Ask HN: What is a good, modern database technology to learn? - <AUTHOR>

Howdy all!
Economic researcher here. I taught myself MySQL for a project and it's been enjoyable, though not without the occasional issue.
I chose MySQL mainly because I had heard of it before. I'm sure that wasn't the wisest way to choose, but it made the selection process much easier.
Now that I've got a bit of MySQL under my belt, I'd like to branch out to some other database systems.
I've heard good things about NoSQL, MongoDB, as well as larger systems like Cassandra.
What I'd like to know is your recommendations. If you feel up to it, having your personal guide to best tech per function (e.g. use _this_ database system for website content management, use _that_ for static data access, etc.) would be awesome.
Thanks everyone! <comment><USER2> I guess part of it is do you want to collect data, or analyse and massage the data.

Just collecting data? NoSQL looks good, you can throw stuff in and get it out easy, but moving bits around is where it gets tricky. You will notice a lot of noSQL examples are forums, blogs, CMSs and such that don't get much action in changes, just additions and mixed media too.

If you want to move bits, crunch numbers, mix and match, etc. SQLish DBs will make those tasks easier. Queries may be long data sets spread out but you can assuredly get out the results you want.

What do you want to do is pretty important on what to choose. Take your target purpose and see if you can find examples in that database if there aren't many even close that might indicate its not currently be as easy to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER3> One SQL database is all you need. (for now)

Learn a new programming language instead, something completely unlike any you're already comfortable with.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is it that you want to _do_?

Having taught myself SQL, starting off with Access, I can say you've still got a lot to learn...no single project can cover the depth of database operational issues that are common to all databases. I wouldn't branch off to something else unless you have a solid project in mind where a non-SQL system is ideal for

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fair question. More than anything, I'm looking to learn the relative strengths of the common database systems.

Specific to my particular needs, a database system that allows good integration with R/python/Fortran is a must for research. The ideal system would allow for easy data manipulation and a nice suite of statistical and aggregation functions (e.g. MySQL has average, standard dev, but no median function).</comment></comment>


Writing a Lisp Interpreter in Go - <AUTHOR> http://bobappleyard.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/writing-a-lisp-interpreter-in-go/ <comment><USER2> Curious. It implies tail call elimination (the description of exhausting the stack explicitly says it wasn't a tail recursive call), but the description sounds like it's so direct that I can't see how it works.

Looking at evalExpr - [http://github.com/bobappleyard/golisp/blob/master/lisp/lisp....](http://github.com/bobappleyard/golisp/blob/master/lisp/lisp.go#L417) \- the only way I can see for this to have tail call elimination is if Go itself does (and I don't think it does, does it? It does have coroutines, which you could use to implement trampolining, but I don't see that here...)

<comment><USER3> I think tail call elimination is handled in the Apply method for closures - [http://github.com/bobappleyard/golisp/blob/master/lisp/lisp....](http://github.com/bobappleyard/golisp/blob/master/lisp/lisp.go#L567) . Looks like a trampoline to me.

<comment><USER2> Ahhh. Thanks. After thinking about that I realised I don't understand Go's syntax :o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a quip awhile back about wanting a scripting language closely integrated with Go. Maybe this would fit the bill? (Though one with a Go-like syntax would be better.)

<comment><USER5> That somewhat points to a development environment that I would like---a statically compiled language that is also easily interpreted. You develop with the interpreted version to get the quickest turnaround, and then you compile it for speed when you're ready to release your product.

Seems like LLVM or the JVM would both make this comfortable.

<comment><USER4> You should check out Groovy then. It has optional typing. Put in enough type annotations, and it's compiled Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't but wait for go interpreter in lisp :)

<comment><USER4> One that can compile its Lisp programs into Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now he can program in a proper language.

</comment><comment><USER8> Obligatory mention of having to use Readability for light-on-dark text...

EDIT: Some of us are on the other side of 30 and won't waste our eyesight on a blog by someone who thought white-on-black was _kewl_. Those under 30 shouldn't, either.</comment>


AnalogicFS: Experiences with a distributed, scalable, methodological file system [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2017/papers/katabi-analogicfs.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure this paper is machine generated.</comment>


Fastest sort of fixed length 6 int array - g-garron http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2786899/fastest-sort-of-fixed-length-6-int-array/

<comment><AUTHOR> His xor-laden branchless min/max code in the fastest version so far, sort6_sorting_network_v4, is some seriously janky shit. It's making it harder for the compiler to generate good platform-specific machine code. That initial impression was confirmed after looking at the x64 assembly code generated by gcc -O3. It was awful. I rewrote his min/max macros to use plain old ternary operators. The generated assembly code looked a lot better, and my code beats his by 2-2.5x on my late 2008 MacBook Pro:

        $ gcc -O3 sortnet -o sortnet && ./sortnet
        sort6_sorting_network_v4: time = 988 cycles
        sort6_sorting_network_per: time = 390 cycles

That win is without even trying. Just from eyeballing those cycle counts, I'd expect you could wring a lot more speed out of this. My coworker Fabian (@rygorous) immediately suggested using the old difference trick for SORT2(x,y) rather than calculating min and max independently. That brings it down further by about 50% in my benchmark. Fabian estimates that's still about 2.5 times off from optimal: "Best bit-magic solution is ~5 cycle dep chain, stupid simple mov / cmp / cmovg / cmovg boils down to 2."

His benchmarking harness also leaves a lot to be desired. But that's another issue. He also says that this is eventually intended for use on a GPU, but he's ranking the implementations by performance on a deeply pipelined out-of- order CPU. Modern GPU cores have some minimal scoreboarding but none of them do the full dance of register renaming and decoupled execution units.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is the sort of stuff that's great to read because you can't help but learn something.

I'd never never heard of sorting networks or oblivious sorting before, and it's good to see some answers other than "Quicksort!"

<comment><USER3> Surely by now you have read that quicksort's worst-case behavior is O(n __2)?

<comment><USER4> If you use a randomized implementation the worst-case behaviour is expected to be O(n log n).

(Worst-case in the input, averaged over your random bits.)

<comment><USER3> While using a randomized pivot implementation decreases the _likelihood_ of encountering a worst case, quicksort's worst-case behavior remains O(n2). See the last pages of

[http://www.cs.duke.edu/~reif/courses/alglectures/skiena.lect...](http://www.cs.duke.edu/~reif/courses/alglectures/skiena.lectures/lecture5.pdf)

I don't know that I've actually experienced a worst-case quicksort situation but I do know of a particular job using quicksort that ran far, far too long - indeed it never completed the quicksort step, because...

After 6 hours of sorting (all previous runs had completed the sort step in 40 minutes or less) we finally killed it, changed the sort implementation, fired it up again and never had the same problem again. It was an enterprise time- critical job running on a mainframe that simply had to complete within 24 hours of start.

<comment><USER4> Depends on your definition of worst-case behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, thanks for the link. I'd never heard of sorting networks before. The first thing I thought of was "use an XOR swap to cut memory accesses"...

<comment><USER6> If you do the naive implementation: int temp = x; x = y; y = temp;

Then a sufficiently smart compiler can decide to assign, say, %eax to x and %ebx to y, and then just rename its notion of registers, and after the swap just begin using %ebx for x and %eax for y. A swap with no copies at all!

(It won't do this in _every_ case, and it depends on context, but such an optimization is possible... but not with xor swaps.)

<comment><USER4> At least xor swaps would need an even smarter compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To be a little more speculative . . . if it is on GPU, is there some way of using rendering operations? The 'hidden-surface problem' in graphics has been described as basically a sorting problem: so represent each number as a triangle Z . . . well, maybe it would not be very fast, but you could do a few million at once!

<comment><USER8> Seven years ago, maybe. But today's GPUs do it easily in their programmable pipeline (shaders).

And where conditionals are costly, you can use tricks like:

        float temp = min(x, y);
        x = max(x, y);
        y = temp;

instead of the conditional swapping operations, to make the whole network sorting algorithm deterministic. (Edit: notice that min() and max() here are hardware operations.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The premise is interesting, but why compare results running on general-purpose CPUs when the goal is to run on a GPU? At this level of optimization, comparing two vastly different architectures and compilers would make any results pretty irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER10> could anyone recommend some reading on theory and implementation of sorting networks?

<comment><USER11> Knuth's TAOCP covers it in vol III of recent editions. (<http://www-cs- staff.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related: Minimum-comparison sorting (<http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~marpe/research/index.html#MCS>)</comment>


6 out of 10 2009 TechStars teams funded and led by VC - <AUTHOR> http://www.techstars.org/2009/11/17/6-of-10-boulder-companies-rounds-led-by-vcs-in-2009/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechstarsBlog+(TechStars+Blog)

<comment><USER2> Techstars was one of the most memorable (and rewarding) experiences of my life. It's great to hear this year's batch of companies are doing so well. Congrats to the 2009 teams!

</comment><comment><USER3> As a founder of one of the other 4, I am impressed but unsurprised, it was an incredibly strong group this year.

<comment><USER4> Is it better (for some arbitrary definition of good) to get VC money than angel?

I always figured that between angel and VC money, these incubators would bat right near 100%...

<comment><USER3> I believe (not certain, Andrew may know better) the average for previous Techstars years was around half got funded. I've no idea on other incubators, anyone know YC's batting average?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will have to look at the data again after this year, roughly 70% are funded or profitable by the end of the session.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> should this automatically mean these are quality companies because they've gotten VC funding? i'm sure all of us can tell a story or two about their favorite VC funded burnout. why does this continue to be the barometer by which start-ups are judged?

<comment><USER6> Multiple anecdotes does not equal data. Sure there are plenty of burnouts.

If you did a study of software startups, I think you'd find:

* Startups that exit for an amount that returns meaningful $ for the earliest investors (YC, TechStars) are likelier to have taken additional funding.

* Startups who exit for HUGE money (Google, etc) almost ALWAYS take Series A rounds.

If those are both true, do you REALLY think this isn't an important milestone for TechStars, YC, and the founders (if a big exit is their goal)?

<comment><USER5> Couldn't I say the same about your facts? Do you have numbers to show that those companies who do take money are likely to be more successful than those who don't, or who pursue money via alternative means? Most VC deals fail and they don't get their money back or break even. The few that make many multiples are what make their firms.

<comment><USER6> You could, but that's the difference between anecdotes and data. Can you really look at my 2 bullet points and say, "I think the data would show those to be false?" There've been studies showing this stuff (PG actually mentioned one during YC, if I recall correctly). Don't have 'em handy.

The truth (supported by data) is that large dollar exits are vanishingly rare without outside funding (but sure-- they've happened). Can you name _1_ large exit or IPO that had no Series A round? Can you name 5? Note that I'm NOT saying that outside funding increasing your chance of survival (I'd GUESS that the funding path is a riskier one)

"The few that make many multiples are what make their firms."

Absolutely. For all I know, a Series A REDUCES your chance of business survival... But the data shows that it increases your shot at a big exit (which is what a lot of people are in the game for).

<comment><USER7> I wished I could disagree with you :)

It's absolutely true, a series A is like a lottery ticket, suddenly you're a gambler, no longer working day to day to make ends meet, but the clock is running and you have to 'score' at a much higher level than you would have to score at without that investment.

Your chances of 'scoring' just went up, but your chances of staying alive just went down about as much.

It would be nice to see an analysis of how outside investment changes the sum total, in other words, is this a 'zero-sum-game' and are the 'funded' companies taking away as much by their much bigger chances at collapse than what they would have made if none of them got funded (keep in mind that lots of money gets lost not only because these businesses fail, but they also take their investors money down the hole with them) or is the capital injection a net gain ?

Incidentally, I know of one very successful exit (and IPO) that was done without outside investments but it was in the mid-80's, not related to online business, and I know of one online venture that got bought out for a fairly ridiculous amount of money. But that's the total score.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another star for TechStars in my book, I've been pretty impressed by their program and it continues to out do itself.

Cool to see the Vanilla forum guys on the list because I've used their forum software for quite some time. They had a big reputation in the design world when they launched around 05/06 for offering a comparable forum that wasn't obnoxious bloat like vB. Congrats on the persistence and hard work, looking forward to seeing you guys grow.

</comment><comment><USER7> You don't judge a startup in the year it was f(o)unded.

<comment><USER9> It's the incubator being judged here, not the startup.

<comment><USER7> Being funded is not a measure of success, not for a start-up and not for the incubator that is associated with the start-up.

Any significant exit of any of those start-ups would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think it's a barometer by which start-ups are judged. Instead, use it as a single data point for each company and 6 data points (for 2009 alone) for TechStars

<comment><USER6> "I don't think it's a barometer by which start-ups are judged."

I disagree-- it's a great barometer for startups at this stage (though certainly not the ONLY one). It's certainly strongly correlative to liquidity (take 100 companies that had a meaningful-for-angel/seed-investor exit and count the ones that took ZERO investment beyond that).

Or, closer to home... Look at the YC startups that are likely make YC a significant return. How many of them took no additional funding?

Or, if you really want to ignore liquidity/return for the investors... Look at the YC companies that experienced the most growth. How many of them took no additional funding?

<comment><USER11> You've got to decide whose return you want to measure - the investor or the entrepreneurs'.

Look at the most profitable YC startups (Weebly, Wufoo (others?)) and one took no further money, one took angel. I can only think of two of the ones who raised big money which are making revenues of the same order that I believe Wufoo is generating and certainly their profits are a fraction thereof.

Startups in the Valley are well optimised for Venture Capital but that's not the same thing as optimising for revenue or profitability.

<comment><USER6> Yaw, that's totally true. This is from the TechStars blog-- the only metric they ultimately care about is return on investment. So this is a big win for them. A huge exit/IPO just about NEVER fails to have a Series A. Given MY tolerance for risk, I'm probably prefer to own Weebly or Wufoo before most other YC companies... But I think it's unlikely that they'll be a HUGE win for YC (9-figure exit, that is).

Entrepreneurs generally (maybe just sometimes?) get into the startup world in the hope that they'll see a multi-million dollar exit (to compensate for the risk and the lack of salary for a chunk of time). For people motivated that way, the Series A is a big deal. Wade through data of $5m+ exits and I think we'd find that the non-funded startup is pretty scarce. Wad through the $20m+ exists and I think they'd be functionally non-existent.

Weebly took $650k according to CrunchBase, so they'd fall into the 6 out of 10 TechStars group, FWIW.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple job queue in Bash using a FIFO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.garage-coding.com/2016/02/05/bash-fifo-jobqueue.html <comment><USER2> Wouldn't there usually be more than a single producer?

Also, a winning producer would block if all consumers are busy, wouldn't it?</comment>


Who cleans up after war? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/question/214593-war-cleanup-damage <comment><USER2> Reminded me of this article about how Gaza is still just rubble after Israel bombed the crap out of it last year. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living- rubbl...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living-rubble-Gaza- nearly-one-year-Thousands-Palestinians-suffering-international-aid-promised- six-months-ago-arrive.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> France is still cleaning up explosives from World War I. About 900 tons a year are collected.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another example is Laos. The US dropped a couple million tons worth of bombs there, leaving a third or more of the country contaminated.

The use of cluster bombs in particular, left unexploded bomblets embedded in trees or under soft earth, where they're detonated all too frequently.

(The US has slowly begun sending some money over to assist with cleanup.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently saw Daniel Craig on the Late Show. He's the "United Nations Global Advocate for the Elimination of Mines and Explosive Hazards"

UNMAS ([http://www.mineaction.org/unmas](http://www.mineaction.org/unmas)) helps with war clean-up in the few cases where peace eventually breaks out as apart from the dead-bodies, mines & IEDs are also painful remnants

<comment><USER6> The countries and companies that make mines found in war zones should be required to clean them up.

<comment><USER7> How do you plan to force them to do that clean up work? In particular, Iraqi Insurgents were planting roadside bombs and land-mines throughout the totality of the 2000 through 2010 decade.

We can't even get them to surrender properly (they just transformed into ISIS). How do you expect us to "force" them to stop planting IEDs?

<comment><USER8> Iraqi IEDs are a tiny drop in the bucket that is 'deployed landmines'. Most landmines are mass-produced by munitions companies. Start there.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty)

It has already started. But not everyone is on board with this. So now what? We go to war about it?

<comment><USER9> "Well everything is fucked so we might as well not bother."

<comment><USER7> Oh we do "something" about it. But I just gotta point out that "forcing other people to do something" is typically a non-scalable solution. As soon as someone disagrees with you, you become deadlocked.

Its not enough to just say "force those other guys to clean it up". If you actually want to say that, you need an action plan (ie: how you plan to force those other guys to do stuff). If you're saying "pass a law", we can pass a law of course, but its not going to affect other countries.

This is a United Nations issue, and it needs to be solved globally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The cleanup contracts probably go to the same ones who profit from the war to begin with.

<comment><USER11> Haliburton comes to mind, their subsidiary, KBR (Cheney's old haunt) made 39.5 billion USD on Iraq War v2.0. Fluor, a Texas based engineering firm, made 1.5 billion USD on logistics and reconstruction.

Security (Dyncorp 4.1 billion USD), transport (Combat Support Associates 3.8 billion USD), and food services (Agility 7.4 billion USD), were all needed for the above operations.

138 billion USD went to private contractors during and after the war in Iraq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Who cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view.

Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?

Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.

We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism.

Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.

<comment><USER13> What do you propose is the alternative to capitalism? It's the only system that seems to have reasonably worked.

<comment><USER14> Slightly off topic, but I don't think that the argument "capitalism is the system which worked better) is valid. It's not that it's wrong, per se, but I think it's an implication of mankind evolution and not the capitalist system itself.

In more concrete terms: if you pick any given point in time, you'd probably be able to say the same without being wrong. At date X, the social system in practice is/was the one which worked better up until that X point; it's because we've been evolving somewhat continuously, not because the system per se.</comment></comment></comment>


My favorite programming books, tools, and services - <AUTHOR> http://youngnprogramming.com/christmas-special-my-favorite-programming-tools-and-books/ <comment><USER2> "My favorite programming books, tools, and services... available through all of my affiliate accounts"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes some of the links are through affiliate, but I do really recommend the things I write about, but as a student I do really need some money to keep the blog up, so I do use affiliate so that I get something for telling about it.</comment></comment>


How to get started with RTL-SDR - <AUTHOR> http://www.lucashayas.com/journal/2014/1/16/intro-to-rtl-sdr

<comment><USER2> If you're on windows, I recommend using SDR# instead [1]. It's got a lot cleaner interface, and easily supports running multiple copies simultaneously if you have multiple SDRs you want to use.

[http://sdrsharp.com/](http://sdrsharp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "My state doesn't allow Amazon Affiliates"

What is the reason for this? Never stumbled upon a line like that.

<comment><USER4> IIRC California[1] ruled that if you were an Amazon Affiliate living in California, then that constituted Amazon having a "Nexus" in the state which would make them liable for sales taxes on all their Californian sales. Rather than have to add sales tax to all their Californian sales, Amazon chose to eliminate all their Californian resident Amazon Affiliates. No doubt the same applies to a number of other states, but I haven't kept up with the details.

So it's not really "my state doesn't allow Amazon Affiliates", more "Amazon took a business decision to not have Amazon Affiliates in my state".

[1] Maybe it was another state, but the principle remains the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What software is suggested for those running Linux?

<comment><USER6> Give [http://gqrx.dk/](http://gqrx.dk/) a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> it's all on [http://rtlsdr.org/](http://rtlsdr.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're on OS X I've been working on a fork of some homebrew packages [1] which could (and hopefully will soon) be a whole lot better.

There are some good getting started tutorials for using gnuradio [2] which I found very helpful when getting started. For different hardware, they still can be quite useful.

1\. [https://github.com/cole-christensen/homebrew- rfbrew](https://github.com/cole-christensen/homebrew-rfbrew)

2\. [https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/)

<comment><USER9> Gosh I swear I tried to follow the brew steps to install GNURadio a million times and after hours it always end up stuck in some really weird compilation error which I failed to Google out.

I gave up.

<comment><USER8> Me too, I became frustrated enough to try to fix it. My hacks on the upstream succeeded on a fresh install of OS X right before I left on vacation alas with some inaccurately documented steps.

Interested in being a tester? E-mail me (I would be very happy if I could help more than just myself and get some external verification)</comment></comment></comment>


Salon publishes 33% fewer articles, traffic grows 40% - <AUTHOR> http://open.salon.com/blog/kerry_lauerman/2012/02/03/hit_record <comment><USER2> Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it.

I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.

The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.

The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.

Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.

<comment><USER3> I truly believe that quality will win out over quantity in the long run. The race to churn out SEO-based, high-volume, crap-quality content farms represented the first phase in online journalism. It was a race to the bottom. Sure, that race had some early winners. But the race has been run. The bottom has been hit. There's no more profit to be reaped there, and besides, the model makes less and less sense vis-a-vis today's internet.

That's because the future of the mass content aggregation business now belongs to Facebook, and to other social networking services yet to come. Aggregation websites are going to look very anachronistic in the coming years, while content-specialist sites will have to differentiate on subject matter and on quality.

So what does this mean for content producers? Well, it's no longer about mass aggregation of cheaply produced crap. It's now about being a high-quality producer, whose content is more likely to get pickup up ("earned," in media parlance) by Facebook users, as well as by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking algorithms. Thoughtful pieces will matter. Well-written pieces will matter.

It's not easy, and there's no guarantee that it'll be profitable. And unfortunately, the advertisers will be monetized by the aggregation layer (Facebook, most likely) on which content producers will depend. So that leaves pay-gates and subscriptions, both of which can be circumvented, and which are often loathed by readers. But however the winning business model gets figured out, quality will almost certainly play a crucial role in it.

<comment><USER4> I sincerely hope you're correct. The analogue to the Internet in Neal Stephenson's Anathem is hardly used. Only those who specialise in digging useful information out of the piles of autogenerated crud bother with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> David Simon, the co-creator of HBO's The Wire and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, speaks eloquently during a PBS interview by Bill Moyers on the demise of print journalism over the past 20 years and the loss of "1st generation reporting". ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s))

It's certainly uplifting to see that online journalism has something of a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just my personal experience, but I find the shift towards "long-reads," particularly by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other similar publications, to be a great boon to the people of the world. Is it so hyperbolic to say that "1st generation" journalism is as important to society as democratic government? I don't think so.

Either way, I'm glad that Salon has published this data to show that there is another way (a _better_ way?). If you look at all the lemmings that simply followed the "quick-hits" journalism that Kerry Lauerman is talking about in this blog post, no one 5 years ago had the guts to turn the model upside down. I'm very glad and grateful that we are making progress to getting to a point where "1st generation" journalism can be found -- and will be sought after -- in online media.

<comment><USER6> If that which the newspapers and television news agencies did was "1st generation reporting", what would actual transmission of newsworthy information be? 0th generation?

I mean, for instance, providing a live video feed or a riot, or videos taken by those in attendance, rather than a reporter talking about the event hours or days later. The video of Gaddhafi being killed, not the reporters seeking to let people know what happened without risking giving offense to any viewers?

It's not particularly relevent to Salon, but I'd prefer to see 'news' be reduced to uncommented raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing. Show people what is happening. As soon as you 'explain' what is happening, regardless of intent, you introduce all sorts of biases and preconceived notions and the like. I would certainly like to see the continuation of long-form well-researched journalism of the past, which takes the raw news items and correlates them, provides context and meaning, etc, but I think that should be separate from 'news' reporting. It is article writing, which has been important in society for ages. Even though it was originally created due to the technological limitation of not being capable of finding original raw material, it does add significant value so it makes sense to keep it.

However, any medium like this responds to social trends. Society has been trending anti-intellectual for over 50 years with no sign of slowing. People do not want to stop and think, they do not want to be exposed to news that jars them out of their comfort zone. They do not want to read about ideas different from their own. They certainly do not want any analysis of the ideas they do hold as true, they see that as attack.

A big help to long-form journalism would be moving away from the concept of central agencies that employ these reporters. What do those agencies provide? Nothing. They used to aggregate reporters together, give them access to technological resources, editors, etc. All of that can be done by some software with an Internet connection. Take the entire revenue of one of those large agencies, and provide it directly to the reporters (they can contract freelance editors online without much trouble). See what kind of quality gets produced then.

<comment><USER5> I agree with some parts of your argument, but I really think that there is just too much content out there to consume. If you had "raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing," I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed with information.

The job of the newspaper editor is to condense the material down, and like you say, correlate and aggregate it to form a narrative that is easier to consume. Sure, I'll concede that the majority of news editors choose to showcase worthless information -- particularly on television -- but you have to understand that it's a capitalist economic model and the newspapers are only delivering what the consumer wants.

"1st generation" reporting to me means a journalist who goes out and gets the interviews and video feeds. Do you think there were _pre-existing_ "raw video feeds" out there for the Enron executives, the survivors of the Japan earthquake, etc.? "1st generation" reporting comprises the effort it takes a good journalist to identify which parts of the story need telling and going out and getting them. Yes, there is inevitable bias -- but we have to be able to take it with a grain of salt and make up our own mind based on potentially multiple narratives of the same story.

(Also, just to touch on this... I think you're underestimating the value of the news agencies. They provide resources to make quality reporting a viable economic model. In addition, they provide a name behind which the journalists' sources can trust. Would 'Deep Throat' have divulged his knowledge to Bernstein and Woodward if they had not been reporting for the Washington Post? Obviously, we'll never know the answer to that question, but I personally believe it's an important consideration for any potential source.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _please let this catch on_ _please let this catch on_

The AOL-ification of journalism has gotten ridiculous over the last few years. It would be really nice to see content go towards Quality over Quantity.

<comment><USER8> It does: get subscriptions to The Atlantic or The New Yorker to see examples of this in action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, the quality has really gone down. Five years ago, I used to read Salon every day. They used to have very interesting well researched and well thought out articles.

Nowadays Salon is progressively obtaining the qualities associated with a bad blog. A lot of half thought out articles, a lot of lazy opinion pieces, a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist, practically no attempt to obtain first hand information, just regurgitating popular culture and what appeared on Gawker two hours prior, movie reviews that sheepishly praise the latest idiotic big budget movies. Oh and I read a book review where a reviewer panned a book she had not read.

So yeah, pretty depressing.

<comment><USER10> _> a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist_

Just thought I'd point out the humor in you using a gendered word to describe their tendency to talk about sexism.

<comment><USER11> Most people don't take the word "bitching" as a sexist term when it's used to refer to an entire group of unspecified complainers. The only ones that would find it "sexist" are looking to be offended.

You can also say someone's "dicking around", and it doesn't have the same gendered connotation as "dick."

<comment><USER12> Most people are too fucking stupid to concern themselves with such things as gender equality.

I don't find it offensive, but it is sexist. It just shows a lack of forethought on your part and a lack of understanding of gender norms/privilege/etc.

Subtlety assigning words like that is sexist. And dicking around does have gendered connotations, if you don't realize that then see statement one.

<comment><USER13> Well, now that we've got your side of it, somebody else chiming in:

<http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122>

and

<http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3567>

:)

<comment><USER14> this is at once the best thing i've ever read by esr, and also a perfect explanation of how open source's image will always remain on top of free software's.

the second part didn't occur to me until i read through it again, but esr himself has been putting rms and (much less appropriately) anyone that sees value in his perspective in an anti-theistic kafkatrap, an especially damning and potent snare considering that both esr and rms are atheists. that kind of diabolical abuse has soured me on esr forever, but i admire how brilliantly he explains it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since Google changed their algorithms to deal better with web spam and useless articles, even blackhatters and web spammers know that you have to serve useful content to get search engine traffic. [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and- sea...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search- engine-spam.html)

Also, how much of this traffic increase has to do with the election, since Salon is a site that runs a lot of political stories? It is good they are seeing more traffic with fewer, better articles, but 2 months of record traffic in an election year would be expected of a political site. What will be their explanation in a year after the election is over and their traffic falls?

He specifically mentioned there were no outlier events that drove traffic, but is that really true? The Republican debates and early primaries have been dominating most news outlets for a few months now. It certainly drives the stories on Salon today.

Understanding what drives traffic, whether it be events, advertising, trends, etc., is essential to craft a content strategy that works in the long run.

I do believe longer, engaging, original stories are good for the user, whether they are scanning or reading the entire article. They are good for SEO too. It will be interesting to see what happens with Salon's traffic and their new- found commitment to better content.

</comment><comment><USER16> " _Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source._ "

I think there's a place for this, if done well. My startup lets the community summarize popular stories with an emphasis on being short, unsensationalized and to the point. This means we sacrifice Google traffic but I prefer to consume _most_ news like this and I know there are others who feel the same.

Of course, there are times you want a deep dive but that's when you go to Slate, NY Times and the like.

If you're interested, it's <http://skimthat.com>

Edit: This is kind of similar to Open Salon but with a very narrow focus on the type of writing: summarized news in a dry, direct way with no puns or jokes. The stories should be as short as possible while giving the reader a good understanding of the topic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Salon articles are constantly on the top feeds in Pulse News for me, and they're usually quite compelling. I've never regretted reading any of their articles.

</comment><comment><USER18> Salon: 5 million <http://www.quantcast.com/salon.com>

Huff Po: 70 million <http://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com>

Just sayin'

<comment><USER19> You have to cross reference that against quality though. In these days of content farms high traffic does not necessarily correlate against high value.

If the higher quality of writing and audience attracts a more attractive advertiser audience Salon could get much higher CPM rates without having the same volume.

<comment><USER20> HuffPo is definitely straddling the content-farm fence.</comment></comment></comment>


Rats trained to play the forex market - <AUTHOR> http://www.artmarcovici.com/rat-traders

<comment><USER2> Much like the monkey throwing darts at the stock market chart who clocks professional money managers on average, this result proves nothing about rats or markets. It provides further experimental proof for the worst kept secret in history: professional money manager systematically destroy value.

<comment><USER3> While it is certainly true that professional money managers don't beat the market on average, this does not imply that they destroy value.

Professional money managers and speculators in general, at least in principle, more efficiently allocate capital as a result of their speculative activities. This causes overall returns to increase. In a world without money managers/other speculators, market returns would be lower overall.

The simple model: in a world without money managers/speculators, overall returns might be 2%. In a world with 1 speculator, returns might be 2.1% and that speculator might achieve returns of 4%. In a world with many speculators, they might _all_ achieve returns of 4%, and none of them would be beating the market. They are creating value, however.

(Another reason they don't beat the market is that many of them are not trying to. The manager of my Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 fund is currently trying to beat the market. In 2040 his goal will be to minimize risk.)

<comment><USER4> The stock market has little to do with allocating capital. The bond market does, but the stock market is mostly about valuing short term and long term risk with associated rewards.

<comment><USER5> Huh? The stock market absolutely has to do with allocating capital. It, together with the bond market, is the place where large companies go when they need to raise funds.

Bond traders and stock traders alike both balance the risk and reward of a company's offering in order to determine a fair value for that offering. Valuing risk and reward is valuing the company and valuing the company is the most critical part of a stock offering. Any post on here about raising money from a VC will talk about the valuation of the startup.

<comment><USER4> A small percentage of stock market transactions are Company to Investor. Most transactions are Investor A to Investor B which only indirectly impacts a company's value. Clearly they are related, but it's generally much better for investors in healthy companies for that company to get money from the bond market than the stock market.

PS: Consider a company with consistent revenue/dividends but zero transitions on the stock market. Its value is going to be heavily influenced by stock market conditions, but it's ability to raise money is going to be dominated by the state of the bond market.

Edit: My point is what it means when a transaction between Invester A and Invester B happens on the stock market at a given price.

<comment><USER5> It is often better for a company to raise money from the bond market, but only up to a point and only because of the tax implications.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade- off_theory_of_capital_str...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade- off_theory_of_capital_structure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you take 80 people and tell them to randomly play the stock market, buying or selling - you will always have some that succeed and some that fail over the short term.

The question is, if the same people who 'succeeded' are put back to the start again and play randomly with a new batch of 80 people - would they still rise to the top, or perhaps this time have worse luck.

Comparing this to the rats, the long term testing / new rounds with a new set of 80 rats (including the elite) would help determine whether these rats are the best, or if it was chance.

If I understand this correctly, the decision the rat makes is based solely on hearing a certain frequency (pattern of trading emerge), unfortunately even if this is the case - trading by patterns could be extremely risky without the common sense / experience of a real trader to see what is really happening to the market.

<comment><USER7> What the rats are doing (if this is not a well done prank) is exactly equivalent to what 'technical' traders and chartists do. As to why these techniques work; they are reacting to the intentions of other traders signaled in data. This may be a case where knowledge of the "underlying reality" that the market is reacting too (supposedly) is a disadvantage because it prevents noticing and reacting to the actual data.

That said, this whole thing reads like an elaborate practical joke.

<comment><USER6> You mean, like they're noticing a 'bearish gartley' pattern (in audio) and acting appropriately?

My point was, that although these can be 'indicators', you still require a human mind to determine whether the trade should be made. If it was as simple as matching patterns and trading, anyone would be able to do it.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily, if (again taking this at face value) only a few rats are able to pull this trick off, that's not too surprising. Of humans who trade forex, only a certain percentage are relatively successful at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These rats clearly deserve $1000,000 bonuses. They are the indispensable financial innovators which drive our economy. These rats are too big to fail.

<comment><USER9> They are providing valuable liquidity to our financial markets. Is it too much to ask that they be rewarded for their contribution to society.

Seriously, this is the most ingenious thing I have seen in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Marcovici is a conceptual artist and this is satire. Wasn't sure if some comments here thought this was for real.

Take a look at his satirical illustrations about BP here:

<http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/>

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the first thing I thought of when I read this:

[http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-07-03/?CmtOrder=Rating&...](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-07-03/?CmtOrder=Rating&CmtDir=ASC)

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish he had compared the rats' performance to the current publicly available "best of breed" programmatic approach that uses technical indicators. Other than that, the interesting part of the experiment seems to be how it may relate to training human traders more efficiently. Starting a fund based on trading with rats seems a bit satirical indeed..

</comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps there is an elaborate rat society running around mazes and pressing switches somewhere in the bowels of Goldman Sachs?

</comment><comment><USER14> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514798>

</comment><comment><USER15> Survivorship bias explains his results.

<comment><USER16> He claims after selectively allowing the best performing rats to breed the second generation of rats performed better than the first generation. If it were survivorship bias the second generation should be no better than the first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this different than training a neural net on historical data?

</comment><comment><USER17> That is ratsome.</comment>


Scheme SRFI-1 (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/srfi-1.html

<comment><USER2> Did you also find that when searching for "underage lesbian sluts"?

<comment><USER3> To those downvoting: it's a reference to a META tag that Olin put in the HTML:

      <meta name="keywords" content="Scheme, programming language, list processing, SRFI, underage lesbian sluts">

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, good ol' SRFI-1. The most useful SRFI there is. Map, fold, filter, take, etc. Can't live without those.

</comment><comment><USER5> Are all Schemes expected to implement SRFI-1 fully? Should they all implement all the commands listed?

</comment><comment><USER6> Olin Shivers also authored the best Acknowledgements page of any reference manual ever: [http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html](http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html)

"Who should I thank? My so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.

If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself."

<comment><USER7> No Olin thread is complete without a link to Olin's antics on usenet:

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/opinion.html](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/opinion.html)

<comment><USER8> Hilarious!

[...] Unix and C suck. C is little more than structured assembler. Ever wonder why "bus error core dump" is the standard C program crap out? Because C freely hands out random pointers to anyone that asks. Slut. [...]</comment></comment></comment>


Wither Second Life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/10/yankee-group-sa.html Original source requires registration: http://www.yankeegroup.com/ResearchDocument.do?id=16437 <comment><USER2> "Companies that provide remote access--through mobile devices or other means-- to their web experience will have a greater impact than pc-centric companies."

A massively multiplayer online game featuring realtime 3D graphics delivered on a phone? Unlikely to happen soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was my thought. I linked it more for the research than the advice and speculation.</comment></comment>


Joyce's Ulysses Banned Again--By Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/app-economy/2010/06/09/joyce-s-ulysses-banned-again-apple-not-government

<comment><USER2> _I hope at least that Berry and Levitas are enjoying the free publicity._

This is the last line of the article. As usual, all articles written by journalists should be read from end to start, because if they're going to accidentally slip in something true and intelligent it always happens at the end. The beginning is where the linkbait, exaggeration, and strained narrative conventions live.

Complainers are part of the cost of running an editorial operation: When you reject someone, for any reason justified or not, they will tend to run to the loudest megaphone they can find and complain bitterly about how unfair it is, and about how the insular world of publishing is operating a sinister cartel with the goal of preventing their monumental work from making as much money as J. K. Rowling's.

In this particular case one imagines that these guys will get the app through on appeal. Some extremely rushed Apple reviewer saw an obvious violation of the _letter_ of the rules and hit the reject button, secure in the knowledge that the details could be worked out during the inevitable appeal. It happens. But in the meantime the submitters are wisely milking the publicity machine for all it is worth. Journalists need something to talk about, and this sort of story slots right in. (Until these stories get boring, anyway. They're boring me already. Surely they will start boring others soon.)

And for the hundred thousandth time: _Governments_ "ban" things, Apple and other publishers _reject_ things. Apple is a publisher with a platform; publishers exert editorial control. Your unmade Hollywood screenplay and your rejected novel are _rejected_ , not "banned". You do not have a First Amendment right to force me to promote or even endorse your work.

But I'm not surprised to see the article misuse these terms. It's the start of a piece of journalism, after all, and the first paragraph needs linkbait.

<comment><AUTHOR> You write "Apple is a publisher with a platform". This is where things get interesting. In the past we had publishers, companies that were free to pick and choose the content that they wanted to invest in and distribute - and we had platform builders - companies who made things like printing presses and telephones. After you sell me a telephone switch or printing press, you don't get to dictate what gets printed on the press, the conversations that can take place on my phone or the kinds of programs that I watch on my tv. Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform and that's why they deserve heightened scrutiny. I don't have a problem with the Disney web site rejecting adult or political content - as you point out that's their business to make those choices - but I get really uneasy when the company building the hardware starts dictating what it can be used for.

<comment><USER2> _Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform_

This is hardware-scarcity thinking. My hypothesis is that our industry is so entrained to think like this that it's going to take a decade to settle in to our new universe. It's going to be like when the mainframe folks had to come to grips with the PC.

We are going to be _awash_ in tablets within a year. Within five years we will be picking them out of the trash.

Platforms are a _commodity_ now. I can buy a Windows laptop -- not a netbook, a 15" laptop -- for a few hundred bucks from my local Micro Center. Netbooks are even cheaper, of course. As for operating systems? The Linux revolution has arrived. Android has arrived and it is open-source. If you want to run your own platform you need to download Android and pay some Chinese manufacturing firm a few hundred bucks per unit to cough out a tablet or a generic smartphone and stick your nameplate on it. And if this isn't true now, it will be true in a year or two.

I have a Flip Mino video camera. Its processing power is surely greater than that of the laptop I owned ten years ago. I am about to literally _take the thing apart for parts_ because its resale value is too small to care and my new iPhone is going to be a factor of five more useful.

When a hardware platform was a three thousand dollar investment we had to worry a lot about the manufacturer "dictating what it can be used for", because we couldn't afford more than one. The one we bought had to support _everything_ we wanted to do, or we would be sad. When hardware platforms cost thirty dollars the calculus will change.

What Apple has figured out is that when hardware is a commodity, editing and publishing is the name of the game. You're no longer competing to sell more hardware independent of content, just as Conde Nast is not a paper company. Your asset is taste. Design. The ability to ship hardware-software-content combos that consistently work and consistently make the customer happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure hardware is a commodity and there is no scarcity there but the issue is not hardware it's access to the OS and there is an extremely limited number of mainstream consumer platforms. Right now the only options are proprietary systems run by two giant corporations. UNIX is currently a niche player and the Google Chrome OS is an unknown.

Furthermore, the increasing market share of the Apple platform obliges developers and publishers to develop custom products (e.g. Ulysses) for the iPhone/iPad. Except that now they'll have to self-censor or have Apple play the role of nanny.

I don't understand why Apple feels that this special user experience could be shattered by the glimpse of a human body part or an unsettling political viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What an absolute shame. It's funny because I started reading Ulysses because it was available for a free e-reader iphone app. I had always been a bit wary of it (Pynchon drives me nuts and I often hear Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow mentioned together) but after reading a few chapters on the phone I picked up a copy and have been absolutely loving it.

Anyway, I realize that what was censored was a cartoon depicting the book . . . still, censoring something like Ulysses (of all things) is just short- sighted and ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is nonsexual nudity really something we need to "protect" children from? All those shows is that people have genitalia.

</comment><comment><USER5> I usually don't get all up in arms about multipage article crap, but this article is barely long enough for one print page, and then they split it at probably the worst possible point.</comment>


Dictatorship of the Minorities - <AUTHOR> http://udrepper.livejournal.com/7326.html

<comment><USER2> Oh, it's a blog entry about linux kernel development. :D</comment>


PV (Pipe Viewer) – add a progress bar to most command-line programs - <AUTHOR> https://ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml <comment><USER2> I don't always have pv installed, especially on smaller systems. More recent "dd"s have an argument "status=progress" which is pretty good, especially if "dd" is the source or sink of the data in question (which for me it usually is, otherwise I'd use "rsync --progress"). pv is great, just thought I'd point out some other options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for the advice!</comment></comment>


Is DHS Ready to Take the Lead on Cybersecurity? - <AUTHOR> http://www.novainfosec.com/2012/10/18/is-dhs-ready-to-take-the-lead-on-cybersecurity/ <comment><USER2> Good question. Let me ask you this - Is the Social Security Administration ready to handle our retirement? Is the Department of Health and Human Services ready to take the lead on health care? Is the Treasury ready to take the lead on reducing our deficit?

Let's be realistic. Government is good at a few things - blowing things up, printing money, and remaining in charge. But they are terrible at everything else. So no, I don't think they are ready. The most ready force for cyber- security in the US is the Department of Defense, the one branch of government that can actually get a task accomplished. Slowly and with the soft touch of King Kong yes; but they can at least get things accomplished. Know how? A clear chain of command and the ability to deal with employees through a meritocracy. No other government institution can do these things. They can't even fire bad workers!</comment>


Quantum Randomness - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16217,y.2014,no.4,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx <comment><USER2> Enjoyed the shout-out to Bohmian mechanics. Nonlocality may be weird, but you know what else is weird? _Everything else about quantum mechanics._ I'd actually prefer a nonlocal deterministic theory to a local indeterministic one, though I know that's just a philosophical preference. Still, I wish Bohmian mechanics was more popular; I wasn't even aware it existed until recently.

<comment><USER3> Multiverse is perfectly deterministic without all the issues with Bell's Inequality and needing a superfluous particle in addition to the wavefunction. I think pilot wave is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pure randomness doesn't need physicality. The expansion of Omega, Chaitin's constant, is random. There is no model, program, or equation, that can predict the next bit.

Perhaps its possible the universe could be run on a cellular automata that is unpredictable in the same way. Is say, radioactive decay, truly random, or just can't be predicted by any program shorter than the underlying cellular automata process itself.

The fact that we can model the universe at all and predict parts of it at various scales -- that math works at all for physics -- is either remarkable, or perhaps required in any universe capable of intelligent life. :) Perhaps in a universe that is incomprehensible otherwise, evolution would not select for intelligence.

<comment><USER5> That's referenced in the article -- Chaitin's constant is 'algorithmically incompressible' according to Kolmogorov complexity -- though note that this definition means it's "assymptotically" random, but the first n bits can be approximated in finite time (there are other numbers with more strict randomness). What the article addresses is that if you're given a long string with that property you can't verify the randomness, by definition. But using the CHSH method outlined you can, assuming only some physical principles -- provided you're given a small 'seed' to start.

Note that the underlying "way" that the universe generates randomness doesn't matter from a scientific standpoint -- as long as we can't predict it, you can think of it as being generated by either an enormous computer or truly random (whatever that means).

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk About 3/4 of the way down, in response to: "The central idea in all of these protocols is simply to be stingy with the use of randomness. We ask Alice and Bob to play the CHSH game over and over again. However, in almost all of the plays, they simply both receive red cards—leading to a boring but also "cheap" (in terms of randomness) game. Only for a few randomly chosen plays does one of them receive a blue card."

If this is true, then these "clever" protocols are breaking the 50/50 rule of the CHSH game. Right?

<comment><USER6> Yes. In the normal CHSH game, the questions to the players Alice and Bob are independent random bits (50/50, as you say). That's a problem, though, if you want to create new randomness, because you put into the game two random bits and you get out less than two random bits! If you want to get out more randomness than you put in, you need to be a little more clever and more stingy with using random bits.

(If the players are honest, the first player's output is uniformly random, but the second player's output is ~85% predictable given the first player's output. Measured in terms of entropy, this means you are getting a fraction more than 1 bit out.)

The standard 50/50 CHSH is still useful for generating randomness, though. Even though it uses up more randomness than it creates, the output randomness can be of higher _quality_ than the input randomness. More precisely, if the input bits are independent to the players Alice and Bob, but perhaps are known to an outside adversary, the game's output bits will be unknown to the adversary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is interesting to see how outcomes of the CHSH game to generate random bits. However, I am left wondering how Alice, Bob, or an external observer learns about the outcomes of the game?

Or, maybe I am misunderstanding the mechanics itself.

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea of infinite randomness expansion really fascinates me, it's like watching Münchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.

</comment><comment><USER9> How exactly do Alice and Bob use entangled electrons to win CHSH game with higher than 75% probability?

<comment> dj-wonk This may not answer your question, but you might enjoy seeing how the 85.4% probability is derived in [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0448v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0448v1.pdf) and [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0449v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.0449v1.pdf)

<comment><USER10> A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0448](http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0448), [http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0449](http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0449)) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


The climate change diet - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/health/thepulse/stories/2008/04/10/2213128.htm

<comment><USER2> It's healthier not to eat meat and dairy products anyway (at least according to the china study). But unfortunately because of the Malthusian law, a diet change will not help much against food scarcity in the long run.</comment>


Perl's Problems - <AUTHOR> http://perlhacks.com/2014/09/perls-problems/

<comment><USER2> The article "addresses Perl's perceived problems" more then it tries to find what the real problems of Perl are.

So here's my take on it:

1\. Syntax. And how it's almost impossible to change it after a certain level of language-adoption. Perl coders knew it needed to be radically changed, understood how that was impossible, and moved on.

2\. As a result of 1: the shrinking community. It is a clear red flag, no-one wants to start a project in based on (soon to be) legacy technology.

3\. The existence of very suitable languages for Perl-refugees. When Perl ruled the web it was pretty much the only open source, web-focussed, runtime- typed language with a package manager fully of goodies. But with Ruby, Python (, etc.) and their very active communities around, it became very easy to switch.

4\. It missed academic backing. Having programmers "schooled" in a particular language seems to be important in this world. The winners in this area seem to be Java, C-Sharp, C++, C, Python and to some extend Haskell; Perl never managed to enter this league (and does not seem very fit).

<comment><USER3> > Perl never managed to enter this league

For a while at least, Perl did find a home in Linguistics. While it was because of the excellent text parsing tools, it makes a strange kind of sense as well, since Perl was designed to be a bit more like a human language and I think Linguists appreciated that. But that's such a small field that the impact was negligible. Most of the modern Computational Linguistic work is done in Java and Python these days, but for a while, many people working in Linguistics came out of their undergrad with at least a passing familiarity with Perl.

For a briefer spell, I seem to remember Perl finding a home in bioinformatics for much of the same reasons. I have no idea what or if that field has moved on to.

For me personally, Perl was the ultimate hacker language when people needed to get shit done and that shit involved munging lots and lots of files in text. But I think these days the world has moved onto other things that Perl isn't any better suited for than some other language (which is then conversely better suited for a bunch of other stuff than Perl).

<comment><USER4> > ... Perl was designed to be a bit more like a human language ...

ADD A TO B GIVING C

<comment><USER5> Comparing Perl to COBOL makes me think you've programmed in neither.

 _edit_ here's some background on the Perl linguistics angle: [http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html](http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Is the difference between arrays and array references really necessary?

This is certainly a annoyance compared to e.g. Ruby. It's getting easier to just always use references [0], but I haven't been using Perl much for a few years and am not sure if this is still considered experimental.

[0] [http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/perl-5.20.0/pod/perl5140delta.p...](http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/perl-5.20.0/pod/perl5140delta.pod#Syntactical_Enhancements)

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with most of what is here save for the Perl 5/6 issue. Perl 5 needs a name change of some kind or another (Since Perl 6 isn't going anywhere or changing its name). You can't really write it off as people not "understanding how version numbering works" when the common way it works is by incrementing the major number when a new version is out.

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's my point. People do understand how version numbering works. But Perl is trying to change that by saying that Perl 6 isn't the next major version of Perl - it's just another language in the Perl family. I think that just confuses people.

<comment><USER8> Personally, my guess is that once the performance issues with Perl6 have been solved and there's proper Perl5 and CPAN integration, the whole sister- language-instead-of-next-version thing will go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To put it bluntly: The next Perl release should be 6.0.

The existing perl6 projects can figure out their own branding, because it's clear they are no longer "successors" or replacements for Perl.

<comment><USER10> Are people still complaining about the version number? If only there were a simple way to get people talking about Perl again. Personally, I think the best approach would be to (1) recognize that every language has a CPAN equivakent so stop using it as a unique selling proposition (or, at least make it better than everyone else's), and (2) keep implementing cool things in Perl. Prove that Perl programs that do a lot of things (1) are maintainable, and (2) don't have to be as large as the equivalent in other languages. Arguing about the version number just isn't enough.

<comment><USER11> Whats the JavaScript equivalent? Every time I need to delve in to JavScript it seems a mess. Or Java for that matter.

<comment><USER10> Npm. It's meant for Node-js code, but you can use it to make sure modules are installed in your source directory for a website. Aside from npm, there are public CDNs available ( [http://www.jsdelivr.com/](http://www.jsdelivr.com/) and [https://cdnjs.com/](https://cdnjs.com/) ).

<comment><USER10> For Java (btw), there isn't a central repository, but Maven lets you download the Internet ( [http://blog.sonatype.com/2011/04/how-not-to-download-the- int...](http://blog.sonatype.com/2011/04/how-not-to-download-the- internet/#.VCmOhuKLNIc) ) which solves the same problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I've always found it funny how many of the people who decry Perl as being "line noise" will then go on to praise such languages as APL, J and K. I think it might be because of their more esoteric paradigms and the fact that they do not follow the formulaic Von Neumann architecture, making them good targets for people to assert how atypical they are, unlike those other Blub programmers.

<comment><USER12> > I've always found it funny how many of the people who decry Perl as being > "line noise" will then go on to praise such languages as APL, J and K

This is not a reality with which I am familiar. I like the idea of APL; I even did some, years ago, but this feels strawman-y to me. Even in the J/K/APL crowd, the running joke is readability.

<comment><USER13> From a distance I'd say APL* having one datastructure and many (cryptically represented) operations. Think Alan Perlis (NPI) epigram ([http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis- alan/quotes.html](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html)). Perl context sensitivity with many builtin types is like combinatorial explosion of cases and is harder to parse mentally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The current version of Perl (5.20.1 as I write this) is a lot different to > the version that was current when Perl 6 was first announced (which was > 5.6.0, I think)

Wasn't "Perl 6" just a tentative spinoff from "Perl 5.6", and didn't Perl programmers start unofficially refering to subsequent versions of Perl 5.x as "Perl x", i.e. Perl 5.7 as "Perl 7" and the latest version as "Perl 20" ? Better make official how Perl programmers are speaking anyway and call the next version Perl 21.0

<comment><USER8> _Wasn 't "Perl 6" just a tentative spinoff from "Perl 5.6_

No. Perl6 is a complete redesign of the language, unencumbered by backwards- compatibility. One of the design goals was to make it extensible on as many levels as possible (proper specification, multiple backends, meta-object protocol, pluggable syntax, macros, FFI, ...) so that another rewrite won't be necessary in the foreseeable future.

 _didn 't Perl programmers start unofficially refering to subsequent versions of Perl 5.x as "Perl x", i.e. Perl 5.7 as "Perl 7" and the latest version as "Perl 20"_

Not that I'm aware of, but I'm on the edge of that community.

<comment><USER14> Read between the lines. I was suggesting a plausible backstory for burying the Perl 6 fiasco, and refocusing attention back onto the Perl 5.x line.

<comment><USER8> Reality is not git: You can't just rewrite history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obligatory xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1171/](http://xkcd.com/1171/)

<comment><USER16> You mean this one: [http://xkcd.com/224/](http://xkcd.com/224/)</comment></comment>


Druid – Distributed, real-time, analytical data store - <AUTHOR> http://druid.io/

<comment><USER2> Who "uses this in production" and how is it better than MySQL and Postgresql? They need a little more show instead of tell.

<comment><USER3> It's used by Metamarkets in production ([http://metamarkets.com/);](http://metamarkets.com/\);) I've seen talks about it at Strata and they're getting really impressive query times on terascale problems.

Shameless plug: if you're interested in fast in-memory analytics and more of the PyData bent, I'm building a system with some similarities to Druid at my company ([http://www.datapad.io/](http://www.datapad.io/)) but more focused on optimizing single-node performance (i.e. minimizing EC2 expenses) on medium data (single columns of tables typically fit in memory) than high scalability / real time ingest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is quite a great piece of kit. Definitely going to look into it for my own RTB uses.

One thing that strikes me as an immediate use is real-time impression bus aggregation for behavioral analysis. We ended up building our DSP primarily in Ruby+Redis/Postres and having this would have allowed some significant architectural changes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would it be fair to say that Druid is more suitable for known questions that are queried programmatically and mostly updated by time segment?

<comment><USER6> Druid was actually built to answer arbitrary questions that could not be answered with pre-aggregated data (because it can become computationally intractable), but still needed to be answered fast enough to power interactive dashboards. At Metamarkets, almost all queries are user driven through our interface. Currently Druid is indeed tailored for time-based event data, but it can shard on more than just time. Disclaimer: I am a Druid comitter and work at Metamarkets.</comment></comment>


The surprising secret hidden in a pregnancy test - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54025997 <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Saw this report a few days back and at first thought huh, typical marketing hype (which it is) but then in the comments section of one of the sources* pointed out that using an FDA type approved paper test strip as the 'sensor' element was a cheap way round developing (and getting certified) an electrical one. They also highlighted some accessibility advantages of a digital display. But yeah, I would be annoyed to find out that all the more expensive digital ones did was read the paper-strip result for me/the user. In one of the other sources* someone hacked an electronic version to display something rather funny.

* (I have been waiting to see if this got submitted by someone with a better link source than I had (saw this report a few days back but could only find 2x sources, both of which had way too many trackers on them for me to feel comforting submitting them since without a script-blocker and ad-blocker they are intolerable).</comment>


Cafe owner thrives with no-pricing policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/17/lippert.qanda/index.html?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCText <comment><USER3> I read one study that showed having eyeballs (e.g., a picture of someone looking at you) next to the cash box increased deposits by some N% (I don't want to spout facts as I can't recall the number, but it was n > 10 - <USER2> digit percentage increase). They controlled for there just being a picture by alternating pictures of eyeballs with pictures of flowers.

I suspect part of it may be due to people showing up just for the novelty of it, but going back to the eyeball study (which I am too lazy to look up the reference for) I wonder if there is another thing at play too. Perhaps people think oh cool, let's show up and game the system, and they make plans to go there _intending_ to perhaps pay 20% less than market.

Then they have to look the owner in the eye and tell him what they think is fair, and for whatever reason their mind changes. So rather than paying .8x, like they originally intended, they end up paying instead x - 1.2x

So you get increased business because people who were willing to pay .8x (lets say x = $10 based on the article, so $8) show up, and end up spending x - 1.2x ($10-12, per the article). Some portion of new customers may see that their game won't work (because they don't want to lie to the owner) and they just leave. No harm done - these people weren't eating at the cafe to begin with.

So I chalk at least part of this up to a neat psychological trick - but I wonder if many of those people will be repeat customers (some portion obviously will).

Anybody have references to back this up? This is just what I suspect may be happening, as it's what I susepct happened with folks who may have intended to steal bagels/candy from the office kitchen, saw the eyeballs and ended up paying for them instead.

<comment><USER4> Link to referenced study: [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=16...](http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1686213)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand how guilt can keep a lot of people from gaming the system too hard, but what about really desperate people (homeless people, for instance)? You'd think they'd eat there constantly, once they heard of it, and drive the place under.

<comment><USER6> The owner retains the right to refuse service.

<comment><USER7> So there is a price, but it's secret?

Sounds like the same scam as tipping to me. Get me there and I will pay/tip over the odds out of fear, guilt, social pressure. But I will try to avoid going as putting that hassle and discomfort on me doesn't make for a pleasant customer experience.

<comment><USER8> Once you've been to the UK, and experienced the blazé waiters and bartenders, you realize why being paid by tips is so important for good customer service. It's probably terrifying to be paid $3/hr + tips, which is common, but that's a big incentive to being nice.

<comment><USER7> I live in the UK.

The thing about tipping is that he cost of tipping is a small addition to the bill of an unknown socially set common percentage depending on place and culture which I don't enjoy guessing.

But the cost of not tipping or tipping too little is incalculable and potentially completely disproportionate to the situation, and potentially long term.

Hence, however much you explain the ideal of tipping being a kind of feedback, ensuring prompt service, etc. I will never not tip well, so it will never work like you idealise.

There is no way to differentiate a poor tip due to bing a cheapskate, one due to misreading the socially accepted norms, an unjustified poor service complaint or a valid poor service complaint. The whole tipping system works against the customer. Just tell me you're adding a set % to the bill and if the service is no good I'll vote with my feet and not come back...

Remember the scene in Monty Python's life of brian? "how much for this?" "20" "ok" "no you have to haggle - offer me ten" "how about 10?" "ten for this? Are you mad it cost me twelve!" etc.

<comment><USER9> Do tipping customs vary widely within the UK?

In the US, as far as I know they are quite stable across the country so it doesn't stress me out. If I traveled to another country, I would consider learning the tipping customs to be just another thing I need to learn, along with the electric system voltage and whether or not to shake hands. But if it varies widely within the same country, I could see how it would annoy you.

<comment><USER7> _Do tipping customs vary widely within the UK?_

_blink_. I don't know.

I've been going to the same barber for a decade, but I don't know if tipping is customary for haircuts in the UK, either in cities or in small towns, or in that establishment. Maybe next time I ought to ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Terra Bite in Kirkland (about 5 blocks from Google) does this, too: <http://www.terrabite.org/press.htm>

</comment><comment><USER11> My first thought as other people have already noted was that I would be terribly guilt tripped and pay slightly above what I thought would be the average to make myself look good.

I do wonder however if people also pay more as a form of social-compensation and not guilt as they figure they are weighting up the cheap people.

This phenomenon would make an interesting study to read.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that people will pay what the owner says they do, when in physical proximity, and totally exploit the creator's friendliness when it comes to "donationware".

<comment><USER13> Maybe someone running somekind of website where donations are accepted could run this experiment: Put on your sign-up/logout or download page a donate feature, and pictures of you next to your children/pets/dependent whatever, or a picture of your old car/tv and some text saying "I'm looking for money to replace this", etc.

I think physical proximity is a factor, but the emotions involved are more like "I can't screw the guy" and "I should help the guy" or "I should be a good person and do this", so if you can make these feelings emerge...</comment></comment>


Show HN: I am trying to start a webring for geeks - <AUTHOR> https://geekring.net/ <comment><USER3> This is really cool to see and I love how webrings are making a comeback. Here's one from Jack McDade filled with weird people/things. [https://weirdwidewebring.net/](https://weirdwidewebring.net/)

<comment><USER4> My favorite weird website: [https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/)

<comment><USER5> The best part is her face in the home page's source code.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that or this: "I take pride in having the most accurate prices on the web".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've not come across the concept of a webring before - but this is cool.

I feel like adding a link back to the ring (or at least next page) should be mandatory - else it feels a bit broken (I know the frameset version is there but feels less elegant). The third page ("[https://finalkey.net/"](https://finalkey.net/")) in the ring when i was navigating had no explicit mention of the ring on the landing page...and that feels unfair?

<comment><USER8> Yep I had the same issue and thought when I got to finalkey. I hit a random site after that and landed on another site where I couldn't find the link.

Got me thinking a browser extension could be useful for this type of thing.

Edit: there's iframes to solve this!

<comment><AUTHOR> I _used_ to be a huge fan of stumble-upon, but at some point they added too much algorithm to it, and something else behind the curtain went south and it just started sucking.

Edit: StumBleUpon was a browser plugin (optionally, you could also use their frameset version at least earlier on), that would try to learn your interests based on previous sites you liked/disliked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice, I often find myself missing the weird web of my youth. I hope this takes off. I think the ring needs a bit of curation though, of the few sites that are on it now the finalkey one seem to be... not relevant? Or at least unexpected. While cool and all this seems like a plain old sales site exept the thing sold is not made anymore. The site itself also lacks the ring widget.

<comment><USER10> The "weird old web" was that way in part because there wasn't much in the way of curation. Occasionally encountering something unexpected was supposedly a _good_ thing.

<comment><USER9> I remember webrings fondly because they introduced a _minimal_ level of curation. If I'm on the Basic STAMP webring I don't want Tintin fancomics. That belongs on the Hergé webring.

<comment><USER11> > Basic STAMP

lol.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.parallax.com/catalog/microcontrollers/basic- stam...](https://www.parallax.com/catalog/microcontrollers/basic-stamp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I did something similar here that you may be interested in:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blown away by the positive reception and the many submissions! I thought it'd be really fun not to give people the usual form where everything is laid out for them to fill out. Lot's of kind words and interesting sites to surf! I can't wait to have a closer look at them tomorrow! :)

I've added all outstanding submissions for now, and will come back tomorrow to add more :)

Someone asked me if "todays date" was local or universal. It's a good question, and it's actually "whatever the server runs" +/\- 24 hours :) so yesterdays date and tomorrows date may also work depending on your location :)

<comment><USER13> This is great! I just put in a submission and added your links to my homepage.

I will say, so far most of the sites I have tried with the random button are missing the webring links. I seem to remember most of the rings I was involved in in the past required that the ring links were present on the homepage in order to be a member of the ring, maybe its worth adding that to this ring? Or maybe rank sites lower in the random priority that don't link back?

For now I am using the iframe browser version

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I did make it optional in order to lower the bar of entry, same with not having to register a user account to submit a page. I will definitely do something about it in the future, maybe if the ring approaches A THOUSAND sites, I will probably make the random selector favour sites with the links, I will also consider some way for ring visitors to browse only the pages that link back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I approve off your plan ;) Just this morning I tried to find a paper but couldn't so I looked at my HN history. Wading through past years I noticed there aren't many information resources on the web left that don't suck, and I noticed that for some time now, whenever I wanted to look up something CompSci-related, I don't even bother using general-purpose search engines anymore (except maybe CiteSeer) but go straight to HN's Algolia search to locate the story where a particular product or other topic is "treated".

</comment><comment><USER15> I love this. webrings were one of the best features of the pre-monetized internet

</comment><comment><USER16> What happened to linking to blogs you like/read (also called blogroll) and letting develop such ring (or rather network) organically? It's quite common among law blogs i.e. Popehat, SCOTUSblog, ..., also among various science blogs: Language Log, Observational Epidemiology, Critical Inference, ...

But for some reason it's rare among techies. It almost looks that because they know about SEO, they are afraid of outside links so not to lower their own search positions.

<comment><USER17> Some blogs link to websites in citations with rel nofollow, but there's no organic seo in it

HN

someone ought to reinvent el goog again

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hit "Random" and got taken to [https://finalkey.net/](https://finalkey.net/), but that site doesn't seem to have the ring buttons.

<comment><USER19> I found that one from the previous and the first thing I noticed was that it's selling a product.

> Who can join?

> Everyone who has a website where making money is not the primary goal.

I think it's a pretty sweet geeky project that I might consider buying - <USER2> selling the product definitely seems to be the primary goal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad about the feedback, I don't intend to make or sell any more finalkeys so I'll definitely redo the frontpage to reflect that, and remove the buy option entirely :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It took me a while to find the actual "ring" functionality, so here's[0] a direct link (there seem to be about 6 sites at the moment.)

[0] [http://geekring.net/site/0/frameset](http://geekring.net/site/0/frameset)

</comment><comment><USER21> Back in the 90's web rings seemed like infinite collections of crappy home pages. Some people seem to feel differently, is it nostalgia or were there some really good ones out there?

<comment><USER22> > infinite collections of crappy home pages.

I think that's the point. People miss home pages in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'll join! What is the simplest place to host a simple webpage?

<comment><USER24> In general? Probably a static page on GitHub pages. Or S3 static site hosting.

<comment><USER23> Thanks - I went with Netlify though. I just set up [http://www.programminglanguagenews.com](http://www.programminglanguagenews.com) (no content yet though!)

<comment><USER24> Netlify is great. Good choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I discovered the Homebrew CPU webring less than 10 years ago and was amazed to find it's still full of great projects. Still going strong today, and many of the links are on GitHub now.

[https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/](https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Just occurred to me that a .ring TLD would be awesome for this :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I _love, love, love_ this.

I was just talking to some younger colleagues, and they'd never even heard of important pieces of computer / internet lore, such as blinkenlights or even something as recent as bash.org.

I miss this part of the web, and am happy to see others putting effort into keeping its spirit alive.

</comment><comment><USER28> The web was such a better place back then despite the dial-up.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is really cool, and I have another idea; there could be a widget or snippet of code or something, which would make recommendations for other blogs at the end of blog posts.

This would solve the discoverability problem for indie blogs, which Medium has an advantage.

</comment><comment><USER30> web ring...thats a word I have not heard in a long time.

<comment><USER31> I, for one, am looking forward to the triumphant return of the web counter.

<comment><USER32> Let's not forget the guest book.

<comment><USER33> And the "under construction" gif with yellow and black barriers and a guy digging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love this!

Can we do this with gopher somehow? Gopher needs curation like this.

<comment><USER35> Well, there are no redirects in gopher, although a similar thing can be done, by having a link to the ring menu, and then doing the rest there. The ring menu could be programmed to put two asterisks next to the active item, so that you can easily see where is next one and previous one. Some item could denote it as a ring menu, so that client software that supports it can display it in an alternative way if the user has enabled that function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I miss seeing '.cgi' or '.pl' at the end of the http endpoints to give it that authentic 90's look and feel :)

<comment><USER37> also the user directories. domain.com/~user/

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This breaks on the 3rd site in the ring because people don't look as though they're including the webring code on their page.

<comment><USER39> > Not all sites link back to the ring, so if you don't want to hunt for the > banner, use The good old-fashioned frameset version or The new-fangled > iframe version

Already covered

<comment><USER38> Ah goodo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> FYI - there's mixed HTTP/HTTPS content on this page. You can fix the security warnings by loading images with https.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I should use relative links for the images, I definitely want to keep the ring open for HTTP, I'm only of those crazies that still takes his Windows 95 for a surf once in a while :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Isn't the entire Internet a "webring for geeks"? Seriously; what sets this apart from the rest of the net?

<comment><USER42> Discoverability, I suppose.

<comment><USER43> At least one human has voted that this page is worth spending the time to do the data entry task to get it to show up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hmm, I always wondered, why are webrings rings (w/ next) as opposed to hub/index/portals of similar sites.

A curated index (vs the dynamic/generated search indexes of google) could be better broken into (related) topics.

</comment><comment><USER45> If I don't see a dripping blood horizontal rule as I click through the ring I'm going to be real disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nobody got drippingbloodhorizontalrule.net yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have never heard of geekrings before, I love it! I can see that included in my morning web routine. Bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it for English sites only? Do you think it make sense for a ring to be multilingual?

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish directory websites made a come back. Like old Yahoo.

<comment><USER49> Have you looked at [https://curlie.org/](https://curlie.org/) (successor to DMOZ)?

What problem do you think directory websites solve that search doesn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> My website is miscdotgeek.com. This is extremely relevant!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to include your site, but, because I want to give people a way to remove their site from the ring again, please use the form or contact me on IRC, so I can add your site and give you your secret that lets you view stats and remove the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Remember when `geek` was a derogatory term? I'm triggered by this word.

</troll>

<comment><USER52> My first thought was "Why a webring for freakshow performers on HN?"

I guess I'm getting old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I like it.

</comment><comment><USER54> You could start with some CSS

<comment><USER35> It doesn't need CSS. CSS is something we can do without. I like it without the CSS. Lets the settings by the user to take precedence instead, please.</comment></comment>


Germany Managed to Outlaw Facebook's Core Business Model - <AUTHOR> https://promarket.org/2020/07/10/how-germany-managed-to-outlaw-facebooks-core-business-model/ <comment><USER2> That's a good thing.</comment>


Echoprint sunsets song/identify API - <AUTHOR> http://developer.echonest.com/forums/thread/3650

<comment><USER2> Yet another organization crowdsourcing all the hard work for free until they get enough data to sell out? Isn't this SOP in Silicon Valley?</comment>


Bridge Busting - 1990 - <AUTHOR> http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/10/11/

<comment><USER2> I remember watching this with my family a long time ago. Always interesting to see what people will come up with. In the later years it really started converging to a few solutions, but it was always nice to see the really out of the box designs succeed or fail.

</comment><comment><USER3> As soon as I saw the photo I doing this in the last year of Primary School (UK equiv of Junior School) - then realized that it would have been around 1990.

Now I know where the inspiration for the teacher to set this challenge to the class coma from.

</comment><comment><USER4> A quick Google for "The Science of Architecture" turned up results in several library catalogues around the world, though none close to me.

I really enjoyed the videos. Now I want to tinker with balsa - bridges seem to be intrinsically beautiful.</comment>