER4> Of course the CRAs didn't tell people about this, but it was very widely known amongst people trying to optimize their credit score, particularly for churning or MSing. Google eg bumpage or B* and you'll find lengthy discussions...

<comment><USER5> Wow, that's amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People like to claim that background checks are used when someone is placed into a trusted position. However in my experience lower end jobs (where you're often trusted less) are often much MORE likely to have a background check.

To give a specific example: Work in a fast food place handling small amounts of cash and they'll background check you. Work in a company handling SSNs, Credit Cards, and medical records and they didn't even ask me if I had a criminal record (I don't).

So I cannot help but wonder if ex-convicts are going to suffer more while getting a low end job than they would if they were applying for high end positions. I guess the assumption is if you have a degree that you are somehow above crime...

I guess that's why so called "white collar crime" often goes undetected for longer and is often more successful overall.

<comment><USER7> That may be your experience, but having worked for a large medical billing and large bank, both do heavy background checks. I've even been finger printed, and had my Facebook searched.

<comment><USER8> You've had your Facebook searched? What was that process like?

I've gone through tons of background checks / drug screens for federal and state governments, and financial companies. But I've never had a Facebook search...

Is that even legal?

<comment><USER9> They have probably looked at your public facebook.

<comment><USER9> FYI [http://m.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/04/opm-seeking- social...](http://m.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/04/opm-seeking-social-media- tracking-background-checks/127380/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why hasn't there been a class action suit against the credit agencies? Seems like you'd have a pretty good libel case.

I have no contract with any of these agencies, yet they say bad things about me to other people that are inaccurate.

In fact, I've been monetarily harmed. I tried to refinance my mortgage, which would have saved me over $1000 a month, but was denied due to bad credit. When I looked, it was all inaccuracies. That was two years ago, so I can say for a fact that they caused me $24,000 of direct harm so far. I finally just got all the inaccuracies cleared up.

I suspect that I've signed contracts with creditors that allow them to _send_ info to these people, but I know that isn't necessary, because I can file a derogatory mark about anyone I want to as long as I have their SSN.

So, what stops a class action suit against these guys?

<comment><USER11> It's a shady and powerful system.

The logic goes something like this: the credit reporting agencies simply provided facts (reported to them by others) to the mortgage company, who made their own decision about your creditworthiness.

Who is at fault in your situation? The mortgage company? No, they took your report at face value and then made their own decision. The reporting agencies? No, they just barf back data fed to them by individual creditors and run it through their arbitrary algorithm. The individual creditors? Perhaps, or maybe they sent an accurate report but somewhere along the line two numbers in an SS# got flipped (innocent mistake) and now you're carrying someone else's bad credit.

Scores of companies each have these tiny slices of responsibility, making it really hard to pin one actor with all of it (ie, to name a defendant).

The incentives are perverse. The worse your score the more expensive to borrow. Best case for a lender is to have a customer who _should_ have a high credit score but doesn't because of mistakes like these -- you get the credit risk of a AAA borrower, but can charge subprime rates. Best of both worlds.

<comment><USER12> > Who is at fault in your situation?

The credit agency. If they're reporting inaccurate information, that they haven't verified, that's libel.

This is something the CFPB [+] needs to clamp down on hard.

[+] [http://www.consumerfinance.gov/](http://www.consumerfinance.gov/)

<comment><USER11> I'm no lawyer, but I have a hard time imagining a successful libel suit here. I would guess the reporting agencies have some set of terms & conditions that say something to the effect of "You (the reporter) certify that this report is true and correct to the best of your knowledge".

I mean, come on -- they're aggregators. They can't go investigate every single report they get; they have to depend on reporters to tell the truth.

Importantly, the reporting agencies _do not make claims of creditworthiness about you_. They present your "credit history" (accurate or not) and the lenders themselves make their own determination. It's an awful catch-22.

<comment><USER10> > agencies do not make claims of creditworthiness about you.

Which is a load of crap. They present a number and even say "above 750 is excellent". It's in their own marketing materials. How is that not making a claim of creditworthiness?

<comment><USER11> Ok, you may be technically correct. Experian, for example, says "Higher scores represent a greater likelihood that you'll pay back your debts so you are viewed as being a lower credit risk to lenders."

Even so, lenders still decide what to do with that information. Some credit cards may approve you at a 500 score. Others may not. Many lenders will tier your rate based on score. Ultimately the decision of whether or not to extend credit and what rate you get is up to the lender.

<comment><USER12> > Even so, lenders still decide what to do with that information. Some credit > cards may approve you at a 500 score. Others may not. Many lenders will tier > your rate based on score. Ultimately the decision of whether or not to > extend credit and what rate you get is up to the lender.

If you're providing factually incorrect information on a person, that someone is then going to make a financial decision around, you should be held liable if your business _is to provide factual information on someone regarding the credit worthiness_.

Unless we're just going to say that credit agencies have no requirement to verify the data they collect. In that case, let's just rule them illegal through legislation and allow them to dissolve (most of the first world does not have credit agencies for consumers).

<comment><USER10> > most of the first world does not have credit agencies for consumers

Interesting, I didn't realize that. How does credit work where they don't have the agencies? Like if I want to buy a house in Germany or get a credit card in France, does the bank just do all their own research?

<comment><USER12> I don't want to generalize too much, but yes, the lender does the majority of the legwork in other countries.

<comment><USER13> I don't know about most other countries but both France and Germany do have credit scoring agencies. The difference is that it mostly deals with negative entries, i.e. you don't build credit by repaying loans but rather by never falling behind on your payment schedule (the German system uses a few additional factors). Banks usually don't care if you ever successfully repaid a loan nor do they ask that question.

I don't know what US banks do apart from getting a credit score if somebody applies for a loan but I don't assume it's much less than banks do here: Assessing your income stability and looking at your large fixed expenses.

I also don't think there are any, say, OECD countries without such credit scoring agencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the topic of credit checks, it would be oh so nice to have two-step verification whenever a hard inquiry is made. As a recent credit fraud victim, it's been a nightmare spending hours on the phone with the credit bureaus. Some let you dispute inquiries online, while others require a phone call. I ended up just freezing my accounts (for a fee of course, and another fee to unfreeze), and am gonna wait it out until two years pass.

All of this could have been easily prevented if I were required to reply via a text message sent from the credit bureaus when an inquiry was made.

Credit cards already have two-step, why not apply it to potentially life- ruining inquiries? Is there too much money in mafia-like companies who will keep the bad guys away if you just pay them a monthly fee like LifeLock?

The credit system infuriates me to no end.

<comment><USER15> If you're a victim of identity fraud, you're supposed to be able to freeze the accounts for free.

Edit: see [https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze- faq...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs) and [https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0279-extended-fraud- al...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0279-extended-fraud-alerts-and- credit-freezes)

It's not free in all states:

>The cost to place and lift a freeze, and how long the freeze lasts, depend on state law: In many states, identity theft victims can place a freeze for free, but in others, victims must pay a fee, which is usually about $10.

Although an alert is free, and lasts for 7 years.

<comment><USER16> I think the problem is that this is a retrospective step. If you don't know you've been the victim of identity theft, then the first time you might find out about it is when you're trying to make a large/important decision, which may well be the most inconvenient time for it to occur).

Then you've got to sort it all out, and _then_ do the thing you first thought of.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, the tools exist for anyone regardless of income to monitor their credit on at least a yearly basis at no cost to them. Going 5+ years without checking your own credit just because you're not in the market for a house or a new car is pretty high on the list of things most responsible adults don't do.

<comment><USER9> And both my credit cards show real time credit score numbers from the one of the services. It's not perfect, but if the number radically changes that should be a red flag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My credit was in the dumps a year ago. I had a few negative marks, debt to credit ratio was off, too many inquiries, etc... I didn't find any mistakes. But, I was able to clean up my credit and raise my score by 120 points by doing the following (YMMV).

1\. Set up an account at Credit Karma.

2\. Review your Credit Card Utilization. If it's under 30%, you should be doing ok. If not, pay off those balances.

3\. Look for derogatory marks. If you see any that are older than 7 years, file a dispute to have them removed (you can do this through CK directly).

Generally, I found that, if an account is closed and older than 5 years, if you file a dispute, the creditor won't care and will either ignore the request (resolving in your favor) or mark it as resolved in your favor.

If you have outstanding balances open in collections, call the collection agency. Here's how that went for me... "Hi, I'm interested in discussing an open collection on my credit. I see you are the owner of the debt." After they pull up the information, ask them "How much are you willing to accept to purge this from my credit?" (They are going to tell you they can't do that. But, they most certainly can!)

If you receive an offer for 20% less (with removal from your credit), take it. Use a credit card (responsibly!) if you don't have the funds immediately available.

If not, make sure they have your phone number on file, hang up and wait. Come the end of the month, I guarantee you they will call with an offer. :)

Tip: Use a Google Voice number, so you can field their phone calls, if they go rogue. When you're negotiating, make sure you write down names, case numbers, account numbers, etc.

4\. If you have old accounts on your credit report, don't close them! Closing your accounts hurts your score. Instead, keep them open. If you have a credit card that you never use, set up Netflix to bill to that card, then set up recurring bill pay to pay off the balance every month. This will keep the creditor from closing the account due to inactivity. That credit history will keep your "Age of Credit History" up.

Lastly, if Credit Card Utilization is constantly hurting your score. Contact your existing credit card companies and request a credit line increase (don't open a new card!). A credit line increase will not hurt your Age of Credit History, but a new card will.

<comment><USER19> Never, ever, ever call, respond to, acknowledge or otherwise interact with a collection agency unless you know what you're doing, especially with old debts.

With an old debt, the bottom feeder collections agencies pay like $0.05 on the dollar. Once you make contact, you reanimate the debt for 7 years, and the collector can sell it for $0.40-50 on the dollar.

<comment><USER20> When you contact a collector you reset the statue of limitations, but derogatory marks can only ever remain on your credit report for 7 years from the date of first delinquency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Credit is, at its core, trust. Trust, well-placed, makes everything about humanity better. Seen that way it feels warm and fuzzy.

But, "credit," meaning the business of telling you whom you can trust (like a bureau), is very very weird indeed.

Without pre-aggregated or nearly-instantly-compiled predictions about trust, it can only spread out in a personal way. But impersonal relations are crucial to trade, to fairness, to the open society (that is, you shouldn't be constrained to trade only with your family/tribe/neighbors).

Hence, a credit bureau, in the ideal, is a trust-promoting mechanism -- something meant to facilitate the best in mankind. And it rewards faithfulness to promises.

Furthermore, in most commerce we can use a default assumption of "trust." Most people will return the rental car, will repay the loan, will queue up to pay for the groceries, etc.

Here's the rub: with the assumption of trust, then the target outcome to model (the labels you're looking for in ML terms) are the defaults or "don't trust" outcomes.

Which means that the best credit bureaus will hungrily look for all labels of, and all features which can be predictive of, defaults. And it must do so opaquely so as to avoid being gamed by adversaries.

So now the institution which is meant to facilitate trust and reward cooperation ... is a secretive digger for dirty laundry.

Just a reflection. It's weird.

(Background: I spent the last five years starting a fairly successful alternative lender, and a less successful alternative credit bureau.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Oliver was saying it was silly to ask for a credit check for firework selling but looking on Criagslist they advance you the tent and stock and then rely on you returning the unsold stuff and a percent of the sales. There'd probably be a higher chance of someone with bad credit running off with the stock.

<comment><USER23> > There'd probably be a higher chance of someone with bad credit running off > with the stock.

Do you have anything resembling evidence to back up that assertion?

<comment><USER24> Being advanced stock is literally being given a loan of that stock, and the primary motivation of credit scoring is to be able to judge whether someone will default on their loan.

Admittedly, that only defers the question to, "Does credit scoring accomplish its primary motivation?" But you could become a loanshark millionaire if it turned out that people with low credit score were equal or better borrowers than people with high credit score, since the existing financial industry isn't serving them as well.

<comment><USER25> This is exactly what Avant in Chicago is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My main problem is it's difficult and time consuming to get back on top of things if you have a string of badly timed emergencies that leave you unable to pay for awhile. That can leave you in a place where you have to let one bill slip to catch up on another, and then next month let the other bill slip to catch up on two others, and then the next month let something slip and...oh crap, another emergency, now you've slipped a little further down the hole!... and its just a vicious cycle.

Even if you start making good money again it can take a long time to right that boat. And the whole time your credit score is swirling the drain, making it even more difficult to get the funds you need to balance everything or weather future emergencies, and you're too afraid to move, because you don't know how you'll pass the credit check, even though you haven't ever missed a rent payment (it's the highest priority bill).

I really wish there was a little more flexibility in payments. Even just a "you can miss a payment if you double pay to catch up next month without us reporting it" would have helped quite a bit.

I also think there needs to be a more universal, centralized place where you can set up online bill pay without it _automatically_ paying (I tell it to pay a particular company a particular amount). I've been locked out of being able to pay my bill on their online sites and it's a nightmare calling or jumping through the hoops to get your account unlocked to be able to pay online again.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I took a job on Wall St, I was not vetted at all by any type of third party agency (credit, background, etc...). It was only 6 or so years ago I had a minimum wage job ringing up products at a convenience store, I had a drug test every 6 months, a credit check (had never owned a CC at that point), and a criminal background check.

<comment><USER28> Candidates on Wall Street are easily filtered by education. Don't want to hire him? Say you're only looking to hire candidates from McCombs. Have people that for whatever reason you want the ability to not hire, but can't base it on experience/educational requirements (low skill, retail, etc jobs)? Well, FICO, drug testing and background checks will give you all the reasons you need so your state Workforce Commission doesn't consider it an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's another problem with credit that can be as difficult as bad credit, and that is no credit. I have plenty of money so no real need for credit, especially credit cards. My car is over ten years old but in great condition since I maintain it well. Former car purchases have fallen off my credit report, they "expire" after a decade I guess. Last year we almost lost out on our current apartment when moving, it was scary.

I'm not even sure what to do to fix the situation, since I'm not interested in credit cards or a new car right away. Any tips?

<comment><USER30> You need to understand that you don't have to "need" a credit card in order for it to make sense to use one, so the fact that you have plenty of money is irrelevant.

In fact there's an older banker's maxim that says "never lend money to someone who needs it."

My recommendation: As long as you are disciplined then start using a credit card for your purchases. Google around and find one from a mainstream providers that provides lots of points and no annual fee. At least 1% back on all your purchases. My Citibank card gets me about 2% back on everything I purchase. So basically I get a little discount on all my purchases for having good credit.

Start using it immediately to build up credit. Like it or not, you're only going to encounter more situations like you did with the apartment. And the older you get, the more suspicious it looks.

If you don't feel you can be disciplined enough to pay it off every month, then just use it for handful of recurring purchases and nothing else, then at least you'll start building a credit history.

<comment><USER29> I did look for one last year but couldn't find any without stupid fees of one kind or another.

<comment><USER17> With no credit, you are not going to get approved for any card where you don't end up paying for the privilege of having it in one way or another. Most like a $40-60 yearly fee. A year or two in with on-time payments you can either convert the card to one without a fee or get a new one without a fee and close that one.

<comment><USER29> Ok, but I thought they made a lot of money through transaction fees.

<comment><USER17> What does that have to do with anything?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Recent fraud victim myself. To initiate a long term fraud alert on report you have to get a police report and send it along with copies of identification, etc. via mail seperately to each credit bureau company. That makes it so fraudsters can still try getting credit in your name but the business is supposed to call you to confirm it's you applying. If the fraud poster has an accomplice, say at the shady cell phone kiosk at the mall, they just ignore the warning. Best case is the detected fraudulent hard inquiry stays on your report for up to 4 weeks lowering your score in the meantime. All a big hassle. Guess what you can do instead? Instantly and online pay to have a credit freeze enabled. Then you pay again and again to lift it when you need credit. In some states you are allowed a free credit freeze BUT you need to have gone through fraud, hassled with the police report, and the kicker is, snail mail your requests in both for initial freeze and subsequent temporary suspensions. Obviously I took the instant paid route. What a racket! I should either start a class action lawsuit or perhaps just buy some stock in these jokers.

</comment><comment><USER32> Inaccurate claims that damage your reputation enough to harm your ability to e.g. get a job are why we have slander and libel laws. Anybody harmed by an inaccurate credit report should be suing the reporting agency for libel.

Unfortunately, the agencies have specific immunity from libel laws. It's probably going to take another trip to the SCOTUS to fix that example of institutional corruption.

<comment><USER21> Except that Congress specifically created a regulatory regime for these businesses, and included a wide array of strictures on their practices _and_ a very specific set of remedies for those who are harmed.

That system (FCRA, FDCPA etc.) is of course the product of major lobbying and regulatory capture -- "don't throw me in that briar patch, bre'r fox." But it also does have at least the fig leaf of support by consumer-focused NGOs and populist legislative rhetoricians.

So, no, if you went to the courts you wouldn't even make it to an appeal, much less to SCOTUS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Most employers don't use IQ tests because without proof that an IQ test correlates with job performance they are considered discriminatory. Why are employers so quick to use credit scores?

Many protected classes have lower average credit scores, so I'm not really seeing the difference here between IQ tests and credit checks in this situation.

<comment><USER34> Well, you do have more influence on your credit score then your IQ -- it is more reflective of your behavior and level of responsibility. Obviously some end up with bad credit through little fault of their own, but employers (mostly) aren't SJWs so they don't mind false negatives as long as there are more candidates.

Personally I don't think anyone who isn't extending you credit should have access to your report, but that will probably require a legislative change.

<comment><USER33> > Obviously some end up with bad credit through little fault of their own, but > employers (mostly) aren't SJWs so they don't mind false negatives as long as > there are more candidates.

That's true but the reason Employers don't use IQ tests doesn't have anything to do with false negatives or them caring about fairness. They don't IQ tests because several protected classes score lower on average on IQ tests, so employers have to prove that an IQ test correlates positively with job performance in order to use them. Most employers don't want to deal with this, so they don't use IQ tests.

Several protected classes also have lower average credit scores. It doesn't matter why, just that they do. Therefore it is likely also discriminatory, and and employer should have to support the assertion that a credit score is an indicator of job performance.

My guess is that there haven't been enough lawsuits to scare employers out of using them yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The problem here is that there is no effective identifier for people. We currently use Social Security numbers, which were not designed for that purpose. We need to have a new national identification system. I think a good idea would be to have two numbers: one public and one private. The public number would be used to identify you in public. The other would remain private and would be used as a confidential identification when matched to the public number, a major PIN, if you will.

<comment><USER36> This doesn't solve the primary issue which is that in order for me to verify my identity I have to give the other party sufficient information to spoof my identity. The solution is obvious: asymmetric cryptography, where I can prove I know a secret without revealing the secret.

<comment><USER35> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER36> I'll try.

There are a lot of ways to flesh out the details of such a system. The essence of all of them, though, is that each person has a public key which is known to everyone and simultaneously serves as a unique identifier to that person and a private key that is known only to the individual. Additionally, either the public key is derivable from the private key or both keys are derivable simultaneously via some process, but importantly, the private key is not derivable from the public key. And, depending on the system, messages can be encrypted with the private key and only decrypted with the public key, or vice-versa, messages can be encrypted with the public key and decrypted with the private key. The name for this broad category of cryptographic systems that have these properties is called "asymmetric cryptography".

To give a specific example of how it could work, each person creates a public- private RSA keypair, and publishes the public key. If I want to apply for a credit line with my bank, my bank can read the publicly available public key and use it to encrypt a nonce (secret token) and send me the encrypted nonce. I decrypt it using my private key and send the original nonce back to my bank, proving that I am the person in control of the private key, without ever revealing what that key is. Thus, if a malicious employee at my bank wanted to impersonate me to some other company, he wouldn't be able to (which is a _huge_ flaw with the current system of handing over secrets to prove identity).

To tie public-private keypairs to real humans, you'd go to the DMV and give the government all the proof of identification that is required to receive a driver's license along with your public key, and the government could then publish that you're really the person associated with your public key, and all this still without the government having the knowledge required to impersonate you.

<comment><USER35> This is what I had in mind, but you explained it much better. Now, how do we get it implemented?!

<comment><USER36> Probably something involving smart cards, each with a display so you can confirm on the card itself every time you sign something. I would also add another layer of signing, so that you have a master key that you keep locked up in a secure location at home (wherever you keep your Social Security card today), and use that key very infrequently to sign and endorse another key you keep in your wallet. If you lose your wallet, then it's a simple matter to take your master key out of storage and revoke the previous wallet key and sign a new one. If you lose your master key, it's a more complicated process of going down to the DMV and proving your identity again to create a new master key.

But it's not going to happen because the costs of fraud in the current system are less than the costs of rejigging the whole whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Credit is mildly dumb, but honestly it doesn't bother me. It's a game. It's a weird game. Arguably an illogical game.

But you know what? It's not a difficult game to play. It's an arbitrary benchmark of responsibility. If you're loaning money to someone or entering a contract you'd want to do so with someone who is dependable and responsible. Someone you can trust to hold up their end of the bargain. If they can't successfully play the credit score game then that's a pretty clear warning flag.

I kinda view high school/college the same way. They're another dumb game. But everyone knows credit scores and degrees make a difference. So if someone can identify and successfully navigate the game that's a very good indicator. Not the only indicator. And certainly not the end all to be all. But a good, solid one.

#UnpopularOpinionBear

<comment><USER38> > But everyone knows credit scores and degrees make a difference.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but how exactly do degrees make a difference?

<comment><USER39> > I agree with the rest of your comment, but how exactly do degrees make a > difference?

The same line of logic from employers that credit = job-worthiness can be applied to degree = job-worthiness. Perhaps less so in the tech industry, but I have friends who are at the ceiling of where they work (non-tech) because they do not have degrees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The bit about selling Orca steaks makes me wonder if you can get a pass from the EPA to raise endangered species for their meat, as long as you create more than you kill.

</comment><comment><USER40> I moved to another country for ten years and my credit report is now _empty_. I'm not saying if it was previously good or bad, but I'm moving back now and either way starting from a clean slate is sort-of cool (even if I have to start off with a $200 wal-mart credit card...)

</comment><comment><USER41> Are the algorithms employed by theses agencies to produce these "scores" public?

<comment><USER42> If you use [http://creditkarma.com/](http://creditkarma.com/) to check your credit report , it gives you quit a bit of information as to how the score is calculated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm actually surprised about this.. a lot of those craigslist job posts that he's talking about are just referral marketing scams to send job applicants for a fake job to complete a credit check from an affiliate link.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm currently dealing with my own nightmare with the three credit bureaus. After a month of no response, I got an "updated" credit report where _literally nothing_ was changed.</comment>


What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/what-ancient-greek-music-sounded-like.html <comment><USER2> Original, for those who don't like retold news:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24611454](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24611454)

Especially when the original is written by the author of the research.

</comment><comment><USER3> German band Corvus Corax recorded a version of this tune.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-4vF5JYxk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-4vF5JYxk)

They play ancient and medieval vernacular music on largely self made authentic instruments. Their approach is that at the time, it was probably played by and for young people having a good time, rather than professors in music history, so their shows are loud and energetic.

<comment><USER4> That was very cool, right up my alley! Thanks for the link.

If you like that, check out Eluveitie's "Evocation" album.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why I'm not really worried about automation meaning the end of work. The fact that we have automation is what enables people to work on these sorts of problems, rather than being out in the fields picking bugs off of their crops and hoping the rains come.

<comment><USER6> Depends if the gains from increased productivity are redistributed to the newly unemployed.

<comment><USER7> It might seem far fetched right at the moment but some thinkers and economists are already seeing a guaranteed basic income for EU countries during the next decades which in time should extend to the rest of the 1st world countries.

I know it looks a bit crazy now, but so did free universal healthcare 40 years ago if you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my memory of Greek music theory is failing me this morning). This particular piece is one of Greek music's greatest hits, and has been in standard music history anthologies for at least 30 years or so, I'd imagine.

It's also not at all apparent that the Greeks used the mathematically pure ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 9:8) consistently in real music. One of the earliest debates in music theory is whether we should trust the ratios or the ear: Aristoxenus was advocating in the 4th c. BCE for a phenomenological view of intervals.

(And Ptolemy, whose intervals are supposedly used in this recording, had some truly bizarre scales in his text. He only allowed superparticular interval ratios, and so the standard Pythagorean semitone of 256:243 appears nowhere in his text.)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's the so-called Seikilos epitaph (I think the name means "Man from Sicily"):

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

Interesting historical anecdote, from the wikipedia article:

 _According to another source the stele [inscribed with the song], having first been discovered during the building of the railway next to Aidin, had first remained at the possession of the building firm 's director Edward Purser, where Ramsay found and published about it; in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the inscription._

</comment><comment><USER10> For those who play Civilization V, the brilliant leader music for Greece is based on this tune.</comment>


Rate my app: Squarelog.com - <AUTHOR>

http://www.squarelog.com
promo codes:
9TXNE7YJH4E3 RLW6KHRPJMPW RR437MMEJMEJ
Squarelog is an iPhone that allows you to easily add photos to your checkins. <comment><USER2> what's different than <http://squarepik.com/>?

<comment><AUTHOR> big diff is that suqarelog.com can be a replacement for 4sq's client ... for launch i'm touting the photos feature because it's the biggest differentiator over 4sq's official app

I wanted to make squarelog.com to feel like an app designed by apple. Heavy on polish and refinements.

<comment><USER3> squarepik could also be a replacement for 4sq client.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter impersonation cases are out of control - <AUTHOR>

The Twitter Rules say: "Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others". I have detected an account (very likely to be a bot) that is posting exactly the same tweets I post, with 5-minutes delay; including mentions and pictures, which mislead people who is being mentioned.
That is clearly an impersonation case, but Twitter says that they don't mediate user content UNLESS it violates the Twitter Rules.<p>Doesn't a bot that replicate your tweets violate the Twitter Rules? Is being Twitter negligent? <comment><AUTHOR> The answer from Twitter Support, they just focused on the bot account profile picture.

"Hello,

Thanks for providing this information. As a policy, we do not mediate user content, including images, unless it violates the Twitter Rules (<https://twitter.com/rules>). Based on this policy, we will not remove the reported image."

</comment><comment><USER2> Have you tried reporting impersonation? You can do that here: <https://support.twitter.com/forms/impersonation>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have reported the issue twice, but Twitter said that since I don't have copyright on the profile picture, they do nothing.

<comment><USER2> But it's not just the profile picture, it's replicating your tweets too, right? That's got to count for something.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeap, still no solution from Twitter Support. That's frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like an script is using your account to grow something that looks like a valid user, then they will start spamming. Sadly, twitter doesn't care about non-famous users.

<comment><USER2> Pretty scary this new trend. They could create a replication bot and get seemingly original content avoiding deletion for spam from twitter, but still being able to inject spam in some of the tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect that Twitter's response would be very different if you had a - EXPENSIVE - verified account.</comment>


Why All Browsers Should Move to WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/16/use-webkit/

<comment><USER2> 1\. Multiple browser engines are the only reason most webdevs code to the standards.

2\. If people don't code to the standards, it's much more difficult to make new and better browser engines.

1, expanded: All browsers have quirks, or bug, or specific ways of handling ambiguous situations. IE6 has more than most, but even modern browsers do have their edge cases and unsupported features and whatnot. If there's only one browser, people will code to the quirks, not the browser. Historically, the single largest category of implementation-dependent behavior that people rely on is how an implementation handles erroneous input. That's why malformed HTML is now standardized.

No, not you of course, but all those _other_ web developers. Look, standards are nice, but to many developers (especially hobbyists), and to most suits, it's just a bunch of hot air. And the hard part is, they're right, at least in the short term. Coding to standards costs time, and coding to browsers produces a pixel-perfect functional site.

Multiple, disagreeing browsers are what make standards practical. Coding to standards is a best-practice, low-cost way of dealing with the real problem of divergent browser implementations. If that problem becomes theoretical, but the cost does not, then the sensible path is to code write pages that work in Webkit, standards be damned.

2, expanded: The more that existing code relies in the quirks of one implementation, the harder it is for a new implementation to arise. The surface area of features they have to match is expanded. Furthermore, these new "features" are more constraining to match because they are undesigned, not always consistent, and often closer to the metal.

Not only does this make it harder to write a new engine, it constrains the ways in which new engines can be better. The easiest example is how having to match another implementation's order-of-evaluation can limit the benefits of concurrency.

So the sum of this is that Webkit wins now, it will be incredibly difficult to get anything better than Webkit in the future (note that this applies equally to forks of Webkit--they're still limited in how much they can differ). Not that Webkit's bad or anything, but I think it's myopic to say that we won't ever want anything more.

Servo, of course, is right now the most concrete example of something that we might want in the future, with its promise of a fundamentally concurrent architecture. But even aside from that, the future has a way of surprising us, and I wouldn't like the be stuck with outdated tech in 2018 because webdevs in 2013 got a bee in their bonnet about webkit vs gecko.

<comment><USER3> Not to be glib, but... most webdevs code to the standards? News to me. Most webdevs code to their favorite API. And their favorite APIs code to an insane list of quirks. No one but book authors seems to care about standards.

<comment><USER4> Your web devs must suck then dude. I don't know a single web dev who doesn't go out of their way to provide the best range of browser support possible.

<comment><USER5> I would consider that a contradictory statement. In order to provide the best range of browser support it is usually necessary to not code to web standards to support older browsers (that do not support latest web standards) or to support newer features (vendor specific CSS, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't the main point about competition? IE6 never had any meaningful competition until Firefox came along, then lo and behold, all browsers started getting a lot better a lot quicker.

I don't see why WebKit-everywhere would be different. If they become lazy and slow at implementing features, what's going to make them get their act together other than a competing engine that's beating them in some regard?

<comment><USER7> The reason that WebKit is different from Trident (IE's rendering engine) is that WebKit is open source. If a company comes along and says "hey, it would be really cool if we had an NFC API for the web", they're not stuck in a rut. They can hire some developers and submit a patch. So I'm not worried about lack of feature development.

The thing I'd be most worried about with a single engine is lack of compliance with the standard. If multiple people are implementing the standard independently, there are bound to be some differences (for example, if an SVG line is rendered at 0px, with a 1px stroke width and crispEdges, do you snap to [-1px, 0px], or [0px, 1px]?) People run into these issues in practice, and report them; it causes clarifications in the standard to be made, and ensures there is an accepted standard of behavior for pages. This ensures we don't end up in a situation like Ruby, where Specs ran on the official compiler dictate language rules. It means that WebKit is allowed to change its implementation details without anyone crying foul when the maintainers change undefined behavior.

<comment><USER8> You're working on the assumption that one of the biggest fallacies of open source software, which is that anyone can make any change they like and it'll be rolled back into the main branch.

Just because it's open source doesn't mean that the gatekeepers of WebKit will accept your patch.

<comment><USER9> Webkit gatekeepers may not accept your patch but they can't stop you from forking it. If you maintain a fork and you're feature becomes popular then eventually your fork will get merged into mainline webkit. If it doesn't become popular then it probably didn't need to get merged into webkit. This is how open source works and it's a good thing. It allows ideas to compete.

And while we are on the subject it seems like people are talking past each other in this debate.

1a. Web standards are good because they provide a baseline of combatibility for browsers. 1b. Webkit forks on all browsers could be good because it would provide a baseline of compatibility for all browsers.

2a. Web standards could be good because they prevent any one browser from setting defacto proprietary standards that lock other browsers out of the market. 2b. Webkit on all browsers could be good because it would prevent any browser from setting defacto proprietary standards that lock other browsers out of the market.

3a. Having webkit on all browsers would hurt standards by becoming a defacto standard providing a baseline of compatibility between browsers and still allowing competition. 3b. Having webkit on all browsers would provide a real baseline of compatibility between browsers while still allowing competition.

It's a little bit funny to watch actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its a shame to have something so ill informed so highly voted, but ignoring the whole fact that there is no 'webkit' and people will still need to deal with these nightmares (hello safari)

This comment I felt gave a good practical example of the more handwavey 'competition is good' argument

"Doing this would mean being forever stuck in single-threaded land for rendering (e.g. nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could ever happen).

People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact.

So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores, by all means try to get them to all switch to WebKit."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5213200>

</comment><comment><USER11> Be careful what you ask for. NetFront have switched to using WebKit as a basis for their rendering engines, finding their way to various gaming gadgets, both console and hand-held.

Unfortunately, due to memory limitations of some of these devices, they don't really score well on automated compliance tests as "nice-to-have" features are trimmed in an effort to get a workable browser on constrained devices. Have a look at <http://console.maban.co.uk/> about the capabilities of these devices. Remember, there are more game consoles and handhelds than iphones and Android device.

Surely we've learned from IE6 why a defacto standard is worse than an open and implementable standard?

Monoculture is a terrible price to pay. Don't forget South Korea's 99%+ IE6 dominance. [http://blog.mozilla.org/gen/2012/11/15/2012-update-to- the-20...](http://blog.mozilla.org/gen/2012/11/15/2012-update-to- the-2007-cost-of-monoculture-in-korea/) \-- such a lock-in that it becomes a political topic: [http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2012/11/13/ahn-pledges- to...](http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2012/11/13/ahn-pledges-to-end- outdated-encryption-standard/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure that won't cause a situation similar to the stagnation we saw when IE6 was the dominant browser!

To anyone who says "you can fork it": If you aren't using the same features as everyone else, how is the situation then different to what we have now?

<comment><USER13> "You can fork it" is pretty outdated as a concept. Today, with DCVS, we have "you can create a branch, then both continuously rebase from upstream, while continuously submitting pull requests _to_ upstream."

<comment><USER14> It does still depends a bit on which direction the 'fork' goes in and whether it remains compatible with upstream's intentions. So a minor feature branch can often be merged back into upstream, but significant changes to the core code may not be accepted upstream.

What I'm trying to say is that while it is much easier than it was to create a branch and merge all or some of the modifications back into master, the concept of a fork, where development diverges because different parties want to do different things with the project, which can't easily coexist in the same codebase, is still relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Opinions like this makes me want to create a new browser engine just to be contrary. And because the web deserves something better than C++.

<comment><USER16> So you mean Servo and Rust? Actually, I just installed the Rust compiler to tinker with Servo.

<comment><USER15> I follow Rust a bit (not Servo yet). It seems a smidgen complex, lots of features there, but as long as it has pattern matching and ADTs I'm happy. I hope it stabilizes soon.

<comment><USER17> It has both, and, if I remember correctly, 0.6.0 is going to be syntax final.

> It seems a smidgen complex,

The thing about Rust is that it seems that way, but that's because things that are library features in other languages are language features in Rust. For example, C++ has one kind of pointer. Unless you count smart_ptr<> and friends, in which case it has just as many as Rust does.

<comment><USER18> > 0.6.0 is going to be syntax final

That's a tentative "final" though. No guarantees until 1.0.

<comment><USER17> Of course. 0.5.0 was supposed to be, too, until Things Happened. It's all good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Diversity is good not only for competition but also for security.

For more information, I would recommend to read the article from Dan Geer about diversity and security - Monopoly Considered Harmful:

<http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~dblough/8813/geer.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER20> I read the article intently up until the point where he unceremoniously dismissed the entire IE6 team as "lazy".

<comment><USER21> Indeed, 'terrible', 'evil' but not 'lazy'.

Nothing could cause such pain without a lot of hard work.

<comment><USER22> I invite you to submit your work from 14 years ago and have it judged by 2013 standards.

<comment><USER23> IIRC IE6 was considered a pretty nasty piece of work by discriminating minds at the time (e.g. more of embrace, extend, extinguish[1]), so no need to time travel.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

<comment><USER24> Back in the days, IE6 was the best browser out there.

<comment><USER23> Whether it was a good browser or not doesn't change the fact that it was also a crafty attempt at manipulating web standards in such a way as to promote vendor lock-in for the entire web, which supports Offler's post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If we had only webkit, they would eventually become like IE. IE had no competition from 1998-2005(?), until Firefox came. I think that ~5 years of dominance killed IE.

<comment><USER26> It was more like 2001-2004 from when Netscape 6 launched to when Firefox 1.0 launched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Currently on my all of my websites, combined, Chrome accounts for 79% of traffic at the moment. It's good they're off IE (not because it's Microsoft, but because it doesn't follow standards), but they're just switching one single pony for another.

In an ideal world the split would be even throughout all major browsers. I feel uneasy seeing Chrome so high. Even makes me a bit melancholic to see Firefox at a measly 17%. (again: for MY websites)

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's possible to have what you describe. It would require roughly equivalent performance and features in multiple browsers. That won't happen unless you inhibit or penalize browsers for improvements above a certain level. Eventually someone will outdo Chrome and the web will switch over but there will always be a top dog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Monoculture is bad, no matter what the monoculture.

The web's strongest feature is that it's not tied to one particular implementation: that's why it's been able to grow, change, and sustain itself for so long.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately when it comes to mobile browsing, with the market share that the webkit based browsers have,h its already a monoculture of sorts.

<comment><USER17> For certain very loosely defined values of 'monoculture.' But yes, I agree: we need even more engines. I'm glad Mozilla is sticking to their guns. I personally installed Aurora today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> WebKit is a great technology but we really need viable alternatives such as Gecko as used in Firefox to guarantee a healthy future for the web. The situation ten years ago where most websites targeted IE 6 led to a stagnant period in the history of browser and web technologies. The past few years have seen enormous progress directly as a result of the competition between Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even IE. It would be sad if we were to return to a browser monoculture. It makes me sad that Apple and Microsoft restrict the development of third party browsers for their phone OS's. I would love to be able to use Firefox on iOS just as I can for Mac OSX. Mobile Safari is great but the risk of web developers ignoring standards and targeting mobile websites at WebKit alone is worrying. I have a more detailed argument at [http://compile-link-run.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/why-john- grub...](http://compile-link-run.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/why-john-gruber-is- wrong-about-webkit_16.html) and would be interested in hearing what others have to say.

</comment><comment><USER30> > So when I heard Opera was switching its rendering engine to WebKit, a first > major browser to do so among many other Opera firsts, ...

What? There top 5 browsers are IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Chrome and Safari already use WebKit, so how would Opera moving to WebKit be "an Opera first"?

<comment><USER31> Chrome and Safari started with WebKit, Opera is the first to drop their own engine and _switch_ to WebKit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There was an article [0] in the very top of HN two days ago from Brendan Eich why Mozilla won't move to WebKit. TL;DR: 1) it would require enormous amount of work, 2) add-ons compatibility would be in danger, and add-ons are the heart of Firefox.

I also doubt that Microsoft will move after heavily investing in IE9 and IE10 standard compliance (apart from that it wouldn't be MS style).

And basically that's end of "everyone should move" topic. The other top browser apart from Firefox and IE already are Webkit (or will become, as Opera announced).

[0] <https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/>

</comment><comment><USER33> All browsers? Even Lynx?</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended reading for an enthusiastic CEO wanting to learn about tech? - <AUTHOR> My CEO is super supporting of the tech change we have to do in my org, but (by his own admission) doesn't get tech. I'm thinking concepts like bike shedding, technical debt, or yak shaving, but more of their digestible or even - dare I say it - strategic equivalents.
They want to know enough to understand our direction, but certainly not so much to be deciding.
Go! <comment><USER2> I think this should help you get started

[https://www.startupschool.org/library](https://www.startupschool.org/library)</comment>


The euro: A transfer union from the start - <AUTHOR> https://voxeu.org/article/euro-transfer-union-start <comment><USER2> Exactly what people feared and what was promised that it wouldn't ever happen. In Germany, the current right-leaning party is currently satiated with extreme voices. But several years ago that was still different. They had some economist voices that correctly predicted the current dilemma. Given, those already left the party because of the surfacing extremism. But for that the other political parties are even more to blame in my opinion. Overall the current situation of the EU is barely acceptable.</comment>


The few paths to startup success - <AUTHOR> http://nathanspeller.com/paths-to-success/ <comment><USER2> Nice heads up. It seems that most newbie entrepreneurs don't really want to get their hands dirty (which is obviously not programming).

Yet, success is a very abstract concept. With that in mind I don't think that, in general, success is rare. Failure and success are both abundant. A single outcome can be a success and failure, depending on what is your baseline.

For example, when I built a small financial firm my goal was to build something cool AND get bloody rich. I failed on that. Yet, we have millions of customers right now. My dream of retiring before 30 to work for fun didn't work out.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Ask the right questions. Create hypotheses. Create experiments to test your assumptions. Measure, measure, measure._

This is what everyone always, consciously or unconsciously is trying. Taking a more scientific approach doesn't necessarily need to increase your chance.

The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. This is against the nature of being exceptional. Stop seeking it.

<comment><USER4> > The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. Stop seeking it. > This is against the nature of being exceptional.

Of the same idea is Alberto Savoia in his book about pretotyping, where he describes such a Law of Failure.

What one can do is try to fail faster and I very much suggest to read the book, it's for free: <http://www.pretotyping.org/pretotype-it---the-book>

<comment><USER3> Failing fast is in my opinion also not a formula for success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Too bad the theory sometimes is hard to implement...For example, my startup don't have enough money to test our marketing theories, the only thing we can do is forever change our products, but that won't help, when you make mobile apps, you /need/ marketing, otherwise you /will/ fail.

<comment><USER6> I hate buying into the idea that any company /needs/ marketing. Word of mouth is very powerful. I think all companies need to position themselves for slow growth. For example, I LOVE the Weebly story: <http://startupschool.org/2012/rusenko/>

Over night successes rarely happen. That's my issue with incubators. A lot of times they invest in potential overnight successes when they should really be investing in those most positioned for slow growth.

<comment><USER7> Marketing != advertising

Marketing, for a startup, means finding a repeatable sales model.

<comment><USER8> It's more. Marketing is you, your partners, your service, your FAQ, the way to handle email/phone calls, interviews, the building of trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is trying to create the next billion dollar company. It's better to start small. Find your niche and solve an actual problem for that niche. If it really is a good product, it will eventually grow on its own.

</comment><comment><USER10> Part of the problem with the backtracking analogy is that the graph changes while you're traversing it. It changes due to external factors. The act of moving to different nodes may cause the previous edge to be deleted. And so on.</comment>


ReactCareers.com - <AUTHOR> http://reactcareers.com/ <comment><USER2> And why isn't this site built in react?</comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for workout app - <AUTHOR>

I just got back to the gym, and I did the free consult with the personal trainer.  I have used a trainer a decade ago, but todays prices are too high.  I do have a gym partner.  Are there any apps out there that can be used in place of a trainer to show proper exercise form, plan a schedule based on goals,  and keep a log? <comment><USER2> I like Fitocracy.</comment>


New start-up links web shoppers with bricks and mortar - <AUTHOR> http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/othercities/washington/stories/2010/10/04/story13.html?b=1286164800^4026811&s=industry&i=high_tech

<comment><USER2> Hm. Seems like these Russkies are using some kind of "secret sauce" crawler/parser? And it does check "in stock" info on-the-fly? Plus stores are not even involved in the process of aggregating the inventory?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. That's ambitious. Let's see how they will compete with Milo. Goodzer will have better coverage obviously 'cause they cover small stores as well. iPhone app coming I guess?

</comment><comment><USER4> I always figured Google Catalog Search would do something like this. I guess I should have called up Larry or Sergey and suggested it before they closed it down :)</comment>


We're Growing and Hiring. It's Been Tough, But I'm Loving Every Bit. - <AUTHOR> http://carvecases.com/carvecases/were-and-growing-hiring/

<comment><USER2> > Closing date for applications is 26 May 2014.</comment>


Have we led our children astray? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/mitchfree/2012/08/23/have-we-led-our-children-astray/

<comment><USER2> Interesting read. I would say that this isn't something unique to the United States. It can also be said to be prevalent in the rest of the western world.</comment>


The Regressive Design of the Playstation 5 - <AUTHOR> http://interuserface.net/2020/06/the-regressive-design-of-the-playstation-5/ <comment><USER2> I don't quite agree. Yes, Dieter Rams' principles are a great school of design, one that I'd wish was much more popular than it is now (although there are some great examples currently on the market - Ikea Eneby, for one), but it's not the only one.</comment>