Dear NoSQL: "SQL-isn't-scalable" is a lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Getting_Real_about_NoSQL_and_the_SQL_Isnt_Scalable_Lie/ <comment><USER2> This is a very reasoned, well-written article. While I like the idea that the NoSQL movement is questioning some core database assumptions, I have often been uncomfortable with the meme that "SQL doesn't scale". Scalability is always a function of your circumstance. This article makes a good point that the group of people for which SQL doesn't scale need another option (internet startups with little cash and massive server load). While that case gets a lot of attention around here, it's important that people not try to extrapolate that experience to other areas of IT.

<comment><USER3> What the NoSQL "movement" is doing is questioning some basic axioms of architecture and operations that may no longer hold in the modern era. There are many aspects to data, how it is used, how it should be stored & accessed, and what is or it not important within the set of available data. The RDBMS cabal set a particular set of standards (ACID) that were a good match for a lot of the early "big data" systems and the computing infrastructure of the time, but times change. As more people are bringing new data sets, new uses and access patterns for this data, and the computing infrastructure is changing from large servers to swarms of small systems the options for storing and accessing this data are also changing. I don't know many in the NoSQL crowd who are actually opposed to a RDBMS as a solution, but it is not necessarily the first choice for any problem; most of the people in this group seem to start by considering the data and the application and then picking and choosing the characteristics of the data system that will be used to meet these needs. The massive and highly distributed systems get a lot of attention (and they are almost always NoSQL systems) but that does not mean that alternative data systems do not have a place up and down the IT stack, nor does it mean that a RDBMS is not a good option for some situations.

<comment><USER4> _The RDBMS cabal set a particular set of standards (ACID) that were a good match for a lot of the early "big data" systems and the computing infrastructure of the time, but times change_

Times change, but in the sense of adding additional systems with new requirements.

The existing systems have not gone away, and are not going anywhere. In fact there are more than ever of them around. I certainly still want my bank to run a system that has ACID transactions. Likewise my mobile phone's billing system, utilities bill, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how many people in the NoSQL and SQL doesnt scale crowd either have never met a truly competent, much less good DBA (trust me, they are very very rare) or decided it could not scale because they applied their programmatic and procedural logic to a tool that operates in a very different (SET based) paradigm.

<comment><USER6> I've always thought good DBAs were the rarest thing in the industry. And the most valuable.

<comment><USER3> "Good" DBAs share digs with santa and the tooth fairy, but competent and opinionated DBAs are not as hard to find as you might think. Just whisper 'NoSQL' and they seem to crawl out of the woodwork :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Such a platform can yield very satisfactory performance for tens or hundreds of thousands of active users"

There are 253 million Internet users in China alone. What happens when your site needs to scale from 0.001% of them using the site simultaneously to needing to scale to 1% of them using the site simultaneously? Within a month?

"Of course if you index poorly or create some horrendous joins"

Which in the Twitter and Facebook cases is exactly what they have to do on many of their requests. As I've personally found out, relying on a database to do a join across a social network graph is a recipe for disaster. One day you'll be woken up because your database's query planner decided to switch from using a hash join to doing a full table scan against 10s of millions of users on every request. Then, you'll be left either trying to tweak the query plan back to working order, or actually doing what you should've done in the first place: architect around message queues and custom daemons more suited to your query load.

"Even with billions upon billions of help tickets."

At 50 million tweets a day, Twitter would hit 18 billion tweets within a year. Good luck architecting a database system to handle that kind of load. That is, one in which the database system is serving all of the requests (including Twitter streams) and isn't just being used for data warehousing.

"Such a solution — even on a stodgy old RDBMS — is scalable far beyond any real world need"

The disconnect here is this guy's needs are not the needs of a lot of us who are actively looking at alternatives. He is simply not familiar with the problem domain.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the original poster was making the argument that Twitter should run fine on a SQL database; in fact, I think he seemed to indicate the opposite. Namely, that large, nominally non-relational datasets that can afford to lose a little data here and there, or at the very least just take awhile to save it, are really what you need for serving up a big, fresh pile o' Social Networking.

So, bringing up Twitter or Facebook really doesn't make a good case against RDBMSes as a good tool in the toolbox -- they've got a very unique set of needs that don't apply to a lot of rest of the world. So, of course, SQL isn't the best solution when you're dealing with trillions of rows of data, and don't really want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the infrastructure required to guarantee that you never go down, and never lose a tweet.

And keep in mind, RDMBS helped them get to point where they could enjoy these problems; Twitter probably wouldn't exist in all its current glory if they spent a year building it to be 'scalable' before launching.

I think the reason that a lot of people end up hating RDBMS and SQL is because of one-or-more of (a) their only experience is with MySQL, which really isn't that awesome; (b) they've been burned by bad schema design; or, (c) they don't really get relational algebra or set theory.

For an example of 'bad schema design', I once worked at a company that had indices on nearly every column of their DB, even though almost none of these ever got queried. There was one database table with _five_ indices on three columns, and of course this was the table that logged _every single HTTP request_ processed by the front end. Including API calls. Did I mention that this table was never queried by any part of the application?

It was a poor design decision, and sure enough, it completely torpedoed performance. But the problem wasn't the RDBMS, because it did exactly what it was told to do, no matter how asinine.

So, in short, RDBMS aren't the solution to all problems, but they do solve a lot of problems adequately. NoSQL databases also serve an important role in the toolbox, but are much more narrowly-focused.

<comment><USER7> You make some good points.

However, the original author's point basically boiled down to: if you define scalability as the problems you can scale an RDBMS to solve, RDBMS systems are scalable. I'm not big on arguing the finer points of someone's tautology.

The particulars of a situation determine the scalability of a solution. For a lot of us working at web scale or on interesting new problems, an RDBMS won't scale. Sometimes it won't scale within the constraints we have, but sometimes it won't scale because we won't be able to build the system we're trying to build. His example of a company-internal billing system really only served to highlight the disconnect between the crowd following along well-trod ground, and the people out front doing innovative work.

<comment><USER9> _"[SQL deal for when] "Data consistency and reliability is a primary concern"."_

I'm curious: lets say you have a tweeter scale app that must satisfy the consistency and reliability as a primary requirement. Is there really a NoSQL solution that can take you there without (effectively) raising the costs to the point that a scalable (money not an object) SQL solution would provide? (Kinda like how the difficult to extract North Sea oil became economically viable once oil prices crashed through a certain ceiling?)

<comment><USER10> The essence of NoSQL is that it gets its scalability by giving up consistency and reliability. Trying to run NYSE or Visa on NoSQL is pointless.

<comment><USER3> Well, "reliability" can be sliced in a couple of different ways since that term can cover both the A & P in the CAP options and it can also mean the elimination of single points of failure and an architecture that can degrade gracefully when components fail. Some NoSQL systems let you select the mix of consistency and reliability you need at a rather fine-grained level -- one thing that does distinguish these systems from the traditional RDBMS is that you are almost never in an all or nothing situation regarding any particular part of the data space unless you explicitly want to create that choice to enable other options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought his example really telling.

Say that his internal help ticket tracking system was built for IBM, one of the largest corporations out there with 300,000 employees. 300k users is _tiny_ for a consumer app. We had more than that when I was volunteering for a Harry Potter fanfiction website. Even if he was working at the largest company on earth by employee count (Wal-Mart), he'd still have fewer users than we had for Harry Potter fanfiction. And usually employees don't submit more than one or two help tickets a day, while Harry Potter fans tend to view a forum thread every minute or so.

It really hits home how consumer data processing has changed the game for data management. When I was working in the financial industry, we dealt with about 50GB of data/day coming off the exchanges. I thought that was a lot. But at Google, there's _terabytes_ per day - at least two orders of magnitude more - and the total volume of financial transactions is basically rounding error on the data we handle.

It makes sense that with this exponential explosion in data, we'd need different techniques to handle it. Quite likely, RDBMSes do scale for the scale he's talking about. But a bunch of industries have opened up within the last ten years that require several orders of magnitude more data, and it's naive to think that just because it works for a corporate help desk or POS system, it'll work for a system that logs every page view and every action for millions of users.

<comment><USER12> >300k users is tiny for a consumer app.

Active users, not the total number of users in the user table. People grossly overestimate the scale of most web properties, where the number of active users is far lower than you likely imagine.

>But a bunch of industries have opened up within the last ten years that require several orders of magnitude more data, and it's naive to think that just because it works for a corporate help desk or POS system, it'll work for a system that logs every page view and every action for millions of users.

Strangely it says nothing of the sort. Yet here, again, you've used Google as the example. How many Googles are there? How much does that apply to about 99.999% of people who deal with databases?

Yet it always appears as the example.

<comment><USER13> > How many Googles are there?

There's tens of thousands of alternative search engines out there, see this for a sample from '07:

[http://www.altsearchengines.com/2007/10/29/the- top-10-list-o...](http://www.altsearchengines.com/2007/10/29/the-top-10-list- of-search-engine-lists/)

Most of them fail, but there's a lot of people trying to solve Big Data problems on a shoe string budget. That's part of the disconnect, us NoSQL folks are excited by having cheap solutions to problems we wouldn't be able to afford to tackle otherwise, whilst SQL folks are are shaking their heads at the mess we'll have to clean up if our prototypes do become successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While SQL can scale, I think this argument is a little spurious.

I truly dislike the NoSQL stance of "never SQL;" it has its place, and its place isn't necessarily at the twitters or the facebooks of today. SQL scales very well with datasets that make sense for RDBMS. CRUD style applications. Core business apps. Data that doesn't necessarily need to be mined furiously. Trying to shoehorn, say, a high-volume message system or intensely self- referential (graph) dataset into an RDBMS is a recipe for disaster, however. Many of the performance issues people see with RDBMS seem to stem from this, I believe.

If your app is hugely real-time datadriven and the datamining (if necessary) can be offloaded to cron jobs, a K/V store is great. And can scale very quickly and relatively cheaply.

If you're doing something hugely relational that, if loaded into a SQL server would require an immense number of self-joins (I'm looking at you, graph analysis) that must be done in real-time and not offloaded to a cron job, a graph database is probably the way to go. They're harder to scale to a huge amount of data, but certain datamining tasks are made much easier - and don't require distributed map-reduce execution. Scaling will get much easier once some systems come out that use k-means (or similar) to cluster and shard the data. That kind of smart scaling would be nigh impossible on either a KV store or a traditional RDBMS. Google gets away with it with BigTable because they can throw so much cheap iron at it - a truly brute force solution. The same solution that needs to be taken with RDBMS when you shoehorn datasets into it that don't make sense.

Emil Eifrem (Neo4J) said it best in his presentation ( [http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation- graph...](http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation-graphs- neo4j-teh-awesome) ): NoSQL doesn't mean Never SQL, it just means Not Only SQL.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think NoSQL people usually claim that SQL isn't scalable, just that it's unnecessarily complicated to scale.

You generally have to partition your data horizontally and thus give up many of the features that SQL has to offer: ACID transactions, unique keys, auto- increment primary keys, etc.

Then you have to come up with your own solutions to replace those features: eventual consistency, UUID keys, map/reduce, etc. And these happen to be exactly the kind of features that many NoSQL databases can give you out-of- the-box.

<comment><USER10> _You generally have to partition your data horizontally and thus give up many of the features that SQL has to offer_

There are plenty of databases that will partition data without giving up any SQL features, but they cost money.

<comment><USER16> > There are plenty of databases that will partition data without giving up any > SQL features, but they cost money.

They also either rely on a single huge SAN for storage (single point of failure + expensive as hell) like Oracle RAC, or they require specialized gear like infiniband to reduce intra-node latency like Exadata (starting price: seven figures) or they're analytics databases that are designed for huge queries with latencies to match like Vertica, ParAccel, etc. (Think minutes between data being loaded and being available to query.)

I'll take NoSQL, thanks.

<comment><USER17> Would would the need for "specialized gear like infiniband to reduce intra- node latency" be limited to parallel databases? (I assume you mean "inter- node"...)

<comment><USER10> This whole discussion is about parallel databases since that's the only way to scale beyond the performance of one machine.

<comment><USER17> Well, replace "parallel databases" with your favorite term for the parallel databases that fall outside NoSQL (VoltDB, Exadata, shared MySQL, etc). My point being that the alleged need for high-speed interconnects is orthogonal to SQL vs. NoSQL.

<comment><USER16> But it's not. Because SQL databases (strictly speaking any requiring strong consistency... which is mostly RDBMSes) are highly latency sensitive, where NoSQL databases like Cassandra design around that by saying "hey, you could not see the most recent write for a few ms, unless you request a higher consistency level." And most apps are fine with that. As a bonus you get multi-datacenter replication with basically the same code, another place most RDBMSes are weak.

It's a classic design hack -- redefining your goal as an easier problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was anybody else dumbstruck by the article's first comment by this bright chap, "Jeff"?

 _Brilliant. I've forwarded this to my team._

 _We make a tax solution and I've been dealing with vague "we should use NoSQL" comments from a few of the less capable members of the team._

If his team members read all the way to the comments it's going to be very awkward tomorrow at work.

<comment><USER19> Well if some of the dumbshits I work with at the White House read this I'll be in trouble too but I don't think that's going to happen.

Care to buy some classified material?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reading this article was a bit annoying. Right from the start: "I work in the financial industry [...] I worked in the insurance, telecommunication, and power generation industries." I was thinking only - you're not even supposed to look at nosql from that perspective - there's nothing for you there... just go away.

It doesn't support transactions and acid most of the time. There's no "we pay $xxxM for the support and blame you for everything" company in nosql products. It's not the same workload as you'd expect from kv/document-store used as a webpage backend.

One of the few serious "nosql" databases for enterprises like that is Berkeley DB - it's got what they need. I'm not sure why did he write that blog post... it just stated the obvious, but in form of a rant.

The funny thing though is - Berkeley DB is exactly what NoSQL is about... and it is used for local reliable storage in many big enterprises. Replication, logging, transactions, etc. - and it's just a kv-store really.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure why, these days, anyone would choose Berkeley DB over something like sqlite.

<comment><USER20> BDB has proper transactions, provides the same type-safety as sqlite (i.e. none), doesn't have to go through abstractions like JDBC (overkill for sqlite), is backed by Oracle, has pure java implementation, has replication.

Sqlite has columns and can search based on them. It can also save you a couple of lines on manual joins. Does it provide something more?

(although tbh, I'd take Tokyo Tyrant over both of them - has columns, writer lock + server-side scripts instead of transactions, same model of replication as BDB)

<comment><USER22> The berkeley interfaces that come out of the box with e.g. Python don't have any of the advanced features that the sqlite interface has, e.g. concurrent access. Any advanced usage of Berkeley DB is far more complex than sqlite, e.g. try opening a database so that multiple users can read/write it. With sqlite, no extra steps are necessary if you have an occasional separate process that needs to access the database (obviously it's not built for efficient concurrent access).

Ad-hoc SQL queries on the sqlite database are also a huge win. Much better than defining your own data structures and then tools to read/write them.

I don't know you mean by "proper" transactions. Sqlite has transactions for DML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish that people would understand that people who disagree with them are not 'liars' but are instead people who disagree with them.

It is possible to honestly disagree on a technical issue, you know. And it is good professional and personal practice to only accuse someone of lying when you are quite sure that they are deliberately telling you something they know to be false...

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the article, but the first comment left on it is telling:

 _I've been dealing with vague "we should use NoSQL" comments from a few of the less capable members of the team._

This appears to be a common attitude of development managers in the corporate world: that anyone who starts suggesting anything vaguely "new fangled" is surely a naïve novice.. rather than being good at picking up and investigating new technologies.

<comment><USER21> Unfortunately, managers who aren't defensive about new technologies end up working with XML databases! Not all new technologies are better and certainly the benefits of NoSQL are up for debate.

<comment><USER24> XML databases are exactly the sort of glossy new technology that stuck-in-the- mud managers _did_ pick up on.. mostly because they respond to glossy vendor pamphlets, sales calls, and trade show pitches than the grassroots findings of their underlings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My favorite part of the rant is the suggestion that the nosql alternative to spending millions on a ginormous RDBMS was throwing away throughput by using Amazon AWS. I guess any argument becomes easier to make when you define the other side by its incompetence.

The only valid point made seems to be that vertical scaling of a RDBMS can be a multi-million dollar exercise.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, what you call incompetence a lot of other people call best practice.

<comment><USER3> If throughput and transaction/analysis speed is a requirement then AWS is not the answer -- anyone who suggests otherwise has never used it for anything larger than a toy dataset. I am currently migrating a large data analysis system (20+ TB running over about 500 EC2 hadoop workers) to a dedicated cluster because the internal EC2 latency reached a tipping point in our analysis runs. If you have the dough to spend on a big vertical system you can spend half as much on a dedicated cluster running a NoSQL solution and probably meet the required spec. The original article was comparing a Porsche Cayenne to a bicycle; the bicycle works for some problems and in certain cases it (or a fleet of them) can solve the problem better, but it was a dishonest strawman comparison for the subject at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was really with this article, right up to this:

> If you lose a Status Update, or several thousand of them, it will likely go > unnoticed.

What? If Facebook lost half of their photos, or of Twitter lost a few thousand tweets, there'd be riots in the streets. Okay, maybe not quite that much unrest, but still.

<comment><USER21> I've run a few medium sized sites (with traffic most people here would drool over) and I would say that people are much more forgiving of slow pages than lost data. Losing a few forum posts would cause riots in the streets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious how services like Amazon's RDS will change this perception.

A SQL database may be difficult to scale, but it is something that can be largely encapsulated and outsourced. If Amazon RDS, or some other product, handles the hardware and software configuration, then the developers can just focus on the application portion of it.

This isn't to say that scalability is guaranteed, it's still important to optimize queries and the data structure. Also, there are problems where NoSQL is simply the better and/or cheaper option.

But if these services can encapsulate a lot of the difficult part of scaling SQL, it still makes SQL a very attractive and powerful option for most(?) problems.

<comment><USER10> RDS doesn't scale at all. The performance of RDS won't exceed that of MySQL running on a "Quadruple Extra Large" instance (because that's what RDS is).

<comment><USER26> Ok, but how about a service taking whatever scalable SQL systems the financial or pharmaceutical industry use, even Oracle, Postgres, or Microsoft SQL server, and then selling it as a service similar to RDS?

My point is, I think there is an opportunity providing enterprise-level SQL scalability on a per-use basis. It won't replace NoSQL systems, because there are some problems where they're clearly better, but it could be done and provide relatively-affordable, scalable SQL access to startups.

<comment><USER10> Enterprisey databases are just too expensive for the HN crowd; making them into a service can't fix that.

Azure might come close, but I don't know what performance it can provide.

<comment><USER27> Azure doesn't run a lot of SQL Server functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One complaint that I have with SQL databases that you don't often hear elsewhere is that they are very complex. People often use them where a much simpler solution would suffice because they are what people are used to using. All else equal, we should choose the simple solution over the complex one, because it is less likely to fail and easier to extend.

</comment><comment><USER29> The word "butthurt" comes to mind when thinking of this article. ;D

</comment><comment><USER30> maybe SQL scales, ACID probably don't

<comment><USER8> I would wager that SQL, and ACID, will scale larger than many startups will ever actually need.

<comment><USER31> True, but my sincere hope is to outgrow Postgres someday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> SQL has, by modern standards, a shitty API. The DSL is an ugly mess and it's extremely difficult to reason about performance, especially when joins are involved.

Ergo, some not-by-choice SQL users only scratch the surface and use common features: INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT, also known as CRUD.

Ergo, it becomes easy (although wrong) to conclude that SQL isn't doing very complicated work behind the scenes and that it's just another overcomplicated dinosaur POS like the Windows operating system, one that remains popular only because it's a standard.

Thus, a lot of undue hate gets directed at SQL with little attention paid to the subtleties of what it does extremely well and where it behaves poorly.

I think "SQL isn't scalable" is in the same league as "Java isn't concurrent". It can be, if you have learned the necessary skills and are willing to deal with a bit of pain. Is Clojure astronomically better for concurrency? Sure, but people can and do scale with SQL databases, and they do this in large part because there are problems for which SQL is the appropriate solution.

<comment><USER33> Why are SQL and RDBMSes conflated? Couldn't one database speak both SQL and something else if it wanted to? In the same way that Clojure and Java both end up as JVM bytecode, couldn't SQL just become another layer on the encoding stack, above something simpler?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: "sql does so scale! if you throw $millions of hardware at it." yawn.

<comment><USER34> The article points out that it has _already_ scaled with hundres of kilobucks or even millions.

However, it _also_ points out much lower-end hardware solutions that cost under $10k but perform much better than the largest EC2 instance, for I/O.

ETA: This is why I tend to roll my eyes at the notion of "commodity" hardware. The article's low-end array is 400MB/s, but rolling ones own can yield over twice that for the same or lower price tag. All this _well_ before reaching the unscalable cliff of enterprise pricing.

<comment><USER35> Yes, but there's a big difference between a 400MB/sec. supported storage array for < $10K, and a garage built "roll your own" storage array that can do 800MB/sec. for half the price.

The main difference is that, even in startup companies, you have a supported solution and can call someone at 2 am when your storage dies and expect to find replacement parts and support. Good luck trying to drive to Fry's and buy replacement hard drives for a server that was built 2 years ago by someone that no longer works there.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, right. I have worked on storage systems that run into the tens of megabucks and even with pricey "4 hour" support we were often SOL when we actually needed the company to live up to its claims. The different with the garage-built system is that I sometimes have components sitting around my desk or that can be pillaged from a VPs desktop to repair the system -- try doing that when the specialized disk controller on your gold-plated solution goes tits-up.

<comment><USER35> Totally incorrect. Ok, go ahead and build me a home built storage array with 1TB SATA drives off the shelf. Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.

What's that? You can't buy that exact drive so now your homemade RAID 5 is running in degraded mode and you hope it will stay up long enough to copy your data off onto another system? Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.

In the enterprise, we pay big bucks because we want to KNOW that we can call an 800 number and get an exact replacement hard drive, even if they stopped selling them 3 years ago.

<comment><USER34> * Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.*

With arrays I build, I don't have onerous constraints like requiring identical size[1]. Moreover, if I'm not already already retiring disks at the 3 year mark, I'm very much remiss in my duties.

* Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.*

We're not talking about a few bucks. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's enough to pay a salary for those 3 years as well as having replaced with something less than a couple generations old.

[1] I assumethat's what you mean, since true geometry is all but impossible to detect on modern drives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Object-Oriented Programming – The Trillion Dollar Disaster - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/codeiq/object-oriented-programming-the-trillion-dollar-disaster-%EF%B8%8F-92a4b666c7c7 <comment><USER2> This has already been mentioned in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495597)

A lot of very insightful comments there.</comment>


A Fully Automated Society - Current Arguments Are Oversimplified - <AUTHOR> http://standardfuture.com/

<comment><USER2> It is patently impossible to discuss social engineering or the automation of a society, i.e., the engineering of social automation systems (silent weapons) on a national or worldwide scale without implying extensive objectives of social control and destruction of human life, i.e., slavery and genocide.

Energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.

All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control. Beyond this remains only one issue: Who will be the beneficiary?

Since energy is the key to all activity on the face of the earth, it follows that in order to attain a monopoly of energy, raw materials, goods, and services and to establixh a world system of slave labor, it is necessary to have a first strike capability in the field of economics. In order to maintain our position, it is necessary that we have absolute first knowledge of the science of control over all economic factors and the first experience at engineering the world economy.

In order to achieve such sovereignty, we must at least achieve this one end: that the public will not make either the logical or mathematical connection between economics and the other energy sciences or learn to apply such knowledge.

This is becoming increasingly difficult to control because more and more businesses are making demands upon their computer programmers to create and apply mathematical models for the management of those businesses.

It is only a matter of time before the new breed of private programmer/economists will catch on to the far reaching implications of the work begun at Harvard in 1948. The speed with which they can communicate their warning to the public will largely depend upon how effective we have been at controlling the media, subverting education, and keeping the public distracted with matters of no real importance.</comment>


Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/13/MN1I1KJFNV.DTL <comment><USER2> I love that they are profitable, growing rapidly, and generally kicking butt. My biggest wish for them is to start taking market share from Adobe by making their website toolkit more flexible and advanced. When a professional designer can get everything they want in a browser, no extra software, and changes are real-time...for me, they win.

<comment><USER3> We actually just did that! [http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer- focused-on-de...](http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer-focused-on- design.html)

When we launched the Designer Platform, we completely revamped our theming engine to be super flexible and introduced a pretty cool web-based IDE with real-time preview of HTML and CSS changes (and pop-out functionality for dual- monitor development).

It's a huge focus for us going forward -- we'd love to hear your feedback on whether the new changes allow you to do everything you'd like to, or if not, where we can improve.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I think the market for Designers is huge - that's basically all we're focused on at Decal is the deployment model and integrating with designers' existing workflows.

It's hard trying to make people realise that we're not "DIY" though :) I've just come up with the phrase "DIY for Designers" which I think captures it pretty well. Designers have, for too long, been punished by dynamic web deployments (the "big 3" Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress) - time to disrupt!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love Weebly. My only complaint is this I couldn't find any professional looking templates for a dance studio. Everything looks like a blog template.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome product and awesome progress from a small dedicated team with a ton of determination and passion! These are the kind of stories that inspire others(myself included) to work those extra hours on their idea. Keep up the great work Weebly team!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of Weebly. It's by far the easiest tool to recommend to a new web client. I can build a simple template and then hand over the reins.

</comment><comment><USER8> I didn't realise you guys had taken money from Sequoia - congrats. Could you be the first YCC to go public? I've got high hopes.

<comment><USER3> We're working on it... we certainly have some stiff competition! :)

<comment><USER9> Genuine interest: why is it so important to go public? What does your company win by doing so?

I understand companies who need the one-time cash injection to stay ahead of competition. It doesn't look like you guys need that much. So what is it, then?

<comment><USER8> I can't speak for the Weeblies but in the event that you don't need the capital for growth and you don't plan to be acquired then going public is the only way for founders, investors and employees to see a significant release of capital from the company. You can just take revenues from the company but in many ways going public is lower risk (and obviously releases more capital too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are the domain renewals still $39.95 through Weebly? Maybe if they raised the price on that they could have already built their new office.

<comment><USER3> We add a lot of value on top of the domain name that we think justifies the price (our customers seem to think so too).

If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge.

<comment><USER10> You've surveyed the customers on the domain renewal price compared to GoDaddy and they prefer the $39.95? Or, they are given the option to purchase/renew from GoDaddy at checkout? Or, maybe what they don't know won't hurt them?

"If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge."

Sounds good. Didn't happen - tried to move a domain off the platform after a year. After 3-5 emails with support the domain eventually just expired. Glad it wasn't anything critical - just a simple site I had thrown together for a family member's business which was remade in Joomla.

I think the product is great for many people, the founders sound like nice people. Just unsure if the experience I had trying to get the domain back is a tactic or incompetence/honest mistakes. Of course I hope it's the latter because that'll get fixed.

<comment><USER3> We definitely support transferring domain names out of Weebly. Once you purchase it, it's your domain name. If we didn't do that when you asked, I'm really sorry. That's our mistake and it definitely shouldn't happen. Would you mind emailing me at firstname.lastname@example.com with your account username or email so I can look into the situation and make sure that never happens again?

As far as domain name prices go, we handle a ton of things for you that are otherwise really hard. The domain purchase experience from Weebly compared to GoDaddy is night and day, and we've put a lot of effort into making it extremely simple and hassle free. A lot of people are willing to pay a premium to save them time and hassle with a domain name, but on the off-chance they'd prefer to go directly with another registrar (GoDaddy or otherwise), they are completely free to do so.

<comment><USER10> Hey - no problem. Not like I spent much time on the original site. No need to apologize either - everyone these days loves an apology it seems! (sickening) I thought about it before you responded and my goal isn't to get anyone in CS in trouble or anything or make a big deal of it. Just seeing the article reminded me.

If you really support transferring domains out that's all I was wondering. I was told I would be sent an EPP code to switch registrars and never was. Asked for it to be sent again, then again, did the whole, "Did you check your spam?" exchange of emails, etc. The people I spoke w/ through email seemed genuine. For whatever reason I was just never sent the code and eventually gave up. Probably just honest mistakes - it happens. Anyways, continued success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love that they are profitable and have been for a long time. I've recommended their product to small business novices and they have been impressed with how easy it is to use.

I'd love to see more articles about companies that are profitable and how long/what it took to get there. We are seeing a lot of hype in the consumer/social media space, but it seems to me that it is much harder to be profitable in that space (but also more likely to have a massive exit). It seems that the B2B space offers less risk and reward.

Way to go, Weebly! (disclosure: they are a customer of ours)</comment>


Ask HN: Immigrate from EU to US? - <AUTHOR> How do I immigrate from EU to US ? How difficult is it with changes in US immigration policy ? My general opinion has been that the EU barring Sweden is mostly a blip when it comes to innovation in software. I snapped after today's copyright law. So how do I immigrate ? I dont care if Trump is president, the American economy and innovation seems to be doing just fine. Any suggestions on how to get out of this hot mess ? <comment><USER2> I've done this. It was the worst decision I've ever made. Looking to get out ASAP.

Turns out there's more to life than tech, and you can tech anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Could you elaborate ?

<comment><USER3> 60h is common standard in US, if you are just doing 40h you are being lazy.

Most companies offer 1 week vacation.

Maternity leave is a foreign word to many companies.

Some have a no limit vacation, but the work culture is such that even less people actually take vacations.

Then you get to be tied up to the company regarding healthcare.

Unions in IT, which exist is a couple of European countries, are seen like persona non grata.

There are lots of wonderful things in US, work conditions in tech not necessarily.

<comment><USER4> The amount of anti-American FUD on HN lately is getting absurd.

60h isn't just not common, it's basically non-existent. In my 15 year career across multiple companies in multiple cities and states the average I've witnessed is 35-42 hours a week. If you subtract lunch, coffee breaks, surfing the web it's probably around 25-30 hours of work a week.

Vacation time typically starts at 2 weeks for entry-level workers(plus another 2 weeks of sick/personal time plus another 10-15 holidays) and increases to 4-5 weeks (or 'unlimited') for people with more than a few years experience.

The average software engineer will pay a trivial percent of their salary in health insurance premiums.

If you're stocking shelves or working a cash register or cleaning toilets you're probably better off in the EU than in the US. But if you're a software developer, your quality of life is obviously going to be far higher in the US.

<comment><USER5> Disagree on vacation. Just scan Stackoverflow jobs. Most places cap out at 4 weeks and that's after 10 years.

In a lot of the EU you start with 4/5 weeks rising to 6-8.

Also for some bizarre reason Canada has chosen to replicate America's awful vacation policies. Only difference is there is a min of 2 weeks. US has no min.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be blunt, I don't think you'll find what you're looking for without thinking a bit more about why you feel this way.

What's the problem with your current situation? Is it that your salary is too low? Lack of interesting opportunities? Small development community?

The US tech industry is interesting for a number of reasons, but it's not without it's problems. There are way more companies, higher salaries and more innovation generally. But working conditions can be worse, even at large employers. Housing can be expensive. Healthcare!

There are lots of places in EU countries that are doing interesting things in tech. They don't have quite the same glitz and glamour of FAANG, but you might find something that makes you happy closer to home.

(Disclaimer: I personally _am_ planning to move to the US, but only because my fiancé is a citizen and his family is there. But even having that easy path through immigration does not make the conclusion at all obvious.)

</comment><comment><USER7> \- Easier path is to applying for a job in EU for Google/Facebook/whathaveyou, and then transferring on L1. Google has offices in zurich, london, frankfurt, dublin, etc.

\- If you have phd in a related field, you might even apply for immigration right away (don't quote me on that).

\- Diversity greencard is coming up, you might want to try your chances (but it's a low one).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly I dont have a phd. I guess I'll take option 1. Thanks !

<comment><USER8> If you have a strong skill set, just send resumes out to medium/large tech companies in the US. If it clicks, they might phone interview and possibly bring you in for an interview. Often times companies are desperate for good candidates that they will sponsor the paperwork for a H1B visa. My previous employer did this for two candidates and they turned out very good. Make sure the employer pays for all expenses for the legal stuff. They should also agree to moving expenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Granted that you are not a refugee, what about staying where you are and putting up a fight?

Vote a party who supports freedom of speech and spread the word about why this is important in your country/constituency and so forth?

If this law enhance political and corporate power, I assure you that most likely will be adopted elsewhere in some form or another.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its not the politicians I am worried about. Sadly its the people. No one here protested. With Mozilla's campaigning nothing happened. To stop the law previously Wikipedia had to shutdown. Seems folks here dont really care.

<comment><USER10> Is moving to Trumpland really the solution?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi, Can you elaborate on your desire to leave the EU(/EZ) _altogether_?

From the data I've seen, an increasing number of Americans are actually leaving the U.S and/or giving up citizenship. The reasons seem to range from tax policy to cost of living/quality of living to 'other'.

In aggregate, the economy may _look_ good, but for many individuals things are actually pretty tough. Even those who aren't all that affected by such problems (think journalist writing uber-positive stories about America's "robust economy", politicians, banking officials, etc.,) will acknowledge this albeit mostly in private settings.

Anyway, rather than leave, _wouldn 't it just be easier to employ some sort of strategic corporate structuring?_

<comment><USER12> Most of your post focuses on attacking the US, rather than actually answering the parent's question. I understand why you and others in this thread are choosing to do that, however it's still inappropriate.

> From the data I've seen, an increasing number of Americans are actually > leaving the U.S and/or giving up citizenship.

2017: "Renunciations [of citizenship] for the year fell 5.1 percent, to 5,133"

So far in 2018, that is down another 8% to 10% on an annualized basis.

While the number has climbed over the years, out of ~245 million adults, a mere 5,133 renounced their citizenship last year. A rate near one in 50,000. In a city the size of San Francisco, 17 people will renounce their citizenship in a given year. A trivial figure.

> In aggregate, the economy may look good, but for many individuals things are > actually pretty tough.

> will acknowledge this albeit mostly in private settings.

That's an entirely empty claim. You didn't actually say anything or provide figures. The US economy is in fact every bit as robust as it appears to be. Manufacturing is booming like it hasn't in decades, with persistent employment gains that haven't been seen in 25 years. Wage growth is at a decade high and heading higher.

\- The median personal and household incomes are both at new all-time highs on an inflation adjusted basis.

\- US household balance sheets are in great shape. Debt service payments as a share of disposable income remain near 40 year lows. The household debt to income ratio is back to pre housing bubble levels, roughly 2003 levels. US households considerably deleveraged, while most other wealthy developed nations have done the exact opposite.

\- The U6 unemployment rate is below where it was in 1999 (and far lower than eg 1997), and nearly matches the lowest figure put in during that economic boom. It's still heading lower yet.

\- Business investment is booming. The percentage of businesses planning to invest into expansion is scoring at multi-decade highs. S&P 500 capex spending has also jumped dramatically.

\- Productivity grew at a solid 2.9% in the second quarter. The fastest rate in three years. You need good productivity figures to sustain wage expansion.

\- Consumer confidence is near 20 year highs. It was last this high during the peak of the late 1990s boom.

\- Small business confidence is at multi-decade highs.

\- Jobless claims are near 50 year lows. You have to go back to 1969 to see these absolute jobless claims figures - the US population was 1/3 smaller then.

\- The number of people without health insurance is at record lows. Homelessness is at/near record lows. The poverty rate is at a low level only reached during two brief periods in the last 60 years.

\- The gap between the number of jobs available vs the number of people actively seeking a job is at a positive multi-decade high and increasing.

\- GDP growth will clock in over 3% in 2018 for the first time (on an annual basis) since 2005.

\- Corporate profits for all business sizes are at all-time highs.

\- The stock market is at all-time highs.

\- Household wealth is at an all-time record high. 100% higher than 2004, at $101 trillion. The US median household net wealth figure, despite taking a hit in the great recession, is still higher than in either Sweden or Germany.

\- The best forecasters, people like Ray Dalio (whose firm spotted the great recession far earlier than most), see several more years of expansion left in the tank yet.

<comment><USER11> Dear _adventured_ : I believe I _asked_ the parent a pair of _clarifying questions_.

I'm not sure why _you_ view mentioning that there are those who also decide to leave the parent's (possible) target destination as "attacking the US," but okay(?)

Re: and 'my' "empty claim" and your statistical screed-- 1) I noticed you excised my source 'references', which is fine, I guess;

2; your list doesn't actually address the crux of the claim;

3) I think it helpful to think about how the stats are derived and what they _actually measure_ ;

4) here's a recent article from "the failing New York Times" on some of those stats you provided [1];

5) and another on the "recovery"[2], most of the commenters don't appear to share your sanguineness, but they're probably Russian bots or something;

6) I remind you that the stock market is neither _the economy_ nor directly _relevant to much of the US population_ ;

7) you're probably right about GDP growth [ _FTR, I was one of few who argued, to seasoned economists, that Trump 's targets were easily doable when they steadfastly argued otherwise], but I refer you back to article [1];

8) having already addressed your "renunciation" data in an unrelated HN post, I won't do it again; finally,

9) your econ stats are, pretty much, about the _aggregate _, which in my initial post, I acknowledged "look good";

10) even if everything that you've stated is absolutely correct, it doesn't explain, _for me _, why the OP wants to take such a drastic step,_ which was what my post was actually about*.

All the best...

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great- recession-economy-gdp.html)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/business/middle-class- fin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/business/middle-class-financial- crisis.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> American dream is long dead. Paradise is here in Europe :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Each year approximately 140,000 visa are made available for immigrant seeking employees. These E visas are divided into four classes. The H1B visas that are common in tech are non-immigrant visas. You cannot use them to resettle in the US. For immigrant employees, workers must first get DOL approval after an "extensive and unsuccessful" attempt to recruit domestically--this is more rigorous than what employers have to do to bring in an H1B visiting worker.

Best case scenario, you qualify as an E1: that requires that you have "extensive documentation showing sustained national or international acclaim and recognition in their fields of expertise," in which case no job offer is needed, OR you are an "outstanding professor or researcher" w/ intl. recognition, OR you are a "multinational manager or exec" with at least one year employment at an overseas branch of a US company.

Second best is E2, for which you must have a graduate degree or a bachelor's and 5+ years professional experience OR have exceptional ability ("having a degree of expertise significantly above that ordinarily encountered in the sciences, arts, or business"). This requires a job offer cleared by DOL, or you can apply for a National Interest Waiver which allows you to enter without a job lined up.

If you don't have a graduate degree of 5+ yrs experience, you are relegated to the E3 category. The E4 category is not applicable to tech jobs. The E5 category is an option if you have US$ 1mil (or half that in certain depressed areas) to invest and you are willing to commit to creating 10+ jobs for US persons in 2 years.

So in most cases, your employer must attempt to find domestic candidates, not be successful, file ETA 9089 with the DOL to get a Permanent Labor Certification, and then file I-140 with USCIS. If approved, you must continue the process with the National Visa Center. Your immediate family can come with you. You must bring various documents and medical certifications to your US Embassy for an interview. Then, you would be issued an E class immigrant visa which you take to the US border and request admission to the country. After paying fees, you will receive an SSN card and your I-551 green card, making you a "lawful permanent resident" of the US.

</comment><comment><USER15> My suggestion is to not immigrate permanently i.e. going for green card/citizenship. Be in US, enjoy higher salaries, network with like minded individuals and than come back to EU and get the best of both the worlds.

</comment><comment><USER16> Get a job as a manager at a multinational with ops in the US and EU. After a year or more get transferred to the US on an L1A then soon after apply for a green card.

</comment><comment><USER17> Look, I think the grass is always greener on the other side. Whether you think you can ignore Trump or not, the fact is immigration into the US is hard. It was hard before and it's probably harder now given the current administration's views on migrants.

I moved to the US back in the 2000's and it took me years, I finally was lucky enough to find a contact at a university to sponsor a H1B. That now seems virtually impossible to get unless you work for one of those giant Indian IT companies.

Also, you might be increasingly frustrated with the state of the EU, but it ain't all roses in the US. I for one, value highly the social safety nets other countries provide. Without being incendiary, things like getting healthcare in the US isn't so straightforward.

We get that the US is still streaks ahead when it comes to innovation and capitalism. But there's so many other considerations important to gauging one's quality of life.

In the end, is living in the EU really a hot mess? What about a different part of the EU?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats the thing. I dont think I want to put years of my life just to immigrate to US. Earlier it was less difficult ( surely not easy ). But nothing of interest happens here. Everybody just wants to preserve the old (old businesses, old ways of thiking) and people are more keen on justifying why what they do is good (and better than US ). For example in Germany people are peoud of their paperwork.

<comment><USER18> I don't think this is correct. I'm a serial entrepreneur and innovation is something that Germany does on a regular day to day basis.

Why don't you just create your own company in a field you like? In the EU it's easy to do so and there are hundreds of accelerator programs that help doing so.

Innovation is nothing US exclusive. For example, just look how many Israel companies provide innovative products to the US tech companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right. I didnt consider that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had a lovely time interning at a Swedish company in Sweden, but not having Swedish EU citizenship made the company want to hire me at their US facility. Maybe we could trade identities?

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. At this point I would actually love to hear a few positive stories. Do elaborate on your experience if you can.

<comment><USER19> I interned at Volvo and it was a very positive experience. Sweden has a very different work culture. And I learned a lot.</comment></comment></comment>


Banks exploiting young, talented and ignorant graduate technologists - <AUTHOR> http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/286155/technology-graduate-programs-in-banks <comment><USER2> I agree this is a problem - but is it isolated to banking? I can think of at least one non-finance org I've encountered that did much the same: pulled in graduates with big promises and friendly recruiters at milkround conferences, only to slot them into stultifying, dead end support roles where the graduate's skills only withered along with their employability.

<comment><USER3> I see same problem in academia too, there are a lot of methods to "motivate" grad student I will write few subtle methods which I saw: From default excuse "There are project(scientific, product type, whatever) 'almost done', need few fixes and there will be easy money and you are super skilled, nobody can do this job and etc...", but in reality few fixes mean 80-90% of job and deadlines/delays can take unlimited unpaid time (depends how unlucky you are, but milking won't stop nicely). If got less luck goes like this with signed contracts: There are "incompetent" manager (client side or you side) somewhere in pipeline which don't want go to court and want be nice for everybody (even when case is 100% win, i'm not usa based), but job needs to done and coincidently by you [your team] for free.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple vulnerability scanner usable without technical skill - <AUTHOR> https://security-guardian.com <comment> sylvain-geinoz I tested it and it works very well. I was looking for a product like this for a while. I'm still testing it so I can't give you a final opinion yet. My only complaint is the scan duration, I had to wait about one hour before getting the first results. Once the servers are added, I think the scans are done at night so it's not a problem anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. We are working on adding more servers to improve the time of the scans. I'm glad the product meet your need :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It really looks like an attractive proposition and solution. I will test it in the coming weeks and talk about it around me. Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your nice comment :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice tool, easy-to-use and does the job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to work quite well!</comment>


I, for one, welcome our javascript overlords - <AUTHOR> http://timpark.io/2012/05/03/does-microsoft-have-app-development-right/?nocache=23

<comment><USER2> For a companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, where the value and competitive advantage is in the network and API, I would really like to see them open-source their clients entirely. I think there is a lot to be learned by everyone by being able to read the entire source code of a very well done javascript app in a native wrapper on Github. On top of that it gives people a great example of a project leveraging your API and using it in advanced ways.

I really can't see what any of those companies would have to lose by opening up their client code.

A general opening up of javascript based client code in cases like this where it doesn't really pose a thread for the company would help further the web app ecosystem and hammer the nails into the native coffin faster (I'm not saying native will completely go away, but for most apps it's unnecessary.)

I know that for myself (and many early adopters), nothing helped us learn more about Backbone.js than being able to read the entirety of the DocumentCloud source unminified/unobfuscated.

If anyone at those companies is reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and if you agree it'd be great to raise awareness within the company that this is a worthwhile thing to do.</comment>


Researchers using parallel processing could save thousands by using an Xbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/print171893988.html

<comment><USER2> Compare and contrast: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827297>

No discussion there.</comment>


PHP Fizz Buzz solution, any other language solutions?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bayes-shelton.co.uk/index.php/the-fizz-buzz-challenge-in-php/ Hi,<p>I thought I would try and get a collection of examples of the Fizz Buzz challenge solution in different languages. If you have a solution of this challenge it would be great to see then. <comment><USER2> Have you tested that? I don't code in PHP, but I'm interested to know what it prints for 15.

<comment><USER3> It returns 15 Look: <http://codepad.org/wsNKZ25Q>

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry my bad, I have updated it.

<comment><USER4> I think this should be a good lesson for everyone: don't post code without testing it.

There's another point here, though. It seems that you're learning PHP (although in your "About" page you claim that it's one of your skills) so there's no shame in getting things wrong, but aside from learning that you really do need to test even apparently trivial things, it's also good practice to acknowledge other people's contributions, even if only by saying "My thanks to those who pointed out errors in the original." I wouldn't want explicit credit by name, but acknowledging other people is good practice. Look at PG's essays - he regularly thanks people for their feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I would just like to thank RiderOfGiraffes, adolfoabegg and ColinWright for pointing out a really silly mistake on my part. I should of tested my code before posting it, This is why I love the development community always great people to help out.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Starlite vs. thermite - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtm_xOtw_r0 <comment><AUTHOR> A good DIY thermal insulator that can withstand thermite. Original NightHawkInLight video : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR4_UoBIzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR4_UoBIzY) The story behind starlite is also interessant, and it's recent probable recent rediscovery make it even more so. The same guys also tested against oxy- acetylene.</comment>


If your kids like Pokémon, they'll go nuts for Nukotoys (with video) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/11/if-your-kids-like-pokemon-theyll-go-nuts-for-nukotoys-with-video/

<comment><USER2> awesome tech..... but i don't think kids will care for the animal planet stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Build your own Facebook, own your own data - <AUTHOR> TL/DR: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/master/README.md
We built it over the last 10 years and we're giving it away.
We are still working on updating the documentation to be as cool as for Angular and React. But it's more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for web sockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it's got integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the stores, such as https://yang2020.app
Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:

  Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)
 And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot password, account management you just do:

  Q.Users.login(options)
 If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use

  Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()
 Reusable tools are placed like this:

  Q.activate(
    Q.Tool.setUpElement(
      element,
      "Streams/chat",
      options
    );
  );
 or with jQuery:

  $(element).tool(name)
  .activate(options)
 You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. Our goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tested, reusable components that anyone can use, even if they are not very technical.
Qbix separates concerns, e.g. text strings go into JSON files letting you translate your entire site with a script, then human translators can fix things.
It's been audited by third party security firms, automatically generates SRIs, minifies your code, loads it on demand, and much more.
Finally, it's interoperable with everything else so you're not locked in. Take a Wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconference in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc. <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to write the background to all this.

With these lockdowns, the corporate online platforms have grown a lot. Zoom welcomed a lot of new people, and Facebook and Google got in the game too. If we want to communicate or collaborate, date or plan something, we go through one of the big platforms.

Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it's been from the beginning. It's the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.

But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.

In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.

The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.

Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?

Web browsers alrrady have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.

There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.

That's basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.

These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.

So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.

Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It's totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done.

If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com

Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.</comment>


Ask HN: Design and Implementation of Term Rewriting Systems - <AUTHOR> Hello!
I'm looking for resources on the design and implementation of Term Rewriting Systems. I'm particularly interested in systems for use in discrete math and computer algebra systems, but any resource is welcome.
Also, how do these systems relate to graph reduction in lazy functional languages?
Thank you! <comment><USER3> The book _Term Rewriting and All That_ by Baader and Nipkow includes a lot of code in ML, I highly recommend it.

The code is available online:

[https://www21.in.tum.de/~nipkow/TRaAT/](https://www21.in.tum.de/~nipkow/TRaAT/)

The book also contains many useful references, which I also recommend to check out for your other questions.

Also, in my experience, _logic programming languages_ like Prolog are especially useful for reasoning about term rewriting systems, because they provide built-in features such as unification, subsumption checks and implicit search and backtracking which are very useful when working with and reasoning about term rewriting systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How these systems relate to graph reduction: graph reduction is one way to implement term rewriting.

Laziness is an orthogonal issue related to your operational semantics.

The designs of TRS implementations are mainly to address an issue - <USER2> reduction rules as written are not ordered. In implementing them you need to impose an order. This is not so desirable, so parallel reduction may be required, but that introduces a whole new bunch of issues.

Baader and Nipkow is pretty good, but I would also highly suggest writing a lambda calculus in an imperative programming language to get a feel for the operational semantics

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Does Google crawl dynamic content now? - <AUTHOR> http://www.centrical.com/test/google-json-ld-and-javascript-crawling-and-indexing-test.html

<comment><USER2> I didn't know Google is indexing async content now, when did this happen?</comment>


UserVoice launches Helpdesk We want to be the only customer facing tool you need - <AUTHOR> http://blog.uservoice.com/entries/introducing-uservoice-helpdesk-a-support-tool-that-doesnt-suck

<comment><USER2> As someone who (a) has tried most help desk services and (b) owns a company that has a really strong reputation for good customer support, I've come to the following conclusions:

1\. No tool/service has every feature we need and we always end up compromising somewhere.

2\. I personally think most of them are over-priced, especially for new/small startups.

We used an in-house Rails app for support for a long time (it's open-sourced here: <https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/>) and now we use ZenDesk. This tool looks cool but they all sort of lock you in because my support staff doesn't feel like re-writing/pasting FAQs, canned responses, etc.

Overall, I just feel like this is a weird space that has no clear winner. I don't see anything compelling with UserVoice that would get me to switch. I think there's clearly room for a competitor with better pricing though. I almost feel like this is an ideal space for a good open-source project (so firms can customize and deploy) that has a commercial hosting side (ala WordPress).

<comment><USER3> It turns out the pricing for this full service product isn't directly under the "Pricing" button at the top, but under the Pricing button under the prices on the Pricing page.

So, the prices for the full service product definitely seem a lot lower than the "Feedback" product.

<comment><AUTHOR> We just spent the last half hour hurriedly changing our marketing site nav based on feedback :)

The prices are lower because their per admin. One of our goals wast to make the entry level price points more accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to use this but these are some serious issues:

1) All packages should have SSL. I don't do business with companies that think security is an optional feature.

2) Single sign-on should be available for all packages. I am not interested in a walled garden approach for my app's support.

3) I don't care about white labeling, but a custom design is extremely important to me. Support is too important for our growth to just throw our brand out the window. Any support system needs to be contained in my website's frame.

That said the app looks really nice. A demo would go a long way to giving me a sense of the user's experience because as it is I don't know what 1/2 of the features are and how they are accessed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback:

1) The entire admin experience is SSL only. Our pricing grid references SSL but that's primarily for private communities (our widgets all support SSL environments)

2) We'd love to get SSO in the hands of as many people as possible but the support costs on it are quite high. I'm happy to work with people on this point.

3) We have design customization (check out <http://foodily.uservoice.com/>) and more is on the way.

We put a bunch of videos on <http://uservoice.com/fullservice> did you see those? Or were you looking for a demo of a live account?

<comment><USER4> I saw the videos, but they weren't very good and didn't give me any sense of how the app worked.

2)If SSO isn't an option due to support costs then how about having no user registration at all. I don't see any reason why people should be able to sign into a support site.

3) I know you have design customization, I am just not willing to pay the price for it. I think it should be standard with all accounts.

That said the foodily example is quite nice, but the navigation is hurting my head. I am getting lost rather easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Yeah we're working on more in-depth workflow videos and a live demo.

2) It's for giving feedback on your product. We don't force people to signin but we do ask them for a name and email (like blog comments). It's so that you can follow up with those people when you launch that new feature or fix their issue.

3) Design customization is on all accounts (like what Foodily used). Full HTML/CSS customization is currently only on the highest plans.

This is great feedback on where we're creating confusion. I appreciate you taking the time.

<comment><USER5> I also would like to emphasize the value of a demo. Feature lists and videos do not let me control the experience and get the answer to my questions as quickly. Also, make sure to put it at the top, in the same bar as your logo.

Many times, I have bought a service over another because of the speed at which I can see exactly what I get. I want land on your page and be able to see demo, right off, and immediately see the concept, design, and layout. No ready, watchy, or thinky, just clicky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We really don't think there's a better customer-facing product out there for other startups like ourselves. It's feedback, support tickets and FAQs all in one package. We've been building this over the last 9 months and I'm super excited to actually have it launch. I'm most proud of the UX but I'd love to have your feedback.

<comment><USER6> The user interface in the admin panel looks very nice, I like it! I was also pleasantly surprised by the pricing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the first piece of UI we built as it was the part that made us gouge our eyes out in all other solutions we tried :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a smart move. Zendesk already figured out that Uservoice alike "feature request management" is a must in a help desk system and they added this feature to Zendesk couple of months ago.

We were using Uservoice and Zendesk, ditched Uservoice as soon as Zendesk started to provide a similar feature to avoid having 2 systems.

Edit: Pricing is unusually low for Zendesk, I assume they'll increase that later on.

<comment><USER8> And we added ZenDesk even though we use UserVoice! But it is a problem because we get people asking support questions on UserVoice. It would be nice to have one system; we would consider switching as well if UV FS turns out to be nice. I'll give it a few months to bake though :)

<comment><USER9> You should try us out now! We've been using this system for all our own support for many many months and we've had 40 beta testers banging on it. Plus we have a 30-day free trial so you can play around. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found the pricing part of the site confusing. I clicked on "Plans & Pricing" expecting to see the new services pricing but it was just for the main UserVoice product.

It took me a while to realize you have to click "Start Free Trial" to see the pricing.

Not a great UX.

<comment><AUTHOR> The marketing site certainly could use some work. It is a bit confusing.

Plans for Full Service are here: <http://uservoice.com/fullservice/plans>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Signed up for a demo just so I could mess around with the UI a bit. Great design! Looks very nice and seems easy to use. Nice work, guys.

</comment><comment><USER12> how do I upgrade my existing account? when I try to sign up, it wants me to create brand new account. there is nothing in admin panel that offers me to upgrade, am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Lubos,

We definitely need to add something to the Admin Console about this. On the to-do list. :)

You can upgrade by:

1\. Signing in to the Admin Console 2\. Going to Settings 3\. Scrolling down and clicking "Change plan" 4\. Clicking the "Full Service" tab 5\. Choosing the plan that fits you and hitting the "Change" button

Let me know if you have any issues/questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Finally... I heard they were working on this 6 months ago. I don't like and won't use Get Satisfaction (confusing, terribly designed widget, and extortionate business model) and have been waiting for a good solution. I haven't looked at this yet but have high hopes.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct. We're very bad about being stealthy. We have high hopes as well so if they're not met do let me know :)</comment></comment>


It's Silicon Valley or the Israeli Army for This Young Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/05/07/its-silicon-valley-or-the-israeli-army-for-this-young-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> I can't believe that a modern nation has mandatory conscription. It's truly backward. What's with military prep school?

Military/wars are ultimately all political, so conscription places obedience to the political leaders right in the middle of adolescence. Very unfortunate.

<comment><USER3> Most Scandinavian nations have mandatory conscription. I wonder if requiring all citizens to serve isn't preferable to establishing a military that ultimately consists of those who have fewer alternatives for making a living.

As for obedience to political leaders, you have it completely backwards. A professional military staffed mostly by the underclass is much more convenient to political leaders. Military adventures are much easier when most people don't personally know any soldier. Think about Vietnam vs. later conflicts.

<comment><USER4> "Military service holds a vaulted position in Israeli's entrepreneurial culture. Many start up founders attribute their success to those post- adolescent years spent following orders and memorizing technical manuals in specialized army units."

Unfortunately this only seems to work in Israel. From a Scandinavian perspective, and personal experience in the Finnish Defence Forces, our conscription and entrepreneurship seem to have nothing to do with each other. Our service does provide connections, but they don't readily turn into businesses. Perhaps because there is nothing like the current threats around Israel. Thus there is less procurement etc.

Finland's and Israel's aerospace/weapons industries have surprisingly much common history. We had the leg up after WW2 until about 80's. Tampella (mostly known for grenade launchers) and other Finnish manufacturers provided quite many designs (for example Israel's Galil rifle was based on a design licensed from Finland) and consulted in the development of Israel's armament industry. Nowadays the tables have turned - Finland buys a lot of defense materiel from Israel.

Scandinavian countries already have quite selective conscription. International op requirements and cutbacks seem to be leading to rapid professionalization (very apparent in Sweden). Soon Finland could be the only N. European country with mandatory conscription, since it's the only non-Nato country which borders Russia.

Military & entrepreneurship: Very interesting pair. Remember Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a waste - why destroy something promising just to get another warm body for another useless conflict over a country so tiny most Americans walk longer to take a piss and which may or may not have once played a role as the place where some people who worshiped a god in their way slept until they were kicked away by some other people who worshiped _the same God_ in a slightly different manner? Why not at least let the delusional people fight it out amongst themself.

And yes, it would have killed me to make the sentence shorter.

<comment><USER6> Islam and Judism are very different religions. To say they worship the same God is absolute ignorance.

<comment><USER7> It's a pretty standard theological view that all Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship (on some level) the same god.</comment></comment></comment>


Tomorrow's Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/29/tomorrows-surveillance/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> Mass surviellenace is just a symptom of a bigger problem:

"The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to." \- Edward Snowden

When any government starts granting itself unlimited powers, this kind of thing will keep happening. Whether it's surveillance, suppressing political dissent, chilling free speech or controlling economic interests.

Democratic representation becomes lost and illusionary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, but the author seems to fall into the trap of the "national-security conservatives" implying that most of the FISC judges being Republican is somehow worse. When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008 we would have agreed. Now it's become obvious that's really a distraction and that both parties are in on it. This is not a political issue. It's a human rights issue and should be treated as such.

<comment><USER4> > When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008 we would have agreed.

Edward Snowden did not vote for Obama.

Edward Snowden: "A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa- whistleblowe...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa- whistleblower-edward-snowden-why)

<comment><USER3> Ah, that's right, good point. I actually campaigned for Ron Paul myself, but, like Snowden, believed in Obama as my second choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote about this a while back, after watching a PBS documentary on domestic spying. Basically, it seems to me that the US could one day turn into a totalitarian regime with no way back [1]. Maybe it's overly-pessimistic, but once all the total-surveillance tools are in place, if the government ever turns totalitarian, it will be extremely difficult to overturn it

[1] [http://andrewoneverything.com/post/43837476217/the-us- could-...](http://andrewoneverything.com/post/43837476217/the-us-could-one- day-turn-into-a-totalitarian-regime)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's both parties, in the US we basically live in a one party system, where sub parties argue about how they are different in public but in secret act the same to further their power. In the end we the people both inside and outside the country become less and less important.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how easy it is to just zap cameras with lasers or the like without being noticed. This was something that occurred to me in connection with glass, but I don't see why it wouldn't become more generally applicable: As hardware and software costs come down I can see people using better tools to attack surveillance infrastructure than the old-fashioned _spray-paint the speed camera_ approach.

<comment><USER8> This might impose a kind of maintenance tax on surveillance equipment, in terms of resources being allocated to fix broken equipment & 'catch the perps' however I don't think it's enough to slow down the surveillance hydra which can grow 2 new cams for every 1 taken out.

Also it's not just 'cameras' but more ubiquitous sensors that provide surveillance data, increasingly embedded in the devices you use in everyday life.

The problem of data collection is arguably moot. The question of who has access to this data and what we do with it is the crux of the matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article vastly overstates the ability for normal people to avoid survellience. We technologists are _building_ the centralized industrial survellience state by voluntarily feeding metadata and content on our users to centralized analytics companies -- eg, Google.

We're centralizing authentication authority in a few providers, enabling web tracking across the Internet, assisting Facebook and Google in their generation of shadow profiles for _everyone_.

We're building web apps and web services that require server side data storage of user information, creating treasure troves of data. The network effects of what we're doing make it consistently harder and harder for users to avoid putting their data, identity, and 'meta-data' about their actions into the hands of 3rd parties.

Centralized phone companies have provided a case study in the ease at which governments can subvert centralized commercial entities, and even make the relationship between commercial entities and the government a lucrative symbiotic one.

We technologists are _building_ the big brother state in the name of 'the cloud' and 'analytics'. We'vs convinced ourselves that webapps mean more freedom, rather than less privacy. We've gleefully abandoned the cyberpunk privacy tenants of the 90s that would have causes many to recoil at the very idea of analytics, Ubuntu's sending desktop searches to Amazon, and centralized monitoring of literally every tap and button press on a mobile device.

 _We 're_ making it harder and harder for users to escape this orbit of commercial industrial governmental spying, because technology is so wonderously and necessarily pervasive, and the network effects to what we build are so strong.

If users are going to escape this future of governmental techno spying, _we must change now_. It will be up to us to provide the tools, and find alternative solutions to the deaf to centralized spying apparatus.</comment>


Air France requires account password to be between 4 and 6 characters - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/874751058764902400 <comment><USER2> Just going to go ahead and assume that Air France is using this to harvest bank account pins and luggage combinations in a creative bid to ensure they meet revenue projections this year.

</comment><comment><USER3> For a long time Schwab.com also had an absurd policy like this - but the username on the account could be 3X longer, and contain special chars...

</comment><comment><USER4> between 4 and 6 is characters is pretty bad, but only numbers as well? Thats begging to be brute force.

<comment><USER5> Well even 4 numbers of 10,000 combinations. Say they lock the account out after 100 wrong attempts (hopefully), then assuming you don't choose 1234 or 0000 then you're pretty safe from a brute force attack.

I'm guessing they require this so you can type it in over the phone, that's the only sensible reason I can think of.

<comment><USER6> This is not safe at all. If you do this with a hundred accounts, you're likely to hack at least one.

<comment><USER7> It is safe for the individual accounts. Like a zebra in a zeal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many companies that have heavy phone support call in usage do this, so you can easily enter the password over the phone keypad.

</comment><comment><USER9> Verizon is the same way. 5 characters.

</comment><comment><USER10> 12345

[https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k](https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k)</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone outside of Google use Dart? - <AUTHOR> I remember when Dart came out it was painted as a JavaScript-killer. To put it lightly, that hasn't happened. Aside from Flutter I can't personally name any Dart projects, and aside from Google I don't know of any companies using it.<p>Does anyone here use it for something other than Flutter and/or know someone who does? Is it a dying language assuming Flutter doesn't hugely take off? <comment><USER2> Yeah, we have a sizeable server-side Dart project for crawling and processing websites and documents.

I also know a few companies using it for full-stack language in web and server apps.

The people I know are not vocal, I guess they are tired arguing with the doomsayers and rather focus on their tasks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrike team - web & backend</comment>


A plane 10 times faster than Concorde - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161206-what-a-16000mph-airliner-might-look-like <comment><USER2> Last time DARPA flew something at 17,000mph within the atmosphere, didn't it just sorta fall apart in the sky? And once you're moving that fast, aren't you more just destroying all the air particles instead of moving them so it's not really aerodynamics?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed#Classificatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed#Classification_of_Mach_regimes)

</comment><comment><USER3> At that speed you're basically just taking a ballistic missile to your destination. You can get anywhere in the world in a couple of hours, but the tickets cost more than a comfortable house in the suburbs.

</comment><comment><USER4> "What a 16,000 mph airliner might look like"

A tube full of pureed humans should even a small buffet be encountered in high speed flight.

A debris field of charred parts should the heat shielding fail.

Bits and pieces washing up on distant shores should a loss of control occur in flight.

<comment><USER5> We should get the engineers in contact with you. It seems you've identified some critical flaws they haven't considered.

<comment><USER6> I don't like the style of the GP comment, but the plane discussed in the article is more a general idea than a detailed design that has been tested in simulations and just need some money to get build. If it were software, I'd classify it as vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2,180 km/h x 10 = 21,800 km/h = 6 km/s

Article claims 25600 km/h = 7 km/s (You need 7,9 km/s to go into space)

Slightly not enough to fly into space. Once again, why do we need it?

<comment><USER8> More accurately, you need 7.9 km/s to get into orbit. You can fly into space at a far lower speed of about 1.2 km/s; you just will fall back. That said; travelling at 7 km/s at 12 km seems ludicrous; air is over 100 times denser at that altitude than at 25 km, where the Space Shuttle reentered the atmosphere (at about the same velocity). So this aircraft would need two orders of magnitude better heat protection than the Space Shuttle. Not to mention the aerodynamic drag at these altitudes and velocities, which will be tremendous.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. ... And this is that article claims, right?

<comment><USER8> The article claims an aircraft design. To meet such a design would require no less than a revolution in materials science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > London to New Zealand to little under 30 minutes

Well, 2h would be enough for me.

On the other hand, it's probably easier to control a 16,000mph plane for 30min than a 4,000mph plane for 2h.

</comment><comment><USER10> Assuming it wasn't a concept... How would the passengers inside cope with that kind of acceleration (and I imagine, deceleration)?

</comment><comment><USER11> Surely they mean scramjet as opposed to ramjet at that speed.

</comment><comment><USER12> From wikipedia, in case anyone else was also wondering who he is:

> Charles Bombardier (born 1974) is a Canadian engineer, innovator and angel > investor. who creates vehicle concepts and shares them openly with the world > with his non profit Imaginactive.org.

> Bombardier's grandfather was Joseph-Armand Bombardier, founder of Bombardier > Inc. and Bombardier Recreational Products and inventor of the snowmobile.

...so, the rich grandson of a business founder who designs airplanes for fun. Not sure how seriously we can take his "designs".

<comment><USER13> You're oddly leaving out the fact that Bombardier is a renowned Fortune 500 company, and a major manufacturer of airplanes.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I thought most people knew Bombardier the airplane maker, but maybe I should have kept that info.

In any case, Bombardier (the company) and Charles Bombardier don't seem to be in any business relationship...?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Loaning money from the IRS? - <AUTHOR>

Here's a question for freelancers out there. I filed an extension this year on my taxes, and have spent the summer working my ass off to get enough to pay taxes (self employment tax is a bitch). I owe the IRS about $25k which I have finally earned into a savings account.
So noow that I'm about to pay Uncle Sam, I'm thinking... what if I just delay and use the money towards a startup I'm currently working. I've been in this situation a few years ago (owed the IRS about 3k, and they put me on a monthly installment plan). In the current situation, I'd much rather pay 1500-2000 a month than hand over everything in lump sum. Also, it seems like interest on the tax only goes up to a certain point (20% of principal). So there's an upper cap to the penalty I'd be paying.
I know the best response to this "talk to an accountant/attorney", which I have an appointment with a tax accountant in the valley. However I'm curious if anyone's tried this, thought of trying this, or has gotten seriously screwed on something like this.
About my situation, I'm right out of college and have been doing freelance development. I own nothing (rent apartment, my car is on loan). So I can't see a downside of this plan screwing up, aside from maybe going to jail, which I think would be a stretch.
Has anyone been in a scenario like this? <comment><USER2> If you owe the IRS 25k wouldn't you have had to make like 90k+ in that tax year?

If that's the case what did you do with all that cash. It just sounds like a stupid idea to me. If you can pull down that sum in "a summer" aka 4 months, why not just pay the IRS their money and then work 4 more months and then start your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> In freelancing, its very common to go on a hot streak. Last summer I had client paying me 100/hr, and I was working 80 hr weeks for almost an entire summer. After that client wrapped up, it was almost 4 months before finding something else at much less rate. Also, this was before the sept 08 market crash.

Pretty easy answer to say what I did with all that cash. Aside from living expenses, travel, and in some cases general overindulgence, I paid off about half my student loans.

Also did ok this summer, but that has also come to an end. Either I can work my ass off for the next few months to try to get another client (and then a few months after that to work with the client), or I can invest my time in a startup idea I have now. I've sort of already made the decision for the latter, I'm just trying to figure out how to stay afloat while I give the startup a chance to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is no worse loan-shark than the IRS. The rules:

1) Make sure you never have to pay them a dime, and

2) If you have to pay them a dime, do it NOW.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Mahmud, thanks for your reply. Can you share what experiences you have to make you think that?

It seems the IRS has one thing going for it (and against us), persistence. They don't forget old debts, pretty much ever. However, in terms of harshness, it doesn't seem like they are too bad. How do they extract money from you? They could seize my bank account, but then they'll get what I already owe them anyways. They can't take my car, house, etc, since I don't own any of it. And they aren't the type to break people's legs (at least, I dont think).

<comment><USER3> If you really want to do this, sit down with a CPA and make sure you keep the IRS posted every stop of the way.

My experience was that they were willing to seize my father's business and liquidate it, sending 12 employees and their families, not to mention my parents, into the street .. all for $80k.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that about your father's business. Will definitely take your advise about talking with a CPA.

I'm sort of operating on the assumption that the worst the IRS can do is seize assets, none of which I have. It's probably a stupid, naive assumption, which I'm sure the CPA will chew me out for. However, I figure it's better to pull this kind of crap when you're young :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Build Your Own LEGO Turing Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/lego-turning-machine-how-to/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions and discussions:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28lego+turing%29&sortby=create_ts+desc)

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/lego-turing-machine/>

Here's a link to the video. I was expecting to see this on the linked article but it's linked to.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish the article would actually link to the github repository.

<comment><USER5> Here's the GitHub Repo - <https://github.com/DavyLandman/TuringLEGO></comment></comment>