Erlang-OTP and the Parallella Board - <AUTHOR> https://www.parallella.org/2015/03/20/erlang-otp-and-the-parallella-board/ <comment><USER3> This is really nice to see... but I have admit I'm really disappointed with how the Parallella has turned out.

The 64 core version of the board never shipped in quantity and has apparently been abandoned. There still isn't a practical way to connect them beyond the networking provided by the ARM processor. Lastly, there isn't a lower cost revision of the board intended to use in clusters, which is a shame because it's that ARM/FPGA chip that represents the bulk of the cost & heat of the Parallella board.

I love the idea and for the most part the community seemed like reasonable folks... it's just that the Adapteva folks were never really able to deliver on the promises made in the original kickstarter and so the whole ecosystem pretty much stagnated.

This morning I read an article about a new many core project using the 64 bit ARMv8 which is supposedly going to be a topic for a talk at this year's Hot Chips...

[http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton- shilov/phytium-t...](http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton- shilov/phytium-to-detail-64-core-armv8-a-processor-for-hpc-in-august/)

<comment><USER4> I don't feel they failed to deliver on the promises in the Kickstarter campaign, and while it's disappointing to not yet see more on the 64-core version that was a long shot. However, they got a decent capital infusion last year so hopefully we'll get to see something more come out of that.

It's not that surprising that the community is moving slowly: They've shipped something not that far above 10,000 boards, many of which are likely in the hands of Kickstarters backers that bought them because we liked the idea more than because we have time to do all that much with them.

They need another iteration and another magnitude increase in community size, really.

<comment><USER5> People getting developer kits and doing nothing with them I reckon is a common enough problem that could be addressed simply by setting up a market place for people who got a device to sell to someone who might do something with it.

For example, I bought an Oculus DK2. I've pretty much not done anything with it because I didn't realize at the time how much computing power I needed to really have fun with the DK2. When I received it and tried it out with my MacBook Pro, I was like "this is really cool and I'd love to play with this more, but I'm not shelling out at least a couple of hundred if not almost a thousand dollars for a desktop with a reasonably powerful GPU that would make the Oculus fun to play with.

LeapMotion was another device where I knew several people that had pre-ordered one and ended up doing nothing with it. One of my colleagues has had a Myo sitting on her desk practically unused.

Companies making hardware for developers need to find a way to figure out who is actively working with their devices and contact those that are not to let them know that there is a way to sell their unused devices to someone else who might want to develop for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Nice. One thing about Erlang/OTP has always been the fact that it is rather bound to the confines of its own VM, and has never been popular as a language for interacting with the host OS on a very deep level, instead it's the VM itself that you overwhelmingly use as your platform.

Though you have mechanisms like port drivers and NIFs to interact with the outside world, they don't seem to have been very popular for doing systems programming or using low-level POSIX interfaces, even if there is some work on that front. It'd be interesting to exploit Erlang's unique properties in building lower level OS infrastructure. I should probably play around with some of the bindings that have been written one day.

Also worth checking out is the Nerves Project, a buildroot-based embedded Erlang distribution: [http://nerves-project.org/](http://nerves-project.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I reading it right that Erlang does not run on the Parallela chip?

<comment><USER7> Could you state this in a different way?

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask.

<comment><USER8> Erlang itself runs on the dual core ARM chip. There are Native Implemented Functions (NIF's) that can do things on the Parallela cores, but those functions are not Erlang.

Or, more succinctly, don't get this thinking you're getting a 16 core Erlang node, not exactly.

<comment><USER9> Considering the Parallela cores are pretty basic RISC processors anyway and have a ton of shared memory, you probably don't want to treat them as regular Erlang nodes regardless. Still, this is hardly a "drop-in" scale kind of thing. It's more like... having an FPGA with some nice glue you can call out to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I loved the vision of Erlang on Parallella, but after a bunch of tries did not have any success. Would still love to see it work, but in the meantime have had good experience with Erlang/Elixir on RaspberryPi2.

RPi2 has a Quad-core CPU and costs $35 - easy to put together a cluster. Runs standard Erlang - simple to experiment with concurrent programming. Built a web-service that delivers 100's of pages per second on a single device - <USER2> memory usage - just great.

<comment><USER11> Did you use Phoenix on the Pi?

<comment><USER10> yes</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Areocase – Completely Wireless Earbuds and Case - <AUTHOR> http://www.areocase.co/

<comment><USER2> No pics of the product, not even a prototype?

EDIT : nevermind, just noticed this "Currently we are accepting pre-signups based on the demand we decide if we will go further and bring this product to life."</comment>


Hello world in Kawa Scheme for Android - <AUTHOR> http://per.bothner.com/blog/2008/AndroidHelloScheme/

<comment><USER2> Almost everyone wants the same thing: they want to program apps for Android, but they don't want to use Java.

</comment><comment><USER3> The site seems to be choking; you can catch a syndicated copy over on <http://scheme.dk/planet/>.

Neat stuff!

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always wanted to learn Common Lisp or Scheme. This is a great motivator for me -- I love the idea of Android, and I hate having to use Java.

Does anyone here have good beginner books on Scheme? I'm thinking long-term; I don't expect functional mastery overnight.

<comment><USER5> Maybe "How To Design Programs"? (<http://www.htdp.org/>) I'm not sure if "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" qualifies as a beginner's text, but that's also available online (<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>).

There's also "Scheme and the Art of Programming" and "The Little Schemer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice, I wondered how long it would be until other JVM languages started getting ported to Android's Dalvik.

<comment><USER7> One barrier many JVM-hosted languages (including JRuby) are quickly coming up against when targeting Dalvik is the incompatible DEX bytecode format. Pure interpreters are fine, since they don't do any runtime bytecode emission, but the faster, more mature implementations tend to compile their source to bytecode at runtime. That won't work on Dalvik, since the Java bytecode->DEX translation tool is only available on a system running the SDK, not the handset itself.

One solution to this would be to create a self-hosting Dalvik DEX translator, so that apps running on an Android device could generate bytecode on the fly; another would be to switch to pre-compilation of your JVM-hosted language, with all runtime code evaluation handled via a simple interpreter.

An interesting example of the second type is Scala -- the Scala compiler generates class files directly, which can then be converted for use in Dalvik on the development host. It won't give you the runtime dynamism of a Scheme or JRuby environment, but it will at least spare you from having to write plain Java.</comment></comment>


Sunsetting Python 2 is a bit of an issue for banks like JPMorgan - <AUTHOR> https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/3002059/banks-python-2-vs-python-3 <comment><USER2> Well, they have the money to pay someone for support / back-porting security patches. I wonder what system they are running Python on as Red Hat is ok for a while.

This actually brings an interesting question on what other languages / systems they have used in the past and does Python represent a new lifetime concern given some of the older platforms.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if the transition could be so hard for some large installations that they move entire codebases to a different language. I guess not, because if they could do that they'd have moved to python 3.

</comment><comment><USER4> What _should_ happen here, is that banks should either pay to accelerate transition to Python 3 to meet the deadline, or they should pay to fund somebody to continue to maintain Python 2.

What _will_ happen here, is banks won't see any issue, because their Python 2 software still works after the sunset. It'll be business as usual, and there will eventually be security incidents due to running Python 2.

</comment><comment><USER5> If they only use it internally and not on external-facing sites then the security issue is somewhat less urgent.</comment>


Ask HN:  Need advice on an idea I started (craft beer related) - <AUTHOR>

After reading pg's recent posting about Organic business ideas I was inspired to ask this community for advice on a project that I started awhile back.
Here's the url http://www.hopchart.com
I got into craft beer a few years ago, but didn't have an efficient way of figuring out what to try.  So I just decided to make a system that let me track what I drank, give it a rating, and then follow others.  Not rocket science.
There are plenty of beer rating sites on the internet (Beer Advocate, RateBeer, etc) but they can often be intimidating to newbies and they really only encourage one rating of a given beer (and require a relatively substantial review).  My concept was to keep it simple so that users will keep rating their beer.  If a Beer Advocate rating is like a blog, then a HopChart rating is like a tweet.  And so that has become my concept.  Keep it simple.
I started this site because I had a lull in work and because it was something that I wanted to use.  I've ended up spending a bit more time and effort on it then I had intended and now I'm trying to figure out if I should keep it where it is or take it a bit further.  The problem is I'm in a state of paralysis by analysis.  I honestly don't know what direction to go.  I have a number of things (including iphone app, foursquare integration) in the pipeline but I'm afraid of investing more time/money/effort if I don't know what the ultimate goal is.  One of my shortcomings is not spending enough time marketing it, I've given myself the excuse that I don't know exactly what I'm building yet...lame I know.  Another shortcoming is not making use of the data I have for building a good recommendation engine.
So now the advice part.  What would you do if you were in my shoes?  I have the makings of gathering craft beer consumption information in real time with geolocations.  Craft beer industry is growing by volume and by dollars (I think 6 and 8% respectively) and gaining exposure.  But I can't seem to figure out a good way to capitalize on what I have.
I'm open to any and all ideas, suggestions, criticism, and comments.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I like it! One note: if I am not logged in, and I browse to a beer, and click the 'I drank this!' button, it just kicks me back to the root, where instead it should probably show a login/register dialog.

[edit] Sorry I missed the original point of your post and did a re-read...your site seems to be just another niche pick/rate/review which is fine, but if you want to expand it then you need to innovate. I rated a Beer and it just gave me a dumb list of other Beers with no (noticable) reason for the list. Maybe this is because you dont have enough data yet? Maybe you could capture some user-centric locale data and tie them with places to find recommended or favourite beer. Enable your ads as quickly as possible and make darn sure they are relavent, (you dont want an Anheuser-Busch ad showing up on your site), maybe evolved companies that started as craft such as Magic Hat etc. Perhaps find ways to get revenue sharing group discounts on brewery tours, coupons to microbreweries, or craft beer equipment stores. Let users submit photos of beer labels. Sorry if I am rambling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh great point! I will definitely add that in.

<comment><USER3> A friend of mine recently created a similar flickr pool: <http://www.flickr.com/groups/1086657@N24/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you have a great thing here. I like the polish of the "Unidentified Location Object" and there is plenty of GUI "Ajaxiness" going on.

Maybe a Map feature? What high rated beers I haven't tried are near me (you can add high rated beers as rated by users who are similar to me aka recommendation engine later)?

One quick improvement is to add  to the city and state where the person had their drink and then list beers had there or near there. Improve it later by adding Zip Code/Geolocation to the user registering, and then you can find/sort by distance to beers and people which can then create beer connoisseur groups ala meetup.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The location thing is definitely I could add now. I like the map feature suggestion and hope to have that integrated into the second iphone app version. Thanks for the compliment and the reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First: recommendations are a Must Have.

Geolocation: craft beers often have limited distribution, and are only available in certain states, or in areas where the distributors decide to carry them. Reviews of craft beers that you can actually find in a store / bar near you are more valuable than finding the one beer that you will totally love, which happens to only be available in Western Montana.

Monetizing: sell your data! To breweries, to retailers, to distributors. Your correlations reduce the risk inherent in deciding to carry a new product.

Dreaming: point the iPhone at a beer menu, and the app OCRs the beer names, and up pops ratings.

Minor criticism on the website: I typed "bell's oberon" into the search box and couldn't figure out how to click and make the search go. It wasn't until I typed "oberon" really slowly that I got it to work. If I were just casually stopping by the site, I would have given up.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pandora for Beer.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting...so maybe having a recommended beer show up after they enter in a beer?

<comment><USER6> Talk to bars, see if your data can be of any use for them. Maybe a customer goes to a bar, orders 4 samples, discusses his/her opinions, and using your data, a bartender can recommend the "perfect beer".

Found this from a quick google search: <http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/1927541>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions! Really excellent ideas, I appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Advertising? Beer advertising in banners? Joining with a beer review newspaper?</comment>


Give HN: My Banner Service - 2nd Banner Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.eddybanners.com/ When you checkout - put in HN in the additional info field and you'll get one extra free banner (any size) <comment><AUTHOR> When you complete payment, please mention HN in the additional info, and you'll have a second banner free (any size)</comment>


Ask HN: Which Android phones have Wifi disabled? - <AUTHOR>

I seem to recall reading somewhere that there were a handful of Android devices that had wifi disabled on them? Does anyone know which ones? Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> I guess it was the At&t Samsung Captivate</comment>


Online advertising is all about purchasing intent  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=1179 <comment><USER2> I'm confused, advertising doesn't affect the consideration aspect of the buying process, marketing does. Social Media Marketing is what affects the consideration process online not advertising, so purchasing intent would be more influenced by SMM correct?</comment>


Iceland police arrest suspected Bitcoin server thieves - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43288495 <comment><USER2> > For the first time, it said, the energy required for coin mining had > exceeded that used by Iceland's 340,000 inhabitants to power their homes.

That is a depressing statistic.

<comment><USER3> I suspect it's to some degree bollocks, but it's also potentially a testament to the low electricity usage of Icelandic homes.

With the exception of the Westfjords, almost all Icelandic homes and businesses are heated by geothermal hot water. There's such an excess of heat that it's often pumped dozens of kilometers through pipes of varying insulation quality and the heat loss over that distance is still more cost efficient than electricity. They also keep the streets downtown ice-free year round with the extra heat, and dump some of it into a beach behind the city to keep it warm enough for swimming.

Anyway, Orka could be playing with their numbers in order to make sensational statements. Tactically not mentioning the hot water, often the majority charge on a residents bill, would make Icelandic houses some of the lowest energy usage in the world. Pretty much everyone else uses electricity to run their climate control devices and often to heat their home hot water, so no real surprises there.

By contrast, some amount of air conditioners are required to cool data centers even in Iceland. Factor that into your mining cost despite the fact that in a data center doing other things it would be running anyway, and voila, there's your difference. I doubt that much power is going through transistors.

<comment><USER4> That's amazing. I wish we could pump coldness from vents in the ground to cool down Queensland over the summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I understanding correctly that these guys apparently stole "more than 600" servers (allegedly) _out of a data center!?_

At a minimum, I would expect the data center to have their own video surveillance. In addition, it's not uncommon for folks to install their own video cameras inside their own cages as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> >The AP newswire said police were now contacting internet service provider

>were

>now

which is it?</comment>


Leaked Andreessen Horowitz data reveals how much SV startup execs get paid - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/andreessen-horowitz-internal-data-reveals-how-much-silicon-valley-startups-pay-for-talent-2018-9 <comment><USER2> The "article" is just a glorified link to the paywalled subscription only content.</comment>


50+ real world use cases built on blockchain architecture - <AUTHOR> https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*cVeTQYLF5Z35yGoZ23Sfmw.png <comment><USER2> Almost all of these would have been possible without a blockchain. Either through a web of trust or even simple cryptographically signed messages with timestamps stored in a normal DB. Some of these aren't even "real world use cases" like Hawaii trying to boost tourism by something-something blockchain.

Civil is a notable exception, though I'm not unconvinced that it couldn't be done without one.

In the end though, if blockchain is sexier / more marketable than signing messages with GPG or SSH keys then fine. At least we're getting higher integrity guarantees on data one way or another.

<comment><USER3> Namecoin is the best example of a real world use case, a proper replacement of a DNS with no central authority. This is clearly one which is very difficult to replicate reliably without a blockchain.

<comment><USER4> Even if blockchain DNS systems were production quality - which they're far from - why is a 'central authority' inherently bad? The entirety of cloud computing, and the modern internet, is based on the pretense of giving your entire infrastructure to a centralized authority. "Oh, but what if your centralized cloud provider is actually evil and incompetent", the free markets allow you to change providers until you have a provider with absolute highest quality.

<comment><USER3> If my cloud provider is bad, I can switch to another one or self-host.

You can't switch from the ICANN, no matter which domain you chose, it depends on them, they effectively have a monopoly. I want to self host my domain name.

<comment><USER4> There's a fair point to be made there. But then I would ask which solution is best: lobbying hard enough to democratize the organizational structure of ICANN, creating a competitive ecosystem, or resorting exclusively to a ledger of entries with no capacity to be modified according to legalities, attacks, or otherwise? What if someone spams the ledger with too many names? What if someone takes domains that should be illegal for them to possess? What if someone takes someone else's private key? What if an organization gets their private key stolen? The vectors for exploitation don't just disappear because you have a decentralized system. The exploitative behaviour just changes.

<comment><USER3> All these issues currently exist with the existing domain name system as well.

> What if someone spams the ledger with too many names

You need to pay in coins to register a namecoin domain so this attack won't work.

> What if someone takes domains that should be illegal for them to possess?

This should be up to courts to decide if the name is illegal and handle it over, not to some random organisation like the ICANN which has no legal basis.

> What if someone takes someone else's private key?

Same as if some gets access to your registrar password right now, nothing changes with that.

> What if an organization gets their private key stolen?

Again, same as before, nothing is improved or changed by a blockchain here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> About that fine art project they mention (it doesn't work): [https://twitter.com/edent/status/1006248586395508737](https://twitter.com/edent/status/1006248586395508737)

> I don't understand the blockchain hype. A startup has certified my artwork & > placed their verification on the bitcoin blockchain. Now art dealers & > auctioneers can feel secure that I am the original artist. One small > problem… I am not Leonardo da Vinci! > [https://www.verisart.com/works/23f2c64a-08c6-4a42-8013-84ac8...](https://www.verisart.com/works/23f2c64a-08c6-4a42-8013-84ac8422dffb) > …

<comment><USER6> That's the part that I can never understand with blockchain applications. Blockchain technology is excellent at maintaining a ledger or variables of information within the blockchain - these processes are completely trustless due to the properties of the blockchain. The problem is getting that information INTO the blockchain. This part DOES require trust and all those nasty things people say blockchain solves. I think it's called the oracle problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just a list of current ideas (mostly) and implementations using blockchain. Calling it a list of "real world use case" is far fetched. We have yet to see whether it actually works.

<comment><USER8> Agreed.

It seems to me that a reasonable test whether these ideas make sense is to ask whether they can be done without the blockchain. Most of these seem to obviously fail this test (eg the government of Hawaii is a centralized institution that clearly does not need the blockchain to mandate a change on any of the islands).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are only 30, it's full of typos, doesn't include any finance stuff, and some aren't actually real use cases.

<comment><USER10> And a lot seem to be "...is experimenting with..."

<comment><USER9> Yeah those are the "not real use cases" I was calling out.

And I am heavily exposed to enterprise blockchain... This kind of half-assed thing doesn't build much of a case in favor of the industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Rare Species Protection

I can't think of a part of meatspace more removed from the special properties of a blockchain. That's honestly dumber than blockchain iced tea or KodakCoin.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think the "Giant Graphic" format was the right choice for this kind of post.

</comment><comment><USER12> Even if these were all full-fledged businesses/ventures/operations -- most of them don't answer what is, to me, the real question of the day: in what applications are the benefits of blockchain an actual imperative to the use case? Most of these don't seem to clear that hurdle.

</comment><comment><USER13> "But why???" is the question I keep asking myself after reading each entry.

<comment><USER14> I wrote a Blockchain to learn the tech. I now have a pretty good understanding. Now that I get it I keep looking for legitimate reasons to use it and frankly I haven't found many. Eliminating property title insurance via an immutable set of property ownership records/txns is one that seems reasonable. It fits because the txn volume is low. Many "forced" uses would be better served by more standard architectures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is just a spam ad for a Blockchain promoter "Internet of Blockchain"

</comment><comment><USER16> Ripple? Mobile payments? How can a bloated ledger with thousands of tps be good for running on mobile. It's more like interbank thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like most of these can be done without blockchain. Some are not even 'real world' at this point, but just experimenting. As others have pointed out, when in doubt - 'do you need a blockchain? no'. Overhyping them for use cases where they are not needed will have a negative effect on trying to get support for the places where they might actually be useful.

</comment><comment><USER18> Blockchain is a collection of technologies rather than a single one. Like a car. Yes, one can claim their motorboat runs on "car technology" because of the internal combustion engine. But it would be strange to do so.

</comment><comment><USER19> Real world use cases?

is developing a, that would use, will be using, it is possible to, as it seeks to, is building, which will be, seeking a way, has been experimenting, ...

Sounds more like a maybe future fantasy world.

</comment><comment><USER20> Time to mount a 51% attack and steal land in Georgia.

"It doesn't work like that"?

<comment><USER21> Indeed it doesn't. 51% attacks don't allow you to steal something you've never owned, because there's no valid transaction that transfers ownership to you.

The only way a 51% attack allows you to steal anything is by reverting a transaction you made that sends something from you to me, and immediately replacing it with a transaction that sends the same thing from you to yourself.

This is only useful if you convinced me to give you something in return for the money you paid me in between you sending the original transaction and subsequently reverting it. Once all is said and done, even if I can't prove it (for some definition of proving it), I still _know_ you stole from me, which has its own consequences.

51% attacks _do_, however, allow you to wreak havoc on the chain state, which can sometimes be an attack worth performing.

<comment><USER22> You can prove it, you have the signed transaction from him that can't be included in the blockchain because their inputs were spent. If you know who you were dealing with that did the double spend, you likely would have a very good case against them of fraud.

<comment><USER21> There's two potential issues: Can I prove they control the private key that goes with that transaction? Can I prove that that transaction was originally used to settle a specific invoice (or something equivalent)? Sometimes, one of the two will be true and I have a strong case. In others, I have neither and it's my word against theirs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm shocked IOTA isn't on this list.

Companies like Bosch and Fujitsu are already creating uses for it in IoT.

There're already a few IOTA-powered electric vehicle charging stations in Europe. It's instant and fee-free, with very little overhead (no power consumption problem).

Since it cannot be mined via PoW, there are already efforts to create "mining pools" were universities can rent CPU/GPU power from "miners" using IOTA, that way miners are performing valuable computations rather than just a bunch of redundant math.

<comment><USER24> Honestly the list would be even more cringy if IOTA was there. The codebase is so terrible, the wallet management so cumbersome, and it has so many security concerns that I can't even understand how any company would push for that other than fad of riding the blockchain train.

Plus the IRI is written in Java, that's totally rock the socks off the IoT world, right?</comment></comment>


Evolutionary perspective on raising intelligence (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2013ISSID.pdf <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about this A LOT as a football player (American). I'm certain I've dropped a few IQ points after seven years of being a defensive lineman. It takes me a little longer to process things; my memory is a little worse. Right now I'm debating if I'm going to make this past season my last.

That being said, if I could do it all over again, I'd still choose to play. Totally worth it. On one hand, I get protecting your intelligence as much as possible (intelligence being a critical component in my career path). But on the other hand, there's more to life than simply maximizing your brain power.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So essentially, the most beneficial course here is getting into healthy habits and pursuing loss prevention. I haven't seen much evidence at all that otherwise well nurished and healthy people can raise their actual intelligence, but there seems to be a lot of things which can effectively reduce it, both short term and long. Removing or mitigating these can get folks closer to their potential. I think this has a lot of applications for people who worry about this. Like I've read studies quantifying I.Q loss per day of losing just 1 hour of sleep a night. After a few days parts of cognition can be effected heavily.

<comment><USER3> Well, the trick is that loss prevention is difficult in a living fast and dying young culture where everythings supplied and effort is reduced to repetitive narrow minded tasks. It should give the brain enough workout to gain some IQ points. Memory can be trained, too, and that is an important part of the intelligence or at least to leverage it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's very important for the brain to be in a thriving environment where all it's faculties are being used.

Great study!</comment>


What are the odds? Book of Odds, quirky new reference site, will tell you - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/10/14/book-of-odds-comes-out-of-stealth-to-make-intuitive-sense-of-statistics-but-can-it-sell-ads/

<comment><USER2> Actual web site: <http://www.bookofodds.com/>

See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880376>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880974></comment>


Greek numerals - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals <comment><USER2> In addition, its interesting to notice majority of Europe has different writing of 1 and 7 [1]

Coming to USA 25 years ago I and so many issues typing "1" my way and people thought it was "7". In addition, European "9" looks like small "g" because of the curly tail at the bottom.

Once I was suspended at work for 2 weeks, because they thought I used someones else SSN [clerk entered it wrong in their system]

[1] [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62586/why- is-1-h...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/62586/why-is-1-hand- written-without-a-serif-and-7-without-a-dash)

<comment><USER3> One time I was working as a cook, and someone gave me a handwritten recipe.

I misinterpreted the 1 for a 7, and I used 7 grams of chili powder, instead of 1 gram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If some of the unicode symbols aren't displaying for you and you're on a debian-based distro, I followed the advice from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters) and ran

      sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts

and they display now after a full browser restart.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat! The article says this is still used in some modern contexts; anyone have an image of that?

<comment><USER6> Sure, you can see it here on the high school mathematics book table of contents.

[https://imgur.com/BwR3ekc](https://imgur.com/BwR3ekc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And a reply by... Peter Shor of Shor's algorithm.</comment>


Square vs VeriFone - Fees & Security - <AUTHOR> http://feefighters.com/square-vs-verifone

<comment><USER2> The Fee Fighters tool is great, but they don't take into account how much better of an experience Square is over Verifone. Go take a look at the screenshots of Verifone's Payware Mobile app: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/payware- mobile/id347863505?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/payware- mobile/id347863505?mt=8) versus Square: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/square/id335393788?mt=8> – On top of that, Square's interface on iPad is just as beautiful.

Square also offers other features like text message receipts that Verifone doesn't, like SMS receipts.

While fees are definitely one of the most important things to consider, ignoring other aspects of payment systems is short-sighted. It's a shame that Fee Fighters seems to be using just the 'checklist features' model of comparison.

<comment><USER3> patr1ck - did you see our link that says "Price isn't the only thing that matters?" That takes you lower on the page where we cover some of these things? <http://feefighters.com/square-vs-verifone#comparison_details>

I'm not asking to be an ass, I'm wondering if we should make that more apparent. We cover some of what you mention, and some things you don't.

<comment><USER2> I saw the anchor you pointed to in the link (the Account Details comparison section), yes, but reading through the page again it looks like you addressed the things I mention in the very bottom section, which I glossed over on my first read – "Square has some neat features..." – my mistake, sorry!

Yeah, It'd be cool that were more apparent somehow. The page (well designed as it is) is heavily geared towards the fee comparison, and offers only quick takes on other details. It'd be cool to see a more thorough review of both units.

Keep up the good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The difference in the breakdown of fees is almost hilarious in its complexity on the Verifone side vs. that on the Square side.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently for smaller and independent businesses Square is the way to go

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for this article. I thought that Square only supported the iPhone, not Android; is this a new development?

My brother and I are looking to sell some physical products (spice mixes / dry rubs) at farmer's markets. We were going to do Cash Only, but I just ordered my Square to handle the CC processing at the markets!

<comment><USER7> The Android app came out almost a year ago I think. I've had it for a while, it's on the market of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ironically, $40 (the price which is set initially) is the highest (average) price at which Square is cheaper than VeriFone.

<comment><USER9> The default was set at the inflection point.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Mail fucking sucks - <AUTHOR>

Um, we pay for a small business Yahoo email account. In other words we are dependent on Yahoo email for running our business. This is not my decision at all.<p>And it has been fucking down all morning. Why isn't Mike Arrington or whoever on this the way he usually is? Is web mail not interesting? <comment><USER2> Sorry, but welcome to technology. Gmail has been sporadic for me. Firefox crashes periodically on this machine, but not my box at home. I've bought games that I can NEVER get to work on any computer. When I plug in my iPhone via USB, Photoshop opens. Back when I actually worked at a big company, the Exchange server acted up from time to time. Google Analytics just admitted to losing some data, but they think they can recover it. Amazon was down for a big swath of time recently.

Yahoo being down for a single morning is not news, and should not come as a surprise- serving up email at that volume is complex. It being down frequently is another story. Is it?

I'm sure if you ever spin up a startup, your first technology catastrophe and resultant unscheduled downtime will cure you of your desire to see an angry mob when stuff like this happens.

<comment><USER3> Or, he could just have his company switch to Google Apps.

<comment><USER4> Google Apps has had outages, too. It won't change anything. Everything has outages. The difference -- if there is one -- might be in an SLA that might give you some money back if there is an outage. I have no idea what the terms are for Google Apps vs. Yahoo! Email.... I'm just sayin', everything goes down eventually...

<comment><USER5> You said the magic letters - SLA. This is why some companies pay big bucks for outsourced email. They guarantee a % uptime and if the provider doesn't meet it, I believe that you have legal grounds to sue for damages and disruption to business.

Honestly, if email is _that_ critical to you, you're going to have to pay for it.

<comment><USER6> They usually offer a money-back guarantee if they fail to meet the % uptime, but I don't know of any provider who would absolutely guarantee uptime and risk a lawsuit for not complying. I'm curious to know if there are some like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wrong choice of words; I don't think you must use such language to express your frustration.

I agree with you Yahoo mail service is bad I switched service a while ago and will stay far from it as long as possible.

<comment><USER8> I thought it was humorous. Sometimes you have to express your raw feelings with crude words :)

<comment><USER9> WE'LL DO IT LIVE

<comment><USER10> If I could upmod you 10x, I would sir. Must be a lot of O'Reilly fans here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey You, have a problem with Yahoo! talk to them. What on earth could one of us help you fix a problem at yahoo data center? Let alone cursing.

What happened to this site?

</comment><comment><USER12> its probably not news because its known to be a sub-par product, with sub-par customer service.

newsflash: dog bites man, sky is blue, yahoo mail is crappy. news at 10 for full stories.

i suggest using this downtime as a foil to convince someone to bite the bullet and switch to gmail or something else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yahoo mail hasn't been down once for me today. I think the "outage" isn't as wide spread as you think. Have you checked your firewall?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't get a DNS error.

We can still check two of our accounts (the most important ones).

I get an HTML page with the text:

        Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

        Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!'s online services. Also, you may find what you're looking for if you try searching below.

That doesn't seem like a firewall/networking problem on our end.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand why the parent post is downvoted to -6.

<comment><USER15> His code tag makes the page super super wide.

<comment><USER16> Setting a CSS width and overflow-x:scroll on code blocks would fix the problem quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FWIW, Yahoo mail was a little slow for me but worked. I have had success with them overall.

I switched to Yahoo as my host from an inexpensive provider because of a bad experience I had with shared hosting. I was apparently sharing a server with a very bad spammer, and got my email blocked by _Comcast_. Not a small part of the market (and owner of my personal email, for that matter).

When I called for help, other provider said they're talking to Comcast but being more or less ignored, and that it was ultimately my problem to get Comcast to let my mail pass.

Uh, no.

Now, if that happens again I have the power of Yahoo to put pressure on Comcast (or whatever) to let my mail pass.

As for a host, I'm disappointed by the lack of tools (latest php, latest mySQL, python, etc), available.

But I've been a desktop app guy, so it hasn't hit me yet. However, my latest market survey is indicating my model may need to change a bit.

</comment><comment><USER18> I know the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that; but shouldn't you be complaining to Yahoo, instead of us?

</comment><comment><USER19> I have been having problems with my paid Yahoo account for months now. Can't search my own email. I call support, they reset the settings, it's fixed for a day or two, then it breaks... hit repeat. And all these new error codes. When did Yahoo mail ever need an error code?! Garbage!

</comment><comment> Kuya-Dan Absolutely Yahoo Mail sucks ... and big time!! For about the past 48 hours, I haven't been able to get my (Yahoo Mail) email there. It's March 9th 2009 as I compose this...

This small box (blue background...white text) appears and says Loading...

And nothing happens! Using Yahoo Mail help is a complete waste of time! Why doesn't somebody at Yahoo get their head out of that place where the sun doesn't shine and fix this problem??? It's perfectly obvious that the problem is with Yahoo Mail...

</comment><comment><USER20> I used it for a week or two earlier this year - even when it was up it could take a couple of hours for a message to be delivered. I don't use it any more.

</comment><comment><USER21> This does not gratify one's intellectual curiosty.

In fact, the majority of articles that make it to the front page don't, and from now on I'll be posting this in reply to each of them.

</comment><comment><USER22> hmmmm i never had problems with Yahoomail. i am using the free one for almost 10 years now. being a poweruser is nice. i can attach 20MB ^_^

</comment><comment><USER23> Webmail is definitely interesting. In fact, news all over the net today are about webmail/webmail tools (Xoopit/Zenbe).

By the way, welcome to the Internet. <http://www.veryfunnyads.com/index.html?id=25575>

</comment><comment><USER24> And you wonder why Yahoo is falling to pieces. Just one of many aspects that is causing its downfall.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Though Yahoo mail looks like a web app, it is a dinosaur that is genetically very far removed from modern web apps. It's the coelocanth of web 2.0, and therefore does not fall under techcrunch's radar.

<comment><USER25> Yahoo Mail is based on Oddpost, which is the granddaddy of sweet AJAX web 2.0 apps. Not only is Oddpost not far removed from today's web apps, it's generally a key source of inspiration for many of the AJAX techniques used today.</comment></comment>


App.net is crowdfunding their realtime feed platform - <AUTHOR> https://join.app.net/ <comment><USER3> I worry that this is one of those market sectors where the price customers are willing to pay to use a service is dwarfed by the price advertisers are willing to pay for access to the users --- and so the ad-supported version is (a) free, (b) more attractive to users, and (c) more lucrative.

In a network-effect dominated business, this doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

<comment><USER4> I can see (a) and (c), but what part of this scenario leads to (b)? The fundamental assertion underlying the desire for a paid network is that ad- supported networks are inherently worse for users because the network is built with advertisers in mind instead of users in mind. A paid network may very well bring in less money than an ad-supported network, but as long as it brings in enough money to operate I don't see the problem.

<comment><USER5> _I can see (a) and (c), but what part of this scenario leads to (b)?_

(a) [Free] makes it easy for people to join initially. More people makes it more attractive to other people (via network effects).

Getting around that is going to be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wait, so the idea is that you're going to charge for Twitter, without the network that makes Twitter worth anything at all?

As far as I can tell from the video and FAQ, that's what it is. A twitter clone that costs $50 a year. If this is NOT what it is, you simply have to do a better job illustrating what this platform is supposed to deliver.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi, Dalton here. Please let me know if you have any questions for me about this.

I wrote a blogpost about my thinking behind this here: <http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal>

<comment><USER8> Your page copy and the first few minutes of your video that I could sit through just tell me you are nerd raging over advertising on the internet. I get that you want to do something differently, but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU BUILDING?

What am I becoming a "member" of? What am I funding? App.net appears to be a way to get more installs of mobile apps. What the hell?

<comment><USER7> There is a FAQ entry that attempts to address the question "OK, great, but what exactly is this product you will be delivering?" Are you unsatisfied with our answer in the FAQ?

 __UPDATE __I appreciate and agree with the feedback that we could explained things earlier and more clearly. Updates to our page coming soon.

<comment><USER9> I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.

I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.

Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.

You've got my money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aside from the "what exactly is this?" reaction, I just can't seem to get over the fact that I'm being asked to pay someone to build a service I will then have to pay for. This just seems absurd to me.

Either build it and I'll pay to use it or I pay you to build it and I use it for free. Can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER11> It's worded awkwardly, but I believe that a $50 donation is a prepayment for one year of service, so you're not being asked to pay twice.

<comment><USER12> Anyone serious about using this for it's intended use case (from what I can tell) would not be in this for only one year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My left-brain says it's doomed. My right-brain says it's brilliant, and alpha geeks will lead the way in a mass secession from today's feudally-managed parasitic platforms.

So entirely separate from any quibbling about the likelihood of success, I'm backing this project at the developer level ($100).

</comment><comment><USER14> Next time, please look _at_ at the camera :) I want to watch your video but I feel like you are talking to someone else, not me.

</comment><comment><USER15> I find it amusing that people are rediscovering the age-old concept of running business that directly charges a customer for a product or service that nets a profit.

This post strikes me as a "gee whiz" rediscovery of that fact through the conflation of:

1\. Web 2.0 companies that "won" were really media companies. To win you need lots of eye balls.

2\. A person can charge more for a product than it costs and get profit, which can be reinvested back into the product.

3\. Instead of waiting for "profit" in said point above (which is risk to you and your company), you can instead reallocate that risk on future customers (and gauge interest at the same time).

That said, I do admire Dalton's efforts.

<comment><USER7> I believe that the people running Web2.0 companies publicly and privately refuse to admit they are running media companies. ie "Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: We're Not a Media Company" (source: [http://allthingsd.com/20120130/live-at-dive-twitters-dick- co...](http://allthingsd.com/20120130/live-at-dive-twitters-dick-costolo-says- twitters-future-is-you/) )

<comment><USER16> Your quote is unfairly taken out of context. Here is the full quote:

Costolo: We're not a media company. We're in the media business. We distribute traffic. We're one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media property.

Dick Costolo seems to understand that driving traffic - perhaps from ads - <USER2> where Twitter makes money

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with just saying "We are a media company" if you _are_ a media company. The definition of a media company is fairly well understood, right? Why insist that you occupy some slightly semantically different space?

<comment><USER16> Context man! He was speaking at a media conference filled with traditional media co's, such as The New Yorker, Viacom, and ESPN. It was even run by WSJ. To that audience, his statement highlights the nuance of traffic referral vs. accumulating page views, which is why Twitter is potentially poised for greater monetization than a "traditional" media company.

It feels unfair to pull that quote out of context. The point you are making is very different than the point that Costolo was making when he said it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What will happen to the current App.net product suite for app developers? Will you continue innovating on those tools?

<comment><USER18> Yes, I'm also interested what would happen with the current App.net product. It was a good rival of <http://www.apptlantis.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a developer-centric parody of <http://www.vooza.com>?

</comment><comment><USER19> If this fails, I think it will be because the video is of one dude talking the whole time without any media at all on what the actual product will be.

That said, I hope it succeeds and I'll be contributing some of my hard-earned cash.

<comment><USER20> Some music and visuals would go a long way towards selling the product. I think we've all been spoiled by Kickstarter, but it's 2012, and we've come to expect incredible experiences when we watch videos of people asking us for money: just having an HD camera doesn't do it anymore.

As it is, I watched the first minute, and I still had no idea what benefit this would provide me as a developer or a user (only that Dalton clearly doesn't like Facebook), so I went back to my own coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hypothetically let's say you reach the $500K goal. That is enough for a small team to survive for 12-18 months. Ongoing, will I have to pay $50 per year to use this service at the member level?

The reason I am happy to pay Github $25/month is because I want access to all my old projects. What is your thesis around whether people really want access to their old "feed" data (is that a proper way to describe it)?

<comment><USER7> My belief is that this sort of service will enable new/interesting applications and _real value_ that could have been unlocked if Twitter took a different direction: <http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of my other opinions have already been brought up so I won't restate them, but I further don't understand why you didn't use KickStarter? I dont know enough about your funding system to trust it with my money or info. KS has built a reputation and I trust I won't be charged in case the project goes under (not to mention you miss out on any network effects).

<comment><USER23> From the page:

"Why aren't you using Kickstarter?

We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter Terms Of Service explicitly prohibits raising money for this kind of service. "

<comment><USER24> I can't see exactly where this project would be prohibited.

<http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines>

<comment><USER7> "Projects, projects, projects. As in all categories, Kickstarter is for projects that can be completed, not things that require maintenance to exist. This means no e-commerce sites, web businesses, or social networking sites. (Yes, this means Kickstarter wouldn't be allowed on Kickstarter. Funny, but true.)"

<comment><USER25> How is Penny-Arcade's Kickstarter allowed then? (Not disagreeing, but it seems like they would run afoul of this if it were actually enforced.)

<comment><USER26> They treat it as a funding for the project of "no ads for a year" rather than "pay to take ads off penny arcade"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure if this is supposed to be a paid Twitter, or if it is a paid platform for developers who need a real time feed infrastructure. If it is the latter, who owns the data? If it is the paying developer, be assured that they will sometimes offset that cost with ads.

</comment><comment><USER28> It is like he is avoid saying this is going to be a twitter clone but keeps advertisers out by charging a small fee for access.

If he could reproduce the twitter API so it would be easy to switch any current twitter client, I say go for it.

</comment><comment><USER29> You need to change the video so it would be clear: WHAT IS THE PRODUCT

<comment><USER30> I agree. I have no idea what he is talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think I am just being naive but I would like to see this succeed.

</comment><comment><USER32> So developer tools for social media feeds - isnt this what Singly already does? <http://singly.com/>

</comment><comment><USER33> How will this project avoid the fate of diaspora?

<comment><USER34> Genuine question: what fate is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Will there be a free tier?

</comment><comment><USER36> What?</comment>


Calvin- Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs.yale.edu/homes/thomson/publications/calvin-sigmod12.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> [https://fauna.com/](https://fauna.com/) core functions are based out this paper</comment>


Reinventing Geocities for the Mobile Web - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking a lot about why personal webpages need to make a comeback (anonymous, interesting, bring back creative output, independence).
I'd love to make this for the mobile web, so a rethink not just a reinvention.
Would love to hear if anyone else has considered this? Very open to collaborating on it. <comment><USER2> I have been thinking about that too but concluded that blogs must be the new version of personal web sites. Tho, I'm still interested in sharing ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that bought depressed me too, but I think there was something literally different about old sites, where they were mixed media, didn't necessarily demand feedback and were more themeatic.

I wondered whether actually you could make it app based (rather than web), with the key distinction being sites rather than profiles.

<comment><USER2> i don't understand what you mean by "app based (rather than web)" and app that you can make a website? vix.com kind of? if i'm not remembering this wrong, i used to upload my .html files to geocities.

i agree with the themeatic part and i believe that's the part that makes those sites unique. nowadays all look the same. i can't believe i'm almost missing ugly personal websites.</comment></comment></comment>


Clike: An extensible C-like language compiler in under 3000 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/combinatorylogic/clike <comment><USER2> Github says it's written mostly in Clojure but it doesn't look like clojure - it appears to be 'pfront' \- does anyone have any opinions on pfront?

<comment><AUTHOR> Github is using some weird heuristics for detecting languages, and, apparently, multiple 'fun' tokens bends it towards Clojure in this case. I'm not sure if this way of language detection will ever work with PFront, as it is a mixture of many DSLs. Actually, Clojure itself must be hard to detect properly, as it is a proper meta-language.</comment></comment>


Putting on the Brakes: Mankind Nears the End of the Age of Speed - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704587004576242450234233350.html

<comment><USER2> "In the 19th, with trains, they reached 60 mph. In the 20th, with jet aircraft, we could travel at 600 mph. Can we expect 6,000 mph in the 21st?" The 21st century still has 90 years left in it. We have no idea what technologies will emerge in that time. If a technological Singularity occurs, well...

<comment><USER3> Yes. If we ever manage to build a space elevator for example, it will open up the entire inner solar system for exploration / colonisation, at which point the people that continent hop today will be able to world (planets and large moons) hop tomorrow, with a corresponding jump in the maximum speed that a person will travel at...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the space shuttle can be really deemed reusable.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's really incredible is that the SR-71 was built in the 1960's. I just read Ben Rich's book about his days at the Skunk Works and it was incredible to see what they had to do to build a titanium airplane. Tools would break when attempting to drill through the material. The plan would stretch several inches in length during flight from heat expansion. The cockpit would get so hot that they risked cooking the pilot alive if the air conditioning failed (and don't ever touch the windshield if you want to keep your hands). LA to DC in 62 minutes!

I'd like to think we've got something faster now that's just classified but I suspect we've gone to slower remote drones and satellite data that has less political repercussions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bit odd that the article doesn't mention the current research into scramjets (Mach 5+) or the Bloodhound SSC land speed record project (~1000mph).

Edit: Forgot to add the continued advancement of high speed trains (~360mph) and the Vactrain concept.

</comment><comment><USER7> Totally incorrect synopsis, humanity IS on the quest for speed.

What killed the Concorde was not that humanity was no longer looking for faster ways to communicate, it's that most of their customers died during 911. For the rest of us Twitter / Email, Skype fill the role of quick highly personal information dissemination.

Companies like SpaceX and Virgin who dare to explore the boundaries of human travel will take humanity to ever greater heights. They are picking up the torch where the government left it in 1969. One of those two companies will eventually partner with FedEx to offer New York to Sydney 'yesterday afternoon' service. The companies that can capitalize on that kind of mobility and speed will rocket infront of their competitors.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention we're throwing much more effort into getting people moving faster, every day, instead of throwing all of our resources getting the ultra- rich faster, sometimes.

Think advances in high speed rail, infrastructure development in mass transit everywhere (except North America, it seems)... Instead of pouring billions into a few showpieces like the Concorde, we're finally working on getting _everyone_ moving faster, more frequently. This is a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The whole problem is friction. Give me the robots to build an evacuated tunnel from Australia to the US with a maglev train in it and I'll show you what "speed" means.

<comment><USER10> are you telling me there is less air friction 4km below sea level than there is 12km above it?

<comment><USER11> The key word is "evacuated"

There is less air friction if your tunnel is maintained at vacuum.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I wonder what kind of energy is needed to keep 12000km long tunnel situated 4+km below sea level at partial vacuum...

Without even getting into problems that will occur at tectonic plate boundaries...

<comment><USER9> Well, once the thing was built you'd expect that particular task to be quite easy. An airtight tunnel surrounded by kilometres of rock - not much air down there in the first place, and you'd just need some effective airlocks on the ends.

Not to downplay the size of the task, of course; it would be an astonishing feat of engineering and probably quite out of our reach for the foreseeable future, at any kind of reasonable cost anyway. The tectonic boundaries, as you say, would present a particularly challenging aspect of the project. However, theoretically it's probably the most efficient way from A to B on our little blue marble and so no doubt it'll be done eventually.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Misaki - a Jekyll inspired static site generator in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/liquidz/misaki <comment><USER2> This doesn't appear to be using Hiccup, which is a shame. But the bigger problem is that the JVM/clojure start time. Rich Hickey has even said that Clojure isn't right for scripting.

You could create a nice Clojure static site generator in ClojureScript (using Himera to compile the templates) though.

<comment><USER3> That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. A static site generator is run once you add something to your site, i.e. not that often. So a slight hit in startup speed isn't really a factor, whereas runtime efficiency is (dependencies are hard, so most SSG's out there recreate the whole site for each new post/page).

<comment><USER4> I gotta agree on that, the only reason for needing a fast start up time is if you want to rebuild after every change and see the result, but misaki actually watches for changes while it's running.

An extra second or two on start up really doesn't matter one bit.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, why? Considering the rather insane amount of time something like jekyll needs, a few seconds don't matter at all. So having a background service won't really get you anything for "production" usage – even if you'd be doing twitter-like 20+ items/day micro-blogging. The only gain I could imagine from a setup like this would be prototyping the look and feel of your site in its very early stage, where it would save you from half a dozen script invocations.

Those seconds would only matter if they would be a large percentage of the whole running time. And I've yet to see a SSG where two, three seconds for a year or more worth of blogging would actually matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My questions is of course - Why not Jekyll?

Is this just for people who have a JVM, but don't have ruby on their box, or are there significant advantages other than just the programming language and environment?

<comment><USER6> Can't talk for the creator of course.

I consider the idea (didn't proceed further than reading the project site on Github yet) great, because - yes ruby is something I don't usually install. Dependencies that are useless for me except to host X are not a no-go on their own, but are counted as minus points.

That and the fact that it's neat to be able to extend the software you're using. I just don't know ruby and the culture is alien to me (running redmine and gitorious for my company - from configuration to error messages).

No hate against ruby. Just a preference for something else.</comment></comment>


Why building a private cloud is an exercise in futility - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nukemberg/why-building-a-private-cloud-is-an-exercise-in-futility-d8f6a0255b2d#.4bekc5szr <comment><USER2> Clickbait. The author immediately redefines the term cloud from IaaS to SaaS and then goes on that proprietary software will not be available for private setups.

There is no contradiction between having a private cloud setup and using proprietary SaaS that runs somewhere else.</comment>


How I "hacked" the OnePlus reservation system - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JakeCooper/how-i-hacked-the-oneplus-reservation-system-120ea1a7ad82

<comment><USER2> I'm around number 18k and I haven't even shared my link with anyone yet xD

</comment><comment><USER3> Lulz</comment>


'Where Does Cloud Storage Really Reside? And Is It Secure?' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/insider/where-does-cloud-storage-really-reside-and-is-it-secure.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> This feels like a puff piece.

> In the case of the big public clouds, the protection is the work of some of > the world's best computer scientists, hired out of places like the National > Security Agency and Stanford University to think hard about security, data > encryption and the latest online fraud.

> And they're pretty good at keeping things safe online.

Cloud providers have employees that make mistakes and bad assumptions just like everybody else. They leverage technology that wasn't created in-house that wasn't originally built for such a large scale use case. They build their own technology that is flawed at the very least because there is no perfect software.

You should never assume that a cloud provider is better at managing anything better than you could do in house. You should verify and understand that the more popular a product is the more desirable a target it is.

Whether you are doing things in house, in the cloud, or some sort of hybrid, plan for security failures and never assume that your environments or your datasets are secure.

<comment><USER3> >You should never assume that a cloud provider is better at managing anything better than you could do in house.

This is a piece for a general audience, explaining what a cloud is.

What percentage of its audience do you think could secure things as well as any of the major clouds? 1% 0.1%? 0.00001%?

If you were to take the class of IT professionals, those with jobs working in IT, I would say less than 0.5% would be able to put something in place in their house that even matches what's going on in the large clouds whose design and policies have been vetted by multiple people.

Whatever a person is doing in their own house is going to be quite difficult to match to the same level of security. Not least of which because people's houses are not secure. Breaking in and adding a keylogger or such in order to break disk encryption is much easier there.

<comment><USER2> > If you were to take the class of IT professionals, those with jobs working > in IT, I would say less than 0.5% would be able to put something in place in > their house that even matches what's going on in the large clouds whose > design and policies have been vetted by multiple people.

What do you base that on?

I googled "what does amazon do to make their cloud secure" and got Amazon's cloud security page.

[https://aws.amazon.com/security/](https://aws.amazon.com/security/)

It says:

1\. They lock the doors at their data center.

2\. They meet some unknown compliance requirements.

3\. You can save money and scale with them.

4\. You can buy some services to make you securer.

5\. You can report vulnerabilities to them.

6\. They use firewalls.

Click on through to their page about Pen Testing and all it says is if you want to do Pen Testing, you have to get permission first.

So how can I make the assumption that they are better than the people who manage security in-house?

I would bet that on more than one occasion, an employee or a customer has spoken up and said "things should REALLY be done differently." And I would bet that will happen again and again because the reality is that security is an ever-changing landscape.

I personally know they do some pretty impressive things where security is concerned, but I don't know the totality of their security solution. I doubt many amazon employees know what they do from the top down.

Would you have guessed that Yahoo would play cavalier with all of their users passwords? Or linkedin? Didn't they have security design and policies vetted by multiple people?

I'm just using amazon as an example because they were the cloud provider I thought of first.

Then I remembered Azure leaving all of their RHEL instances vulnerable by design:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/28/microsoft_update_ser...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/28/microsoft_update_servers_left_all_azure_rhel_instances_hackable/)

Would 99.5% of IT professionals really have set up RHEL environments that could be owned by a remote hacker on 1st startup? I don't know. That's a pretty bold claim.

I'm going to stand by my original comment. It's not meant to steer people away from the cloud. Just from making false assumptions.

<comment><USER4> You're missing the point of the article. It's for the average Joe Public personal computer user who probably has no idea how to secure their own computer. The article isn't aimed at businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > For the people running the computers, it doesn't really matter where the > data or the programs are at any one moment: The stuff is running inside a > "cloud" of computing capability.

For the purposes of security, this makes a huge difference. It's also one of the biggest flaws with the authors argument. With a service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Office 365; your files are likely stored both locally and on their servers. This undoubtedly make your files less secure... now potential attackers have two attack vectors when they would previously only have one.

<comment><USER6> You don't need to sync Drive to your own storage. I don't. Do Dropbox and Office require that?

<comment><USER7> those documents exist in some form, either partial or whole, in your local system memory, video memory, and probably a filesystem cache of some sort. they also traverse your network subsystem and other IO buffers/subsystems.

a root level compromise on your system can see any of this stuff in plaintext as it gets shifted around.

<comment><USER8> > a root level compromise on your system can see any of this stuff in > plaintext as it gets shifted around.

Sure, but that was true without cloud storage, too. Worse: Without cloud storage, a root level compromise lets the attacker destroy _your only copy_.

However, this does not refute the argument that, with the cloud, the attacker can get at your data two places, instead of just one, thereby increasing the attack surface. (In fact, the attacker can get at it three places: in transit.)

<comment><USER6> I doubt this increase in the attack surface is meaningful. If someone gains control of my device they can in all likelihood initiate a transfer of my files from cloud storage. They can also gain control of the cloud service. But the probability of the latter is too small to consider. When A >> B, A+B =~ A

<comment><USER7> if you believe in unbreakable encryption, sure. but i don't. now it's traversing an unknown number of systems, every time you view or edit.

<comment><USER8> You don't have to believe in _unbreakable_ encryption, just like you don't have to believe in _unhackable_ cloud hosts. You just have to believe in _hard enough to break_ and _hard enough to hack_. Then you're back to stuckagain's point, slightly revised: When A >> B and A >> C, A+B+C =~ A.

(Ah, that is, you have to believe that the encryption _used in all legs of transit_ is hard enough to break.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thinking that "secure" is a boolean is fundamental misunderstanding of security.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I'm reminded of this fairly well known quote within the security world - "security is a process, not a product".

I do not trust anyone to house any data of mine that I consider too important or sensitive to put at risk - unless there is end to end encryption so that no one except me can access it at any time. That's about the only exception. If I am not sending the data over already encrypted, forget it. I try to do as much in house as possible.

Also, let's not forget the risk of unintended affiliations - there have been several times when law enforcement has seized drives/servers that were shared and the non-offending users that were simply sharing the resource ended up having their sites unintentionally taken offline. That may not really apply to cloud storage, but it definitely applies to shared hosting services, which are abundant and widely used. Could totally screw over a small business.

<comment><USER8> It depends on your threat model. Data security has three components: confidentiality (nobody else can read it), integrity (nobody else can change it), and availability (I can get at it when I need it).

If you're mostly worried about confidentiality, cloud storage may have too much risk for you. If you're primarily worried about integrity or availability, though, cloud storage (plus a local copy) is a big improvement.

<comment><USER10> Good point. Yes, for me confidentiality is the primary concern. I run my own data duplication tasks to close the integrity gap. And availability is largely a non-issue for what I'm doing.

That's why I choose many times to not use cloud services but they may serve the purposes of others, especially if they are not as technically savvy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > None of the most catastrophic hacks have been on the big public clouds.

Wasn't Apple's iCloud hacked last year? Or was that the work of social engineering?

<comment><USER12> Social engineering, IIRC.

Edit: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hackers-get-into-your- app...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hackers-get-into-your-apple-icloud- account-2014-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice layman explanation of cloud storage. I think it would've been worthwhile to add something about how difficult security is, and how cloud storage makes it easier to keep your data secure (at a cost).

</comment><comment><USER14> "Most of those attacks hit traditional servers, though. None of the most catastrophic hacks have been on the big public clouds."

Absolute fucking bullshit. Yahoo. Linkedin. iCloud.

It's called fucking 'iCloud' for fuck's sake. This is not a puff piece. It's simply wrong. No, it's so fucking wrong, it's fake news.

<comment><USER15> You could qualify that with "at the level of infrastructure" and it would be very close to true.

Yahoo wasn't public cloud. Their infra has long been a sieve. Linkedin was an application issue.

iCloud is the strongest case of these three, but they had weak user-facing authentication for a consumer service (most users were unaffected).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cloud computing, is another attempt in a long line to consolidate network resources. It was attempted, and failed, with X terminals, network computers, java stations, etc.

Those that want to throw their hands up and give up on managing their network, data, and security by pushing it out to someone else to manage it thinking "it's cheaper and I can fire most of my IT staff" well that is their choice.

I wouldn't surrender my security to google or amazon at any cost, let alone the plundering of your data as they mine the hell out of it for whatever they can get.

I've never been a fan of this thinking and I never will be. I am a dinosaur.

<comment><USER17> So what do you do for internet access? You do realize that whoever is giving it to you can plunder your data as they mine the hell out of it for whatever they can get, right?

<comment><USER16> Really? All my ZFS pools sitting encrypted and on a private network not attached to the internet in general in my home/office? They can mine that? Wow I am impressed!

<comment><USER17> And you can run encrypted filesystems on a cloud provider such that they can have no knowledge of your data. It will also be a little safer and more reliable than running it on your network.

<comment><USER16> The data is only encrypted at rest. In flight it's in the clear and there is ample time and opportunity for them to mine it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is no "cloud", there are "servers you don't control".

<comment><USER19> And there's no "internet", there are "cables you don't control".

<comment><USER20> It's slightly different, because as long as what goes through them is encrypted you don't really care about the pipes. Well, you should still care about the metadata, but it's not exactly the same issue.

With Cloud computing, operators frequently have access to all your data. Sometimes it is part of their business model to use it (e.g. gmail). As long as you are aware of that, no problem. They typically won't use your data for things more harmful than targeted advertising (although you should check that ToS do not give them _ownership_ of your data...), except if you're, say, a paedophile, in which case they might tell authorities ([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11012008/Paedophi...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11012008/Paedophile- snared-as-Google-scans-Gmail-for-images-of-child-abuse.html)).

In other words, your data is typically well protected as long as the cloud provider and entities which could require access to its data (e.g. law enforcement agencies from its home country or the countries where its servers are) are not part of your threat model.</comment></comment></comment>


Smalltalk a good option? - <AUTHOR>

Hello guys, lately I've been more and more interested in smalltalk, I believe that both DabbleDB and auctomatic have their systems built on top of squeak, but is it pratical to build web app (which depend on a lot of out of the box libraries, for image processing and web crawling) in smalltalk? <comment><USER2> What turns people off about Smalltalk is it doesn't talk to the rest of the world the way you're used to so it takes getting used to.

You're certainly not going to have much luck using Smalltalk for prototyping novel image processing algorithms.

<comment><USER3> Sorry about that, I accidentally downmodded you. I guess there is no undo here. (I modded up some of your other comments to make up for the karma loss. But it sucks that I can't just undo it :( )

<comment><USER4> I added a "free" upmod (i.e. one I wouldn't have otherwise given) just to undo your mistaken downvote jrockway.

<comment><USER5> Ahh, but what if you're not the first person to do that? Be careful about overcompensation.

<comment><USER3> Until we can cash in our karma for fame, fortune, and hot babes... I doubt we need to worry about overcompensating :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, I think Seaside with Magritte is The Way (tm) to do web apps. But you're not going to find many libraries with Smalltalk. My recommendation is to just port those to another language, then use that :)

I'm currently working on a port of Magritte to Perl called Ernst, and a new web framework called Kiiteh. Both are very in-progress right now, so I don't recommend even imagining that they exist. In a few months, though, that will be the One True Way. Decent language, phenomenal library support, and a nice way of easily writing web apps. :)

<comment><USER6> hey, you are that dude who wrote the catalyst book (<http://www.packtpub.com/catalyst-perl-web-application/book>)

Nice to see you're into hacker news, anyway.

I would like to recommend Groovy and Grails, the main advantage of these over Perl/Catalyst for me was portability, Groovy/Grails or GG just work better on windows and SQL Server 2005. They were way easier to install, run and getting started with. For example with Perl/Catalyst, Perl doesn't have a DBD::MSSql, I think one can use JDBC or DBD::JDBC, but JDBC is at version 0.1 and DBD::JDBC is also old DBD::Sybase, is well Sybase!

DB support of GG via hibernate is just way more robust.

Java have many many more active projects which GG relies on and can depend on.

Perl's CPAN is for sure fantastic, but CPAN is just not as portable as Java's project, so with GG you know, and I know, that it will run on windows, with Perl, there is no guaranty

Finally the moral is, with open source, you really have to consider a project popularity. Project that are too centralized, that do not rely on other popular project are doomed to get in your way!

Catalyst relies on CPAN modules, this alone, assure me it is a better option than RoR, because a lot more people are working on the different pieces idependently, the work is better distributed, DBD::JDBC is usefull for a lot more project, not only Catalyst, this suggest it will better survive and evolve, RoR is full stack, so do evolve it will add a lot more work for its developer, and its open source, so no guaranty you will find one to do the work!

GG situation is even better than catalyst, it relies on an even more popular and solid foundation.

New Open Source Poject should always trie to introduce the least amount of new code!

I do believe that the future for Ruby, Tcl, Python and Perl should be on either Parrot or the JVM this will make it easier for new project to rely on other people's work, will improve portability etc ...

I will not drop Perl/Catalyst from my knowledge efforts, I very strongly believe in the Perl community, and that the current problems will be solved in ways that will even push Perl beyond Java

Hope i was clear

<comment><USER3> > hey, you are that dude who wrote the catalyst book

yup :)

Anyway, I agree that Perl on Windows is painful. Most of the developers use UNIX variants, so naturally support on the UNIX side is going to be better. Basically, I think it's best to take the path of least resistance. If using Windows is important to you, you'll have fewer problems if you use the Microsoft stack. If Perl is important to you, you should just use UNIX. It's a shame that we have to make compromises like this, but sometimes you just need to get your work done :)

But anyway, I've used DBD::Sybase with modern versions of SQL Server. It worked fine to get a UNIX application to talk to a remote SQL Server instance and call stored procedures. DBIx::Class also works.

<comment><USER6> I never really understood the importance of portability until I got this job

I work in the business applications group in the IT department in a non-it multinational company

I don't have a say, or least not much of it, on waht OS or DB engine, we can use, there is a different IT infrastructure team that deals with this, and honesly this is a relief, I dont have to worry about backups and stuff like this.

I try to be a an open source proponent, and try to introduce or slip in OOS application. But if that application won't work on windows, SqlServer and IIS. I will never be able to make the case for it and push it.

Maybe after I successfully introduce few OOS business apps and Dev framework, I can start to make a call for a linux server, but not before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Qwaq, which recently raised $7M, is also Squeak/Smalltalk/Croquet:

<http://qwaq.com/company/press_releases/pr-2007_11_27.php>

Qwaq has put a lot of its developments back into Croquet. A few more ventures using Squeak could cause the (already high) productivity of the environment to take off.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't find it in Gmail, but IIRC one of the Auctomatic guys told me they were on Seaside, and they didn't understand why the whole world wasn't on Seaside too.

I would be working in Seaside if I had more time, but there's the huge Rails job market, the fact that I've been working with Rails a bunch, and the fundamental fish-out-of-water feeling of being without my Unix security blanket. I'm going to the OSCON tutorial on Seaside soon, though, and Steven Baker told me he has a cool Seaside app to show off at RailsConf.

In addition to programming I devote serious amounts of time to acting and music. If programming were my only thing, I would be working in Seaside. I really enjoy Ruby immensely, but Seaside's very impressive. It even makes everything else look a little silly.</comment>