The Django Project Debates User Tracking - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/707443/5710ef3733710462/ <comment><USER2> Why does it not suffice to examine 'pip install Django' metrics from PyPI? That would be a reliable indicator of the relative popularity of the package against other packages in a level playing field.

While it would overcount the number of true installations of projects using Django, judging by the number of times I spin up a VM for testing, I would still argue that would be a better metric than a custom GA integration for which you'd have no relevant point of comparison. Even if they were to make this opt-out, what would they compare it to?

A: "Based on our custom GA developer tracking, we count 400,000 new Django projects this month."

B: "Django is the 4th most frequently installed third party Python package, based on the Python package index."

Personally I'd trust statement B more than A. No one can independently verify statement A.

<comment><USER3> I've seen many CI environments take forever because they download Django from pypi and forget to cache it. Downloads != usage.

<comment><USER4> But if that CI server creates a VM or container and uses runserver, you have the same problem.

<comment><USER5> How so? The analytics service would dedup the IP address.

<comment><USER6> Very large businesses with dozens of Django installs could be behind a single IP address.

<comment><USER5> That may not be a problem if all you care about is the number of organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At first before reading the article I was very much against it. But after reading it, it seems a little bit more reasonable but I would really strongly prefer two things if this were to ever get implemented: 1) don't use Google. There must be services that will provide analytics pro-bono/really cheaply for open source/non-profits that aren't tied to a company with terrible privacy track records like Google. 2) make it abundantly clear that this will happen and explicitly give the opt-out instructions the first time (if it was indeed opt-out). As in, "We are enabling user tracking for better usage statistics. If you would like to opt-out, please type <...>." I know that I rarely read changelogs and that if things are not presented to me at installation time they would probably sneak in, through the fault of the Django team or not, but I'd worry that such a thing (notifying users directly) isn't easily possible through pip installations/setup.py.

However, would it be very useful statistically compared to the Pypi installation numbers? Sure, Python is different than NPM because NPM almost always locally installs packages whereas Python installs globally by default, but the numbers must still be high as Django is likely one of the highest installed packages from Pypi and in Python-land in general and as _czep_ points out, because they would only be tracking themselves, it would be hard to compare numbers to anything. It would be useful from a total amount perspective but it wouldn't have any use in comparing to other packages because the kind of data would be different: Django would have usage statistics whereas Pypi has installation/download statistics.

I'm also surprised this is even necessary, since the main purpose of this is supposedly to be able to talk to potential investors for the DSF with concrete numbers. Is Django being basically familiar with every Python developer not enough? I'd really want to know specifically if investors have said they want usage data explicitly, rather than the nebulous idea that it may help make it easier to raise money before I'm more open to the proposal.

<comment><USER8> > 1) don't use Google. There must be services that will provide analytics pro- > bono/really cheaply for open source/non-profits that aren't tied to a > company with terrible privacy track records like Google.

As an occasional Django user -- 100% on this. It's nothing difficult to store and persist some key-value pairs from a POST request, certainly doesn't require Google Analytics.

<comment><USER9> Storing and persisting is the easy part. Generating useful aggregations, doing decimation on the data to avoid having an unbounded set of data while keeping some historical values, and all this kind of work is why people use GA and other analytics software. And all this is far from trivial.

<comment><USER8> Depends what your visualization requirements are, probably most of what Django project is looking for can be done in a few hours with matplotlib.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use django professionally, and if tracking usage helps guide development or attract sponsors to achieve higher quality -- I'm all for it.

There is a problem to be solved (how to make OSS sustainable), and I'm both interested in solving that problem and trying different approaches to solve it.

(edited for less use of the phrase "I'm all for it")

<comment><USER11> Personally I'm not opposed to a popcon-style thing that just lets us estimate "X million people use Django". But it's increasingly looking like it's impossible to put together such a thing in a way that's both A) useful and B) not going to cause privacy issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Someone proposed tracking django developers using the django command line? What a ludicrous and creepy idea.

edit: why downvote? that's what it says:

> the developer commands: startproject, startapp, runserver

</comment><comment><USER13> So even if we do have an accurate usage count, say 10 millions, so what? What's the Foundation's plan to get funding?

I think they should run annual campaign like Mozilla and Wikipedia. The spend of the money should be 100% transparent. I am not really sure why we need a Foundation. I get the hosting cost, and rewarding people to work on very difficult features and enhancements, but what else? Conference cost & scholarship? What else.

</comment><comment><USER14> I do not support user tracking. Id fork it at that point.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Django and don't mind being tracked if it helps development. However, the proposed tracking sounds like hit tracking which doesn't give you any meaningful numbers only trends. So I think tracking pip installs would give you the same trends.

</comment><comment><USER16> The best part:

"It is encouraging to see that a community can discuss such issues without heating up too much and shows great maturity for the Django project."

<comment><USER17> I agree though. The Django (and Python) community in my experience has been good at actually debating issues on their merit, and trying to keep own feelings/opinions with no facts to back them up out of it. Of course this doesn't always work and there's always going to be some comments that don't follow those principles, especially with more controversial topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> jezdez' proposal seems to be rather reasonable: just force the user to explicitly select yes or no - that gets over the objection that people will be too lazy to opt-in, since the effort is the same. And it removes another source of bias, which is the disabling of the tracking by redistributers like Debian, since the user does provide explicit permission.

<comment><USER18> If forced on screen with a honest message, people will just opt out in droves and make the numbers as useless as the PyPI-download ones.

This seems such a huge waste of time and effort. If they can't get funding by showing massive PyPI numbers, they won't get funding by showing massive startapp numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The threat to add user tracking could be the best incentive for me to donate more to the project.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is an strong idea, and I don't see any issues with the proposed implementation using google analytics.

Certainly it seems more practical than any of the proposed alternatives suggested here. (Eg, micropayments. Come on, that's not even plausible...)

</comment><comment><USER21> I allow both Eclipse and Firefox DE to collect usage and bug information during my use of those systems ... I feel there are a few keys to making this decision for both platforms:

\- I can opt out if I want to

\- I can see what's sent if I want to

\- The information is anonymized and aggregated

I would assume that Django developers would feel the same way as I do if there were these guarantees - that it's also in my interest for the software to improve.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think they did a very good job in discussing it openly instead of going the homebrew-way.

</comment><comment><USER18> What if, instead of tracking, they added micropayments? Have a very simple way to donate $1 every time you run startapp or something like that, and boom, profit.

<comment><USER23> Would you experiment with an unfamiliar framework for the first time if it cost $10?

How many $10 frameworks would you be willing to pay for if you didn't know you were going to use them?

Would you pay $10 to install django to spin up a new env to build a pluggable library for it that you intend to open source?

What about $10 to populate your environment each time you run a build on circleci?

<comment><USER18> It doesn't have to be forced, just a little nag (and $10 is too much, i'm thinking max $5). You could have it the 10th time you use runserver, or after 5 hours of uptime when you log on the admin panel, and so on. People who don't want to pay, wouldn't pay; but you need a relatively small amount of people to raise enough to pay a few salaries. In a lot of cases the cost could just be charged to the final client anyway, not the developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Have they tested charging for Django? Id pay a reasonable fee to use it. I mean, least I could do (aside from donating sporadically).

<comment><USER25> But no one else would.

The very next minute a fork of a free version would ensue.

In an era that almost all similar frameworks are for free, charging for it seems like a really bad idea for its future.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, good point. Its the shitty side of open source. People expect everything for free as in free beer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh well Django had a good run for me but I don't use spyware. I guess something similar can be built up using Flask.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm really not sure posting to HN is what lwn subscriber links are for.

<comment><USER28> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688151#5688887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688151#5688887)

> FWIW I (as the editor of LWN and the author of the article) do not mind the > posting of this link. It has brought in 16,000 people (at last count), many > of whom are probably unfamiliar with LWN. Some subscriptions have been sold > in the process.

> Certainly I don't want large amounts of our content to be distributed this > way, but an occasional posting that puts an LWN article at #1 on HN is going > to do us far more good than harm.

> (That said, I do appreciate your concern!)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793183#3793448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793183#3793448)

<comment><USER27> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use Django quite a bit, and would immediately disable any such tracking mechanism, even going to the extent of maintaining my own fork if necessary.

Having this on tools (like brew) is sort of OK because you can disable it and not risk having it deployed to production. Having it on a library is senseless, risky in many regards and likely to get it banned from, say, public contracts.

It is also a likely hook for exploitation, but I'll need to see an implementation first. Which I sure hope won't happen.

</comment><comment><USER30> The problem is Django itself as a framework and Python as a slow infrastructure for it are getting too old with time. I love Django but it grows too restrictive as projects get more complicated (ORM and template rendering for example), not to mention the slow performance compared to new languages like Go and Elixir, which is actually Python's responsibility not Django.

Django is a monolithic framework that wants to do everything while there are good and even superior alternatives(SQlAlchemy, Jinja2, WTForms), which makes things harder for its developers.

<comment><USER31> You can easily replace template engine and ORM in Django when your project becomes large. I've personally made this several times.

<comment><USER32> You easily ripped out the orm and templating engine on a large project?

Would love to know how.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon RDS MySQL Now Starting at Just $19 a Month - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/amazon-rds-mysql-now-starting-at-19-month.html

<comment><USER2> Not a fan of RDS. It has all the same drawbacks of using an EBS partition for storage, but as far as I know you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc) to know when your storage subsystem starts to flake out. EBS removes a lot of Sysadmin & DBA headaches, but when you suddenly get mysterious DB stalls, good luck trying to figure out what's wrong.

I've worked with some systems that used a software RAID10 array of EBS volumes, and when a single EBS volume started to flake out, they'd just kick it out of the array, and performance would improve. They'd then rebuild the failed replica during off hours. If you're going to rely on EBS for DB storage for anything in production, this seems like this is the way to go.

<comment><USER3> > you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc)

And you need this for the intended purpose _why_ exactly?

From the article:

> The t1.micro RDS instance is a low cost instance type designed for low > traffic web applications, test applications and small projects

<comment><USER4> He's complaining about RDS in general, not this specifically priced offering of it.

<comment><USER3> So what is he doing commenting on an article that talks about this specially priced offering of it?

<comment><USER5> The article about the new MacBook Pro line also included a discussion of Airs and Mac Pros. Sometimes the discussion strays beyond the boundaries of the headline.

Most of the time that is a good thing - I for one am interested in the point the OP raised, which is that RDS (at all instance sizes) gives you no visiblity in to what is happening under the covers on your DB server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love a Postgres RDS option, and am somewhat surprised Amazon hasn't offered one yet.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I have to wonder if there's an exclusivity agreement with the Oracle licensing in RDS that requires that MySQL and Oracle be the only options for linux databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> About $8.60/month with a 3 year buy in. Not bad.

I will try one for a few weeks and see what kind of performance it provides.

I was hoping that Heroku's new PostgreSQL service would be a good option for a hosted easy to use database but I have lots of small projects and Heroku's offerings are per database not per virtualized database server.

<comment><USER9> I could potentially use a hosted postgres solution, i just tried to go to heroku's site to look at what they've got. their homepage is currently an error message saying "no application is configured for this hostname". That certainly inspires confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great update. You certainly don't want to put anything production on here, but small applications would be great with this. Even a properly cached WP blog (low traffic) would do just fine on here.

The automatic backups and rollback in RDS is worth way more than $19 alone.

</comment><comment><USER11> I sure wish they would allow the slaving of RDS instances to non-RDS instances (aka CHANGE MASTER TO). I would love to host a MySQL slave at Amazon AWS.

Sure, I can get this done with an EC2 instance but how killer would a "DR slave" with rollbacks and automatic backup features be? Besides feature-sets I could eliminate quite a few delayed replication nodes and dedicated DR servers at hosted providers if they would offer this feature.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is actually a small example of how Amazon keeps being aggressively competitive by making the pricepoint almost impossible for anyone else to match at scale.

<comment><USER13> That's exactly backwards. Amazon are expensive; they're fighting on features, not price.

<comment><USER14> That's an odd way to restate what the original poster said. Your argument appears to be the tautology that AWS is expensive when compared to different services which do less.

<comment><USER13> First, that's not a tautology. Second, that's not my point. The OP is wrong in saying that Amazon are being price-competitive. That's not their strategy; you can see it by comparing their VM costs to just about anyone else out there. Amazon's strategy is to out-feature everyone and lock customers in precisely so that they don't have to compete on price.

<comment><USER14> It is the definition of a tautology: you're both saying the same thing but from different directions. AWS is trying to avoid room for equivalent services, not services which do less: they don't want a customer who's sensitive to $2/month but they do want people to say "ops is expensive, let's save our people for non-commodity jobs"

Also, those cost comparisons almost universally compare spot pricing rather than reserved. If you run the numbers seriously AWS is not the bargain basement leader but it's a lot more even than the contrarian blog echo chamber would have you believe, particularly if you have bursty workloads, use some of their other offerings and/or need servers outside of the US/Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like you can get it cheaper than $19 if you get a reserved instance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Currently for one of my sites we have the web server and MySQL database on one medium instance. I assume performance would be a lot worse on a micro rds and same web box?</comment>


The Web and Education: We Need Scale - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/190217323/the-web-and-education-we-need-scale <comment><USER2> I agree with the author completely. There is a huge fragmented education market which requires a technologically scalable innovative solution.

<comment><USER3> I have yet seen a way to scale having a beer with a teacher after the class is over and chat about the field of study. Email or IM is just not the same thing.

I've seen people teaching online classes, and I've been in online classes. There's a difference between learning a series of facts and truly having access to an expert in the field.</comment></comment>


Websites targeting Olympics visitors closed down by police - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/26/olympics-cybercrime-met-websites <comment><USER2> When the Olympics are somewhere, the seem to trump any civil liberties in place. Happened here in Vancouver, will be in Londo, in Sochi, etc.</comment>


Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/ <comment><USER2> I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over- engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used.

I'm sure more technology focused companies don't have any issues using these self-service models, but you wouldn't believe the innumeracy that some people have in industry.

<comment><USER3> > one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used.

My dad started developing software in the late 60s. As a kid (let's say circa 1982, definitely in the minicomputer era), I remember him talking about a problem at work: to do all their daily processing, they needed about 28 hours. A lot of the workload was reporting, so he asked managers what reports were no longer useful. Naturally, he was assured that every report was absolutely vital to proper functioning.

His solution was just to start dropping reports. If anybody complained, he'd put them back in the job list. A significant number of reports went unlamented, and soon the computer was able to complete its daily workload handily.

The lesson I took from this is that expressed desire is often very different than actual need, so separating the two can pay big dividends. I've never used that trick, but the lesson runs all through my methods.

<comment><USER4> Well, the only issue I can see with that now a days is if one such report is actually needed _only_ for compliance purposes. Then, five years down the line, an audit happens and 1825 copies of that required daily report happen to be missing...

<comment><USER5> Well at least they didn't worry about the report on leap days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs.

I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? Excel sheets, because they travel easily and have all-around permissions.

I've been waiting for an out-of-the-box solution that's at least relatively easy to leverage across different organizations, but I haven't seen a painless one yet.

I'm hopeful that Quicksight, while not the be-all end-all solution, provides an example for others to follow, if it does end up being easy to set up and use.

<comment><USER7> I'm not really a BI guy by trade, though I've developed related skills over time. My expertise is in communications. Specifically responding to RFPs/RFIs/SOQs, and marketing collateral.

Whenever I see a program such as this, I'm definitely impressed.

Then, a little voice comes into my head, one from having spent years in the RFP and presentation trenches...

"Put this in a PowerPoint slide."

Point being, for internal use it's nice, but it may not be that different from what other software already does with proper data input (e.g. Excel).

<comment><USER8> I lead a team that develops a more advanced BI toolkit, that apart from supporting all typical BI scenarios, handles PPTX export very well (generating 50+ quarterly presentation for investors, etc.). If you're interested, drop us a line at www.binoclebi.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We use Chartio at my company. If you haven't tried it yet, this product is stellar - almost all of our BI needs are handled directly by stakeholders rather than having to go through an engineer, and their support is very helpful and responsive.

I would consider moving off to something like Quicksight if it supported redis. Some of our BI-related data is stored there, and currently to get at it we have an app that proxies data from there to postgres for Chartio's sake.

<comment><USER10> It is terrific that your end users are willing to spend the time and effort on building their own BI solutions. In my experience, at least with C-levels, that is not the case at all. C-levels also tend to want the most stuff.

<comment><USER11> I agree, but I must point out that in some cases the alternative to the "time and effort" involved in the exec playing around with a particular end-user report tool is the time and effort involved in a series of meetings attended by the exec and everyone on the chain between the exec and whoever is actually building the reports.

If "not able to specify a report format to a software service, even with assistance-as-needed from more technical users" disqualified one from executive employment, would any firm actually be hurt by that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are so many BI tools around that it's hard to figure out which solution is going to be best for a particular use case. Creating further confusion, it seems like most "enterprise" BI products aren't explained properly on their websites and are hidden behind "request a demo". It's nearly impossible to evaluate all the possibilities without going crazy.

I want to be able to generate my domain models in some way. Point and click data descriptions are awful. Letting certain people work with raw data is fine, but a lot of users are going to want to work with names that make sense to them. Let me define models with text, just like ORM models.

I want row based security. Let me assign groups to values on certain models. This essentially boils down to hidden filters and required tables.

It should all be web based. I'm not exposing my database directly to customers.

It should definitely not cost 100k a year.

I like the idea of QuickSight, but I can already see that it's not going to work for my needs. But at least they give an upfront description and price. Here's hoping the pricing model drives down the crazy license fees the other vendors are extracting.

<comment><USER13> I think the big issue with "bi" is that the term is just too broadly applied to be meaningful anymore. Every piece of software with a chart in it somewhere is billed as BI these days and moreover if you ask 10 business users what they want out of their BI system you'll get descriptions of several very different tools which all happen to produce charts. I'm sorry to say I've seen countless businesses deeply disappointed in their BI tools simply because they assumed since "it's a BI tool" it will do X,Y,Z when in reality there are a bunch of different classes of tools to choose from with very different features. The few options that really cover the spectrum are extremely complex and costly to really get value from over the long term. There's a reason why the analyst industry exists - it's just too much damn work to suss out what all these tools actually do on your own.

I make BI tools for a living and I am still struggling to really do a great job classifying all these types of functionality and communicating it well enough to lead customers to the tools they really need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We're trying out Apache Spark with Apache Zeppelin and it's been a pleasure so far. We faced the same problems that everyone else mentioned here -- data is not accessible to people who need it and every datasource requires different tools.

What we like about Apache Spark is that it can take any source and provide the same very fast and programmatic (code reuse!) interface for analysis. Think JSON data dumps from MixPanel, SQL databases, some Excel spreadsheet someone threw together etc.

Apache Zeppelin is a little bit limited in the visualization that comes out of the box, but the benefits of having a shared data language across the company is just such a huge plus. Also, super easy to add data visualization options and hopefully companies will start to contribute these back to the project.

</comment><comment><USER15> For me, the most interesting part is SPICE. To implement a data warehouse, one creates a star schema (OLAP) database from a regular OLTP database. This involves massive amount of work. It looks like SPICE aims to replace the need for OLAP database and produce similar data directly from OLTP systems. I would love to know more about this engine. I hope Amazon open sources the engine (I highly doubt that they will do it).

<comment><USER16> My question is how does SPICE differ from BigQuery? I can connect to BigQuery from Tableau, BIME, Chartio, etc.

<comment><USER17> Not sure about BIME, Chartio. But Tableau certainly connects to Google BigQuery.

<comment><USER18> Both Chartio and BIME do support BigQuery as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now.

Amazon takes risks, and _ships_ innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push.

No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a flash.

<comment><USER20> One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone here.

<comment><USER21> One manager's decision can make the work of hundreds of people worthless or even destructive. I've lived thru and seen it. Like it or not the shot callers at the top wield enormous influence and the ones who make consistently good decisions should be celebrated for that.

<comment><USER22> You are right - one bad decision can destroy a project/product.

But the opposite is not necessarily true. To ship insanely great things, you need a lot of factors to come together, not just one person's decision (although it helps).

Steve Jobs kept using ideas from the people who worked from him (presenting them later as his ideas). Yes, he had great intuition and good taste to choose the better ideas, but without the people who generated these ideas, he would have been yet another arrogant, loudmouth suit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm glad to see they put a little more effort into the product page for this release than seems typical for AWS products. It's much easier on the eyes and, at least for me, much more readable.

<comment><USER24> Now they just need to modernize the AWS web console :)

Seriously though this product page is a huge improvement over some of their previous releases so kudos to them.

<comment><USER25> My god I would be thrilled if there could just be a usable S3 filesystem browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of what you are paying for in BI solutions is implementation costs and then to a lesser extent yearly maintenance and support costs. I wonder how they intend to lower implementation costs, since that is kind of lengthy and inherently difficult process.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks similar to Power BI. [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en- us/features](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features)

<comment><USER27> The Power BI is an incredible product - thanks for listing it here... unreal! Coming from SAP/BusinessObjects products which are generally overweight and expensive, Power BI nails it... Price is free, they offer a download for Windows, web app and appears to have a mobile app. Worth a try. In 5 minutes, I had a dashboard built out of exported data from our accounting system...

<comment><USER28> Have you tried SAP Lumira?

[http://go.sap.com/product/analytics/lumira/desktop.html](http://go.sap.com/product/analytics/lumira/desktop.html)

Personal Edition is free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At first glance, this seems like a Tableau competitor. So I'm surprised to see Tableau listed as a partner.

<comment><USER30> Looker ([http://www.looker.com](http://www.looker.com)), Periscope ([http://www.periscope.io](http://www.periscope.io)), Mode Analytics ([http://www.modeanalytics.com](http://www.modeanalytics.com)), and Chart.io ([http://www.chart.io](http://www.chart.io)) should probably be even more worried than Tableau.

<comment><USER31> Co-founder and CTO of Mode here. I'm not too concerned that visual exploration is going to replace SQL for ad-hoc data analysis or data modeling for business intelligence. I think proprietary viz platforms are strictly inferior to open sourced ecosystems like Vega in any case. Open ecosystems win over closed ecosystems in the long-run.

We're more interested in integrating the tools and ecosystems people are already using in novel ways than we are in being yet another dashboard or visualization tool. Dashboards and visualizations are incredibly valuable but they're just one of the many ways that analytics teams deliver value to the organization. There are a lot of "jobs to be done" for an analytics team and the list isn't getting any shorter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> SPICE is definitely the most interesting part of this announcement but there isn't enough information about it.

<comment><USER16> SPICE looks to me to be extremely similar to Google BigQuery. I'm very curious about how it differs.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure about that because they say that SPICE is an in-memory query engine unlike BigQuery which is a distributed query engine that fetches data from a persistent distributed file-system. It seems to me more like Spark in- memory RDDs that caches data fetched from external data sources.

They also support incremental loading similar to Periscope.io which is actually quite cool. I would be great if they could give more information (syntax etc.) about SPICE.

<comment><USER33> > Built from the ground up for the cloud, Amazon QuickSight's Super-fast, > Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine ("SPICE") uses a combination of > columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware > innovations, machine code generation, and data compression to allow users to > run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses.

The description sounds awfully similar to Spark, yet they say it's "built from the ground up", which I assume means "from scratch".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> AWS is the new IBM

</comment><comment><USER35> Seems like a cool way to further increase the "stickiness" of AWS

</comment><comment><USER36> So is SPICE an actual data warehouse or is it more a query engine such as Presto, Hive or Spark?

</comment><comment> erik-n >Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine ("SPICE")

Now that's a _nice_ acronym! I think Amazon have skilled people in charge of marketing. They make their announcements feel exciting but not too "markety".

<comment><USER37> On the one hand, you're totally right about the annoucements. On the other hand, the names they give their AWS products are pretty mystifying. AWS Snowball?

<comment><USER38> AWS Snowball is a play on AWS Glacier. Glacier is the slow moving practically frozen storage system. Snowball takes the same stuff and hurls it rapidly to a destination. Pretty slick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Presumably this is for data that you want graphs of but doesn't fit in Excel?

<comment><USER2> When you're working with large companies that process enormous volumes of transactions you can't just download things to excel.

<comment><USER40> Surely if you're that large then you could invest in some in-house domain- specific solution. There are whole programming languages dedicated to doing statistics on datasets.

<comment><USER41> For many companies (even large companies) it is cheaper and faster to use a service like this than build an in-house solution.

<comment><USER42> Not to mention that if you want this built for your company you call up the BI provider and tell them to send some consultants over to build it for you. You _might_ train one person or possibly two at the most to be able to make tech calls with the BI provider. Much easier for a company to say "I want a dashboard that reports X, Y, and Z" and then the BI company scurries off, builds it, brings it back to you, and you hand over some cash for their effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Amazon is basically eating away at all the big data startups.

</comment><comment><USER44> For one, this: "makes it easy for all employees to.." work with business insights data is usually inaccessible to everyone for a reason.

<comment><USER3> Building your business around carefully constructed employee ignorance is a dangerous strategy. It basically assumes that they won't do any useful thinking. That was fine circa 1930, where treating people as dumb pairs of hands was an effective strategy because there was so much manual work to do. But the more we turn rote work over to machines and software, the less this will work.

<comment><USER44> Agree with your comment wholeheartedly. My comment was mostly around business information flow to the market since that's regulated due to various reasons.

<comment><USER3> Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is this just Amiato? Did they acquire them?

Edit: Yep, looks like it. Congrats to the Amiato team.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd really hate to be in the same space as amazon.

</comment><comment><USER47> I really like [http://www.manifestinsights.com/](http://www.manifestinsights.com/) for visualizing data.

</comment><comment><USER48> They mention integration with RDS, which is kind of scary considering the data a lot of databases hold.</comment>


Hacker News comments with greatest number of upvotes, by month of posting - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZwonVX_KlDYhuhPnAAnVpdVRgu4LxldP74-c_kvOd5k/edit?usp=sharing

<comment><AUTHOR> I am currently working on a blog post detailing an analysis of all 5.6 milion HN comments, so I figured I'd get an exploratory perusal of the comments first to see if there are any trends.

The reason I'm posting it is because it is _very_ interesting to see the difference between a highly-rated comment in 2006-2010 and in 2012-2014. The former are mostly Reddit quality, and it shows just how much HN has changed over the years.</comment>


Hidden Founders: Technical Co-founders as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiddenfounders.com/

<comment><USER2> Stunning idea guys ! Love it !

<comment><USER3> Thx! we're very excited about it. We're sharing more details about our first batch next week, so stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the future !</comment>


Amazon Web Services: Clouded by Duplicate Content - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/amazon-web-services-creator-of-mass-duplicate-content?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+seomoz+(SEOmoz+Daily+Blog)&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be simpler to use VirtualHost so you only respond with content to requests for your domain?

Then set it up so requests without the domain name get a 301 redirect to the canonical URL.

<comment><USER3> on Apache, SSL and VirtualHost don't play together.

<comment><USER4> They do with Apache 2.2.12 or later and any recent browser:

<http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication>

I'm using SNI on all of my domains, and it works great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't quite understand why this article doesn't recommend using <link rel="canonical" href="..."> as described at [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify- your-canonical.html) (resp. [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling- legitimate-cross-domain.html))

Such an easy solution to this problem.

<comment><USER6> The suggested rewrite rule is even simpler than putting a <link> tag in every page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, but the author is disqualified by this sentence:

"Now there were no external links to these AWS subdomains but, being a domain registrar, Google was notified of the new DNS entries and went ahead and indexed loads of pages."

<comment><USER8> To clarify:

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar)

* The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration.

* In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up.

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

EDIT: Damnit HN, you look like reddit, why can't you use a sane text preprocessor like reddit?

<comment><USER9> ... Google is a registrar and has been since 2005.

[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a_domain_registrar.html)

<http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html>

<comment><USER8> Thanks for correcting me, I've never used google apps so I'd never noticed you could register domains there. Personally I'd still register my own domains elsewhere as I've had bad experiences with combined registration and hosting, and even the almighty Google has been known to partake in shenanigans.

In any case I'm pretty sure you don't even have to be a registrar to get lists of newly registered domains, not that it matters because the rest of my post addresses why registration has nothing to do with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Now there were no external links to these AWS subdomains but, being a domain registrar, Google was notified of the new DNS entries and went ahead and indexed loads of pages"

Domain registrars wouldn't be notified of new RR's inside a second-level domain - that would be pointless.

I can't see any way they would ever index a URL that used a dns RR that was brand new - I'd hazard a guess that either the URL was used previously within the cloud and published somewhere, or it was set up as a CNAME in your own DNS, or your main webserver returned it as a response to a googlebot in some fashion at some point.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think we would all be better off just using an elastic ip address, and not using the dynamic address for public websites.

Also, the same problem applies to normal servers where the webserver is configured to show the website for the ip address, kind of like:

<http://184.108.40.206/>

which google also has picked up:

<http://www.google.dk/search?q=site:126.96.36.199>

</comment><comment><USER12> Every website should have a similar redirect rule in there somewhere (I implement it in PHP). If someone hits yoursite.com, you probably want to redirect them to www.yoursite.com. I whitelist my domains such that if someone goes goes to anything that points to my server and isn't a valid subdomain, they get redirected to www.

</comment><comment><USER13> Horseshit. Learn to configure your webserver.

</comment><comment><USER14> If accessing your web server via .amazonaws.com does not make sense for you, why not just block (whether 403 or 404) all HTTP requests with a Host: *.amazonaws.com header, rather than messing around with rewrites and robots.txt?

<comment><USER15> Because once that content is indexed, you can receive a negative effect from Google by mass 403-ing a huge amount of content

<comment><USER14> 301 then it if this applies to you. It's still the same solution.

<comment><USER15> No its not. Google has said that in situations like this, use a 301 redirect to properly tell them where the actual content is located. Using a 403 is an error page that will tell the spiders that that page doesn't exist anymore, and that can have a negative impact on your rankings</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why your phone records are not, in fact, protected by the 4th amendment - <AUTHOR> http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=442&page=735

<comment><AUTHOR> Only legal nerd enjoy reading Supreme Court decisions, but here's a quick breakdown of how to read this (you don't have to read the whole thing to get it).

The first paragraph, reproduced below, is the 'summary,' which tells you what the case is about:

 _The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed._

Next, the part after the word HELD: is known as _the holding_ , and this is the part of the ruling which has legal force and constitutes _precedent_ designed to guide courts going forward into the future.

Finally, the _opinion_ (beginning with 'Mr. Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the court:') is an explanation of what the holding means by one of the judges who was in the majority (which particular judge is assigned at the whim of the Chief Justice, if s/he is with the majority, or otherwise the most senior Justice in the majority group). A _concurrence_ is a supplementary or orthogonal explanation from another justice who supports the decision but for a slightly different legal reason. A _dissent_ is an explanation of how a justice on the losing side thinks the law should have been interpreted, or addressing some perceived flaw in the opinion.

The opinion, concurrences, and dissent are (of course) of great interest to lawyers and judges who have to consider similar cases in the future, but it's important to remember that they're _not law_ (lawyers collectively refer to them as _dicta_ , meaning 'speeches' or 'sayings'.). Only the holding is law. I have seen decisions where the holding set precedent and the opinion is so logically or factually flawed as not to make sense, but bear in mind that you can't overturn a court's decision solely by pointing out flaws in the opinion, because the opinion itself is not law. You have to either point a contradiction or falsity within the holding itself (rare) or start over with reference to external sources (Constitution, legislation, prior precedent) to show why the holding is wrong.

It's very important, and often difficult, to distinguish between the holding and the _dicta_. I mention this because many people, and especially hackers, are liable to get caught caught in some ambiguity or linguistic argument about the contents of an opinion and mistakenly think that they've thereby invalidated the holding. Lawyers and even courts are not immune to this kind of mistake, and cases sometimes come apart because one side has relied too heavily on a particular sentence in an opinion.</comment>


Star Labs' Newest Linux Laptop Is Small but Perfectly Formed - <AUTHOR> https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/starlabs-lite-mk-iii-linux-laptop <comment><USER2> for the same price I got a Lenovo E495, with a Ryzen and 1TB HD. not comparable.</comment>


Some Google managers maintain personal blacklists - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.html <comment><USER2> So people don't like working with some people. That's surprising because?

<comment><USER3> Suppose you decide not to hire someone. That might be OK. What if a coworker recommends not hiring them because they don't like the person? Again, that's probably OK.

But now consider if you read a list created by various people, many of whom you've never met. The person you want to hire is on the list. You neither have the full feason the person is on the list nor the personal relationship with the perso who added the name to the list. Unlike in the previous cases, names can be added for no reason other than a personal vendetta or a political disagreement unrelated to work performance.

And that's why blacklists are far more than jist "not liking to work with some people". You can't know whether you like working with that person if you don't even know why theu're on the list or if the person who added them is lying.

From the worker's perspective, they get into an argument one day with a supervisor, get fired, and suddenly can't find work at any company they apply for. That's a chilling effect.

<comment><USER4> I see what you're saying, but if in one interview someone is throwing a million red flags that show they are not and likely will never be fit to working there, then why not make the blacklist to ensure they don't interview again and fake their way through it?

<comment><USER5> Employee gets sexually harassed by manager, tries to retaliate but can't prove anything. S/he leaves the team, but now they can't find any work in town because the manager put them on the blacklist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "A Google spokesperson told Inc. that the practice of keeping blacklists is not condoned by upper management, and that Google employees who discriminate against members of protected classes will be terminated."

Yikes! Actually terminated.

Grammar jokes aside.. they can't really choose to not protect the protected classes eh? But everyone has their blacklists, whitelists, etc. No rocket science.

<comment><USER7> These unconscious biases make it even more important that 'members of protected classes' join management, rather than people with discriminatory beliefs.

<comment><USER8> That assumes that 'members of protected classes' cannot also hold 'discriminatory beliefs'. I dont believe the two are mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The company culture is really starting to fall apart. I wouldn't be surprised to see internal changes structurally to teams. Managers should manage but not be able to pick their team.

<comment><USER10> A junior employee publishes a memo, it gets leaked, there is a media shitstorm because anything one Google employee does reflects on the entire company. Now all of a sudden the culture is falling apart?

Managers certainly should have influence on who is on their teams but obviously not absolute control.

<comment><USER11> I remember michaelochurch talking about closed allocation for a while now.

<comment><USER12> I haven't thought about him in a long time. I miss him. HN is lessened by his absence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some people maintain personal blacklists.

<comment><USER14> As long as they don't upgrade them to "kill list" then that's fine!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personal blacklists are a great way to get your company sued.</comment>


Uber Agrees on Southeast Asian Sale to Grab - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-25/uber-is-said-to-reach-agreement-on-southeast-asian-sale-to-grab <comment><USER2> > _SoftBank Group Corp., a major backer of Grab's and Uber's as well as > China's Didi Chuxing, has pushed consolidation to improve the profitability > of a global ride-hailing business that bleeds billions of dollars a year_

The anticompetitive effects of common ownership [1] have been hypothesized in respect of the public markets:

"A lot of the way we traditionally think about corporate governance does not fully account for the fact that most investors are diversified. This comes up a lot in mergers and acquisitions. Company A wants to buy Company B. If they combine, they will have cost savings worth $X, and the question is how much of $X goes to Company B shareholders in the form of merger premium and how much of it goes to Company A shareholders. If you are a diversified investor holding a proportional amount of both companies' shares, you don't care at all. You just want the deal done. But because corporate law, at least in the M&A context, gives directors a duty to maximize value for their shareholders, Company B will negotiate hard to get as much of the premium as possible. Money will be spent on bankers and lawyers. Company A might be pushed to raise a lot of debt to pay more, making the benefits of the deal riskier (for Company A). And Company B might ultimately just say no to a deal because it doesn't like how the benefits are split, denying those benefits to diversified shareholders. By maximizing value for its shareholders, considered as its shareholders, Company B might actually be hurting those same shareholders, considering their entire portfolios." [2]

One doesn't find Fidelity going out and saying "you two should merge so you can raise prices on consumers." But I guess that's okay if you're Softbank?

[1] [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427345](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427345)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-04-16/should- mu...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-04-16/should-mutual-funds- be-illegal-)

<comment><USER3> >"you two should merge so you can raise prices on consumers."

This is pretty much it. A generic strategy for most of "megafunds"

<comment><USER4> Given that prices are now so low that the service is unprofitable, it does not seem all that irresponsible for the firms' owners to want prices raised?

<comment><USER5> Yes, the fact that customers are basically paid to ride even at this late stage means that the question of survival isn't really about individual firms so much as about the category altogether. When this was the case for satellite radio, Sirius and XM merged, which was a good thing even though it meant prices would rise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not surprised. After watching this video [0], my conclusion was that there are no actual rides sharing companies in the world. There is only SoftBank.

As an aside, Lei does some awesome videos on technology and definitely worth a subscription!

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfFX9iKZAj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfFX9iKZAj0)

<comment><USER7> [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-i-left-google-to-join- gr...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-i-left-google-to-join- grab-86dfffc0be84)

That guy would disagree I think.

<comment><USER8> "In August 2017, Grab raised US$2.5 billion in series G funding from Softbank, Didi, and Toyota.[47"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_(company)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_\(company\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember coming to SE Asia a couple of years ago, and finding it amazing how I could order an Uber with the same app / account that I do in the West (albeit only from major, supported cities).

However, returning recently, for me (at leat anecdotally) it's almost infeasible to order an Uber here now due to their low driver rates. Grab seems to be everywhere, but with rates similar to Uber, I do wonder what went wrong. I was thinking only the other day that it feels like Uber let this opportunity slip through their fingers.

Both platforms are vastly cheaper than their western services ($1 for over a mile). They also both offer 'moto'/motorcycle hire for one-person rides which is extremely convenient... I'm wondering why we don't have similar services in the built-up western cities such as London or New York.

<comment><USER10> (I live in SE Asia.)

Grab did a better job of having an offering that fit the local markets, whereas Uber tried to fit its US model here. It has since adapted but Grab has always executed faster and better.

Grab showed up front pricing first. Grab allowed paying by cash. GrabPay has been (somewhat) adopted by other companies.

<comment><USER11> There's another thing I heard lots of people saying in KL a few weeks ago. Uber had developed a reputation for employing crooks—drivers who would accept a fare and claim the payment, but simply not show up, and so on—and not doing anything when they were reported. Grab was supposed to be a lot stricter with its drivers, and their drivers were much more trusted.

<comment><USER10> I dunno. I don't live in KL. Uber is fine where I live. Grab is also fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In pushing for these sales, SoftBank appears to be valuing Uber and other cab hailing business as taxi businesses and aiming to improve profitability by reducing competition rather than as a precursor to gain marketshare for some kind of driverless taxi fleets. The insiders don't seem to subscribe to the breathless enthusiasm of online commentators who have long considered Uber's current model as merely a stepping store to driverless fleets.

<comment><USER13> Because that's all they are. Uber and its competitors provided a valuable service in demonstrating what a modern taxi service ought to look like (at least from a customer perspective). But now that they've raised that bar, they don't provide a lot of added value other than as a worldwide integrated brand (in the case of Uber specifically).

Whenever door-to-door self-driving eventually arrives, it won't be in a timeframe that's remotely interesting to current investors in these services.

<comment><USER14> And that's particularly true of South East Asia, where human driver costs are negligible and differences in road networks and driver behaviour create all sorts of interesting new challenges for self driving software even if it handles California near perfectly.

<comment><USER13> Those are good points. If I have trouble imagining self-driving vehicles navigating Boston at rush hour, it truly boggles the mind to imagine them making it around Bangkok, Jakarta, or KL. I'm an experienced driver and I wouldn't want to.

And, as you say, while a lot of people probably overestimate the driver cost as a percentage of a taxi ride in developed Western countries, it truly is almost negligible in Southeast Asia. It's very common for people to have full- time drivers.

<comment><USER15> In a lot of SEA and EMEA markets road signs, signals, traffic lights, etc. are often non-existent, wrong or broken. Intersections may have 10-20 signs all oriented in a non-standard position.

Throw in motorists and bicyclists that are constantly swerving between lanes and inches from cars. Seeing current videos of how self-driving cars react, it would constantly be jerking in different directions.

There are also lots of local habits that self-driving cars would need to be trained to do, eg in Nepal when in a two lane and you spot an oncoming car, you turn on your right blinker to signal you see each other and can pass safely.

<comment><USER16> What are these 'lot' of SEA markets?

<comment><USER17> I think probably countries like Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pity, the repeated discounts from grab and uber making trips almost free will quickly be a thing of the past...

I like it when inventors subsidize my life style in an effort to get market share. Hope gojek can become a competitor in the markets I go to so that those discounts start again.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is a list of company softbank has invested in: Ola, Grab, Didi Chuxing, 99.

[https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king- of...](https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride- hailing/)

Softbank/Saudi Arabia is going to control the global taxi market.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who recently had a bad experience with Didi in China, I really wish there would be at least two competitors for each industry at any given point.

<comment><USER21> China still also has Dida Pinche.

But I agree, before Uber left the Chinese market, there was more pressure to be customer friendly. And the regular promos (with ridiculous amounts of free rides) where also nice from a customer perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I get a sense of deja vu with this deal, and previously the Didi deal in China. It's very reminiscent of how Yahoo ended up holding a large chunk of Alibaba stocks.

<comment><USER23> Also Uber merging/making a joint venture with Yandex in Russia and a few local countries where they got 1/3 of the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to see Uber's income statement - they've grown fast but are they profitable yet, and how much of their revenue comes from subsidised rides?

<comment><USER2> "Uber said it lost $1.1 billion in the last three months of 2017 on revenue of $11.05 billion — results that reflect a steady improvement in the company's financial position, with revenues growing and losses narrowing. In the preceding quarter, Uber lost $1.46 billion on revenue of $9.7 billion. Uber said it lost $1.1 billion in the last three months of 2017 on revenue of $11.05 billion — results that reflect a steady improvement in the company's financial position, with revenues growing and losses narrowing. In the preceding quarter, Uber lost $1.46 billion on revenue of $9.7 billion.

...

Based on a financial earnings criteria excluding expenses like stock-based compensation — a significant portion of how Uber rewards its employees — the company said it lost $475 million in the fourth quarter compared with a loss of $607 million in the prior three-months period."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/business/uber-earnings- ip...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/business/uber-earnings-ipo.html)

<comment><USER24> Thanks. Starting to wonder how much cash in the bank they have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know how this works in practice? Is Grab somehow able to rebrand the Uber app with Google/Apple's blessing? I'm really curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uber sent out an email for people to download Grab, since it will no longer work in SE Asia after the 8th of April[0].

Personally, so far, I'm not impressed with grab's software and epayments infrastructure in Indonesia, compared to uber where I can use my card and pay for any of my wifes/friends usage without having to think about things like topping up or buying credits (though to be fair, a lot of platforms in Indonesia [maybe even SE Asia] seem to have the same situation regarding payments, with worse software). Maybe this will change, but right now it feels like a demotion.

Here's to hoping a decentralized platform for ride hailing can come into existence in the future and remove the reliance on SoftBank's will to unify the market on their terms.

[0] [https://help.uber.com/h/1e6cfc45-10da-416c-a7a3-d13f75505c34](https://help.uber.com/h/1e6cfc45-10da-416c-a7a3-d13f75505c34)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So what is Uber's thesis these days? Global taxi monopoly is dead. Self driving cars is dead. Time to dump this dog in an IPO and hit up the buyer of last resort ... America's 401ks.

</comment><comment><USER27> So is Grab going to take over Uber in India?

<comment><USER23> I don't think there's any chance of that. Uber is only getting 27.5% of Grab. Uber has roughly 50% of India's market. Grab has basically none of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone think Uber vs. Ola will go down the same path?

<comment><USER23> Eventually perhaps. There are differences for now. Namely this battle is mostly or only in India. And Uber has around half of the market share. With SoftBank owning 30% of Ola and 15% of Uber, I'm sure they'll want consolidation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And now grab vs gojek</comment>


Stop Using the Daylight Savings Time - <AUTHOR> https://stopdst.com/ <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but the way these statistics are worded is setting off my skepticism alarms:

> Between 1986 and 1995, fatal traffic accidents rose 17% the Monday following > the switch to Daylight Saving Time.

Accidents rose 17% that Monday? Does it mean 17% more than any other day, or just that the raw number for that Monday is 17% higher than it used to be? Because they worded it like the latter.

For all this page says, accidents were up 17% _every_ day of the year over that decade.

EDIT: Wikipedia says total US traffic deaths were lower in 1995 than 1986, so I'll chalk this up as poor wording. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year)

<comment> nv-vn >A 2014 study showed that the hour of sleep lost when switching to DST can increase your risk of a heart attack by 25%

I highly doubt that one less hour of sleep on one day of the year can affect that risk by so much. If that were the case, I assume the risk of heart attack would be much higher than it is now.

<comment><USER3> It's 25% higher _on that day_. For all that statistic tells you though, it might just be bringing forward a heart attack you would otherwise have had the following week.

<comment><USER4> 1.25*(a really tiny risk of a heart attack on a given day)

This same numerical trick happened when the WHO classified red meat as a carcinogen "in the same category as" cigarettes, and it was stated that it increased your risk of some cancer by ~50% (or something), but the baseline risk is so low that it's a lot less dramatic than it sounds.

<comment><USER5> This. When I asked a doctor, who was suggesting 'a certain med would reduce chances of some cardio incident by some 10s of percent' (I don't remember, specific details), as to what is the base percent if would be affecting, he sort of evaded the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All these articles seem to keep gloss over the actual issue: the _switch_ between standard time and DST twice a year.

People are fine with the time system, especially since timezones themselves are somewhat arbitrary in their regions. DST is actually more comfortable to live with by allowing for more daylight after work hours. It would be better to just switch to DST permanently and avoid the constant frustrating changes.

<comment><USER7> > DST is actually more comfortable to live with by allowing for more daylight > after work hours. It would be better to just switch to DST permanently and > avoid the constant frustrating changes.

Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?

It just sounds kind of Kafkaesque... your boss has set your schedule too late in the day, so your solution is to trick him by winding all his clocks forward by one hour.

<comment><USER8> _> Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?_

I think you're analyzing it from the perspective of mathematical logic. In an isolated perspective, one employer (instead of all employers), can arbitrarily change the working time as 7am-4pm instead of 8am-5pm because it's mathematically equivalent to the +1 hour DST.

But society wants to coordinate on a bigger scale than that one employer you were able to convince. (Children's school hours, restaurants, tv schedules, customers calling help desks, etc). Also, the math viewpoint ignores the fact that there are long standing cultural anchors tied to specific times such as 9am-5pm[1].

The bottom line is that it's easier to address the coordination problem by hacking the time via permanent DST rather than adjusting _everyone 's_ familiarity around nominal times. Changing out the nominal times displayed in glass windows doesn't look easier than implementing DST. Even changing nominal times in the digital realm is a hassle: think of all the recurring meetings in MS Outlook, Google Calendar, iPhones reminders, etc that say 10am-11am. Millions of people would have to change those times to say 9am-10am. Again, leaving those nominal times the same and fixing it more "globally" via DST seems a lot simpler.

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+window&biw=1171&bih=1421&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER9> If the timetables are to be changed every March and November, the calendar tool providers will make it easy for people to set up an automatic time slot change.

The point is, for a lot of people (if not most of all), the timetables don't need to be changed. If my working hour is 11am ~ 12pm, DST or no, I will see daylight when going to work and not when coming back. 4am~2pm is likewise.

Your solution sounds like fixing the Y2K problem without updating the software to use 4 or more digit variables for years, rather by making everyone living the 20th century over and over again.

<comment><USER10> "Easy", "automatic", bah humbug! I take it you have never seen the hoops _any_ date library needs to jump through because of DST. (An example: your scheduled task is at 2:30. When does it run on DST change, and how many times? 0? 1? 2? Guess what: no right answer, just a lot of wrong ones. And that's one of the _simplest_ examples.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's the switch that everyone hates. Instead of ending DST, can we agree to stop using Standard Time?

<comment><USER12> Agreed! I'd rather have sun in the evening when I can enjoy it than when I'm sleeping or working. DST year round would be fantastic.

<comment><USER13> That is blaming a symptom for a problem. The fact people "expect" the sun to rise between 4-6am and go down between 6-9pm is just a product of a broken timekeeping system from two hundred years ago.

"Time" is not a thing that cares what side of the planet you are on, and it makes international scheduling and communication literally hell when you have to calculate time zones.

If we are going to fix time, we should switch everyone to UTC time. If you want to go to work in the dark and leave when the sun rises, have your company schedule hours accordingly. Changing DST now doesn't change that, your business is still setting hours arbitrarilly based around an archaic model of "wake up at 7 work 9-5 go to bed at 11" no matter where you are on the planet. It just makes no sense, and is simply culturally normative so people expect it and structure their internal model of time around it.

<comment><USER14> Unless international scheduling and communication are plunged into eternal flames and tortured by demons, DST can't really be said to make them literally hell.

<comment><USER13> Try writing international date & time library support for a client and get back to me on what literal hell is :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Both sides of the Atlantic these sort of articles crop up regularly. Move to summer time year round and so forth.

What is always forgotten is latitude, and that we forget to learn from history and experience.

In Southern England, or California I doubt it's much more than an annoying relic of olden days. But I don't think anyone has true statistics on whether it is or not. Go north and it starts to matter and accident rates go up when you don't have DST.

The UK had an experiment of staying on summer time between 1968 and 1971, introducing British Standard Time. At the end of the period, the vote was to restore the old way, by a large cross party majority.

I believe at the start of the expermient it was generally thought it would confirm the sense of getting rid of summer time permanently. Switching clocks twice a year is annoying after all.

<comment><USER16> Interesting. I would have guessed that it would have been the other way around. Go far enough North, and DST is pointless because they're just isn't enough daylight no matter where you put it.

Also, your comparison on latitude is a bit off. London is at a higher latitude than Seattle, for example. It just doesn't get as cold, because you have the Gulf Stream warming it up.

<comment><USER15> Wintertime there definitely isn't enough daylight to go around here, but staying on summertime meant that northern England and Scotland wasn't having sunrise until nearing 10am. Dark mornings, it seems, had more effect on accidents than dark evenings.

I just picked southern parts of each nation, rather than checking. It may be that it is more relevant to Canada than US, excepting Alaska. :)

Work and living patterns have changed quite a bit in 50 years too.

<comment><USER9> China has only 1 timezone, which is based on a city on the east cost. In the west part of the country, the sun always comes up and goes down later than what we east coasters consider as normal. However, they got used to it anyway.

Time zones are artificial and don't make it too complicated. Pick a simple solution and let people adjust.

<comment><USER17> From what I've heard, in Xinjiang (the westernmost province of China), the locals completely ignore the Beijing timezone rules and work on a local timezone that's two hours off, although that's also in part a (relatively) benign form of civil resistance against the unwanted Chinese government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a European that's living further up north than most Americans: Sorry, but no!

I don't want to get up totally in the night in the winter. And in summer I want to be able to use the long evenings with the sun still up instead of getting up too early.

Except one, the cited effects are all about the switch from winter time to summer time.

<comment><USER19> If you're far north enough (which you would be, if you are "further north than most americans"), DST won't help. Sunrise in winter morning is several hours off. The entire day is distorted. Shifting things one hour is useless.

<comment><USER18> Europe lies relatively far north: [http://www.astro- tom.com/images/latitudes.gif](http://www.astro-tom.com/images/latitudes.gif)

DST will help: Lastest sunrise in Munich is 8:04 in winter, earliest in summer is 5:13. That would be 4:13 without DST.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> DST is about the compromise between two reasonable scheduling systems: in one you use a 24 hour day with a clear landmark (noon, when the sun is highest in the sky). In another model you use sunrise as a natural beginning to the day.

Sunrise is a bit complicated, and in winter it compresses the afternoon more than many people would like. Also hard to build the necessary clocks. So we simplify things and make a compromise between the two systems, and we get DST.

<comment><USER21> Clearly DST should be improved to better match the sunrise! [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.10.html#subj1](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.10.html#subj1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I live by Wintertime since a few years now under the motto "if you want to change the world start yourself". So only half a year you have to shift your calendar. Main reason for me is that I can easier read the time from the position of the sun in the sky (I don't use a watch). I've my computer, tablet and phone shifted to mediterranean Tunis as they don't have DST there since 2009. [http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/tunisia-cancels- dst-200...](http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/tunisia-cancels- dst-2009.html)

<comment><USER23> How do you function in relation to other people?

<comment><USER22> Half a year all appointments I make with others I translate back and forth, but the technology exists to make it easier. I'm just in a different location and timezone then the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why can't they just leave the time alone, and change their working hours during summer and winter?

<comment><USER25> If you are the only person in your life, fine.

If you have kids, or a wife or anyone else that you might like to spend daylight time with in the evening then it starts to get harder to manage.

<comment><USER26> > If you have kids, or a wife or anyone else that you might like to spend > daylight time with in the evening then it starts to get harder to manage.

People always say this like it's a compelling argument. But guess what? People lready work different hours; schools and business ar already open for different lengths of time; different businesses and industries already have different norms. People live different distances from work. I've worked 7-4, 8-5, 9-6 and more, and have had commutes as short as ten minutes and as long as two hours.

And you know what? Things work out alright anyway. A world in which individual organizations determine their working hours is the world we already have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's "Saving" time, not "Savings" time.

<comment><USER28> Article is correct, only the HN title has the s

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> While we're at it let's get rid of leap seconds.

... and switch the entire planet to a single timezone (UTC).

... and require everyone use the same text encoding (UTF-8).

... and pick a single format for separating fields in numeric fields (commas for 000s and dots for decimal points).

<comment><USER30> UTC is intrinsically linked to leap seconds, that's why it's called Coordinated Universal Time, because it's coordinated to shifts in the solar year using leap seconds. I do think everyone using UTC + an offset would be a great switch though.

<comment><USER10> I thought that's what time zones do: "it's UTC on server, the user is in +01,add a hour to current time, format and show it to them."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just do my entire calendar in UTC, and keep all my devices in UTC. No daylight savings. I pretty much refuse to use it. It also wreaks havoc on my logs and things.

</comment><comment><USER32> A recent article in the Washington Post (Wonkblog) making the case for "Why daylight saving time isn't as terrible as people think". US centric. The argument uses the data of number of days with "reasonable" sunrise and sunset times based on latitude/longitude when using DST or not.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/11/why-d...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/11/why- daylight-saving-time-isnt-as-terrible-as-people-think/)

</comment><comment><USER33> My favorite counterargument:

[http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like- dst/](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/)

>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it's bright enough to see without artificial light, you'll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.

>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn't turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.

DST is the only sensible option in my opinion.

<comment><USER34> >Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.

Well, that's no longer a problem because children are never left unsupervised anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I agree, DST causes more problems than any benefits from it.

<comment><USER36> I guess you don't live far up north. All wake hours in total darkness is quite depressing.

<comment><USER26> You do realise that DST doesn't actually add any daylight to the day, and that if you get far enough north it'll be dark in the morning even an hour later than usual, right? In fact, if you get far enough north the sun won't rise at all in the winter…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I live in a a pocket region doesn't have Daylight Saving. This year we added the town of Fort Nelson to our little time zone. Nobody concretely seems to remember why we started to do this, but it is generally agreed on that we do it for business reasons. Much of our business is tied to our neighbors to the east in a different time zone. With the winter months typically being more busy. Coordinating resources is much easier given this system. I thought I would throw a counter argument into the ring, although I would state it is an edge case.

Also, I am thrilled about news being at 11 again.

</comment><comment><USER38> Let's switch to dst all the time. It's really nice to have an extra hour of light during spring and summer but we lose an hour when the days are shortest during winter. (Where I am in California)

</comment><comment><USER39> Split the difference (30 mins) and be done with it. __Please __.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think Daylight Saving Time is a bad idea in the same sense that (abusing) global variables is a bad idea in programming.

In programming, changing a global state in order to achieve something is almost always a bad practice because it affects everywhere and sometimes in unpredictable ways. Instead of abusing global states, we invented object- oriented programming, which I consider as a way to keep states locally (inside objects).

So if someone wants to save daylight, that should be achieved locally for example by changing school schedules.

<comment><USER41> I think perhaps the global variable in this case is the tilt of the Earth's axis and the Earth's orbital position. The local variable is the offset in your local hemisphere / longitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can't help but think some of these statistics are ridiculous fear mongering, particularly the heart attacks.

"Get rid of DST! If you get up an hour earlier than usual, you might die!"

</comment><comment><USER43> I've always been curious where the federal government gets the power to define what time it is? If we simply ignored it would there be fines, or does it not have teeth?

<comment><USER3> You are, of course, free to set your watch to whatever time you like. But if you do that, you can't expect anyone else to agree with your view of the current time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There's actually a bill in the California Legislature to present removal of DST to the voters[1], DST was imposed on the state by the voters in 1949, so it must similarly be removed by the voters.

[1] [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB2496)

</comment><comment><USER45> I was most interested by how the generated the tweets with my state and county representatives. The scripts is all in js/app.js and uses maxmind's geoip lookup to get back location information. It then uses the Sunlight Foundation's api with the loaction information to pull back the twitter ids for the reps. Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's a shame the website seems to focus on the U.S. only. I would support it and link it if it were a worldwide effort.

</comment><comment><USER47> It might seem crazy and impractical, but I feel that daylight savings is treating a symptom and removing time zones altogether would be treating the cause.

<comment><USER48> So now, rather than remembering what timezone someone/some location is, you have to remember instead what is "normal daytime" for that locale. Everyone worldwide isn't going to operate on the same schedule regardless on the position of the sun.

<comment><USER49> We have these devices called computers which are quite excellent at this kind of task.

Snark aside, it wouldn't be that hard to have the clocks all set to UTC, and then a second "day equivalent" clock that's used only for translation, but not for actual timekeeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Love DLST personally, don't want to get up in the pitch black in the winter, but want long light in the evenings in summer. perfect.

</comment><comment><USER51> This whole conversation got me thinking... Why not abolish time zones altogether and have the entire US be on the same time zone?

<comment><USER52> It would screw up high-noon for a lot of people. However, getting the US down to two time zones would be much less problematic, and achieve most of the benefits you'd see from one time zone...

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/daylight...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/daylight- saving-time-is-terrible-heres-a-simple-plan-to-fix-it/281075/)

<comment><USER53> Is 'high noon' that important that it needs preserving?

<comment><USER33> How else when you know when to duel?

But seriously, look up how time zones work in China. The whole country is on Beijing time so the western areas essentially maintain two clocks because the "official" clock is so far off the day/night cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's Daylight Saving, not Daylight Savings.

</comment><comment><USER55> So far I know that Chine made this choose long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER56> DST will never ever be abolished in this country. A major part of the reason why is evening sports games become more difficult to schedule.

In the USA, sports aren't just sports. They're more like sacraments, tentpole observances which help to shape the order of society.

<comment><USER57> Given that evening games are often played under artificial lighting anyway, I don't see what difference it makes in the end.</comment></comment>


The case of blue-collar Chinese migrants that Kenya is calling "cyber-hackers" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/530427/a-new-wave-chinese-immigrants-seeking-opportunity-in-africa-are-finding-misery-and-struggle-instead/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure about what the situation in Kenya is, but what I can speak to is what I've seen in Botswana and Costa Rica. In essence the Chinese will come in to invest in something or give a gift of something like a road, mine, stadium etc.. On the surface that sounds great for the local economy.

The problem is that there is a catch, it's not. Why? Because they bring their own materials, food and labor with them in essence adding nothing to the local economy. So, rightfully some have begun to question their presence because in many instances it is about extracting resources while giving little, if anything back to the local economy.

I'm sure the workers are unfortunate pawns in this game, but while there is racism where-ever there are people, to me it sounds like this issue goes much deeper than that.

<comment><USER3> > something like a road, mine, stadium etc..

> while giving little, if anything back to the local economy

Aren't these two lines contradictory?

<comment><USER2> On the surface yes, in reality no. The only reason the road is built is to get the goods out of the mines. They extract the resources, leave and then there is no money to fund maintenance. Once again with no local jobs being created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could it be just racism and hatred of immigrants as usual?

They live in military style dorm because they can't afford any better. They are a visible minority, and there's no reason while Keynyans shouldn't be more racist than say Europeans.

<comment><USER5> I'm a Kenyan, Runda is one of the high end estates in the country. They never lived in a 'military style dorm'. I think there is more to the story than what the article says.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra So, they were placed in this Kenyan house to do what exactly?

Article takes a long time to tell a story, then it jumps over this crucial question, and then it continues its ramblings. More details are desperately needed.

Who hired them? To do what? What they really did? Were they actually paid? What exactly are they charged for? What do their compatriots think they did?

<comment><USER6> > To do what?

"Luo arrived in September, expecting to be assigned work as a driver."

> What they really did?

"We weren't doing anything. After we got here, all we did was sleep and eat. We never saw the boss,"

> What exactly are they charged for?

"Local media have reported that the group was running a command center for hacking, money laundering, and eventually attacking Kenya's financial and communications system." The article at Standard Digital News which is linked from that article says "The group, operating in military style dormitories, are believed to have been conducting high-tech espionage and internet fraud, police said."

> More details are desperately needed.

I don't think the author wanted to write about cyber crime per se, the case is just a starting point to tell about the situation in general.

<comment><USER7> It's weird that he arrived in September and seems to have done nothing but sit around until December when he was arrested. Why would someone import 70-some workers and then have them do nothing for months?

<comment><USER8> Because they're cheap and management is inefficient?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> wrong people at the wrong place; it seems they were unlucky and ignorant in choosing this deal</comment>


Ask HN: What "exotic" language to learn? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in learning a more exotic language for fun, and I'd like to hear some suggestions. Some I'm considering so far: Pascal, Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Prolog, Forth, Ada, Erlang. Any others I should look at? Please no BF, lolcode and similar. <comment><USER2> Pascal is not exotic. It's one of the foundation languages that's been around for decades. If you want to learn top-down, structured programming, Pascal is easy to learn and a perfect language for small, quick one-person projects. (It's one of the first languages I learned, and the one I remember most fondly.)

Having worked professionally with Ada for decades, I can tell you quite unequivocally that it's not fun; not in the least. The only reason to learn Ada is if you want to work on huge projects with hundreds of other programmers for defense contractors.

I've never used Cobol but what little I know suggests that it may be even less fun than Ada.

If you want to bend your mind into new shapes, Prolog would be useful. You can do things with Prolog that are much more difficult than with other languages. Prolog lets you program using the backtracking paradigm, which is useful in solving some artificial intelligence problems.

If you want to learn functional programming, Lisp is often recommended, although I would probably suggest that the Racket dialect of Scheme is a better choice.

As far as the other languages go, Forth is usually used to program microcontrollers, Fortran for mathematics heavy applications, Erlang for multicore applications.

<comment><USER3> I like Pascal and still use it. You're basically writing your program in English, so you're not using many symbols or making any syntax errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only one on your list worth learning is Erlang. However, there is a JVM language called Clojure that is a form of LISP and is very worthwhile, but the main reason for learning Clojure is not that it is a form of LISP, but that, like Erlang, it deals with the issue of how to build highly scalable concurrent applications. A less exotic path to the same thing would be to use Groovy along with the Apache Camel library. Or to use Scala along with Akka which essentially is an implementation of Erlang's actorsystems in Scala.

J is an interesting suggestion, but I think that it is best learned along with another more conventional functional language such as Scala or Erlang. J was really innovative back in the 1960s when it was called APL, but now it is a bit of a niche language although still highly useful for financial applications.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, if you haven't worked in assembly, learning it is actually really interesting.

<comment><USER6> Assembly gets my vote too. Its one of the lowest level languages you can learn and it gives you a more 'wholesome' appreciation of computing.

Don't expect the ability to create something useful in it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clojure or Haskell would be my choices, depending on how into static typing you are or how interested in lisp you are. I really would want to learn both, and if that's an eventual goal, I think Clojure might be an easier first step.

<comment><USER8> I second this. I'm pretty proficient in all of the typical languages in web development...PHP, Python, Ruby.

I started SICP, but followed along in Clojure, and I've been having a blast, plus my eyes are opening to a lot of things that I needed someone smart to tell me.

I don't have plans to ship Clojure in production, but it has still shaped what I'm doing on a daily basis in other languages.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Here's a real exotic language for you: F18 assembly. Different from x86 assembly, it is a RISC assembly language of 32 instructions, and is runs on a stack. F18s are tiny computers, so you're not only working at the bare metal, you're working with not a lot of bare metal: they have 64 byte-words of RAM, but because the instruction set is so terse, you can usually fit 6-9 functions in there (I've fit close to 30). If you can learn to use it, the next step would be to learn to use many of them together, in parallel. A $20 dollar chip contains 144 of these cores, and they're tightly networked.

</comment><comment><USER9> Factor is, what I would call, a modernised Forth. It is actually a very practical language with batteries included. See [http://factorcode.org/](http://factorcode.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I would learn Common Lisp. It's not strongly tied to a paradigm like Haskell. For the same reason I'd stay away from Clojure. I think forcing a particular view or paradigm makes a language less "exotic".

CL molds itself to the paradigm and problem domain with no bias. It allows ultimate macro power even over other Lisp dialects.

There are efficient compilers. It's not tied to the JVM so you can deploy native, but there is a JVM alternative if you want it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Goodness, most of those languages (with the exception of Forth and possibly Lisp) are really only interesting for historical reasons. If you're interested in seeing where the wind is blowing, you should have a look at Agda ([http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/](http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/)). If you have any questions, come talk to us on freenode/#agda!

</comment><comment><USER12> I really think Haskell. Purity is super cool. As is functional programming in general.

<comment><USER11> If only Haskell were pure...

<comment><USER11> Since I'm being downvoted, let me clarify for the "hackers".

By "pure", I mean lacking unaccounted side effects (including crashing and non-termination).

I take a rather strong view, as you can tell, of what it means to "support" pure functional programming. That is, I think it is insufficient to show that your code lacks appeals to falsehood and rampant non-termination. Because your code is linked with other code from other sources, it must be shown that appeals to falsehood and rampant non-termination are in fact _impossible_.

(By "rampant non-termination" and "appeals to falsehood", I mean the use of circular reasoning. This is distinct from structural recursion and coinduction, which can be used to do REPLs and servers.)

So yes, Virginia, there is indeed a Pure Functional Programming. But you can't do it in Haskell.

<comment><USER13> > So yes, Virginia, there is indeed a Pure Functional Programming. But you > can't do it in Haskell.

True, but if you want to get as close to purity as possible whilst actually writing usable software Haskell is the answer. I'd love it if Agda was actually a fully fledged programming language, but currently it is not.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, though Idris I think will soon become the "reasonable trade-off" language that Haskell is today. We could do worse, I suppose!

What I really want is a proper Epigram with OTT (or, be still my quaking heart, HoTT).

<comment><USER13> > Yeah, though Idris I think will soon become the "reasonable trade-off" > language

That would be cool.

Don't know anything about Epigram though. Dependent types is still firmly on my todo list.

<comment><USER11> Come hang out with us on freenode (#agda, #coq, #idris) and we'll try to answer any questions you have about dependent types and such!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You're missing a Ken Iverson language from your list. Might I suggest J? It's unlike anything you've ever seen before, unless you've worked with APL, and it'll give you a whole new perspective on programming.

</comment><comment><USER15> J is kind of mind blowing because it has some programming paradigms that are pretty strange and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER16> COBOL might have its uses later in code conversion, I hear there's a skill to reading and writing good COBOL. LISP seems to be a popular language still...

</comment><comment><USER17> I had much fun playing with Rebol

</comment><comment><USER18> OCaml

</comment><comment><USER19> MIX</comment>


Lifestyle changes could delay or prevent 40% of dementia cases – study - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/30/lifestyle-changes-could-delay-or-prevent-40-of-dementia-cases-study <comment><USER2> > Addressing 12 factors such as excessive drinking and air pollution exposure > may have significant effect, experts say

Article never proceeds to mention all 12 factors.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a link to the study in the article. You can find it here:

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30367-6/fulltext)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Quit the job, created GTD app with Angular in 6 months - <AUTHOR> https://gtdnext.com

<comment><USER2> Looks nice, but it would be great if there were an easily accessible demo that didn't require registration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I already noticed that from the visitors conversion from HN. Actually, social and search traffic converts better, but maybe it's just more target audience.</comment></comment>