A modern and more featured "echo" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Unlimiter/put <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because it interested me, but I have nothing to do with the project. I love shells, use `zsh`, mostly, but like to play around with other options.

I was curious about:

          It has more features than echo, but it is not necessarily faster.

Any idea how far off it is from the performance of `echo` or the equivalent when calling `echo` from `zsh` or other shells where `echo` is a _builtin_? The support for color output is interesting; reminds me of `Write-Host` in PowerShell. Curios if ANSI codes are suppressed when piping (like `grep`/`ls` would do when `--color=auto` is passed) and I like the `delay`, even though I can't find a use for it other than making things look like they're coming out of a 1200 baud modem :)</comment>


Your Question Couldn't Be That Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/6/30/multiple-passes-at-the-target.html

<comment><AUTHOR> VC's have a better understanding of customers and markets than entrepreneurs. Often the assumptions a founder makes about how their product will be accepted are fundamentally incorrect. The best way to make sure that the premises upon which you are basing your theories aren't false is to run them by people who know better than you. No question is so stupid that it will disqualify a founder from receiving funding.</comment>


Phantom of the Floppera - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmoDLyiQYKw

<comment><AUTHOR> Remarkable in that it's polyphonic instead of monophonic as all earlier variants. My first encounter with this was in 1991 on the Amiga; a program called "Drivekiller", which played "The Blue Danube" on the floppy drive, effectively killing it in less than a minute.</comment>


Filtering millions of packets per second on commodity NICs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass-with-netmap/ <comment><USER2> This blog post nicely fits as a fourth part of the series we've been releasing since June:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-receive-a-million- packets...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-receive-a-million-packets/)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-achieve-low- latency/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-achieve-low-latency/)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel- bypass/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-bypass/)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass- wi...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass-with-netmap/)

I hope this gives a bit more context.

<comment><USER3> What is the aggregate PPS Cloudflare handles now? Whats the goal (aside from infinite)?

<comment><USER2> We regularly have many-million pps per server.

You might find this interesting:

[https://youtu.be/UcAygzNSxlI?t=7980](https://youtu.be/UcAygzNSxlI?t=7980)

[https://indico.dns- oarc.net/event/21/contribution/5/material...](https://indico.dns- oarc.net/event/21/contribution/5/material/slides/0.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Awesome links, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _We would also like to thank Luigi Rizzo, for his Netmap work and great feedback on our patches._

Clearly a useful contribution! The linked pull request looks like more of a finished product; I appreciate it even more when companies include the details of the sausage making.

</comment><comment><USER6> This gives a very interesting data point to the "open-source" vs. "free software" debate. Normally free/libre software zealots would tout BSD/ISC/Apache licenses as a way to never get back any downstream changes. And yet - cloudflare did contribute back nicely to a BSD-licensed project, in a situation where they were absolutely _not_ under an obligation to do so.

In fact, even GPLv2 would not have imposed an obligation to publish changes here, only a super-strict GPLv3 would.

One data point of course, hardly warrant a far-reaching conclusion; still - that is something very nice to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> We open source stuff because it's a virtuous circle. We think other people will look at our code and make it better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What exactly is the process() doing in the sample? Or is that also commented out in the test?

Because if the only processing here is throw-away this still screams for a FPGA in front of the NIC. Someone mentioned higher R&D on a FPGA solution, but clearly there is massive R&D here in just making sure _evil_ packets don't hit a _slow_ code path.

<comment><USER8> You can get FPGA-based switches, e.g. from Arista. They're not cheap, but you can do whatever you like with the packets as the bytes arrive. But for most applications you'd stick with commodity cards for the cost.

<comment><USER7> FPGA-based switches from Arista are a gimmick of that particular vendor. 10G ethernet and beyond is absolutely _commodity_ in the FPGA world, every dev kit has one.

<comment><USER9> An FPGA dev kit probably costs more than a NIC and is harder to program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ju-st Does anyone know about the current state of IP routing on commodity NICs and Linux? Is 14M pps on 500'000 routes possible?

<comment><USER10> You want to check out Brocade, Intel DPDK and 6wind. Brocades Vyatta router has DPDK support as has Juniper VMX.

[http://www.slideshare.net/shemminger/dpdk- performance](http://www.slideshare.net/shemminger/dpdk-performance)

<comment> ju-st Nice, DPDK has even a library for longest prefix matching [1] but sadly there are no published performance results.

[1] [http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/lpm_lib.html#lpm- api-o...](http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/lpm_lib.html#lpm-api-overview)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When you have to bypass your operating system to get your hardware to perform, perhaps it is time to re-assess your choice of Operating system.

<comment><USER12> This isn't quite so much bypassing the OS as it is redefining the boundary of the privileged space to not include the network traffic. This lets your filtering application get the network packets directly without having to copy them out of kernel space and into user space. This is exactly the same technique all high performance network devices follow presently. The ones that aren't doing it in userspace, are doing it in some sort of RTOS that doesn't even have protected memory spaces.

<comment><USER11> In hpc circles this scheme is called OS bypass

[http://blogs.cisco.com/performance/mpi-newbie-what-is- operat...](http://blogs.cisco.com/performance/mpi-newbie-what-is-operating- system-bypass)

<comment><USER13> (netmap author here) I prefer to define netmap as a "network stack bypass" scheme because we use as much as possible of the OS -- all the things it does well, we do not want to reinvent. Device drivers, system calls, synchronization support etc. are part of the kernel. Native netmap support for a NIC only involves 3-400 lines of code, or 10% of the typical device driver.

Processes do ioctl(), mmap() and poll() for I/O - all standard system calls implemented by the OS, there is no NIC-specific code in the application. NICs can be switched in and out of netmap mode without reloading modules (and with the cloudflare patch, even sharing the two modes). There are no custom memory pools or hugepages to reserve. Device configuration relies on ethtool and ifconfig etc.

This approach is what let the cloudflare folks implement their traffic steering with zero new code, just a couple of ethtool lines; the change they contributed back to support the split mode is completely agnostic of the specific NIC being used.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Insect: a fast, repl-style scientific calculator - <AUTHOR> https://shark.fish/insect/ <comment><USER3> This is pretty slick, and I think very useful as-is.

But, while we're all posting wishlists, one thing that'd be nice is if it simplified unnecessarily complex compound units in the result. In the simplest case, it's able to do this, canceling out literally identical units that appear in both a numerator and denominator:

        > 2m/s * 2s
        4m

Obviously that is a better result than this hypothetical example would be:

        > 2m/s * 2s
        4 m·s/s

But if you use two different units of time, you get essentially a result like that worse one:

        > 2m/s * 2min
        4m·min/s

The unit m·min/s is not exactly _wrong_ as a result here, but is unwieldy and a bit unusual as a unit of length. Since a "min/s" is just a scalar quantity, the scalar 60 (1 min/s = 60 s/s = 60), this simplifies to 240m.

You do get that result if you explicitly ask for it,

        > 2m/s * 2min -> m
        240m

But it'd be convenient to automatically get these kinds of simplifications, especially when dealing with more complex expressions.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback!

Absolutely agreed. This is on my priority list and there is already an open issue which is tracked here: [https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/37](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/37)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since Numi <[https://numi.io/>](https://numi.io/>) has become slow to launch – and I find Soulver <[http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/>](http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/>) overkill for quick calculations – I've been looking for a replacement. Here's how to set insect up to run "as" a Mac app.

[https://gist.github.com/msutherl/b2ab6d5ae7454ea1a987ee85385...](https://gist.github.com/msutherl/b2ab6d5ae7454ea1a987ee85385d8c3d)

<comment><USER6> OT: The angled-brackets are getting interpreted as a part of the URL - <USER2> links couldn't be found because of it.

<comment><USER5> [https://numi.io/](https://numi.io/), [http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/](http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish it automatically captured the last result and let you easily use it in your next input. The current command line calculator I'm using also lacks this.

> 5+20

> = 25

> +10

> = 35

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback. You can use `ans` to refer to the last result:

      > 5+20
      25
      > ans+10
      35

<comment><USER7> That should be in the docs!

<comment><USER4> Done, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems very nice. It's a little odd that the examples include characters that are hard to type on most keyboards.

<comment><USER9> You just need a better layout.

However, everything the examples inspired me to try fails. 2² works but 2⁴ fails. 30° works but 30°25′8″ fails. 10×3÷4 fails. 'pi' and 'hbar' are predefined but 'π' and 'ℏ' aren't.

<comment><USER4> Author here, thank you for the feedback! I will try to add these. Tracked here: [https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/44](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/44)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not to be snarky, but these days Wolfram Mathematica has spoiled me so much that I use it for even simple computations like the ones is meant for. And I almost always already have it open and I don't need to wait for anything to load.

        >  1920/16*9
         1080
        >  Sin[30 Degree]
         1/2
        >  Quantity[2, "Minutes"] + Quantity[30, "Seconds"]
         Quantity[150, "Seconds"]
        >  UnitConvert[Quantity[6, "Megabits"/"Seconds"] *Quantity[1.5, "Hours"], "Gigabits"]
         Quantity[32.4, "Gigabits"]
        >  r = Quantity[80, "Centimeters"]
         Quantity[80, "Centimeters"]
        >  UnitConvert[Pi r^2, ("Meters")^2]
         Quantity[(16 \[Pi])/25, ("Meters")^2]
        >  UnitConvert[Quantity[40000., "Kilometers"/"SpeedOfLight"], "Milliseconds"]
         Quantity[133.426, "Milliseconds"]

It's more verbose to type out the units unless you use the integrated WolframAlpha query with Control-Equal.

</comment><comment><USER11>
      > ln(-1)
      NaN
      > sqrt(-1)
      NaN

Hmmm...

<comment><USER12> Would you expect a complex number as an output? I wouldn't, if someone didn't tell me that it supported complex numbers.

<comment><USER13> From a scientific calculator I would definitely expect complex numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> this is pretty cool,

        > sqrt(2)
        1.41421

        > sqrt(2)-1.41421
        0.00000356237

        > 1.00000356237 + 0.0000001
        1

What are the rules you apply when truncating results? number of digits displayed?

        > 3e6 + 0.1
        3000000
        > 3e7 + 1
        30000001
        > 3e7 + 1.1
        30000000
        > 3e7 + 42.9
        30000000

There might be a bug, 42.9 < 1 ?

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback!

This is not really a bug, but I agree that it looks quite weird right now. Explanation in this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13918393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13918393)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is neat!

One small annoyance is that it captures common browser shortcuts: e.g. Cmd-L on Mac (iirc Ctrl-L on Win/Linux) is a shortcut for the URL which is what I usually use when I want to go to another page. In insect, it just prints an "l" on screen, so I need to use the mouse to navigate elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback!

Ctrl-L is used to clear the screen (same as in terminals, apparently it does not work for you?), but I agree... I also use Ctrl-L to change the URL. I'll see if I can change it (this is not really part of insect, but jquery.terminal).

<comment><USER15> You are welcome! :)

Just to clarify: Ctrl-L does clear the screen -- this would have been a problem on Windows, but does not bother me on a Mac; on the other hand, Cmd-L (which is the Mac shortcut for the URL) simply prints an "l".

<comment><USER4> I see, thanks for the clarification

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've used Calca[0] for a while now; and it computes pretty much anything I throw at it. And while its paradigm is nice for a lot of things (a markdown editor that can also do math), I would love a REPL-style interface to it, for quick commandline calculations, so maybe this will fill that void. However, my initial reaction is that its different enough to make it not worth my while. But it's always good to see other products/tools in the same space.

Oddly enough, the reason I eventually stumbled Calca was trying to find a replacement for qalculate[1].

[0]: [http://calca.io/](http://calca.io/) [1]: [https://qalculate.github.io/](https://qalculate.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is cool -- is there a distinction between Bytes and bits? That would be useful for performance calculations. Right now, it seems like lower case 'b' is used for bytes and there is no support for bits.

<comment><USER4> There is: Currently, "b", "byte" and "bytes" is for bytes and "bit", "bits" is for bits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be fun to wrap it in a mobile app and customize it for Siri. You could probably generate some decent input speed considering a phone doesn't have a physical keyboard.

Anyway, nice project.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice tool!

      > 6Mbit/s * 1.5h
      9Mbit·h/s

It seems as though the "h/s" should be resolved and that the result should instead be "4.05Gb", without needing to explicitly specify that the resulting unit should be Gb:

      > 6Mbit/s * 1.5h -> Gb
      4.05Gb

It would also be nice if "month" and "year" were added. WolframAlpha uses "30 days 10 hours" for a month and 365 days for a year.

<comment><USER4> > It seems as though the "h/s" should be resolved and that the result should > instead be "4.05Gb"

Yes, thank you. This is already tracked here:

[https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/37](https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/37)

> It would also be nice if "month" and "year" were added. WolframAlpha uses > "30 days 10 hours" for a month and 365 days for a year.

I thought about it and didn't add it at first, due to the ambiguity. But I guess these values seem like reasonable defaults.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is quite neat. I tend to just fire up the Python or GNU Units whenever I need some quick math, but it's nice to have something rather consolidated.

<comment><USER21> I used to use Lua for quick calculations, but I've recently started using R because of operator vectorization.

For conversions, why use GNU Units over, say, Google in your browser? I find that most of my unit conversions happen in my browser, while I'm online. Anecdotal evidence, obviously, but is this not the case for others? Where do most people use unit conversions?

I'm also not an engineer, so I can't take that into account from experience alone. Wouldn't your tooling provide automated conversions into "correct" units?

<comment><USER20> Oh, I just use Units because I'm used to it, and it has always done the job well. I also like that it's self-contained on my computer, instead of requiring a dependency on the outside world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a similar MacOS app called Numi that's a bit more polished.

[https://numi.io](https://numi.io)

<comment><USER23> Soulver is also similar and has been around for longer, although it's paid: [http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/](http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems strange to market a scientific calculator as "fast" when processing power hasn't been a limitation since the 1980s. The way to make a scientific calculator faster in a meaningful way is to make the user interface more efficient. Insect doesn't appear to have any innovations in that field.

<comment><USER4> When I wrote that, I thought of wolfram alpha....

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use Frink for pretty much of this. I keep it open on my desktop and do calcs like:

250 lbf * 1 m/s -> kW

You can put hp or other desired units you require in the answer. It will hint on balancing the equation to make the units physically similar.

      [1]  https://frinklang.org

</comment><comment><USER26> May also be worth looking at Wolfram open cloud: [https://lab.open.wolframcloud.com/objects/wpl/GetStarted.nb](https://lab.open.wolframcloud.com/objects/wpl/GetStarted.nb)

</comment><comment><USER27>
      > sin(pi)
      -3.73566e-20

Needs some more work...

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback! I will try to fix this.

<comment><USER28> Notice the following:

      > sin(pi)

      -3.73566e-20

      > sin(2*pi)

      7.47132e-20

      > sin(3*pi)

      -1.1207e-19

      > sin(4*pi)

      1.49426e-19

So

      abs(sin(n*pi))

is proportional to n, and

      sin(n*pi)

alternates in sign. This is because your "pi" is really a floating-point number which is slightly more than pi...

Is there a way around this without doing all computation symbolically?

<comment><USER4> You are absolutely right. I am afraid there is no good solution for the problem except for performing symbolic calculations or simplifications.

A hacky solution could be to round the output of sin(x) to a given internal precision. This would only hide the real internal numerical problem, though.

It seems that other calculators suffer from the same issue: [https://www.google.de/search?q=sin(1e10*pi)](https://www.google.de/search?q=sin\(1e10*pi\))

For now, I have increased the internal precision to 30 significant digits and updated the value of Pi to be more precise than that. Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem... just shifts it by a few orders of magnitude :-)

Edit: Also, note that everything is fine if the answer is not zero (due to the rounding in the output):

      > sin(pi)+1
      1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems very similar to speedcrunch (desktop application)

[http://speedcrunch.org/](http://speedcrunch.org/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish it was a bit more usable on my phone, where I would most likely find use for an interface like this.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hm, it wraps weirdly (mid-word) on narrow screens...

</comment><comment><USER32> > 1/0.999996

1

<comment><USER4> The output is currently rounded to six significant digits. In this case, the result is 1,000004.., which is rounded to 1,00000 and displayed as 1. I'm not sure what the best default behaviour would be. Typically, I would say that six sign. digits are more than enough for most applications..

<comment><USER33> It's great that you use significant digits, but then you have to be explicit about it, and display exactly that many digits, in this case all the zeros (1,00000).

> I would say that six sign. digits are more than enough for most applications

A better solution would be to not use a fixed number of significant digits, but to display the result with the precision of the least precise number the user entered. If you could follow the propagation of uncertainty through the calculations, that would be even better.

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

PS: Great job anyway, bookmarked, thanks!

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the feedback!

> It's great that you use significant digits, but then you have to be explicit > about it, and display exactly that many digits, in this case all the zeros > (1,00000).

Yes, I completely agree from a statistics/physics viewpoint. The reason I display it as `1` right now is that I only have a fixed number of sign. digits (and not the sophisticated solution that you propose - which would be great!). If I always displayed all six digits, one would get `3 - 2 = 1.00000`...

> A better solution would be to not use a fixed number of significant digits, > but to display the result with the precision of the least precise number the > user entered. If you could follow the propagation of uncertainty through the > calculations, that would be even better.

That would be fantastic. I'll look into it.

> PS: Great job anyway, bookmarked, thanks!

I'm glad you like it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> nautical miles / knots would be useful :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it funny that nowadays one seems to need 30 or 40 routers, a few hundred kilometers of cable, some power source, 43 level of abstraction, 30 maintenance engineers around the globe to, well, compute 10 + 5

</comment><comment><USER36> As somebody who thinks messaging is everything, I must protest this name as bad marketing surrounding a potentially good product. Insects evoke in humans a visceral feeling of disgust and sickness. If my work tools were ever being audited I would not be able to explain to my boss why there I am employing an "insect" in my computer.

First impressions are everything. Please see in "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" the excellent description of humans' "Influence-from-Mere- Association Tendency." The technical merits of a product will not matter if people can't get past their initial feelings. This is highly inconsiderate.

Until the name is swapped out for a more sensible one, I will not be downloading this software.

<comment><USER37> There's a certain irony in this rant coming from 'dongslol'.

<comment><USER36> Well, loldongs was taken!</comment></comment></comment>


Balanced Makes Volume Pricing Public - <AUTHOR> http://blog.balancedpayments.com/volume-pricing/ <comment><USER2> This is actually one of the very few things that has bothered me about Stripe – they don't make their volume pricing public (Amazon does, now Balanced does). We've had to email when we hit larger sums to get pricing reduced.

Edit: although to be fair, I asked them about this, and they said their processing costs vary user to user, so they don't have a simple matrix (rather, they apply discounts based on the costs associated with an account). That's probably the best possible answer short of a pricing matrix...

<comment><USER3> Right; we've gone back-and-forth on how best to implement our volume pricing. The upside of a clear pricing matrix is that it's clear. The downside is that it's conservative -- we can (and do) give _lower_ pricing than what we could commit to in a matrix like this to many users.

Perhaps we should release a matrix of what we do on average (or a set of minimum discounts) or something.

(As ever, feel free to drop me a line to discuss -- firstname.lastname@example.com.)

<comment><USER4> _we can (and do) give lower pricing than what we could commit to in a matrix like this to many users._

Can you elaborate on this? What factors influence what rates you can (and do) give? Chargeback rate? Mix of card types? Type of product or service being sold?

 _Perhaps we should release a matrix of what we do on average_

I think that would be great -- even better if it's combined with a list of situations which would result in the rates being higher or lower than the norm.

<comment><USER5> (I work at Stripe)

The biggest factor in processor costs is actually the card mix, and not the volume that a business generates. To give you some sense, international, AmEx and corporate rewards cards tend to be much more expensive to process. Debit cards, on the other hand, tend to be fairly inexpensive to process for (although, despite the costs mentioned elsewhere in the thread, not all debit cards qualify for Durbin debit rates).

Balanced's pricing matrix only takes one factor (volume) into account. So, for example, if a business accepts a high percentage of debit cards, we can offer a significantly lower rate than the prices in Balanced's matrix.

<comment><AUTHOR> What happens if a customer's card mix changes?

<comment><USER5> Generally, we hold to the offered rate even in the case that the card mix changes and becomes more expensive. In the case that the card mix becomes less expensive, we'll decrease the rate as our costs have changed and we can offer a better price. Our pricing is always based on the costs of the transactions, rather than volume alone.

There are downsides to focusing rates and adjusting them on volume alone. With the Balanced pricing matrix, if a merchant has a mediocre Q3 in volume, their pricing could increase for the highest volume quarter (Q4), even if Balanced's effective cost per transaction hasn't changed at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Generally, we hold to the offered rate even in the case that the card mix > changes and becomes more expensive. In the case that the card mix becomes > less expensive, we'll decrease the rate as our costs have changed and we can > offer a better price. Our pricing is always based on the costs of the > transactions, rather than volume alone.

This poses an interesting optimization problem. Given that model, a customer should email you at the beginning of every month asking you to (re)evaluate their rate given whatever period (trailing month? trailing 3 months?) you use to determine the card mix.

If the card mix has changed such that Stripe's cost has decreased, the customer would get a lower rate. If the card mix has not changed or has changed such that Stripe's cost has increased, the customer would maintain the same rate.

The above process could further be improved if the customer keeps track of their own card mix and only emails when favorable to do so. This could even be automated.

> There are downsides to focusing rates and adjusting them on volume alone. > With the Balanced pricing matrix, if a merchant has a mediocre Q3 in volume, > their pricing could increase for the highest volume quarter (Q4), even if > Balanced's effective cost per transaction hasn't changed at all.

Yes. It's certainly not perfect. We used to have a tiered model where in each month the first $x was charged at some rate, the next $y would be charged at another rate, etc. It became difficult for customers to calculate their effective rate and project into the future. We'll continue try to improve based on the feedback we get from customers on our current model. Regardless, we'll publish any improvements in our pricing model and make it available to everyone.

I don't want to make this conversation about Balanced vs. Stripe. I asked my question because I was genuinely interested and wanted to see if there was something we could learn from each other. If you do have an internal formula, I encourage you to publish it. If the model is better than the one Balanced uses, it will allow us to learn and for everyone to improve. _That_ is the nature of openness and what we're trying to accomplish.

<comment><USER5> That's assuming we're only looking at the card mix for a given month. Generally, we're looking at a trailing 3-month period -- and if a user wants to email us every three months to ask if we can lower their rates, we welcome them to do so.

We've certainly thought about how we can be more open with our pricing, as Patrick mentioned, and for customers that want details about why their rate is the way it is, we'll definitely dial-in to the details. We optimize for simplicity though, as we know that many of our users don't want to read an excel spreadsheet detailing the variety of charges we incur from card networks and other parties, which factor into their overall rate. Many of our users have chosen Stripe because we abstract away all the complexity involving pricing.

<comment><USER6> Why not give clients the benefit of a rolling 3-month rate automatically? That way you could help educate them (by showing them their own data back to them- scheme tier x volume) as to how merchant charges work.

To keep it simple, you could require a minimum volume to participate which may also help you get people to consolidate their merchant activity with you, similar to the way traditional tiering works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And to further the transparency, Visa & Mastercard also publish their interchange fees, which is the main cost for a processor like Balanced.

Here's Visa's: [http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa- interchange-...](http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange- reimbursement-fees-april2013.pdf) For online the fee program is usually "e-Commerce Basic".

So here's Balanced's interchange costs, for Visa:

Major debit cards[1]: 0.05% + $0.21

Unregulated debit cards (small banks): 1.65% + $0.15

Non-rewards credit cards: 1.8% + $0.10

Rewards credit cards: 1.95% + $0.10

Visa Signature Preferred (highest-end Visa cards): 2.4% + $0.10

Mastercard is usually similar. AmEx is usually more expensive.

\</comment><comment>-----

[1] This 0.05%/$0.21 rate is super interesting to note. The Durbin amendment was recently passed and regulates most debit card interchange down to practically nothing. This basically just happened and is potentially a huge profit center for processors who haven't updated their fees to reflect it. My guess is processors are right now all looking at each other and waiting to see who breaks rank.. but for the moment, merchants are not necessarily seeing the benefit. Processors are.

<comment><USER8> This is one of the advantages to having a real merchant account instead of using a 3rd-party processor like Balanced/PayPal/Stripe. I pay interchange + 0.04% for all cards, so when someone pays me with debit, I'm charged 0.09% and not 2.9%. Several thousand dollars a month of my subscription payments are from debit/check cards; it adds up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been dealing with credit card merchant accounts for our company for many years. The lack of transparency in the industry made it impossible to know if I was getting the best rates possible. Then I found [http://www.cardfellow.com](http://www.cardfellow.com) where major providers compete for your business. All bids are cost plus based, so you can do a real comparison of the bids. Rates are locked in for life. You can keep the gateway that you're currently using. I ended up with a different division of the same provider I was using, but at a much lower rate. This reduced my net merchant account cost by 3 percentage points. Give it a try. There's no cost. And I have no connection to CardFellow other than that of a very happy customer.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry if this is stated somewhere but I have not seen it anywhere. How are these thresholds calculated? Is this per store/merchant account or for the whole marketplace?

<comment><USER11> (I'm a Balanced employee)

We calculate these fees per marketplace. Usually a single marketplace has many merchants associated with it.

<comment><USER10> Thank you! This is pretty nice then, I think when I first stumbled upon the pricing page a while ago, these reduced rates were already public. At the time I just assumed it was counted by store and got back to work. I still chose Balanced for the native marketplace support and general "openness" feel I get from the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bravo to transparency. Isn't this expensive though?

<comment><USER13> Uh...no. In fact, 1.9% is probably way less than their costs (ie, unsustainable).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool. So this is essentially per marketplace? I've just launched simplegym.co that uses Balanced for handling payments. We currently are only doing around $10K/month in payments, but I believe it could grow into the discounted volume over the next few months.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for using Balanced.

Yes, this is per marketplace. We'd love to give you a discount. Our discounts are applied quarterly, so if you get to $100K+ by April 1, we'd be happy to drop your rate to 2.7% + 30¢

More here: [https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing](https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am really trying to integrate balanced into my software but I am just getting stuck. A few video tutorials or a live workshop/meetup/hack day would really help!

<comment><AUTHOR> MyNameIsMK: We'd be happy to help. We're online right now for chat on #balanced on irc.freenode.net, which you can join online by going to [http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=balanced&uio=MTE9OTIaf](http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=balanced&uio=MTE9OTIaf)

You can also email us at email@example.com

<comment><USER11> live workshop/meetup/hack day would be really fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this flat rate include AMEX transactions?

<comment><USER11> yes.</comment></comment>


Download Our Latest Free Report: Engaging Online Communities - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/download_our_latest_free_report_engaging_online_communities.php

<comment><USER2> Pretty lame, link [edit: to download] is to slideshare with registration/form to fill out.

Here are the required fields:

      Error! These details are incorrect.
      * First Name
      * Last Name
      * State
      * Country
      * Zip/Postal code
      * Email *
      * Work Phone *
      * Job Role & Title *
      * PC Count *
      * Contact Preference:  *

edit: to coderdude's correction

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, the link is to ReadWriteWeb where you can view the report. You don't have to go to slideshare if you don't want to.

<comment><USER2> Sorry my correction, I meant to download it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is something wrong with plain pdfs? I cannot even view the slides without giving up info.</comment>


Mprpc: A fast Python RPC - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/studio-ousia/mprpc <comment><USER2> Sweet! was playing around with it @ runnable [http://runnable.com/U5wIq8VhhNkI6vb2/basic-mprpc-example- for...](http://runnable.com/U5wIq8VhhNkI6vb2/basic-mprpc-example-for-python)

<comment><USER3> Obvious beginner question here, what use cases would this work well for? I ran the the code you linked, and understand vaguely whats happening. Could this say, be used to distribute database requests to another server?</comment></comment>


I ruined our startup culture because of office chairs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cgherb/your-office-chairs-matter-fae874d1290e <comment><USER2> > At Shine, 2 of our conference room chairs are broken..

I get frugality, but this is going too far. Staples sells office chairs for about $100, and these are certainly good enough for conference room use. Having broken chairs just shows you don't care and can't keep up with things.

(plus it probably doesn't make sense economically either. You are likely paying over $100/hour including taxes - so if 3 people lose 5 minutes per day looking for chairs, you are losing $1k/month in labor on that)

</comment><comment><USER3> Frugality is a good value, except when applied to office chairs.

<comment><AUTHOR> The office chair thing makes it something people talk about which creates a myth in the employee culture about the crazy things the company does to save money. This myth is retold to other team members so everyone gets that the company cares about frugality. You probably wouldn't want to work with me and that's kinda the point of culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> 3 Good reads on what I mean: [https://www.amazon.com/Under-Hood-Fine-Tune- Employee-Culture...](https://www.amazon.com/Under-Hood-Fine-Tune-Employee- Culture/dp/1591845025)

[https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who- Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7](https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7)

[https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio- ebook/...](https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio- ebook/dp/B071CTK28D)</comment></comment></comment>


I2C or SPI Serial Communication, which one to go with? - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/i2c-or-spi-serial-communication-which-one-go <comment><AUTHOR> Before adding serial communication to your design, let's say adding a serial eeprom, you should have an understanding of the different types of serial communication that you can use. There are two main protocols to consider, SPI protocol and I2C protocol.</comment>


Show HN: Lucid Illustrations Pack - <AUTHOR> https://lucid.pixsellz.io <comment><AUTHOR> 20 beautifully organized isometric illustrations pack for your project presentations</comment>


The Remarkable Comeback of Przewalski's Horse - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/remarkable-comeback-przewalski-horse-180961142/?no-ist <comment><USER2> This website hijacks my Chrome 'back' shortcuts. Not cool, Smithsonian.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are tens of thousands of wild horses in the USA: [http://theweek.com/articles/460722/american-west-being- overr...](http://theweek.com/articles/460722/american-west-being-overrun-by- wild-horses)

<comment><USER4> Those are _feral_ horses, descendants of escaped domesticated horses. The species in this article has never been domesticated.

<comment><USER3> Gratefully upvoted--thanks for the correction. Never thought about the difference until you put it that way

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As soon as I saw that thick neck and mane I thought of the horses in the Lascaux cave paintings:

[https://www.ancient.eu/image/5589/](https://www.ancient.eu/image/5589/)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are in QC and want to see a P-Horse, the Granby Zoo has a small herd. They are neat to see in person, your brain says "horse" and then "wait a minute, something is slightly off here".

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember seeing these at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (now called the Zoo Safari) in the 80's. Thought they were pretty cool, and I'm glad they've prospered.</comment>


Japan's sexual apathy is endangering the global economy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/22/japans-sexual-apathy-is-endangering-the-global-economy <comment><USER2> previous discussion, 2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866601)

<comment><USER3> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831521)

and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822755)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Japanese people aren't having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy."

The premise of this article is absurd, and flat out wrong.

Japan's big problem is debt, currency destruction, a collapsing standard of living due to the prior two items (zero savings rate, trillions in loans to the government being paid back in debased currency, high taxes, ~45% of tax revenue being eaten by debt servicing costs, and so on).

All of that debt is eating a large portion of the available capital for investment. Without enough private sector investment, you can't grow an economy, you can't bring in higher tax revenue, and so on.

You don't primarily grow an economy through massive reproduction anyway, you do it through innovation and productivity gains. If population gains were the key to massive economic gains, Nigeria would be a leading economy, and Sweden / Denmark / Norway / Switzerland would have spent the last 20 years languishing.

Or take Germany, their population has hardly moved in 40 years. Their GDP has increase nine fold in that time (and is still a dramatic increase accounting for inflation).

Japan's nominal GDP hasn't moved in 20 years. In that time their population has remained essentially flat (+2m). In those same 20 years, Germany's population has actually declined. And in that time Germany boosted its GDP by 77% roughly. By this article's logic, Germany's economy should have spent the last 20 years in dire condition.

The age of robotics is upon us. The last thing you're going to want in the next century is a vast oversupply of human labor. Japan should allow their population to continue contracting, while they focus on replacing human labor with robotics and artificial intelligence / software.

That's where a large portion of the economic growth in the next several decades is going to come from, the vast productivity gains to be found in those two areas.

<comment><USER5> So the problem is not that they don't have enough people. The problem is that they won't have enough people to form a sizeable enough tax base in the future, given demographic trends and the situation of debt/currency destruction. The demographic trend isn't the underlying cause, but it comes at a particularly bad time.

<comment><USER4> You don't need more people, you need economic growth via capital investment, innovation, productivity gains, and government that isn't wildly fiscally irresponsible.

Again, see: Germany

If your theory were true, Germany would be in terrible financial trouble just like Japan. Their population decline over the last 20 years would have reduced their financial tax base, but the exact opposite happened.

You do not need more people to grow your financial tax base.

Also, without productivity gains and a competitive private sector when it comes to innovation (see: South Korea and China taking Japan's growth by out- competing them), an expanded labor pool will not boost your tax base, it'll make everything worse - you'll still have the social welfare costs of an ever greater number people, meanwhile you'll primarily stagnate existing labor through wage pressure that comes with more workers.

<comment><USER5> _You don 't need more people, you need economic growth via capital investment, innovation, productivity gains, and government that isn't wildly fiscally irresponsible._

A) You're mostly preaching to the choir. B) If more economic growth with a declining tax base is good enough, then more economic growth with an increasing tax base would be better. Also, if insufficient economic growth with a stable population is bad, then insufficient economic growth with a declining tax base is clearly worse.

 _You do not need more people to grow your financial tax base._

I never said that. Please get off your soapbox and read the comments you are replying to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually, this is probably nothing more than FUD: [http://www.yutaaoki.com/blog/top5-mistakes-journalists- make-...](http://www.yutaaoki.com/blog/top5-mistakes-journalists-make-about- sexless-japan)

<comment><USER7> Well, that blog does still support the assertion that Japanese people have way less sex on average. They're by far the lowest on the graphs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reproductive apathy is not the same as sexual.

<comment><USER9> >> Reproductive apathy is not the same as sexual.

No, but this is: "More than a third of childbearing-age Japanese have never had sex: 39 percent of women and 36 percent of men, ages 18 to 34"

<comment><USER8> How does this statistic compare to other countries? I suspect its in the same ballpark everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't their current economy significantly smaller than their current population, the same problem the USA has, but worse? In that case they can either suffer eternally, shrink their population to match their economy, or expand their economy. Apparently #1 is unappealing, they're carrying out #2, and #3 has proven impossible for the past couple decades.

One way to report on the future is to make a "questioning" article that asks what will happen if ... and carefully point out there is no answer. So, much like CO2 emission, this isn't a "if" or "unless" story, this is the inevitable future. Best start thinking about how to handle the Japanese bond defaults, because they're coming. Other than that, there appear to be no real problems at a worldwide scale.

<comment><USER11> > _" Isn't their current economy significantly smaller than their current > population"_

I'm not sure what you mean. These are apples and oranges you are comparing here.

<comment><USER10> Supply and demand. Much like the various ecological simulations of predator/prey or food/consumer.

So if you have an economy that only has space for 90M people as participants yet have 100M population, you've got a very big problem. Immigration, starvation, revolution, they'll find something to do. Or if they're mellow they'll just sit out the supposed societal mandates, after all, what else could they do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's really nothing sexual, rather economical. If you plot marriage rate by their income level, you'll see it's impacting heavily for lower income group.

For women at least some good chunk of "cannot meet a suitable partner" is pretty much "can't find a suitable partner making good money" and it got to the point, that it's common things people joke about these days. :-) But here's some relevant data[1] about it from the post in the past.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579574)

</comment><comment><USER13> Let's try looking at birthrates another way: Japan might be one of the few rational countries in the world.

If the economy is not growing in a way that supports having 3-5 kids per family, with a high quality of life (very important detail)...

...then perhaps the rational response is for birthrates to drop so the population can reach a natural size where quality of life is acceptable for the kids that are born.

Countries that continue to grow their population over everything else wind up being pretty miserable places to live over time.

</comment><comment><USER14> > More than half of Japanese are single. 49 percent of unmarried women and 61 > of unmarried men, ages 18 to 34, are not in any kind of romantic > relationship.

So 12-24% of women are sharing men then? Or would this be an artifact of the age bounding and women pairing with older, not counted men?

<comment><USER15> Or maybe there's some disagreement between the sexes on what constitutes "a relationship".

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't that be shocking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a silly analysis. Japanese are not having babies so the economy is doomed. Maybe less consumption and unmitigated infinite growth is not such a bad thing.

<comment><USER18> I'm reading Stewart Brand's book "Whole Earth Discipline" right now [1]. Prior to reading the book, I would have had a similar assumption.

Turns out that population collapse is potentially very dangerous to the environment. Why? Because a rapid collapse in population would cause economic distress and wars over resources. During economic crisis, environmental conservation tends to (unfortunately) go out the window. And war is devastating for the environment.

Anyway, Brand says the world population requires something like 2.1 kids per person to avoid a collapse in population, but is falling below that in many countries. The green movement of the 1960's was very effective at lowering population growth, averting a potential 'population bomb' that was so feared at the time.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline)

<comment><USER19> I don't understand. Why would a _collapse_ in population cause wars over resources? If there are less people, shouldn't that mean that there will be more resources to go around for everyone?

<comment><USER18> If the population collapse wasn't economically devastating than this would be true. But, according to the book, lower fertility rates result in an aging population that becomes an economic liability -- especially if it happens rapidly. In an economic crisis, resources become constrained even if there are technically plenty to go around. I'm sure there are examples of this in America's Great Depression.

I'm not by any means an expert in this area -- just doing the best I can to paraphrase what so far has been a very interesting and paradigm shattering book.

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Just wait until they discover virtual reality and the "appropriate accessories".</comment>


Hack Reactor Acquires MakerSquare - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/01/coding-bootcamp-boom-continues-hack-reactor-buy/ <comment><USER2> As an alum and current Hacker in Residence at Hack Reactor I was really interested to see what direction HR's (inevitable) expansion would take.

This approach seems like a good one to me. Giving Maker Square access to their model and materials will allow some of the things I love about HR (rapid iteration, epic alumi support, holistic focus on software engineers rather than just coders) to spread without creating cookie cutter campuses. Increasing quality without losing diversity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading this piece makes me a little ... I don't know if uneasy is the right word but, fine. It's like these bootcamps are just popping up to give out Web dev jobs to people that have never programmed before and now they will be slapping together Javascript like nobody's business. It gives the impression that any "monkey can be a software engineer."

The quote at the bottom just has me shaking my head:

 _"We're still seeing lots of Ruby developer jobs. But we're seeing a huge uptick in JavaScript developer positions."_

I'm not sure this is really a good thing but I guess it doesn't really matter either way. Maybe I'm a CS elitist or maybe I don't like the idea of saturation and dilution of market by bootcamp programmers. Who knows.

<comment><USER4> > It's like these bootcamps are just popping up to give out Web dev jobs to > people that have never programmed before ... It gives the impression that > any "monkey can be a software engineer."

I'm an instructor at MakerSquare who is intimately involved with our admissions process. We don't believe that "any monkey can be a software engineer." We believe that anyone who has spent time teaching themselves the basics can be taught to be a productive junior developer.

We have not accepted applicants with zero programming experience for some time now. We made that change for several reasons but the main one was that we wanted to be able to start with more advanced topics. Starting with more advanced topics means ending with more advanced topics. Ultimately, that means that our students will be better prepared for the job market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The biggest change for MakerSquare—its new curriculum—was already in the > works before the acquisition. The school intends to focus on the JavaScript > programming language. Traditionally, programmers used Javascript to write > code that runs inside web browsers, but now they're using it to write code > that runs on computer servers, code that drives the heart of online > services. As a result, Phillips says, _MakerSquare can now focus on teaching > only one language for both browser-side and server-side programming._

Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was accepted into Hack Reactor's 5th class and MakerSquare's 1st class. I chose Hack Reactor (and I'm glad I did) but I really liked the MakerSquare founders and was happy to see them be so successful. Both teams have liked and respected each other as long as I've known them.

This seems like a win-win for both sides: Hack Reactor's hiring support is amazing (the 99% hiring rate is not just accurate but calculated using a higher standard than most competitors[1]) and MakerSquare is still the big dog in Austin.

I'm especially excited as a Hack Reactor alumnus who's getting tired of SF and eyeing Austin!

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Hack-Reactor/When-you-say-the- average-i...](http://www.quora.com/Hack-Reactor/When-you-say-the-average- income-of-HR-grads-is-103k-is-that-the-mean-or-the-median-If-its-the-mean- then-what-is-the-median)

<comment><USER7> Austin is amazing! If you're in town stop by an Austin on Rails, great community. There's always friendly folks, companies hiring, and ususally some food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am an instructor at MakerSquare in Austin and I just wanted to say that we're all very excited about this. If anyone has any questions about our program I'd be happy to answer them.

<comment><USER8> I'd be interested to hear how this will affect MakerSquare. I saw the announcement and it seems like Hack Reactor is adopting a fairly laissez-faire approach. Have you seen any changes in the lead up to this? How do you think it will play out?

<comment><USER4> I agree that they are taking a laissez-faire approach. For now we will adopt their curriculum (which is great because we were moving to a JS only curriculum anyway) and their class schedule (till 8pm daily and class on Saturdays). We'll keep our name and staff as is.

We'll likely adopt their admissions process, however, we're very proud of some aspects of our process and we're looking forward to see how the two can work together.

No changes were made to any part of the program leading up to the acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kaplan bought Dev Bootcamp a while ago - Interesting to see so many aquisitions in this space.</comment>


Video of giant squid - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081124-giant-squid-magnapinna.html

<comment><USER2> Go away and post this on Digg or Reddit.

<comment><USER3> _"... "They are these creatures of almost myth and legend and that just blows people away, but secondly, deep sea in general is just so fascinating because you don't have to travel to other planets to find alien creatures," he said.

"There's things down there where their entire bodies are made of snot, they've got detachable heads, their teeth fall out, they explode and they eat their snot jackets. There is just weird things going on everywhere ..."_ ~ <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/17/2307028.htm>

Some of you here have a distinct lack of curiosity. The words above describe such squids. I happened to make time earlier this year to see a live squid dissection undertaken by Dr Mark Norman Deputy Head of Science (Marine Zoology) and a team of scientists at the Museum of Victoria and it was fascinating stuff ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157606211764544...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157606211764544/)

The video show is important because there is so little known about giant squid even though they live a kilometer below the surface of the ocean.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, it was an interesting video. I'm glad I saw it elsewhere. But I come here to read startup related stuff. If it ever gets to the point that center of gravity isn't in stuff related to startups here, I'll stop visiting. There are better news aggregation places out there.

<comment><USER3> _"... But I come here to read startup related stuff. If it ever gets to the point that center of gravity isn't in stuff related to startups here, I'll stop visiting. ..."_

Old news as the place long since changed from "Startup" to "Hacker" ~ <http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html> One positive trait that is encouraged is "curiosity" (another is focus) but I seriously don't just hang around for the "news" posted but the quality of the comments. BTW, let us know if you find a "HN" alternative with a purely startup focus. Mine is ~ <http://groups.google.com.au/group/silicon-beach-australia>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not only is this not hacker news, this is old news. It's been floating around Digg/Reddit for a month.

<comment><USER6> Most of us don't visit those sites. :)

<comment><USER7> I wonder why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the fact that there are real life "sea monsters" that are yet to be discovered. A reminder that despite mankind's scientific achievements there is a multitude of unknowns for our children to explore.

</comment><comment><USER9> small correction: it's a bigfin squid not a giant squid.

<comment><USER10> True.

Man! I thought they had captured Architeuthis on video. Got all excited. What a bummer.

Cool vid though.

Edit: A Japanese team actually DID get Architeuthis on video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"[...] Vecchione suggests a feeding behavior that is more like trapping than hunting. He speculates that Magnapinna passively waits for prey to bump into the sticky appendages."_

Fascinating, reminds me of barnacle monsters from Half-Life.

</comment><comment><USER12> What SpaceX, Virgin Galactic etc. are doing with space tourism is great, but I reckon a lot of people would pay good money to see one of those up close (safely!).

</comment><comment><USER13> I am not sure if the giant squid gave permission to have his video taken. Shell should expect a DMCA notice any time soon, signed with a squirt of ink.

</comment><comment><USER14> Best. Shell. Ad. Ever.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like a giant spider.</comment>


Ask HN: Please Fork My Project - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I am the (only) developer behind magnetico[0], the (first?) fully-decentralised BitTorrent search engine suite that you can host yourself. It is intended to replace public trackers, so to speak.
It was featured on Hacker News and TorrentFreak:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018877
https://torrentfreak.com/magnetico-a-personal-torrent-search-engine-that-cant-be-shut-down-170409/
I believe that the project serves an actual need, that is, decentralising the only central component of the BitTorrent stack: trackers. I have been developing the project for the past 3 years and I know that it still has lots of room for improvement, but the development came to a halt as I burnt out. I no longer have the will to work on this project, simple as that.
It consists of ~4.2k lines of Go, and ~500 lines of very basic JS.
I would be grateful if anyone here is interested in forking magnetico. I am happy to answer your questions and help with onboarding too.
Bora
[0] https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico/ <comment><USER2> It's better to use a meaningful title. Something like in the 2017 submission " _Magnetico: self-hosted BitTorrent DHT search engine suite_ " . Perhaps you still can edit this.

Try to get user. Users will became poweruser. Powerusers will become contributors. [You can try also with first-good-issue, but I don't like it too much.]

In the last submission there was some complains about the greedy strategy to connect to other nodes. Have you fixed it?</comment>


Second Review: Linode Versus Slicehost - <AUTHOR> http://www.unix.com/blog/2010/10/second-review-linode-versus-slicehost-one-year-later/ <comment><USER2> I love Linode too, but where is review? It's more looks like comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2010 update to 2009 review...</comment>


Introducing EasyEmailProtection - Intrusion detection for your Gmail account - <AUTHOR> http://easyemailprotection.com/?hn

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this is just an MVP to see if there would be an interest in this type of product.</comment>


Field of dreams: heartbreak and heroics at the World Ploughing Championships - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/23/world-ploughing-championships-no-till-farming <comment><USER2> >But to the conservationists, spraying glyphosate is a minor interference compared with the aggressive upheaval caused by ploughing.

This is a pretty huge claim without any cited evidence. Farmers I've talked to are very concerned with glyphosate and the chemical as been banned in France [https://www.euronews.com/2018/05/29/france-committed-to- glyp...](https://www.euronews.com/2018/05/29/france-committed-to-glyphosate- herbicide-ban-despite-parliamentary-rebuff) . God save us if the bees all die.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Most ploughmen can't imagine not ploughing. Why would they stop doing > something they had always done? ... As a ploughman once said to me: "The > plough's been here for far too long for it not to be right."

If the no-till movement is correct in its claims, they might be wrong about that.</comment>


Banks: Credit Card Breach at Home Depot - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/09/banks-credit-card-breach-at-home-depot/

<comment><USER2>
      This apparent breach may be the same group of Russian and Ukrainian
      hackers responsible for the data breaches at Target, Sally Beauty
      and P.F. Chang's, among others.

Interesting how financial and geopolitical motives coincide for these thieves. The batches of stolen credit cards are named "American Sanctions" and "European Sanctions".

By the way, what happened to the supposedly massive state-sponsored breach of JP Morgan Chase from last week? That attack was also linked to Russia, but I can't find any updated stories on it.</comment>


Robert Williams (first robot fatality) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(robot_fatality) <comment><USER2> If you found a robot trying to climb inside you, wouldn't you kill it?</comment>


Ask HN: Rejected from YC? What's your startup? - <AUTHOR>

This isn't meant to be an angry discussion; simply state your idea, and wait for helpful feedback from your HN peers. <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't apply, but because I thought my business wasn't mature enough for YCombinator. BUT last time I started this thread, I was criticized for not being as forthright. So! my bootstrapped startup:

www.CameraLends.com, P2P camera rental. We've reached 500 users and nearly 100 transactions to date (and growing and accelerating week-over-week). We did not apply to YC because all YC alums who gave me advice said that YC is looking for "10% week-over-week growth" and our numbers are low enough to not be able to show that consistently.

<comment><USER2> Nice. I like the design and good product photos. Not sure of the market size. That would be a good part to focus on if you apply in the future imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! Re: market size, BorrowLenses was acquired by Shutterfly for ~$14m in equity ([http://www.imaging- resource.com/news/2013/10/25/shutterfly-a...](http://www.imaging- resource.com/news/2013/10/25/shutterfly-acquires-borrowlens-rental-service)). The market for pure consumer cameras is shrinking based on industry reports (~$100m/year and decreasing) but professional cameras aren't bleeding as bad. And Calumet (a HUGE national rental shop) closed it's doors recently, leaving a lot of photographers not knowing where to rent from.

<comment><USER2> Ya, I figure your market is the SMB that needs high end equipment. Very cool. I know guys that could use this.

But I bet you'd have great funding success if you broadened the concept beyond just cameras and became Borrow.it or something. I was recently wishing there was a service that rents espresso machines since I've never used one before and the ones I want start at $700. Similar theme but another passionate crowd :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're testing the waters for lighting equipment (which is as expensive as cameras) and high-end video, like the RED ONE and Epic-M. It's funny that you suggest becoming more generic -- that was specifically why we began focused on camera gear. There are existing "P2P rent anything" sites like Zilok, Snapgoods, and the now defunct Rentalic. The main problem is that most items aren't expensive enough to be worth the hassle. The frustration that lead to CameraLends was my girlfriend complaining that renting a sewing machine for a few days would require $100 and renting a car to drive across town to pick up, whereas buying a brand new one on Amazon was only $150.

<comment><USER2> Ah snap! That's good stuff right there. What else can we think of renting? P2P game rentals?

<comment><USER3> nothing in it really for the renter. you would need a decent size collection. how are you going to large advantage enough over these guys to make it worth while: gamefly, redbox, gamestop

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We had ambitious, though perhaps misguided plans to revolutionize recipe publishing across the web (and also didn't have the idea for long before applying). Since applying, and talking a few other folks, we've realized that what we really want to do is pick up the torch of the early work on RecipeML and make an open format for the web to encode recipe data in. Ideally, we'd like to see companies like Epicurious and Allrecipes.com use this format and compete on features rather than data. We believe all recipes should be open and public to the web, allowing anyone to cook anything, anywhere.

So, we're still on the task, but maybe this is about creating a consortium to manage an open format / standard, rather than a company... though I certainly think profitable companies could come from this.

You can view our submission here: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/n99prz9wkxjb223/s2014form.htm](https://www.dropbox.com/s/n99prz9wkxjb223/s2014form.htm)

Just open in a browser (or text editor, if you really feel like it).

<comment><USER5> What's in it for Epicurious and Allrecipes, considering they currently own the data and competing just on features probably means they lose market power?

<comment><USER4> Well, one of them would have to race to have market dominance, but imagine being the publisher / host for every recipe on the web. You could really only achieve that by opening in your platform / format to 3rd party devs and other services, to allow other tie-ins.

So... Instagram didn't invent JPEG... they just made it really simple and easy for everyone to share images, and the 3rd party services that have sprung up around it have strengthened their ecosystem. That's a bad example... but... you get what I'm saying I hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi guys we have built a search engine for local apps, 98% of the apps in the stores has less than 50.000 downloads, that is not a healthy ecosystem. For us each application has a place and each location is a store. Is no the first time we got rejected ;) Apple did not allow to publish our search engine back in July and later on they publish "Popular" Near me. We will keep fightint for a fair store and organic positioning for every indie dev. Hope you like what we are trying to do. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.mapplas.co...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.mapplas.com) www.mapplas.com

<comment><USER7> I just want to warn you, google will also remove your app once they notice it. Apple & Google do not want anyone competing with their stores.

<comment><USER8> What are you talking about? Quixey.com is an app that let users discover apps and hasn't been removed from the android app store. Plus it has raised millions from Eric Schmidt's fund, Innovation Endeavors.

<comment><USER6> And xyo.net has an app aswell, google is not apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My startup is visual programming system ala Spreadsheets + Zapier, here is my YC application – [http://spreadsheets-on- steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/...](http://spreadsheets-on- steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/my-failed-application-to-yc-summer-2014)

Would like some feedback on my application.

</comment><comment><USER10> Applied, but didn't get invited for an interview.

We are creating a door to door travel itinerary search engine. (www.travelmacho.com) Currently, most of the travel website only provides you with one leg of the travel such as flights, but there is still the problem of figuring out how to get to the airport. So what the users typically do is open up multiple windows to plan their travels.

We would like to create a platform that aggregates all modes of transportation (bus, train, flight, airport shuttle, taxi etc) into one search engine. The users will be able to find the best way to travel in one website.

Let us know what you think! [http://www.travelmacho.com](http://www.travelmacho.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi all, 4th attempt w/ recommendations from YC founders and no interview this time. I think I know why (single founder, little traction).

My company, Stirplate.io, is an app for scientists to store, share and analyze their data in the cloud.

Science needs help managing it's data, so my company helps with that process. We also automate data analysis for scientists, making hours of excel work take about 15seconds.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.innGrid.net](http://www.innGrid.net) 4 months old. 100 sign-ups. 10 paying customers.

<comment><USER13> Fyi, the smooth scrolling JS you use on your homepage is very awkward with a Macbook trackpad (in Chrome). It kind of accelerates erratically.</comment></comment>


What is happening with Thinkster? Lastest update on React course is last year - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gothinkster/react-redux-realworld-example-app <comment><USER2> If you want an up to date React course I suggest: [https://fullstackopen.com/en/](https://fullstackopen.com/en/)

"Learn React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, and GraphQL in one go! This course will introduce you to modern JavaScript-based web development. The main focus is on building single page applications with ReactJS that use REST APIs built with Node.js."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestion. I will check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What "course" are you referring to? The link goes to an open-source "Real World" app example project. It's a community thing, not owned by any one person or group as far as I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry to forgot mentioning. This repo is referred by Thinkster.io via this course of them: [https://thinkster.io/tutorials/build-a-real-world-react- redu...](https://thinkster.io/tutorials/build-a-real-world-react-redux- application)</comment></comment>


Why Landlords Raise Your Rent. (It's Not for the Fifty Bucks a Month.) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@goldfine_48628/why-landlords-raise-your-rent-its-not-for-the-fifty-bucks-a-month-154953218327 <comment><USER2> Inflation has a minor effect too.

The $300K is fixed for the purchase year but the expenses are not. The inflation-adjusted expenses of $12,000/year corresponds to $6-$7 of the $50/month increase.

($12,000 / 3 / 12 = $333⅓ per apartment per month. With inflation around 2%/year that's $6⅔/month.)</comment>


Show HN: Techstarts.io – jobs for new grads in tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.techstarts.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, creator of techstarts.io here. I created techstarts.io to make it easier to find jobs as a new grad. I myself am currently applying to new grad positions and decided to create this to help others in the same situation (if you're working at a company that is hiring new grads would love to hear from you!).</comment>


Show HN: Plane Popper – New game for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bobby.game.planepopper

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this game totally on my own. I did the programming, graphics, and sound. I even made my own game engine which uses OpenGL. Currently I am working on generalizing my game engine so that I can release it for others to use.

For more information, visit: www.bobbyloujo.com

I hope you enjoy my game!

<comment><USER2> Installed it on my One M8, gets stuck on the splash screen I'm afraid.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange. How long did you wait? Did you try opening it again?

The splash screen shows while the ad is loading. Sometimes the ad just takes a while.</comment></comment></comment>


SuperSQLite: SQLite library for Python (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/plasticityai/supersqlite <comment><USER2> Interesting pick from one of the links in the article:

"SQLite has fantastic write performance as well. By default SQLite uses database-level locking (minimal concurrency), and there is an "out of the box" option to enable WAL mode to get fantastic read concurrency — as shown by this test. But lesser known is that there is a branch of SQLite that has page locking, which enables for fantastic concurrent write performance."

[https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite- to-4m-q...](https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on- a-single-server/)

<comment><USER3> _When you have a write-heavy workload with multiple servers that need to write concurrently to a shared database (backend to a website), you would probably want to choose something that has a client-server model instead like PostgreSQL_

It's easy to get really stellar concurrent performance out of SQLite using a many reader, single writer model (ie many threads, single process). In testing we did it easily surpassed Postgres.

<comment><USER4> That's really interesting.

I've always been a big fan of SQLite and this is the one challenge I've always faced.

Can you give some more insights as to how you achieved that?

<comment><USER3> For reads just create a new connection for every request (be sure to set connection properties for wal etc). Then create a global (or something equivalent to global, like a singleton) connection to serve as the writer and put a mutex around it when doing writes. Easy, scales like a mofo.

<comment><USER5> What does "mofo" mean here. Can you give us a rough estimate on the transaction rate you achieved with this setup? My own experience and all independent benchmarks I can find seem to indicate a limit of 100-1000TPS on reasonable hardware.

Note that you can "batch" up many inserts into a transaction, which gives you a high "nominal" insert rate but still only ~100 actual transactions or so per second. To see why this is not the most useful number when comparing to a database like Postgres, consider that the limiting factor in a SQLite/Posgres design are cache flushes which outweight the costs of actually writing the data, so the number of rows per batch is mostly arbitrary; using this metric you can always claim a huge insert performance by choosing a suitable N. Also, if you do the batching, you of course loose some of SQLite's consistency/durability guarantees for your writes, which is probably fine if you didn't need them in the first place, but begets the question if an embedded ACID database is the best tool for the job at hand.

<comment><USER6> > What does "mofo" mean here

Motherfucker

<comment><USER7> I think they meant what makes it a positive `mofo`, if you will.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes of course. Not deleting my comment because I think my misunderstanding is funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like it just bundles a full build of the sqlite shared library, along with some kind of gross hacks. It bundles pysqlite2, which notably is missing a ton of features and improvements from upstream. I'll just compile my own, thanks...

<comment><USER9> Hi @coleifer, I'll disagree, I'm the author. I don't think they are gross hacks, just a more sensible default configuration. In fact, I used a lot of your advice from your blog post [https://charlesleifer.com/blog/going-fast- with-sqlite-and-py...](https://charlesleifer.com/blog/going-fast-with-sqlite- and-python/) while making this library.

Fair enough if you want to compile your own version, but there's a lot of people and Python devs who don't know how / won't go through the effort and that's what this project is for.

It's also a work in progress and not meant to be released yet. Shoot me an e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com if you have suggestions for how to improve it.

<comment><USER8> The advice in my post that you linked can be supplemented by this:

[http://charlesleifer.com/blog/compiling-sqlite-for-use- with-...](http://charlesleifer.com/blog/compiling-sqlite-for-use-with-python- applications/)

Describes several handy ways to compile sqlite for use with python (2 or 3), as a system-wide shared library or compiled directly into the python module. This can also be applied to sqlcipher, etc.

If you don't know how to compile sqlite, I'd argue that you have no business trying to use it's more advanced features. How can you tune or optimize something you don't understand?

Furthermore, your library is stale. Anyone using it is dependent on you to merge in upstream changes constantly. And based on what I saw, it's already well out of date.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I've seen that post as well. Thanks! It's good advice.

>> If you don't know how to compile sqlite, I'd argue that you have no business trying to use it's more advanced features. How can you tune or optimize something you don't understand?

I'm not sure I agree with that, some people understand the advanced features but have a miserable time with compilers and compiling something like SQLite. There's a lot of great engineers with Python and SQL expertise that just don't know how to compile a C project. That might sound contradictory, but it's just something a lot of engineers still don't do day to day since people are using a lot of scripted languages (Node/Python/Ruby).

For example, there's probably a lot of people who want to use the JSON1 or FTS5 modules with SQLite in Python. That doesn't require advanced knowledge, but requires them to re-compile SQLite!

>> Furthermore, your library is stale. Anyone using it is dependent on you to merge in upstream changes constantly. And based on what I saw, it's already well out of date.

It is stale, I agree. But it's still a WIP. This was posted here early. My plan is to pull in changes from the upstream sqlite module with the latest CPython 2.7 tag and latest CPython 3 tag in the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, I'm the author and founder at Plasticity (YCS17) and built this for some internal use cases our startup. This is actually a Work-in-Progress and not meant to be released yet, but it seems like someone has found it online. I will re-submit this here when it is ready as a Show HN given the interest, shoot me an e-mail at email@example.com if you would like to be kept up to date!

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks like a dead project that just bundles together the built-in sqlite3 And another wrapper library APSW which itself is more active than this project. Why is this on hn?

<comment><USER11> No commits in 9 months, "looks like a dead project".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any features in this library you'd like to see standard library's sqlite3 [1]? Maybe a PEP [2, python enhancement proposal] could do it.

[1] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html)

[2] [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/)

<comment><USER13> In the standard library? Probably nothing.

But if someone published an alternative APSW wheel with JSON1, ICU, and FTS5 enabled, I'd be happy.

<comment><USER14> I'm the APSW author. The binary builds for Windows are distributed with those extensions all compiled in, although my doc needs some updating. It is also only a single flag for other platforms to include all extensions during compilation. What can I do?

<comment><USER7> Whats the hold back to getting it via pip install via a wheel? I'm curious (happy APSW user here). Its not well elaborated from what I could find. This is something I would love to help with but not sure where to start, as I'm not sure where in the process of doing the builds it falls down.

Would Cython help, perhaps?

<comment><USER14> Cython wouldn't help. The reason[1] is in the docs.

I already do Windows builds[2] - 21, becoming 23 in next release so that isn't a difficulty.

The problem is tying all this together in a way that is useful, with sensible defaults and appropriate tools. APSW supports python versions going back 16 years! I welcome discussion at python-sqlite[3]

[1] [https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/download.html#easy- install...](https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/download.html#easy-install-pip- pypi)

[2] [https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/download.html#source- and-b...](https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/download.html#source-and-binaries)

[3] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/python- sqlite](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/python-sqlite)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > SQLite is extremely reliable and durable for large amounts of data (up to > 140TB). It is considered one of the most well-engineered and well-tested > software solutions today, with 711x more test code than implementation code.

I keep seeing this statement. Why is it considered one of the most well- engineered software?

<comment><USER5> About the well-tested bit: Per it's own documentation, SQLite has a massive test suite. [*Not all of] the test suite is actually open source though, so the overlap between commenters selling you on how well tested SQLite is and those that have seen how the sausage is made is probably [close to] zero.

However, pointing this or any of the other practical shortcomings of SQLite out on hacker news is blasphemy and will invariably get you downvoted into oblivion by people who (apparently) never ran into them.

<comment><USER16> What are some other shortcomings of SQLite? I'm genuinely curious even though the below probably sounds like some text from the ~Rust~ Sqlite evangelism strike force.

With the default settings which I semi-affectionately refer to as paranoid mode, an untuned database can start to have worse performance after getting 500,000+ records going. Then things like indexes, RediSQL, and WAL mode start being more necessary rather than just best-practices.

But if you set your pragmas correctly and so on, SQLite scales up just fine. I haven't done a large scale Sqlite base simply due to caution around needing to use a 'real' database in production like SQL server or Postgres, Maria etc. Sqlite is excellent for ephemeral databases to be created, seeded with test data, run tests against, and deleted in repeatable automated testing.

Based on the link to the Expensify article, it sounds like Sqlite can scale up even better than Sql server under some circumstances.

But I have barely tried using it in production because of that aforementioned caution. What are some pitfalls to watch out for?

<comment><USER17> the elephant in the room with SQLite is that they refuse to support most forms of ALTER TABLE, that is, to be able to change the structure of a schema.

Their rationalization for this is that the way SQLite stores data, this is more efficiently performed by simply creating a new table and copying all the rows from the old table into the new one, and that one would want to batch all the table changes together rather than emitting individual ALTER statemnts.

from the POV of people who make tools like my own Alembic Migrations, this is an annoyingly insufficient answer because the logistics of recreating table schemas and copying data over is much more complicated than just emitting an ALTER directive. I'd like if SQLite had at least the ability to be _extended_ to support a third party "ALTER" plugin that would under the hood run the intricacies of copying the tables around, rather than pushing this out to the tool creators. It doesn't really matter in most cases, for the use cases used by SQLite, that ALTER would be inefficient.

instead, my users bugged me for years to solve this problem and I have to maintain this thing [https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/batch.html](https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/batch.html) which I mostly hate completely.

SQLite's typing model is also very idiosyncratic and is based on a naming convention approach, which I think most users of SQLite don't understand very well, because it works in a completely strange way based on looking for substrings inside of the completely arbitrary names you can assign to types. I can create a column with the datatype ELEPHINT and that is a legitimate datatype which will store integers. there's also the "INTEGER PRIMARY KEY " / "INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT" silliness but that's a relatively mild poor API compared to things MySQL does all over the place, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its supports 'Remote Streaming over HTTP' without explaining what that means. Maybe someone here knows?

<comment><USER19> From what i saw in the source code, it's a feature that lets sqlite open a database file stored on a web server. There is a class in the code HTTPVFS [1] that proxies sqlite's filesystem operations to http requests.

[1]:[https://github.com/plasticityai/supersqlite/blob/01e54bbb829...](https://github.com/plasticityai/supersqlite/blob/01e54bbb829a9441627c416342b1f1e50f94333e/supersqlite/__init__.py#L1203)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title is misleading. It needs to add something like `python-library`. I thought they supercharged sqlite itself.

<comment><USER9> Hi I'm the author, see my parent comment in the thread. This is still a WIP. You're right that it's mostly a Python library, but when it's released, it will actually be released with pre-built native static SQLite libraries that can be linked into any C application, so it is actually supercharged SQLite itself :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > SQLite is extremely reliable and durable for large amounts of data (up to > 140TB).

This has not been our experience. Our experience is that it sort of bogs down around 12GB in file size. linux box, ext3/4, spinning disk (not SSD)

<comment><USER9> Hi @jgalt, I'm the author of this library, and we've been using it to serve extremely large files over ~130GB at Plasticity (YCS17) for AI model data! Shoot me an email firstname.lastname@example.com and if you'd like to chat, but it should remain extremely responsive even at that file size.

<comment><USER21> Thanks may take you up on that after running some new tests. It was years ago we had performance issues (approx 3-4), so will see if time has healed all wounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been toying with the idea of using SQLite as a data exchange format instead of JSON or XML. I can't stand navigating through complex JSON trees, I want to just use SQL queries. Has anyone else tried this?

<comment><USER23> Works well if your data is big and doesn't have to be read on a web browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How accurate is this statement? "SQLite is faster than nearly every other database". It links to a page that's decades old.

</comment><comment><USER25> The title would be better as "SuperSQLite: a supercharged SQLite library for Python".</comment>


Aviary's entire suite of editing tools is now free - <AUTHOR> http://aviary.com/blog/posts/free-online-editing#2

<comment><USER2> I have to wonder what the logic is behind abandoning what I assume is a primary revenue stream. Does anyone know what their plan is?

<comment><USER3> This from the blog they wrote:

As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone.

We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone - not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues opportunities to other exciting areas that don't limit individuals in any way. We are excited at the opportunity to stay true to our mission. Not many companies are so fortunate.

<comment><USER4> They really must have an ace up their sleeve. This seems both illogical and suicidal. They had a product people were willing to pay for, and in the name of some higher ideal they are abandoning a model that was shown to work.

If they really wanted to open up their tools to more people, they could very well have adjusted the pricing model within their current, working business model. Not throw the whole thing out in the name of persuing an un-proven model.

I have a hard time believing the VC's were all on board with this move. It's not simply risky, it's _unnecessarily_ risky, which is the worst type of risk for a startup to incur. (They already have enough risk as it is.)

Edit: Note, I'm not trying to say that what they are doing _is_ the wrong move -- only that since it is so apparently unnecessarily risky from the outside they must really have something big planned that has a much bigger upside for them in the long run.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. A lifestyle business is not acceptable for a VC model - they only invest in businesses that operate in large markets and can take these markets by storm. My guess is that the founders realized that they cannot create a scalable business by charging for the products - not enough people would be willing to pay for them. However, they _could_ take the market by storm if their products were free. From a VC's point of view this makes perfect sense because a lifestyle business (despite how great it is) does not justify a VC investment.

<comment><USER6> I can see that viewpoint, although it does sort of play into the old stereotypes of VCs. Ditch a proven revenue stream and give the product away for free? Sure, we'll make it up on volume!

<comment><USER5> Well, I hear what you're saying, but I think more often than not people are simplifying it. The way VCs operate is really a consequence of liquid financial markets. If I have a large amount of capital, I can invest it into treasuries and get a small return at zero risk (zero in a sense that if the U.S. government defaults the entire world economy will go to hell anyway). So, it just doesn't make any sense for people to invest into high risk low return businesses, and lifestyle startups tend to fall into this category. It seems that the decision has been made implicitly by the way modern financial markets are structured, and hasn't really been made by the VCs themselves.

This is why I'm a bit skeptical of the "new breed" VCs that have a different business model (invest less money into companies that potentially target smaller markets). It just doesn't make any sense from the financial perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think the web-based graphic editor time has come yet. The user experience is not great. I have to wait for over a minute to start editing an image.

<comment><USER6> For simple stuff that I once might've done in MS Paint I've already switched almost exclusively to using <http://www.canvaspaint.org/>, both because it's really quick, and because File->Save saves to a URL, so you don't even have the extra uploading step before sharing your quick sketch/diagram.

I agree that Aviary's tools, being much more full-featured, are pushing what can be reasonably done on the web currently without it being painful for the user. But I think the model is a pretty good one, and a matter of time plus perhaps optimization: something as responsive as canvaspaint.org that was more like a modern image editor would be a winner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In their 2 minute pitch video (on the homepage) they say over and over again how people shouldn't use photoshop. Even the first line is "do you want to be a photoshop guru but...". And how does it end? "so don't burn cash and harddrive space on photoshop". Really, that's the best they can come up with?

If complaining about their competition is their best strategy... well then they deserve to fail.

<comment><USER9> A price of £630 seems worth mentioning to me.</comment></comment>


Microsoft office in greece attacked with bomb - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57461840-71/microsoft-office-in-greece-attacked-with-bomb/

<comment><USER2> "This was the work of people frustrated that they still don't know the price or launch date of Microsoft's new Surface tablet."

I hope that's meant to be some sort of strange attempt at a joke...not that it seems appropriate.

<comment><USER3> Yes why microsoft I could seen Greeks geting upset at Mercenees, Porsche or Audi Dealers.

Could be some hard left Terorist group reactivating but an od choice of target even so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > (Germany) seems to be doing much to force the Greeks into performing hideous > acts of financial restraint, after the Greek economy imploded like Microsoft > Vista. The more insensitive might therefore wonder whether German companies > might have been more logical targets.

I thought Germany is bailing Greece out?

<comment><USER5> Germany is forcing Greece to accept punitive austerity measures that will throw more people out of work, worsen its deficit/debt situation and further depress its economy.

Why Germany is insisting on fiscal policies that will actually frustrate its own efforts to bail out struggling Euro economies is anyone's guess.

<comment><USER6> (Disclaimer: German)

"Austerity" is a media invention. Or what does "austerity" mean for you? The word is probably the most used word in the crisis, which is never explained by facts. What are those "punitive austerity measures"? This is not a rhetoric question, I'd like to know.

Germany (and others, Netherlands, Finland etc.) want taxes to be paid (could end the crisis real quick) and structural reforms to prevent bottomless pits and enable growth in the future.

Greece was not able to take 15 billions EUR over the last years of infrastructure money from the European Union because of a local administration that just does not work and is extremely corrupt. The European Union was supporting Greece growth with money for innovation projects, infrastructure money etc. over the last decade, but Greece was not able to run the necessary projects.

I was managing European IT projects 10 years ago. Poland did show how to take EU money and prosper. They were on EVERY IT project I was part of, payed every company and university that took EU money additional money, helped get projects into Poland etc. They did everything right, now - and it was of course not only EU money but a very strong spirit and enthusiasm in Poland - they prosper from what they did since they joined the EU (and before).

The crisis is kind of sad for Greece, because their productivity grew strongly in the last 10 years (contrary to Spain or Italy) and the crisis is often attributed to "lazy" Greeks.

<comment><USER7> Yanis Varoufakis, who left Greece and we now know him here as Valve Software's economist-in-residence, gave a good explanation what austerity will mean for Greece. Not to mention where the German taxpayers' money is really going. (<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S120621>)

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previously discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166545></comment>


EuroDjangoCon Presentations - <AUTHOR> http://eurodjangocon.pbworks.com/Presentations <comment><USER2> Good conference - Too heavy on scalability.

Best slides from the bunch IMHO:

James Tauber's Django Patterns - an in depth overview of common patterns found throughout a Django Project:

[http://eldarion.com/talks/2009/05/eurodjangocon_djangopatter...](http://eldarion.com/talks/2009/05/eurodjangocon_djangopatterns.pdf)

Alex Gaynor's Form's presentation included many interesting ideas including a few 'ohhhh' moments using some functional hotness to get things done fast:

[http://www.slideshare.net/kingkilr/forms-getting-your- moneys...](http://www.slideshare.net/kingkilr/forms-getting-your-moneys-worth)

Paul Smith's talk on the EveryBlock stack dives into map tile generation and rendering using Django.

[http://www.slideshare.net/pauladamsmith/the-web-map-stack- on...](http://www.slideshare.net/pauladamsmith/the-web-map-stack-on-django)

Simon Willison's talk was excellent though you might not get as much out of the slides. Turtles all the way down!

<http://www.slideshare.net/simon/django-heresies>

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there going to be videos of these presentations?

<comment><USER4> Yes: <http://twitter.com/djangocon/status/1637612685></comment></comment>