Pattern-matching is as real in tech media as it is in Silicon Valley - met3
http://betabeat.com/2013/02/race-tech-media-silicon-valley-pattern-matching-jamelle-bouie-jason-calacanis/

======
rjknight
"Twitter attempted to have a conversation about race and the tech industry
yesterday. The loudest voices? White men on either side of the argument
shouting each other down."

The end of this para links to Buzzfeed, which adds nothing except a lot of
crap advertising to this Storify: <http://storify.com/mattbuchanan/how-to-not-
be-racist>

Actually I'm not convinced that Jason Calcanis is as wrong as he looks in the
linked story. He's kinda right that if you want to be a top tech writer, you
can probably get there by starting your own blog, building a following, and
then being rewarded with a column on <insert major tech site here>. And this
process will probably work just as well for a person of any given ethnicity.

The real problem isn't that awesome ethnic minority tech writers can't
succeed, it's that there's an awful lot of mediocre white male tech writers,
and relatively few mediocre black/female ones. This is presumably because a
lot of tech writers aren't really judged on their merits; their editors need
to employ some people to write about technology, and they're making 'safe'
choices by going for the white guy who fits the pattern of 'tech person'.

------
sixbrx
Warning: not about pattern matching as found in functional languages.
Hopefully those discussing race in tech can latch onto another term.

[Edit: yeah I missed the word "Media" in the title which would have been a
hint...]

~~~
nkt5
That's the term VCs use. What would you suggest?

------
pwang
> That might also be the reason why, when we read about how black people use
> Twitter, it’s so rarely from their own perspective.

Isn't this whole framing that "black people" use Twitter differently than
"white people" or "Chinese people" part of the inherent dysfunction in these
discussions?

I wish civic discourse in America would grow up and talk about the issue of
socioeconomic class as a first-class concern (no pun intended), instead of
overloading it on race.


Do you think this iOS Game idea will be fun? I do - FileNimbus
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699170558/make-catch-crisis-reach-its-full-potential

======
nickynix
It looks generic and already claims to adopt the freemium model. It almost
looks like something Ray Wenderlich (a great blog, by the way) would have made
to teach people how to develop a game for iOS.

However, I could be wrong. The gameplay could be completely unique, but there
is no demo video to demonstrate that fact; all we have to rely on is the
author's word.

It doesn't look like something I would pay for, especially given that it is
still in the design stage. It might work as a paid-tutorial if all the code is
released (gameplay code, assets, detailed tutorials, IAP code, etc.), but in
its current state it looks like a Chinese-developed clone.


Dropbox sends email about credit card expiration to non-paid users - bdcravens

8:34pm (ET)
Subject: Your credit card is about to expire!
Your credit card is about to expire! To keep your Dropbox Pro subscription, please make sure that your billing information is up to date. If we are unable to bill you, your Pro plan will automatically be canceled after 2 weeks (all your files will still be safe).
Visit to update your information.
As a reminder, Dropbox Pro gives you lots of great benefits:
Tons of space for all your files (100, 200, or 500 GB)
Faster support from the Dropbox team
10x the bandwidth for sharing links
Keep over 20,000 photos and memories
- The Dropbox Team
Ignored it, thinking it was phishing attempt
11:47pm (ET)
Subject: Email Sent in Error - Re: Your credit card is about to expire!
Earlier today you may have received an email from Dropbox stating that your credit card is about to expire. Though the email did in fact come from Dropbox, it was sent to you in error. We recognize that you’re not a paid Dropbox user, and there haven’t been any changes to your account.
We apologize for any confusion we may have caused.
Sincerely,
The Dropbox Team
======
c0deporn
Didn't contain any sensitive information, so not a huge deal in my opinion.
Obviously someone needs to pay attention though.


Announcing the First Art of Computer Programming EBooks - gholap
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news.html

======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9825421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9825421)

------
mauricioc
This announcement is on Knuth's website since June 2014 at least [0]. Did I
miss an update or something like that?

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140620191712/http://www-cs-
fac...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140620191712/http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news.html)

~~~
engi_nerd
"Here then, ta-da, is the current draft of pre-fascicle 6a (318 pages). This
is revision 1, dated 08 July 2015."

------
scriptdevil
Isn't the AoCP series a little too dense to be read as an ebook? It isn't
really organized as a reference and requires one to pore over it for a long
time. Not having a mobi/epub also rules out several good ebook readers. Are
there good ebook readers that have e-ink but still manage to render PDFs well?
My Kindle Paperwhite is trash at PDFs.


Yahoo Announces Non-Exclusive Search Agreement With Google - ideas101
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/yahoo-announces-non-exclusive-search-agreement-with-google/

======
dmix
As much as monopolies hurt business and innovation I set two benefits to this:

1) As a publisher using Adsense I have much more relevant ads with more
advertisers flocking to one supplier.

2) As an advertiser I have access to a nearly unlimited amount of channels in
almost every market.

I'm sure one day we might look back at this as a negative thing but for now I
still hold respect for Google.

------
popat
yahoo made a smart move - problem creators now have to calm down for a while -
it will give some time to breath and move their strategy as a success ... kind
of wait and watch.

~~~
ideas101
as pg once said that if enough time and freedom is give to jerry yang to run
the company the way he wants then he can prove his worth - i think the time
has come that he proves himself and get back the reputation and business as
earlier ... good luck to him.


A friend of mine gave me this link, what does it mean and is it CQC material? - LeInception
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KYzuxSAKBbQhfVP200_4QdWMXYlUA2FwP339Sfilw3Y/edit?usp=sharing
======
gus_massa
> "tY1WKT...EEdLVw=="

Pretty sure it's base64!


Show: Bfore.me want to send a handwritten christmas card to world, join them - replayzero
http://christmas.bfore.me

======
benwerd
I'm not sure it's any more personal to have your card be handwritten by a
stranger.

For friends and family, a card or a personal letter is really worth taking the
time over. For bonus points, you could even make the card yourself.

~~~
replayzero
Hi Ben, We are not trying to be insincere, we want to do something fun for
everyone :)

------
gobengo
You say 'fun and meaningful'. I hear 'unnecessary waste of paper'.

You're capitalizing on something that is actually harmful at the scope of the
planet and race.

------
taskstrike
The design looks great.

However, handwritten makes me think that you can "draw" your own message via
the mouse rather than typing. I was only allowed to type.

~~~
replayzero
It would be great if you could give us a share on twitter - This is an epic
quest, the more the merrier :)

------
jstanley
What is the point in this?

~~~
replayzero
I have a web start up that enables people to send handwritten greeting cards
without an address. We have made it as cheap and easy as possible to help
people send hand written cards to each other - It's a fun and meaningful way
to connect with people. Everyone loves christmas cards right?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
There's no privacy statement on the Xmas page, you might want to add one.
There is a link to one on the main website. [1]

The statement mentions the product containing ads and sharing information with
ad networks. Nowhere else do I see anything about that on your web site.

You also want to use the addresses later on, not just to send one free card.
Customers should know that.

 _"We use information held about you in the following ways: […] to provide you
with information, products or services that you request from us or which we
feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such
purposes"_

And if I don't give out the address for the person I'd like you to send a card
to, you'll make him sign up too:

 _"We will mail your card as soon as your friend updates their address
information at Bfore."_

So, thanks for the offer but I'll pass.

[1] <http://www.bfore.me/privacy>

~~~
tomsinger
Some parts are also irrelevant:

"to provide aggregate statistical information about site visitors and users to
recruiters (such as the number of CVs on the database, or the number of
visitors to the site) and for other lawful purposes. We provide this
information to customers, advertisers, suppliers and other reputable third
parties on the basis that it will not include any information that enables
them to identify individuals."

Which appears to have been lifted from Total Jobs
<http://www.totaljobs.com/privacy-policy>

~~~
replayzero
We have updated the page with the privacy policy.


Reclaiming Software Engineering (2010) - akkartik
http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-engineering
======
twic
> Yet so long as we are developing software within a social context, where the
> finished artefact has users other than its designers, we can scarcely escape
> the conclusion that what we are doing is engineering.

This conclusion is far from inexorable.

There are kinds of making other than engineering. Carpentry is not
engineering. Cooking is not engineering. Gardening is not engineering. Sewing
is not engineering.

All of these things involve making artefacts for users other than their
designers, within a social context no less. All of them require specialist
knowledge and tools, involve the application of judgment learned from years of
experience, and give rise to communities of practice which codify their agreed
knowledge in books. They even have formal certifications.

Before you can declare that making software is (or can be) engineering, you
have to be able to explain why those things aren't.

My tentative theory is that engineering has rigorous ways to check whether a
design will work before it is manufactured, and even before it is drawn in
detail. A civil engineer can use known formulae to check if a bridge span of
given dimensions is even possible before sitting down to design it. A chemical
engineer can use known formula to check if a reaction is plausible. A
mechanical engineer might need to draw a detailed design, but can then check
it rigorously with finite element methods. When we make software, in practice,
we have to construct the software and test the artefact, hoping that our tests
are adequate. We can't do meaningful checks on the design itself, let alone on
any sketch which prefigures the design.

~~~
groovy2shoes
> _When we make software, in practice, we have to construct the software and
> test the artefact, hoping that our tests are adequate. We can 't do
> meaningful checks on the design itself, let alone on any sketch which
> prefigures the design._

But we _can_ do meaningful checks on the design beforehand, and we _can_
create high-level sketches of a design. We have tools from computability
theory, complexity theory, automata theory, graph theory, etc. We have tools
for formal specification and verification. We have tools and principles for
designing software components and their interactions. We have experiences from
past projects that we can draw upon. We can do research, and we can readily
discuss issues with other engineers all over the world.

I (and I suspect that I'm far from unique in this) do these things in the
early stages of every project. My boss will come to me with a list of
requirements, and _some_ requirement(s) will invariably be intractable in
terms of computational complexity, and I'll have to sit down with him and work
on a compromise (most often, it's a case of the client trying to describe the
solution they invision rather than the problem they need solved, and once
we've determined the rationale for a requirement, we can come up with an
alternative that fits the bill easily enough).

After all of the requirements are both computationally possible _and_
tractable, I come up with a design sketch to illustrate the architecture of
the application at a high level. I identify the major components and how they
relate to each other, and I identify the flow of data for each her case and
what happens to it at each step. I describe what extension points we'll need
in order to accommodate the addition of functionality that didn't make the cut
for the first iteration, but that we already know to be needed in a future
iteration.

------
lolc
Seeing source code as design documents is very helpful. Every design has
errors, and these errors may or may not cause failure during construction and
use. So the focus must be on controlling the errors, keeping them within
safety margins.

"Breaking the build" has become a really cheap mistake these days.

------
twic
> Pencils and paperclips break all the time. Even in areas where safety of
> life is an issue - popularly assumed to be the sole province of engineers -
> failures still occur absent any negligence on the part of engineers.

Reliability of software is not like reliability of a machine, or building.

Machines and buildings are made of matter, and so have uncontrollable
variation, and wear out over time. Everything made of matter fails eventually;
it's part of the engineer's job to trade off reliability and cost.

Software is made of bits. The only reason it fails (cosmic rays and other
negligible intrusions of matter aside) is defects in design.

Do you really get mechanical or civil engineers saying "yeah, we expect there
are a few fatal flaws in the design, that's just how it goes, we'll build it
anyway and ship a fix if customers complain"? Apart from on Kickstarter, I
mean.

~~~
zb
(Author here)

> Do you really get mechanical or civil engineers saying "yeah, we expect
> there are a few fatal flaws in the design, that's just how it goes, we'll
> build it anyway and ship a fix if customers complain"?

Heck yes! (Well, not _fatal_ flaws.) Any product you can think of that has
been popular enough to get a second production run probably has had some
design flaws corrected. Some of which were probably already known by the time
that the first version shipped, and some of which were probably only
discovered after real users had it in their hands for a while.

> it's part of the engineer's job to trade off reliability and cost.

Correct. But the cost includes not only the cost of the artefact but also the
cost of the design. The difference with software is that design costs dominate
in a way that isn't often the case with physical artefacts.

------
ktRolster
I would suggest that a reasonable proxy-measure for how good a code base is
would be to look at how long the bug list is (of course, this assumes the bug
list hasn't been gamed). Is the bug list ever-growing, with no hope of being
fixed and cleared? The code quality is awful.

Is the bug list empty, with bugs fixed rather quickly once they are reported?
Then the code quality is probably good, because that is hard to reasonably
achieve with a moderately-sized (or larger) lousy codebase.

~~~
gravypod
If there is an ever growing bug list and the list is being worked through is
the software still bad? Could there just not be many issues compounded with
the design that must be worked out?

~~~
digi_owl
Or it could be that large projects inherently gather bugs, no matter how well,
or poorly, it was designed from the outset.

JWZ seems to be of the notion that it is better to hammer away at a known
codebase than keep trying to reset the clock, while certain big name FOSS
projects seems to reset the clock at every generational changing of the guard.


Ask HN: Coming up with ideas? - jwdunne

I'd like to build a few small but useful apps to build experience and a portfolio outside of my workplace, an area shamefully neglected.
I'm stuck at the first hurdle and I haven't got a clue where to start or what to build first!
Do you have any tips for coming up with ideas?
======
mc_hammer
i usually just get the ideas while im working, from things that suck

need to write a regex for css parsing... why isnt there a regex generator yet

need to debug my javascript... why isnt there a repl?

writing windows 10 hello world, <button xmlspec123ABCUnstandard="{{
Microsoft.Windows.XAML.WinForms.Imaging.Image.NewBitmapFromFilestream(filestream)
}}" /> ... wow mixing xml with code sucks why doesnt someone make a good
template language

(edit: actually, why dont compilers have enough logic to at least try to
include the right library so I dont have to type shit like use Namespace
Windows.XAML.Winforms.Imaging 10 times for every file)

etc!

anyway

another good idea is to get your ideas from books, say a productivity book,
the guy recommends keeping a schedule? make a scheduling app with the features
you need, the author recommends using timers? make a timer app with the
features you need. this is actually what i did. heck why not even sell it on
iphone for a few bucks afterwords using phonegap.

------
ingenieros
[https://www.udacity.com/course/product-design--
ud509](https://www.udacity.com/course/product-design--ud509)

Start with Lesson 1: Ideation and validation to get those creative juices
flowing.


Ask HN: Advice for those getting started in the Web Industry? - danw

If you were starting out in the web industry again, what advice would you give yourself?<p>Or if you're just getting started, what would you like to know?
======
danw
I'd have given myself three tips:

      * Learn constantly. Read books, blog, tweets, attend events and network.
      * Build things. Apply what you've learnt and constantly build things. Either at work or as personal projects. Don't worry if the things you built are crap or pointless or un-monetizable.
      * Share. Constantly share what you've learnt and built. Help others. Join the community and participate. You could be the best developer ever but it won't matter if nobody knows about you and your work.

------
vaksel
Stop being a perfectionist, build something and get it out there as soon as
possible. Don't waste time making sure everything is perfect. Better to lose a
few people who get annoyed, than lose the 2-3 months w/o any users

------
blender
Although the first rule of a startup is build something people want (after PG)
more and more that something should solve some "serious" problem (after
O'Reilly).

Please - no more social networks!

Cheers

------
noodle

      * learn while/from doing
      * continuously learn
      * avoid planning paralysis
      * don't be afraid to scrap chunks of code or whole projects.

~~~
truebosko
Agreed. Keep learning new things. Don't ever stop, but don't feel rushed if
you feel you're behind. Someone out there is always going to be better and
smarter then you at what you are doing

Engage people that are smarter then you (It's why I read Hacker News)

------
yaj
Do -> Read -> Repeat

------
ram1024
keep abreast of emerging tech and trends. stuff moves fast and it's very easy
to fall behind.


I spoke at our PTA about games - ssclafani
http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2015/04/08/i-spoke-at-our-pta-about-games
======
po
I feel like if you're a tech person with a child this is a great example of an
_extremely_ valuable public service you can perform. People out there are
really looking for guidance and it's extremely hard to know what to do if
you're not into tech. This article itself is a great FAQ to get started.


Show HN: Prisma – Turn Any Database into a GraphQL API - sorenbs
https://www.prisma.io/?q=a
======
sorenbs
Søren, Co-Founder of Prisma here!

We have raised $4.5M from KP, but Prisma stays open source. Happy to answer
any questions about Prisma, GraphQL and databases :-)

~~~
fiatjaf
Ok, I have question about GraphQL in general: is there any tool that supports
offline-first use-cases with GraphQL? I mean storing the data in a local
database in the browser, then syncing it back to the server.

~~~
tango12
It's not exactly what you want, but I think realm comes closest to that kind
of an offering.

[https://realm.io/](https://realm.io/) [https://realm.io/blog/realm-scales-to-
the-web/](https://realm.io/blog/realm-scales-to-the-web/)

~~~
nslog
AppSync does this as well:
[https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/](https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/)

------
thedangler
Any? We use MS SQL at my work, I didn't see that its supported. Will you
support it?

------
gdi2290
This is great news for GraphQL adoption. I also really like the landing page
design

~~~
fiatjaf
I don't like it that much, but the explanatory drawing/schema is wonderful.
I've tried to understand where exactly Prisma fitted before, but couldn't
before watching it.

------
yodon
Looks very cool - How do you see permissions/roles/authenticated access being
managed for APIs where say most gets are public but most puts and a few gets
are private? (I apologize if I missed that in the intro)

~~~
murdockq
I have done this in a node app that acts as the intermediate / proxy between
your frontend and the prisma service. Infact you can even run it as a
serverless endpoint just fine to keep it lightweight.

~~~
yodon
Is that whitelisting routes? I’m sure there’s a good solution, I’m just not
sure how to make sure I’ve got the full surface area properly covered (which
naively feels tricky to do with GraphQL but again I’m still trying to
understand what are the best practices)

~~~
murdockq
I have had good results with [https://github.com/maticzav/graphql-
shield](https://github.com/maticzav/graphql-shield) but I am also keeping an
eye on [https://github.com/prismagraphql/graphql-
middleware](https://github.com/prismagraphql/graphql-middleware) as it is
written by the prisma team but isn't ready for production just yet.

------
crubier
I love Prisma and use it daily for the backend of our apps


Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - kalvin
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html
======
fleitz
I've written software to replace this type of thing, in my case it was
classifying communications as to whether they were attorney-client privileged
or not. It has to be cheaper, it was about a month of my time. And about a
week working with a high priced lawyer to write the ruleset and confirm it
caught everything and was excluding all the right stuff. With that software
they've essentially got their best lawyer going through every piece of
communication.

It has to be cheaper, I can't imaging paying someone with a law degree to go
through all of that. And now their lawyers are freed up to do something more
useful.

~~~
sandGorgon
is it possible for you to mention, how you went about doing this ? technology
stack, algorithmic approach, etc.

~~~
fleitz
Tries for text search, that's really the only thing I learned is that if your
searching through a body of text for 40,000 odd keyword you need to turn the
document in to a trie. But that's something you'd learn as soon as you read
any of the research on the topic.

It's basically a programming language for text search that's stored in a
database. If I had to do it again I'd base if off a parser-generator and use a
DSL, possibly using git for versioning.

I ended up basically storing an AST in the db and then creating an object for
each node in the decision tree. It was written in perl but that was more of a
constraint than a choice.

------
kalvin
Things I didn't know (no idea how accurate they are, if anyone has more
detail, chime in):

On the Enron Corpus:

"He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to
academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation
of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy
constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made
a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and
how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social
groups based on e-mail communication."

On future law employment:

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike
Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will
likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated
that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a
manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once
required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect
duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic,
could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical
company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s
lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60
percent accurate, he found.

“Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin
toss,” he said.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's mainly accurate. My wife works for a major vendor in this sector, and I'm
a pre-law student with a hacking background, knowing more about this
technology than I can say here. However, discovery is just one part of the
legal industry. Lynch's numbers are exaggerated, though his basic points are
correct. Don't generalize too much from this.

~~~
sunchild
Correct. This has little to no effect on transaction or corporate practice.
Some of these vendors claim to handle M&A due diligence. Having been through
one or two mergers/sales myself, I am convinced that no expert system in the
near term will be able to replace humans in that area. Unlike discovery, which
is focused on a readily-searchable data set like email, the job of piecing
together a company's assets and contract obligations is extremely complex
business, where the bottleneck is often the mish-mash of paper records and
broken contract management tools, and nuanced judgment calls about critical
asset dispositions must be made every few hours over the course of months and
months. I'm not saying there isn't an obvious, eventual technology solution to
these problems – just that it isn't anywhere near as mature as litigation
support, discovery, and patent practice.

------
stretchwithme
“Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is,
does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Overall, I have to disagree. Letting machines do all the mind-numbingly boring
work leaves the rest for human beings. And we pay a lot less for the final
products, leaving resources for new jobs, which will also have the boring
parts automated.

Disagree? Hire a hundred people to do all your drudgery. Then pretend you're
paying them hardly anything. I submit your life will suck less.

~~~
hackinthebochs
You're assuming most human beings are capable of doing knowledge-based work. I
don't think this is true. The reason knowledge based workers make so much is
precisely because the skills necessary to perform it are rarer than manual
labor. Fully automating manual labor means a large class of people (possibly a
majority) will not have any marketable skills from which to make a living.

Furthermore, there are much fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an
economy. At the end of the day, most knowledge work is a one-off thing. Once
the program is written, it can be duplicated at no cost. Once the drug is
discovered, that knowledge is spread for no cost. Of course there are many
exceptions to this, but this is a trend. There is necessarily orders of
magnitude fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy than labor
jobs.

When the automation revolution comes we're going to need a new basis for the
economy because the current one just doesn't fit in that world.

~~~
reemrevnivek
You seem to be assuming that knowledge-based workers can deplete the corpus of
knowledge work.

I don't think that's the case; once one program is written, another will be
needed, once one drug is discovered, there will be still more diseases to cure
and more side effects to eliminate.

I'd even go so far as to say that knowledge work is growing and will continue
to grow - The more you know, the more you know you don't know, right? There
wasn't a need for working on computers or airplanes as short as a century ago.
Now how many people are employed in those fields?

~~~
hackinthebochs
My assumption is that growth in knowledge work is dependent on there being
growth in disposable income for the population. In my scenario where a large
portion of the population has no marketable skills and therefore can't find a
job, this effectively puts a cap on the amount of knowledge work the economy
can sustain. See my reply to stretchwithme for a further explanation of my
thoughts on this scenario.

~~~
stretchwithme
The growth in knowledge is dependent on how much brain power there is.
Everything we do is subject to improvement by anyone that cares to analyze and
innovate.

In the scenarios of those against technology 50 years ago, they also could not
see how the economy would evolve or how people would adapt. But that lack of
vision isn't proof that they were right.

------
crux_
We're rapidly approaching (have almost certainly passed) the point where it
would be feasible for the average worker to do far less than 40 hours a week.

Notwithstanding the cultural & structural reasons we can't get there from
here, that is.

But at some point in the future, most of what we now call "work" will not be
done by people.

This has the potential to be incredibly liberating, if by then we will have
found ways to decouple a persons ability to meet basic economic necessities
from their ability to find a job.

------
regularfry
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William
Gibson.

------
bhousel
For those that don't know, this is the model by which electronic discovery is
generally conducted today: <http://edrm.net/>

It's over a billion dollar market and there are plenty of enterprisey vendors
that have positioned themselves into every box on that EDRM chart. Lawfirms
and corporate counsel will happily pay for this stuff because the amounts at
stake in litigation are so huge.

~~~
kovar
Actually, the EDRM model is only one model, and it is rapidly falling by the
wayside. For example, ECA - early case assessment - is becoming a very
important part of ediscovery but you can't fit ECA into the EDRM as the EDRM
is essentially linear and doesn't allow for loops.

~~~
bhousel
Wha? EDRM has loops built into it..

I admit that my understanding may be off, but it seems like ECA is just using
the same EDRM model and iterating faster upfront. I feel that it's more of a
vendor buzzword than a new way of conducting electronic discovery.

~~~
kovar
The industry is full of buzzwords, hype, and snakeoil, alas. ECA is one
example, and I'd argue that the EDRM is another. The EDRM was good a few years
ago but hasn't really evolved to reflect current, and developing practices.

ECA describes a part of the process that was hard to do in the early days
because the tools didn't support the faster iteration upfront. As people
realized the value of that iteration, the tools improved and the term gained
power and marketing presence.

In other words, I agree with you.

------
kovar
One of the things the article doesn't address is how do we determine the
accuracy of these tools and processes?

Self-serving answer -
[http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-
virt...](http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virtual-
crime-scenes-for-the-ediscovery-world/)

It is a real problem and not one we're trying to create. There was a lot of
discussion at Legal Tech this year about the need to determine the accuracy of
ediscovery processes, and in particular, review processes.

------
djm
I think we can expect much more of this sort of thing. Technology always
removes humans from the work force and we now have the right set of resources
- reliable, cheap computers and a large enough pool of skilled programmers -
to do to office workers with software what we did to farm works with tractors
and auto workers with robots.

~~~
gfodor
There is still a big piece missing -- the methods for translating business
rules used by these people into workable software is error-prone, cumbersome,
and ad-hoc.

~~~
Unseelie
That really doesn't sound like a huge problem.

The method for building robotic arms was full of early errors in robotic arm
programs(and likely still is), but the programmers identified those errors and
fixed them, over and over again. For that matter, programming in general is
error prone. Bugfixing happens.

Businesses which can hire ten men to oversee a buggy program rather than
twenty men to do the actual work will do so, and over time, the program will
get better and need less overseers. Its an iterative process, and one that
doesn't need perfect programs to bootstrap.

------
bane
One of the difficulties in the legal analytics space is that there's not much
incentive for lawyers to spend less time on a case. In fact it's the opposite,
the more billable hours they can charge for their work, the better. Speeding
up their process is not necessarily hitting their pain point.

~~~
kerben
Consider the firm or lawyer being compensated on a contingency fee basis --
they must cover all the expenses and overhead related to prosecuting the case,
including the salaries for attorneys and paralegals working the case -- and if
they lose they get nothing. Since their reward for winning the case is fixed,
at usually 1/3, reducing the time and cost they expend on a case, particularly
during e-discovery (which can consume quite a bit of time and manpower), is
both valuable and in their best interests.

~~~
bane
Any idea how common this is?

~~~
jakewalker
Very common for plaintiffs lawyers in many types of cases (consumer class
action (sort of), personal injury, among many others). Almost impossible to
have a contingency fee for a defendant. And often the defendants are the ones
with the burden of producing (and first reviewing) a high level of documents.

~~~
ippisl
In the last few years , there was in the legal industry for fixed-fee
arrangements(probably because of the financial crisis).

Does a similar business model change happens in the defense part?

------
dougabug
Finally, here is a technology I can get with. Most of the web entrepreneurs
seem to embrace a "Field of Dreams" breed of business plan: build it and they
will come. And when they do come - advertise, upsell, follow, track and slice
and dice the hell out of them! Thanks, but no thanks.

But saving millions of lawyer hours a year? Realizing substantial savings on
significant business costs will always prove valuable. Win for society, win
for technology, win for capitalists. While I wouldn't say that lawyers are
parasites, reducing the proportion of lawyer cost strikes me as highly
positive for the economy.

~~~
kovar
If you literally want to get behind it, let me know ... I can throw in "hold
lawyers, SaaS providers, and vendors accountable for the quality of their
offerings in a court of law."

------
jasonostrander
I wonder if something like this could help solve the patent troll problem. As
I see it, there are two conditions that allow patent trolls to function:

1\. The ease of obtaining frivolous patents. 2\. The cost of litigating patent
disputes exceeds the cost of settling.

The software industry has focused primarily on the first point, but if we
could reduce the costs of litigating, it may well reduce the financial
benefits of being a patent troll.

I'm thinking of something like IBM's Watson being used to find prior art,
auto-filing court motions, etc. Of course, it all comes down to what some jury
in Texas thinks so I'm probably just dreaming.

------
MatthewDP
This thing reads like a press release... Sponsored post?

~~~
kovar
I know several of the firms quoted pretty well. I don't think they sponsored
it, I think they just have very good PR departments.

------
wisty
I read somewhere that it's easier to spot a lie in written communication than
from listening to a tape. People are magnificent at bluffing, if you listen to
the tone of their voice, but when you look at the transcript they become a lot
more transparent.

------
stretchwithme
There are probably all kinds of potential jobs in the real world that are way
too expensive to have a human do and that computers are better at or will be
soon.

Like gold mining. I'm sure there are rivers in Canada that haven't been fully
explored. Send in the drones!

------
fredBuddemeyer
this technology wont hurt legal employment because it enables so many more
lawsuits. every document on earth holds potential tort value that can be
exploited now. after discovery its still a manual process to litigate so the
number of attorneys should rise.

~~~
kovar
Enhancing the quality of automated review tools will significantly reduce the
number of lawyers employed doing sweatshop style review.

Just because a technology might enable more lawsuits (which I am not certain
is the case here) doesn't mean more lawsuits will be filed. Oftentimes,
finding evidence causes parties to settle rather than go to court.

Further, the existing courts can only handle so many cases per year. You can't
suddenly up the throughput on the court system.

------
sabat
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --William Shakespeare,
Henry VI

Maybe this is coming true in an unexpected way.

~~~
sabat
Hmm. So either you don't get the not-that-nuanced reference, or you just look
for any opportunity to vote people down. I used to take downvotes more
seriously -- but less and less so these days.

------
zephjc
I think we are behind schedule for Back to the Future 2's 2015 prediction of
the abolition of all lawyers.


Hacker News Daily (direct link) - cperciva
http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

======
achew22
First, let me say that I really like the idea of this site. You already have
the tools built to scrape HN every 5 min so why not expand on this idea. It
would be very interesting to create something that scrapes HN and then
provides the N most popular articles (by vote) for the day where N is defined
in the URL. It would also be interesting to scrape the "New" section and then
have a special section that has more stringent than the HN front page. A sort
of "HN Plus" (forgive my reference to Hulu). Personally I like that HN
trickles (sometimes torrentially) in through the day. I will admit that
sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the content but it is always a good break from
whatever I'm doing. Maybe that should be an "Ask PG" of my own but the idea
has been rolling around in my head for some time to do something similar. I'm
glad you're a lot less lazy than me and doing something about it. Is there any
way you would be willing to put the source up on GitHub?

~~~
cperciva
_provides the N most popular articles (by vote) for the day where N is defined
in the URL_

Aside from the "don't include links which were on a previous Daily Hacker
News", this is exactly what I do. The top-10 list for YYYY-MM-DD is at
<http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/YYYY-MM-DD.html>

_s there any way you would be willing to put the source up on GitHub?_

I'd prefer not to do that, simply because it would encourage people to add
extra load to the HN web server -- besides which, the code is extremely
trivial and I'm sure anyone who wants to could replicate it easily. :-)

~~~
almost
Maybe you could provide the data as a JSON feed? Then others can do their
thing without hurting the HN servers. I imagine the bandwidth to serve them
would be pretty small (or maybe I underestimate the hunger for HN JSON feeds
:p)

I'm sure you have better things to do with your time, but it would be cool and
maybe would lead to some other cool stuff...

------
etm117
I love the idea as I agree it is difficult to keep in the loop during the day
with the volume of posts.

One quick request though, would it be possible in the RSS feed to send the
entire post and not just the first ~125 characters?

------
cperciva
Discussion about the annoucement (I'm not sure which people will vote for, the
site or the announcement of the site):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514037>

EDIT: Looks like almost all of the discussion is over in the other thread.

~~~
jacquesm
> I'm not sure which people will vote for, the site or the announcement of the
> site

Apparently both :)

~~~
cperciva
Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. I figured that once one had received a
significant number of votes people would just pile onto that one.

(I considered only submitting the blog post, but I figured that if I didn't do
it someone else would submit the direct link, and by submitting both at once
at least I could have links pointing back and forth.)

------
smitjel
I give him an "A" for effort but the higher the vote does not always equal the
most interesting. Take yesterday for example...the old spice twitter feed.
Wtf?


How I Outsourced My Online Dating - jcsnv
https://josecasanova.com/blog/how-i-outsourced-my-online-dating/
======
wrrr
Did you see the 2nd date again?

~~~
jcsnv
Yup!

------
Cypher
Outsource swipe right.


Show HN: I made a site that calculates the market price of items on ebay. - locksley
http://www.getmarketprice.com

======
locksley
I made this in rails over a couple of weekends after learning how to code late
last year. The inspiration came from wanting to buy an iPhone 5 from ebay but
not knowing what a fair price should be. After a writing a script to calculate
this for myself, I thought it could be useful for others too and abstracted it
into its current incarnation.

Any feedback would be fantastic, especially on UX!

------
byoung2
I keep getting an error:

 _Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please
try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details._

~~~
locksley
Sorry! It should be ok now.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Now it's throwing a 500 error that says: "Sorry, we stuffed up. Please try
again."

<http://i.imgur.com/zhNDB.png>

------
toki5
/results?utf8=✓

This made me laugh aloud.

------
klous
Can you dive more into the technical details of this, eg. are you using the
ebay API or are you scraping the data?

~~~
locksley
Yeah sure, it's a scraper. The histogram is then built out of the 200 results
retrieved from 'completed listings', minus the ones that weren't sold. The X/Y
scatter plot is built from the 200 upcoming results, intended as a way to find
good bargains after you know the median/mean price.

~~~
klous
And the scraper is using a "logged in" ebay account, correct? Because I
believe to view completed listings you need to be logged in.

------
Pezmc
Perhaps implement a cache for the results? It already seems to be being hit
quite hard!

------
bdfh42
Sadly just reporting an error when I tried.


Is Your Tribe Holding You Down? - mikecuesta
http://www.copyblogger.com/two-tribes/

======
omouse
Gah, marketing people.


On moving from CouchDB to Riak - franckcuny
http://labs.linkfluence.net/nosql/2011/03/07/moving_from_couchdb_to_riak.html

======
smanek
I went through a length evaluation process of Riak recently, and came away
with a generally positive impression.

First of all, it's beautifully engineered, as long as you just need a KV store
or a graph DB (I wasn't in love with the MapReduce stuff, but that's another
story). None of the hassle that Hadoop/Hbase have about some nodes being
special (HBase Master, HDFS Namenode, etc). Also, no running multiple daemons
per server (e.g., no distinction between regionserver and datanode daemons,
like HBase). Easy config files, simple HTTP API (so you can just throw an off
the shelf load balancer like HAProxy in front of it), and lots of little
things that just make life easier.

I also really like how it's very explicit about the CAP tradeoffs it makes -
with powerful conflict resolution available for when consistency has been
sacrificed (instead of trying to sweep the issue under the rug, like many
other distributed dbs do).

However, there are a few downsides.

First, as mentioned in the article, with the default backend (a kv-store
called 'bitcask') all the keys per node have to fit in memory (and each key
has, on the order of, 20 bits of overhead, IIRC). Annoyingly, this fact isn't
noted anywhere in the Riak documentation that I saw (although, there is a
work-around by using the InnoDB backed). This won't matter too much for many
use cases, but it can be pretty painful if you're not expecting it.

Second, you can guard against data loss by specifying N copies of each piece
of data are stored on your cluster. However, under some conditions
(<https://issues.basho.com/show_bug.cgi?id=228>), the data may be replicated
on less than N distinct nodes. So, the failure of less than N nodes could
result in dataloss.

Finally, to the best of my knowledge, the largest Riak clusters in production
are around 60 nodes, while Hadoop has 2000 node clusters running (e.g., FB) in
production. Perfectly acceptable for most users, but just one more thing to
worry about if you're planning to roll out a large cluster (more potential for
'unknown unknowns', so to speak).

~~~
ot
> (and each key has, on the order of, 20 bits of overhead, IIRC)

20 _bits_? Really? Less than an integer? Or did you mean bytes? (Not
nitpicking here, I'm just curious)

~~~
pkulak
20 bits can support a million records. As an average, per node or cluster, it
seems reasonable to me.

~~~
Devilboy
Only a million records? That's waaaay too small.

------
rnewson
Describing Bigcouch as a bit of hack while admitting you've not used it seems
a little unfair. That said, it's very valuable to hear how other people see
our product.

Without doing a full-on sales pitch (I am not a salesman and do not portray
one on TV), I should say that Bigcouch adds a lot of desired features to
CouchDB, notably scaling beyond a single machine and sharding (which supports
very large databases). We run several clusters of Bigcouch nodes in production
and have done for some time, it's a thrill for me personally to see a
distributed database take a real pounding and keep on trucking.

I've been meaning to try Riak myself, so you've inspired me to finally pull
down the code and give it a proper examination.

~~~
biot
My reading was that they found CouchDB to have problems and adding complexity
on top of a problematic base wasn't an appealing proposition for them.

~~~
rnewson
My counterpoint is that Cloudant test and harden the CouchDB that we embed,
it's not, for various reasons, a verbatim copy of CouchDB itself.

That said, vanilla CouchDB is quite stable. While there are always bugs, I
don't recognize the system that the original poster is describing.

~~~
cdavid
What kind of data do you record (number of documents, average size of
document) ? We have to use couchdb at my current job, and I have encoutered
all those issues for even moderate size (replication failing more often than @
~30-40 Gb). I wonder if that's an environment issue.

~~~
timanglade
The current CouchDB replicator is notoriously inadequate for the larger
datasets or transfers across datacenters. A complete rewrite has been
completed and will be merged in CouchDB & BigCouch soon.

------
siculars
Re. File size growth in Couch:

Couch files are written in an append only fashion so that all operations are
considered appends, such as updates. The main upside is durability meaning the
file is always readable and never left in an odd state. As noted, however,
this has the downside of requiring compaction to reclaim disk space. You
should note that if you are using bitcask, the default backend for riak, you
will have the same problem that you had with couch as bitcask is also an aol
(append only log) (aka. wol - write only log). Bitcask will also need
compaction but as of the latest release there are various knobs to tweak
regarding when that is queued up and when it is executed.

Re. database being one file:

I'm not exactly sure why couch uses one file but I suspect it is due to the
use of b-trees internally. Would love to hear more from someone more
experienced in couch. Riak splits its data amongst many files. Specifically
one file (or 'cask' when using the default bitcask backend) per 'vnode'
(virtual node, 64 by default). The drawback here is that you need to ensure
that your environment has enough open file descriptors to service requests.

~~~
davisp
The main two reasons that CouchDB doesn't use multiple files per database are
system limits and increased complexity.

CouchDB has a bit of an alternative design in that it accepts that people
might be running a large number of databases on a single node. I don't
remember the exact numbers but I think we've heard of deploys using 10-100K
(small) db's on a single node.

As to complexity, with a single file, there's no magical fsync dance to
coordinate when committing data to disk. Its not unpossible, its just more
complex.

Its not out of the question that CouchDB will move to using multiple files per
database, but as its open source, the biggest road block so far is that no
one's needed it badly enough to implement it.

~~~
rch
I've noticed that interesting things tend to show up in bigcouch before
couchdb. So, if I were starting a couchdb based project today, it would be
with cloudant.

------
philwise
"We store a lot of data... 2TB"

Given that a pair of 2TB drives is less than $250 on ebuyer right now, 2TB of
data is not 'big data'. You could comfortably stuff that in any decent
database (SQL Server for example, I'm sure PostgreSQL would work too).

Just because a tiny machine on slicehost isn't big enough doesn't mean that
your data won't fit in a normal database.

~~~
defroost
> You could comfortably stuff that in any decent database (SQL Server for
> example, I'm sure PostgreSQL would work too).

You may have noticed that the OP's requirements were: * a REST interface *
sharding The costs of SQL Server are unbelievably high, and which you can do
horizontal partitioning and sharding, Riak is designed to be used in this
manner. On the other hand, re: SQL Server according to this article the
"horizontal partitioning feature requires Enterprise or Datacenter licenses
which have a retail price of 27,495 and 54,990 per processor." I think the OP
made a wise choice. <http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/02/SQL-Sharding>

~~~
JoachimSchipper
You don't necessarily need to shard if the data fits comfortably on a standard
disk... and the parent did mention PostgreSQL.

~~~
grncdr
Sharding (for free) on PostgreSQL is surprisingly painful

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I thought people just built sharding into the application level when using
MySQL stuff - I'd imagine the same thing works just fine for PostgreSQL. Or
were you talking about something else?

~~~
prodigal_erik
Anyone who volunteers for app level sharding is going to find themselves deep
in Special Hell. Step one is to rewrite all your queries so they no longer
expect really exotic use cases like "SELECT ... WHERE" to actually work until
you somehow figure out which nodes to run them on (and if it was supposed to
be a join between entities crossing shards, good luck with that). Step two is
to find working XA-aware drivers (haha). For step three you need a knife and a
goat....

Apparently really high-end clustered databases solve this problem correctly,
i.e., the schema is extended to specify where any record can be found, the
cluster uses that to work out a minimally-stupid query plan, and record->shard
mapping becomes merely a tuning decision. I've never had the opportunity to
work with one. But I'm not bitter.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Actually, if you use MySQL as a "great hashtable in the sky (cloud)", it's not
all that much more painful to shard things. That said, if you do that you're
already in a state of sin/pain...

------
rch
Anyone planning to store significant quantities of data across multiple
distinct nodes should have a look at the Disco Distributed File System:

<http://discoproject.org/doc/start/ddfs.html>

It handles 'data distribution, replication, persistence, addressing and
access' quite well.

------
electrum
> We rolled out a cluster of 5 nodes and 1024 partitions. Each node has 8gig
> of memories, 3x1Tb disk in RAID5.

This hardware configuration doesn't make sense. 8 gigabytes of memory is
pathetically small today. 32 gigs is basically standard, with 64 gigs costing
little extra. RAID 5 with only three disks will have horrible performance. A
single machine with 32/64 gigs and 12-16 disks in a better RAID configuration
should perform better at a lower operational cost.

~~~
timanglade
Don’t forget what node separation gets you in terms of availability and
partition-tolerance. But I do agree that the 8gig, RAID5 and 3-disk specs seem
odd. It'd be useful to get some additional details from Franck or the Basho
folks as to why they chose those.

------
davidhollander
What I disliked about Riak is that although at first glance it appears you can
namespace key\values into multiple buckets you can't. The whole database is
really only a single bucket and if you want to run a map\reduce it's always
over every key in the database!

Now you can simply increase complexity and create multiple Riak clusters for
different data schemes and treat it as a replication tool. However, their in
memory bitcask map-reduce was actually slower than a hard-drive map-reduce on
text JSON files in a folder. Where each file was individually opened, read
from disk, encoded, and closed in a loop (with nothing held in memory). Which
was rather scary!

Their replication scheme appears to be a pretty genuine copy of Amazon Dynamo
though (consistent hashing ring, quorum, merkle trees) which is nice.

~~~
aphyr
To my knowledge, there is no such thing as an in-memory bitcask backend for
Riak. Could you have been using regular Bitcask (keeps values on disk in log-
structured files) or the ETS memory backend?

~~~
davidhollander
Bitcask is an in memory datastore because it keeps a copy of the entire
dataset in memory. 4GB of data==4GB of memory>trivial amount of memory used by
a file descriptor.

> _keeps values on disk in log-structured files_

Of course it does. Log files are the easiest way to make an in memory
datastructure persistant. Logs are generally used for periodically dropping
fast writes as a backup in case you want to reload the memory datastructure in
the future. Read requests are structured and served from the in memory
datastructure and do not require a disk access.

The fact that you have something using all your RAM that should require 0 disk
accesses for reads NOT substantially beating something performing thousands of
disk accesses is a FUBAR situation.

~~~
aphyr
_Bitcask is an in memory datastore because it keeps a copy of the entire
dataset in memory._

Begging your pardon, but I think you may be misunderstanding bitcask. The
bitcask keydir is stored in memory, but the values are stored on disk. The
keydir is a hash mapping each key to a file ID and the offset/size in that
file at which the value is stored. The only time _values_ are stored in memory
on is when the kernel's fs cache or readahead buffer provide them.

<http://downloads.basho.com/papers/bitcask-intro.pdf>

Since a filesystem directory listing is likely held by your OS cache, you
should see similar performance between bitcask and files on disk: an in-memory
lookup to obtain the inode/offset, and a disk seek+read.

Riak will be substantially slower than directly using bitcask, however,
because you may need to talk over the network to as many as N nodes, wait for
all their responses, and compute the resultant vclock/metadata, and then
serialize it for HTTP (huge TCP overhead) or protocol buffers (relatively
fast). If you're running on a single machine, then you may incur additional
time for that machine to run what would normally be distributed over three
nodes. Without knowing more about your benchmark, however, it's difficult to
say.

~~~
davidhollander
> _you may be misunderstanding bitcask_

Yes I was, I apologize. It must have been MongoDB that required total data be
no larger than amount of RAM.

The test was run using protocol buffers and Python client on the same computer
testing reads vs. a naive map reduce. The naive map reduce was storing 4,000
files in a folder, treating the filename as the key and parsing the text file
contents from JSON into a python dictionary to see if an attribute matches.
Basically I figure doing a loop of thousands of blocking disk accesses from a
laptop harddrive on a standard filesystem buffering nothing in memory should
_always_ be much slower than _any_ database.

This was last year so maybe Riak's performance has increased since then. I'd
be interested if TokyoCabinet was added as a backend.

~~~
aphyr
Riak, by default, uses a replication value of three. Your single test machine
has to do ~three times the work, so you should expect slower performance here.
(I'm oversimplifying somewhat.)

You'll see significantly improved performance on a linear test (in my informal
testing, 3-4x speedups) by adding an extra two nodes. _Parallelized_ tests
pretty much scale linearly with nodes.

In practice, I've found Riak to be slightly slower than MySQL. Direct
reads/writes tend to be fast, but JSON parsing can bite you and
denormalization requires more writes. The major advantage is that the Riak
system can scale linearly with nodes, and that it can fail in predictable and
resolvable ways.

As an example, the feed system I'm currently building on Riak will survive a
total network partition and allow full reads and writes from every node with
no data lost. Everything is automatically merged when the partition ends. The
vclock-tagged multi-value functionality of Riak is exceptionally powerful when
you want to design these types of systems, and is, in my mind, worth the
performance hit and additional design complexity for certain classes of
problems.

 _This was last year so maybe Riak's performance has increased since then. I'd
be interested if TokyoCabinet was added as a backend._

There are also InnoDB and multiple in-memory backends, which may provide
performance characteristics more in line with what you are looking for.

------
rb2k_
It's great to see that I'm not the only person having problem with CouchDB's
compaction failing when dealing with larger datasets.

I had the same exact experience during my master's thesis (hn:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022192> ) and this was one of the
reasons why CouchDB didn't seem a good solution for a dataset that has a high
number of updates.

------
tillk
I'm a little let down by the detail of this blog post.

For anyone who cares: we've had 6x as many documents (as linkfluence) in a
single CouchDB instane before we moved to Cloudant. We now have over 360
million documents on Cloudant.

Our database is very write intense, lots of new documents, little updates to
the actual documents and a lot of reads of the documents in between. We also
have a couple larger views to aggregate the data for our users.

The ride with CouchDB has been bumpy at times, but not at the 'scale' where
linkfluence is at.

------
karmi
> Each modification generates a new version of the document. (...) we don’t
> need it, and there’s no way to disable it (...)

Note that there's a `_revs_limit` setting available:
<[http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_database_API>](http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_database_API>).
It's very beneficial for a use case like yours.

(Though I've seen CouchDB performing rather poorly when taking _really_ heavy
read/write load or compacting big datasets, on occasion.)

------
davidw
Hrm... with N "nosql" things, there's great potential for writing. Redis vs
Riak. Cassandra to CouchDB. Why I gave up on Mongo and moved to Mnesia. And so
on and so forth;-)

~~~
pjscott
Your comment applies to any job for which there are multiple competing tools.


Google’s 18th Birthday - ForFreedom
https://www.google.com/doodles/googles-18th-birthday
======
mattbgates
Okay, for the most part, most of us alive today are older than Google and
remember it began around 1998, but someday... everyone alive is going to be
younger than Google, and there's going to be no one alive that even remembers
when Google was founded, and everyone alive is going to use Google as like its
Skynet.

~~~
martin-adams
Yep, they're called the 'after Googlers':
[https://youtu.be/ozYez0I0Xs8?t=1m25s](https://youtu.be/ozYez0I0Xs8?t=1m25s)

~~~
meira
15 years ago, we could spend a lot of times thinking about 'after
microsofters", and today we can laugh a lot.

~~~
drdeadringer
Why are we laughing?

------
bfuller
Who else remembers the first time they visited google.com?

I was on a 56k dial up connection, but the page loaded so quickly.

This was during a period I was used to pages taking 20+ seconds to load, and
the google homepage loaded almost instantly.

In fact, just for fun, I went to google.com on my new laptop with ssd and 16
gig of ram using the latest version of chrome, and maybe it is through rose
tinted glasses, but it seems like the first time I visited google using my
dial up connection it loaded a lot "snappier" than it does today.

~~~
guessmyname
Most if not all the ISP companies in my home country used to ask you to access
google.com while troubleshooting connectivity issues. They would eventually
assume your Internet was working as expected if at least Google loaded.
Recently they changed the strategy and now use Internet speed tester which
come with the requirement to have Flash installed _and_ enabled.

Many people in my country still believe that Google == Internet so I am pretty
sure that if Google stops serving for whatever reason here the majority of
people will get cut out of the Internet because they don't understand how to
use the address bar. I have even seen people accessing google.com just to put
facebook.com in the search form instead of simply typing that domain in the
address bar, I cringe every time.

------
jamespo
I still recall switching from AltaVista :D

~~~
jagermo
Fireball for me. I remember the icq chat with a friend who told me to try this
cool new thing without ads!

~~~
zakki
And now Google push all possible ads to us :(

~~~
karakal
A couple of ads (clearly marked as such) at the top of the results page are
"all possible ads"? Come on.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
In a new Safari window (private browsing, 1920x1080 screen), for the search
query "holiday cottages Wales", I don't get any organic results above the
fold. The first one is at 1380px down the page.

~~~
Intermernet
Very OT, but if you're actually looking for one, I can recommend
[https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/12448783](https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/12448783)
. My partner and I stayed there a few months ago and it was wonderful!

------
SmellyGeekBoy
I'd never really considered it before, but Google is pretty old now in
internet terms. It's been around twice along as some of its fellow giants like
Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006) and the like - although not
nearly as long as Yahoo! (1994) and AOL (1991).

~~~
Mahn
What's impressive is not that that it's one of the oldest internet companies
around, but that it's _still relevant_ today! The vast majority of large
internet companies usually fade into obscurity in less than ten years as they
fail to change and adapt and are replaced by whatever is new and shiny at the
time; Google though, they knew they had to place bold bets beyond what's
making money _today_ , and that paid off beautifully.

~~~
muse900
and their main website is old-style. Well they implemented new fonts etc and
they didn't change over to use a bootstrap template. Simple and easy, is what
their search engine is actually.

------
zerognowl
Great to see Google splintering off into single duty compartments instead of
spreading itself so thin that nothing gets done with the same amount of focus.
Alphabet was a true design decision, and a mature one at that. One thing that
crossed my mind recently was the notion of Google and its long relationship
with hardware: we have this thing called the Blockchain now, and it could do
with some of Google's hardware to run on, instead of independent factions of
people spending their pocket money on their own hardware. It kind of makes me
jealous and annoyed that so much could be spent for what effectively is
sometimes just a data center for storing people's holiday snaps on Google
Plus, when it could be used to host micro democracies and change the direction
of finance. I suspect all that hardware will eventually be re-purposed many
times throughout the course of the Google experiment and probably will
eventually be given away at some point to the blockchainers who need it. I can
picture the scene: dreadlocked decentralists rejoicing at their new hardware
gift from Google, 25+ years from now. The ultimate redemption from their years
of slavishly handing their personal information over to Google in exchange for
a decent search experience. A true revenge for consumers of Google. Meanwhile
Google would have entirely switched to SSDs and are probably using post-
quantum chips, but at least we can host multiple different blockchains now
without spending our pocket money on them. The blockchainers can start to get
rich and blockchain can really flourish.

Also, Google needs to create services which are for a post Snowden world. Allo
is cute, but entirely inferior to things like Signal which addresses the
problem of encrypted private chat head on. Google needs to create things like
its own VPN service, perhaps?

~~~
dpark
> _One thing that crossed my mind recently was the notion of Google and its
> long relationship with hardware: we have this thing called the Blockchain
> now, and it could do with some of Google 's hardware to run on, instead of
> independent factions of people spending their pocket money on their own
> hardware._

I was under the impression that most mining is now done by a few groups using
special purpose hardware. Mining using hardware bought with "pocket money"
seems like a losing game at this point.

> _It kind of makes me jealous and annoyed that so much could be spent for
> what effectively is sometimes just a data center for storing people 's
> holiday snaps on Google Plus, when it could be used to host micro
> democracies and change the direction of finance._

It makes me sad that so much energy is wasted computing hashes for mining when
it seems to add so little to society. In comparison, I think hosting holiday
photos is a more valuable task.

> _I suspect all that hardware will eventually be re-purposed many times
> throughout the course of the Google experiment and probably will eventually
> be given away at some point to the blockchainers who need it._

I'm not sure why Google would give their hardware to a random group of miners.
I'm not sure why the miners would want it either since x86 is not an efficient
way to mine. Out of date x86 hardware especially.

------
the_common_man
Google makes great doodles :
[https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2016/googles-18th-
birth...](https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2016/googles-18th-
birthday-5661535679545344-hp.gif)

~~~
zargath
"stolen" from a danish tv show
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZR_8SoD20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZR_8SoD20)
:)

~~~
giancarlostoro
I'm in the US: This video contains content from DR, who has blocked it in your
country on copyright grounds.

~~~
dawnerd
I was hoping it would say Google, Inc. as soon as I saw the removed video
graphic loading. Would have been all too perfect.

------
cko
Almost everything I've ever learned started with a Google search. I'm 30 now -
I started using it when I was 15 - and since I didn't have a lot of friends or
stuff happening growing up, I spent hours browsing. A lot of porn, but also a
lot of random stuff I was curious about. I kind of stopped believing the words
of people around me and chose to believe everything I read instead. Over time
I did develop a better sense of what's credible and what's not.

By the way I've always had the idea of a credibility plugin to a browser that
rates the credibility level of everything you visit.

Sometimes I judge someone based on how they search. If they're typing out a
whole question, perfect punctuation: not a good sign.

~~~
DanBC
> Sometimes I judge someone based on how they search. If they're typing out a
> whole question, perfect punctuation: not a good sign.

You read the Google instructions "How to use Google" about 15 years ago, and
you started using Google when they had a 10 word limit, with no substitutions
and no stemming.

Nowadays Google is mostly used by people who ask whole questions, complete
with punctuation, and websites and Google optimise for those people.

Sometimes it's the best way to get to a good website.

~~~
cko
I never knew that. I always just thought those words were parsed out as noise.
You're saying that whole questions help?

Also sometimes when I search I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, so it
takes a few queries to learn the basic vocabulary of the area I want to learn
about. So putting a few keyword guesses into the box seems to work. In other
words I never expect to land on a good website on my first try because I don't
even know the right vocabulary.

Is there a better way to do it?

~~~
DanBC
> Is there a better way to do it?

Who knows? Google used to tell people how to search. SEO arseholes ruined it
for everyone, and now Google has an opaque mechanism.

If I don't kno much abotu something asking a full question seems to get useful
introductory pages. If I know a bit about something keywords seems to work.
I'm I know a lot about something I have to include "exact" words, and use the
- to remove some not relevant terms.

Google went from being a precision tool to good enough most of the time.

------
Yhippa
I was a bit late to the Google party. I first heard about it when I was in my
CS seminar in undergrad. Someone in class talked about a cool new search
engine called "googol" (what I thought it was called). I am not sure when but
slowly I ditched Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves in favor of it and never
looked back. Each time I try alt search engines like Bing or DDG I keep coming
back.

The second big Google moment I remember was when Gmail first came out. I
wanted an invite so bad and eventually got one. I thought how cool is this
that you can have a usable email client in the web browser. Not that it was
the first one; I remember using Hotmail before that. But it had threaded
messages!

Of all the tech companies I've used in the past Google has treated me the
best. They've done some unforgivable things like killing Google Reader but for
the most part I'm happy with them.

~~~
ryanobjc
the death of google reader was sad, but at the same time, RSS as a method of
reading blogs and news has exited the building. Competing products have failed
to provide the same kind of mindshare that reader apparently had. Social media
has taken over, for better and worse.

The internet has changed, and reader is one of those things that is solidly in
the past.

~~~
CaptSpify
Heavily disagree. I still use RSS constantly. Sure, I don't think RSS will be
here 100 years from now, it'll die someday, but I've yet to see an actual
alternative to it.

~~~
ryanobjc
Here's the issue, yes, you can disagree, and your workflow is different.

But in general, most people get their news from social media now - mostly
Facebook as it turns out. That is hardly a disputable fact. RSS is a technical
detail of how sites publish, and in the end, people seem to not care about it.
They care about end user features, which apparently includes their friends
commenting. And that is what Facebook does.

Yeah you could make an argument that Google Reader killed the promising RSS
market, but I don't think that argument really holds a lot of water.

------
hypertexthero
The first time I visited Google.com was at a startup called European Artisans
in Rome, Italy, using a Flower Power iMac G3. I was reading a book called The
Cluetrain Manifesto at the time and remember thinking that Google 'got' what
the [internet][1] is and where it was was going. And despite some missteps,
they still do!

Looking forward to the next 18 years! Happy birthday, Google!

[1]: [http://www.worldofends.com/](http://www.worldofends.com/)

------
laumars
Interestingly the top result I get from that query is the following article
from UK newspaper, The Independent:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/when-is-googles-birthday-18th-doodle-today-a7331271.html)

[Title: When is Google’s birthday? The big thing wrong with the search
engine's celebratory doodle]

~~~
chki
I think there are always at least five news articles written on any topic that
is mentioned in a Google Doodle because those are really the simplest clicks
you can get with so much traffic coming from Google. (They often get shown
under the "news" segment)

------
nachtigall
Then: Don't be evil.

Today: Google is the new MS. XMPP kicked out of Google Talk, RSS put on a
hold. If there wasn't Firefox, Chromium would be burried. I'd even wish that
Bing would be more successful, let alone DuckDuckGo.

~~~
domfletcher
I have some sympathy with this but I think people ignore a lot of the stuff
which Google just gives away with some fairly light advertising. Think about
navigating with Apple maps, or trying to organise your life with Hotmail or
trying to do anything without Google search. Some of their product decisions
wind people up but I think they do a lot more good than harm.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>a lot of the stuff which Google just gives away with some fairly light
advertising. //

... which furthers their eco-system and cements "vendor lock-in". They kill
off too many major projects seemingly for purely financial purposes for the
point you make to carry well.

------
EugeneOZ
I think tone of "congratulations" on this site should be really important sign
for Google to reconsider their way.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The problem is that Googlers live and work and are friends with other
Googlers, and have a massive echo chamber effect. Most of the people who
Googlers interact with are either Google employees or Google enthusiasts, so
it's easy for them to believe that something like the comments on this article
are some sort of concentrated effort by a small group or something, as opposed
to a very real, widespread concern.

~~~
cobookman
Most googlers recognize the echo chamber of not just google but silicon
valley. Many of the complaints issued here are also issued directly to the top
executives as well. Sometimes the issues get resolved, other times its a
complicated issue with no good answer (in regards to google itself).

------
wiremine
I remember using Google for the first time in college. It was like a breath of
fresh air after using Yahoo, Northern Light or any of the other search engines
back in the day.

------
amelius
Google has lost its innocence and is slowly turning into an old voyeur :)

~~~
nommm-nommm
Anyone remember google-watch.org? Unfortunately it's something else now and
it's excluded by the wayback machine. Would be interesting to read now.

~~~
orly_bookz
Is that the guy that set up scroogle?

I suppose DuckDuckGo with !g is a better version of that now anyway but it was
always an interesting concept...

~~~
nommm-nommm
I have no idea, I don't know what scroogle is. Google-watch.org was a site
that existed in the early 2000s (before Gmail) that was critical of Google and
brought up some of the issues with things they were doing.

If I recall correctly.

------
legopicode
Then: An epic algorythm

Now: An interner super power

Happy birthday

------
Mithaldu
Should i be seeing anything special on that page, other than a list of "news"
articles discussing when Google's birthday should be?

------
franze
I'm part of the Google economy now for 12 years, so well thank you Google,
kinda.

My story for all who are interested:

In 2004 the director of the Austria Press Agency (APA) came to me and said
"Hey, our PR customers wan't to find their press releases in Google, do that!"
I was in web business development then, a fancy name for a one man team of
developer, coder, hacker, sysadmin, product development, cooperations,
conceptionist, designer, data analyst, external contributors coordinator for
www.ots.at, the public relations branch of APA.

I did, and it worked. As a matter of fact it worked so good, that for some
time the press releases of the companies showed up before the actual websites
of the companies. (I used such advanced and then highly controversial
strategies like internal interlinking and title-tags) Traffic and soon later
revenue exploded.

As I was frustrated with web development at that time (IE6 had a market share
of 90% plus, FF (firebird or phoenix at that time) wasn't ready yet, no
competition anywhere near). Web 2.0. was just starting at that time, we saw
what was possible, but we could not do it, as the IE6 bugs were crashing all
innovation.

I could code since I was a child, then I made code my work, now I swore to
myself that I will always ever code for fun (or projects that are 100% owned
by me and therefore fun) again, but earn money in another way.

I followed the money and started my first company "Search Engine Optimized
distribution of PR and Corporate Information via Blog and Web 2.0. Networks"
in 2006 i think. Today we would call it a "Corporate Blog"!

I created a piece of software that was from the front end better than
WordPress of that time, faster, bug free HTML, W3C valid, beautiful tag
clouds, just awesome. The backend and the actual getting content in there was
a complete mess, so what, I had a product!!!! Now I just needed to sell the
product, cold calling companies and convince them that they need a corporate
blog and that their content needs to get found by Google. Oh yeah, zero sales
experience from my side. Lets just say it didn't work.

So I did what any young founder would do: went to a party, jumped over a wall
to save entrance fee, broke my knee in a very complicated way and went into
hospital for 3 months.

I took a job again: This time as a key account manager to sell websites in the
real estate business. I learned a lot, most horrible job ever, too.

Went to the next job, now officially called myself SEO for the first time:
becoming the SEO manager of the then world leader in sports-betting, poker and
casino. Oh what fun! For the first time I realized what unbelievable esoteric
bullshit people started to believe about Google and SEO. High-up management
talked about "PageRank Black Holes" whereby I explained to them that "Google
being able to crawl us" is kinda a good idea if you want to get found for
anything. Also I had months long projects to convince the powers to be, that
it just isn't a good idea to run internal links over 16 (internal & external )
redirects (whereby IE which was still around at that time only supported
10...). I had 70 people working on changing the footer links (as they were
owned by different departments and country managers). Learned a lot in those
years, especially about working with consultants and other third parties
brought in by country managers, product heads, other consultants, bought
companies, ...

And I learned that the state of SEO, which was a dev driven discipline for a
long time became the ultimate bullshit industry. With people selling links
that suck, selling tools that nobody needs, telling stuff that could neither
verified nor falsified, hurting businesses until the point of bankruptcy. And
whenever I though SEO has arrived at a new bottom, it became worse.

Then I did what any employee which was fed up with the status quo did, I
joined a startup. Well not one, an incubator which owned the majority of all
the startups it incubated. I.e.: I helped scale 123people form about 300 000
monthly to 60 000 000 monthly visits before it was sold. And some others which
I'm more proud of. Then joined another startup.

In 2011 I started my second company, my goal is simple: To make all SEO
agencies, including my own, redundant. I'm doing great, it's still lots of
fun.

So anyway, thx Google. You gave me a career. I work in the world/economy you
created.

~~~
amelius
> So anyway, thx Google. You gave me a career.

Interesting story. But in that last line you make it sound like without Google
you didn't have a career :)

~~~
franze
Well, you never know the paths not travelled.

------
ksk
I don't quite like Google, but happy birthday Google :)

20+ years of being online. Google was a welcome change when they launched, but
they've been on a path of slow credibility erosion for much of the last
decade. IMHO.

------
social_quotient
Happy birthday!

------
meira
Making Internet a worse place day after day. Congratulations, Google!

------
Dolores12
Barely legal Google.


Who Are The Top Tech Bloggers? - hwork
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/20/who-are-the-top-tech-bloggers/
======
shafqat
As I mentioned in the TC comments, in the context of that list, ‘top’ means
most frequently quoted on TechMeme. At NewsCred (my startup), we’re collecting
metrics so that we can determine lists of the top news sources as well as top
journalists (both mainstream/bloggers), but using credibility as our
criterion. We want to highlight writers and sources based on quality, rather
than popularity or frequency of posts.

We just launched our Alpha, so the dataset is very limited, but in terms of
sources, the Economist and Techcrunch (go figure!) came out on top this week.

Also, the lists will be syndicated each week of course!

------
chrisbroadfoot
Interesting, I guess, but not really surprising or useful


Hey Dropbox, build MailDrop. I will pay you to replace my Gmail - iProject
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/15/hey-dropbox-make-maildrop-and-i-will-pay-you-to-replace-my-gmail/
======
jubari
Incidentally, that's somewhat what I've been building since my recent
submission: Show HN: A personal Gmail.
(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804690>)

I learned a lot from HN about trust and got a lot of great feedback via email.

Basically, I currently manage my own email via a native app I build with
TideSDK and AngularJS. MailGun catches the emails and my rails service drops
them into my dropbox as JSON files.

There is some magic going on regarding conversation views, labels,
attachments, etc.

Sadly, I came across a critical memory leak in TideSDK, which currently
prevents me from releasing the app/service to the public.

Feel free to drop me a message if you're interested in updates.


Creditor moves to dismantle copyright troll Righthaven - llambda
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/creditor-moves-to-dismantle-copyright-troll-righthaven.ars
======
athom
Quoting:

A filing in the case shows that Randazza wants the court to “authorize the
U.S. Marshalls to execute Hoehn’s judgment through seizure of Righthaven’s
bank accounts, real and personal property, _and intangible intellectual
property rights_ [my emphasis] for levy, lien, auction or other treatment
appropriate for satisfaction of Hoehn’s judgment.”

I hope this isn't a spurious question, but could this end with _Hoehn_ owning
copyrights entrusted to Righthaven?

~~~
nash
Righthaven never had any copyrights to begin with. Which is why they keep
getting absolutely slaughtered in cases (no standing).

So unfortunately Randazza won't get those copyrights.

~~~
stan_rogers
I believe the rights being referred to are things like Righthaven's own name,
trademarks, copyrights and so forth, not just what they may have acquired from
other parties.

~~~
nash
Probably.

Still, I can't imagine the trademark "Righthaven" has a lot of value any more.

------
pseudonym
Hilarious, but also sad. What's going to happen to the $120,000 payment handed
down to the other folks, plus all other Righthaven suits still in court?

Does it end up being just $120,000 out of pocket to defend against a frivolous
lawsuit, or can people go after the people behind Righthaven for this as well?

------
CaptainZapp
"Righthaven had asked U.S. District Judge Philip Pro of Nevada to stay the fee
award, saying it might slip into bankruptcy if forced to pay."

So fucking what?!

This must be about the dumbest, most ludicrous reasoning I have read in a
long, long time.

So you frivolously try to screw people and companies with dodgy copyright
lawsuits. After the bullets of your double barrel shotgun forcefully blasted
into your feet you argue that you can't continue with your "business model"
when forced to pay for the consequences?

Either something here is very much out of context or those Righthaven dudes
are really not the smartest cookies in the jar.


Apple solves marital spat with three simple words - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/140984/apple-solves-marital-spat-three-simple-words
======
RiderOfGiraffes
Same story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351084>

Many comments.


PLEAC-Haskell - brassybadger
http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_haskell/

======
dasil003
Are there any plans by the maintainers to get off of SourceForge? I realize it
doesn't have the risk of distributing binaries, but still, any time I see
SourceForge now it's a huge red flag.

~~~
erpellan
[http://sourceforge.net/p/pleac/code/](http://sourceforge.net/p/pleac/code/)

CVS?? Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time... a long time.

------
asimjalis
PLEAC is a good resource as long as you watch out for the Blub paradox. “But
when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the
power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely
weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub,
but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well.”
[[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox)]

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Wasn't the Blub paradox particularly in relation to dynamic languages with
advanced metaprogramming capabilities?

------
kwhitefoot
Looks like SF is falling apart, every link I try from the PLEAC home page
gives me a guru meditation error. Pity, because it sounds like a worthwhile
resource, a shame too because SF used to be so good. This is the sort of thing
that really should be on some kind of distributed file system so that it is
not beholden to any one organization. I could give some space and a few kB/s
of bandwidth.

------
LukeHoersten
This is awesome. I've never heard of PLEAC before but it's exactly what I want
to see when starting a new language. Idioms and best practices are much easier
to grasp when factoring out superficial differences.

------
gaius
PLEAC is absolutely the best resource if you are an experienced programmer in
the throes of learning a new language.

------
karmakaze
Great resource. Why does it not cover files/directories, databases or
sockets/Internet which is where I could most benefit?


Great Manager Institute Publishes the 'Manager Mantras' Ebook - GMI
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FNQ8VFD
======
GMI
Taking inspiration from People Managers across the spectrum, Great Manager
Institute™ brings in a collection of some of the best stories heard. Among
these pages, the reader can find understandable and actionable practices that
have been tried and tested by a plethora of People Managers. This e-book would
be every manager's go-to book when it comes to inspiration and motivation.


Why education is about more than jobs - AndrewDucker
http://lizw.livejournal.com/517257.html

======
chasingsparks
I have no experience with university education over the pond, but I have to
personal observations about the US system: 1) far too many people go to
college and 2) the wrong people go to college.

Political pressures have created a huge demand for colleges while supply
remains comparatively inelastic. Consequently, the student population has
become dominated by people whose parents can afford to send them to college,
but whose intellectual credentials and academic interest are far from stellar.
College revolves around teaching the mean -- and I don't like it.

I hope graduate school is different.

~~~
chasingsparks
I should follow this up by correcting myself: obviously, the pressures are not
only political. If a college education offers the perception of competence,
then market pressures increase the demand that the universities are more than
willing to accommodate. I think -- somehow in a way that I do not see --
universities have to just start being more selective.

------
jrwoodruff
I might just be imagining it, but I seem to be getting an 'anti-college' vibe,
or at least 'anti-traditional education' vibe from HN these past few weeks.

Sure, we probably can't afford to send 50% of the country to college. But why
not try to send as many as possible, at least of those who want to go?

Dominated by those whose parents can afford to send kids to college? Hasn't it
always been that way? After all, if you can't afford it, no matter how bad you
want to go, you won't. Not without assistance.

I'm not sure I understand this negative bent on college education - or am I
just reading things wrong?

~~~
cschneid
Like everything else in politics, there is a nice gray area in education. The
internet is very bad at gray areas, and tends toward extremism.

The gray area here is between "pursuit of knowledge, become better citizens"
and "career school, what is history for anyway".

Universities used to be #1, and have shifted toward #2 over the years. Now
people see it more as the default to be the career school, and laugh at people
who are in favor of learning for the sake of learning.

Then the problem is that while both approaches are relatively valid, they lead
to different conclusions to the answer of "who should go to college".

~~~
jrwoodruff
That makes sense, actually, since I definitely reside solidly in the middle of
the two. Prior to college, I was definitely in the 'what is history for'
crowd, but college broadened my horizons so much, and I enjoy learning to the
extent that I could easily argue the 'pursuit of knowledge' reasoning these
days. I went to a liberal arts college for an applied degree, so I guess
that's a little of both worlds.

------
mattj
I think this attests more to the dangers of early tracking in European
societies (didn't take the right tests in high school? You're never going to
college) than the benefits of education as access to knowledge. In the us,
taking classes like this COULD lead to a job, if you were willing to fight
really hard for it.

------
gaius
If there are _intangible_ benefits, then by all means, have all the
_intangible_ support you want.

We can't afford to put 50% of the population through university, it's as
simple as that.

~~~
fhars
A modern industrialized society can't afford _not_ to put about 50% of the
population through an education that gives them at least something like a
bachelors degree.

~~~
kaa2102
Are we trying to make University trustees rich or have a well-educated and
civil society? I don't think 4 years of college are required to teach someone
to think critically, be rational, and right/speak well.

~~~
gloob
I don't want my open heart surgery to be performed by a dropout, no matter how
passionate and relentlessly resourceful they might be.

~~~
jerf
That's a total strawman. It's not even worth expanding on this reply further.

~~~
gloob
_That's a total strawman._

Not really. It's probably not a terribly popular sentiment on a site for web-
based hacker startups, but there are plenty of jobs that actually require some
sort of meaningful education. Most of the medical system is composed of such
jobs, as are large chunks of the legal system. Government bureaucracy (while
the benefits of having a degree in such a job may be questionable) commonly
requires them, at least in Canada. The government is not a small employer.

50% may well be excessive, but there are a huge number of jobs out there that
demand a degree.

~~~
jerf
Who said "Hey, let's do away with higher education entirely, such that doctors
won't have an education?"

Total strawman. Thinking there's too many people going to college is not the
same as thinking _nobody_ should go to college, and you're not helping anybody
with anything by conflating the two.

------
akl
... from a teacher at open university, apparently.

I'm sure I'm biased as a college drop out myself, but I've never been
impressed by abstract ('learn how to help society!', etc) type reasons to go
to college.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Understanding what you read on the news, being able to communicate clearly and
effectively, and being able to spot bullshit and faulty arguments when you see
it - great reasons to go to college.

But 90% of people won't be using what they learn to "improve their community"
and whatnot, not unless they're specifically going to school to learn that.

~~~
hughprime
_Understanding what you read on the news, being able to communicate clearly
and effectively, and being able to spot bullshit and faulty arguments when you
see it - great reasons to go to college._

It's a pity, then, that these skills aren't very well taught in university (at
least on the humanities side). Indeed, if you do a course on, say, Foucault or
Derrida then you'll need to _unlearn_ how to spot bullshit and faulty
arguments if you want to pass the course since a final essay which says
"Derrida in this book says a whole bunch of vague bullshit that doesn't make
any real sense" will get low marks.

Interestingly, I don't think spotting bullshit or faulty arguments is that
difficult a skill -- relatively uneducated people can easily spot a BS
argument when it's used to argue for something they don't want to believe. The
really hard part is developing the discipline to be able to spot a BS argument
even when it's arguing for something you _do_ want to believe.

I don't think this skill is very well taught, either.


Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit - ghastmaster
https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/29/internet-archive-responds-to-publishers-lawsuit/
======
ilamont
> These publishers call for the destruction of the 1.5 million digital books
> that Internet Archive makes available to our patrons. This form of digital
> book burning is unprecedented and unfairly disadvantages people with print
> disabilities.

It's a stretch to call this a book burning. It is not a politically motivated
campaign to destroy books, or a witch hunt to root out deviant social or
religious teachings. It's a dispute over copyright law.

In addition, I thought the justification for expanding controlled digital
lending was around COVID-19, not rights for people who have low vision. Was
this issue a central part of the the IA's reasoning before the lawsuit?

------
ghastmaster
[https://archive.org/details/internet-archive-
answer](https://archive.org/details/internet-archive-answer) \- Defense Filing

I'm seeing more and more "503 Service unavailable" on the waybackmachine.


Are women bad at math: Graphs refute. - ColinWright
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/08/29/are_women_bad_at_math_graphs_refute.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=sm&utm_campaign=button_toolbar
======
ALee
The last slide is really important since studies have also shown that social
stereotypes ("women are bad at math") are reinforced in testing conditions.
When people are reminded of these stereotypes, they perform worse (questions
of race/gender before the big test).

I found that I did better at stuff when (a) I didn't care and (b) when I
realized I'm not the smartest person, but darn it, I'm gonna try.


Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin [audio] - chrisbroadfoot
https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-88-kubernetes-1-7-with-tim-hockin/
======
cobbzilla
I have nothing to add here but a positive ad-hominem: I went to high school
with Tim and he's a super nice, super smart guy. When we were in HS I didn't
even know he was such a cool nerd. I only discovered this when I was getting
deep into Linux (late 90s/early 2000s), and found out he was the author of an
important kernel patch that I needed. Go Tim!

~~~
philips
Tim is one of the people in the Kubernetes community that makes it an
enjoyable place to work.

Building an open source community is hard and building an open source
community for a platform that has a ton of orthogonal interests is even
harder. But, Tim, along with many of the other leaders, do a solid job of
ensuring that the project does its best to listen to all of the various users
and stakeholders and then ultimately takes an opinion and heads in a direction
that tries to navigate immediate needs without egregious long-term compromise.
It is hard work and no one can expect a 100% success rate, but Tim has done a
great job and has been pretty close.

In any case, thanks for your dedication to the project Tim.

------
nameless912
What have people been experiencing with K8s 1.7? For me it's been nothing but
RBAC issues everywhere (Granted, I'm upgrading from 1.5 so it's kinda my own
damn fault).

~~~
rascoe
We took the RBAC "hit" in 1.6. This mostly involved grokking the
Role/RoleBinding and ClusterRole/ClusterRoleBinding details first. After that
it was primarily a matter of updating a slew of Helm charts. Ones that we
maintain for ourselves, and several community charts that had yet to be
updated.

~~~
nameless912
I think I understand cluster roles and bindings, my biggest thing is that I
was using a bunch of off-the-shelf helm charts (for spinnaker, k8s dashboard,
and deis workflow especially) and all three stopped working with RBAC. Those
have been an...adventure to fix.

------
nodejscloud
I'm coming from traditional VM's and want to play around with Kubernetes. What
are the best guides/articles to get started with Kubernetes?

I've heard to start with
[https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube](https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube)
locally, but looking for a solid article to get familiar with all the concepts
and best practices.

~~~
dankohn1
Minikube is a good place to start and the kubernetes.io guide is pretty good:
[https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/stateless-
application/h...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/stateless-
application/hello-minikube/)

If you like video, try out this new (free) EdX course:
[https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-kubernetes-
linuxfoun...](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-kubernetes-
linuxfoundationx-lfs158x)

(Disclosure: I run CNCF and we developed that course.)

------
swozey
I completely forgot about this podcast. Thanks for posting this here.