
Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi - alpb
https://pi.delivery/
======
nodesocket
I'm calling this: after attending Google Cloud Next last week, and seeing the
huge improvements to GCP in the last 18 months, I am supremely confident that
AWS should be worried about Google as a legitimate competitor.

$GOOG is betting big on GCP, and they are executing at a very high level
releasing iterative products and new features.

I'm recommending GCP for all my clients (shameless plug
[https://elasticbyte.net](https://elasticbyte.net)) if they don't have any
infrastructure setup or provisioned already. While AWS offers a wider array of
integrated services (they do have a large lead time), GCP has learned from all
the mistakes of other providers. They started off with a superior project
based structure, then per-minute billing, then sustained-use discounts, then
Container Engine (GKE), then the Firebase acquisition (genius), now Functions
and SQL Postgres support.

~~~
jedberg
Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is
that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to
sell to an enterprise.

Google's sales method is, "There's the docs, good luck". Enterprises don't
like that. They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out
for lunches and dinners.

So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how to enterprise,
and in fact it's fairly counter-cultural for them.

If they learn to sell to the enterprise, I agree with you.

But right now, almost all the money in cloud is with the enterprise, and right
now Google has no idea how to address that market.

~~~
013a
Did you even watch GCPNext? The entire event was enterprise-focused. They
brought a half-dozen companies on stage to basically say the same thing over
and over again: "We moved to Google cloud, its so much better, Google helped
us every step of the way."

Its possible these companies were lying, but I think that conference should be
evidence enough for any prospective customers that Google is ready.

~~~
signal11
> The entire event was enterprise-focused

Some _very_ old-school enterprises are working with Google to onboard GCP in
their organisations. A few of them even spoke at the event. I'm assuming
they've done due diligence to ensure that Google will devote time and
attention span to GCP and not treat it like a "side project".

Also, looking at this logically, whether Google offers GCP or not, you can't
deny that that they'll continue to refine their internal infrastructure. Their
internal platform is one of their crown jewels. It just makes sense to offer
that to businesses willing to pay for it.

~~~
manigandham
Yes. Sales is easy to staff up but technology is very hard to build. Google is
going in the right order and can easily hire the enterprise handlers it needs
to close large contracts.

~~~
jedberg
I'm not saying Google can't do it, and I agree that they did it right (build
the technology first). What I'm saying is that there isn't strong evidence
that they are getting good at enterprise sales yet. If they can do it, then
they will be very successful. I'm starting to see signs that they might be
doing it right, but the jury is still out.

------
hyperion2010
So my take home here is that webscale makes
[https://github.com/philipl/pifs](https://github.com/philipl/pifs) possible.

------
lacampbell
Now, if only there was a service to leftpad my strings...

~~~
johnhenry
Not sure if you'r being scarcastic, but... [https://api.left-
pad.io/?str=be%20careful%20what%20you%20wis...](https://api.left-
pad.io/?str=be%20careful%20what%20you%20wish%20for...&len=45)

~~~
nihonium
That's great! I'd like to use this but sending my enterprise data to a third
party is not very secure. Do they provide a docker image or ami?

~~~
johnhenry
Now, I just assume you're being sarcastic :). But, if you would like, I can
build docker image that does the same thing for a price ;).

------
JorgeGT
> This is just for fun. There is NO SLA. It might be turned off at any time!

Google service confirmed!

~~~
lechiffre10
loooollll

~~~
campoy
I'm a Google employee and you made me LOL hahaha

------
hellbanner
Is there anything we can learn from the transition between numbers? Any
pattern?

------
jedberg
Things I would do if I were a better JS programmer:

1\. Figure out how many BPM I need to to have the music simulation generate
digits at the same rate as the visual simulation.

2\. Figure out how to press both start buttons at the same time.

~~~
saturnism
it's actually here: [https://pi.delivery/demo/](https://pi.delivery/demo/)

but we didn't have time to make it look nice :(

~~~
aviraldg
Is that a standard template you're using for the website?

~~~
saturnism
not standard, but browsed through jekyll templates - this one fit our needs
the most: [https://github.com/CloudCannon/aviator-jekyll-
template](https://github.com/CloudCannon/aviator-jekyll-template)

------
coldcode
I've always wondered if you take the digits from Pi, do they represent a
pseudo random sequence or not?

~~~
larksimian
It's speculated that Pi is a normal number[1]. If it is in fact normal, then I
believe the answer is yes. However determining whether a number is normal or
not is an unresolved problem according to Wolfram, so the answer is a solid
maybe.

[1]
[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html)

------
du_bing
Just curious, what algorithms do you use for computing Pi? I have read about
the Fabrice Bellard's job and algorithms about computing Pi, he uses
relatively small CPU but his algorithms seem efficient.

~~~
detaro
The software they used is linked and has a some info about the internals here:
[http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/algorithms.html](http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/algorithms.html)

------
sly010
Pretty cool. I did look at my calendar quickly to see that it's not April 1.
The "How we made this" part makes for a great parody of cloud computing.

~~~
nix0n
> great parody of cloud computing

I don't get it.

~~~
sly010
All that stack and overhead to serve what is basically static data? Come on,
if this was released ~2 weeks from now it would be funny...

It kind of reminds me when all bitcoin private keys were leaked:
[http://directory.io/](http://directory.io/)

Edit: It's impressive, but still funny.

~~~
sfeng
One of the great things about having all of this great tooling is it makes the
easiest way to do something also the best way. They were able to quickly spin
something up which, incidentally, could also massively scale should it need
to.

------
bbcbasic
Love that the piano works as a normal piano!

------
__s
Listening to the essentially random sequence of notes, fancy recognizing
Feynman's point

~~~
essayist
What was Feynman's point? I've got Pi/Listen going in the background, and it's
quite pleasant, so I'm doubly interested.

~~~
ncfausti
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi)

~~~
tgb
It's amusing to read the talk page on this article - there was lengthy
investigation about whether this really had any Feynman connection (i.e. was
the story about him apocryphal) and what the article should be called. I think
the current title is fantastic - I would have struggled to name such a thing.

------
mrevolution
Nice job! You have a lot of AltCN in your SSL cert!

------
alcari
Here's the requisite cynical comment lamenting the death of "standards".

They could easily have implemented RFC 3091 [0], but instead they chose to
create yet another proprietary API with vendor lock in, just as cloud service
providers love to do.

[0]:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3091](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3091)

/s

~~~
anshargal
Mentioned above RFC specifies port number 314159 which is greater than
possible max 65535. So once again unrealistic standards that does not work
force people to invent something sane. /s

~~~
danbruc
That is only a problem if you insist that Windows 3.1 is the best operating
system in existence and if you are therefore unwilling to upgrade to Windows
95. The future is 32 bit, move on.

------
Myrmornis
That first visualization using d3 is a classic example of a bad visualization
isn't it? It's extremely difficult to get a sense of the difference in off-
diagonal transition rates, and impossible to get an accurate sense of them or
any sense at all of the on-diagonals. And yet, the transition rates could have
been conveyed perfectly well by writing them in a 10 by 10 table! Maybe
shading the cells of the table somehow to show the rate -- I'm no expert in
data visualization -- just not the one chosen!

I think d3 is wonderful, but I worry that this sort of thing will make some
people shake their heads and say "fancy JavaScript nonsense just causes people
to make bad visualizations nowadays".

~~~
thesandlord
It's just supposed to look pretty, not really serve a function. We opened the
API to the world so people who are way better at visualizations can build what
they want!

------
pugio
I know it's Pi day, and the title uses the word for the greek letter, but my
mind read the domain and immediately thought Google was offering an API for
automated pie delivery.

Now I really want this.

~~~
Waterluvian
I thought it was someone with a large array of raspberry pi computers for
rent. It would be like an itty bitty AWS with adorable APIs at cute as a
button prices.

~~~
oaktowner
There's a great April Fool's joke in there somewhere.

------
shujito
I was expecting Raspberry Pi

~~~
hammeiam
Google Cloud Pi Compute is coming out on April 1

~~~
ktta
Someone told me it was coming out last year April 1. I'm still waiting. Hope
they do it this year.

