Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and Commerce Committee [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/JohnHanke.Niantic.%20Pokemon%20Go%20Letter.2016.07.19.pdf <comment><USER2> Those questions seem a bit loaded; since when does a business have any responsibility to "make the customer whole" in the event they exceed their data cap?

Yes, they could be more transparent about how much data is being used. Maybe display it in the settings somewhere. However, I can't see how a customer being slapped with a large bill falls on anyone other than the customer. Does Google have a plan to make me whole when I watch too many youtube videos? Or Apple when I stream too much Apple Music? Instagram when it pre-loads movies as I scroll through the app?

<comment><USER3> One time on a road trip years ago I downloaded the Guitar Hero mobile game to my Razr to kill time. It turns out that the game downloads song data repeatedly when you play different songs. An hour or so of playing ended up costing me almost $100. I didn't understand how much data was being used, and I didn't ever want to use mobile data again (on my feature phone) after that point.

I can definitely see regulators being concerned about this kind of predatory pricing. Carriers should price data close to what it costs them to offer it, not at outrageously high prices to milk as much money as possible out of their customers before they realize what they're spending.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of the pricing, the onus is still on the customer to understand the service they are using in my opinion.

If I go to the gym and drop 100kg on myself then it is my fault for not understanding the risks, where it is reasonable to do so.

It is reasonable to expect you as a customer of the internet service to understand the service you are using and the costs involved. It really falls on no one elses shoulders.

I do agree that it tends to be over priced and the pricing structure is often confusing but I still think it's within the grasp of most to understand it.

<comment><USER5> What the hell are you talking about? The weights are clearly labeled and you know what's up before you even attempt it. With data, not only are there multiple abstractions away from the consumer which all play in using and controlling the data used, the phone companies purposely don't provide a data cap lock in some cases. And then you get singled out and have to grovel for forgiveness. Having software metering at device level and and phone company level should be mandatory.

It's pretty much like not giving you the car speedomoter, and then the city places speed trap cameras all over the city and then after a month, you get a bill for $200 because you went over 4 times.

This business make money first mentality is pretty bonkers.

<comment><USER4> Yeah the gym analogy didn't work. My point was simply that the gym isn't responsible should you do something stupid, because there is plenty of ways to educate yourself on avoiding that.

The internet provider offers a service with certain penalties that are typically made clear enough if you read the contract. It is up to you, through whatever means you have available, to not use it in a way that gets you excess charges.

I like your speed trap analogy but I still don't think it is the ISP at fault. If you can't afford the overage and your phone has no metering then there are plans and pre paid plans available to suit that need. You are still the one signing up to the service and using it, you don't have to if you think the situation is unfair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like this isn't really the House Energy and Commerce Committee's job... Like, people choose their plan(s) and should be able to be responsible for themselves.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. They have absolutely no reason to even give this a moment's consideration. This letter is an example of the US government overreaching its powers and meddling with an organization that's doing nothing wrong.

<comment> loup-vaillant Overreaching perhaps. _Probably_. Doing nothing wrong however…

If this game is consuming more bandwidth than is necessary to deliver its experience, then they _are_ doing something wrong. Both in the technical sense and the moral sense.

Developers have a moral obligation to not waste their user's resources, dammit.

<comment><USER8> Would you care to share the premises that lead to such a stance? I can't think of how such an obligation would be occurred or why. To me use indicates that the value the end user gets is greater than the costs. Why would creating something valuable but not perfect be immoral? If those that create value are acting immoraly when failing to achieve perfection, are those that don't create value likewise held to the same standard?

I'm honestly a little offended at the notion that developers owe anything beyond what's contractually agreed to their users. That something can be accessed and enjoyed for free, that it can be preferable to any other alternative activity the user could be doing, and still not be enough on the part of the supplier to avoid moral condemnation seems like the height of entitlement.

<comment><USER9> > failing to achieve perfection

This is a straw man - nobody expects perfection. For some reason there is a lot of resistance to _educating_ the use and _asking their permission_.

I suspect that this game simply needed a clear warning before download and on startup that includes an estimate of the bandwidth needs. Perhaps only the first startup with an acknowledgement from the user. It may not be possible, but if there is a way to estimate the remaining data plan limit it, including an estimate that "This game will use X% of your data plan per hour" would be a very good way to let the user manage the own usage.

> offended

Welcome to the club. I'm offended every time a developer user resources (including data) without specific informed consent. "Free" is rarely without cost, and the user is rarely informed in detail. This lack of respect for the user has grown in recent years with the paternalistic attitude that users shouldn't/can't understand technology and the developer should manage the software for the user. Often this is claimed to be for dubious security reasons.

You complain that the developer shouldn't have to do anything beyond what they promised in a contract. They can have that level of interaction if-and-only-if they inform the user properly so the user can make informed choices, and they leave the user alone. If, however, the developer wants to retain any amount of control such as data gathering, forcing updates, or using any user resources without informed consent, then the developer is the responsible party. Let the user _actually_ manage everything for themselves in a responsible manner, or accept liability for any problems derived from your software.

> height of entitlement

The height of _improper_ entitlement are the developers that think they have a right to spy on users, take actions on the user's system without their permission, or otherwise do anything behind the user's back.

The user, however, _is_ entitled to business interactions free of any dissembling or obfuscation.

<comment><USER8> >This is a straw man - nobody expects perfection. For some reason there is a lot of resistance to educating the use and asking their permission.

The person I responded to specifically said _waste_. As in the part they find morally unacceptable is that if a developer had spent more of their time optimising their product they could have got the data use down from 20mb/hour to something less but chose not to.

If not perfection then they're still setting the bar for morally acceptable actions to be somewhere between benefitting others and perfection. So my question there would still remain. If someone developing a data wasteful product that people enjoy using is immoral, what exactly is me sitting on my couch eating doritos and watching tv? It's benefiting others far less than creating pokemon go is.

>I suspect that this game simply needed a clear warning before download and on startup that includes an estimate of the bandwidth needs.

Why this game? Or do you think all internet using apps should do this? If so why would this not be on the operating system rather than every app rolling their own version? Note that they already do measure data use and allow for restriction. If pokemon go is using between 10 and 20 mb of data per hour as the paper suggests then I'd be very surprised to learn that this is in excess of most peoples data useage per hour of internet use. Facebook, instagram, snapchat, reddit, pinterest, youtube, spotify, browsing around on ad and large header image infected news sites is standard internet use no?

>Welcome to the club. I'm offended every time a developer user resources (including data) without specific informed consent.

I don't see why informed is their responsibility and not yours. They aren't choosing to run their work on your device.

>This lack of respect for the user has grown in recent years

Why does the user of a free service deserve anything from the developer, including either the service or respect? Why does the developer owe the user respect? Where did they earn that? If they are paying for the product, why do they deserve anything more than is listed that they're paying for, of which I know at the very least for pokemon go 'respect' is not a listed item.

>They can have that level of interaction if-and-only-if they inform the user properly so the user can make informed choices, and they leave the user alone.

Why is the default that they owe the user something unless stated otherwise? Were they born with this responsibility? Was it bestowed upon them when they learned to develop? When they wrote the code? When they put it on a public accessible site? When they marketed it? I can't see at which point they start to owe complete strangers something if not at the point of contract signing.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _The person I responded to specifically said waste. As in the part they find > morally unacceptable is that if a developer had spent more of their time > optimising their product they could have got the data use down from 20mb > /hour to something less but chose not to._

Scale matters.

Let's suppose they reduce the data use down to 19mb/hour, saving just one little megabyte. Let's assume the average user's data plan cost about 1$ per gigabyte. Apparently, users spend about 5 hours per week on this app, let's say 20 hours per month. So we're saving 20mb/month, or 0.02 (two cents). Let's assume there are a million such users. Total, this would save 20.000 dollars per month.

Okay, now let's suppose a developer's time is worth about 100$ per hour. It would take 200 hours worth of development for the development cost to exceed the savings, or about 5 weeks.

One little megabyte for a month is worth more than a _month_ of developer effort. And of course this is just one megabyte. If the sibling threads are any indication, a proper caching mechanism would likely save over 15Mb.

15Mb means the users are losing over 3 _million_ dollars per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been playing Pokemon Go since the day of release, and my cellular settings report the app has only used 230MB of data out of my 5GB per month. I'm not too concerned about data usage - I'd rather Niantic cache more to reduce load on servers.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious they seem to have so many problems, given that at it's heart the game is rather .. decentralized.

They have access to this vast swath of cloud technology and a few Moores law iterations to boot yet they seem to perform worse than even WoW did on launch, with a game that is extremely forgiving to latency.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. In addition to this their outages have, over the past few days, been very predictable. There is one happening right now [1], and one happened at the same time yesterday and the day before. As far as I can tell that should make it easy to decide when they should deploy new servers to handle load better.

1 - [https://pokemongostatus.org](https://pokemongostatus.org)

<comment><USER13> Yup. The load usually starts to happen when kids leave school, and then the servers blow up when adults leave work. Until this week, the game literally stopped working for me every day at 17:00.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some Senator's kid maxed out their data plan in a few days and now they're writing an angry customer service letter.

I really hope the outcome is that cell companies are forced to get rid of caps but we all know how much money telecom companies donate to prevent this kind of regulation.

<comment><USER15> It's the House so it'll be a Congressperson not Senator.

Usually that's what these committees do - check on variety of issues that impact their voters back home. Sometimes it can be inane, sometimes not.

But usually nothing will result from this as no bills will be proposed till after the election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The real question is, why aren't the mobile carriers giving us more data? 5GB per month seems unreasonable for a $100 mobile plan.

<comment><USER17> For less than 20$ i get 40GB here in Denmark

EDIT: this one [https://www.oister.dk/mobilabonnement/taletidsabonnementer/o...](https://www.oister.dk/mobilabonnement/taletidsabonnementer/oister- fritale-20gb/) and then I took advantage of a "double your data" offering they had. It's 120DKK for 20GB, usually.

<comment><USER18> For 20$ I get unlimited everything in the UK

<comment><USER19> Most likely your speed will decrease to something like 128kbps after a cap.

<comment><USER20> That's true on every network except Three. Unlimited data on Three genuinely does mean unlimited without any restrictions (well, one actually, data used tethering your phone as a wifi hotspot isn't included). You could download a terabyte of stuff for £20/month (about $25).

<comment><USER18> I'm 15GBP/month with Three for unlimited data, 4GB tethering which is fine for the occasional train journey of email/twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pokemon Go is fairly low data usage, 10-20 MB per hour of play (which this document lists) is nothing compared to the hundreds of megabytes you can blow in 10-20 minutes streaming video.

Few other apps go out of their way to make similar warnings, instead they rely on the OS to do this for you, Android at least allows you to set both a warning and a stop point for your data consumption very easily. Many mobile providers prevent surprises to their customers by sending a text at 50%, 75%, 90% and then stopping unless they reply at 100%.

<comment><USER22> And 10-20MB/hr is a massive overestimation. I've been playing virtually nonstop for a week and Android calculates its usage at 193MB...

<comment><USER21> Yeah, on the other hand I had a buggy weather app that managed to use 2 GB of data in a period of a few hours, while I wasn't even looking at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is what the term "nanny state" was invented for, right? Why is your data usage the govt's, Niantic's, or a telco's responsibility?

<comment><USER24> This is the state making sure that uninformed customers are not taken by surprise by a gigantic data bill. Sounds like the state trying to protect its citizens. They're not bullying Niantic, just raising a concern. If anything this could prevent backlash from users against Niantic.

To me it looks like these people are doing their job.

<comment><USER23> The onus is on the uninformed customers to inform themselves.

<comment><USER25> yes, let's get rid of the FDA too. The Onus is on customers to inform themselves of the quality and origin of their food. Buyer Beware baby!

<comment><USER23> I am glad we're in agreement.

<comment> loup-vaillant You know, if we're going to go full Libertarian on this issue, a number of people is going to die. They will buy poison and ingest it because they didn't properly inform themselves. Others are going to trust the ads, then die all the same.

When people are sick of dying, some form of regulation, or at least a trusted communication channel, will likely take root. In the mean time, lots of people are going to die.

This is a heavy price. So I wonder: is this issue worth all those deaths?

<comment><USER26> You know perfectly well that the FDA kills a lot of people already. You need to argue that having it is better than not having it, not that there are undesirable consequences to not having it.

<comment><USER13> It's not either/or, if you're honest about the issue you can also argue scaling down (or up) some regulations.

That said, it's ridiculous to assume that if you do away with enforcing food safety and quality standards things will be peachy. That's not how free market works. You or your kids will likely die of poison. Because quite a lot of entrepreneurs are assholes and the only thing that stands between you and painful death are those regulations.

(Don't believe me? Do some shopping on eBay. Or better, go work for a week in a grocery store and see the shit they pull off while _still_ staying within regulations. I'm a chatty person so I quickly make friends with people at stores, and a side benefit of that is that I get told when _not_ to buy meat from them...)

<comment><USER26> > the only thing that stands between you and painful death are those > regulations

Obviously, that is not actually true. Those regulations are a recent phenomenon. But before we had them, very few people suffered painful death from their lack.

<comment><USER13> Before we had them, the world was much less complex. Think of it this way - regulations allow societies to grow bigger. A village of 100 people can handle everything through interpersonal relations. A town of 10 000 will need a mayor. A country of 10 000 000 requires a government to exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can get 30Mbit/s (3.75MB/s) to my handset and they're worried about _10-20MB per hour?_ The problem here isn't the data usage by Niantic: it's the carrier rate plans.

<comment><USER28> > 30Mbit/s

sustained?

burst capacity and total capacity are different.

<comment><USER29> Obviously it varies wildly based on distance to nearest tower and how saturated the band is with other users. "Burst/sustained" doesn't even capture the main variables that would reduce his speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I know it's from big, scary government, but why would they ask a few yes/no questions without requiring any sort of detail? A high school newspaper could do a better investigation.

Dear Congresspeople Pallone, DeGette, and Schakowsky,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I hope this response reaches you before the August 9, 2016, deadline.

1\. Yes 2\. No 3\. No 4\. No

Kind regards, Niantic.

</comment><comment><USER31> "A recent survey found that the average user spends 43 minutes on Pokémon Go per day, compared with 30 minutes on WhatsApp, 25 minutes on Instagram, and 22 minutes on Snapchat."

How is this even a useful statement? I'm thinking that 22 minutes of video is going to be a lot more data than 43 minutes of playing a game.

side note: I hope an irritated group of howling howler monkeys shadow every speech of any politician that distributes a PDF that cannot be selected from because its a friggin image file.

</comment><comment><USER32> A better question would be: Why US carriers have overpriced data plans and/or outdated infrastructure when my third world country provides me with better price/performance that makes the Americans look like they are being ripped off?

7$ per month assures me of download speed 300mb/s 100mb/s upload speed and unlimited traffic on fiber. Do you have better deals guys?

<comment><USER33> There are three issues here that I can think of.

First is the obvious one that your loaded question alludes to: a resistance to change because that costs so companies won't do it until it would give them a relatively easy advantage (that lasts more than a week) over their competitors.

Second: creating new infrastructure can be a lot easier than upgrading. You don't have to worry about supporting existing devices and userbase.

Third: In developing nations infrastructure projects like that are often in significant part funded by internal government funds and external aid rather than there being an expectation that commercial entities will foot the entire bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Was a similar inquiry conducted with Snapchat? I've read several stories of 4-figure data bills having been run up by teenagers addicted to the service, but have not read about Congressional investigations into that issue. This letter seems like a desperate attempt by its authors to ride the wave of publicity currently surrounding Pokemon Go - it's clickbait for Congresspeople.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't pay anything for Pokemon Go but I pay way too much for self-righteous grandstanding from lawmakers.

</comment><comment><USER36> The house should be asking questions. But it shouldn't be of Niantic; it should be of the carriers, who are treating a not-very-scare resource as if it were far more valuable than it is, thanks to their poor management of a government-granted monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER37> When are all the other GO apps going to be released?

Mario Kart GO (ok that's a risky proposition)

Super Smash Bros Go

Zelda GO

Silent Hill GO or Resident Evil GO

Augmented reality after many years I think will change video games and how we play them. Virtually reality for me no thanks .. bulky and uncomfortable in it's current form.

Now if you could wear sun like glasses in which augments reality (see & explore a new world via these lightweight sunglasses) that would be cool!

</comment><comment><USER38> I have completely secondary questions related to the politics of it: why is "democrats" in the URL, don't they de-politize the working groups? isn't the majority of the congress Republican? What about the "ranking member" in the signatures? wikipedia doesn't really explain what it means.

On a side note, I'd like to add that this is an initiative from the legislative power, not the government, and that this is a discussion and not an enforcement. One of the big job of the legislative power is taking the pulse of the world to try to inform their voting on law matters. If I were libertarian, I would be really pleased to have a heads up before any law is moved in my field of activity, and knowing the move has been made after at least an enquiry has been made.

</comment><comment><USER39> 3 Democrats. :|

But yeah, this is silly. People have to be responsible for their own choices after some point.

</comment><comment><USER40> Never mind the data usage, how about the House _ENERGY_ committee focus on the woefully inefficient battery usage the app has? I mean, that directly impacts their area by way of forcing heaps of people to charge devices far more often.

<comment><USER41> A 5W charger is negligible compared to other things like 1000W+ air conditioners. And you don't have to cool a house if you're outside playing Pokemon...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It seems the consensus here is that data plans from US cell providers are more expensive than they should be for their little amount of data. I'm curious what the technical constraints of allowing more data for consumers would be. If increasing everyone's data amount is _free_ for providers, then what's stopping providers from getting in a battle for the largest data amount for a given fixed price? Since this isn't the case, there must be some actual cost/constraint for serving data ofer 3G/4G/LTE.

</comment><comment><USER42> Isn't asking content-providers to subsidize the cost of data for the users of their app contrary to network neutrality (which all three of the representatives signing this letter voted in favor of)?

</comment><comment><USER43> State, this is none of your business! Focus on real issues! What are we, infants who cannot keep track of our data usage? What are the cell phone carriers, imbeciles who cannot maintain infrastructure at high loads? This is an example of how the state poisons harmless interactions between consenting parties by making up problems to grow and gain more legislative power.

</comment><comment><USER44> These numbers are flat out wrong, there's no way that the game uses '10 to 20 megabytes of data per hour' jpmorgan must have fucked that up somehow. I can't be bothered typing out the whole url referenced in (5) but that's just wrong.

<comment><USER29> Maybe if you click on a LOT of PokeStops, and expand the description to see the larger photograph ...

And anyway, even if it were true, 10 MB/hr is nothing. That's 100 hours of playing until you reach 1 GB, which is the lowest cap I've ever heard of. Randomly browsing reddit will eat up a lot more than 10 MB/s if you're clicking on image links. Hell, there are individual gfys that are larger than 10 MB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Isn't monitoring of data usage of apps an OS-level issue/responsibility of the user or their parents? Why is it the fault of Niantic? Any game could easily use loads of data, and 10-20Mb/hour doesn't seem that much given what it does.

</comment><comment><USER46> I now wonder if the "server issues" are more an overloaded local cell network.

<comment><USER47> I tend to have the opposite problem. Any public places with wifi like malls and such are completely overloaded. It's not perfect, but I do much better on my cellular data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Tip: Download an Offline Area in your Google Maps settings for your local region.

<comment><USER49> Debunked as false. Source was somebody who works in the Google Maps org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The only thing more infuriating than the fact that this letter was sent out...is that taxpayer money went to some incompetent person who couldn't be bothered to use a proper small-caps font.

</comment><comment><USER51> > recent reports suggest that playing Pokemon Go could exhaust a consumer's > available monthly mobile data.

Well, I'll be. Poor consumers.

Ranking members Frank, Diana and Jan might be exhausting your tax dollars.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been playing this game quite a bit (level 20) and my data usage is a mere 122MB since July 1. It ranks 4th among apps in my overall data usage.

</comment><comment><USER53> i feel like they're trying to stay ahead by focusing sights on niantic before the public shows up at the telcos with pitchforks. lame overall.

</comment><comment><USER54> Wow the report that I published was cited in the letter! Kinda cool!

Two questions:

1\. How did Congress get our note? 2\. Why is Congress spending time doing this?

</comment><comment><USER55> Gosh. Do you still not have unlimited data plans in the US?

         love, Europe

(EDIT - I was rather expecting downvotes for that glib post but there was a serious intent. You guys should be angry about your mobile and cable data situation. Very angry. It's pretty much the most expensive in any country I'm aware of. No doubt there are countries with a worse story on data charges but I've not been there)

<comment><USER56> We did and then they took them away.

<comment><USER57> Capitalism and Free Market :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is the app uploading pictures all day?

</comment><comment><USER59> Give me a break.

This is yet another reminder that Serious People hate anything which is fun. If you're playing the game for hours of time, it of course uses data. Per minute, its data usage is actually rather minimal.

</comment><comment><USER60> If Pokemon Go results in legislation mandating reasonable rates for mobile data I will buy a Wii U and several shares of Nintendo stock.

<comment><USER61> No, they're going to punish Niantic for using so much data, not make rates reasonable. Remember, the shareholders in US Senators are the large businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> 3 good things could come out of Pokemon Go and similar games/apps/trends:

1\. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days/weeks for the rest of the world)

2\. through healthy competition, carriers hopefully stop charging ridiculous amount of money for data

3\. convergence of home wifi and carriers, i.e. you can use and share your home wifi within miles from your home

</tooOptimistic>

<comment><USER63> > 1\. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 > day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days/weeks for the rest of the world)

This is blocked upon a breakthrough in battery technology, not any (in)action on the part of handset manufacturers as you are lightly implying. Drones are more my wheelhouse but phones and automobiles are similar; we've reached roughly the top end of energy density with current known technology and chemistry. The fact that your phone can talk for several hours while operating multiple radios is already quite impressive given battery size, so I'm not sure why you classify phone batteries as anything but "decent."

Pokémon Go isn't going to revolutionize our understanding of chemistry and physics, unfortunately. If you want a phone the size of an old brick you can have longer battery life, with the risk that a battery of that size will react very violently to being punctured or abused and swells frequently. Even current ones do.

(You should see my drone's LiPos after I pull them out of a particularly demanding run [i.e., sport mode]; they're often hot to the touch and swelling, and this is somewhat expected depending on circumstances. Battery health is something you have to take seriously with drone batteries because they're surprisingly sensitive and don't have a long useful life. "Invent a better battery" is a meme among drone folks.)

<comment><USER22> The answer is literally bigger batteries. I'd rather have a phone that lasts all day than one that's a millimeter thinner than it was last year. I carried around a 14oz 1" deep Cassiopeia Pocket PC in my pocket for years, a smartphone half that size would last days... so where is it?

<comment><USER63> Keep in mind that the larger you make lithium-ion batteries, the scarier they get.

<comment><USER64> > the more fun they get

FTFY</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sidewalk Labs project means Toronto to have 'constitution-free zone,' CCLA warns - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-quayside-waterfront-toronto-constitution-free-zone-ccla-letter-1.5044813 <comment><USER2> > _" Sidewalk Labs recently offered a glimpse at a handful of high-tech > prototypes it hopes to launch. These include hexagonal sidewalks that light > up to indicate a change in a street's usage and heat up to reduce ice and > snow."_

This shit again? And now they have google on the hook too? Am I correct that they've dropped the solar panels from it as well, so they've dropped any pretense of this shit being anything other than an energy sink?

> _" Sidewalk Labs formally unveiled plans for Quayside, a new "smart" > waterfront neighborhood in Toronto, last April, with the stated goals of > conserving energy,"_

Yeah, when I think "conserving energy" I think using electricity to melt ice, outside in the winter. What a farce. Godspeed to the CCLA.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _" People can't be watched all the time. They have a level of privacy and > dignity and an ability to engage in free assembly or not. And the > constitution protects that and creates that kind of country for us," he > said._

I don't mean this as an affront but this is anthetical to one of their principal allies' views, in that the inability to be watched at all times is seen as a "direct threat" to security.

We need to conquer this on two fronts:

1\. Whether governments need to have access to everything 24x7.

2\. Whether businesses can subvert the desires of people whom don't expressly give consent for such monitoring for sales.

For point 2, take into consideration someone who wants to visit a person living in Quayside (pronounced: _key-side_ , for our American friends). If they're not aware, they're caught in the dragnet surveillance of the area. Sure the people living there _might_ consent to 24x7 monitoring but it shouldn't be an automatic assumption that everyone will. Consider those in the delivery services sector (e.g.: FedEx, UPS, the mail system, etc.) as a principal example of where compulsion might lead to undesired consequences.

For point 1, I haven't any clue as to what to do about it. I get the rationale behind _why_ security services might deem it a "necessity" to see all the things, everywhere (especially, after being burned from 11 Sep) but, as has been demonstrable from the past, there is nothing preventing it from being abused. It's solely based on the "trust us" premise and that has never worked- out well for anyone, given enough time.

<comment><USER2> Governments wanting something they cannot or should not have is nothing new, nor is their fear mongering about security threats to get what they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a better name for it, "Delta City".

Check out the pop culture classic, RoboCop, which besides being a popcorn chewing action film, contains a rather cynical, but prescient, view on the future of corporations and privatization of public interests.

For those unfamiliar or don't recall, in the film, the mayor signs a deal with the mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) will be allowed to turn the run-down sections of Detroit into a high-end utopia called Delta City. Much fun, crime and corruption ensues.

Sidewalk Labs wants to make a better world for us. Ha. "I'll buy that for a dollar."

<comment><USER5> Paul Verhoeven is very prescient.

<comment><USER6> Not just Paul Verhoeven but the writers Neumeier and Miner, as well.

"You'll see that we've gambled...

...in markets usually regarded as nonprofit.

Hospitals. Prisons. Space exploration.

I say, good business is where you find it."

-OCP's Senior Vice President Richard "Dick" Jones

<comment><USER7> I disagree with the sentiment around space exploration. Having government involved to support the science is very valuable, but private enterprise has driven exploration for a long time and hopefully could open frontiers more quickly.

I vastly agree with the sentiment on prisons and hospitals, however. Prisons in particular make me so angry I could explode. Feels like a fundamental violation of the moral imperative upon which our society exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I sometimes wonder if the future of humanity sees the decline of the state, and people just live on corporate land (Sidewalk Labs as an early prototype of this idea) protected by corporate militaries (Blackwater)

<comment><USER9> You're not far off.

An interesting tally was made recently¹ on the amount of privately owned land in London that fulfils the role of public squares, parks, and connecting passages between public roads. There is a lot of it, and you don't really notice it until you break their rules.

That is, if you are homeless, or just look destitute, or simply undesirable, you can be legally ordered to move on. You can be brutally awakened from napping on a (seemingly public) bench by private security appearing out of nowhere, simply because the local government made a deal where the project developer could do their project, as long as they provided a public square, or replaced a public road with a private pedestrian passage; but they own it rather than the public, and they can make their own rules there.

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed- pseu...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseudo- public-space-pops-london-investigation-map)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "'Not good enough': Toronto privacy expert resigns from Sidewalk Labs over data concerns", 2018-10-21

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ann-cavoukian- sidewal...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ann-cavoukian-sidewalk- data-privacy-1.4872223)

</comment><comment><USER11> The privatization of public spaces is a serious ongoing concern in all Canadian urban centers. In its more insidious manifestations it gives corporations power over homeless individuals' rights, by the removal of places of rest, drinking fountains and the coercive removal of the homeless.

</comment><comment> nv-vn I get that there's privacy concerns over a neighborhood owned by Google (and a government agency) but like... where did the notion that it's "constitution free" come from? If it's partially run by the government then how can that even be the case in the sense of "this is private property, so laws restricting government don't apply?" And further, privacy concerns are totally absent from the Canadian constitution as far as I can tell. This just seems like one of those issues where people lose track of telling the truth in order to push their narrative, like when Net Neutrality groups basically stated that "Google will cost $1/search if we lose Net Neutrality!"</comment>


Meteor is now MIT licensed - <AUTHOR> http://meteor.com/faq/how-is-meteor-licensed

<comment><USER2> When Meteor first launched, I was one of the very very many people who said that Meteor looked amazing, but was afraid that their license would hamper adoption.

With the change in license, I think the only major hurdle has been removed. The fundamental idea is good, their current execution is extremely slick, and their immediate plans[1] look achievable. I have very high hopes for the project.

If you haven't checked out Meteor yet, at least watch the screencast: <http://meteor.com/screencast>

[1]: I originally said roadmap; as mcrider rightly points out Meteor does not have one. There is some info floating around about current development goals (notably related to adding authentication), which is what I was thinking of.

<comment><USER3> GPL was perfectly fine for a product like Meteor.

Unless you plan to modify Meteor, ship your version and not share your changes, there are very few things you can do to violate the GPL by using Meteor.

Meteor is neither a library nor boilerplate code to add upon. Lots of folks seem to be "hating" on GPL for no good reason, except maybe not knowing it (which is a good reason but it's hardly justifiable at this point).

<comment><USER4> No.

If you use a GPL library all of your code has to be released under a GPL compatible licence. The Meteor framework counts as a library due to the way it interacts with your code.

You might be confusing it with the Lesser GPL which allows library code to be incorporated into propriety software (or websites in this case).

To understand the difference between the two you should read: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html>

<comment><USER3> It's not a library.

Most users of Meteor won't even ship any code at all, they will expose sites/APIs.

There's also a difference between interacting of output code and libraries.

<comment><USER4> The way Meteor works is that the client side framework is bundled with your code and pushed to the browser of the end user, it's this pushing of the merged framework + your code that counts as distribution under the GPL.

The code isn't just run server side.

Also you should read the following sections of the GPL faq which should help clarify your understanding of the issues:

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL> (the output of a GPL program is also GPL "when the program copies part of itself into the output.")

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation> (linking doesn't have to be in the compiler sense of the term any form of tight coupling between code is covered)

<comment><USER3> What I don't understand well yet is the way Meteor works. I'm waiting until they (and firebase) make their final version available, although I've played a bit with them.

If it does bundle itself then it could have implications. Maybe LGPL would be more reasonable then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel it is sad that so few HN hackers seem to appreciate the vision of the GPL. GPL needs more indispensable software like this for it to thrive and protect us all from a future of completely locked down computers.

<comment><USER6> From a user perspective, GPL offers _in theory_ more freedom, since new products built on codebase X will also be free.

It is debatable if this is true in practice. If less software gets built as a result of the license restriction, the GPL _takes away_ freedom. Even closed source software adds some freedom - the freedom of choice.

From a developer perspective, there is no question which one is more free. We often do not have the choice to release our software as open source, and when we do, an invasive license like the GPL is still a headache. If I can pick up a library or framework and _just use it_ , that's the one I will pick.

<comment><USER7> "GPL takes away freedom" is a very developer-centric point of view. From user point of view _GPL gives freedoms_ that MIT/BSD don't give.

Where freedoms of developers and users conflict, GPL sides with users.

In other words, GPL only takes away your freedom to take freedom away from others. If you don't intend to restrict others' freedoms, GPL shouldn't get in your way.

<comment><USER8> The GPL actually trades off freedom over time. Specifically, it trades away actual freedom right now for the person who currently has a copy of the code, in an attempt to secure potential freedom later for people who do not yet but might someday have copies of the code or of code derived from it.

As such, the GPL is always, in the "now", a license which grants less freedom than, say, the BSD or MIT licenses. Most objections to the GPL, including my own, come from a position of cost/benefit on the trade it wants to make, and of disagreeing that that trade is worth making.

<comment><USER9> _Specifically, it trades away actual freedom right now for the person who currently has a copy of the code..._

How so? As far as I know, if I have GPL code, I can do whatever I want with it. Could you tell me any action I might want to take that the GPL prevents?

The only "freedom" the GPL removes is the freedom to restrict the actions of others. To me, that seems like a rather odd sort of freedom.

<comment><USER10> Link BSD software with the GPL code. I go out of my way to avoid or rewrite the GPL libraries I need because of this restriction.

<comment><USER9> The GPL doesn't prevent you from linking to BSD software.

All it does is prevents you from redistributing the resulting binary under a license that could result in the user's freedom being restricted. I.e., the only thing that is prevented is (BSD, GPL) -> BSD, since the next step might be BSD -> Proprietary.

<comment><USER10> Right. I want to give others the freedom to use my software in propietary ways, so I put my software under a BSD license. This means I can't use GPL- licensed libraries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm just not the audience for Meteor, because while it looks like a great project but as a nodejs guy, the fact that it hides itself away from the platform and turned away from the fantastic npm makes me sort of weary about it as a whole.

But I imagine people coming from rails or whatever don't find this a problem at all.

<comment><USER12> I thought exactly the same, I really like the reactive programming principles they've brought. But without npm it's useless.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. For this very reason, after watching the Meteor screencast, I immediately looked into alternatives such as derby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this is a great move. Longer term it'll be better for Meteor, the team and the community.

Ruby on Rails would be fine as an analogy here. The monetization model might be different from directly licensing and selling the framework, but these guys are smart, they'll figure it out.

I am quite impressed by this. The team listened to the feedback from the community. They weren't obligated to do so :-)

<comment><USER15> We got some amazingly specific and valuable feedback -- check some of the Meteor HN threads. MIT is going to be a big part of making Meteor available everywhere.

<comment><USER14> Doing that now. That gets me thinking. I'll deploy a weekend app with meteor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome - I was one of those highly critical of the original license, so let me be among the first in congratulating them on making this (quite major) change so quickly.

<comment><USER17> I was also critical, and agreed, this is a fantastic change!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh, wow! I'd been working on what appears to be a Meteor-like framework with the very premise of "All the same APIs are available on the client and the server — including database APIs!" for the past few days. It came from my frustration of having to duplicate JS code on both the server and client which just seems stupid when you can provide the same API but with different end- points for each side (i.e. client -> API, server -> DB.)

</comment><comment><USER19> [Checked] Fix License [TODO] DB Security/Authorization

<comment><USER20> Yep, that's what's on the whiteboard :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Isn't it a security risk to allow arbitrary mongodb (or minimongodb) commands in the client side? In their demo, they show a client deleting data from a js console. If that is possible, what prevents an evil user from doing the same to my deployed meteor app?

</comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome news. There are currently 3 competing frameworks: Meteor, Firebase and Derby, all discussed on HN last week. I guess the new license gives Meteor a big plus.

I am glad they changed their minds.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is great to hear. This issue was one of my great qualms with the platform, and the biggest argument for creating a copycat platform. Now to address the auth/permissions!

<comment><USER15> Thanks! auth is next. But check out the madewith.meteor.com source for a good example of how you can lock down an app today.

<comment><USER24> Just a random thought but perhaps you should put up a honeypot version on it's own server to see where the weak spots in security are. Then invite the community to find the holes, or actually ask the hacking communities to help identify gaps in security? Honeypot in this instance meaning a machine dedicated to pulling in attacks (Like flies to honey) to help you identify weak areas of your framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fantastic!

I think the sky is the limit with this framework.

If these guys can stick to the spirit of the project, add what can truly help push the system forward while ignoring the multitudes of one offs that will try to chip away the utility, this really has a shot of not only being a game changer but helping define the game for years to come.

Great work!

</comment><comment><USER26> That is very generous. I hope that this is a win-win situation for the ecosystem _and_ their business.

<comment><USER27> I'm curious about what the new business model is going to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Let's hope there's nothing patentable in that project.

</comment><comment><USER29> It would be interesting to see some statistics before and after this announcement, even if it's still a young framework.

</comment><comment><USER30> While reactivity is an interesting idea and possible incremental improvement, the huge win is in saving us from building UI. Why aren't there more frameworks like Cappuccino but with built in bindings to the DB?

</comment><comment><USER31> Why is this framework better than things like ember.js, especially if ember has something like this <https://github.com/tchak/colors-demo>

<comment><USER32> I don't think 'better' is the right question. Their's room for multiple frameworks. To answer the question I think Meteor's strong suit is live coding for rapid prototyping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think we all sortof knew this was what it was going to be.

<comment><USER34> Honestly, I'm surprised.

You've got a team of cracker jack developers who introduce a product that, frankly, isn't ready for prime time by any sane person's definition with the goal of targeting the majority of developers (e.g., not the most experienced, and not the ones operating at the top end of scale), with no real mention of license?

I expected it to be a commercially licensed language, and honestly, was perfectly happy with that. This is of course better, but leaves me wondering just a little more what the business model is. Not that it's going to stop me toying with it -- I think Meteor is the best JS framework I've seen for ease of use.

<comment><USER24> I would suspect the business model will be support and feature development. In a widely used framework, there will always be people who need it customized, or need to integrate it in new and interesting ways, or require some sort of commercial support contract in order to use it. If they make these options available early on, they will make money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's up with all the trolls on this thread?

</comment><comment><USER36> is there an open source license that says says free to use for people etc.. but if you have a company larger than x then you must support the project with $$$ ?

<comment><USER37> I don't know of any projects that do exactly this, but there are projects that are dual-licensed. You can either use the code under the GPL or buy a commercial license and use it in your proprietary code.

ExtJS is a great example of this sort of dual-licensing, and I've seen it on other projects as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> (whoa the background needs a <fixed> attribute...)

</comment><comment><USER39> More importantly, how do I keep clients from fucking up my database? How is security being done?

Seriously, if I'm not capable of baking limitations into data persistence/logic at the server level then this entire framework is worthless except for building up a portfolio of cute demos that can't be used for any real work.

<comment><USER40> As this question comes up every single time Meteor or Firebase is brought up, I think its fair to say that "we're working on it" wasn't and isn't a good enough answer.

<comment><USER41> You should also have a quick look there: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858838>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for them. Unfortunately the FOSS community has burned into developers' consciousness to never pay for anything, ever, which produces and environment of extreme lack of innovation.

Our development tools completely fucking suck precisely because developers are no longer willing to buy quality development tools.

<comment><USER37> I think that's demonstrably false given how _good_ development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, _too_ much work goes into open source development tools--certainly much more than in any other category!

Just look at how much is accomplished--and how is easily--by various start-ups using open source technology. There are great web servers, web frameworks, libraries, programming languages, text editors and all sorts of other stuff (that I don't use much so can't comment on).

Also, plenty of people contribute to (popular) open source libraries and frameworks. Even less popular projects get a good amount of contribution--I'm following a couple of emacs modes (a fork of JS-2 and Haskell-mode) as well as some tools (like DoctorJS) on GitHub and all of these get pull requests surprisingly often. I suspect the ratio of contributors to users is pretty high.

In short, open source as a model works if your only goal is quality software. Making a framework open source is a good course of action and we should encourage it.

<comment><USER42>
      I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are

No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi- client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced.

Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier.

The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.

<comment><USER43> You seem to ignore the fact that open-source allows more people to use a product. When more people use it, more activity happens - which leads to evolution.

Not sure how you can ignore the open-source software that rules the software development world.

<comment><USER42> More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them.

Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

<comment><USER45> Maybe you should check out other MIT licensed frameworks and assess whether they have fostered a closed or open community.

Rails is MIT licensed and as a result we have seen a lot of companies build their web applications on Rails and build very successful businesses, but we have also seen a range of opens source plugins/gems and applications themselves built around Rails which have resulted in a better web community.

This is 2012, developers who care about something like Meteor also care enough about open source to give back. We don't want developers to be forced to make their products open source, they should feel compelled by the enjoy of helping others.</comment></comment>


Python multiprocessing is different under Linux and Windows - <AUTHOR> http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2010/python-multiprocessing-linux-windows/ <comment><USER2> I said this in a reply to another comment, but it's worth repeating. Yes, brandon is right, there is a difference, albeit an intentional one. I agree with him that having an option to force this behavior to match across platforms is desirable, however, I do not currently have the time to implement it myself.

So, in short; I agree, patch welcome or we wait until I or someone else has the time to do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> He should stop trying to test for Windows behaviour on Linux and use a VM. Having the multiprocessing module expose an option for turning off forking would be useless, as Windows is not UNIX and there are many other subtle or not so subtle differences.

<comment><USER4> If multiprocessing exposed such an option, it would effectively be harder to write non-portable code, which seems like a good thing (to do optionally). You could then switch on "no, do a sensible fork(2)" purely as a performance optimization. Seems like a pretty obviously good thing to add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should call Microsoft and report a bug on how Windows handles child processes. This seems serious ;-)

Can anyone check if this problem also exists in the Cygwin version of Python? It's closer to the Unix source and should behave in a more unix-ish fashion. I am glad I no longer can ;-)

I always install Cygwin when I work from a Windows box. It gives me a varnish layer of civility on what I feel is a mostly barbaric environment.

That said, the POSIX subsystem NT had should be able to handle proper process forking. I am not sure how easy (or not) would it be to run Python on it, but that should also work.

<comment><USER6> NT's POSIX subsystem never supported fork(). They, um, overlooked that bit...

<comment><USER7> Actually, that's incorrect. Both the old-school POSIX subsystem and the Interix (Services For Unix) subsystem support a fork system call with copy-on- write semantics. In fact, the NT kernel itself can fork processes trivially, but this isn't exposed in the Win32 subsystem, like most of the fun stuff on NT.

<comment><USER5> I always found it weird having a bunch of Windows kernel operations that are not exposed to Windows apps.

How would you call those?

<comment><USER7> Ntdll.dll contains the userspace side of the NT API. Specifically, Zw* and Nt* contain most of the APIs that map directly into the kernel. Then there's the Rtl* stuff which provides a lot of fun functions for manipulating processes, and the Ldr* stuff for loading binaries; Ldr is a lot of fun to hook into, if you want to manipulate binaries with a high degree of transparency.

Edit: One thing to note, though, is that it's easy to subvert the Win32 subsystem by using these APIs directly. I.e. if you want to fork a Win32 process, you're going to need to not only fork it the standard NT way, but then tell CSRSS what you're actually doing. It's easy to run into a situation where the Win32 subsystem won't play nicely with you, because it just doesn't have enough information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shared resources across multiple concurrent processes is not a good way to ensure a full night's sleep. I would follow the documentation's advice and pass arguments to the child process and not try and depend on the state of global objects.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I think the #1 rule of multi-platform support is to NOT support multiple platforms. Been there, done that, you won't like the tee-shirt.

But if you "must" do it, let the implementation/agent for each platform be as different as they need to be, with no shared mutable memory, and just pass messages.</comment></comment>


Circle point – new simple and challenging arcade game - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vluncasu.circle <comment><AUTHOR> I would like to introduce Circle point - a new simple and challenging arcade game:

The game idea is simple: 1\. You have a simple circle that increases and decreases continuously. 2\. Whenever your circle is above some point - tap to collect! 3\. Don't let points disappear. 4\. And don't tap when there is no point on your circle. That's it!

Can you score more?</comment>


AI Resources - <AUTHOR> http://airesources.org/ <comment><USER2> Anyone know how to list just the data resources? Searching for "data" gives a whole lot of code resources and I don't know if it includes all of the data resources. The subtopic choice does not seem to include tag options and there is no mention of tags in the advanced search help.

</comment><comment><USER3> Open AI != OpenAI

Still very useful, though</comment>


Four billion messages an hour: benchmarking Deepstream throughput - <AUTHOR> https://deepstream.io/info/performance/four-billion-messages-per-hour/ <comment><USER2> So, roughly 1.1m messages per second of about 23 bytes.

We're handling 4m to 6m 1.5k log lines per second using Apache Kafka on a cluster of around 100 nodes.

<comment><USER3> 1.5k log lines is how many bytes? Would've been helpful if you sticked with the same unit.

<comment><USER4> I think he means 4 to 6 million log lines with 1.5 kB each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested to know what happens when there is a failure or a deployment? Having static servers handling load is only part of the problem in our experience. The true complexity and scalability of a system comes when you consider how it copes under load with unexpected failures (network, hardware), but more importantly expected maintenance such as regular deploys, scaling up and scaling down events. Do you have any metrics for that? Those are the problems we've been focussing most of our energy on at Ably ([https://www.ably.io](https://www.ably.io)), not just message per second rates which is often not really the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, failover times under load / HA setup metrics will come out next week

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> t2 instances have credits that are replenished at a constant rate, and used up when you use the CPU - is this sustainable for more than 1h?

That's ~25MB of data per second for an in-memory workload over 6 machines. I think they missing a zero on the size of the messages?

</comment><comment><USER7> What does this compare against? Having a little trouble navigating the "real time" apps landscape.

<comment><USER8> I think the most obvious comparison is Firebase, but as a self-hosted solution deepstream is much cheaper (5-10x, dependant on the usecase). The creators of deepstream.io have actually written a blog post that covers this exact topic: [https://deepstream.io/blog/realtime-framework- overview/](https://deepstream.io/blog/realtime-framework-overview/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      Deepstream relies on garbage collection to free up dereferenced
      memory. If a machine's CPU is overutilized above 100% for a
      consecutive time, garbage collection will be delayed and memory
      can add up. If this continuous for a prolonged period, the
      server will run out of memory and eventually crash - so be
      generous enough when it comes to resource allocation to make
      sure that your processors get some breathing space every once
      in a while.

"Be generous when it comes to resource allocation".

\--

> The costs of running a six-instance cluster for an hour on AWS are 36 cents > (6 x t2.medium @ 0.052$/h + 1 x cache.t2.medium @ 0.068$/h)

AFAIK, pricing in AWS world depends upon the region. Bandwidth, hard disks and so on also contribute to the price.

I'm not sure what to make of such conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER10> How does Deepstream compare to Meteor?

<comment><AUTHOR> deepstream solves similar problems as meteor, but is conceptually quite different. It's a standalone server that you install the same way you would install e.g. Nginx or a database. Clients connect to it using small SDKs that come in different languages.

It similarly provides data-sync, pub-sub and request response with no opinion about your frontend framework or technology stack and has an open ecosystem of connectors that make it work with all sorts of databases, caches and message buses.

It's also significantly faster than meteor, making it possible to also use it for multiplayer gaming, realtime trading etc...

<comment><USER10> Isn't Meteor a stand-alone server? It sits on top of node.js, and has a number of extra packages included to make it more of a complete framework, but those packages can easily be removed or replaced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does deepstream compare to MQTT?

I see a lot of advantages on using a more standard protocol such as MQTT over deepstream

<comment><AUTHOR> deepstream is a very different thing from MQTT. It's a server that provides high level realtime data structures to clients and backends alike.

It's closer to a self hosted version of Firebase or Parse than MQTT

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How many concurrent connections can you get with the test nodes?

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it possible to cluster deepstream in multiple AWS regions? It may be beneficial when it comes to latency...

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, you can cluster deepstream across multiple regions. The only thing to take into account is that its datalayer (e.g. redis cache / some combination of cache and db) needs to be clustered as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you only need one hour then indeed it's great price but if you need it 24/7 then it's 260$ a month which is really expensive if you compare alternative (you can get dedicated server capable of same throughput easily for half the price).

<comment><USER14> Tell us, what's this product that you have that's so successful that it needs 4Bn messages/hr full time, that you can't put together $260/mo?

<comment><USER13> First of all you are replying to something i didn't write. Or maybe show me where i wrote that I HAVE product that can't put together $260/mo ?

It's not about 260$ it's about tens of thousands of dollars saved by companies i work with after migrating from AWS.

AWS is overpriced service for people that do not have time or resources to do things on their own and pay massive prices for that.

<comment><USER15> "AWS is overpriced service for people that do not have time or resources to do things on their own and pay massive prices for that."

Isn't that the point of AWS?

The time / resources cost to build (monitor and maintain..) your own infrastructure isn't zero.

Did these companies have spare teams lying around the place, such that no new hires were needed to make the transition? If not, then it's not so much of a saving at the current cost of dev / ops personnel, just now on a different balance sheet.

<comment><USER16> Yep. Aws is funny. You want to at do it first, then it doesnt make sense at e.g the 10k per month price point. So you do something else.

Then you come back when you have due diligence and compliance and availability requirements. And you see how much that is really costing you with the arrangements you have.

Finally if you're super successful, you could self host or otherwise. But "rack costs" (naively) trade off against people and auditors.

Summary: AWS is expensive, especially for bandwidth. Practically if your business requirements are not bandwidth intensive, it ends up being paradoxically cheaper than the alternatives if your business involves legal agreements and things like availability commitments to customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mary Meeker's 2013 Internet Trends - <AUTHOR> http://www.kpcb.com/insights/2013-internet-trends <comment><USER2> I maintain the kpcb.com website and I'm watching the server logs at the moment for this page - it is quite amazing how much traffic nginx can serve up without missing a beat on a single small server!

<comment><USER3> How much traffic are we talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to understand how VCs and other institutional-type investors are thinking about the Web today, you MUST read Meeker's annual "Internet Trends" presentations. There's really nothing else like them. Always chock-full of useful data and insights.

<comment><USER5> > _Always chock-full of useful data and insights._

Judge for yourself and look at the past presentations:

2012: [http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet- trend...](http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet-trends-2012)

2011: [http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet- trend...](http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet- trends-2011-9778902)

Kinda low S/N if you ask me, but perhaps helpful to those who consider it helpful.

<comment><USER6> Helpful for _you_ to know what the investment hive-mind is being told.

This deck isn't what you need to know to build your business. This deck is vital for knowing what potential investors are being told. You need to know what _they think_ the trends are, so you can tailor your pitch to their preconceived notions. Even if their notions are wrong. Especially if they are wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm all for increased immigration for skilled professionals, but slide 87 is mendacious at best. For example, Woz co-founded Apple; why isn't he listed along with Jobs? Same with Larry Page. Worst of all, Intel was founded by Noyce, Moore and Arthur Rock; Andy Grove was an early employee, yet he's listed as the sole founder.

<comment><USER8> The headline for that row implies that they're talking about one selected founder of the company.

<comment><USER7> The title is "60% of Top 25 Tech Companies Founded By 1st & 2nd Generation Americans = 1.3MM Employees, 2012". It was created to support a thesis (immigrants found highly successful companies at a higher rate than their share of the population suggests), but it presents an incomplete data set. Either the authors are naive and didn't understand how misleading the chart was, or they chose to structure it that way to support their agenda. It's so wildly misleading that it makes the rest of their "data" suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Photos on Snapchat vs. Photos on Facebook/instagram is an apples to oranges comparison.

Snapchat is a _messaging_ platform, so it would make more sense to put in context with other messaging platforms, like Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.

<comment><USER10> I think the point was to put into perspective the marketshare/growth of whatever platform snapchat is by putting facebook's bar on the same graph using the same scale.

It's like if you showed a photo of several species of elephants to a person who's never seen an elephant, they'd only know that woolly mammoths are larger than African elephants, which are larger than Asian elephants, but for all they know a mammoth could be the size of a large dog. Unless you put something else they already know in there, like a person, they won't know how huge they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those wondering, Bitcoin makes an tiny appearance on slide #97:

        Gross Volume: 18MM+ Cumulative Transactions
        Y/Y Growth: ~5x Y/Y Growth
        # Users: 11MM+ Bitcoins in Circulation (???)

<comment><USER12> Yeah that confused me since with the others, it's users... with Bitcoin, it seems like an inflated stat and not particularly relavant in the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who knew that Yahoo has more U.S. visitors than FB and as many as Google?

</comment><comment> T-A Slide #63 is funny. Even TechCrunch noticed: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/people-actually-use-qr- code...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/people-actually-use-qr-codes-in- china/)

<comment><USER14> I wonder how many people use the embassy QR code. I'd be pretty reluctant to start waving my cameraphone outside the guarded entrance to an embassy even in a country with more liberal attitudes towards security than China...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So wearable computing has gone mainstream now. Looks like lot of institutional investor money is going to flow (in startups in that area) during next couple of years.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, along with stacks of uninformed nouveau speculators that are simply chasing trends. Cheeks have untightened as of late and so much money is just begging to be put to work on good ideas, and bad ones.

My thought is to avoid investing engineering time in this particular trend unless you have a particularly solid inside track with someone already on the move in this space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> On slide 97: the number of bitcoins is not equal to the number of bitcoin _users_.

Correctly measuring the number of bitcoin users is non-trivial, or maybe even impossible.

(Of course brownie points do go to Mary & Liang for including Bitcoin in the report at all.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Apparently print publications are doomed (way overweight current ad budget vs. viewership). Who would have thought?

</comment><comment><USER19> this "mobile" thing seems like it might have legs...

</comment><comment><USER20> Why is Liang Wu's name on there?

<comment><USER21> Probably because he wrote 98% of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Subjectively, I thought this was well worth reading. Better than previous years' IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER12> Short story for anyone involved in advertising:

Spend more/get better on mobile.</comment>


The fight between Roam and Notion has begun - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1306722418786881536 <comment><USER2> This is extremely petty for Roam. Notion isn't Roam, and Roam isn't Notion, and this attempt at making them rivals seems more like resentment.</comment>


The Unofficial Guide to Migrating Off of Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~silver/gae.html

<comment><USER2> A few points (disclaimer: I work at Google on projects including App Engine)

1) It's not fair at all to say that Google "continue to ignore the two critical issues of uptime and data store latency". The HR datastore is specifically designed to address the concerns about variable latency of datastore operations, and to prevent both planned and unplanned downtime.

2) In my experience, high CPU cost for datastore operations is generally tied to things like having large numbers of indexes, or doing queries that don't have the right indexes. Each index written involves a bigtable write, if you are doing hundreds of these per entity it can become very expensive. That said, in general it isn't easy enough to know when you are doing something that will be expensive.

3) The bulkloader is definitely painful to use if you aren't familiar with it. In particular, casting schemaless data to a format such as CSV is hard because of the problem that rows can have unexpected keys. An improved "Bulk Datastore Import and Export tool" is on the 6-month roadmap for the product.

<comment><USER3> 1) Yep. My company moved to an HRD instance this week and our CS reps and customers have both noticed a significant difference in stability. That doesn't imply that it's perfect but to say that Google is ignoring the issue is completely false.

<comment><USER4> How bad was the cost differential?

<comment><USER3> Not sure yet. Even though we are one of the bigger clients on App Engine we weren't getting charged much at all for our usage anyways. But I believe Google said it would be around 3x for the HRD which isn't bad at all. Our executives really didn't care though as stability and reliability to our customers is worth too much to worry 3X (GAE's non-hrd stability has not been good recently). Btw we all use EC2 for some of our other services and that is costing us quite a bit more than GAE is at the moment. We'll see if that continues to hold true as we grow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been a heavy App Engine user since the beta days -- even gave a talk at I|O 2009 about scaling with App Engine. I have clients that run complex GAE sites that handle millions of daily requests.

I somewhat disagree with the author about scalability. There is a very narrow sweet spot of apps for which App Engine is a quite natural solution. If you're in the sweet spot, you'll probably scale well without too much up-front engineering investment.

The sweet spot _is_ narrow, though. For example, as the OP states: geo data doesn't really belong on GAE -- you can do a limited set of bounding box/proximity queries with the third party geomodel library, but wow, it's expensive and dog slow!

I do agree with the author about both the status dashboard (it only sometimes reflects my current experience with the system) and the surprising variation it data store latency. Latency has been much improved of late with 1.4 and beyond.

<comment><USER6> Could you please elaborate more on the "narrow sweet spot".? I would love to know which applications fit this sweet spot.

<comment><USER7> I must be in it, because I have rarely seen a downside to using AE. Here's the nature of my apps:

1) Extremely simple or very flattened data-model 2) Few writes, TONs of reads (I peak at 150 requests/second every day) 3) The occasional DeadlineExceededError causes me little or no headache. For some people this would be frustrating.

Also AE is awesome as a CDN. The latency is very tolerable for static assets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found that the AppEngine 1.4 SDK addressed many of these concerns. Personally, I've managed 50 requests per second on my blog without trouble, and with minimal CPU overhead. That's probably because everything is in memcache, so the database almost never gets hit. The pricing structure seems to actively encourage you to memcache as much as possible, too. Things are probably pretty different in a more write-intensive app, though.

<comment><USER9> Which blogging engine do you use and how much do you pay? I'm looking to migrate my blog to GAE too. Also, how's the latency?

<comment><USER8> I wrote my own. <http://github.com/thurn/ackbar>. If an article gets popular, I've paid up to $5, but below 6000 hits, it's all free. Latency could be better, but there's a lot of factors there (Clojure might be one of them?).

<comment><USER9> I see, thanks. If you don't mind, how come you pay? The free tier seems very large for a simple blog, which resource did you run out of?

<comment><USER8> Bandwidth runs out fast (images are the killer). CPU has gone over a couple times too.

<comment><USER10> I take it that your images are rather static. If so, you should be adding caching headers which will cache them for free in Google's front end servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't quite understand with some of the commenters: why do you guys talk about caching immediately as if your app needs to scale from the ground?

Isn't the point of GAE is that it scales (as long as you don't do stupid queries)?

If we have to put everything in memcached, what's the point of using GAE?

I also don't quite understand the push of using memcached for almost everything (especially for young startups). How do you handle data integrity? I'm guessing most data models of young startups are fairly simple and only contain at most 10 models with almost no relationship? Otherwise data integrity is painful.

<comment><USER12> Your site will _scale_ well - as in it will give exactly the same performance for the millionth user as for the first user.

That doesn't mean you will have a _fast_ site, though.

On GAE the datastore is pretty slow (it's a lot better now, but it used to be terrible), so a common pattern it to use a read-though cache to improve performance.

I wrote a thing that touched on this a couple of months back: [http://nicklothian.com/blog/2010/11/23/a-pragmatic- approach-...](http://nicklothian.com/blog/2010/11/23/a-pragmatic-approach-to- google-appengine/)

<comment><USER11> I saw your blog. One question for you if you're using GAE/J: how heavy it is the GAE/J warm-up compare to GAE/Python?

I heard stories where some people that use Spring MVC would have their request fails because the call stack is too deep.

<comment><USER12> Java is heavy, but there are ways to work around it.

The worst offender is the data access libraries. JPA is bad, JDP slightly better, but something like Objectify works really well.

Typically, Spring isn't the problem (I guess it could be if it is doing a lot of classpath scanning stuff or something though)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> St-Clock "4) The GAE design patterns in python are ugly. I find our current Sinatra- based implementation cleaner and easier to understand. Python + django is verbose, its templating system is obtuse, and its testing framework is, well, I don't know because I've never seen it. This point is a religious one, so I'll leave it be"

Should Python programmers write the unofficial guide to migrating off of heroku?

</comment><comment><USER13> A bit off topic: all of my customers but one in the last two years wanted to deploy to Amazon Web Services. I find this odd, being enthusiastic myself about AppEngine (no paid work, but I host some of my projects with it and I have written a few articles on GAE).

Clearly, not every web app is a good candidate for GAE.

I have found objectify-appengine to be nicer to work with than the _official_ Java data store APIs and I think it helps minimize loading request times.

</comment><comment><USER14> Typhoon App Engine allows you to set up your own GAE compatible environment: <http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/>

I never used it, but it sure looks interesting if your application doesn't fit GAE anymore or you want to make specific infrastructural adjustments. They support multiple different database/http/.. servers too.

<comment><USER15> This project looks promising. Could be a good basis for a consulting business, taking apps that have hit some obstacles or design limitations on Google AE, and getting them running on TyphoonAE-based hosting with app-specific infrastructure customizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm starting to notice that App Engine's memcache is incredibly slow. If serving up a page requires one memcache hit (for, say, caching entire response objects), it works well. If it starts to require, say, a dozen, the response time slows to ~700ms at best, and ~4s at worst.

<comment><USER9> Oh wow, that's surprising and somewhat disconcerting. Do you have any sort of reference? If true, it's very serious.

<comment><USER16> I have no exact data at the moment. I looked through my application's logs and compared the response times in situations when the front page loads from a full-page cache entry and when it has to build the page from multiple pieces of memcached data. If I find time, I'll write a small benchmark application which tests memcache performance. Empirically however, App Engine's "memcache" is pretty slow.

<comment><USER17> Using appstats, you should be able to get this information without having to write your own profiling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This guy loses credibility when he says that Django templates is ugly and that there's no unit testing framework.

Those are defensible positions in the first 10 minute impression of app engine, but building a simple app (and testing it with GAEUnit) should put both to rest immediately.

Yes, the Datastore is unreliable, but a newer, more reliable version has been released.

App engine is still my preferred platform of choice -- just waiting for ssl, naked domains, and per-entity-group selection of which datastore service level to use.

</comment><comment><USER19> On the other hand, GAE looks like a great fit for a static site built with Jekyll, like a personal blog. In fact I'm planning to migrate my site over today. Almost any personal site will be free to host. Even though I would only be paying a few dollars with S3, I see no reason not to give app engine a shot.

One thing I worry about is the reported downtime. I'm not sure whether or not that will affect a static site.

<comment><USER9> Our company website (<http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/>) and my resume (<http://resume.korokithakis.net/>) runs on GAE, on _one instance_. However, the script has a sort of mod_rewrite, so it requires that you declare your URLs beforehand. If you'd like to check it out, see [https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static- appengine-...](https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine- hoster).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Django might not be the best tool for GAE.

<comment><USER21> My experience agrees with this. It should be noted that this is largely due to cold start time.

<comment><USER9> I disagree, this is only an issue if you have almost no visitors, and then you can pay a nominal fee and keep instances awake. This is definitely worth the development time you will save and the ability to move off GAE easily if you need to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone provide some enlightenment about why one would migrate away from GAE? I only ask because I'm currently building an a web application on GAE and am starting to look down the road, wondering if building on GAE will allow us to grow as a business in the ways we want to, or if there are some arbitrary limitations that will come to bite us later.

(knowing of course that we're more or less tied to Google's infrastructure and the GAE way of doing things)

<comment><USER15> The original article does point out a few reasons, but the way I see it is this: AE is great if you want to scale and your app can scale in the AE way. There is a sweet spot and the tools work pretty well if you're in that sweet spot, but if you stray outside that spot you don't have a lot of options. Even getting your data out can be difficult, making the "export data and start over" nuclear option difficult.

If you know what you're building and you want to scale it using the sort of tools AE provides -- i.e. the datastore, taskqueue, etc. all fits your app well -- it's quite good. And quite cheap; it's not really fair to compare per- resource pricing to AWS because on AE you'll only pay for what you use instead of paying for idle time on a server instance. But it definitely constrains what you can do, and also locks you to a single hosting provider. If you're still exploring what you want to do, that level of design and vendor lock-in can be a pretty severe liability.

<comment><USER23> Another way of saying the same thing is that GAE is perfectly fine if you know all the requirements of your app before you build it. In a perfect world, you know exactly what you want to build, everything you want is available with GAE, then you go build it and it scales nicely.

In the real world however, requirements change: * You come up with a new idea that requires a certain library. Chances are, the library won't work on GAE out of the box. * You find out that you need to change your schema. It is pretty hard to update to the new schema while keeping everything in sync.

Finally, you pay the Google cost. When Google implements a new feature, they spend enormous time making sure that it scales well. They need to do so since they could be looking at millions of users on day 1. Most of us however, are looking to build something as cheap as we can, not knowing whether anyone is going to bother to look at it. However, you have to do the same performance optimizations that Google has to do so that your app scales. Chances are, it will be wasted effort - unless your objective is to just learn. I find it funny that GAE goes completely against the rule that "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil". Yes, you should think about your application's scalability. But your bigger problem should be about finding traction, and being able to react fast, not optimize for millions of views.

<comment><USER22> If I understand correctly then, it would appear that GAE may be poor for applications that require heavy computation on the server side (say, a facebook style graph, crawling and computing various metrics on it) but great for serving tons of dynamic pages?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers' Big Problem: Energy - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/06-brain-like-chip-may-solve-computers-big-problem-energy/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C= <comment><USER2> My favorite part is when Boahen says of binary computing, "It was so brute force." I hadn't thought of it like that before, but it makes sense, and highlights how the perspectives of different people can shed light on a problem.

<comment><USER3> A place to look for innovation is in the shadow of the fears of earlier (or original) innovators.

Most of the would-be inventors of flying machines were afraid of instability, so many of the failed attempts at heavier than air flight were encumbered by very large stabilization surfaces. It took the Wright's insight that dynamic stability could be provided by the pilot to make it work.

The same insight resulted in highly manuverable fly-by-wire fighters like the F-16, which were a departure from aircraft with _huge_ stabilizers for high- speed flight like the MIG-23. (Versions of the MIG-23 actually has a vertical stabilizer that extends below the aircraft, which has to fold-up prior to landing.)

If you're seeking to innovate, think: "What were my predecessors _afraid_ of?" Find those rocks and look under them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was wondering few times after encountering concept of artificial neural networks why people use them as they do.

One or two layered perceptron taught with back-propagation has just as much to do with how brain works as anything.

Why don't people just build network of simplest possible silicon based components with bounds that remember whether they were recently active, and strengthened if a moment later it occurs that reaction of a network to a given stimuli was proper but weakened if it was improper.

I bet you could teach this kind of network anything if it consists of enough elements and density of connections is sufficient and you can counter in period of random component discharges to simulate sleep and thus avoid overlearning.

Brain architecture, chemistry of synapses are just implementation detail of this general idea if your have to build it out of biological cells.

<comment><USER5> "One or two layered perceptron taught with back-propagation has just as much to do with how brain works as anything."

I understand by the above that they are not related. I agree.

"Why don't people just build network of simplest possible silicon based components with bounds that remember whether they were recently active, and strengthened if a moment later it occurs that reaction of a network to a given stimuli was proper but weakened if it was improper."

Your proposal dismisses just about all we know about neurons, and ignores all we don't yet know about neurons. That we neuroscientists make preliminary simplifications (as a sort of working hypotheses) and that some computer scientists run with them and find use for them in a variety of signal processing situations doesn't mean we have the faintest idea how neuron ensembles compute. Reproducing such simplifications in hardware, as you propose, may result in products that find a technological application, but don't advance our understanding of brain computation.

"I bet you could teach this kind of network anything if it consists of enough elements and density of connections is sufficient and you can counter in period of random component discharges to simulate sleep and thus avoid overlearning."

You'd be hardcoding a battery of special cases. While we expect the brain to be hardwired in some regards, its agility and flexibility are mighty. Your model falls short of emulating even our current limited notions of brain computation.

<comment><USER4> > Your proposal dismisses just about all we know about neurons, and ignores > all we don't yet know about neurons.

Yes. That's because I think that the things we know about neurons are mixture of recipe for great adaptive control system and implementation details of this idea in biological hardware. In fact I think that most of the things we know are implementation details (although valuable form medical point of view and intrinsically interesting).

> Reproducing such simplifications in hardware, as you propose, may result in > products that find a technological application, but don't advance our > understanding of brain computation.

I agree. I don't claim that such neural network can help us understand how brain works. But I bet such simplified artificial neural network could learn how to walk, run and jump maybe even see - as good as a child.

> You'd be hardcoding a battery of special cases.

I think that you are referring to my statement about sleep. I believe that sleep is not special case of anything but essential thing for any neural network learning. I have not heard about single organism with neural network that does not dream (perhaps with exception of one human being, Ngoc Thai). I interpret hallucinations resulting from sleep deprivation as symptoms of neural network over-learning. I think that periodical disconnecting of neural network from sensors and actuators and letting neurons discharge randomly is essential for proper learning.

> While we expect the brain to be hardwired in some regards, its agility and > flexibility are mighty.

I think that specialization of some parts of the brain for some tasks is just minor optimization. I draw that conclusion from the fact that young human with large parts of his brain missing can grow to be perfectly fine because other parts of the brain train themselves to replace functionality of missing specialized parts.

> Your model falls short of emulating even our current limited notions of > brain computation.

True. But I am not striving for modeling biological brain. I just want to build new brain in silicon.

Evolution is simple idea obscured in details by strange biochemical hardware it has to run on. I believe that same is true for neural networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Prof. Boahen gave a talk at TED a couple of years ago. This article doesn't really shed any new info on what they are doing. The video is really interesting and contains a simple demo: <http://blog.ted.com/2008/07/kwabena_boahen.php>

</comment><comment><USER7> Good article. Questioning everything that's 'known' is essential to coming up with new paradigms. And so far, computing certainly isn't an 'elegant' solution.

"doubling your signal-to-noise ratio demands quadrupling your energy consumption"

Interesting assertion. Makes sense intuitively; the more we dither about an unobvious/complex choice we're facing, the longer it takes to make it. I'm wondering how broadly that statement applies.

</comment><comment><USER5> The field of neuromorphic engineering is rather big. Started off with Carver Mead's book "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1989), and a very cool paper titled "A Silicon Neuron" by Mahowald and Douglas ([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v354/n6354/abs/354515a0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v354/n6354/abs/354515a0.html) , Nature 354, 515 - 518 (26 December 1991)). The field has grown to amazing devices currently becoming standard engineering practice like silicon retinas and cochleas ( <http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch> ).</comment>


Cmd meltdown: I know that command - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@souravray/cmd-meltdown-i-know-that-command-5a4b31aeb0ef#.y6otjyvcb <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am the creator of the comics-strips 'cmd meltdown'. Let me know if you have question or a funny command-line experience to share. Also suggestions for future strips are welcome too ;)</comment>


Show HN: Record your CSS usage on your website - remove unwanted CSS - <AUTHOR>

This is a follow up to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5095516 regarding CSS optimisation.
The common request/theme in these comments was the ability to 'record' your CSS usage on your website as you used it, thus capturing all the CSS selectors (i.e. on a dynamic website).
Turns out this functionality is actually inside Chrome Developer Tools; "CSS Selector Profile".
The profiler seems to be designed to record how much work each CSS selector takes - but I've noticed that it actually 'records' your usage (you press start + stop) - and shows you how many times each selector was called during your usage.
i.e. some selectors were used 100 times, other selectors 0 times.
So now you can look at your CSS across your whole dynamic site - and remove selectors that are never used. <comment><USER2> Is there a tool that will remove the selectors for you? It would be nice to have something included in a site build process that does this for particularly large CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.</comment>


You Too Can Save Loads of Money: The Details of the Bayesian Model - <AUTHOR> http://tech.zalando.com/posts/you-too-can-save-loads-of-money-the-details-of-the-bayesian-model.html

<comment><USER2> Does their cost/benefit analysis incorporate the cost of paying data scientists to build these models?

I'm really confused as to how the weight of a SKU is not information that's readily available to them from the manufacturer, or why a missing weight can't be determined as part of the fulfillment process. After all, you only need to weigh a SKU once, so it's only a problem the first time that item is packed. You'd think knowing the weights of products in your warehouse would be a solved problem by 3PLs and not one requiring the services of people with graduate degrees in statistics.

<comment><USER3> Clothes and shoes have a high turnover (fashion) and multiple variants per SKU. I can see a manufacturer not providing perfect or accurate weights for every shoe size for every style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the authors see this, I'd be interested to learn what MCMC package they use.

<comment><USER5> we used our own C++ multi-threaded Gibbs sampler, which turned out to mix fast enough for the estimation - even given the large number of parcels/items we have at Zalando

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since the graph only has variables and the explanations are mentioned in the text, you have to keep cross referencing.

</comment><comment><USER7> -1 for disabling zoom</comment>


New app Clipp takes the nuisance out of bar tabs - <AUTHOR> http://www.shoestring.com.au/2013/08/new-app-clipp-takes-the-nuisance-out-of-bar-tabs/

<comment><USER2> I hope that the push notifications for marketing aren't a crucial part of their business plan, because that's explicitly forbidden in the App Store.

Unfortunately I can't see much of a reason for places to start accepting Clipp tab payments without that incentive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious how they make a business of this. Doesn't apple take a 30% cut of every in-app purchase? Or are these purchases somehow not a part of that?</comment>


New York Times parody account restored to Twitter after outcry - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/20/new-york-times-parody-suspended?CMP=twt_fd <comment><AUTHOR> NYT meet Barbra Steisand...</comment>