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Should software be patentable? That's the wrong question to ask - llambda
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/intellectual-property/2011/10/29/should-software-be-patentable-thats-the-wrong-question-to-ask-40094152/
======
nemoniac
The central argument holds: a machine process implemented in hardware is in
essence no different from one implemented in software.
But you can drive that argument in two directions.
1\. The hardware invention is patentable therefore the software invention
should be patentable.
2\. The software invention is unpatentable therefore the hardware invention
should be unpatentable.
Because it suits his purposes, the author article opts for the former.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Who are working on young open-source projects? (or know such?) - pankratiev
I mean projects that just started recently and are not so popular.<p>I am working on a flexible discussion platform for open-source projects. If you are interested, could you please drop me a few lines at vladimir@tagmask.com
======
cperciva
I released kivaloo just recently.
As far as I'm aware, it currently has zero users (Tarsnap isn't using it yet),
which probably qualifies it as "not so popular".
------
rkalla
I see a lot of node.js work here... I'll be the super-uncool guy in the group
and admit that so far I've only ever released Java libraries under Apache 2.
I just released a CloudFront log parsing library:
<http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/cloudfront-log-parser/>
and a simple XML parsing library (speed of pull-parsing with the ease of
XPath-esque expressions): [http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/simple-java-
xml-parser-...](http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/simple-java-xml-parser-
sjxp/)
and one library that seems to be picking up is an image-scaling library I have
made a few releases of: [http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/imgscalr-java-
image-sca...](http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/imgscalr-java-image-
scaling-library/)
There are a handful of other libraries: <https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/>
I just haven't finished the project-pages for them.
~~~
pankratiev
Do you have any interest in a flexible discussion platform for your projects?
------
m0hit
PGfb is an extremely nascent project (only one day of work), that started at a
hack-a-thon at Berkeley.
Aim is to bring PGP encryption to facebook using browser extensions.
<https://github.com/m0hit/PGfb>
~~~
pankratiev
Looks very promising. Can I contact you?
------
JamesChevalier
This is my first open source project... It's an open source "LaunchRock"-type
site: <https://github.com/JamesChevalier/Launch-Soon>
------
__david__
I wrote a program called daemon-manager to scratch an itch of mine
(<http://porkrind.org/daemon-manager/>). It lets you manage non-root daemons
from your user directory without requiring root permissions to start and stop
them. I've been dogfooding it for about 6 months and just can't live without
it any more. I think other people would be interested in using it but I'm not
very good at marketing.
I also co-wrote and maintain commit-patch (<http://porkrind.org/commit-
patch/>) and it's another that I can't imagine living without. I've been using
it for about 8 years and it has slightly more recognition--but not much.
------
kstenerud
I created a universal framework template for iPhone/iOS (lets you build static
frameworks that work on device and simulator):
<https://github.com/kstenerud/iOS-Universal-Framework>
Also, a nicer interface to iPhone audio:
<https://github.com/kstenerud/ObjectAL-for-iPhone>
I also put out my Objective-C programmer's toolbox:
<https://github.com/kstenerud/Objective-Gems>
------
olalonde
Just wrote a small native Node.js extension for displaying desktop
notifications: <https://github.com/olalonde/node-notify>
Tutorial available here: [http://syskall.com/how-to-write-your-own-native-
nodejs-exten...](http://syskall.com/how-to-write-your-own-native-nodejs-
extension)
Node.js has a lot of potential but is still pretty young.
------
metachris
I've recently started appengine-boilerplate, which makes setting up new
appengine projects much quicker and more fun. Includes html5-boilerplate,
openid-authentication, memcaching, etc.
<https://github.com/metachris/appengine-boilerplate>
If anyone wants to help, authentication with OAuth and MailChimp integration
would be great places to start :)
------
excid3
While I started it a while ago, Keryx for Ubuntu/Debian is pretty new to the
Linux community and not near as popular as it could be.
<http://keryxproject.org>
It's a GUI tool I built in Python to help offline users update and install new
software on Linux.
I no longer have time to work on it and would love it if someone would like to
take over maintaining it for me.
------
baudehlo
I recently started creating an SMTP server using Node.js:
<https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka>
~~~
pankratiev
I saw it. It's very interesting. I am working on flexible discussion platform
for open-source projects. If you are interested, how can I contact you?
------
indexzero
We open-sourced our fullstack application server for node.js at NodeConf last
week: haibu. <http://github.com/nodejitsu/haibu>.
The project had been internal for a year and as such is pretty mature
technically, but has a nascent community. If you're thinking about running
node.js in production definitely check it out!
------
pestaa
I'd like to point out Hyde (github.com/hyde/hyde), it's a static website
generator written in Python, and I find it pretty well executed.
~~~
pankratiev
It's very interesting! Thank you very much.
------
wess
Friend and I are currently working on an embeddable library for server-side
javascript called CoreJS (<http://github.com/frenzylabs/CoreJS>). It's not to
compete with node, as it's meant to be embedded. It's threadsafe, and is,
optionally, async.
------
hsmyers
For no particular reason that I can think of I write modules relating to Chess
on CPAN---probably not what you were thinking of, but it fits the description
in that I've recently (last few weeks) updated/revised all of them. As to
their popularity, well, this is chess, so what do you think? :)
------
madhouse
There's like.. hundreds starting each minute. You might wish to be a tiny bit
more specific.
~~~
pankratiev
I think there are not so much people who will write a comment here about their
project. However, I am interested in any project.
------
cfinke
I'm almost always starting new projects. One of my more recent undertakings is
a client-side JavaScript implementation of a Hunspell-style spellchecker:
<http://github.com/cfinke/Typo.js>
------
clark-kent
Mine is Ragios - Ruby based system monitoring framework:
<https://github.com/obi-a/Ragios>
A good way to find recently started projects is to follow the keyword 'github'
on twitter.
------
simonsarris
I am about to start a few small <canvas> game engines for my own use, chiefly
a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game engine.
I probably won't start coding in earnest until July though.
~~~
pankratiev
Do you have any plans to share it on github?
~~~
simonsarris
Yeah, lemme make the repo for it right now. You can watch it if you're
interested.
<https://github.com/simonsarris/canvas-adventure>
------
dinesh_oi
I have created a write though cache for mongodb based on memcached. ( mongoid
supported currently. ) <http://bit.ly/mfdIN7>
------
Rinum
Aiming to create a multiplayer sim ant <http://github.com/rinum/openant>
~~~
pankratiev
Interesting! Is there any way to contact you?
------
wrburgess
Score is a new open source project for fantasy sports gaming.
<http://scoreos.org>
------
helwr
<http://thechangelog.com/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Incident Report – DDoS Attack - alainmeier
http://blog.dnsimple.com/2014/12/incident-report-ddos/
======
latch
I need to learn to let things go, but:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280515)
I've been a DnsMadeEasy customer for a while (they had an outage ~4 years ago
from a 50Gbps attack), but once my year is up, I'm switching to Route53. The
addition of the Geo DNS Queries was key for me. It isn't clear to me why I
shouldn't pick Route53. DnsSimple's unlimited queries seems nice, but I kinda
like having actual scaling costs forwarded to customers.
~~~
kyledrake
I've had a similar thought RE using Route53 for Neocities. Here's the problem
with Route53 though. If you get a DDoS attack using it, it's quite plausible
that you would be charged for resources used in the DDoS attack. A recent Vice
article discussed this: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-unending-
cyber-s...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-unending-cyber-siege-
of-hong-kong)
DDoS is a nasty problem. We've received a DDoS attack that shut the entire
site down for days. We can't use Cloudflare because they don't support
wildcard domains without their very expensive plan. I've also heard stories
from people using Cloudflare that have still not been able to resolve DDoS
issues (I'm not knocking Cloudflare, they're a great company that does a
really good job fighting this very hard problem, but sometimes even they have
trouble with it).
I'll be completely honest and say that I have no idea how to solve this
problem. It's really, really, really hard. Switching to different service
providers won't get you very far against the monster DDoS attacks that some
people can execute.
~~~
stevekemp
If you're going to go the Amazon route then you absolutely need to keep an eye
on billing, and set up alerts so that any DDoS which caused a spike in your
costs would be caught as soon as possible.
~~~
Intermernet
I was burnt by this in the first 48 hours of using Amazon DNS. Very unlucky I
guess... I'm amazed they still bill for DDOS traffic, or even traffic from
black-listed IPs. It seems many of their competitors don't.
------
kator
> A new customer signed up for our service and brought in multiple domains
> that were already facing a DDoS attack. The customer had already tried at
> least 2 other providers before DNSimple. Once the domains were delegated to
> us, we began receiving the traffic from the DDoS.
I'm curious did they know this in advance or discovered it after the fact?
I often wonder about business models where the core expense is "unlimited and
free". The reality is there is nothing unlimited or free for the service
provider. It seems with a business model like this you open yourself to people
abusing your service either by accident or by choice. Imagine poor Mr.
Customer here who most likely was having horrible problems thinking to
themselves "These guys can do it and for free, if I go to X service they'll
cost me a lot of money".
I'm a big believer in business models that incentivize both parties properly.
I'm sure in general this service provider is arbitraging the 99.9% of domains
that barely need any services. That said it only takes a couple of "opps"
customers to drive your operational costs through the roof.
~~~
aeden
Anthony from DNSimple here. We discovered it after the fact, via a tip from
other DNS providers.
~~~
rpug
As someone who has been down this road many times before - I can't stress this
enough: DDoS mitigation solutions don't solve the problem of an app-specific
layer7 attack and it is important to do some testing of how well your
mitigation service responds (and that it isn't a silver bullet.) Additionally,
you need to make sure your team has tested and proven procedures for engaging
the service, respond to attacks, etc. Services like NimbusDDoS
(www.nimbusddos.com) are good because you can do some real scenario testing
and make sure your team and infrastructure is prepared. There are other
services out there too that I am less familiar with, but either way really
good stuff to do.
------
stephenr
The solution here is one for customers, not providers.
Manage your DNS at one location on "master" (potentially a "private" server
with IP restricted access and zone transfer ACLs).
Setup 2+ accounts with "DNS providers" that support incoming zone transfers -
that is, they can operate as "slave" DNS servers, pulling records
automatically from your "master" (once access rules are set of course) and
returning results directly to clients making DNS queries.
Most "Secondary DNS" packages are < $50 year, so use a few, and don't worry
about individual DNS networks being burnt to the ground.
~~~
jhealy
It seems like inbound and outbound zone transfers aren't offered by a number
of providers (like AWS). Do you know of a list of DNS providers that support
either option?
~~~
mike-cardwell
I used to use these two services together do this:
https://puck.nether.net/dns
https://acc.rollernet.us/
They're both free to sign up, provide free secondary DNS, zone transfers and
fully support IPv6.
I only stopped using them because I wanted to run my own DNS service.
------
abalone
So who do you think the "well-known third-party service that provides external
DDoS protection using reverse DNS proxies" is they're going to use now?
CloudFlare?
~~~
crystaln
Hopefully not. CloudFlare is remarkably unreliable for a service that claims
to improve uptime.
~~~
ad_hominem
[citation needed]
Last I checked CloudFlare routinely handles[1] 10Gbps to 65Gbps attacks, and
has successfully handled attacks as large as 300Gbps and 400Gbps. According to
this report DNSSimple crumbled under 25Gbps.
[1]: [https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200170216-H...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200170216-How-large-of-a-DDoS-attack-can-CloudFlare-handle-)
~~~
etcet
Their last significant outage was only 2 months ago:
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/route-leak-incident-on-
october-2...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/route-leak-incident-on-
october-2-2014/)
~~~
xxdesmus
As the blog post outlines, the outage was related to an upstream network
provider leaking routes. Note exactly something we can prevent for them.
------
cm2187
Out of curiosity, what are the follow ups of an attack like that? The
perpetrators are probably using their own servers or compromised clients or
servers. Would DNS Simple follow up on this with the abuse/complaint dept of
the ISP of the attackers? Are ISP typically responsive to abuse and
complaints? If they are not is there any way to black list blocks of IPs
assigned to ISP who do not care about being the source of DDoS attacks?
Investing in anti DDoS devices is important but even more important is for the
perpetrators to face the consequences of their acts (or anyone who lets his
machine being used by pirates - terminating or suspending their contract would
be a fair response).
~~~
iancarroll
I was looking at [http://map.ipviking.com](http://map.ipviking.com) earlier
and it was apparent it was a botnet, most likely innocent home users with a
virus.
~~~
brownbat
It'd be nice if IPs involved in botnet DDoS's could go into a public registry,
then get a banner from Google saying, "Hey, you might have a virus, someone
reported you to this list."
Abuse would be tricky, you might be able to limit it by letting only a few
DDoS mitigation providers populate the list.
~~~
Xylakant
A lot of ISPs for example in Germany reuse IP addresses and force a reconnect
every 24 hours. I don't think showing me banners because the previous "owner"
of the IP had a virus is going to improve the situation.
Other people share a network behind a NATed IP which is also a problem. They'd
all receive a banner, check their computer and a test would come up negative.
~~~
cm2187
Google wouldn't know but the ISP would know who was behind a particular IP at
a specific time. They are the ones who should police their network when there
are abuses.
~~~
Xylakant
The original proposal was that google delivers the ads. So google would have
to contact my ISP who would then have to return whether or not I was using any
of the given "spammy" IPs at the time that they were spammy - or my ISP would
have to deliver the banner.
No thanks.
------
milos_cohagen
What was the overall makeup of the attack traffic? For example, 50% tcp syn,
etc.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The freelance software developer’s limbo: from freelancer to agency - peppesilletti
https://medium.com/@peppesilletti/the-freelance-software-developers-limbo-from-freelancer-to-agency-761c91848f53
======
peppesilletti
There are many blog posts, communities, online courses, and gurus talking
about how to get started on the freelancing path, but not so many about
transitioning from being a solo gig worker to a fully-fledged web agency. This
is also true for freelance software developers. In this series’ articles, I’d
like to talk about this intermediate stage, the “limbo” where many freelancers
like me are wandering around looking forward to establishing a successful
agency.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Config manager based on Git for your $HOME - albertzeyer
https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh
======
rofrol
And this is my imho simpler approach:
[https://github.com/rofrol/.configs](https://github.com/rofrol/.configs)
Store all configs in ~/.configs, and make symlinks to ~/ with install.sh.
There is also push_configs.sh to rsync configs to some host and users
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do I find an angel investor for my startup? - sktrdie
Really I don't know anything about investors, company logistics, economics, marketing. I'm just a developer that created a useful product (I hope).<p>Can Y Combinator help me with this?
======
badmash69
As Tony Montana ( Scarface) said:
In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money,
you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.
In a start up context ,it means that first get some traction -- customer
registrations or signups or revenues then you get your brand recognition --
people will start talking about you or your product then you get your
investors.
This is what I am doing with my bootstrap.
(and much apologies for quoting a violent mobster)
------
dmlevi
Everyone can have great ideas but its all about execution and the team.
Through my experience when speaking with Angel investors and other people with
money, they want to see some traction. They want users and to prove that it
works and that people will use your baby. You will need to build a revenue
model on projections based off your current traction. Hope this helps.
~~~
sktrdie
Ok. I hoped it would be as easy as showing the investor a "good" product :)
~~~
dmlevi
It totally depends on the investor. Some investors might see your passion and
have tons of money and throw you a bone. Others want the facts and proof. My
advice is to cover yourself so you don't seem naive or incompetent.
------
veyron
Can you describe / show your product?
~~~
sktrdie
Sure, it's a Windows application meant to automate installation of software on
multiple workstations on your network, remotely and silently.
So it's basically like a package manager for Windows, but instead of working
for your local Windows machine, it works for all the Windows computers on your
network.
Think of agencies with lots of workstations that need to keep software up-to-
date on each and every machine... this would normally require an IT guy going
through each and every computer and manually start the installer... uDeployer
does all this automatically.
More info here: <http://udeployer.com/>
So I guess the idea has possibilites, but would like to get connected into
this entire world of investment.
~~~
hnbd
Big agencies with many Windows workstations already use Microsoft SMS or
System Center (I believe that's what its called now) to deploy software over
the network. How do you differentiate?
~~~
sktrdie
I offer latest, up-to-date, stable, 3rd party packages.
With SMS or System Center you have to create the packages yourself and/or have
a system in place to fetch the latest packages.
~~~
veyron
customers with large numbers of machines dont necessarily care about having
latest software. They care about stability. They don't just upgrade willy-
nilly.
Upgrading 7-zip [first entry on your screenshot] isn't compulsory. If you do
upgrade, you take a risk that there will be no adverse effect.
~~~
sktrdie
Actually I tend to differ with that statement. Latest software is always more
secure and less buggy. I would personally prefer having my workstations with
all the latest software.
~~~
polyfractal
Veyron is right. While newer software _may_ be less buggy, it isn't always.
New features may break old features, or break other pieces of software.
Older software is usually vetted and proven functional in the particular
corporate environment where it's deployed, doesn't conflict with other
software, etc. My friends in corporate world have told me how it takes X many
months for upgrades to be rolled out because they must be tested in sandboxes
first to make sure nothing explodes unexpectedly.
This apparently applies to all software, from OS updates down to individual
program updates.
~~~
sktrdie
Ok well, but you're not going to keep the version around forever... you will
update at some point in time, and uDeployer can serve you when you need to.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Impossible Figures Library - franklin_p_dyer
https://im-possible.info/english/library/index.html
======
matsemann
I like these. Some of them are even non-obviously impossible. They may pass at
first glance, but then one sees why it shouldn't work.
I recently posted my figures [0] here. It's also a kind of impossible figures,
however they are actually printable in real life but still tricks the mind.
[0]: [https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible-
objects](https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible-objects)
------
mmazing
It cracks me up that I'm getting tons of ads for 3D printing on a website for
impossible objects.
~~~
082349872349872
Then I'll suggest [https://www.kleinbottle.com](https://www.kleinbottle.com)
"Glass Klein Bottles for sale - inquire within"
~~~
eternalban
You could be the future of advertising..
------
onion2k
I'm struggling to understand why the illustration at the bottom left of
[https://im-possible.info/english/library/grey/grey4.html](https://im-
possible.info/english/library/grey/grey4.html) is impossible. If you don't
assume the two horizontal bars are parallel, and the top one is farther back
than the bottom one, it make seems to make sense.
Eg it has a side profile of;
----
----------------
----
~~~
coding_lobster
I guess it's because the bottom and top bar look like their edges are actually
touching which should be impossible with the middle bar going between them
without it being squished.
------
082349872349872
I wonder what the text equivalent would be.
Are there sentences which are locally consistent[1] but globally impossible?
(the question is on my mind because earlier on HN I'd had a nice convo about a
folk song embedded in a protest song in which the quoted verse worked nearly
as well as polish under a functor as in the original ukrainian.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696)
)
[1] on a longer scale than "colourless green ideas sleep furiously", of
course.
~~~
theemathas
Garden-path sentences. Or comparative illusions.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-
path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion)
~~~
082349872349872
ขอบคุณ! The garden-path admits of a consistent, yet initially unpredicted
reading, while the comparative illusion is exactly what I'd been groping for:
locally cromulent but globally uffish.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bare Metal Rust 2: Retarget your compiler so interrupts are not evil - dbaupp
http://www.randomhacks.net/2015/11/11/bare-metal-rust-custom-target-kernel-space/
======
jscheel
I've been playing with Rust for os dev and emulation for a little bit. It's
great to have others who are significantly more well-versed in this field
sharing their knowledge with those of us who are struggling through it.
~~~
easytiger
With that memory model its not surprising.
On the other hand, i really really would encourage any new developers to read
the rust docs before learning c++ etc. It is amazing to have a language that
puts its mem model first. The docs tackle the very basics really well.
The k&r c book is amazing but did a poor job of dealing with the true memory
model because that was common knowledge at time of writing. Its short because
of assumptions
the best java (top 0.01%) developers are the only ones I encounter often who
understand the x86 + javas basterdised memory model
The rest just take it for granted. Even c++ developers (I'm one).
~~~
Manishearth
I actually doubt Rust puts the memory _model_ first, but it provides a path
through which you effectively don't have to worry about it at all. Which is
wonderful and good enough, really.
IIRC Rust has a similarly confusing underlying memory model. However, due to a
lack of direct shared mutable state being available, you don't get to see this
often. In fact, one might call Rust's model more confusing than C++ since you
have `noalias` everywhere which can enable more aggressive optimizations. But
it's mostly irrelevant since you don't deal with it unless you're writing
unsafe code.
On the "encourage new devs to read the Rust docs" front I agree, though. We've
had tons of people saying that they code better C++ after learning Rust. Also
I've heard of companies wanting to start programming in C++/Rust-y things with
a majority of python/ruby/js/etc devs use Rust because "Rust teaches a lot of
things to the programmers that they no longer have to". Something like that.
~~~
easytiger
Agreed. What i meant was they start talking about the memory model at the very
beginning of their online book, more than most languages bother with.
[https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/the-stack-and-the-heap.html](https://doc.rust-
lang.org/book/the-stack-and-the-heap.html)
~~~
steveklabnik
Yeah, this is because we want people who may not have a systems backround to
be able to use Rust. That's just general info on the concept of stack vs heap,
it's not Rust-specific.
------
br1
Can you just not use the first 128 bytes of the stack on a interrupt?
~~~
DSMan195276
No - Part of how interrupts work is that the CPU itself pushes the values of
certain registers onto the stack (As well as an error code in the case of an
exception). The CPU has to store those values _somewhere_ so that when the
interrupt is finished it can return to where the CPU was running when the
interrupt happened, and the stack is the obvious location to do so. You can't
tell the CPU to do anything different in this case, so you're forced to simply
make sure your stack pointer always points to the top of the stack so it
doesn't get clobbered.
At the end of the day, it's not really that big of a deal - Allowing the
redzone only really allows you to avoid two `sub` and `add` instructions on
the stack-pointer. It's a nice idea, but losing it isn't that big of a deal at
the end of the day. The majority of functions can't take advantage of the red-
zone anyway, because any function that calls another function has to make sure
its stack-pointer is correct before calling it.
~~~
br1
Understood. Thanks.
------
steveklabnik
There's been a lot of really neat stuff focusing on beginners in the Rust
OSDev space lately. Glad to see even more posts about it!
------
viraptor
I was wondering, would the monolitic/micro-kernel discussion be different
today due to userspace services being able to use all the fancy cpu
extensions, or would that still disappear compared to the cost of ring
switching? Now that filesystems are more complex databases, maybe extensions
could help with fast indexing/checksumming.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: I made an Android app that gives you an extra phone number to give out - dustball
https://market.android.com/details?id=net.tyx.extraphone
======
dustball
I built this using the Twilio API, which I really enjoy using.
The app is a little expensive; I can lower the price later if I move to a
different solution, for example my own asterisk server.
Also looking to use in-app purchasing and/or new subscription model as
appropriate for each platform (Android/IOS).
~~~
jat850
That's a very neat looking concept, and congratulations on getting it out
there.
I don't see any link between a dollar price and the purchase of credits,
however - could you add or address that?
(It seems you get 360 credits for 8.95 but doesn't indicate how much it costs
to buy extra credits beyond the initial ones)
~~~
dustball
Ah, thank you. Yes, additional credits will be able to be purchased at the
same rate. (I'm actually just waiting on Android 2.3, which includes in-app
purchasing, which would be perfect for purchasing additional credits.)
------
bitskits
...Or you could use Google Voice in the same way for free. In fact, you can
selectively block from GV (send certain callers to "number is no longer in
service"), which makes it better than a throw away, IMO.
~~~
dustball
Actually, I use Google Voice as my main phone number. I don't even want to
give _that_ out -- so same exact problem for me. <shrug> Selective blocking is
only a partial solution; your number is still "out there".
Well, that is why I built the app, anyway =)
Something neat about just being able to "buy" an extra number from the market.
~~~
manvsmachine
As someone who also uses GV as a "real" number, I love the option to flush
your number and get a new one. It's like the voice equivalent of "cleaning
house" on social networking sites.
------
vijayr
Tried to access android marketplace using chrome and this is what I got :)
<http://i.imgur.com/ZpqWg.png>
~~~
hucker
Chrome 11 on OSX gave me this: <http://i.imgur.com/nUyaP.png>
------
magicseth
Fantastic. It's really hard to come up with a good pricing scheme. I've found
that simple is better than cheap. If you can figure out a flat rate, or some
other scheme that doesn't make me have to do math, I'm much likelier to join.
------
SwellJoe
Cool idea. It also has other possible uses outside of giving it to potential
stalkers. Adding basic analytics would make it useful for A/B testing offers
on TV or in print media, for instance.
------
Groxx
Price per credit?
Very nice idea, and the page is a great sell. Definitely need a more useful
developer website landing page, though.
------
wibblenut
I like it. A reviewer says, "shouting numbers in a crowded bar isn't a
particularly fun sport". Exactly
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m50xrDcj0fc>).
I'm a big fan of the .tel TLD for this, and other reasons: publish contact
information dynamically, it's fast, reliable, gives you fine grained privacy
controls, etc. etc.
I don't understand why this hasn't really caught on yet. The implications for
the telco market would be huge if more people used DNS to its full potential.
~~~
r00fus
Hasn't caught on because it isn't simple. I hardly think dealing with
registrars is an activity people relish. Startup Idea?
~~~
wibblenut
That's a very good point, although it's changing; specialist
registrars/resellers, directory publishers, and VOIP companies are all showing
interest now. But I was thinking more about early adopters - the type of
people who hang out on HN and register domains in their sleep :)
------
leot
Wouldn't I get phone calls from the disgruntled last person who had the phone
number? I suppose even then at least it would be temporary ...
~~~
dustball
Numbers go out of service for 6 months before being reused, IIRC. The carrier
may even lengthen the time if the number is actively getting calls during the
hold time.
------
babo
Brilliant idea, the image on your page describing it very well!
------
moe
Do you have a QR code for this app?
Market search doesn't find it for me (from the phone) and all QR codes I find
on the web give me a 404.
------
iPhoneJunkie
Tiny market, isn't it? How many geeky guy Android users are giving out their
numbers at bars?
------
msquared
Are you in North Jersey? Recognize the 201 in the screenshot :)
------
antihero
Does it work in the UK perchance?
~~~
markszcz
I dont know if this one does but what I did was get a SkypeOut number and used
Skype to call out when I was in Barcelona to call my friends in the US. So at
least you can call people in the US cheap =\ ([http://www.skype.com/intl/en-
us/features/allfeatures/call-ph...](http://www.skype.com/intl/en-
us/features/allfeatures/call-phones-and-mobiles/))
------
T_S_
Great idea.
------
T_S_
Perfect for celebs. Know any?
~~~
wibblenut
I heard Michael Jackson used to change his number on a biweekly basis. Would
be quite interesting to see a survey on this group. See my other comment for a
neat solution ;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Not Hotdog App - rcamp
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/not-hotdog/id1212457521?mt=8
======
timanglade
Ha didn't expect this to end up here. If anyone is interested, I'm working on
a blogpost explaining how we built the app in detail… It uses embedded
TensorFlow on device (better availability, better speed, better privacy, $0
cost), with a custom neural net inspired by last month's MobileNets paper,
built & trained with Keras. It was loads of fun to build :)
~~~
bitmapbrother
Is there a reason you didn't release on Android? The app was even demoed on a
Pixel.
~~~
pkulak
It was written in Objective C?
~~~
timanglade
It's actually written in React Native with a fair bit of C++ (TensorFlow), and
some Objective-C++ to glue the two. One cool thing we added on top of React
Native was a hack to let us inject new versions of our deep learning model on
the fly without going through an App Store review. If you thought injecting
JavaScript to change the behavior of your app was cool, you need to try
injecting neural nets, it's quite a feeling :D
~~~
tomduncalf
This looks great, haha! Shame I can't access it from the UK.
It would be really interesting to read more about your thoughts on working
with RN and C++ and perhaps how you did some of it. I'm currently doing the
same (but with a C++ audio engine rather than image processing stuff) and I
think it's an incredibly powerful combination - but I do feel like I'm making
up some interop patterns as I go and there might be better ways, so would love
to hear how other people use it!
Broadly, I've created a "repository" singleton that stores a reference to both
the React Native module instance (which gets set when I call its setup method
from JS) and the C++ main class instance (which gets set when it starts up),
so they can get a handle on each other (I bet there are better ways to do
this, but I'm new to C++/ObjC and couldn't work out a better way to get a
reference to the RN module).
I'm then using RCT_EXPORT_METHOD to provide hooks for JS to call into C++ via
an ObjC bridge (in an RCT_EXPORT_MODULE class), and using the event emitter to
communicate back to JS (so the C++ can get the RN module instance from the
singleton and call methods which emit events).
I've not done anything that really pushes the bridge performance to a point
where I've seen any noticeable latency/slow down caused by the interop - have
you had any issues here?
Like I say, I'm finding a really cool way to build apps that need the power of
native code but still with the ease of RN as the GUI and some logic, and I
actually quite like the separation it enforces with the communication
boundary.
~~~
timanglade
Sounds like you're further ahead than I was with the React Native part! Not
Hotdog is very simple so I just wrote a simple Native module around my
TensorFlow code and let the chips fall where they may performance-wise. The
snap/analyze/display sequence is slow enough that I don't need to worry about
fps or anything like that. As much as I enjoyed using RN for this app, I would
probably move to native code if I needed to be able to tune performance.
~~~
1zee
Can you explain to a noob how you wrote the Native module around TensorFlow?
My main area of focus is in python, but I feel hindered when I think I'm ready
to start developing for mobile apps. I'm looking into RN, but still not sure
how that plays with TF and other python modules.
~~~
timanglade
It was honestly just maybe 10 lines of code, but I was very confused about it
before I got it done. The message passing is a bit counterintuitive at first.
I'll try to share example code in my blogpost!
~~~
1zee
awesome, what's your blog?
------
alexcnwy
For anyone keen to learn more about object detection (and deep learning in
general), I just finished working through an excellent free MOOC taught by
Jeremy Howard (former chief scientist at Kaggle) - you basically learn how to
fine-tune a convolutional neural network with your own data (e.g. hotdog vs
not hotdog) in lesson 2!
[http://course.fast.ai/lessons/lesson2.html](http://course.fast.ai/lessons/lesson2.html)
~~~
timanglade
I can't recommend that course enough! I attended it in person and got a lot
out of it. Jeremy & Rachel were also enormously kind & helpful outside of
class.
~~~
alexcnwy
Ah so jealous! How was part 2?
------
davb
I always find it strange when apps like this are made unavailable in certain
countries (in this case, the UK).
Video, I understand. From a consumer perspective it's crappy, but I do
understand that licensing agreements for video are generally geographically
restricted. But an app that goes along with a TV show? I can't see Sky (the UK
network broadcasting Silicon Valley and most other HBO shows right now)
distributing Not Hotdog.
It would be fun to play with it while the novelty is still fresh.
~~~
an_account
My guess is they don't want to put in the lawyer work to figure out if they
can. I imagine HBO has to heavily vet things like this, unlike small startups.
------
malanj
Craziest thing - it works! Just detected a hotdog (off a photo). Machine
learning has really come far, that this can be done for a joke app is really
cool.
------
avaer
Hm, is this an officially licensed HBO marketing stunt? Or does SeeFood
Technologies Inc. actually exist as a corporation?
If not, I'm curious what the legal ramifications are of doing business as a
corporation that does not exist.
~~~
throwaway76543
The term you're looking for is "Fictitious Business Name," or "Trade Name."
Generally, the legal ramifications are a requirement to register the name and
pay a small fee. In Santa Clara it costs $40 to register a fictitious business
name with the county and the registration is good for five years:
[https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rec/Fictitious%20Business%20Nam...](https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rec/Fictitious%20Business%20Names/Pages/Fictitious-
Business-Name-Filings.aspx)
It's really not a big deal.
~~~
avaer
Thank you, that's a pleasant surprise! Cheap and painless enough that it makes
me want to try my hand at an ARG with fake corporations.
------
DannyBee
I'm still sad they weren't allowed to release the fully functional bro app
that got created.
~~~
joshu
I am a consultant for the show. I actually saw it!
~~~
DannyBee
Yeah, same here :) It was actually pretty well done.
------
tripzilch
Hail Eris! This app may be very useful to Discordians, because of the Original
Snub and the Five Commandmends of the Pentabarf:
[http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/11.php](http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/11.php)
------
elmigranto
US only, welcome to the "global system of interconnected computer networks".
Hope Richard's P2P-internet will work better :)
~~~
timanglade
Yup sorry about that, the app is available only in the US (& Canada) due to
some legal restrictions we couldn't avoid. FWIW I also worked about on
Richard's New Internet concept for this season so I definitely hear ya ;)
~~~
ominous
Can you please enlighten us as to what kind of legal restrictions apply here?
It is always interesting to see how these «little» legal details get in the
way of running software.
Congrats for getting the app out!
~~~
0x0
Could it be that the app is using HTTPS? iTunesConnect has all these crazy
questions with very little guidance about encryption and export compliance if
you say you do use HTTPS.
~~~
ascorbic
Guys, we have HTTPS in the rest of the world now!
But seriously, the iTunes connect question specifically excludes stuff like
HTTPS using the regular libraries, which is just as well as otherwise pretty
much every app would be affected. Legal issue is probably boring IP rights
stuff.
~~~
0x0
It's not that easy. Even the first question in iTunesConnect explicitly states
you must answer "yes" even if you just make use of the built-in HTTPS
libraries in the OS. If you start digging into the various guidelines you open
a can of worms of recursive cross-references between documents and sections.
Nowhere have I seen a statement that says "if you just use os HTTPS, you don't
have to do anything". At the very least you may have to consider if you have
to submit various annual self-classification reports.
For an app like this I could easily see a serious company deciding to skip the
hassle and CYA, instead of potentially taking on a huge legal risk. Would you,
as a regular worker-bee developer, be OK with personally signing off and
accepting a legal risk on behalf of a large company without involving
expensive lawyers to evaluate the validity of your opinion on this legalese?
Would that be a responsible action to take?
------
gregdoesit
Is there a reason this is not released globally, but only in the US? I am not
on the US App Store, so cannot see this app.
------
IgorPartola
I had an idea for an app that would tell you if what you are about to eat is
helthful or not. Basically all it has to do is determine the ratio of green to
brown color. Obviously it would not really work (purple carrots, spaghetti
squash), but would be a nice novelty thing nonetheless.
------
FilterSweep
I wonder if it's able to tell the difference between hot dogs and well-shaven,
tanned legs.
------
dozeone
Make available in Norway stores please! I want to be able to know what I am
eating...
------
geekme
Will it be released world wide
~~~
anderscarling
I second this, world wide release would be nice. It's a shame how many "locale
neutral" apps end up walled in on the US app store.
Is there any specific reason why this happens, just seems to me like you get
worse reach and no benefits? Especially for a marketing stunt like this.
~~~
knd775
Crypto export restrictions, I believe
------
goatherders
My faith in the internet is restored. Well done.
------
ziikutv
DANM! I wanted to start learning NN and write an app after watching the
Silicon Valley episode. You beat me to it. Congrats.
------
jgtrosh
Why wasn't it called "Hotdog or Not" ? to avoid copyright infringement ?
~~~
lalalalagrr
They own the copyright.
------
bitmapbrother
Jian Yang was demoing the app on a Pixel. Looks like Apple negotiated another
exclusivity deal ;)
------
ruleabidinguser
Thought a hamburger was a hotdog btw
------
tyingq
I hear UploadVR loves it and is considering an acquihire.
------
daveloyall
This is related to a TV show.
Maybe this comment thread could use a link to a video clip of the show.
Maybe this comment thread could use a link to a video clip of the app in use,
since it doesn't work on most devices.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New Hack: Tired of getting kicked off News.YC? - apgwoz
Is noprocrast dragging you down? Or the maxvisit clock staring you in the face? Well, then I've got the solution for you.<p>1. Wait minaway minutes after your maxvisit has timed out.<p>2. Reload the front page<p>3. In new tabs, open each and every link on the homepage<p>4. Read til you become exhausted and forget about those silly arrows. By now, your maxvisit has expired, and you'll have to wait minaway in order to press the arrows, so you'll do it when you loop back to step 1.<p>Luckily news.yc isn't high volume enough that you have to do this more than once or twice a day.<p>Enjoy! <p>(oh, and I really do like this new feature... so does my employer)
======
hollerith
I applaud. Now if only redhotpawn.com/blitz/blitzchess.php would add that
feature.
------
juanpablo
Your employer force you to set noprocast on?
~~~
apgwoz
No. But theoretically my employer is happier that I'm not distracted by random
posts.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Big Tech needs to act on concerns over ‘surveillance capitalism’ - mancerayder
https://www.ft.com/content/37a0cb82-23c6-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632
======
mancerayder
Apologies for the paywall. This is a letter to the FT from John Chen, CEO of
Blackberry. I can't post it in whole, but the gist is:
_The inevitable implications of a data-driven economy are right in front of
us and we now stand before a moral, ethical and public policy crossroads.
Recent events, where mass privacy breaches have occurred, have raised public
awareness of the pitfalls of big data and the elevation of profit over privacy
by some corporate actors. As a consequence, public authorities are demanding
more comprehensive answers from Big Tech, and a healthy policy discussion has
finally begun._
and:
_The onus is on businesses to protect the data they manage, not exploit it.
Every person should own their data. It should be yours, and yours only._
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: my website doesn't work in Opera (it works in Firefox,chrome,explorer)) - Vejita00
www.winteriscomming.com (just test domain name,i know it's wrong)<p>Don't know what to do to make it work with Opera.
Any help?
Thanks.<p>It's theme from themeforest, and it worked until I made some changes, but I can't remember what changes exactly.<p>EDIT: wow,just downloaded Opera at my workplace, and it works.Don't know what's the problem with Opera at my home (latest version)
======
TobbenTM
Seems to work OK in Opera here.
~~~
Vejita00
Thanks Tobben.Seems that something is wrong with my Opera at home.I will
reinstall it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Could “Is Dead” Please Die? - api
http://adamierymenko.com/is-dead-should-die/
======
goatandsheep
People can say any phrase that catches our eyes and we'll believe it. Tech
news is learning from Buzzfeed and people are taking it seriously. Also, I'm
not too impressed with the watch. I'm sure there could be some Spritz
([http://www.spritzinc.com/](http://www.spritzinc.com/)) type browser that
will come up.
------
greenyoda
_" When something really is dead, like COBOL or OS/2, nobody talks about it."_
COBOL isn't anywhere close to dead. According to Wikipedia, the language is
still evolving, with the latest standard dated 2014. And it's apparently
object-oriented now.[1] That seems to imply that there's still new code being
written in COBOL (you wouldn't need new language features just to support
legacy code).
"In 2006 and 2012, Computerworld surveys found that over 60% of organizations
used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those,
COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software."[2]
[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Legacy)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
So You Want to Make Games - szafranek
http://szafranek.net/blog/2017/05/04/so-you-want-to-make-games/
======
madshiva
Mobile industrie are not the same than game for PC, they are really focused
more on money than the game itself, they are for dumb users (sorry I don't
have other word for, and it's not even casual) making game like this is more
commercial than a passion for gaming.
There's plenty exemple of sucessful game that have only few developper and are
better than AAA.
I personnaly have started to make game because I like it to try other approach
of programming and I want try to do things that other don't do more or don't
focus. Like choice, cooperation, rewards on cooperation, etc.
Just focus on doing things that YOU would play, that make fun and people will
talk about it, pay for it (I'm not even close to this but finish something
always give reward.)
~~~
ungzd
Mobile games are focused on exploiting addiction on people vulnerable to them.
There are no interesting gameplay process, no nice graphics, no art.
Traditional games vs mobile is the same as journalism vs clickbait. Mobile
games are in the same league as downloaders, browser toolbars, doorway pages.
~~~
swsieber
I would say that the top games have good gameplay process, nice graphics and
good art.
I've played some where I've thought - "oh, this game would be so much better
if it wasn't stuck in a IAP addiction mode".
I never get very far in these games due to the artificial IAP barriers.
~~~
MrMember
I've pretty much given up on mobile gaming. People just aren't willing to pay
money for a quality game. These days if I play a game on my phone or tablet
it's usually a board game (one of the few genres that's mostly free from
exploitative IAPs) or an emulator.
------
JabavuAdams
One thing I would strongly recommend _against_ is going to a private game-
development school. These tend to market very aggressively and be _very_
expensive. The education provided is hit-or-miss, largely dependent on the
specific high-turnover instructors you get.
In my province, you can pay > $25k for an 18 month program. At the end of that
program, only the top handful of programming students will actually know how
to code vs. copying and pasting.
If there's any way you can get into a college or university CS or engineering
program, do that instead. Four years may seem like a long time, but if you
include the time spent looking for a job after your 18 month program, it could
easily be 4 years before you get your first reasonably paying game gig. Also,
you can do a four-year engineering degree for about 8-10k a year in Ontario.
Co-op can help defray those costs further and make you more attractive for
that first full-time job.
Universities all have game-development clubs. Also, these are the people
you're competing with for that first job. I would much rather hire a CS grad
from University of Toronto, or University of Waterloo than someone who barely
knows C# from a game school.
The flip-side is that there are exceptions. It's possible to find those
diamonds-in-the-rough who weren't able or willing to go to university.
------
animal531
Focusing only on for example the Apple app store in deciding whether to go
into making games or not is not a great idea, since it's by far the most
congested (as the article also shows).
But for the moment other markets also exist, such as desktop where one can
still be very successful (as long as you can hit a certain level of word of
mouth).
~~~
supercoder
What evidence do you have that your game will make any more on the desktop
than it would on the App Store ? (Given the same amount of word of mouth)
~~~
LoSboccacc
Top paid app on the app-store show games that are of significant age
(minecraft, plague inc) or with significant name recognition (monopoli, risk,
etc) hinting at a stagnant market for independent, paid for games.
Now, evidence is a hard word, but I've the hunch that unless your game is an
addictive style freemium incremental, all other genres are as of today more
suited to desktop, because of user disinterest on paying a mobile game
upfront.
~~~
animal531
Pretty much this.
It's far more difficult to gain recognition and get word of mouth going on the
app store (due to volume), combined with the lower selling point as compared
to desktop (for example $1 vs $15). People don't want to pay up front for
games and the race to the bottom on prices have really hurt the little guy.
All graphs I've seen of sales on the app store show an inordinate amount of
sales for the top sellers, whereas the tiers in the middle and below don't
make anything significant at all.
Then go look at steamspy etc stats, even games 2/3rd's down the lists for a
year's releases would have made a few thousand $ (as compared to app store
where they might have been sitting on tens of $).
Either way, learning to code via writing a game is something I recommend for
anyone, anywhere.
~~~
clarry
And then I guess mobile gamers don't feel so excited and invested in their $1
break time distraction that they would talk about it on chats, streams,
forums, or with friends. Heck I don't think I've ever seriously heard people
discuss a mobile game, whereas discussions or passing mentions of PC & console
games (both old and new) happen all the time on various media.
~~~
lfowles
The only two examples of that I can think of are Puzzle&Dragons and Clash of
Clans. I suspect it definitely contributes to them being so large.
------
drops
This video will always stay relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Lightweight vacuum packed foam camping matress - alexlajeunesse
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/campcomprest/comprest-the-unstoppable-camping-bed-that-charges
======
alexlajeunesse
Hey HN, a guy I went to university with followed through with his idea to make
a better alternative to the current camping mattress options. Incase you don't
want to go to the kickstarter link (unfortunately it's the only product page
he has so far) here's a brief rundown:
\- Compressor is 7.5 x 3.25 x 5.5 in, 2.6 lbs.
\- Foam mattress
\- The vacuum packing takes 2-3 minutes to complete.
I'd love to hear what you all think about it. It looks like he's trying to
raise money for injection moulding to produce a bunch now. I've never worked
with manufacturing personally but from reading blog posts it seems that this
is a difficult part of getting a physical product going.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Would you be interested in being provided daily option plan entries - marketgod
I currently utilize a system to trade for myself. It has impressive returns and is fairly simple to enter plans.<p>With a developer skill set you would be able to enter the trades automatically and sell whenever you decide. Generally at 100% you want to take profits and keep a contract or two extra to catch the run.<p>The system I use provides entry points similar to this:<p>[PLAN] If BIDU breaks over 264.25 the Jun 15 210.00 Calls can be used. [ 600k on a 3minute chart is required.]<p>In the above case an API call can be written with your brokerage, i.e. Interactive Brokers, to monitor the 3 minute volume, and if it hits 600k while crossing 264.25 purchase, otherwise, wait for the price to increase 25-50 cents to enter.<p>Another entry would be:<p>[PLAN] If BIDU breaks over 264.25 the Jun 15 210.00 Calls can be used. [ Break over 264.25 ]<p>If the stock price goes over 264.25 buy the calls.<p>Would people be interested in a system which provides plans but doesn't get you into them automatically. I currently provide consulting privately however the people are at work and miss many trades, which lowers the effectiveness of the strategy.
======
icedchai
I’d be interested. I have my brokerage web site open most of the day at work.
~~~
marketgod
Follow me, see profile for details.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What are the features users want in a location based app? - vskr
======
cdvonstinkpot
Automatic tagging, don't make me have to initiate interaction with the
interface to make the apps primary function do its thing.
------
AznHisoka
the ability to see where their friends are. Nothing more.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bash Vi Command Line Editing Mode - timmorgan
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet/
======
glymor
It's readline that has the vi mode
set editing-mode vi
in .inputrc will enable it everywhere.
~~~
james2vegas
luckily not everything on the command line uses readline, else there'd be way
more gpl licensed command line tools. vi mode has been in nsh and pdksh,
independent of gnu readline. It is also part of the specification for sh at
opengroup.org:
[http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/sh.h...](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/sh.html)
Interesting note about emacs mode though:
In early proposals, the KornShell-derived emacs mode of command line editing
was included, even though the emacs editor itself was not. The community of
emacs proponents was adamant that the full emacs editor not be standardized
because they were concerned that an attempt to standardize this very powerful
environment would encourage vendors to ship strictly conforming versions
lacking the extensibility required by the community. The author of the
original emacs program also expressed his desire to omit the program.
Furthermore, there were a number of historical systems that did not include
emacs, or included it without supporting it, but there were very few that did
not include and support vi. The shell emacs command line editing mode was
finally omitted because it became apparent that the KornShell version and the
editor being distributed with the GNU system had diverged in some respects.
The author of emacs requested that the POSIX emacs mode either be deleted or
have a significant number of unspecified conditions. Although the KornShell
author agreed to consider changes to bring the shell into alignment, the
standard developers decided to defer specification at that time. At the time,
it was assumed that convergence on an acceptable definition would occur for a
subsequent draft, but that has not happened, and there appears to be no
impetus to do so. In any case, implementations are free to offer additional
command line editing modes based on the exact models of editors their users
are most comfortable with.
------
bittersweet
This works in ZSH as well, I also didn't know about it so this is definitely
going to save me a lot of keystrokes. Although I already had some of the
regular shortcuts memorized (like ctrl-a goes to start of the line) being able
to use one set of keybindings is great!
~~~
sundarurfriend
And in Zsh, you could even have it show the current Vi mode (Insert or
Command) in the prompt. I don't have my .zshrc handy, I'll try to get the
command once I get the .zshrc.
~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Wow, that's been my biggest trouble with vi mode for years, and I've been
using Zsh for a long time and didn't know it could do that. I would be
eternally grateful if you could post the solution here...
~~~
sundarurfriend
I'm at work after a long vacation, so got access to my .zshrc. Here's the
relevant part:
#It starts in insert mode
export VIMODE=INS
function zle-keymap-select {
VIMODE="${${KEYMAP/vicmd/CMD}/(main|viins)/INS}"
zle reset-prompt
}
zle -N zle-keymap-select
bindkey -v
I use Oh My Zsh, but as far as I know this should work without it too.
Wish HN had a notify-on-reply system like Reddit's orangered. Would you see
this? Would you not? Would I miss eternal gratefulness from a fellow HN
citizen? Oh, how I wish I knew the answer!
~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Maybe you won't even see this ;) , but it unfortunately doesn't seem to work
on my vanilla Zsh. Perhaps I'll look into OMZ a bit and see if things work out
that way. Thanks anyways :)
------
timmorgan
I've been using Ubuntu and bash for several years now, and never knew until
today that Bash had a Vi mode. I'm ashamed.
------
nuclear_eclipse
My biggest complaint about readline's vi mode is that there is no visual
indicator of what mode you are in, and it seems there are quite a few actions
that unexpectedly take you out of insert mode as compared to using Vim, and
without some way of seeing this, it's an exercise in frustration.
I've been using Vim as my primary editor/IDE for three years now, and I still
can't get used to vi mode on the command line, and keep going back to emacs
mode because it functions exactly like you would expect it to.
------
imurray
I use vim as my editor but never got on with "vi mode" in bash/readline or
zsh/zle. However, when you have a complicated command line you can use vim (or
your favorite $EDITOR) on it.
In bash type Ctrl-x-e
In zsh I press Ctrl-z, which does what I want because I have this in my
.zshrc:
setopt hist_ignore_space # trick so that history doesn't get polluted
function edithist() {
local tmp=${TMPPREFIX}${$}hist
read -Erz >| "$tmp"
"$EDITOR" "$tmp"
print -Rz - "$(<$tmp)"
rm "$tmp"
}
bindkey -e '\M-q' push-input # replaces push-line in 3.0.x
bindkey -e -s '\C-z' '\M-q edithist\n'
The zsh version leaves you editing the command line after exiting the editor.
The bash version executes the command after exiting the editor.
~~~
james2vegas
And if you don't have a problem with vi mode, use ESC to enter command mode
and enter v to edit the command line in ${EDITOR}
------
dylanz
I've known about Vi mode for a long time, but have never been able to make the
switch. It's a brain bender!
~~~
rg3
Something similar happened to me. I'm a happy Vim user and have been for
years, but I've always used bash in emacs mode.
However, some months ago I started to work in an environment full of Solaris 8
machines with ksh as their default shell in vi mode for some reason. It's
configured that way for every machine and we have to constantly log in and out
of them to do our jobs, and it's always been that way so I simply didn't ask
for it to change. After all I was also the new guy.
After a few weeks I got so tired of trying to use emacs commands in vi mode
shells while at work, and vi commands while in emacs mode at home that I
changed to vi mode at home. And I've been happy since then. It's not that
hard. You get used to it quickly, especially if you use vi or Vim a lot like I
do.
------
sophacles
One really really annoying thing about this: pressing return in "normal" or
"insert" modes executes the command. That behaviour just doesn't feel right.
~~~
sundarurfriend
Why? What would you expect it to do?
~~~
sophacles
Well, Enter in normal mode in vi puts the cursor on the next line, at the
first non-whitespace character. I would like enter in "normal mode bash" to do
the same. I would also like to scroll up (j) and see the previous command as i
left it (i.e. if modified, show them).
------
albemuth
Is there an analog for \e on the postgres console? That makes more sense to me
than using vi editing all the time
~~~
gredman
fc
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Richest 1% now owns more of US wealth than at any time in past 50 years - eevilspock
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/
======
vfulco
Trickle down capitalism at its finest.
------
danschumann
If you took all their wealth and gave it to the poorest 1%, by the end of the
decade, they'd probably have it all back.
------
ajroas
So, what?...
------
eevilspock
Yeah, I know that we've seen reports like this before. But if the SV sphere
wants to stop being part of the problem and start working on a solution, it is
critically important it first stops perpetuating the meritocracy myth and
looks at reality.
~~~
goldensnit
Can you expand on what you mean? SV seems to represent more of a meritocracy
than most industries or areas?
~~~
eevilspock
I don't have time to write the treatise this deserves, but here are some
things to consider:
1\. More does not mean sufficent.
2\. Does Zuckerberg have more merit than all the people who invented the
Internet in the first place? I'm pretty sure the net worth of _all_ those
people don't add up to 0.1% of Zuck's ($74 billion today).
3\. Google was better than Infoseek. It won on the merits. But Google wins and
owns markets now not on the merits, but on its accumulate power, and the moats
it has built. Including political moats and advantages (It puts a lot of money
into lobbying). The Matthew Effect (the rich get richer) is the antithesis of
meritocracy.
4\. Do VCs merit the cut they take? Smacks more of rentier capitalism than
meritocracy to me.
5\. Bill Gates supposedly won the OS wars on the merits (many in SV will
strongly disagree with that, myself included). But now he uses his wealth
(i.e. power) to push his ideas and preferences on education and healthcare.
Did Common Core get selected on the merits?
6\. In the spirit of going back to first principles, what exactly it
meritorious? Look at all the things that SV is rewarded for versus the things
that this fucked up world really needs. Why is Instagram worth so much? Does
coding work on any of YCombinator projects, for example, have more merit than
teaching children in our totally neglected schools? Why do teachers get paid
so little? Is our society valuing things properly _on the merits_? "The best
minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That
sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of
Cloudera. If we define "merit" as able to figure out how to capture eyeballs
and data about those eyeballs in order to sell them to advertisers, that's a
pretty meritless definition of merit.
7\. Advertising itself is antithetical to meritocracy. Products should win on
the merits, not on which one has the best marketing (much less which one has
the most money for marketing), not on who is the best used car saleman.
Silicon Valley not only uses advertising, a lot of what it does is _funded_ by
advertising (undermining things like privacy while they're at it).
8\. Likewise, producing and making money off of products that taps into our
psychological weaknesses, our propensity for addiction, our desperate need for
social validation, is not meritorious, it's despicable. See Farmville,
Facebook, and many of SV's greatest "successes".
9\. Here's another first principles question: What does it actually mean to be
a meritocracy? Is it "the best idea, solution or person for the
issue/problem/job get chosen" or does it also mean "get the most money".
Because we have a economic system that is built on the idea that self-interest
and greed are so inevitable, so fundamental that we should build an economic
system around these givens, "gets the most money" is our answer. I don't agree
that someone born with a higher IQ merits a greater share of the world's
wealth or resources, just as I don't agree that if 10 people get shipwrecked
on a desert island with no edible food on land, the best fisher of the 10 gets
to eat the most much less be king. They each get the greater share by
leveraging power. That's not merit. Note also the situational arbitrariness:
in SV the higher IQ gets more money and power, and in the shipwreck the better
fisher does.
Okay, maybe I should go write that treatise.
~~~
wahern
Does Zuckerberg have more merit than all the people who
invented the Internet in the first place? I'm pretty sure
the net worth of all those people don't add up to 0.1% of
Zuck's ($74 billion today).
How to judge merit is a separate issue. Whatever the value of all the other
contributions, it's Facebook that attracted the most money in the marketplace
--one of the most common ways to judge merit in our society. When people
discuss the [lack of] meritocracy, usually the issue is whether, how, and to
what extent people are rewarded for their individual actions as opposed to
being rewarded for their status or associations.
Zuckerberg may have profited by standing on the shoulders of giants, but to
the extent that the environment was meritocratic those were shoulders anybody
else could have stood upon had they chosen, not shoulders that preferred
Zuckerberg over someone else equally situated. Of course, not everybody is
equally situated, but that has nothing to do with the merit of Facebook over
TCP/IP.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Emails prove traffic shutdown was political payback from office of NJ governor - ck2
http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html
======
ck2
What's interesting about this is apparently you can get anything back from
Google gmail via a warrant.
Also, without the press, this would have been completely buried. Note how it
was done to another mayor and no-one believed him until now.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Review my startup, Snapherd.com - endtwist
So I've just launched Snapherd, a mobile photo game. Basically, every 48 hours a new catchword or catchphrase is given, and the goal is to take a picture of what you think best represents the subject matter.<p>The idea is simple, but I'd love to hear what the Hacker News community thinks!
======
petervandijck
I like it too. Nice design. Nice concept. I think you need to convince 10
friends to snap lots of pictures to get things rolling, because right now it
looks pretty empty, and nobody likes an empty community site.
~~~
endtwist
It should start filling up quite a bit more today...the word had just rolled
over last night (from "debate" to "absurd") and my friends have not submitted
new images quite yet. I do very much appreciate the input, though!
------
wensing
<http://www.snapherd.com>
For convenience.
------
calambrac
Why 48 hours? Would cycling catchwords in shorter increments do a better job
of keeping people engaged with the site? What's the smallest period of time
you can find that still yields decent photos?
------
kenver
Really good idea and I like the site. You probably know, but when I tried to
find it with a search engine there was nothing there. You should probably do
something about that
------
pxlpshr
We tried to do this last year when the "Safari SDK" was released, but the side
project died... I still think it's a great idea and you've executed it nicely.
There's another iPhone application that does something similar called Scavenge
built by the hosting company A Small Orange, however they currently do not
have the website component as far as I can tell.
<http://www.apptism.com/apps/scavenge>
------
vaksel
did I see a sign for your site during last night's debate? Or was that
something else?
~~~
endtwist
That was my sign during last night's pre- and post-debate, on MSNBC. It got me
a few new users, but not quite as many as I'd have hoped.
------
walesmd
I like it - design is nice. What is the incentive for winning (other than
community)? I think this is a prime opportunity to purchase (or get one
donated) an iPhone or the T-Mobile G1 and give one away.
------
tomsaffell
nice idea.
maybe you could try to tie the word of the day to current affairs in some way?
as for building traffic, maybe you could find a way for people to vote (or
even submit) w/o needing to login. you might need to bring the login back
ultimately, once it's popular - but do you need it now?
final thought - the home page runs off the bottom of the screen (at 1280 x
1024) by a good few hundred pixels. And the bottom is where all the real
content is. Maybe reshuffle and/or shrink?
cheers
tom saffell
------
migpwr
I wish I didn't have to register to vote for a picture... i was about to vote
for deep fried candy bars on "absurd"
------
mattjung
Simple, but appealing idea, nicely done. I'll keep an eye on it. How many
users do you have already?
------
jsmcgd
I enjoyed the HL reference. I reckon all it needs now is some users and some
content. Well done.
------
Tapthat
where.com did this a couple years back... It got some response but you
definitely need to find a way to get buzzzz
------
joshu
Today's word is "mesothelioma"
------
jcapote
openid support would be nice, but I love the idea.
------
mwinters58
business model? grow traffic and sell ads?
~~~
kenver
Offer prizes/incentives to people who manage to incorporate a second "sponsor"
type word.
------
alaskamiller
cute design. kind of an addicting concept. should make this into an iphone
app. need to seed more, i only see two pics/words.
~~~
tialys
Wow... and iPhone (or Android) app could be great for this! Start the app,
snap a pic and send it in with details about location and everything. It would
certainly put the site in front of a lot more people as well.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
See Star Wars a Day Early - lenkendall
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2015/12/14/do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try/
======
DerekL
I'm in the SF Bay Area, and many theaters are showing it on the 17th starting
at 7PM.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Flight search to max. accr. mileage at best price (for frequent flyers) - alexjawad
http://www.bunainternational.com/demo-0.1.html
======
alexjawad
The demo page is primarily for potential users to provide feedback on the
features before building, and it's a bit sloppy but should illustrate what
it's all about. Feedback is very welcome!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why OpenHeatMap is banned from Github - joshfraser
http://petewarden.com/2013/09/27/why-openheatmap-is-banned-from-github/
======
alexholehouse
The weird/upsetting thing is that CTO would go to the producer of a software
his or her company use for _free_ and despite having active communication
lines open go behind the developer's back to have it removed from the very
website they got it from.
I believe that the technical term here would be "dick move".
~~~
iends
The world is full of people who are quick to jump to conclusions and refuse to
give you the benefit of doubt.
I used to use a self hosted blog aggregation software (Gregarius) and put it
up at www.mypersonalsite.com/blogs that was unlisted and unlinked to. It got 3
uniques/month for about 12 months. Then one day a company owner (a regular
from the Joel on Software's forums -- a technical person) wrote a blog post
linking to my site, calling me a spam blog, and posted my personal
information. He sent my host a C&D, and also blocked my work IP (most of the
local IBM office) from reading his blog.
From what I gather, he looked at his refer logs and saw I clicked through to
his blog 2-3 times, went to the link and freaked out that I was displaying his
RSS feeds.
I emailed him to try and clear it up, and was quite polite, but he kept being
an asshole, accusing me of stealing his content and breaking the law. He
threatened me with further action, and was condescending because I was 17.
("You should password protect your 'blog reader' as a learning exercise, then
blog about it so you'll have content of your own and you won't have steal my
content").
He never reached out to contact me. He just sent the C&D, wrote a nasty blog
about me, and didn't even try. Once he jumped to conclusions, it was too late.
~~~
euroclydon
Some people are like that. It's frustrating. But it's a good lesson that if
you're wrong, you're wrong, nobody owes you a conversation about it and
similar people in high stakes venues will deliver swift, harsh, uncompromising
justice that can have devestating consequences.
~~~
ballard
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss
people." Eleanor Roosevelt
The only thing to add is great minds are more generous and less concerned with
violent retribution to compensate for a lack of control in their own
frustrated lives.
Others have a 4 letter word for it....
cool.
------
lm741
That's funny. The Github page
([https://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap](https://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap))
says it was disabled due to "excessive use of resources, in violation of our
Terms of Service."
I also didn't find anything here:
[https://github.com/github/dmca](https://github.com/github/dmca)
------
xpaulbettsx
GitHubber here, we'll follow up on this with Pete. We think one of our replies
was missed along the line. Thanks for letting us know.
~~~
catch23
hopefully there is a documented process so that one doesn't have to make a
blog article to post on HN to get this stuff resolved.
~~~
unreal37
It doesn't sound like the OP tried very hard to contact them. He sent them an
email, didn't hear back, and then decided to write a blog post about it. I
mean, if he cared that much about github, he would send them an email back
asking what was up. Or 5.
~~~
twistedpair
There are always things like real people and phone numbers. You know, find
some GH staffers via G+, LinkedIn, Fb or your own network of friends and work
some connections. Pete does not say the lengths he went to, but email is
admittedly one of the most passive mediums.
~~~
mineo
You really should not have to find people working at GitHub on other parts of
the internet for something like dealing with copyright issues if you're not
the copyright owner because (I suspect) copyright owners will have no trouble
getting GitHub to (at least) listen to their complaints.
------
fiatmoney
Why not BitBucket then? Github is nice, but it's not the end-all of hosting
solutions.
~~~
zonkey
Yes. I use BitBucket because it allows free private repositories. No problems
at all.
------
kurotek
The copyright claim seems unsupportable in the first place. As far as I
understand, a simple list of things that fit in a category does not meet the
minimum originality requirement. See:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural)
It also seems like it would be trivially easy to compile a similar list from
linkedin.
~~~
chrismcb
Data isn't copyrightable. The format is, but the data itself isn't. Yes, it
would be nice to sanitize a list. And yes it would be nice to not actually use
real names with real addresses. But no copyright violation here.
------
alsobrsp
Sadly there in lies the problem of using a third party, you are at the mercy
of their legal department. The facts don't always matter.
------
jonchang
Another unfortunate example of the necessities of contributor agreements.
~~~
ansible
_Another unfortunate example of the necessities of contributor agreements._
Uh, no. This is an example of needing to take care, and fully understand what
is going into each commit.
The OP got a little sloppy (which happens), and is now praying the price for
it. Hopefully it can all get resolved soon and everyone can get back to work.
~~~
jthol
Whoever gave him the file might also share some of the blame.
~~~
PeterisP
There is a big difference in submitting an example that provokes a bug, and
publishing that example.
If an audio player crashes when opening a file with the latest Miley Cyrus
hit, then that specific file is useful to reproduce the bug, but it doesn't
mean that it can be redistributed further.
The same is with any personally identifiable information - if you have
obtained a list of people names/emails/adresses, it doesn't automatically mean
that it's okay for you to publish that list.
------
bougiefever
Another example of someone abusing copyright. This person is using copyright
as a means to shut down someone else's work, even though this is clearly not a
copyright issue. Something needs to be done about bogus copyright claims that
are really about censoring someone else. There should be penalties for issuing
bad copyright claims. That is simply not working.
------
joeevans
Why doesn't GitHub make it easier to research or attach an open source license
to code?
~~~
dbaupp
When you create a new repo it allows you to automatically pick a license (and
even a initialise a default .gitignore file).
~~~
joeevans
Ah, ok... I didn't know they had a license picker. Cool!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Many Students Around the World Can’t Read or Add, World Bank Says - stablemap
https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2017/09/26/many-students-around-the-world-cant-read-or-add-world-bank-says/
======
moretai
So is the world just a top that's about to stop spinning? I mean we are
probably the most educated group of humans in history, yet it still feels like
we're just playing make believe and we aren't doing shit with our jobs.
Besides people building buildings, catching criminals, and putting out fires,
are any of us actually contributing anything to the world or are we just
laundering money around from one person to the next? It feels like we're just
really good marketers is all.
------
downrightmike
Neither can my HR department.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
APOD: LIGO detects gravity waves... - AliCollins
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
======
AliCollins
Currently a "Placeholder APOD" until the LIGO Press Conference at 11AM
(ET)...we're waiting!!
------
AliCollins
...and now there is an interesting image showing the signals from the twin
LIGO detectors - fantastic!!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
2 Steps to Becoming a Great Developer - jmonegro
http://theadmin.org/articles/2010/04/16/two-steps-to-becoming-a-great-developer/
======
dinde
I can definitely appreciate the fears listed in step one. I am about four
years into my career and have recently begun realizing that I will not surpass
what I consider mediocrity without taking steps beyond my 9-5 job. Now that I
have begun looking seriously at my path, it is amazing to look back at the
fears that have been holding me back. I have been afraid to start my own side
projects, out of fear that I won't be able to contend with what other people
can do. I had to have the very obvious realization that I will never get
better if I don't try, and that everyone has to start exactly where they are.
Since then it is like a light has gone off, and I have become much more
appreciative of those who try, rather than hold back and criticize. Thanks for
posting this.
~~~
bbuffone
"I have been afraid to start my own side projects, out of fear that I won't be
able to contend with what other people can do"
Why do you care? Taking some one else's code and rewriting is a great way to
learn. First, you don't need your own idea. Second, there is already a
"viable" solution you can learn from and third, you can get to the meat of
being a great coder. "How can I make XYZ better, simpler, more performant..."
Once you learn thoughs skills you can go off and create yor own projects. Look
at all the things people love today, they are simpler. better architected,
more performant versions of existing solutions. Apache -> ngnx, MySQL -> ...,
If you are afraid to fail or worry about what others think you won't be a
great coder.
------
AndrejM
These blog posts are kind of like those "Learn this language in 24 hours"
books. They're not bad per se, but it's as if becoming a great developer is
some kind of <insert-number-here>-step process. Becoming great is, in my
opinion, not a final destination. You can be great from day #1 by pushing
yourself to learn more, for every day in your life as a developer.
~~~
blaix
That is essentially what this article is saying. It just gives a couple
concrete examples of how to do this. I think the title of the article does it
a disservice.
------
aditya
Wow. What has Giles started?! This "I'll-teach-you-to-be-a-great-developer-
for-$$$" trend is scary...
------
10ren
#5 is true: fear makes you tired.
------
d0m
Is Eric Davis a great developer?
~~~
ryanhuff
Maybe not (don't know him), but teaching is an entirely different skill set.
Perhaps he's not a great developer, but is a great teacher?
~~~
ohashi
I can't emphasize this enough. It applies across all disciplines too. Great
teachers don't have to be the best in their field, most are not. However, in
my limited experience, those who _think_ they are best in their field are more
often than not awful teachers.
In those rare cases where they are both, it's something magical. I can only
think of 3-4 teachers that I have ever had that fit that bill.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: anyone willing to contribute ideas for pricing for our startup? - andrewstuart
Hi folks - we're coming out of beta soon and need to come up with pricing. trouble is I'm not sure how to price it. Is anyone willing to contribute ideas on pricing this service? Any input would be a help and much appreciated.<p>The service is an REST based API that converts documents to PDF and other formats, for example extracting text from documents.<p>The site is at http://www.pdfalchemy.com<p>I'm thinking that we should have subscription levels like:<p>$0 (free) per month to convert up to 100 documents per month<p>$x per month to convert up to 500 documents per month<p>$x per month to convert up to 1,500 documents per month<p>$x per month to convert up to 3,000 documents per month<p>$x per month to convert up to 10,000 documents per month<p>$x per month to convert up to more than 10,000 documents per month<p>I'd love some input from the HN community on what people think the prices per level should be, and also some input on the numbers of documents per month.<p>your input valued. thanks as
======
exline
I have a project for a client that has a need for exactly this tool, but the
pricing per month is a sticking issue. The problem is that the conversion to
PDF is not tied to revenue for the project. And because it would be an unknown
cost (they don't know how many word docs they will be getting), the client
would not like it.
That said it could in theory be up to 5-10K documents a month in a year from
now, but right now it is probably only 100-200 a month. Currently we are using
an open source tool and having decent results. Not great, but acceptable so
far. The second option is to require their users to provide only PDF, which is
not ideal, but also acceptable.
It seems like this is a commodity product, so figure out what the cost is per
document (or per gig of data.) Then add in some profit and that is your price.
You can have larger profit on smaller plans and less profit on the larger
plans. To do this, I would charge by data not document, since you can
determine costs by data, not document.
------
carbocation
Are there other value-adds besides # of documents? In the abstract, I'd like
to see less granular pricing over the # of documents, instead charging more
for value-adding benefits.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Show HN: Assistant to help you fight social media addiction and do smth useful - pogorsky
https://douseful.com/
======
pogorsky
Hi, I'm Eduard, and over the last few years I've been enrolled on many online
courses to strengthen my research skills, broaden my career prospects, and to
simply learn something new. Some of these courses were free, and others I paid
to take part in. However, I haven't completed all of them. Often, I tried to
find excuses, telling myself that “this week I'm too busy with my work”, or
“this week I’ve a lot on socially, so I don't have the time to submit an
assignment…”. This led me to the idea that I needed something that could help
me fight procrastination. I needed regular pushes, or gentle advice from some
as yet unknown source. As I tried to explore how a tool could be developed to
solve this problem, I attended the summer school on behaviour change at
University College London. The puzzle has developed. Why not use behaviour
change techniques applied effectively to change behaviour in healthcare
settings and help others to learn something new instead of wasting their time
online.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Maya Angelou Dies at 86 - tieistoowhite
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/arts/maya-angelou-lyrical-witness-of-the-jim-crow-south-dies-at-86.html
======
silverbax88
I was fortunate enough to have Maya living within a couple of miles of me, and
was able to meet her a couple of times. I admired her, and she was an
inspiration to me. Her words and actions resonated with me, and I always felt
she had veracity of emotion that I could only aspire to.
I too, know why the caged bird sings, but I learned it from you, Maya.
------
goatforce5
Here's a recent 14 minute interview she did. As ever, she speaks beautifully
and is engaging to watch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE)
In the video she mentions having "already been paid for" (paraphrasing - don't
have time to rewatch video at the moment). She uses a similar phrase in her
Clinton poem and other interviews.
As I understand it, it's her concept that all the people who went before you
to make your life better (moving countries to seek a better life, fighting
slavery, fighting wars, getting the right to vote or whatever) paid a price
long ago to make your life better. The only way to pay that debt back is to
make life better for those yet to come.
~~~
js2
Lovely interview. Asked about her frailty: "What I really want to do is be a
representative of my race, of the human race. I have a chance to show how kind
we can be. How intelligent and generous we can be. I have a chance to teach
and to love and to laugh and I know that when I finish doing what I was sent
here to do, I will be called home. And I will go home without any fear [or]
trepidations."
~~~
goatforce5
I think she says "trepidation... some. Wondering what's going to happen..."
She sort of changed thought midstream.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE#t=11m53s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE#t=11m53s)
I liked her incredulity when asked how she resolved her religious beliefs and
views on homosexuality:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE#t=9m53s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1T9CEjjRzE#t=9m53s)
...but just go watch the whole thing.
------
packetslave
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
------
jonahx
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what
you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
------
akilism
RIP
"I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be
moved."
------
akavi
>(pronounced AHN-zhe-lo)
/ˈæn.dʒə.loʊ/ in IPA, if that confused anyone else. (I misinterpreted it as
representing /ˈɑːn.ʒə.loʊ/.)
~~~
freehunter
That's interesting. I learned the pronunciation from The Simpsons episode,
where they apparently pronounced it wrong (I know it wasn't actually Maya who
did the voice).
------
aniijbod
How many of us deserve to be described as consistently: 1\. beautifully
spoken? 2\. profound in thought? 3\. joyful in outlook? and yet despite
possessing these outstanding qualities, never allowing those who do not seem
to, to feel anything but encouraged to try to follow her example.
------
calebm
She is no longer a caged bird.
It's really odd timing: I had never heard of Maya until yesterday, when I
discovered her beautiful poetry. I even looked her up on Wikipedia to she if
she was still alive...
------
rrrx3
She was a real inspiration to so many. A brilliant person that will be sorely
missed.
------
Duhveed
I saw her speak once in college. She was a brilliant and engaging speaker.
------
davidtanner
She was an amazing woman.
------
CoachRufus87
RIP
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Share Your Location Easily - crjHome
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/mycords/id803293602?mt=8
======
crjHome
If anyone wants a free download then please tweet @conrjac for a coupon code
for the App store.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Street pastors calm down drunken aggro after closing time - pbowyer
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/what-do-you-do-when-theres-drunken-aggro-after-closing-time-send-in-the-street-pastors/
======
hanoz
> Street pastors calm down drunken aggros after closing time
At the risk of opening a Lego-built can of worms, the word aggro should not be
pluralised to aggros, as it refers to the activity, not its practitioners.
~~~
herbig
It's a British colloquialism.
------
dkokelley
Very interesting point about the difficulty police have in being a "friendly,
neutral presence". Is it possible to replicate the "street pastors'" success
through police presence, or does the uniform elicit a response that
antagonizes potential troublemakers?
~~~
ludamad
I think a uniform is fine, but they have to really be a certain kind of people
who see you doing something illegal and be friendly. Otherwise people will
treat them with the same suspicion.
~~~
throwaway049
I believe dkokelley meant could the police achieve the same result or does
their _police_ uniform cause a response among the drinking public that the
street pastor uniform does not. In my experience working in the ambulance
service, there is a threshold of aggro above which the police struggle to de-
escalate (but can still overpower). I can't say if street pastors can do any
better as I haven't worked alongside them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica - sqdbps
https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-locationsmart-scandal-is-bigger-than-cambridge-analytica-heres-why-no-one-is-talking-about-it.html
======
WisNorCan
This is far beyond Telcos. Lots of apps are selling location data to data
intermediaries (e.g. GroundTruth and FourSquare) without user awareness or
consent.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
First OpenSocial Application Hacked Within 45 Minutes - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/first-opensocial-application-hacked-within-45-minutes/
======
hello_moto
Was this Google fault or the 3rd-party fault?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New York, America’s unhappiest city - __Joker
http://nypost.com/2014/07/22/new-york-americas-unhappiest-city/
======
__Joker
Article based on this study
[http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Glaeser...](http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Glaeser14.pdf)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How does instagress get permission - wootez
Instagram requires users to have a proper business case in order to use their API to like/follow people. Instagram says you shouldn't use this to automate likes and follows. However, instagress seems to sell automated likes and follows - how does this happen? Is instagress secretly a facebook company?
======
MarkCole
Very unlikely that it's a facebook company, the money they're making is
nothing at the scale of facebook. It's more likely they don't have access to
the official API, they've just reverse engineered the instagram
iphone/android/web app and are using that to like/follow people.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Graphene Doubles Up on Quantum Dots’ Promise in Quantum Computing - gsmethells
http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/quantum-dots-made-from-graphene-help-realize-their-promise-for-quantum-computing
======
xbmcuser
I wish someone would do a chart of all the things graphene can be used for
that have been posted on hacker news in the last 5 years with actual products
that use it or are going to use it.
~~~
CoryG89
Here is the list: [ ]
No really though, there are a lot of people researching it. I could find very
little on the market actually using it.
[http://www.physics.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/research-
im...](http://www.physics.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/research-
impact/graphene/)
Graphene looks great on paper and in the lab. It seems making the economics
work at scale may be a bit more didficult.
~~~
paulwal
[http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__2001__85__Batteri...](http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__2001__85__Batteries_Accessories-
Turnigy_Graphene.html)
[http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2592234](http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2592234)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter/comments/43z8d0/thought...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter/comments/43z8d0/thoughts_on_the_new_turnigy_graphene_batteries/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Startup Madness - guglanisam
http://sameerg.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/startup-madness/
======
bootload
_"... Each time we met a new person, we were constantly thinking of how this
person can help our venture, . Everywhere we went, we explored if there was
something there that could benefit our startup. Frankly we were classical
‘opportunity hounds” and quite shamelessly so ..."_
I've seen this so many times and it tends to work well in a boom. I'm curious
how well does this idea work in the current crash?
~~~
guglanisam
I would think importance of this increases in the bust / crash times as money
is scarce / precious, one has to use innovative / free ways to get things
done. In fact it happened with me most when madhouse was running with very low
cash.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Some business schools are shutting down their on-campus MBA programs - hhs
https://www.forbes.com/sites/poetsandquants/2019/05/26/why-business-schools-are-shutting-down-their-mba-programs/
======
mcmoose75
I went to one of the top-tier (top 3) MBA programs in the US.
The way I've described that value of the top MBA programs is in 3 (roughly
equally-weighted) categories:
1) The Education: Getting to discuss business concepts with a group of smart,
successful folks for 6-9 hours a day is very helpful. Most of the content, I
could get from books/ online articles at a fraction of the price, but spending
the time in a focused way is actually helpful.
2) The Network: In terms of network, this isn't some vague amorphous thing at
Stanford GSB, HBS, or Penn- it's knowing several hundred other folks who are
going to be very successful in their careers. This can be useful in sales,
fundraising, finding a next job, etc. and DOES have a tangible dollar value.
3) The Rubber Stamp: Having your resume say "Stanford GSB" or "Harvard
Business School" does have value to future employers or customers- it de-risks
you as you've been validated by a famous institution, and helps THEM to
associate with these famous brands.
For the top 3 programs, even though they're VERY expensive (approx $250k in
tuition + living expenses, plus at least another $250k in foregone income for
most incoming students, for $500k in actual cost+opportunity cost), they're
almost certainly worth it.
For middle-/ lower-tier MBA programs, 2) and 3) above aren't NEARLY as
valuable, or perhaps don't even exist- is your "network" from Podunk State
School MBA actually valuable? For these, the only real value is the actual
education, and most students would be better served with an online program or
just actually picking up some books/ case studies/ reading online articles.
~~~
Scoundreller
> This can be useful in sales, fundraising, finding a next job, etc. and DOES
> have a tangible dollar value.
I believe you, but I haven’t seen any school websites actually advertise an a
dollar value on these human synergies.
If anyone would, you’d think it would be them.
~~~
lotsofpulp
That would be very gauche, and would net them negative PR from the overall
public due to laying bare the “it’s not what you know, it’s who know” mantra
for no reason. The people looking to attend these schools already know the
implied value.
~~~
Scoundreller
Sounds more like intangible value then.
~~~
0xDEFC0DE
You can probably establish a floor value but getting a good average/median is
going to be difficult because the top end is basically unlimited dollars for
yourself.
Taking a guess, a degree from a school listed should easily get a $100k salary
in any big city at minimum unless you've tanked your reputation very publicly
(like paying for your acceptance with bribes).
Most people who go to ivy league aren't really concerned about their safety
nets though.
------
amb23
US MBA programs need to start following the European model: Year-long to 16
month programs tailored to a slightly older demographic (late 20s to 30s) who
actually need a degree to move a rung higher in their career. The shorter
program length will decrease the costs for students (both in terms of tuition
& opportunity costs) and--based on how much travel my friends currently
pursing MBAs do during the academic year--is unlikely to hurt academic
outcomes.
There are a few MBA ROI calculators online, and for my career I wouldn't see
an ROI until ~20-25 years down the line. (For context, I'd probably gain a
~30k salary increase if I were to pursue an MBA.) And that's with consistent
salary growth with no sabbaticals or career changes (and any subsequent loss
in earning potential) I might want to pursue. I would love to use a year long
program to gain some needed financial modeling, HR, and operational skills
while taking the time to pursue a business idea, but the traditional programs
are not structured to accommodate that. And besides, you don't actually need
an MBA if you work in the tech industry until you're in a senior position--VP
or C-suite--so there's no direct need for the degree itself until ~10-15 years
in the future.
~~~
jayalpha
"US MBA programs need to start following the European model"
No they don't. I, as a dual citizen, think US programs are by far superior.
"And besides, you don't actually need an MBA if you work in the tech industry"
"How to value your start-up? Add 1 Million for every engineer, subtract 500k
for every MBA" Guy Kawasaki
~~~
rchaud
The Guy Kawasaki quote is absurd when you consider that US startups bleed cash
all the way up to and often well past their IPO. You best believe that the
banks who are out there selling a fantastical vision of a startup's future
profitability have MBAs in their team. They're the ones making the engineers'
equity worth something.
~~~
ska
It's not so absurd - it doesn't imply you shouldn't have any MBA's, just that
the ratio to engineers should be very small at this stage. Which isn't wrong
in a tech startup.
Also, the banks don't really create value here, they preserve it if they can
and in the best case help people not piss it away. All for a handsome
percentage, but c'est la vie.
------
rahimnathwani
The two existing comments are from people who are considering an MBA at some
point, so perhaps these thoughts are helpful:
\- Doing a full time MBA at a top school (or any school) is a large commitment
of time and money. If your aim is to start a business, then it's worth
considering what you could achieve with the same amount of time+money invested
in getting that business started. If your aim is to get a promotion then,
again, it's worth considering the opportunity cost.
\- Some of the things you'll learn during the MBA can easily be learned on
your own. But 90% of us usually only study the stuff we find most interesting
or most immediately relevant. An MBA is a good mechanism to force some
breadth.
\- The people who get most out of an MBA (from what I've saw at my school, and
other people I know) are those who have a clear goal, and have done some
research beforehand about how an MBA from their chosen school will help them
to get there. Those people also spent a significant portion of their time
researching jobs, and trying to meet people to get leads. They didn't just
focus on the classes until near graduation, and then apply via standard
processes. They were focused on their goal (e.g. 'M&A Associate position at a
top-tier investment bank') from the first day, until they got their job offer.
\- There are plenty of people who pursue a full-time MBA as a 'break' from
work, or because they want to learn a set of skills they can apply in their
existing or future business, or because their employer (e.g. investment bank,
or top-tier consulting firm) expects it and pays for it, or even just for fun.
These are all acceptable reasons. But pursuing an MBA because you think it's a
magic solution to $current_career_problem probably won't end well[0].
[0] This last part might be incorrect if you end up at a top school. Like,
maybe if you do an MBA at Harvard you won't even need to apply for jobs, and
people will come knocking on your door. I don't know. But I suspect the
intersection of people who (i) get into HBS, and (ii) have unrealistic
expectations of what a piece of paper can do for their career, is pretty
small.
~~~
dahart
> If your aim is to start a business, then it's worth considering what you
> could achieve with the same amount of time+money invested in getting that
> business started.
I’m not sure how to even begin evaluating opportunity cost.
I started a business, and had a successful exit, and I’m still considering the
MBA for the next time. The reasons include: as an engineering founder I
undervalued marketing dramatically and don’t know how to do it well, and I had
a hard time speaking the language of investors. I want to add skills to my
quiver that I found missing when I needed them.
How would you suggest thinking about opportunity cost, especially if you lack
experience in one or both options? In order to make starting a business more
valuable than school, I feel like you have to either be much luckier or know
what you’re doing and execute perfectly, which is incredibly hard to do the
first time. The things I spent time on as a first time founder are things I
think I would have learned not to do in business school. It worked out for me
only because I got lucky, but I did burn a few years and a lot of money. After
having chosen to start a business instead of school, I feel like it might have
been more efficient to go to school.
~~~
rahimnathwani
"I want to add skills to my quiver that I found missing when I needed them."
This is a really good reason. What are those skills? Would attending business
school help you build all/some of them?
"I’m not sure how to even begin evaluating opportunity cost."
If I were to give you $100k, on the condition that you spend the next 18-24
months doing only things that would help you build those skills, what would
you do with that time? Start a business? Take smart people out for dinner? Get
a job at a company you admire, and spend the cash on making your life more
comfortable? Sign up for a degree program?
~~~
dahart
Hmmm. If the goal of the $100k was to build the skills, I would include at
least some school. Taking smart people to dinner and working in successful
teams would also be on the list. The only thing I’d actively avoid is using
that cash for comfort.
But, building those skills may be far away from both knowing what skills I
need, and from executing, right? I guess that’s part of my question... the
answer to how to build those skills doesn’t necessarily have a lot of bearing
on whether it would be better to start a business or go to school. Aside from
what I might guess, how could I actually and meaningfully evaluate whether
going to school is a more valuable use of time than just launching into
another business? Maybe looking at rates of MBA founder success vs others is a
start...?
------
vikramkr
Most of the value in an MBA is from the face to face interaction and
networking - the classes in business school are helpful sure but nothing you
can't learn yourself in a book. If these schools weren't able to offer much in
the way of networking and development of soft skills in the first place, then
frankly going online makes sense because you don't lose anything, but i think
that's a factor specific to these business schools, not the very top bschools
that have no shortage of funding/extensive networks etc.
~~~
povertyworld
Is it possible some corporations just have MBA requirements for advancement?
Then it doesn't matter where you got the degree from just that you have it. I
know this is the case in education, and has lead to the proliferation of
online education grad degrees. Since you just need the piece of paper, most
careerists optimize for the easiest online "mail order" type degree possible.
They don't, however, optimize for cheapest, since tax payers bankroll most of
these cheesy degrees through tuition reimbursement.
~~~
delfinom
MBA used to be an requirement for an engineer to jump into manager roles. But
nowadays it depends on the company.
------
rchaud
You can see from the list of names in the article why those schools are
dropping on-campus programs. Some of them are prestigious institutions, but
not for business:
\- University of Iowa
\- Wake Forest University
\- Thunderbird School of Global Management
\- Virginia Tech
\- Simmons College
There aren't many people out there thinking, sure, I'll go into six-figure
debt so my LinkedIn can say I have a Simmons College MBA. Simply put, if your
on-campus MBA program isn't likely to result in a six-figure job right out of
the gate, it's not worth the cost.
And those six-figure jobs only come about if big, rich companies (banks, big 4
consulting/audit, big tech) come on campus to hire MBAs. If yours is not a Top
15 MBA program, you may be better off career-wise by staying at your current
job and pursuing professional certifications related to your field.
~~~
askafriend
I’d take it even further. If it’s not a top 5 program then you’d really really
have to think about if it’s worth doing at all.
~~~
joker3
Top five is a little too strict, but top twenty, yeah, maybe.
------
bitL
IMO online MBA from a respected school is a perfect thing for entrepreneurs
that need flexibility and can't just take 2-3 years off. It's also awesome for
digital nomads that can literally earn degree while lying on a Hawaiian beach
or traveling around the world. And if the class is massive like at UIUC (2000
people?), networking effect gets a huge multiplier, globally, comparing to
much smaller classes at M7 (and FAANG is quite strongly represented there,
like with Georgia Tech's OMS CS). The only problem I see is prestige, so I'll
keep an eye on iMBA to see how they wrestle with rankings.
------
_sword
Interestingly, institutions such as Simmons (highlighted in this article) are
partnering with online education platform vendors such as 2u to bring their
campus online. Using 2u as an example, the schools offload all of the
marketing for candidates, managing the online platform, and more to 2u in
exchange for a revenue share for tuition for online students. Schools are in
turn responsible for the course content including the professors, and for
their admissions department to accept or deny applications provided by 2u. The
net impact for the school can be incremental revenues by addressing students
that weren't accessible previously, and that these incremental revenues come
with a high margin for the school, which can help fund other areas of the
school. Fascinating business model in my view.
------
miohtama
Online MBA would be only for career signalling? Is the other side of the coin,
networking, present in any form? Has anyone taken online MBA and can comment
the benefits?
~~~
Ibethewalrus
Interested as well about the benefits/downsides of an online MBA by a
prestigious vs regular school
------
baron816
Is there a lot of value in getting a non-specialized MBA if you're working in
tech (or want to work in tech)?
------
SQL2219
There are 16 references in the comments about "top" programs. I am curious as
to what top actually means, can I sort by the top column in a spreadsheet? Is
it a code word for cost?
~~~
filmgirlcw
It means Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, Penn — most generally.
But there are different MBA programs. There’s the traditional MBA, the part-
time MBA (which is a great choice for people who already work), and the
executive MBA.
------
RickJWagner
Anything that adds prestige and profitibility to online education is ok with
me.
Traditional college education is a racket. I'm hoping online is the way of the
(near) future.
------
dahart
Tl;dr on-campus programs are in decline while online programs are growing.
Seems like the title is a tad misleading, the programs aren’t shutting down,
they’re going online.
But isn’t a lot of the value of an MBA in the face time and networking you get
during the program? (Or is that a myth or only something that happens at
Harvard?) Every once in a while I think about going back and getting an MBA,
speculating it might help with my next startup, but I’ve always imagined going
to campus. Are online tools and online degrees improving in the areas of
having class discussions and making friends and asking questions and general
people time?
~~~
lotsofpulp
It’s not a myth, top MBA programs are top because they give you access to an
exclusive network. Personally, I wouldn’t value an MBA much without that
aspect.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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The future of photography and Unsplash - dstein64
https://medium.com/unsplash-unfiltered/the-future-of-photography-and-unsplash-811f114aab7a
======
pgeorgep
Unsplash powers nearly all of the stock photography I see these days. It's
crazy to see photographers are able to get more impressions on their photos
than any other platform (ie Instagram and the New York Times)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Golang only 2x ruby at net/http level and same as ruby at web framework level? - gankgu
https://gist.github.com/gankkank/3a59513ea81cb5ec5e33
======
nostrademons
TechEmpower has it at about 3x Ruby at net/http level, but close to 10x on
BeeGo vs. Sinatra.
[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=p...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=peak&test=json)
(Interestingly, JRuby is actually within about 10% of Go.)
This doesn't surprise me all that much: the guts of Ruby's HTTP parsing &
network handling is generally done in C. It's only when you layer all the code
in Rails through the default Ruby interpreter that it gets slow.
------
coldtea
What does this "hello world" measure?
It doesn't measure Ruby's speed, that's for sure. The IO is C, and the HTTP
parsing and network operations are also C in Ruby.
Also the frameworks you used are minimal (for both Ruby and Go) so their
overhead is negligible as well. Again you're mostly measuring some C calls vs
Go calls.
So, a more accurate title would be: "Golang only 2x C at net/http and same as
C at web framework level".
Now, try a full blown Rails service or a Sinatra endpoind that DOES some
processing, not just prints something, and compare it with the same thing in
Go.
------
gankgu
But in actual world, people will be attracted by post like "Iron.io Blog: How
We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go". And like to think so we can use it do
faster and easier !
Also, for start-ups, It's important to choose a language that has a certain
level of performance rather than rewrite all codes later.
------
smt88
Cross-language benchmarks are nonsense.
Hardware can be scaled. Time cannot. Use the platform that saves you the most
time (now and when you're in "maintenance" mode) and worry about performance
later.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Careful, there's an app which will delete all your tweets - FluidDjango
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/27/9737518-careful-theres-an-app-which-will-delete-all-your-tweets
======
rtjggfj
The point of the application is to delete all your tweets, it explains that
it's not undo-able, and it requires confirmation before it does it. Relax.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
LShift is terrified by asynchronous libraries performance - bandris
http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/12/15/asynchronous-libraries-performance
======
tptacek
Couple things.
First, there isn't enough context in the LShift article to judge whether Marek
has a valid point. He's conceded up front that both Libev and libevent show
logN growth for adding new fd's to the loop, and seems to be arguing that it
could be brought down to constant time. So? He hasn't presented evidence that
the overhead he's talking about is significant in the real world. This is
compute vs. I/O in an I/O-bound environment.
Next, he also seems to be taking his cues from the second set of benchmarks on
the Libev page, in which every socket has a random timeout. This is a worst-
case scenario for both Libev and libevent. Contrary to both the Libev page and
Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on individual I/O events is not the only
way to implement "idle timeouts" (which many protocols don't even have); it is
in fact one of the poorer approaches.
Finally, he's taken two very specific benchmarks and generalized them to the
whole design approach. Libevent is considered "high-performance" because async
I/O is a high-performance design --- especially compared to demand-threading
--- and libevent was the first stable, cross-platform implementation of it.
It's also "high-performance" because it implements the high-performance kernel
interfaces, like epoll. But the internals of libevent, while reasonable, are
not (at least last time I checked) particularly optimized.
You can get around most of these problems by building on top of libevent; for
instance, at Arbor Networks, we ditched libevent's (verbose, clumsy) timer
interface for a better data structure, and simply kept libevent notified of
the next closest timeout.
"Terrified" seems like a very silly word to use here, but I'm always eager to
get schooled.
~~~
signa11
> Contrary to both the Libev page and Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on
> individual I/O events is not the only way to implement "idle timeouts"
just a quick question: what would you consider, is a superior approach to
idle-timeouts ? thanks for you insights !
~~~
tptacek
Use another data structure to track connections by liveness, which you can
measure by timestamping on each RX event. Relax the requirement that an
connection idle timeout of 60 seconds must fire in exactly 60,000
milliseconds; 60, 61, 65, nobody cares.
------
huhtenberg
_The problem is that currently asynchronous libraries often use binary heap as
a representation of internal priority queue._
This is a grossly ignorant statement. I have written my share of event loops
(including epoll and IOCP based) and choosing heap for timer management is an
_obviously_ dumb thing to do if you care about the performance. Also removing
objects from the event loop _before_ delivering a callback is even more dumb
for exact reasons he listed in the post. Essentially what he's bitching about
is a lame-ass un-optimized implementation of an event engine.
Also, interestingly enough he actually reinvented a simplified form of Linux
timer management code - <http://lwn.net/Articles/156329>.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A new class of attack via LinkedIn Skills - rjurney
https://twitter.com/rjurney/status/567455739245895681
======
positr0n
Sorry to be that guy, ([http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/) and
all), but this isn't new. It was discovered soon after the skills feature came
out.
Here's a buzzfeed article from
2013:[http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/heres-how-to-
endorsmen...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/heres-how-to-endorsment-
bomb-your-friends-on-linkedin)
Congrats on your independent discovery though :-)
------
rjurney
I did it all for the lulz.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Postmortem: Azure DevOps (VSTS) Outage of 4 Sep 2018 - wallflower
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/?p=17485
======
a2tech
Long story short they give no indication as to why their data center cooling
systems were unable to handle voltage changes caused by the storm and their
systems are not designed for speedy restoration into another region.
~~~
chrisbolt
Seems like there's more information in the preliminary RCA on
[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/status/history/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/history/)
~~~
bpicolo
> Initially, the datacenter was able to maintain its operational temperatures
> through a load dependent thermal buffer that was designed within the cooling
> system. However, once this thermal buffer was depleted the datacenter
> temperature exceeded safe operational thresholds, and an automated shutdown
> of devices was initiated
~~~
souterrain
Total failure of a data center's cooling apparatus seems to be a very rare
occurrence to me, perhaps limited to simultaneous failure of utility and
genset power (example: electrical switchgear and fuel pumps underwater due to
flooding).
Anyone have any data around how frequently such a failure occurs?
~~~
beh9540
I had the same thought. The only thing I could come up with is that it wasn't
a failure of power supply, but that a surge took down enough cooling systems
that they couldn't maintain temperature. A lot of DC's I've seen are N+1 with
cooling (or even 2N), but they all run at the same time and are the same
units. Or the control system went down, and they weren't able to get it back
up and running, although I would think they would have redundancy in that
case.
------
outworlder
Ok, it's understandable, freak events happen.
> The primary solution we are pursuing to improve handling datacenter failures
> is Availability Zones, and we are exploring the feasibility of asynchronous
> replication.
This I do not understand. I was also amazed when I saw that Azure AZs are not
available on all regions. In AWS, the bare minimum is 2 AZs (except for one
odd region). Same thing for Google Cloud.
~~~
scarface74
From what I understand and I can't find the reference anywhere, each region
has at least three availability zones. Some regions only have two user
selectable AZ's.
For instance, S3 promises that it is replicated between 3 AZ's in a region.
That guaranteed is available in regions that only have two publicly available
AZ's.
------
romaniv
At the end of the day, Azure and AWS are monocultures with considerable amount
of centralization and interdependency within their services. Their scale
undermines the original purpose behind the Internet.
It bothers me that increasing number of large companies dump their own data
centers to jump into The Cloud. Thia means future outages (which will
undoubtedly happen) will have wider and wider impact on end users.
For example, if your email is hosted on AWS and it goes down, you loose access
to your email. No big deal. However, if your email, VOIP and IM/chat go down
at the same time, you may loose all ability to communicate electronically.
This can be a very big deal in certain situations.
~~~
otterley
The original purpose behind the Internet was to build a robust layer-3 network
based on packet switching technology. The designers weren't focused on the
application layer.
Source: [https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-
internet/br...](https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-
internet/brief-history-internet/)
Separately, I think we have enough history of working with the cloud at this
point to demonstrate that major providers' availability is on par with, or
better than, the availability of the typical small entity. Sure, the impact is
potentially wider spread (although this can be mitigated with a cellular
architecture, which first-class providers do employ), but there's a perverse
advantage that when outages occur, they tend to get fixed a lot faster because
the complaint volume is much higher.
~~~
romaniv
_> when outages occur, they tend to get fixed a lot faster because the
complaint volume is much higher._
On the other hand, they can be much harder to fix, because the sheer scale of
failures and complexity of the infrastructure. There is a higher probability
of complex systemic issues, as demonstrated by this very outage.
There are plenty of smaller providers that beat Azure VMs in uptime. Plus,
smaller websites/services can employ much simpler failure mitigation
strategies.
~~~
otterley
The "complex systemic issue" here is that Azure is only now rolling out
availability zones, and the product in question hasn't yet been able to take
advantage of them to mitigate a serious DC fault caused by an Act of God.
The necessity of low-latency-but-decoupled-physical-plant AZs is well known in
the art by now, and these issues will no doubt be addressed as Azure matures.
Remember, they're 5 years behind AWS.
~~~
romaniv
_> The "complex systemic issue" here is that Azure is only now rolling out
availability zones,_
Availability zones are a _mitigation_. The issues is the sequence of events
and dependencies described in the postmortem. The description has six
paragraphs.
~~~
otterley
I'm not precisely sure what you're referring to. Can you cite the precise
problem discussed in the postmortem, and how, specifically, you think it could
have been better designed?
And how could your perfect model, whatever that is, survive a similar
catastrophic DC failure without availability zones?
------
swebs
That's an extremely roundabout way of saying there was a lightning strike and
they had inadequate surge protection.
------
em0ney
Really not the worst post mortem I've ever seen
------
sungju1203
just use AWS. simple.
~~~
Bhilai
Comments like this are counter productive for the discussion. Competition is
always good and some of us like that AWS has competition in the form of Azure
and GCP. AWS has had its own share of outages so its not perfect either.
------
byte1918
> VSTS (now called Azure DevOps)
Not again.
~~~
herbderb
What's the point of even mentioning that when they just use the old name for
the entirety of the article anyway
~~~
skrebbel
The point is that the headline should've been "Azure DevOps Outage…" but
they're afraid that other outlets will take that over as "Azure Outage..." and
they don't want a headline like that making the rounds. So they use the old
name for bad news and the new name for good news.
TBH I'd do the same.
~~~
freeone3000
But is _is_ an Azure outage. It took out a DC. VSTS is one of the services
affected, but other services were also affected.
------
indemnity
Is this what we have to look forward to as GitHub will be forced onto Azure?
~~~
manigandham
No service is perfect and github has had plenty of outages. They will only
become more reliable with the resources of MS/Azure at their disposal.
~~~
tumetab1
Having worked in big Azure customer I wouldn't say resources equals stability.
The reality is more resources + quality engineering + failure testing.
As this case tells, Azure, isn't spending a lot on failure testing. Also,
having experience with being an big Azure customer, I can tell you that things
look better than they are.
~~~
eropple
Small Azure customer (five figures a month), but can co-sign all of this.
Azure looks shiny from the outside but we've had way, way more problems, from
uptime to bad APIs to _awful_ language SDKs to bad user interfaces to
licensing hell, than I've _ever_ had on AWS or GCP. It's so bad that I am
currently weighing whether or not to advocate for a migration off of it, at
nontrivial expense, because I cannot pretend to provide reliable services for
our customers.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: I Just Got A Used MacBook Pro. What To Install? - tronium
I just got a late 2011, 15-inch MacBook Pro from my older brother. I enjoy programming/developing a lot, so what apps should I get/install on the new system for developing and productivity?
======
jevinskie
Divvy lets you easily resize windows to a grid pattern. There may be similar
free utilities but I found that it was worth the $14.
[https://mizage.com/divvy/](https://mizage.com/divvy/)
If you are interested in binary objects/executables, check out MachOView.
Think of it as an excellent GUI version of nm/readelf (for MachO, obviously)
with search.
[https://github.com/gdbinit/MachOView](https://github.com/gdbinit/MachOView)
~~~
tsm
People at work use SizeUp, which is free and beautiful:
[https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/](https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/)
I use Slate, which is free and powerful:
[https://github.com/jigish/slate](https://github.com/jigish/slate)
~~~
kovrik
+1 for Slate
------
karangoeluw
Some apps I use every day:
\--------------------------
Homebrew - [http://brew.sh/](http://brew.sh/)
Growl - [http://growl.info/](http://growl.info/)
Alfred - [http://www.alfredapp.com/](http://www.alfredapp.com/)
Sublime Text - [https://www.sublimetext.com](https://www.sublimetext.com)
Transmission -
[http://www.transmissionbt.com/](http://www.transmissionbt.com/)
Transmit - [http://panic.com/transmit/](http://panic.com/transmit/)
Evernote - [http://www.evernote.com/](http://www.evernote.com/)
BetterTouchTool -
[http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1722](http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1722)
Dash - [http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash)
F.lux- [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)
~~~
arzugula
I thought Growl was kind of dead since Apple introduced Notification Center?
------
vincentbarr
These are my 'must-haves', or very close to it, and most of them are free or
offer a free version.
Alfred 2 (search and a lot more)
aText (text expansion)
Adium (Chat)
Adapter (audio/video filetype conversion)
Caffeine (prevent display from dimming or sleeping)
Chrome (browser)
Colloquy (IRC client)
Dash (documentation and snippet browser)
Dashlane (password management)
Doubleplane (window resizing)
Dropbox (cloud storage)
Evernote (notes, bulky)
Firefox (browser)
F.lux (smart display brightness)
Handbrake (video transcoder)
Hazel (file/folder automation)
iTerm (terminal replacement)
Jumpcut (store and recall clipboard history)
MailMate (email)
Mou (markdown editor with live preview) Readkit (RSS reader)
Screenmailer (free, easy screencast creation and sharing)
Simplenote (notes, lean) Skype (calls)
Spark (hotkey)
Sublime Text Editor 3 (text editor)
TicToc (time tracking)
VLC (media player)
------
hansy
For the people who use Alfred
([http://www.alfredapp.com/](http://www.alfredapp.com/)), I'm curious to know
Alfred's advantages over the native Spotlight (which IMO works fairly well) or
other similar apps like Found
([https://www.foundapp.com/](https://www.foundapp.com/)) or Quicksilver
([http://qsapp.com/download.php](http://qsapp.com/download.php))?
Oh and to add my two cents to the OP's question:
HyperDock ([http://hyperdock.bahoom.com/](http://hyperdock.bahoom.com/)):
Windows 7 functionality to preview individual windows
------
Croaky
[https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop](https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop)
will install Homebrew, Tmux, Silver Searcher, Postgres, Redis, a few
programming languages, and other items.
[https://github.com/thoughtbot/dotfiles](https://github.com/thoughtbot/dotfiles)
sets up a bunch of slick aliases and plugins for Vim and ZSH to make
development productive.
------
shawnreilly
Lately I've become a fan of isolating multiple environments. This way I can
run different IDE environments on the same machine without conflicts or
dependency problems. There are quite a few ways you could do this, ranging
from entire VM's (something like virtualbox), to VM containers (something like
docker), to language specific isolated environments (something like virtualenv
for python or rvm for ruby), to prebuilt environments (something like
bitnami). Each one has different pro's and con's (too heavy, too complex, etc)
but the general idea is the same; Having the ability to build multiple
isolated environments makes it easier for me to maintain those environments.
It also gives me the flexibility to test different environment variables with
some sort of fallback if something goes wrong. So it's something I would
recommend, but YMMV. Another recommendation I would make (not software, but
still a must IMO) is to install an SSD and max out the RAM. Feels like a whole
new machine! Good luck and have fun.
------
ken_laun
You have a good older brother.
I recommend these apps.
<Developing>
iTerm2
Firefox
Sublime Text
Cyberduck
Xcode
Gimp(Image)
Skitch(Image)
<Productivity>
Evernote
Dropbox
Alfred
Memory Clean
1Password
------
jmagnusson
Alfred App is an absolute essential in my book (especially custom web
searches) [http://www.sequelpro.com/](http://www.sequelpro.com/)
Sublime Text. Makes u feel like a magician.
[http://www.sublimetext.com/](http://www.sublimetext.com/)
Sequel Pro. Best db manager out there. Wish they just supported more than
MySQL. [http://www.sequelpro.com/](http://www.sequelpro.com/)
iTerm2. The built in terminal in OS X kind of sucks.
[http://www.iterm2.com/](http://www.iterm2.com/)
Homebrew. The missing package manager for OS X.
[http://brew.sh/](http://brew.sh/)
~~~
surreal
( Typo, Sequel Pro's URL has been put for Alfred App. For convenience it's
[http://www.alfredapp.com](http://www.alfredapp.com) )
------
marmarlade
Some great submissions here already (second/third the usual suspects Divvy,
Alfred, VLC, Sublime Text et al.)
Depending on what you use for productivity, you might find a Pomodoro Timer
useful. There are loads, and I quite like this one:
[https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pomodoro-timer-focus-on-
your...](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pomodoro-timer-focus-on-
your/id872515009?mt=12) (or just use the Chrome app [http://tomato-
timer.com/](http://tomato-timer.com/))
And for writing creatively, I can highly recommend OmmWriter.
[http://www.ommwriter.com/](http://www.ommwriter.com/)
------
rgawdzik
The other recommendations are awesome.
For me, I like using a lot of desktop window management, however the Mission
Control transitions are too slow for me, with the fact that are bulky and
uncustomizable.
There is TotalSpaces2, which basically is similar to Ubuntu/etc spaces, but
you can customize the transitions, hotkeys, locations, etc. Even though I
don't have any transitions (so my switching is instant), you can have cube
transitions, etc, very similar to Gnome. Downside to the program: $18, with a
trial. If you miss proper desktop management, do it. Combined with Spectacle
(A tiling window manager), I have functionality similar to XMonad, so I can
use my mac effectively.
------
BillyParadise
Lets see... I recently went Mac for the first time, and what do I have on
there?
For "serious" work-related things, I have Sublime Edit and MacPorts. That's
everything. I picked up Omnigraffle but it's just not all that useful to me
with a small screen. I'll look at using it again when I replace my desktop
with a mac (or when I get an external monitor for the MBA)
Oh, and I have MSDN access, so I put Office on there. But honestly, I never
use it.
(Disclaimer, I'm an old school "only have 1 page of apps on my iPhone" kind of
guy)
------
celias
SourceTree from Altassian git and mercurial client, free
[http://www.sourcetreeapp.com](http://www.sourcetreeapp.com)
CodeRunner from Nikolai Krill for easily running/testing code snippets in any
language, $9.99 on the App Store
[http://krillapps.com/coderunner/](http://krillapps.com/coderunner/)
------
british_geek
Guardian Angel is pretty cool, it locks your Mac when you walk away so you
don't need a password to lock / unlock it. Definitely worth checking out for
$4 - [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guardian-
angel/id657241260?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guardian-
angel/id657241260?mt=12)
------
collyw
Windows
~~~
adamconroy
Ditto
------
xauronx
I'm a fan of Sip, it lets you grab colors off the screen and generates code
for you.
------
itazula
Notational Velocity
------
2close4comfort
Quicksilver
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Industry job for 1+ year or try directly for grad school? - cybernoodles
Curious about what your thoughts would be on the pros and cons of the two options and whether or not going into industry for a bit would hurt or improve someone's chances. My real passion is research. I've been told working at one of the top tech companies could only help me get into my desired program (CS, possibly ML/AI).
======
elmarschraml
Go work in industry for a bit before you go to grad school.
Why?
You already know academia, but not industry. There is a good chance that you
will like working in industry, and after a year or two will think that going
back to school would have been a waste of time. And if not, you can always go
to grad school later.
Even if you are already set on going to grad school, having worked in industry
will give you a much better idea of what really matters to users and
applications in the real world and will probably give you good ideas about
what direction to take your research.
And on the practical side, you can make more money in an industry job, so you
can save up some money, and spend the time in grad school not having to worry
about finances.
------
narwally
I'm going through that same decision right now. I'm currently doing an
internship at a startup that is allowing me learn machine learning and data
analysis in a production setting. Like you I eventually want to do research,
but I think grad school is just one way to get there. I'm going to spend
another year or so in industry, see if I can make it into doing the kind of
research I'm interested in, and if not I'll head back to school.
I see grad school as taking a massive pay-cut over 2-6 years in order to
further my education. However, If I can get a similar education while being
payed at market value, then there's no competition.
~~~
cybernoodles
How could you get that same education while being paid market value? Don't
these companies require a post-grad degree in order to be considered for
research positions?
------
codegeek
You can always go back to school. But nothing beats real industry experience
specially if you can work at one of the top tech. companies. So I would say go
get a job, work for a year or 2 and then decide if you still want to go back
to school to continue research etc. You will have a much better idea.
On the other hand, if you feel that your chances of getting into one of the
top. tech companies is not that great right now but you can get into a top
grad school program, then go for the grad school. You will connect with top
companies there.
~~~
cybernoodles
Sorry. Forgot to mention, I have an offer from one of them. Would it be a bad
idea to try to negotiate the "non-negotiable" starting salary since the stocks
and signing bonus wouldn't be much use to me? (I need to be there for probably
4 or 5 years for all the bonus and stock stuff to be dispersed. I'd say about
25% of it would be dispersed before I went off to grad school without needing
to be repaid.)
------
forward_number
Having a year of experience may help you to define your research interests
with a more pragmatic goals in mind. A complaint that I frequently hear from
friends who have got into academic research is that there are very few people
in the world who can understand the area where they do research. Presumably,
if one can focus one's research one the area that is of interest to the real
world, one can find many more people to talk to, get motivated, etc.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution - dmmalam
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588104-humble-usb-cable-part-electrical-revolution-it-will-make-power-supplies
======
kabdib
It's going to be interesting, from a security standpoint. One of the original
cracks on the PS3 was via the USB stack. I'd not go plugging my computers or
phones into jacks that I don't necessarily control.
I can see a market for buffering devices that allow power through, and perhaps
do power negotiation for you, but that do not allow data traffic. I believe
these devices already exist. though I don't know how sophisticated they are.
~~~
x0x0
(I'm not an engineer). I a similar article; iirc android phones could be owned
by plugging them into a hostile usb connection. I wonder, though, if you
couldn't produce a simple adapter that just drops some of the pins? Maybe I
don't know enough about usb.
~~~
jdietrich
You can buy just such an adapter from the link below; Version 2 is in the
works, which will include a microprocessor to allow for full-power charging.
[http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms](http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms)
~~~
x0x0
thank you jdietrich
------
Brakenshire
This is interesting as a contribution to the solar net metering debate. If you
have a local low-voltage DC network, perhaps backed up by a UPS, you can
charge the UPS battery using solar, and that means that solar electricity
generated on-site automatically displaces grid electricity at the retail rate.
That means that solar would only need to compete with the retail price of
conventional electricity, and not the generation cost. And solar cost is
already at or near parity with retail price in many parts of the world:
This is 2010: [http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/solar-pv-its-cheaper-than-
yo...](http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/solar-pv-its-cheaper-than-you-
think-58689/bnef-12)
And this is 2025: [http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/solar-pv-its-cheaper-than-
yo...](http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/solar-pv-its-cheaper-than-you-
think-58689/bnef-2025)
(Countries above the isobar have lower solar costs than the price of
electricity from the grid)
~~~
furyg3
Of course you also have generation costs, though (The solar panels, the UPS).
------
ams6110
One problem with low-voltage DC is that according to Watt, to achieve
equivalent power (watts) at a low voltage, current is higher. And heat is
proportionate to current squared. So you can't send a lot of power at low
voltage because you lose a lot to heat. That means low-voltage runs have to be
kept fairly short, or very low power, limiting their usefulness.
~~~
GammaDelta
Funnily enough USB's inability to work over longer cable lengths works in its
favour here. Generally we don't rely on anything working over 3 metres.
Wikipedia says "the maximum power supported is up to 60 W at 20 V, 36 W at 12
V and 10 W at 5 V" [1]. For a typical 3 metre 20 gauge USB cable 10 W power
delivery will cause a voltage drop from 5 to 4.6 V. This is within the
+0.25/-0.55 specified for USB 3 [2].
Since nobody can rely on the 5 V from USB to be exactly the charging voltage
they need, there will probably be switchmode regulators in-line anyway. Device
manufacturers will just have to spec these up a bit to accept higher input
voltage if they want more than 10 W.
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Power_Delivery_Specificatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Power_Delivery_Specification#PD)
[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB)
~~~
michaelt
Yeah, it's fine for USB cables. The difficult bit would be if you're planning
on cabling an entire office building from one low voltage DC source, like the
solar panels the article mentions.
If you want 60 watts at 20 v is 3A, and if you want to supply a hundred ports
with that you're going to need copper cables the size of your finger.
~~~
tanzam75
A standard is currently being developed for DC distribution in datacenters and
commercial buildings, at 380 volts.
One of the proposals for residential DC is to supply 380 volts and 24 volts.
The higher voltage would be for things like space heaters and hairdryers,
while the lower voltage would be for electronics.
------
kochb
This was posted a month ago as well, discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591186)
~~~
jcampbell1
I find it notable that this article entirely ignores the EU's Common
Electrical Power Supply law
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply)),
which effectively mandated that all smart phones sold in the EU use micro USB
for power. This had a swift and noticeable effect in the diversity of
connectors in phones (basically Apple is the only maker that doesn't use micro
USB and this change happened at the exact time of the law). The emergence of
USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property,
but via considered government regulation. Government: it can actually work.
~~~
icebraining
The EC memorandum was only passed after the industry had already decided on
its own to implement it: [http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/mobile-industry-unites-
to-drive...](http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/mobile-industry-unites-to-drive-
universal-charging-solution-for-mobile-phones)
------
jzwinck
This is great. Five years ago I carried on trips a phone with a proprietary
USB cable, a GPS with mini-USB, a pocket camera with a like-sized charger (and
2m lead, which I refactored), and a AA battery charger for the rest of the
stuff.
These days, bike lights charge from mini-USB (or even have integrated USB A
plugs), phones are semi-required to use micro-USB, computer mice have USB
charging and data, and I recently learned that even pocket UV water treatment
devices use micro-USB and integrated Li-ion instead of AAs now. I think the
only use I have for AA batteries anymore is a camera flash. One of the
requirements when I bought a pocket camera recently was that it charge via USB
(Sony gets this; Olympus sort of does but their cables are "special"; Canon
has one or two models).
USB power can also do wonders for places where mains power is provided only
part of the day. Those USB "power banks" are already taking off, and the more
things we can use them with, the better.
We've basically killed off the C and D-size battery, the 6V lantern, and a
bunch of other unnecessary form factors. Now let's finish the job--we can make
AAAs as obscure as AAAAs if we get USB charging remote controls, and there's
no reason we can't make smoke detectors last a full year if we get rid of
their antiquated and inefficient 9V packs.
P.S.: America, think about migrating to 220-240VAC outlets someday. The fewer
standards, the better. You can make USB wall outlets standard at the same
time!
------
_Adam
If anyone is interested in the actual technical details, check out the docs
here:
[http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/](http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/)
There's a 37.7MB zip and the USB PD specification (328 pages) is packaged
within.
In order to ensure shit doesn't melt, they'll have detectable cables for >5V
and >1.5A operation. I'm reading the spec to find out how they plan to do
cable detection. IC based, or electrical connections, or maybe something else?
------
blocke
Network engineers in campus and enterprise environments have been building a
DC network overlay for years in the form of Power over Ethernet. All of those
VOIP phones, access points, and security cameras all need DC power with UPS
backup and the network closet has become where that power is provided.
On our campus it's reaching the point where every switch we'll be buying will
soon be PoE. I imagine many places are far ahead of us on this.
What is the max cable length of USB Pd?
------
fab13n
100W at 5V means 20A. We usually recommend 4 A/m2 max for copper conductor
sections, so it would require two 5mm2 wires in the cable here. It would feel
more like a rod than a cable IMO. Anyone got an idea how they plan to address
this? Higher voltages?
~~~
kyzyl
Well they're pretty limited in what they can do. Most things you'd plug a USB
cable into are not thing you'd want to plug higher voltages into, so that
would require device-side voltage conversion which is wasteful in energy,
space and complexity.
I suspect that the 100W figure is actually just a pulsed maximum
specification. The thing is that current ratings for wires are actually
specified as a max. continuous current for a given temperature rise in the
conductor, per unit length. So blowing 3-4x the current through a conductor
for a very short time (think of flashing a bulb or moving a servo) is not a
big deal. You just get a transient heat rise. Also, most applications simply
don't require 20A. Even microwaves and kettles stay below the 15A residential
fuses. (Although they do come close. I once had a shitty basement suite with
an underrated fuse. If I ran my toaster and my kettle at the same time the
breaker would flip!)
~~~
nickff
Almost all your USB-powered devices have voltage converters with varying
inefficiencies.
It should also be noted that a switched mode voltage converter can have well
over 90% efficiency, even with large changes in voltage.
You should also remember that those microwaves and kettles are getting up to
15A @ 120VRMS continuously, which works out to 1800W. You can verify the
actual power output of a kettle by timing how long it takes to boil a liter of
water, and calculate power from this time and the specific heat capacity of
water.
~~~
kyzyl
There are some practical limits to voltage conversion if you want to keep that
high efficiency. Probably most important is that your switching frequency
shouldn't be as high as it is in most small devices (because high freq. allows
you to use smaller components).
In any case, as dfox mentions, most internal voltage level conversions won't
be switched, because it adds complexity. They will be some form of linear
regulation s.t. they can move between logic levels. That's different than
moving from whatever high voltage is on your 150W USB line into a level that
won't fry CMOS circuitry. There's a reason that the wall-->DC plug conversion
usually happens in a brick on your power cable. Switched mode will be used as
sparingly as possible, such as when you also need AC signals rectified, if you
need both buck and boost depending on a battery or something, or if you need
to be able to modify the control loop dynamically.
> those microwaves and kettles are getting up to 15A @ 120VRMS continuously,
> which works out to 1800W
Well that's kind of my point. Even at 1.8kW those devices don't need to draw
20A continuous (or even pulsed, because of the fuse). Basically no matter what
you're doing, the copper losses are roughly fixed by the hardware. What you
can control are heat dissipation and current levels, and it's a lot more fun
to play with Ohm's law than try to fight against thermodynamics.
------
zhte415
In 2006 China demanded all mobile telephone manufactures to standardise on USB
connections for charging and data transfer. South Korea did so a year earlier,
requiring 'standardized charging' without explicitly stating USB. [1]
I'm curious if or how this requirement had any impact on charger
standardisation. The Chinese market combined with economies of scale for
common production models could have outweighed any cost benefits a market for
chargers could have brought.
[1] [http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chinese-Government-Demands-
US...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chinese-Government-Demands-USB-Access-
Mobile-Phone-Chargers-43092.shtml)
------
pkulak
Anyone know how this standard actually works? I think right now Android phones
tend to short the data lines and Apple uses some system of voltages to
communicate that it's high power, which means that the other device usually
gets stuck pulling 0.2 amps. How does this new standard tell the device it can
supply 100 watts? And does this mean that iOS and Android will be stuck on 0.2
amps? Can you plug a legacy device on at all?
~~~
em3rgent0rdr
[http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/](http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/)
USB has both power and data lines. This new standard can use data lines to
negotiate power delivery, I believe. I'd expect will still be backwards-
compatible of course. I would think the only allowable voltage would be 5V, as
is currently.
~~~
srinivasanv
100W at 5V would be a 20A current, which is sort of high.
[http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/PD_1.0_Introduct...](http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/PD_1.0_Introduction.pdf)
Page 9. There will be different voltage levels: 5V, 12V, and 20V.
~~~
em3rgent0rdr
yup, I had read that and corrected exactly same time as you :)
------
simcop2387
With the new USB Power Delivery spec this can finally make sense to really
start thinking about. Being able to power things that are "non-trivial" as far
as power goes would make this go a long way. Imagine your sound system being
powered off of a very clean DC power source, would be an audiophile's dream.
20V and 100W would make for a lot of nice options for powering things.
~~~
quesera
> 20V and 100W would make for a lot of nice options for powering things.
Requires a pair of 17AWG stranded wires for a 2m run, allowing 3% cable loss.
For comparison, cat6 is 23 or 24AWG stranded, and US residential power wiring
is typically 12 or 14AWG solid core. Smaller numbers are bigger, less flexible
wires.
I guess it won't work with microUSB contacts, or at least not at full power.
------
perlpimp
On wikipedia I can count at least 6 different types of connectors for
different voltages/current, sounds like a deal breaker to me.
I'd rather have devices adapt Power over ethernet which requires just one
cable and gives many more opportunities for networked future of devices.
in fact
[http://www.commercialintegrator.com/guide/product/details/po...](http://www.commercialintegrator.com/guide/product/details/poe_to_usb_chargers_it_chrg_p2u_it_wpchrg_p2u)
[http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/the_wire/2012/06/14/fsr...](http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/the_wire/2012/06/14/fsr-
powers-up-for-infocomm-2012-with-new-poeusb-charger-for-ipad/)
So I think R45 is a better standard to rely on, that it does have option to
carry networked data and intelligently carry voltage to charge usb powered
devices.
you can already get RJ45 hubs on the cheap too, ones with 8 ports and such.
~~~
kalleboo
We'd need a "micro-RJ45" to get any adoption among portable devices such as
phones or tablets. And some solution to those terrible plastic clips.
------
skreech
Disregarding the flamboyant visions of an electrical revolution, just having a
flippable physical interface (and hopefully not in three different sizes, two
of which always gets mixed up) would be a huge enough leap forward for
everyday life.
------
legulere
They forgot to mention the most important thing about the system from Moixa:
It's variable voltage and devices generate the needed stable voltages
themselves.
------
imahboob
love USB.. now I don't have to go looking for a compatible charger or
connector when ever I lose mine
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
10 Most Recommended JavaScript Scene Articles of 2015 - ericelliott
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/10-most-recommended-javascript-scene-articles-of-2015-292be655d6cc
======
honua
The article is written by Eric Elliot and literally every one of the ten
articles he recommends he wrote himself.. reminds me of the plastic surgeon in
the show Workaholics who said "I'm widely considered by myself to be the best
plastic surgeon in Rancho Cucamonga"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Anything better than Tableau for data viz, dashboards? - datavizq
I am in charge of implementing a web-accessible dashboard to visualise some data we are collecting on behalf of a client.<p>I am currently planning to use Tableau. However, my (admittedly very limited) exposure to the platform has left heavily underwhelmed. Tableau dashboards appear expensive, slow, ugly, and completely lacking in statistical tools.<p>Can anyone suggest a platform that can improve on any/all of these issues?<p>I am experienced with Postgres, JS, Ruby and Objective-C, and also with Stata and R, so I'm not afraid of some coding. But I am looking for something considerably quicker than coding the thing from scratch.
======
click170
As someone who has multiple years of experience maintaining tableau, it is
laughably Ops unfriendly.
Want to change the email address that tableau sends reports to? Requires a
restart of a Tableau.
Want to update the ssl certs used in tableau? That's a restart.
Want to upgrade tableau to a new veraion? Get ready to uninstall and reinstall
the new version.
Of all of the servers and services that I manage, Tableau is my least
favorite. However, apparently its incredibly good at what it does. I say
apparently because I maintain it but I don't use it in day to day operations.
------
learnyearn
If you want to leverage R, there is a web application framework called Shiny
that lets you build interactive apps from R analyses:
[http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/](http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/)
------
gerpsh
If you're using more common visualizations (e.g. bar chart, line chart,
scatter plot, etc) there's an excellent js library called C3
([http://c3js.org/](http://c3js.org/)) that wraps charts implemented in D3
with a super-simple api. I'm a huge fan.
~~~
colordrops
I did a lot of test plots with several D3-based charting libs, and found
weirdness with C3, such as performance degradation over time, and oddities
like including the label for the data as the first entry in the array. NVD3
seemed to be the most mature and sensible of all the libs I tried.
[http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/)
------
kposehn
I can't believe I'm going to say this, but tableau can easily be the right
solution.
So, if you're dealing with large datasets stored in multiple systems (like
Excel + MySQL + others) Tableau can be a boon.
The ability to use many different sources of data, create calculated fields
that merge/modify other fields, and then operate against them? Quite nice.
I especially am happy with how I can create larger visualizations that work
across different disparate datasets from many sources.
However, it does have quite a few issues in terms of UX, usability, etc. but
so far I've liked it. Your mileage may vary :)
------
bmh100
If you want something with a lot of batteries included, extensive through
JS/HTML5, and fast, look to QlikView [1]. Message me (address in profile) if
you want someone to show you around the platform.
[1]: [http://www.qlik.com](http://www.qlik.com)
~~~
spaceactuary
In my (admittedly limited) experience, you'll probably run into some of the
same issues with QlikView being "expensive, ugly, and completely lacking in
statistical tools".
~~~
bmh100
I have deep experience in the QlikView (QV) platform, so I can address some of
the points in your experience:
> expensive
QV is not free, that's for sure. You'll be spending tens of thousands of
dollars for the one-time license fee, as well 20% yearly maintenance. On the
other hand, you'll be saving thousands of hours of engineering effort by not
reinventing the hundreds of wheels already in the platform. Don't succumb to
"not invented here" syndrome.
Check out a few dashboards I designed in just a day total [1], or the vendors
demos of Twitter data [2], HealthData.gov data [3], or Salesforce.com data
[4].
> ugly
If you are a first time user, the default visualizations are ugly, no doubt.
But for someone with design skill, the visualizations can be made quite
beautiful. For wanting more tools, just add your favorite JS library and HTML
to make a custom visualization.
> completely lacking in statistical tools
Fortunately, QV can link with R, allowing you to all the advanced capabilities
you need. Need something more specific? Throw a microservice REST API on top
of your desired application, and load that in through a GET request. There are
Hadoop connectors also built in.
One thing that people often don't realize when comparing Tableau and QV, is
that QV is a platform, as opposed to Tableau being just a visualization tool.
QV includes ETL, task scheduling, and an in-memory analytics database.
[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/3Tzni](https://imgur.com/a/3Tzni)
[2]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Social%20Media...](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Social%20Media%20Buzz.qvw)
[3]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Epidemiology%2...](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Epidemiology%20-Tycho.qvw)
[4]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Salesforce.qvw](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Salesforce.qvw)
~~~
chris_wot
I have to agree with this assessment. Qlikview does ETL very well.
------
hobbe80
I like periscope.io myself, although I haven't done an in-depth comparison
between the current options.
------
travisoliphant
You might take a look at Bokeh
([http://bokeh.pydata.org](http://bokeh.pydata.org)) and either the PyData
stack or R (Bokeh can be used from R as well:
[https://github.com/bokeh/rbokeh](https://github.com/bokeh/rbokeh)). Bokeh
inside a Jupyter notebook with widgets and/or emerging "Bokeh Apps" is a
powerful application stack. Anaconda is a single download that can help you
get started with all the tools (including R):
[http://continuum.io/downloads](http://continuum.io/downloads)
It still requires some coding but it is very powerful. There are a lot of
examples in the Bokeh gallery and in examples directory:
[https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/tree/master/examples)
.
There are several devs on Bokeh mailing list eager to help and the company
behind Bokeh ([http://continuum.io](http://continuum.io)) can provide more
significant help if you need it.
------
jkaykin
I quite like BIME
([http://www.bimeanalytics.com/](http://www.bimeanalytics.com/))
------
Afton
Disclaimer: I work at Tableau, but I don't claim to represent them, and I'm
not in tech support or sales.
Two things that are likely: If you think the statistical tooling is limited
you may not be aware that Tableau offers R integration built in. So if you're
comfortable in R you can probably build what you want.
[https://www.tableau.com/new-
features/r-integration](https://www.tableau.com/new-features/r-integration)
If you find it slow, it may be something that tech support can help out with
(changing config settings, or reworking your dashboards to be more
performant). You should email whoever manages your account, or hit up
[https://www.tableau.com/support/request](https://www.tableau.com/support/request)
and include your contact info.
You can also email me (email in profile) and I'll get back to you from my work
account with the right contacts.
------
mclemme
I've used Dashing quite a bit, for relatively simple data, demo here:
[http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample](http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample)
official page: [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)
------
tixocloud
It really depends on what your use case is. There are still many unknowns
related to implementing a web-accessible dashboard to make a decision.
What does your client intend to do with the dashboard? How much interactivity
do they want in place? Is the data real-time? What sort of advanced
statistical analysis does your client want to run?
Having answers to those might help guide you toward or away from Tableau. As
an everyday user of Tableau with a solid technical background, there are some
things that Tableau does well and there are some that it doesn't.
I love Tableau because it allows me to join many different data sources
together quickly so I can analyze the data. I can easily drag-drop and
visualize my data in many different dimensions. That said, sometimes the
analysis is basic and it runs slower when there's a huge dataset.
------
buu700
For Cyph, I initially looked into Tableau and various analytics platforms like
Mixpanel, then ultimately realised that Google Analytics (which we were
already using) had an events API that worked fine for our needs.
See:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events)
And this is what our dashboard looks like:
[http://i.imgur.com/F8g8Hxq.png](http://i.imgur.com/F8g8Hxq.png)
It's fairly basic when it comes to visualisations, but thought I'd throw it
out there in case it's helpful.
------
jboggan
I don't know about built in statistical tools beyond the basic aggregates
available in SQL, but we (Fullscreen) have been using Chartio and are really
enjoying it. I'd say it does great for 95% of the dashboards and
visualizations we need (custom d3.js for the rest) and it plays well with our
data sources. Particularly coming from Redshift data I found Chartio a lot
snappier than equivalent charts in Tableau, especially for large data sets.
You can either use their UI to make charts, or write pure SQL, or my preferred
method of making most of the functionality in the UI and tweaking the SQL for
the last few details if you need something bespoke.
~~~
JPKab
Chartio looks awesome, but I'm unable to get any pricing information from
their site. Care to elaborate on the cost for a small shop to leverage this
for a few dozen users?
------
ryanatallah
Argo ([https://argo.io](https://argo.io)) is a web-based tool that enables
fast, natural-language based question asking and visualization of data. It's
designed to be used by a non-technical user, so you can share dashboards and
visualizations with people, and they can ask their own questions.
Under the hood, Argo uses advanced search processors to turn natural language
queries into SQL, optimized for visualization.
You can request a demo on their website: [https://argo.io](https://argo.io)
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and CTO of Argo
------
ecyrb
Kibana / ElasticSearch? It's limited, but pretty and interactive, and gets you
a bunch with very limited up-front work. I'm sure you can find some better
demos, but here's one:
[http://parlement.letemps.ch/](http://parlement.letemps.ch/)
HUE is a similar but different alternative. The "search" tab has some great
demos, but appears to be down atm:
[http://demo.gethue.com/](http://demo.gethue.com/)
------
akg_67
Though Tableau is incredibly expensive, I haven't yet found anything better
that Tableau for web dashboard and visualization. Tableau is strictly a
visualization tool and not statistical analysis tool. Tableau expects you to
perform all the calculation on the back-end and send it the final data for
visualization. I have also used Shiny, D3, Flot, Highchart, Chartio, Spotfire,
Bime, FusionCharts,Qlickview and nothing comes close to Tableau.
------
gt565k
I'd suggest you use a JS library like HighCharts or D3JS (or both). All you
need to do is format your JSON on the back-end in the correct format and throw
it into the chart's configuration.
HighCharts has an amazing API, documentation, and examples.
[http://www.highcharts.com/](http://www.highcharts.com/)
[http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/)
~~~
panorama
What's your opinion on Highcharts usage longterm? I find it's great to get
something up and running, but I've found myself hitting limitations,
especially when it comes to custom design. But it's possible I may just be
using it ineffectively. I always assumed that one day I should port my
company's charts over to D3 if we wanted to be _serious_ about our data
visualization (which makes up a big part of our site).
In other words, is it like Bootstrap in that it's a useful starting tool, but
doesn't really scale well if you want to have full design control in the
longrun? Do you happen to know any notable sites using Highcharts? Thanks in
advance.
~~~
gt565k
You can style almost anything on the chart with CSS and HTML I believe. Custom
tooltip templates, etc
The API docs are just fabulous, with examples for everything :)
[http://api.highcharts.com/highcharts](http://api.highcharts.com/highcharts)
------
MrApathy
QlikView is similar to Tableau, though more powerful and with a steeper
learning curve. But if Tableau is too expensive, likely that QlikView is, too.
Another option is Looker, a relatively new product that relies more heavily on
existing transaction/DW infrastructure. Dashboards are not ugly.
You can also look at d3, though by comparison development time will be much
slower than the other two I've named.
~~~
chris_wot
If you've got SQL experience it's actually very easy to learn Qlikview
scripting language. I recently finished a gig where the CEO retrenched all the
IT staff and didn't bother to have any of the Qlikview dashboard processes
updated. I had to pick up Qlikview in a few days, and had it all worked out
pretty fully within 2 weeks. Learning "set-analysis" took me few days to get
up to speed.
It's honestly not that hard to understand. The difficulty as always is putting
together a sane data model.
------
chahex
You might want to try out Tibco Spotfire; it is similar to Tableau and Qlik.
They do provide some statistical tools (I personally don't know much about
it). And they do have a WebPlayer to view the dashboards online.
See demos here:
[http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos](http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos)
~~~
doctaj
I use Spotfire regularly, and it's a pretty good tool. I highly suggest
getting professional training, though, because our team didn't and it just
took FOREVER for everyone to get in the swing of things.
It's really good for allowing your end users to explore data - it just
requires a lot of development time to make really usable (ie: to make it more
than "just a dashboard").
It has been built with R in mind from day 1. They have their own "Tibco
Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR)" which I don't get to play around with much,
but it's an obvious place to start for advanced predictive stuff, machine
learning, and general data manipulation. Using the "RinR" package, you can
pretty much do anything that R can.
My only absolute HATE with it is the LACK OF FREE SUPPORT/Community. Even
though they have a nice "tibbr" (Facebook for businesses, basically)
especially for Spotfire support, it's all behind a login wall, so it's not
indexed by Google at all and it's not very searchable in my experience. In my
opinion, this is a fatal mistake with their entire solution. Forums are
amazing. Forum posts stay around forever. Very rarely do you want "the newest"
forum post. You usually want a SPECIFIC forum post - making tibbr an awful
user experience for support.
Additionally, their OLD forum/community IS indexed by Google, so you'll end up
at dead-ends (404s with the exact information you want, conveniently
highlighted in Google just before the answer is presented). Only a few people
have blogged about it in the past, and even those are usually old versions.
Also, basically no one talks about it on StackExchange. So, I just find it
really hard to find answers to specific questions - like you might naturally
do when programming to get a problem fixed quickly.
That said, it's super flexible and might be worth a look. I have very limited
experience with Tableau and Power BI, but those lacked some of the convenience
features I was used to when I used them. Personally, I wish I were forced to
just program all my data visualizations in R or Python, haha.
------
jastr
VQL is a gui for really quick analysis and plotting. It’s mostly for non-
technical people, but we’ve had data science teams that use it to explore
their data before breaking out IPython or Tableau.
I’m the founder of VQL. Nothing on our site yet, but happy to send a
demo/instance. My email is jstrauss (then an @ sign) getvql.com
------
civilian
One candidate is [http://redash.io/](http://redash.io/) My team has a backlog
task to set it up. We use bigquery to hold onto our data, and redash can work
with that.. It's open source, so it's free (except for one server) and looks
good.
~~~
jhorman
We use redash for some basic reporting. It is nice, and development is active.
------
asdfprou
My favourite right now is Looker. Dashboards are beautiful and ad hoc query
creation is dead simple and on point. You will save yourself many "oh could
you re-run this data but split it out by device type?" moments because your
clients should be able to do it themselves extremely easily.
------
thorin
Jasperserver with jasper reports has dashboards and is much improved now with
visualize js. The dashboarding is only in the free version i think and not
sure how the cost compares to tableau. It's much cheaper than business objects
or oracle bi publisher etc though.
------
q2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FusionCharts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FusionCharts)
EDIT: This seems to be heavily used in industry as well as in Federal IT
dashboard...etc. So it appears to be a good choice.
------
dedalus
Interana ([http://www.interana.com](http://www.interana.com)) which is a YC
S12 company sounds like your best bet.
Whats your scale? how many events per day/month etc?
------
dreaminvm
D3.js or even Google Charts will get the job done for most visualizations.
------
bra-ket
Pentaho, Saiku, or plain D3.js on the front end with your own middle layer
------
apurvadave
A new product you could take a look at is
[http://www.jut.io](http://www.jut.io). It's in beta / free for anyone.
It's a streaming analytics development environment, and uses d3 for
visualization. It ingests both events and metrics.
It's based on a high-level dataflow processing language that allows you to
process your data flexibly (moving window analytics, anomaly detection,
general statistical processing). you can build interactive apps & dashboards
and control which facets users can manipulate.
aaand here's the disclosure - I work at Jut and run customer success.
------
whatok
Demoed Tableau at work a few years back and it was lacking in real-time
visualizations. Is that still the case? If so, anyone have any
recommendations?
------
slake
I'm a user. I haven't found something as good.
------
drewrv
Clicdata is user friendly and affordable.
[http://www.clicdata.com/](http://www.clicdata.com/)
------
alison985
Looker. Looker is the best. It's an upfront monetary investment, and the
language you most need to know is SQL, but I love it dearly.
------
mstkrft
[http://www.bimeanalytics.com/](http://www.bimeanalytics.com/)
------
marianoguerra
take a look at [https://event-fabric.com/](https://event-fabric.com/) we
didn't officially launched the saas version but I can set up an account for
you to try it for free of course.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Where can I hire designers? - sidwyn
I need a new icon and UI for my iPhone app - Definition.<p>Been looking through oDesk but somehow it doesn't really appeal to me. Browsing through Forrst and Dribbble is driving insane too. Anyone has any good contacts experienced in iOS design?
======
lachyg
<http://www.dribbble.com/> is the best source of designers. Browse through it,
searching keywords, etc, and then click on the profiles of 10-15 that interest
you.
Contact them. Easy!
If not, shoot me an email and I'll hook you up with a designer (emails in
profile). I've connected about 20-30 HN'ers with designers.
------
limedaring
Not sure if you'll find specifically iOS design, but <http://sortfolio.com> is
another service for finding designers.
------
solost
My contact information is in my profile, contact me if you want to discuss
your specific needs.
------
rfugger
Try <http://99designs.com/> ?
~~~
djb_hackernews
whoa! $1000 for a 2 page mockup?
------
taitems
I'm interested, maybe we should chat? taitbrown@gmail.com
------
paulsingh
I've been using brandstack.com for ny side projects.
------
niico
Drop me a line. My email is in my profile
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is there a name for the 'web shortcut' services? (tinyurl, tinypaste, cli.gs, etc) - AlexeyMK
Other than 'web shortcuts', is there an umbrella category name for tinyurl and the resulting offshoot services?<p>This feels like an interesting niche blog to start.<p>[Full disclosure: I created look.fo and str8.to]
======
pwoods
I think they are referred to by there services. Like tinyurl is a tinyurl. But
if you wanted to coin plink I'll support it! Only 1,499,999,999 internet users
to go
~~~
AlexeyMK
Yes; but what would you call the industry as a whole, do you think?
------
AlexeyMK
(just found this) lifehacker is calling them "url shrinkers" -
<http://str8.to/best-url-shrinkers>.
------
ram1024
call em plinks <\-- cause it's cute
short for hop-links maybe?
~~~
ph0rque
how about urlets (not sure how one would pronounce that)
~~~
ram1024
ooh i like that one too!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Final Beta released - jgillich
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2014-March/000181.html
======
ghotli
Most of the articles and chatter I can find talks about the changes in 14.04
from a desktop perspective. I only run ubuntu on servers and vms. Does anyone
know where I can find a good changelog as to what's changed between 12.04 LTS
server and 14.04 LTS server?
~~~
hnriot
most of the reasons for running ubuntu are dekstop oriented. Centos is
probably a better bet for servers.
~~~
cies
I will not voluntarily use "yum" on a server in a million years.
Debian has always been my favorite, and currently we use Ubuntu on servers as
the OS-packages-as-shipped are more up-to-date; which turns out to be quite
important in web-dev-land.
Frankly I dont know what CentOS/Redhat does better then Ubuntu nowadays, apart
from selling enterprise stuff like JBoss :)
~~~
jgillich
What's wrong with yum? I never had any issues with it on Fedora and CentOS and
actually prefer it over apt* (mainly due to it's speed).
------
scanr
I'm using 12.04 LTS quite extensively. For folk in a similar situation, how
long are you thinking of waiting before switching to 14.04 LTS?
~~~
negativity
Ubuntu's user interface upgrades as of 11.10 (the "unity" interface) sucked so
bad that I refuse to use Ubuntu beyond verision 10.04 on desktops/laptops.
11.10 was when I switched over to Mint and never looked back, and it seems
that doing so was a wise move, given the Amazon adware/spamware/spyware that
Canonical saw fit to include in more recent versions.
[http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182)
Even though Mint includes proprietary binaries (like Flash and Audio/Video
codecs), which may or may not contain opaque questionable material, at least
the third party non-open-source software is something that (arguably) improves
the distribution and actually serves a purpose for me, as the end user.
Mint has changed over time too, though, and now I'm thinking about moving to a
personally customized Debian image, and a hobbyist project. Hopefully it won't
prove to be too demanding to pull off.
~~~
JeremyMorgan
I too was pushed to mint after 11.10 but I'm sick of Mint now too. Not only do
upgrades break it frequently, but I find small 'glitches' that end up taking
up too much time tracking down. Stuff like Wifi dropping, and icons in my
taskbar dissapearing, random browser crashes etc.
What I did was decide to sit down and do an Arch install. Yes it takes time,
and yes you have to know what you're doing. But I invested the time up front,
and now it runs very reliably, and faster on the same machine.
I say if you want to GSD the best thing to do is set up something like Debian,
Arch or Gentoo and invest the time setting it up so you can use it without
problems later. I don't know about you but I have better things to do than
screw with an OS all time, I have real work to do. These "harder" distros are
great for that.
~~~
vivin
I am using Mint 16 now; first time using it. Previously I was using Ubuntu. I
had to switch to Mint because we got W540's at work which has a lot of new
hardware that is not currently supported (well). I wasn't able to get Ubuntu
working on it properly, but I have been impressed with Mint so far. The only
issue right now is that it doesn't see my nvidia card and so I have to use the
integrated chip instead of the discrete one. I'm hoping that Mint 17 fixes the
issue.
How hard is it to get a custom system up and running from Arch? I haven't done
anything like that in a few years although I've had a lot of experience with
setting up custom FreeBSD systems. Is it more or less like that?
What I'm reaching for is something that "just works" and that I can work on
reliably instead of having to fix obscure problems all the time. I figure once
I set something up that works, I can simply create an image of it to use
later.
~~~
JeremyMorgan
Arch isn't that hard to set up, it's still easier than Gentoo. You just have
to set it up from an explicit point of view. You must know every detail of
what you want, and each item up, rather than a "10 clicks and I have an OS
now" type of setup.
It helps to have a good knowledge of Linux to do it, because you know where
things should go and where to look if there is a problem, but it doesnt'
require you to become a kernel hacker just to get it to a prompt.
------
JanezStupar
I would use this magnificent milestone to raise my hand and ask...
Nvidia, where are my native Linux Optimus drivers?
~~~
vanderZwan
I dunno, but as someone on a laptop with an intel HD 4000... who can I thank
for this _ridiculous_ increase in performance? Default Ubuntu has gone from
laggy to rivalling Lubuntu in responsiveness.
~~~
JanezStupar
For me Unity stopped working somewhere between 13.04 and 13.10... (Asus
UX32VD).
I am going to upgrade to 14.04 in a couple of months and see what happens.
~~~
mdeslaur
FYI, I'm currently running 14.04 on an UX32VD. I was previously running 13.10,
and that worked great too.
------
listic
What improvements in touch device and HiDPI support have made it to 14.04?
I'm going to use Ubuntu on Microsoft Surface Pro 2, because even though full
convergence for Ubuntu is delayed, I think of all Linux distros it is in the
best position to run on such devices. Some enthusiasts have made 13.10 work on
Surface Pro 2, surely it can only get better from there?
[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183946](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183946)
~~~
matb33
I'm also eagerly awaiting HiDPI support (I have one of those QHD screens on a
15" display, 3200x1800!). There is apparently some support for it in the GNOME
version (I've read it was not perfect though). Don't recall where I read this
but it was rumored HiDPI may come to 14.10. Probably no more than a rumor...
But at least a version number to look at helps me cope :)
~~~
owaislone
14.04 has very good HiDPI support per monitor unlike Gnome. I've been using
14.04 for months and am loving it on a retina display for the last few weeks.
The shell scales perfectly, GTK3 apps scale as well. Firefox has the
`layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` setting in about:config that you can change to 2
or 4 to make it scale properly.
Chrome doesn't yet support HiDPI screen but setting the default zoom level to
200% does the trick.
~~~
matb33
Upgrading now just to try this! (Now to get past "symbol
'grub_term_highlight_color' not found" on boot... I should have waited for the
weekend to update to a beta release!)
------
Yuioup
Is there a short summary of changes since 13.04? The blueprints list is quite
extensive.
~~~
jgillich
[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/03/ubuntu-14-04-beta-
release...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/03/ubuntu-14-04-beta-released)
------
ausjke
I already moved all my servers to Debian, have not decided when I should do
the same on the Desktop side yet, I don't really care about games/MIR/smart-
UI-decision-made-for-me/one-GUI-does-all-screens etc, all I need is vim and a
browser, with newer tested packages installed underneath for development.
~~~
thinkmassive
I was using Arch as my laptop OS for a couple years until just recently
switching to Ubuntu Server 14.04. Since I use i3 it still seems like the same
environment. The reason I switched is because I'm developing solely on Ubuntu
Server 12.04, and it's less work to get things working once instead of twice.
Is there any advantage to using Debian over Ubuntu for servers and/or
development?
~~~
ausjke
I feel Ubuntu is moving towards more to the mobile arena which _could_ impact
the desktop/server quality especially for the long run. It could also be
fighting a battle that is too big with its limited resource(i.e. stretched too
thin). I switched to Debian as a precaution.
------
butchlugrod
Just installed it into a VM. No issues, very slick. The UI scaling stuff is a
neat addition. Haven't tried the Server edition yet, but I imagine I'll start
deploying that in six months or so. Precise Pangolin has been my bread and
butter for servers.
But why does it still have a "Floppy Disk" icon in the launcher? This is 2014
right? I feel like that is even more absurd than using a floppy disk icon for
save buttons in documents. My desktops and laptops don't even have optical
drives anymore, much less floppies.
~~~
Shorel
> But why does it still have a "Floppy Disk" icon in the launcher?
Because the BIOS of the VM reports a Floppy Disk even if you add no Floppy
Disk to the list of hardware installed.
That's a bug for the VM BIOS, and a feature for Ubuntu.
You can disable it if you want:
[http://imgur.com/anGmzpj](http://imgur.com/anGmzpj)
------
sesm
Very excited to see Ubuntu Studio getting LTS support.
------
keithpeter
Desktop oriented end user here: Does anyone else use the mnemonic shortcuts,
e.g. ALT-F-A for Save As... and in LibreOffice Alt-I-O-F to pop a mathematical
formula into a document?
Broken completely in 13.04 and 13.10 and somewhat broken in 14.04 (Alt-F opens
File menu but any attempt at a second note in the chord opens a different top
level menu).
Otherwise sensible changes, menus on window bars makes sense on larger
monitors and shrinking sidebar very nice on a 1280 by 800 screen. Very snappy
from live image on a Core Duo 2 laptop with Intel graphics (Thinkpad X200s).
Good for demonstration of Linux!
~~~
kleiba
Not exactly, but ALT+F is M-f in Emacs which is by default bound to forward-
word, i.e., lets you jump over a word. When you run Emacs inside a terminal
window, I find it quite annoying that the Menu bar gets activated when you use
that shortcut.
------
username42
I am very happy that Ubuntu GNOME is present. This means no unity for the next
3 years ;-)
~~~
adwf
At the risk of starting a flamewar, is Gnome 3/Shell really any better? I've
never felt quite so unproductive as when I use Gnome nowadays.
~~~
daivd
I have never quite understood all these desktop emotions. I run Kubuntu, but
almost never interact with any desktop features. What is it in your workflow
that requires you to interact with Gnome/Unity? (just curious)
~~~
cturner
alt+tab. Used to work perfectly. Now broken. I've returned to debian stable,
which comes with a gnome-2 legacy option that works out of the box just as
well as it did a decade ago.
~~~
vertex-four
Go to [0], install, configure to either "all windows" or "all windows in
current workspace", and alt+tab probably works like you want again. It's not
terribly difficult.
[0]
[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/)
~~~
rglullis
Or, you know... just keep using an old, stable, dependable version. But you
can't do that with GNOME since they are such rabid fans of the CADT model.
------
ciupicri
Is it to me or this release hasn't switched to systemd from upstart?
~~~
kijin
AFAIK, the systemd decision was finalized too late to make it into 14.04.
Last-minute changes are not a good idea for an LTS release that emphasizes
stability.
This also means that Canonical gets to keep supporting their darling (Upstart)
for another five years ;)
~~~
Already__Taken
It does mean at least that a systemd LTS ubuntu will be completely bulletproof
with so many years of work from all other distros in it....
------
dexcs
fyi: "final release expected on April 17th, 2014."
~~~
Kudos
Also, upgrading to the final release will happen automatically with your usual
`apt-get upgrade`.
Edit: to clarify, I mean upgrading from this release to the final.
~~~
richardwhiuk
Are you sure that's true? Normally it requires do release upgrade?
Normal upgrades also require apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade the kernel as
there's a new package.
~~~
gnur
Upgrading from beta to release is apt-get upgrade. Update from 13.10 (or
12.04) to 14.04 is do-release-upgrade.
------
ycombasks
Any idea if it will be possible to keep the menu in the title bar from being
hidden? It looks like you have to mouse-over to show it, which could be a pain
if I'm trying to access it often. I'd like to see where to take my mouse
without guessing.
~~~
smithzvk
I just watched a video overview of the changes. It seems like you must still
mouse over to reveal the menus, even with the new option to put menus in the
title bar of the window instead of at the top.
~~~
ycombasks
That's a bit annoying. Hopefully someone will release a patch or something
that keeps it from hiding.
~~~
smithzvk
I think this is a reminder that different interfaces work for different
people. I think that the Unity interface, with its hidden menu bars,
application menus, scroll bars, etc. is almost perfect and a clear step in the
right direction (with the huge exception that it crashes frequently, hopefully
this will be fixed for me in the 14.04 release). The idea that I would ever
access a drop down menu by mouse is in some way ridiculous and signifies a
failure of the application's user interface. Again, that is what I think and
it is obvious that other people think drastically different things.
~~~
ycombasks
How else would you access it? I often access the toolbar in Sublime Text, for
example, so I'd like to keep it visible.
~~~
smithzvk
Typically via holding alt and pressing short cut keys. That is the old way to
do it. Unity introduced a new way to do it where you use the alt key and a
text box comes up which allows you to search the options by keyword. It could
be done better in Unity, but I still like it better than searching though the
hierarchy that mostly never made sense to me.
The real answer is that things like Vim and Emacs long ago came up with
interfaces that don't require toolbars/menubars. They were added a long time
ago, but I am amongst the people that turn them off and don't use them even
though they are available. For many of us, mousing is less efficient than well
tuned muscle memory.
~~~
ycombasks
Perhaps so. I tried Ubuntu with Unity a little while ago and didn't like it
much--I'm used to minimizing to the taskbar and seeing the names of the
programs. I settled on Linux Mint as it offers a clean and "classical" way of
doing things.
I'll consider trying out Ubuntu again when 14.04 LTS comes out this month.
Maybe I'll get used to it, who knows.
~~~
smithzvk
To me Unity just made sense and if not for it crashing entirely too often and
incurring a performance hit due to all the eye candy, I wouldn't look further.
To me the nice thing about GNU/Linux on the desktop is that each person can
have the interface they want. This has secondary benefits where if you have
your interface which is significantly different from my preferred interface,
it forces application developers that really care about supporting their users
to develop high quality abstraction layers that support both. The same goes
for software packaging, driver support, general compatibility of proprietary
software, etc. So, by all means, keep using Mint, it is in my best interest if
you do (and yours, and everybody elses).
------
davidgerard
Toshiba Portege R830-13C, Intel HD Graphics 3000. Minecraft, running in
Xubuntu 14.04 on openjdk 7.51, is having graphics problems that it didn't in
13.10. (No, I haven't filed a bug yet, yes I should ...)
Anyone else running Minecraft on Intel HD Graphics 3000? In 14.04 or
otherwise.
------
hit8run
Is Python3 now the new default Python?
~~~
rlpb
Define "default". Both Python 2 and Python 3 are installed by default (it's a
goal to not have Python 2 installed by default, but Python 3 is already
there).
If you want /usr/bin/python to be replaced, this is unlikely to ever
happen[0], but what difference does that make?
[0]
[http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/](http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/)
------
herokusaki
Based on your experience is it stable enough to upgrade to already? Previously
some final betas were.
~~~
pizza234
I've found the Ubuntu [Desktop] stability to be in constant decline over the
time, even experiencing bugs in the installers in the latest versions.
A few notes: \- the "stability" I refer to is always minor errors \- I remove
lots of packages every time I install it, although I've experienced system
error notifications even when I didn't uninstall anything
All in all, I'd say that there is a lack of polishing, at the low-level, more
than lack of stability.
There is no excuse for having the installation fail, though, and it happened a
number of times.
To reply the question directly, I've used betas a few times, and they worked
as much as the final version for me. I wouldn't do it now though - in the
past, for my usage, some types of changes were very significant; today, I get
very little in upgrading.
~~~
chrismonsanto
> I've found the Ubuntu [Desktop] stability to be in constant decline over the
> time
I wish I never upgraded to 13.10. Sometimes drag-maximizing my window can
crash my entire system. And compiz leaks memory like a sieve, sometimes I will
wake up to find compiz using ~5.5gb of memory and the system will be unusable.
Gotta restart!
When I first upgraded, I thought "oh, it's always like this at the start,
they'll fix it." And here we are at the next version and it still hasn't been
fixed.
Probably jumping ship (to another Linux distro) once my next work deadline
passes.
~~~
kator
Or maybe dig in and contribute a fix?
~~~
chrismonsanto
Is this a serious suggestion? I can't even reliably reproduce it. It just
happens randomly. The problem could be unity. It could be in compiz. It could
be in the nvidia drivers, which I don't even have the source to. Who knows
what in that mess causes my system to lock up.
Regardless, I do not have enough loyalty to Ubuntu to do this kind of work.
There are a number of open source projects that I am involved with, and if I
spend time on this (likely to be fruitless) endeavor, I end up with less time
to spend on projects I care about.
My post is purely to vent, and to serve as a warning for those looking to try
Ubuntu Desktop. My personal opinion is to try something else. I am.
~~~
popey
For anyone who _does_ have the time and inclination to debug this there are
some comprehensive docs on the wiki
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging) \-
I've used these steps to get backtraces before so devs can get stuff fixed.
------
csense
I hope they fix the part where Unity is crashy, slow, and has a really sucky
user interface.
I mean, seriously, Unity is a piece of garbage. You have to look up some
magical key combination to do something as simple as launching multiple
instances of an application. It's as bad as the Mac [1] -- designed to cater
to users who aren't smart enough to understand the concept of "multiple
instances of an application."
In order to launch something, you have to search for it -- WTF? I don't want
to search for my application, I know what application I want to run! Let me
run it dammit!
That whole "no menu you can browse and discover what's installed on your
system" is a huge barrier, especially to new users to the Linux ecosystem,
because how are you supposed to know the default email client is called
Evolution, or your spreadsheet is "LibreOffice Calc"? If there's a
comprehensive, categorized menu of all installed applications, you can look
through it to, you know, _browse_ what's on your system.
Unity is supposed to be good for noobs. I probably have way more understanding
of computer fundamentals than anyone who fits in the "noob" category so I
probably have a better chance of figuring out what the UI's _trying_ to do, I
probably have way more tolerance for crappy, clunky UI's than most noobs [2],
and every time I've tried Unity I've usually uninstalled it within a day. If
Unity sucks too much for _me_ to handle, the only noobs I can see sticking
with it are those who've never used a computer before and have no idea that
it's possible to do better.
[1] Sorry if this isn't up to date. I don't use Macs much; the last time I
used a Mac was sometime around 2004.
[2] I played a lot of DOS games in the 1990's. Enough said.
------
cies
Any other netrunner-os lovers here? Its an Ubuntu derivate with KDE by
default, but with much more sane defaults and loads of goodness preinstalled
(ad-blockers, YT-downloaders, Steam, codecs, etc.)
I love it! (but it's released several months after Ubuntu is released)
------
Shorel
I tested it in a VM. It is like a low latency version of what the previous
version is. Extremely responsive.
Now I need about 6 ppas to add support for Trusty before I can upgrade my main
system to it.
Including TrueCrypt.
------
anonbanker
been using 14.04 for about 2 months now. if you're reliant on open drivers
(Radeon, Nouveau), and use HDMI output, understand that Kernels 3.13.x and
3.14.x are going to be miserable for you, and you'll be limited to sub-720p
resolutions due to regressions in the drivers. 3D has much improved, but the
lack of 1080p makes this a dealbreaker for me right now.
------
nitishdhar
good to see Ubuntu GNOME has been kept
------
onmydesk
who?
------
horaceho
I love LTS!
------
retube
Things I would like:
1) drop the ridiculous Unity desktop. maybe I am old and out of touch, but
that was <i>horrific</i>.
2) Dual boot just works with UEFI/Windows 8.1
3) Supports audio and graphics hardware in common brands like Acer
I have 9 installed on a samsung since 2009 and it's been an absolute pleasure,
just worked. Trying to get 12 or 13 onto a modern Acer however... was a
nightmare. V disappointing. I still don't have a functioning soundcard and the
battery indicator only starts 1 in 10 boots.
~~~
jfoster
Why would you use Ubuntu if you think Unity is ridiculous? That's like getting
a Mac and saying that Apple should drop OS X.
It's very clear that Unity isn't for everyone, but I don't understand why
people who know it's not for them seem to still want to use Ubuntu.
~~~
unicornporn
True dat. If unity does not appeal, there are *buntu options. IMO, Xubuntu is
the way forward.
~~~
zanny
Xubuntu doesn't have the flashy mass market appeal. For power users its great
due to its low footprint, but if I was trying to sell Linux I'd show them
Cinnamon or Zorin or KDE, and _maybe_ Gnome, because they all have eye candy
and the first three work a lot like Windows (albeit KDE is a lot more powerful
than the rest in that regard and would probably scare newbies off).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How does Twitter implement following and followers between users? - benkovy
I have always been curious as to how twitter implemented this in their user model. How do they keep track of who the user is following and who is following the user?
======
tedmiston
In 2010, Twitter was using a graph database, FlockDB, instead of a relational
database to implement their social graph where relationships like following
and followers are represented as edges between nodes that represent people.
It's since been deprecated, and I'm not sure what type of database they're
using today. Anyway, they have a nice write-up blog post [1] and FlockDB is
open source [2].
[1]:
[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/introducin...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/introducing-
flockdb.html)
[2]: [https://github.com/twitter-archive/flockdb](https://github.com/twitter-
archive/flockdb)
------
bsvalley
\--- USER TABLE ---
| USER_ID |
| USERNAME |
| NB_FOLLOWERS |
| TWEETS -> List of TWEET_ID's |
| FOLLOWING -> List of USER_ID's |
| FOLLOWED_BY -> List of USER_ID's |
etc.
NB_FOLLOWERS, FOLLOWING and FOLLOWED_BY are updated when a USER
follows/unfollows another USER.
------
miguelrochefort
User1 follows User2
User1 follows User3
User3 follows User1
User3 follows User5
...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Oculus Rift co-founder killed by a car speeding form police. - bamfunkified
http://3dgeeks.com/news_story/oculus_rift_co_founder_killed_by_a_speeding_car_ina_police_chase.html
======
ColinWright
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5802474>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Facebook hack - jeffmould
So a few hours ago I looked at my FB on my laptop. At the top of my profile was a message that my account was memorialized. Doing some digging it seems anyone can submit a request to FB to have one of their friend's profiles memorialized. It appears that when that happens whoever is listed as the legacy contact can take control of some things on the person's page. There is no proof required, you simply fill out a quick form with profile and date of death.<p>https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192<p>Anyone ever heard of this and is there something going on with FB? It seems like there is significant potential for abuse for this without having to prove the person is dead.
======
exolymph
Appears to be a widespread bug: [http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-
death-bug-tells-peop...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-death-bug-
tells-people-they-died-2016-11)
On the one hand, this is hilarious. On the other hand, I hope no one gets
confused and thinks that someone is actually deceased.
~~~
dwiechert
Also reported here - [http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/11/13602824/facebook-
just-ki...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/11/13602824/facebook-just-killed-
everyone)
~~~
exolymph
Casey Newton cracks me up.
------
ganeshkrishnan
Press F to pay respect
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Myself (interactive programming demo) - IA21
https://codepen.io/jakealbaugh/full/PwLXXP/
======
King-Aaron
That was extremely cool, and would make for a useful little demo for front end
development students (and maybe also for people working in the field, grinding
their teeth looking for something to engage themselves with!)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Recursive Women in Tech Issue - DoreenMichele
http://gistofthegemini.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-recursive-women-in-tech-issue.html
======
lkrubner
I think partly people want an explanation for why women's participation in
tech has declined so much since the 1980s. Consider:
\----------------------
_Suppose there was overwhelming evidence that 95% of women were terrible at
technology and 5% of women were awesome at technology. There are roughly 7
billion people on the planet, roughly 3.5 billion women, roughly 1.5 billion
women who work outside the house for a wage. In this scenario, where only 5%
of women love technology, there are 75 million working women who are awesome
at technology. According to the Bureau Of Labor Statics, the USA had 1,256,200
software developers in 2016. The BLS also tracks some other minor categories,
such as Web Developer, which have about 150,000 jobs. Lump all the sub-
categories together, and let’s say there are 2 million such jobs in the USA.
Let’s be wildly generous and double the number for the EU, and triple it for
Asia. That gives 12 million software developer jobs in all of the advanced and
developing economies. So even with exaggerated assumptions about women’s
inherent weakness in technology, we still end up with a scenario where every
single programming job in the world can be filled by a woman who will be
awesome at the job. There is no need for men, at all, in the tech industry._
[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-
productivity-h...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-
has-been-undermined-by-the-hubris-and-power-grabbing-of-elite-computer-
programmers)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
“This is my Merrill Lynch portfolio – 1.83% expenses, underperformed S&P 500” - keywonc
http://hellomoney.co/portfolio/347
======
philrea
Problem with the arg how can an "average" investor expect to compete against
the big dedicated investment houses is that in most respects the big guys are
average at best.
Speaking as a former aspiring fund manager turned software developer, most of
the tools at these manager's disposal are simplistic and completely invalid
yet in most cases the manager's don't quite understand them anyways.
Bottom-line: its a boys club of MBAs whose curriculum still says the sharpe
ratio is important and holds their students responsible for at the very most
being able to calculate probabilities from a normal distro using a table of
values.
Solution: invest in a lot of risky small companies, you will lose most of the
time but, those few winners more than make up for the loss. Spread across
enough bets stats says its very unlikely to lose. Contrast that with your
family's 401k split in two a few years back while invested in the "blue-chips"
------
nodesocket
I've had pretty good luck in the market. Owned a REIT
([http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp))
during the housing boom, owned APPL during their run up, and recently TSLA.
When I don't have a company I like I've owned QQQ (Power Shares 100), AGG
(iShared Bond), and various ETFs. I'm young so I can take risk, but honestly
you can manage your own investments without the fees.
------
iamahnsihyo
Pretty good portfolio, if you think 1.83 expexses fine, you have to bet more
risks.
------
junheek
1.83%? That's highway robbery!
~~~
Afforess
Maybe not:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/28ys30/this_is_my...](http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/28ys30/this_is_my_portfolio_managed_by_merrill_lynch_it/cifsa0p)
~~~
outside1234
There's always a winner but many many more losers for active portfolios in
general.
The research shows that the passive index tracking approach very convincingly
beats actively managed portfolios net of taxes and fees.
~~~
Bsharp
Approve!
I don't understand why Average Joe thinks he can beat investment firms long
term with staff dedicated to tracking each and every tradeable asset. Who do
you think you're trading with?
If you want to gamble on a company or a market shift then fine, but for the
most part that's just what it is - gambling.
~~~
7Figures2Commas
The Average Joe shouldn't be "trading." But the individual trader absolutely
has certain advantages over hedge funds and large institutions. One of the
biggest is that the average individual trader can move the needle without
establishing large positions. This often makes it possible for the individual
trader to take positions in securities that larger players couldn't invest in
even if they wanted to (and no, I'm not talking Pink Sheets issues).
There are of course lots of reasons many individual traders are not
successful. Lack of discipline and poor money management are far bigger
contributors to individual trader failure than lack of dedicated staff and
institutional tools.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
API Keys on GitHub - fabulist
I wanted to add something a little more dangerous to this recent meme. A lot of the time, people bake credentials into apps and then accidentally commit them. Especially database credentials and API keys.<p>A naive approach for hunting API keys gets a of false positives; things like api_key = "<VALID KEY>". But if we put some characters you'd be likely to find in an API key, we get a much better ratio.<p>https://github.com/search?q=api_key+%3D+%22z9&type=Code&ref=searchresults<p>Repeating the search with different values can yield a lot of keys.<p>Another method is to go for less keys, but more valuable ones. This has an awful signal/noise ratio, but the keys you find are pure gold to a bad guy.<p>https://github.com/search?q=amazon+api+key+%3D+%22g&type=Code&ref=searchresults<p>I expect most of these keys are redacted by now, but this has lead to real compromise in the past. This story was on HN a while back:<p>http://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining.html
======
techaddict009
Seems like you found a gold mine for hackers!
~~~
fabulist
They've been abusing it for a long time, and GitHub has taken steps to
remediation the situation.
There are also other avenues, such as PasteBin. I've seen a bunch of people
post, say, router configurations to PasteBin to share them with tech support,
including password encrypted with Cisco's broken password 7.
RaiderSec built a bot that find them automatically: twitter.com/dumpmon
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Botlist – An App Store for Bots - iisbum
https://botlist.co
======
bentossell
Hey! I'm one of the makers here
Appreciate any thoughts anyone else. WE are all ears :)
Mobile responsive isnt in place yet so apologies for that.
Trying to get bots/AI from different platforms in one central, 3rd party place
- not owned by Facebook/Slack/Kik etc.
We are looking to update more information - probably giving the bot makers the
ability to take control of their page, add more info and images so hopefully
that will help. Has been a time-consuming manual process so far.
Happy to hear feedback!
But yes, just a bare bones MVP for now
~~~
joshbaptiste
Saw an error and a PHP call stack and relative directories, should disable
that from being visible on a production webpage.
~~~
iisbum
Fixing that right now.
------
asimuvPR
Visited the site on mobile and could not find a little explanation about what
the goal of the site is. Maybe a short introduction might work. This seems
interesting but it's not fully clear what it aims to do now and in the future.
:)
~~~
bentossell
Gotcha! Will look into adding that :)
------
jedberg
Interesting business model. It's free to submit, but if you want to show up
"quickly" you have to pay $50. Even though it hurts me as a bot owner, I think
that's really clever!
------
an4rchy
This is a pretty neat idea. I know it's probably an MVP but a description of
what the bot does instead of forcing the user to click through to the bot
website.
~~~
ajpgrealish
There are some very short descriptions of what each bot does but it's not
enough to help me decide if it is what I need. I searched for a JIRA bot to
connect to slack but clicking the bot link took me to the install page rather
than more info.
~~~
bentossell
yeah we want to add more info on each bot detail page, then give the option
for direct 'install' or landing page.
------
iisbum
Very happy to launch our MVP for Botlist.
We hope someday it will become a fully fledged store, but for now we're
working towards building a complete directory of bots available on every
platform.
~~~
karimdag
I've seen this on Product Hunt but couldn't comment so now that I have the
chance to, Here's what I want to say: \- first, awesome idea. This would make
things way easier. \- second, say that I have built a bot, then what ? Would
it follow the same philosophy as the regular App Store? (Meaning you upload
then people download or buy) \- Third, you should add a FAQ and a roadmap so
that people can help! (Even with just an idea)
------
chillydawg
Are these bots just for slack? What do you consider to be a "bot"?
~~~
spinlock
I was thinking the same thing. I'll admit that I'm out of the loop when it
comes to slack but I've heard they don't support IRC. Seems too bad to me as
IRC would make a great platform for all bots rather than just for one
platform.
~~~
tyrust
Slack has an IRC gateway - [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connectin...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP)
------
dreeves
Beautiful collection! I'd love to convince you to reject from the collection
any smarmbot emails --
[http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot](http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot) \--
which I define as emails that pretend to be sent personally ("I noticed that
you recently...").
I realize a lot of hackers (I've argued with @patio11 about this) don't see
the problem with those. Maybe because it's inconceivable to us nerds how
anyone could be deceived by them. But some people are and I think the best of
both worlds can be achieved by either saying "we" instead of "I" \-- as in
"all of us, including the program that sends these emails!" \-- or just
appending something like "This email is obviously automated but you can reply
to it and it will go straight to me personally!".
------
sourcd
Nice design & +1 for the groundwork. How will you protect your hard work from
someone who just wants to scrape and clone it ?
There's also botpages.com discussed 3 days ago here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456651)
------
harry_botter
Saw botpages.com on Product Hunt last week. It looks like they're free to
submit.
------
toyg
502 bad gateway. _It 's dead, Jim._
~~~
eb0la
I think we're going to need a bot to tell us when _something_ that shows on HN
is back online :-)
------
yeukhon
My first foremost suggestion: try not to ask for password as a new site. I am
not saying I'd only trust the big players (they were once a startup or a
little project to begin with), but I would enjoy more if I can reuse
Google/Twitter/FB or whatever as an option.
Next, any plan for validating bot's security and privacy? Rules for submission
(must be open source etc?) Fake feedback is always a tough war in real
monetize app store.
------
amflare
My #1 question is where is the About Page? Even if it's just a small synopsis,
I'd like to know what this is, and what it is meant to do.
------
arcameron
Improvement: If I navigate to
[https://botlist.co/bots/filter?platform=5](https://botlist.co/bots/filter?platform=5),
then I should be able to see what each bot claims to do, without needing to
click in to the #show page
~~~
bentossell
yeh we are currently trying to figure out if taglines can be included in a way
that doesnt make the site look too busy/messy. possibly a 'quick-view'
------
tomc1985
Ugh. Now we're gonna be hearing about chatbots for the next 5 years :(
------
fiatjaf
I want to sell my bot which currently people are using for free, where can I
do if not in an App Store?
------
tomc1985
Also can we call these something else? Bot is too overloaded a term. "Chatbot"
is more accurate.
------
drewry
I'm getting "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." when trying to
register.
~~~
bentossell
hmm we've had a couple of instances so I will look into it! Sorry about that.
~~~
drewry
Looks like it's working now, thanks!
~~~
strictnein
Getting this now: 502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.8.0
~~~
bentossell
should be back up in next 10 mins!
Had overwhelming response today, sorry
~~~
prdonahue
May want to throw CloudFlare in front. (Disclaimer: I work there.)
------
findjashua
getting the following error:
[http://imgur.com/Duxzl6W](http://imgur.com/Duxzl6W)
~~~
iisbum
We didn't quite get zero downtime deploys worked out for our MVP :) If you
refresh thing should be working now.
Thanks!
~~~
findjashua
now i'm getting 502s :-(
------
swalsh
You should resubmit this as Apply HN:
------
woodruffw
Any plans for an IRC category?
------
studentrunnr
yikes - link doesn't work!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Recommended Space Books for Kids, 2019 - sohkamyung
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/space-books-kids.html
======
mncharity
Sigh. So, a common misconception in astronomy education, is that the Sun
itself is yellow. It's common even among astronomy graduate students at, err,
a first-tier institution for both astronomy research, and astronomy
_education_ research. Indeed, you can roughly guess who has/hasn't done the
'common misconceptions in astronomy education' class by asking them "[A five-
year old asks...] What color is the Sun?"
So it's utterly without surprise, but a sad commentary on the state of science
education, that I see... (via image and video search)
_ABCs of Space_ and _8 Little Planets_ have yellow or orange Suns. _Pop-up
Peekaboo! Space_ has no Sun, but yellow stars. I had hope for _Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star: I Know Exactly What You Are_ which used white stars when
explaining twinkling... before it explicitly said the Sun was "yellow", next
to something the same-ish orange color as the "Red" dwarf a few pages back,
and one page before a yellow Sun. _Moon’s First Friends_ , and _Planet
Hunting_ , and... ah well, I'll stop there.
The handling of scale is... never mind.
To be fair to astronomy graduate students, among first-tier non-astronomy
physical-sciences graduate students, a common response is some variant of "it
doesn't have a color; it's lots of different colors; it's rainbow colored" \-
misunderstanding color, rather than a classification scheme.
If some country ever aligns its science education content incentives with the
creation of robust understanding... it's kind of hard to imagine where they
might end up. But that's not us.
------
mncharity
"Launch Ladies" was a kickstarter project.[1]
[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameyerickson/launch-
la...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameyerickson/launch-ladies-a-
childrens-book-about-the-women-of)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What's the most secure communications method today? - JamesAdir
Assuming that I can exchange keys of some sort (physical, digital) with the other contact.
======
adrianN
What's your threat model? If you don't care about metadata and you can
exchange keys, use some form of symmetric encryption. If you care about
metadata then things are a lot more complicated.
But if you can assume that you have a secure channel for exchanging keys, you
can just use that channel for communication.
~~~
Retric
There are latency issues. Suppose you meet up once to exchange CDs full of
random data 20 years ago.
Now you can exchange messages with newspaper adds secure in the knowledge
nobody can ease drop even though your secure communication happened 30 years
ago. Granted, this is limited to low bandwidth text, but you can leverage this
for key exchange if you happen to trust some other form of crypto.
~~~
Tinyyy
Of course, given that the CDs are kept securely or promptly destroyed upon
use.
------
anikain
One time pad. without the original key, the message could litterally be
anything. There's no way to analyze the text at all
~~~
eeZah7Ux
Not again!
Your OTP is extremely sensitive to the quality of randomness and requires a
lot of it - which makes things very difficult.
It provides no authenticity and integrity or at least proof of tampering.
It does not protect from message reordering and capture+retransmission.
It obviously leaks metadata in a real-world usage: sender, receiver, msg
length, time of message.
~~~
falcolas
All of these problems are present with any pure encryption method. That's why
authentication hashes, message ids, high quality randomness sources, and so
forth exist. OTP can use these just as well as any other encryption method.
~~~
irundebian
What do you mean by "pure encryption method"? No one (no smart people) uses
AES purely, but of course in some mode of operation such as GCM which provides
integrity.
------
hnarn
If you want it to not only be the most secure, where the answer in my opinion
is symmetric encryption, but also the easiest to use, I would say using the
app "Signal" on a smartphone. As long as you're able to meet afk and you can
verify the safety number between the two phones, you should be good to go.
Disappearing messages adds another layer of security.
I'm sure there are ways that are more secure in terms of encryption strength
and opsec, but in the real world most people you want to communicate with
aren't savvy enough for most "truly secure" setups to be realistic.
~~~
zulln
What I dislike the most about Signal is the need for a phone number though.
Yes, I understand I could register with a temporary phone number but that
still is not good enough.
~~~
hnarn
Surely most smartphones will have a phone number anyway, no? It doesn't have
to be connected to you personally and it's a good way to keep illegitimate
Signal registrations down.
------
Jaruzel
The most secure conversation is the one you don't have to have.
~~~
dom0
The standard answer: Want to talk about something that could compromise you or
the company? Well, don't talk about it.
------
Fox8
Signal, Wire, Privus SecurLine, Riot (Matrix), Threema are good candidates for
audio and text secure communications.
Some leak metadata, some have countermeasures like not using own's phone
number (SecurLine and Threema) or using fixed bitrate for audio calls (Signal,
Wire, SecurLine).
If you want privacy and trust choose a solution in that you can audit the
source code and that it is verified by a third party auditor.
------
Tepix
Does a one time pad qualify for what you defined as "key exchange"?
One time pads are proven to be perfectly safe as long as they are used
correctly (read the first paragraph of the wikipedia page at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-
time_pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad) )
~~~
heinrich5991
If you want to avoid metadata, you need more than one-time pads.
------
kobeya
For what purpose? There are many trade offs to consider. Do you want
repudiation? Do you need group messaging? Synchronous or asynchronous? Etc.
------
perlgeek
Define secure. Is leakage of meta data (who communicated with whom, when, and
what size of data was exchanged) relevant? Or just the content? Is reliability
of delivery part of "secure"?
------
mr51m0n
Threema? [https://threema.ch/en](https://threema.ch/en)
------
uoaei
The process of exchanging keys will theoretically leak metadata unless you
already have an established secure line. In which case you will not need to
open a new one, defeating the purpose.
Anyway, the most secure method of communication would be to leave all
electronic devices somewhere far away and ideally locked in a solid metal box,
then meeting in person somewhere where surveillance is hard or impossible. In
the ideal case this will obfuscate all metadata including sender and receiver,
unless someone happens to see you travelling to or away from the meeting
place.
------
lmm
For letter-like communications GPG is fully open-source, has gone through the
fire of decades of use, and if you believe the Snowden leaks then even the NSA
can't break it. If you're serious about security use it via something like
Tails - keep the thing you boot from on you at all times, and never let
plaintext leave your securely-booted system
For OTR-style messages I'd find a fully open-source messenger that uses an
atoxl-like protocol - i.e. OMEMO (Conversations/ChatSecure) or Riot/Matrix
~~~
codewritinfool
The problem with GPG and the like is that the assumption is made that the end
platforms are secure (where the message is generated or read). They are not.
~~~
lmm
That's true for almost all cryptosystems. I mentioned Tails which is pretty
much the state of the art as far as securing the endpoint goes.
------
therealmarv
[https://vuvuzela.io/](https://vuvuzela.io/) \- Private messaging system that
hides metadata
------
Frenchgeek
Face to face in a SCIF?
~~~
anotheryou
I'd say going for a walk without phones in a noisy place is good. Any fixed
facility can easily be bugged.
Cameras are harder to hide, so handing over some folded paper that you wrote
on in private will be even easier. Just burn after reading :)
~~~
crottypeter
A noisy place might not give the protection it appears to...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone_array](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone_array)
~~~
anotheryou
Yes, the movement part is more important and to go somewhere you are not
expected. These arrays are indeed scary: [https://youtu.be/bgz7Cx-
qSFw?t=3](https://youtu.be/bgz7Cx-qSFw?t=3)
------
nottorp
One time pads (with good randomness) delivered by armed couriers. Sorry for
the non technical answer ;)
------
koehr
This really depends on who you are and from what you are hiding:
1) Communication between non-targeted (unimportant) individuals hiding
information from:
1.1) other individuals or non-governmental institutions
1.2) governments or GOs
2) Communication with targeted (important) individuals hiding information
from:
2.1) other individuals or non-governmental institutions that target you
2.2) governments or GOs
The first one is the easier one as expected:
1.1) Individuals want to secretly share information without someone else
notice. "Someone else" can be another person, family, friends, a teacher,
collegues or their boss.
Important here is, that the person to hide the information from doesn't target
you. This makes it VERY easy because the person doesn't necessarily expect any
secrets to be exchanged.
Simple chat apps do here. Telegram and others support self destroying
messages.
1.2) Individuals want to secretly share information without being
(potentially) tracked by the government. They are part of the grey mass of
"normal citizens".
As long as you or your partner are not actively watched by a government,
things can still be relatively easy. Standard apps (eg WhatsApp, Telegram)
might be even enough. Mass surveillance might be a problem though (in China,
Iran or the US for example) so to be on the save side, better use non-standard
software that is decentralised and uses hard encryption and something like
Off-The-Record messaging. Good and mature candidates would be of course XMPP
(aka Jabber) with OMEMO or the newer Matrix protocol.
2.2) Individuals want to hide information from someone who knows or suspects
that they do it:
As soon as you or your communication partner is targeted, things get a lot
harder. Now not only the information itself needs to be encrypted (good old
rubber hose decryption works against the best encryption methods). Other
individuals usually don't have sophisticated surveillance methods, so it
should still be relatively easy. Important is, that meta-information (who
communcated with whom at what time, etc) needs to be secret, too. As soon as
the one who suspects you to secretly share information knows that you did,
they will ask questions. Better they don't have anything at hand to do so.
Plausable denyability is the keyword. Off-the-record messaging provides this
but is of no use if you keep the chat logs or be seen. Even the contact in
your phone could be suspicious enough. Better use a dedicated system or
memorise the contact information and only use it without saving it. Never ever
communicate while the watching person could see it.
2.2) Governments or governmental organisations watch you:
Now this is the hard part. Hiding from a government that watches you and/or
your communication is REALLY HARD. Don't be fooled by advertised end-to-end
encryption and public law-suits of companies trying to defend their users
privacy.
You have no idea what GOs are capable of which is why you need to implement
measurements even against unknown attack vectors.
The best you can do is to hide your communication traces by following at least
the following rules:
* Never use something that leaves a trace of personal information. Use pre-registered sim-cards or internet cafes in different cities. Always use public proxies, TOR, everything.
* Use asynchronous communication: Leave an encrypted blob somewhere in the void of the internet without any receiver. The receiver needs to be potentially everyone but of course nobody except the receiver can be able to read the message.
* Use disposable keys. Hide signatures but never forget to use them! A cryptographic secure signature is the only way for the receiver to be sure that it is really your message and nothing intercepted or faked. But the signature needs to be hidden inside the unreadable crypto-blob.
Phew… that was a long one. But I hope it gives you and the interested reader
some insights.
Some links to kick-off the research:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-
Record_Messaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO)
[https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html](https://staltz.com/an-
off-grid-social-network.html)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(communication_protocol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_\(communication_protocol\))
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-
key_cryptography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography)
------
toanant
Consider using [https://keybase.io](https://keybase.io), they have recently
added chat feature as well to their app.
~~~
dsacco
Keybase Chat doesn't feature forward secrecy.
------
irundebian
Is there something like a state of the art one time pad implementation which
provides integrity and other security properties which are lacking with pure
OTP?
------
1ba9115454
Secure messaging on a bockchain. Due to the fact you no longer have to trust a
3rd party.
If you choose the Bitcoin blockchain then you can send your encrypted data and
no-one will know who decrypted it due to the P2P nature of the network. Every
node receives every message.
Example.
AES encrypt your message with a key you both know.
Add it to the message field of a bitcoin tranasction.
The person at the other end decrypts any transaction they find with a message
until they find one which does decrypt with that key.
For more securtity you can hide the message in the content of the transaction.
i.e. the public keys you pay to.
~~~
jwalton
> no-one will know who decrypted it
> Every node receives every message.
Neither one of these strike me as desirable characteristics of a secure
messaging system. I can see the advantage in a third party not being able to
tell who received a message, but in a perfect world as the sender I'd like to
know that only my intended recipient received it, which is the opposite of
what's going to happen with the block chain.
Also, to encrypt with AES you need to pick a key length, and since your
message is going to everyone in the world, you need to pick a key that is both
impractical to break using today's technology, but using all future technology
for as long as your secret remains relevant. If AES is ever broken, then all
bets are off.
If you have a chance to exchange keys of unlimited length ahead of time, then
you could use a one time pad and message over the block chain. This would be
secure, but then if you have a OTP, almost any message channel you pick is
going to be secure. Someone else in this conversation recommended using
newspaper ads.
~~~
1ba9115454
> no-one will know who decrypted it
This is useful when you want to send a mesage but you don't want anyone to
know who you were sending too. It's a form of obfuscation.
------
zero_one_one
Can you also assume absolute trust with the party you are communicating with?
------
miguelrochefort
The risk with communication is not to have your messages read by the wrong
people.
The risk with communication is to not have your message read by the right
people.
The risk with communication is for your message not to properly reflect your
true intent.
1\. We need to stop obsessing about privacy.
2\. We need to fight censorship.
3\. We need to improve our semantic model.
~~~
icebraining
These are contradictory statements, because privacy is an essential protection
against censorship. You're never completely free to speak if you can't speak
anonymously, and you can't speak anonymously if you don't have privacy.
As the SCOTUS wrote in _McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission_ , “Anonymity is
a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”
------
twobyfour
A face to face conversation in the woods, perhaps?
------
vgb2k11
>Assuming that I can exchange keys of some sort (physical, digital) with the
other contact.
Each contact has an identical table of data (pure-random, 1 terabyte, ASCII
256 or choose your own encoding); this is your "Key of some sort". Messages
sent between contacts are encoded character-by-character as offsets from the
start of the table. No offset can be used more than once. After offset
1099511627776 (for a 1 terabyte files) has been used for encode, a new key
file is generated and exchanged.
Example:
tables contains a terabyte of random data such as "ahx Ui D 7gu3a7NrdMr 9y&S
)iM AAt 8'9s 98m..e kj j uhbd f..."
1,5,6,9,12,15,18,20,23,25,30,33,35,36,39,41 = hi garry it's me
~~~
y7
If you're gonna go through the trouble of exchanging 1TB of one time key, use
a standard one time pad. This method is either insecure (when offsets are not
strictly ascending), or unnecessarily wasteful.
~~~
vgb2k11
After searching the definition of one-time-pad, I'm pretty sure post is
redundant and shall be deleted (in T-minus 2 minutes). [edit] No delete
option. Mod please delete.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
µTorrent 1.0 for Mac released - drewr
http://www.utorrent.com/downloads/mac
======
Naga
This is a bit late to the boat. Not sure about on Windows, but on OS X,
Transmission is a great torrent client.
~~~
maximilian
I don't have any evidence to back it up, but I think uTorrent has better
network code and produces faster downloads. I use despite its slight ugliness
compared to transmission.
------
surki
hmm, Linux?
After trying many clients, I have settled for rTorrent
(libtorrent.rakshasa.no) which is quite lean and terminal based (so that I can
wrap it in a Screen session)
It supports OS X as well.
~~~
pjscott
The uTorrent people say they're working on a Linux version, but haven't given
details. Until then, it works well under Wine. Or there are a lot of other
options, too.
------
erenemre
oh who needs a torrent client after <http://put.io> ?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: online Work a winner takes it all market? Elance vs. odesk - cked
Hello hacker news community,<p>I am a frequent user of marketplaces like Elance and odesk where I offer my services as a .NET developer. I thought a lot about the nature of hat market and how many platforms we will have as the markets matures over the next 5 years. The main questions I would like to answer is if that market is a winner takes it all market and what are its characteristics. <p>For example Facebook is a winner in my opinion. It might get replaced but I do no see multiple social networks co-exist due to strong network effects and switching costs.<p>For online work and the current platforms available it is not so clear for me. I do not see a big advantage for a developer like me if I signed up with a platform having 15000 or 100000 projects. For a contractor it's kinda the same. A platform with 15000 or 100000 developers does not concern me. I do not see a strong network effect. Switching costs aren't so high as well. <p>I would expect to have maybe 4-5 big players worldwide. I don't see multiple platforms like over 50+ neither. It would be too hard to maintain for human in my point of view.<p>However, I have observed something interesting in the data Elance and odesk disclose for the market in USA and Canada. The past two years odesk seems to show a monthly growth rate which is way higher than the growth of Elance if you look at number of projects and number of service providers. I am not sure if odesk managed to steal a market share from Elance since both compani are growing. Anyway, if I look at the exponential growth (oconomy at odesk) it feels like that the reason for that growth can't be only operational excellence which brings me back to market effects/ dynamic.<p>If you have any more insights I would love to discuss with you because I am personally interested in topic. I think in the future online work will play a big role how humans work. <p>To sum up, will there be one player one
In that market which takes it all?<p>Is it just a money game? By money game I mean the player with the most funds will win? <p>A the end I want to apologize for my English. I am not a native speaker which stopped me from posting earlier, but I still hope m points are clear and we will have a good discussion. I am happy to answer any questions.
======
teyc
One of the problems I heard is that people are concerned about what work
actually gets done at outsourcing sites.
Odesk's monitoring enables customers to know that work is actually being
completed in a distributed environment, while elance doesn't do that.
If that is the case, then it explains ODesk's growth.
~~~
cked
This is true but elance offers a monitoring software as well. Both companies
show a steady growth but odesk is way more successful in the last two years.
On top of that elance started the market entry in European countries. However
odesk seems to grow twice as fast as elance.
Is the outsourcing market in USA and Canada still growing that fast? Seems
that odesk is stealing from elance AND is drawing from network effects or a
different market effect which could be a indicator that it is a winner takes
it all market
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Functional programming with python - Anon84
http://united-coders.com/christian-harms/functional-programming-with-python
======
hedgehog
Newer versions of Python also have generator expressions which look similar to
list comprehensions but with parenthesis instead of brackets. They mostly can
be used for similar purposes but they are lazy, that is they only generate
results as they are requested.
~~~
graywh
The keyword 'yield' comes in handy for making your own generators.
------
GeneralMaximus
Offtopic: I recommend picking up _Expert Python Programming_ by Tarek Ziadé if
you want to get a feel for what is 'Pythonic'.
------
sharjeel
Guido wanted to kick out map and filter in Python 3000 but there was community
out there using these two, God knows for what reasons. As long as the lambda
is limited to single expressions, map and filter are pretty much useless; and
lambda is going to stay like that due to the way Python handles scoping using
indentation.
~~~
evgen
> As long as the lambda is limited to single expressions, map and filter are
> pretty much useless
Not really. It is not too difficult to actually define a named function and
the code usually ends up being easier to read/understand so that lack of
multi-line lambdas is not a serious problem. Additionally, now that map and
filter return iterators they are a bit more flexible than they used to be.
OTOH, if you are using map and filter in your python code you should probably
take a close look at what you are attempting to accomplish and see if a
generator expression might do the job better.
------
graywh
Should we tell the author that 'reduce' was removed in Python 3?
~~~
jrp
Ironically, map and filter are still available, when they seem easily
duplicatible with comprehensions:
map(f,lst) = [f(x) for x in lst]
filter(f,lst) = [x for x in lst if f(x)]
But I don't see a way to translate reduce, except for perhaps the particular
case of sum.
reduce(f,lst) = ???
~~~
jacobolus
Write a for loop. Much of the time, the code ends up clearer.
See Guido's explanation at:
<http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196>
~~~
jrp
Thank you. I picked up Python from assorted online tutorials; maybe it's time
for me to look at the book mentioned elsewhere in this thread to improve my
style.
------
bcl
Nice little introduction! I wish I had read something like that when I first
started with Python.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Steve Bannon's far-right Europe operation undermined by election laws - orf
======
_Schizotypy
missing link ?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Cockroaches deliver kicks to avoid being turned into “zombies” - YeGoblynQueenne
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/karate-kicking-cockroaches-can-fight-off-zombifying-jewel-wasps/
======
symplee
The video[1] in the article of the kick defense is pretty crazy.
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt8XoT2-qwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt8XoT2-qwQ)
edit: remove all but the reference to the article's video
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Does taking a severance package make you less marketable? - DrWumbo
Is it a bad idea to take a severance package from a job that I was already planning on leaving?
I work as a developer at a Fortune 50 company that is currently doing "restructuring" and is offering severance packages to anyone who wants them. The package is enticing despite my position (unlike the Business Analyst) not being in danger.
======
ChuckMcM
Absolutely not, _take the package_. Use the extra runway to recharge your
batteries and destress and re-focus. You'll come back stronger.
~~~
DrWumbo
Thanks for responding :) I took the package, and am very excited to move on!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
One Minute Reads for Writers – 30 Posts in 30 Days - monkeymagick
https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/one-minute-reads-for-writers-30-posts-in-30-days-6b781fb9cf22
======
CtrlAltEngage
"These are all friend links — because I love you — so you will be able to read
them whether you’re a member of Medium or not."
Promptly got told off by Medium for not having an account and that I'd hit my
quota of "Member Previews"
~~~
monkeymagick
No idea why that happened. All links are friend links. This should be the
friend link for the post: [https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/one-minute-reads-
for-write...](https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/one-minute-reads-for-
writers-30-posts-
in-30-days-6b781fb9cf22?source=friends_link&sk=168034b96f94610f532a2f7786e9152c)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Lego NXT Mindstorm Bot controlled through IRC using perl - bsdpunkblog
http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2009/02/spike-irc-nxt-mindstorm-video-using.html
======
jacquesm
This reminds me of the beginnings of the webcam project, I had a silicon
graphics box with a camera attached to it pointing at a 'mobile' with a bunch
of paper birds, a fan and a light. You could control the fan and the light via
the internet, a simple cgi program would change the state of two output lines,
a couple of relays and it was done.
For months I would receive messages that would roughly fall into two
categories, those that thought that it was really neat and those that thought
it was fake :)
Now, as for this robot, imagine two of them in an arena!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Demigod: So much for piracy - jemmons
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/349758
======
jemmons
The money quote: "When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than
fighting pirates, you end up with more sales."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
When the boss is wrong: How speaking out can save lives - schrofer
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33667046
======
thaumasiotes
Title is unrelated to article. Did you mean to submit
[http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33544778](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33544778)
?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Let me Duck Duck Go that for you - arst
http://lmddgtfy.com
======
antirez
Using DDG as a replacement for Google in the latest two months. I'm impressed.
If it's better or not than google for certain types of usage, I'll let other
users to decide (but it _is_ better, for my usage). But what is truly
impressive is how this guy build a search engine that works in a way that is
comparable to Google for the end user, with limited resources.
~~~
Volt
I find that Google gives me better results when it matters. So although DDG
has been my primary search engine, there are times when I'll enter my query
into Google and get something that better satisfies my information need as
either the first or second result, whereas I might have to look further down
the list on DDG.
_That said_ , I do love DDG, and it's still my primary search engine after 2
months as well. I switched based on the privacy policy (no personally
identifiable information retained), ability to use HTTPS, and the nice
infinite scrolling implementation, and unless these things change I'll
certainly continue to use it. The combination of these, plus the generally
impressive quality of the search results, make it really great.
Kinda solidifies the notion that you can compete on more than just the content
of the search results list.
~~~
Sirupsen
It's easy to double check on Google with DDG, if you search for: !google
hacker news
It'll take you to Google's results on Hacker News.
~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's even easier now. You can use the !g shortcut, and there are shortcuts for
most google services, e.g. !gf !gn etc.
------
epi0Bauqu
Stuff like this keeps me super-motivated. Thx Mike for making it!
~~~
lappie
I think ddg is a great initiative and like how you are going about it. I have
been following ddg quite a bit and also on the reddit ads/postings. With a
slightly long term view and clear focus I think it has a decent chance to
compete with the big guys.
Having said that, there are two things I noticed which I don't completely
agree with.
1\. The interface - the fonts, layout on the first page somehow is very
unreadable. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is, but imho even a
copy of hte exact google serp fonts/layout should have been good enough. The
only way ddg will stand out from Google is the quality of data on your serp.
There is very little incremental innovation possible from the layout that
Google already has for listing a list of links and text, and it also doesnt
seem to be your focus anyways.
2\. I think the auto extension of search results is a bad interface choice. A
pagination interface provides a clear anchoring and also for most people the
first 10 results are more than enough - anything more and the information
becomes too overwhelming. Again I dont think this provides any more value from
the Google interface and is bad from a cognitive overload viewpoint.
Just my two cents. Best of luck on ddg.
~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx for the detailed constructive criticism. On 1, I disagree with the premise
that you can't improve UI. It's a subjective thing but I strongly believe a
non-negligible % of people would prefer a different UI.
That being said, wrt to fonts and sizes, I wonder if you like any arrangement
after tweaking the settings? <http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html>
On 2, I get way more positive feedback on this than negative, perhaps 10/1,
though I do agree there are issues around the edges.
~~~
axod
I know I've said this before, but the infinite scroll always catches me out.
I often brush on the trackpad to get to the bottom of the page. If there isn't
a bottom of the page, it just freaks me out. It makes me think something's
broken. Maybe I'm just an outlier though ;)
------
mattmaroon
Or they could just change their name to something people would take seriously.
Just a thought.
~~~
roc
... because the search engine market has so long been dominated by serious-
sounding firms?
~~~
Legion
My first reaction was to agree with your point.
But I wonder if there are varying levels of non-seriousness.
Names like Google and Yahoo definitely aren't serious, but they also have a
sort of generic quality. Not in a bad sense, I just mean they don't evoke a
specific silly image in my head - at least not by themselves (when I think
Yahoo, I see a big purple !, but that's by marketing design).
Duck Duck Go, though, doesn't have that same nebulous quality. There's
something more concrete there, and more specific imagery that comes to mind.
And I think that's why someone might react that way to the name and not to the
names Google or Yahoo or Bing. It's less vague, and decidedly more Saturday
morning cartoon.
Is that bad? I don't know, it doesn't necessarily bother me. But I understand
why some people view it differently than the search engine names already out
there.
~~~
mattmaroon
That's my exact thought. Google and Yahoo! come off as genuinely irreverent
and fun (but, importantly, not childish). It's like something you'd expect a
couple 20-something hackers to name their product.
Duck Duck Go comes off as the 50 yr old guy who yells "'Fo Shizzle!" and holds
his hand out for a fist bump. It's something you'd expect from an older guy
trying to pretend to be a 20something hacker. It thus comes off as insincere.
~~~
epi0Bauqu
Empirically, people seem to love or hate the name, i.e. it generates an
emotional response. When I talk to "normals" this love/hate ratio is very
high. I understand though that you've taken issue with the name right from the
beginning. This is not the first time you've shared this viewpoint :)
~~~
mattmaroon
Ha, yeah wouldn't surprise me. I don't remember it but definitely believe you.
I think what New Coke proved though is that haters have an unduly large
influence. New Coke kicked both original Coke and Pepsi's asses in blind taste
tests. It's possibly bad to have something that has a love to hate ratio, even
if a large one, rather than something people respect but don't care much about
one way or the other.
------
blueben
Is DDG engaging in some sort of grassroots campaign to make sure they get a
link on HN at least a few times a month? I get it. DDG is out there. They're
an alternative to Google. Great. How about some articles with merit rather
than yet-another-link to the search engine front page and a bunch of people
gushing about it?
~~~
epi0Bauqu
Nope. I didn't make this and I didn't know the person who did. Nor did I
submit it.
~~~
blueben
Take pride in the fact that people love your work so much that they will spam
their friends to share it. :)
------
arst
[http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+this+for+you&v=](http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+this+for+you&v=)
------
heyitsnick
[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v=](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v=)
------
resdirector
Quick question: what types of searches are better done through DDG than
Google? I've tried a few searches, but haven't found DDG better than
Google...is DDG superior only for certain types of searches?
~~~
epi0Bauqu
<http://duckduckgo.com/about.html>
Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide
swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The
information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of
searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.
Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names
and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-
examples everywhere...
What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search
engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to
me with your feedback.
~~~
resdirector
Very initial impression:
* I like the zero-click info.
* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?
The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a
non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here.
I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to
Quora, Vark etc.
~~~
epi0Bauqu
How would that work exactly in your mind? We already have a feature to send
your search to hundreds of other sites, <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>
Is it as simple as redirecting you to those sites, or do you mean manage the
workflow, email you the results, etc.?
~~~
resdirector
(I like the bang feature: many of my searches are of the form "wiki william
henry harrison". By the way, I think the search results for
<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+henry+harrison> are out of order)
My _ideal_ search-engine would be a cross between a traditional search-engine
(machine) and a Q&A site (humans). If you were taking a lot of iterations to
find your answer, you could simply expand the text-area to allow you to write
out a human question.
So, short of DDG becoming also a Q&A site....yeah, dunno :P.
------
blahedo
In the early days of Google, back while it was still beta, I remember having
to go to my backup search engine—remember Altavista? :)—for queries where I
just needed a boatload of sites, or where I had a complex boolean thing, or
where I needed to search for a whole phrase.
Of course, back in the 90s Google knocked out my reasons to backoff to
Altavista, one by one, adding boolean queries, and phrases, and of course
adding a boondle of data. So I was eventually able to stop using Altavista.
For the last few months, DDG is my primary and I love it. I still use Google
for:
* a few queries that DDG can't find anything for
* to find out what _other_ people will see when they "google it"
* YouTube and maps.
YouTube will be hard to ditch because that's where the content is, although I
suspect I can wean from maps if I actually try.
------
asimjalis
I tried <http://lmddgtfy.com/foo> and I got this message:
Unhandled Exception
An unhandled exception was thrown by the application.
~~~
simonk
It looks like the URL should be
[http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v=](http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v=)
Although, yes a lot easier to remember your way.
~~~
asimjalis
True. Still an unhandled exception does not sound good.
------
natep
Sharing the link is really hard (at least for me, maybe I'm doing it wrong?).
When I type something and click search, it takes me straight to the page I'd
want to send someone, and I can't really select the url (because of whatever's
moving the pointer?). So, do I just have to figure out the url scheme and
write it out myself? lmgtfy just gives you the url to send someone.
~~~
arst
It doesn't actually move your cursor, just an image of a cursor. You should be
able to copy & paste the URL out of your address bar as it is animating;
you're right that just showing the URL after the user clicks 'Search' might be
more user friendly, though.
------
varjag
[http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%D0%B0%D0%B6+%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0+%D1%8...](http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%D0%B0%D0%B6+%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0+%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0&v=i)
and
[http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD+&v=i](http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD+&v=i)
throw an unhandled exception.
Seems like non-Latin character sets give it bad vibe.
------
stcredzero
I think of DuckDuckGo as a "budget airline" sort of search engine. It seems to
be best at handling the "low hanging fruit" or the common case, but it does so
with better presentation, more convenience, and no bells and whistles.
By contrast, Wolfram Alpha is more like an arctic bush pilot. Or maybe that's
Cuil?
~~~
jacquesm
> Or maybe that's Cuil?
I think you mean 'cpedia'.
~~~
stcredzero
You are correct.
------
gnoupi
Oh, great, one more condescending way to answer people when you are too lazy
to provide a real answer but want to be """funny""".
Yay.
Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search
on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest
that than that kind of sites.
~~~
cookiecaper
LMGTFY is just a tool -- it can be used in good humor or malice. This site,
likewise, but it has the added benefit of promoting DuckDuckGo and producing
brand exposure, and is therefore less likely to be taken as a slight; with
LMGTFY, everyone knows what Google is, so they don't take that as an
informative thing; with LMDDGTFY, few people know what DDG is, so they may
just assume that the linker is humorously and conveniently promoting a new
search engine out of personal preference.
~~~
gnoupi
I see the interest in promoting DDG, but the "let me take your hand and do
that for you" is and will always be a bit condescending.
You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my
opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I
think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM",
years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.
~~~
eli
I kinda disagree. There's a difference between saying "search yourself" and
"search for yourself using these keywords"
And depending on context, some people really do need to be shown that they can
type keywords into the search box like so in order to get results like these.
------
RyanMcGreal
Returns a server error when the DuckDuckGo page loads:
\----
Server Error
The following error occurred:
[code=CACHE_FILL_OPEN_FILE] An internal error prevented the object from being
sent to the client and cached. Try again later.
Please contact the administrator. \
\----
[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&v=](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&v=)
------
vaksel
Someone should make one of those blind experiments where you pull in the
search results from yahoo, bing, google and DDG, so people can do a blind test
to see which search engine is better
~~~
eru
Already happened. People seemed to have preferred the bing search results, and
the Google-looking page. Perhaps somebody can even find the reference for
this?
~~~
nostrademons
Nope, they preferred the Google results:
[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-
you-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-choose-
in-the-blind-test/)
~~~
eru
I probably saw an earlier tally:
[http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090607/bing-vs-google-
vs-...](http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090607/bing-vs-google-vs-yahoo-
blind-search-engine-test/)
------
senko
Crashes on non-ascii input. Example (query is "rašić" in utf-8):
[http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ra%C5%A1i%C4%87&v=](http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ra%C5%A1i%C4%87&v=)
------
helwr
Linkedin profiles with 500+ connections are still not at the top when
searching for people names, some junk pages somehow get higher rank
~~~
epi0Bauqu
This isn't true across the board, e.g.
<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg>
In any case though, I'm happy to fix if you give me some specific examples to
work with.
~~~
helwr
try "geva perry" for example, he has like 5 thousand connections and on google
his linkedin profile is #3 from the top
~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx.
------
asimjalis
I am curious. Is DDG running their own web crawlers or are they a front-end to
search results from some other engine?
~~~
epi0Bauqu
Both.
------
motters
I Duck Duck Went a couple of months ago, and have been going ever since.
------
shimonamit
I wonder how they plan to monetize this...
~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's fun. Why does everything have to be monetized?
~~~
ippisl
If you're not really devoted to monetizing it , you might be able to compete
with google on ad quality. google's really into getting maximum money , so
many times the ads suck.
You, on the other hand , could offer the most helpfull ads.i'm thinking of
something like showing the disruptive companies for a service your looking
for.
for example , let's say you're looking for a divorce lawyer. one option to
save a lot of money is using an expert system software to generate the
required papers. most people don't know about this option, probably because
real lawyers outbid them in the ad market.
So knowing about the expert system option is very useful.
Of course , you don't have to show only disruptive ads , but an ad combination
that offer the best knowledge for the user.
Now , if there's a way to make this scalable across many product types, you
have a very powerful feature, one that the big search engines would find very
hard to imitate, because it would hurt their profits.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Oracle linking to it-ebooks.info - ishanr
In Oracle's New to Java Programming page (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/newtojava/downloads/index.html), the recommended books section (bottom of the page) contain a link to Head First Java on it-ebooks: http://it-ebooks.info/book/255/<p>Are those books legal?
======
sixQuarks
I don't know what to think of that site. How has it not been shut down?
personally, I've used that site to browse through books before buying them
online. In my case, it is beneficial for the publisher to have their books on
that site, but I'd imagine most people don't use it that way.
------
mindcrash
No. Support Kathy and buy it instead.
[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596009205.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596009205.do)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What are you building? - northfoxz2018
What are you guys building? What are devs excited about nowadays?
======
rijoja
Onscreen keyboard for writing math.
§ - toggle visibility 1,2,3,4, q,w,e,r, a,s,d,f, z,x,c,v - Select block
recursively
So for example: 1,z => π q,4 => \int_{a}^{b} e,1 => newline
Currently it's basically a latex editor even though there will be mathml which
will feature inline editing and some other niceties.
Based on MathJax.
Would like to use this opportunity to complain about the chrome gang, dropping
MathML support which would make everything so much easier.
Not mobile friendly so, if your on the phone check out the youtube video:
[https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/richard-
ja...](https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/richard-
jansson/roosevelt/blob/master/index.html)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1v4L1rxsaQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1v4L1rxsaQ)
------
bsvalley
A house. I'm literally building a new house (high level supervision I'm not
part of the actual labor of course). It is far more exciting than any software
I've ever built in the past. Especially when you've been coding since forever.
I know this message is a little out of context here but I'd highly encourage
any devs to build something completely unrelated to software at least once in
your life. It brings new perspective and expends your reach. While building
that house I come with at least one new software idea every week. Best way to
understand real life problems that can be solved with automation and software.
That was my 2 cents :/
~~~
billconan
maybe blog about this project, the cost, the procedure and documents needed
from the government? what kind of land is suitable for building?
~~~
bsvalley
I thought about it, it's a great idea and could help a lot of other people out
there.
------
ecesena
Solo, an open source security key:
[https://github.com/soloKeysSec/solo/](https://github.com/soloKeysSec/solo/)
In terms of dev/sw, the most exciting things are 1) adding support for
openpgp/ssh in addition to FIDO, 2) rewriting the firmware in rust, 3) porting
the firmware to other architectures.
------
pplonski86
I'm working on automatic machine learning platform. It is already working as a
SaaS ([https://mljar.com](https://mljar.com)). I would like to go open source
with it and add ability to read data from different sources.
------
billconan
I'm building a blog platform that allows you to write executable program, like
a mix of medium and jupyter.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
$50K bounty for practical robocall-killing technology. - jamesbritt
http://robocall.challenge.gov/
======
astangl
I dispute their contention that an "ideal" solution would not block political
or charity robocalls. Ideally we close these loopholes in the No-Call List, so
these all are illegal.
It seems to me a lot of the problem results from allowing the caller ID
information to be spoofed. Any serious attempt to fix this problem would seem
to involve tracking down real numbers, defeating the spoofing.
Most satisfying (and effective!) thing I have ever done to eliminate a
repeated scam call (to lower credit card interest rates, never admitting who
they're with, except some vague reference to imply they're associated with the
credit card companies) is to string the guy along, when I am "going to get my
credit card", setting the phone down and going about my other business, until
it's clear he finally hung up. Then he called back, and I said "when I got
back to the phone you weren't there!", and repeated the game a bunch of times
over the day, with the guy getting more & more exasperated. Funnily enough, I
never get those calls anymore...
~~~
rhizome
Caller ID spoofing is a true misfeature. The ability should be removed, or
consumers should have out-of-band access to the real number in order to be
able to _at least_ blacklist it.
<http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/misfeature.html>
~~~
dangrossman
Phone numbers are to the telephone network like IP addresses are to the
internet. Caller ID is to phone numbers as DNS is to IPs. I don't think
getting rid of caller ID would really help anything, and you can't fix the
caller ID to specific numbers, as phone numbers are as transient as IPs --
they can terminate to an IP phone in Pakistan one day, and to a Twilio gateway
used by some other company's apps the next day. Blacklisting the number can be
both ineffective and harmful.
Letting the caller set the caller ID is the only way someone calling you from
Comcast about your bill can have Comcast show up on the ID. Most large
companies like that don't own the numbers they call from, or the call centers
-- they outsource both inbound and outbound phone support and sales. Typically
to multiple phone center companies at the same time, who all have to call "as"
Comcast, and ramp up or scale down with more or less phone numbers as needed.
They'll use autodialers too, with real people rather than recordings, to
minimize the delay between one outbound call ending and there being another
person for that now-available rep to talk to.
~~~
mleonhard
The ability to set caller-id is important. I was surprised by how easy it is.
With the free X-Lite SIP softphone and a flowroute.com account, I can set an
arbitrary caller-id number and place a call to anyone. This is very useful, as
it lets me place cheap VoIP calls "from" my mobile phone number. It could also
be used to get into voicemail and other systems that trust caller-id.
~~~
Shivetya
Businesses can detect your billing number, the ANI. Having been involved in a
system where employees logged in and out of work via the telephone it was very
important that we could prove where they were. We had many people attempt to
spoof it which never worked.
So the information is there. However it is worth a lot of money to the phone
company and they sometimes resell that information to others who repackage it.
They also in turn don't always give you this information even when you pay for
caller id which is similar but not the same. Originators can block paid caller
id, I have never seen a case where you can block ANI subs
~~~
rhizome
I was under the impression that ANI was forced on WATS lines, but that it
didn't necessarily exist for residential, shall I shift my understanding? I
think this could actually be a good lever, putting the problem purely into the
policy domain.
------
btilly
All that I want is this.
Right after I get a call I don't want, have another number that I can call. If
I call that number, I'm telling the government, "My last call was an unwanted
robocall."
Trace that call to its source (as best as that can be determined). If that
source has generated a lot of calls recently, and is not on a white list, it
is blocked. Any attempts from that number to make a phone call go to a
recorded message saying that it is blocked, with instructions for how to get
unblocked.
Any phone number that gets blocked several times in a week is permanently
blocked.
~~~
gshubert17
After I get an unwanted robocall, I want to dial "*RC" for "RoboCall". I get a
credit on my next phone bill for 25 cents. The phone company charges the
originator 50 cents. Now the phone company has an incentive to track all
robocalls. And I have a little compensation for my time.
~~~
greenyoda
If the phone company is going to charge the originator, they'd have to verify
that the call you reported was actually an illegal RoboCall. Some dishonest
people might report people whom they know but don't want to hear from as
RoboCalls. Others might erroneously report organizations that are legally
allowed to call them, like companies with which they had a business
relationship or political candidates. Verifying that each claim was valid
would probably cost the phone company much more than 50 cents.
~~~
cabalamat
> If the phone company is going to charge the originator, they'd have to
> verify that the call you reported was actually an illegal RoboCall
If I'm getting unwanted calls, I don't really care whether the government
thinks they are legal, I just want them stopped.
How about this solution: if the caller ID is on a whitelist, it goes straight
through. If not, the caller gest asked a question (which should filter out
robots). If there are determined human unwanted callers, a second line of
defence would be to ask them to key in a 4 digit code (and I'd only give the
solution to people who wanted to call me).
~~~
Firehed
Google voice lets you do something along those lines. I personally found it
incredibly tedious and quickly turned it off.
I think the grandparents idea of *RC is spot on. Verification can be done
through volume; i.e. a one-off may do nothing but repeated reports indicate
something is up. Just like reporting spam in email.
Along those lines, some sort of charge-to-call system may work. Like calling
collect in reverse, but the receiving party can decide to not charge the fee
if its someone they know (or flip it, hitting # within 30 seconds of an
inbound call will capture the fee and disconnect)
------
bstpierre
I don't just want robocalls killed. I don't want calls from politicians,
charities, pollsters or any other exempt organizations either. I don't want
calls from the debt collectors trying to reach the person who used to have my
number. For me, and people like me, a telco-based solution won't work because
they have to adhere to the regulations that have these giant exemptions.
In volume, you could make a device for landlines for probably <$50. Connect
the device to the primary incoming line. Connect phone(s) to the device.
User dials #4321 (some non-secret activation code, printed in instructions and
sticker on device) from house phone. Follows prompts to record (a) his name,
(b) names of other individuals at the house, (c) one or more bogus names. May
also follow prompt to enable a bypass code. May also follow prompts to add CID
numbers to whitelist (see below; this is for DESIRABLE robocalls, e.g. from
the school district in case of emergency or school cancellation). User hangs
up; device is programmed.
Incoming call, 2 rings, CID/CNAM captured (FWIW), house phones do not ring.
Device answers: "Calls may be recorded. Press 1 for Bogus John, 2 for Real
Alice, 3 for Real Bob, 4 for Bogus Carol". Caller presses 1/4, "Please leave a
message after the tone", tone plays, incoming voice goes to /dev/null for 10s,
call is dropped. Caller presses 2/3, house phones ring, stored CID/CNAM is
provided.
If the incoming caller uses the bypass code, the call goes straight through.
Bonus: distinctive ring for Alice vs Bob.
Bonus: after an annoying human caller "leaks" through, user can hang up, pick
back up, and dial #5432 [some other non-secret access code]. Incoming CID put
on block list. Calls from blocked numbers are unanswered (will go to VM if
user subscribes to VM from telco).
Bonus: similar to blacklist, user can dial #2222 (for "whitelist to Alice") or
#3333 ("whitelist to Bob") to whitelist a just-received call. Whitelisted
calls immediately go through. DR means that I don't have to check CID to know
it's my MIL calling for wife. Numbers can be whitelisted during programming
(see above) because desirable robocalls (e.g. kids' school) will otherwise
never get through and can't get #2222 treatment.
Bonus: pressing ## (or some other code) during a call starts a recording.
Saved as <cid>-<date/time>.wav to removable flash or USB on the device.
Bonus: insert flash/USB, dial #9876 from house phone. Device upgrades itself
from the flash.
------
crb3
We use an answering machine to screen calls. I put SIT tones (the tones
usually followed by a network message such as "we're sorry but the call cannot
be completed as dialed" -- google SIT.WAV) at the beginning of our outgoing
message. We don't pick up until the message ends.
We get a lot of 'ghosts', calls dropped before the message is done -- those
were automated calls. We get callers which are partway through delivering a
canned spiel at that point because their delivery system triggered on the
tones as if 'your-turn' beep -- those were automated calls intended to be left
as recorded messages.
It's not exactly what the contest is about, but it does provide some personal
relief on a landline.
------
iloveyouocean
So AT&T has the technology to bill each subscriber down to the bit of data
used, but they can't detect when an entity is making 10s of thousands of calls
. . . . ?
~~~
DanBC
10s of thousands of calls isn't necessarily illegal, nor unwanted.
Phone companies will probably claim to be just a pipe for data, and that they
cannot interfere with that data, and that regulation is for other people.
They'll stop you if you're damaging their network.
Cynically I'd say that a company making tens of thousands of calls is worth
more to the telco than me, making very few calls. (I doubt that's actually the
reason.)
------
tezza
Help me out here as a UK person: What sort of Robocalls are there ?
Here in the UK there are variants.
1) Pause to hear you pickup, then they connect to a human salesperson
2) Full blown automated call
3) Human on the other end but how did they get your number ?
I have a solution, but can't enter as I'm outside the US :(
~~~
tinco
Still you choose to keep your solution to yourself? :)
~~~
tezza
I figured I'll wait until the competition is over.
When I see the announcement of the winner, it may be better than my
implementation and I will congratulate them.
If not, then I'll post mine and see.
------
ww520
There should be a Kickstart project for this. Lots of people would pitch in.
I'm sick of these daily robocalls.
------
bediger4000
Please robocall-kill "Ann from Account Services". I must get an average of 4
calls a week from that scratchy-voiced hag.
------
BryanB55
I feel like robot calls used to be much more common. I think I only get maybe
2-3 a year now. I think most recently they were from DirecTV and GNC. I tend
to give out my Google Voice phone number to businesses and non personal
contacts so I can block them if they sell my number or start robo calling it.
Although I've only had to block maybe 1 or 2 numbers on google voice in the
last few years.
I wish the iphone had a way to create a black list and block callers. I'm not
sure why they've never implemented this. I know it can be done by jailbreaking
but it seems like it should be part of the os.
~~~
dredmorbius
On Android: Mr Number and other call screening apps exist. I use this, though
the app has been getting a lot more snoopy/annoying of late.
------
ww520
Penalty should not just be on the illegal robocalling telemarketers, but
should also on the businesses contracting the telemarketers. Cut the funding
off from the sources.
------
swampthing
They should let people pledge donations to increase the bounty.
------
dredmorbius
An endpoint-based fee-collection system.
"To complete this call, a payment of $NOMINAL_AMOUNT is required. This may be
refunded at the discretion of the caller."
In actuality, you'd whitelist numbers not required to make payment, and/or
clear other numbers at the end of your billing cycle if desired. Payment
options would be provided. The call would not ring through until authorized or
paid.
This would increase the costs of phone spam markedly.
Survey organizations would have a bit of a problem. Oh well.
~~~
dredmorbius
Erm: discretion of the callee.
------
joebeeson
Would it be possible to use the same technology of SSL with phones? Have the
telco, who presumably knows the endpoint of the call can either apply an SSL
certificate (or equivalent) to the call so that the receiver can confirm their
validity?
Or, alternatively, much like how websites currently operate, the person making
the call would have to attach their certificate which the receiver could check
against CA(s). This would be nice because if certain CAs had rules where they
wouldn't sign up certain numbers (telemarketers, politicians), you simply
wouldn't use that CA to validate calls.
------
elastigirl
I definitely know where you're coming from. I get calls like that a lot and I
With all the consumer complaints these nuisance calls created, I don't
understand WHY these companies still operate!
Well, yeah, there's that thing they call the freedom to "advertise" but what
the ____?? They're already trespassing into our freedom to privacy!
I don't know anybody who'd disagree but if these companies continue this
unethical business practice, I would surely be happy to see them shut down!!!!
------
arohner
Can anyone explain why this is hard, technically?
~~~
anonymous1019
Sure. If you plan on implementing this as some sort of end-user device that
would be hooked up to a phone handset or a software "app" you would install on
a smart phone, then all you've got to work with is caller ID. Caller ID can be
blocked by the caller (e.g., by dialing *67 first) and spoofed, including the
purported outgoing number. In fact, VoIP systems like Skype have made spoofing
caller ID and now even ANI, a toll network analog of caller ID, trivial.
So even if you keep some sort of constantly updated database of numbers used
by robocallers, you are still relying on the robocallers 1) not blocking
outgoing caller ID and 2) not spoofing the numbers of legitimate users
resulting in them getting blacklisted.
~~~
hollerith
>VoIP systems like Skype have made spoofing caller ID and now even ANI . . .
trivial.
Is there any way for hardware connected to an ordinary phone line to
distinguish between an incoming call from a VoIP system versus an incoming
call from an ordinary phone line?
------
DanBC
You pass a law saying that all robocalls must comply with ROBOCALL_STANDARD.
You include a regulator in that law. The regulator is responsible for updating
the standard as needed, and for taking reports from people who receive a
robocall, and for imposing sanctions on companies who i) do the robocalling
and ii) ask other companies to do the robocalling for them.
Sanctions include fines for the companies; potential prison time for the
directors of those companies (obviously this would need to go through court)
and 'blocking of numbers by telecom companies' (not sure how realistic that
is.
The regulator has an "opt out" list. Every one with a phone who doesn't want
to receive calls registers on that list. New numbers are added by default.
(They can maintain an "Opt in" list, so people who want to receive junk calls
can).
Then the regulators set up a website. This site contains a simple report form;
the opt in and out lists; links to the current standard; links to the law;
links to previous adjudications.
If CompanyX uses a robocall company in a different country you can still go
after CompanyX. Not sure what you'd do if both CompanyX and the robocall
company are overseas with no US presence.
------
mxfh
Hey, Shazam there's an almost "free" prize waiting for you. Just make an app
that hooks into you calls on demand and records & forwards suspected
robocall's to match them against validated malicous ones. Someone else might
figure out the telco backtrace part with timestamps and so on.
------
elastigirl
And guess what? All you trespassers out there, be aware that I am reporting
your phone numbers to Callercenter.com every time you call. Just so you know,
in case you start wondering why your calls seemed to be blocked.
You want publicity by harassing me? I give you just that. Negative publicity!
------
sahaj
I believe Google Voice has already solved this problem. Just as with email,
click report spam and the whole user-base benefits. I suppose Google could
share that phone number list with others providers.
------
forgotAgain
This just reeks of the FTC abdicating its responsibilities to enforce the
existing laws. Show me the budget the FTC spends on prosecuting violators of
the law and maybe I'll change my mind.
------
stickyku
What I think would be cool is to be able to forward the call to a smart enough
bot that wastes like 5 minutes of their time every call. This will surely kill
their spammy business model
~~~
bstpierre
Robocalls aren't necessarily interactive. You can't waste their time.
------
icewater
Why does a company need at least 10 employees to compete in the Federal Trade
Commission Technology Achievement Award?
~~~
hollerith
You're reading it wrong: if the winning team has fewer than 10 employees, the
team gets $50,000. 10 or more, the team gets no cash, just bragging rights.
------
Andaith
Just ban robo-calls. Make it illegal.
~~~
civilian
They're already illegal. This is an enforcement problem.
~~~
xulescu
And why isn't this a problem in Europe? E.g. Germany? I'm not getting any
unsolicited phone calls anymore - robot or not (this used to be a problem 15
years ago, but not isn't anymore).
~~~
Sander_Marechal
There are national do-not-call registries. Companies are required to check
those before calling. If they don't then they get fined, which usually starts
at around 25,000 euro.
This is for The Netherlands, but I believe it's similar throughout Europe.
~~~
kbuck
The U.S. also has a do-not-call registry that you get fined for violating
(donotcall.gov). The problem is that they don't know who to fine, because it's
really easy to spoof caller ID and the businesses aren't dumb enough to
identify themselves.
~~~
tripzilch
How can those businesses try to sell you something without identifying
themselves?
Also, there must be some weird political or legal reason why they can't (or
won't) get the identity from the phone companies. It can't be a technical
reason, because they're already capable of tapping everything, and the phone
companies are already in full cooperation with that, even developing and
providing specific technical interfaces for law enforcement.
And, maybe someone can tell me if this is actually possible (as opposed to a
"CSI" type exaggeration): In many police series you see them requesting full
cell-phone logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to a certain phone in the
past few weeks or so.
In case that's realistic, I certainly hope that it can't be foiled by
something as simple as spoofing the caller ID? Because, you know, that'd make
it really easy to frame someone.
~~~
kbuck
I haven't seen or heard one of these calls actually play out, but they might
not even be trying to sell something - they could just be scammers out to
steal credit card information. (I get one all the time that's a prerecorded
message from "Rachel from Cardholder Services")
I'm sure telephone companies could _technically_ stop them if they really
wanted to, but telephone companies make a profit from these people. What
incentive do they have to stop them? Same with text message spam. If they
tracked it (which they surely collect enough money per message to do), they
could easily notice one number sending a hundred spam texts and stop it before
it sends tens of thousands of them. They don't, though, because each of these
messages means anywhere from another 5 to 25 cents in their pocket. Most
people don't even contest getting charged for receiving spam texts, because
who's going to argue over a quarter?
The biggest issue seems to be that all of this data is ephemeral - even if
they had a "more powerful" caller ID (which I believe 911 dispatchers do), you
would have to catch them in the act and personally have access to check where
the other end of the call is terminating, and you'd have to do it before they
hung up. For IP calls, I think it's unlikely they would even be able to fully
trace it.
~~~
tripzilch
> What incentive do they have to stop them?
That it's illegal? (the ones that are)
~~~
kbuck
It's not illegal for the telephone company to not try stopping them.
------
ruby_on_rails
"Contestant further represents, warrants, and agrees that any use of the
Submission by the Sponsor, Administrator, and/or Judges (or any of their
respective partners, subsidiaries, and affiliates) as authorized by these
Official Rules, shall not:
a. infringe upon, misappropriate or otherwise violate any intellectual
property right or proprietary right including, without limitation, any
statutory or common law trademark, copyright or patent, nor any privacy
rights, nor any other rights of any person or entity;
b. constitute or result in any misappropriation or other violation of any
person’s publicity rights or right of privacy."
(<http://robocall.challenge.gov/rules>)
I find this clause rather disturbing, I think I know what they meant to say,
but they instead wrote something so overly general, that if enforced,
effective makes this competition un-winnable. Maybe someone else can weigh in
on this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Drag and Drop for AngularJS - codef0rmer
http://codef0rmer.github.com/angular-dragdrop/#/
======
tanepiper
It's good, but again adds another dependency with jQueryUI - I wish people
would stop adding heavyweight dependancies to this stuff.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NIH investigating if U.S. scientists are sharing ideas with foreign governments - SiempreViernes
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/nih-investigating-whether-us-scientists-are-sharing-ideas-foreign-governments
======
java-man
scientists do science?? outrageous!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Everyone’s AirPods Will Die - Ice_cream_suit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/08/everyones-airpods-will-die-weve-got-trick-replacing-them/
======
mft_
Interesting example to consider. I can usually mostly understand Apple (and
others) making batteries unremovable, as it allows them to pack the maximum
battery into the minimum space (and sometimes a awkwardly-shaped space which
wouldn't support removability anyway). However, in the AirPods example, the
'stalk' doesn't appear to hold anything except a battery, charging contacts,
and an antenna for bluetooth reception.
This being the case, it should have been possible to design the 'stalk' as a
self-contained unit which would then have been easy to swap out; it would have
needed maybe a millimetre extra to incorporate contacts to transfer power and
the antenna signal.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google shifted $23 bln to tax haven Bermuda in 2017 - bitcharmer
https://www.reuters.com/article/google-taxes-netherlands/google-shifted-23-bln-to-tax-haven-bermuda-in-2017-filing-idUSL8N1Z3403
======
tareqak
Submitted yesterday
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18828050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18828050)),
and the day before
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816984)).
------
GreeniFi
A lot of people - myself included - feel pretty uncomfortable when we read
these stories. But we have to remember that (1) directors are under a
fiduciary duty to maximize return to shareholders, (2) use of tax havens is
legal. The 2 facts together means directors can be sued by shareholders if
they _don’t_ use tax havens. So the route to change, would be to legally end
use of tax havens - through the ballot box. I would support that, it doesn’t
seem fair. But I’d also point out that one line of thinking is that when the
EU started getting real about stopping corporate tax havens, the oligarch
class got together and fermented Brexit. Damned if you do, damned if you
don’t. We’ve got some big problems!
~~~
sokoloff
Directors do not have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns to
shareholders. They do have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best
interests of the company (and therefore the shareholders), but not a specific
duty to maximize after-tax profits.
They can be sued for anything, just like anyone, but there is a large body of
corporate case law supporting the use of business judgment to achieve goals
other than short-term maximization and typically have E&O coverage as well to
provide some coverage for nuisance lawsuits and cases other than personal
misconduct or conflicts of interest. So, sue away, but you almost surely won’t
win if the board pursued a lawful strategy other than the one you as a
shareholder prefered.
~~~
GreeniFi
Can you differentiate acting in the best interest of the company to maximaing
return to shareholders, when that is the very raison d'être of a company?
~~~
sokoloff
[In most states] Companies may be formed for any lawful purpose; maximizing
returns to shareholders does not need to be the primary purpose (nor
necessarily a purpose at all, the extreme example of which are charities).
IOW, it _could be_ the raison d'être of a particular company, but is not
necessarily so.
Read the Hobby Lobby case as a start.
Quote from Justice Alito in that opinion: While it is certainly true that a
central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern
corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the
expense of everything else, and many do not do so. . . If for-profit
corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason
why they may not further religious objectives as well.
~~~
GreeniFi
Tell that to the shareholders of Google! We’re not talking about a company set
up to manage a water feature in a town square here!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Applications are open for TinySeed's 2020 batch - einarvollset
TinySeed is a remote, year-long accelerator for independent software businesses.<p>We just opened up our applications for our second batch: https://tinyseed.com<p>We focus on SaaS and “non-unicorns” (companies that don’t aspire to grow at all costs to reach a $1B valuation). In addition to investment, we are a tight-knit community providing advice, support, a deep network of founders, and valuable connections to world-class mentors.<p>Applications will be open for the month of November and will close at midnight, November 29th. We’ll be reviewing applications through December and making decisions in Winter 2020, with the next batch starting Spring 2020.<p>Let us know if you have any questions; either here or email einar@tinyseed.com. Hope to see your application!
======
limedaring
Hey, I’m the program manager at TinySeed, I’ll be hanging here through the day
to answer questions as well. Ask us anything!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Every October, Write a Lisp Interpreter In C - blackhole
https://twitter.com/#!/haikoschol/status/128741308985643008
======
demallien
I would have thought that writing a C compiler in Lisp would be more
interesting... Every time I read a book on compiler design in C, the book
passes an inordinate amount of time setting up the infrastructure for creating
an AST, yet surely this would be a very natural thing in Lisp?
------
geekytenny
Do you think they would want us to spend our 'Octobers' reinventing things
they built or for us to take their works in computing to greater heights?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Finding Ideas For Your Next Project - br0ke
http://nathanbarry.com/finding-ideas-project/
======
amix
I think a better approach is to solve your own problems. This way you don't
have to waste time cold calling people and hoping they are sincere with you
with their feedback. You are the user and the creator... It's a very powerful
position to be in.
I would recommend reading Paul Graham excellent post on "startup ideas" (which
could easily translate to "project ideas"):
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to
look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself."
<http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html>
~~~
yitchelle
Solving your problem is a good way to find ideas. You know the problem well
and the context the problem is in. However, if your work life, social life or
life in general is not too varied, finding a problem to solve can be a problem
in itself. Not being respectful and some people live quite contented lives
like these, but living a simple, straight forward, suburban life style can be
hard to find pain problems.
So to increase the ways of gaining problem to solve, getting out there to
experience different aspects of life and talking to other folks are two sure
way of find problems to solve. The side effect is that you will be a more
rounded character and will, most probably, enjoy life much more.
Basically, this is what Nathan is saying.
~~~
amix
The problem is that people could be insincere, non-rational or ignorant. I
doubt they will know what their problems are, what they are willing to pay or
what the solution could be. There's a great quote by Henry Ford: "If I had
asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
For Nathan his pain point could be something related to writing and publishing
books. I think this would be a much better problem domain since he is a user
and I am sure he has some problems regarding this process that could be
improved.
~~~
yitchelle
Great quote! It stresses the point that a great solution to a problem could
comes from a different domain.
------
lukethomas
"I’m doing some research into software used by ________. Just curious, is
there any software you’ve been looking for?..."
I think you would be surprised at how many people get confused by "software."
I've received answers like "Safari" to this same exact question.
Just a thought, but instead of focusing on providing another piece of software
(and phrasing it that way), look to provide business value. I know that's your
end result, but I would present it that way from the first interaction.
Also, when you've picked the market/client base you want, I highly recommend
seeing if you can visit the business for a day or two (if you can find time.)
There's nothing better than immersing yourself...it will lead to better
insight.
~~~
ErrantX
Reading through, Nathan wasn't expecting any realistic answers to this
question. It was just an ice breaker to establish contact for the follow up
call.
As to your last paragraph; this is solid advice. I've picked up a few software
ideas by viewing businesses "in action" and observing the pain points.
------
sharkweek
I stole Drew Houston's idea for ideas by carrying a little notebook around to
write down things that annoy me; has lead to the beginning of several little
projects.
~~~
alok-g
How do you handle cases when annoyed by lousy implementations of features of
existing products? In other words, if the idea resulting from the frustration
looks like "feature, not a product". Doing it right now involves not just
doing that particular aspect right but also the remaining 95% of the product.
------
nicholassmith
I'd say asking them as well, "What do you think you'd pay for it?" could be
useful to establish if it's genuinely worth going after it, but it's a really
awkward question to fit in and it's a _really_ awkward question to answer as
well.
~~~
nathanbarry
I like to judge the awkwardness of their response. It helps you learn how
serious they are. If they really struggle to find a price they probably don't
think their problem is that painful.
You can also focus on how much a problem costs them in wasted time or lost
revenue.
~~~
nicholassmith
That's a pretty awesome kicker to the question, I'd never thought of it in
quite those terms.
------
rsobers
Another option: do what someone else is already doing. For instance, bug
tracking and project management apps have proven demand. Sometimes you can
steal enough market share by doing things better or by making subtle
variations.
------
gfodor
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Customer development based
approaches like this are effective at birthing certain types of products. But
lets not fall into the trap that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to
innovation. Necessity is always the mother of invention, but often people
can't conceive of what their life is missing or what parts of life could be
more enjoyable or less painful.
------
eranation
HN traffic took it down? all I get is "Error establishing a database
connection"
~~~
nathanbarry
Sorry, should be back now.
~~~
ekurutepe
It seems like it went down again. I'm getting the DB error as well.
------
ThomPete
Ideas, execution, problems, audience....
They are all part of the same thing.
You can choose to be the gold digger or the merchant. It doesn't matter. One
is filled with risk but great fortune. The other is more secure but the
prospects of making it big are much less.
~~~
bjelkeman-again
Yeah. I always think it is funny when people are talking about ideas as if
they are really worth much. I have new business ideas regularly. Ideas are
cheap. Execution and access to markets, is where the idea hits the road.
And the likelihood that the idea and execution will make you insanely rich is
so small that I have removed it from my equations these days. Just keep
executing though.
------
wacheena
I dig this overall process (and transparency), but I'm bummed that ultimately
it came down to "I have an idea." It's an idea that has some customer
validation, but the value of this series of blog posts for folks was to prove
a process for creating a web application that didn't start with "an idea."
~~~
nathanbarry
I didn't start with the idea. It came out of a conversation with a friend last
week.
My goal for the post series is to create a web app and be transparent about
the process. So finding an idea and validating it matches that goal perfectly.
~~~
muellerwolfram
true, but the idea coming out of the idea finding process that you describe in
your post would have been slightly more awesome.
...but only slightly, and i'm still eager to read follow-ups on this
experiment!
------
ebertx
There are a couple of sites that help for finding or at least verifying viable
markets:
1) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov) 2) and FreeLunch.com -
<http://www.economy.com/freelunch/default.asp>
------
wasd
I really like articles like this (on how to "find" ideas) and have seen a few
on HN. Does anyone have more articles like this book marked? I've seen PG's
essay.
~~~
amitklein
Here are a few: \- <http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html> \-
<http://cdixon.org/2010/03/14/developing-new-startup-ideas/> \-
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/st_qareis/>
These are tangentially related: \-
[http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/02/entrepreneurial-
turbulence.h...](http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/02/entrepreneurial-
turbulence.html) \- <http://500hats.com/niche-to-win>
I have more general "starting a startup" links here:
<http://bitly.com/bundles/o_7ki5mkvgf8/1>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Problem With 'Above Average Programmers' - gacba
http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/problem-above-average-programmers/
======
hga
" _Being an expert means you know it all about your subject._ Unfortunately,
it also means you’re going to get lazy. _It means you’re going to eventually
rest on your laurels and sit around thinking you’re better than everyone else
instead of actually working to get there. Your expertise will become a
liability because you stop trying to learn. Maybe not today, but soon enough._
"
(I look at my bookshelves, recent Amazon.com purchasing history and piles of
books I'm in the process of reading or have queued up.)
Uh, right.
" _So what’s the number one thing you can do to be the best programmer out
there?_ Start by considering yourself below average."
But that's stupid if it's not true. "Know thyself" is one of the cardinal
rules in this game. If I thought myself below average in this field, I'd spend
my time in another where I _know_ I'm above average (e.g. chemistry) and I
wouldn't try to tackle some hard problems I'm looking at, including a few I
don't think it's likely I'll be able to contribute to.
------
gte910h
Author has confused experts with people who don't continually learn.
------
pixelbath
An interesting article, but it seems like the author is drawing the incorrect
conclusions from the Dunning-Kruger effect (which I found to be a MUCH a more
fascinating and informative read).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
VS2008 Stepping into framework source code - tarunkotia
http://referencesource.microsoft.com/serversetup.aspx
Configuring Microsoft Reference Source Server
======
tarunkotia
Since January 2008, Microsoft has enabled a public symbol server containing
source code for most of the .NET Framework libraries. This means you can step
into the source code for System.Web.dll and various other core assemblies,
which is extremely useful when you have an obscure problem and not even Google
can help. This contains more information than the disassembly you might get
from Reflector you get the original source code, with comments.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tesla First Quarter 2018 Update [pdf] - kgwgk
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/6239644551x0x979026/44C49236-1FC2-4FD9-80B1-495ED74E4194/TSLA_Update_Letter_2018-1Q.pdf
======
magicbuzz
Model 3 has a larger market share in the US now than BMW 3 series? That seems
to be what the graph for April says...
~~~
secabeen
The 3 series is pretty late it its product cycle: Sixth generation
(F30/F31/F34; 2011–present)
I would expect a surge in 3-series when they next release a new generation.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple Exploring New Glass Panel MacBook Keyboards - kmano8
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/04/apple-exploring-new-glass-panel-keyboards/
======
hsbaut76
Sorry Apple, but I won't buy another MacBook Pro again in the foreseeable
future.
I won't accept your dogma anymore.
I encourage other developers to use Linux. Many Distros have come along way,
personally, I think Manjaro is great.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Origins and migration of Soccer's elite – data visualization and app - antonmc
https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2016/06/03/origins-of-soccer-superstars/
======
antonmc
A blog post and link to an interactive data science app that plots the origins
of Copa America players and the paths that led most to Europe.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Help with Yahoo Pipes Error - jdavid
http://jdavid.net/?p=93
I am getting an error on the response while using OSDE ( Open Social Developer Environment )<p>HTTP ERROR 500
Problem accessing /gadgets/makeRequest. Reason:
host parameter is null<p>I think Yahoo Pipes is rejecting the request because it's coming from a local server. Can anyone confirm this?<p>I did not see any documentation at pipes.yahoo.com that would confirm or deny this in their documentation or their forums.<p>Has anyone use used Yahoo Pipes in an opensocial/ facebook context?
======
powdahound
Why not post on stackoverflow.com?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why don't you hire Indian freelance developers? - googlycooly
======
anandnair
One thing I've felt is that there are lot of freelance developers in India,
both good and bad ones. Most of them say "Yes" to everything but only few of
them have the capability to do what we need.
When I posted a simple task on Upwork recently (related to AWS server
configuration), I got 100s of requests, mostly from Indians. Now the problems
are
1) I'm looking for a freelancer, not an agency. Most of them are pitching on
behalf of their own agency, and we will never know who is actually doing the
work. (They might even outsource it) [This is the worst part]
2) Some of them won't even read the work description properly, and so we need
to spend a lot of time filtering the requests.
I got confused and skeptical about their capabilities because of all these and
finally hired a freelancer from Europe.
But I've seen amazingly talented freelancers from India as well. It's just
that, filtering through 100s of requests is painful.
~~~
smartis2812
We had the same experience at my last company. And the final result was very
disappointing. Also we found exact parts of the received code on
StackOverflow.
------
PaulHoule
From the U.S. timezone is a big concern.
When I meet with people in India it is always around 8am or 8pm, it is kinda
fun the first few times but it gets old fast.
There are many people in CONUS, Canada and South America who are easy to work
with in terms of timezone. Particularly there are many people who can do data
science and other fancy work in Argentina, I have even had good experiences
with freshers from Brazil and Colombia.
~~~
googlycooly
+1 for the timezone issue.
------
Porthos9K
I'm an American, and I'd rather hire my fellow Americans. They have a much
more sensible work ethic, and are more efficient; they put in a solid day's
work in eight hours or less and then get the hell out of the office. If they
leave at 5pm, then I don't have to stay all night to babysit them.
------
manyxcxi
Primarily, it’s because I don’t know many. Most attempts at networking come
from body shop style companies in very spammy ways.
Second to that is the time zone issue. I’m on the US West coast, I’m an early
riser, but it’s still rough.
------
catacombs
Build American. Hire American.
I'm not one to outsource work to people overseas to save a buck. That, to me,
is extremely problematic.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
ICloud: The Mother of All Halos - jsherry
http://allthingsd.com/20110608/icloud-the-mother-of-all-halos/
======
stanleydrew
It would seem that this guy has never actually used more than one Android
device.
Cause Android has done this from the very beginning, syncing data and apps
through your Google account. Which is free.
Indeed it has been awesome. When I turned on the Samsung galaxy 10.1 I got at
I/O this year, it already knew my wpa key. That was just the latest in a
series of small touches that have gone completely unnoticed by those living
deep within the apple ecosystem.
~~~
saturdaysaint
As an iOS user, I understand that Android's always been cloud-centric, but I'm
curious (and a bit skeptical) if this has really entailed everything that
Apple just unveiled:
Does Android automatically sync photos (both with the cloud and the PC)?
Does stock Android do a full backup (including application data) to the cloud?
When I synced my iPhone 4 to iTunes for the first time, I instantly got voice
notes, text files and PDF's I've had since my first iPhone. I've always
wondered if an Android user picking up a new phone could expect the
equivalent.
Is the Google Docs experience (ie Google's answer to the "document syncing"
problem) better on Android than it is on iOS devices? I've wanted to use
Google Docs exclusively for years, but editing is practically unusable on an
iPhone. I'm shocked at how slow they've moved to make documents mobile.
~~~
blinkingled
Photos : Multiple solutions exist to do n-way photo and video sync although it
is highly debatable how useful anything other than Mobile to Cloud and Cloud
to Mobile is which Android does out of box.
Picasa photos and videos automatically appear in gallery and there is no limit
to the number of photos.
<http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html> \- Backup can
include anything including app data and it doesn't have to go to Google's
cloud - the backup client component is designed to be customizable to send
your backup data wherever you please. Best part of all!
Google Docs - Again multiple solutions exist. Documents to Go full edition
offers seamless Google Docs support with decent editing functions. There exist
Word/Excel add-ins that save to Google Docs from desktop.
------
blinkingled
Quote - " Who wants to go back to emailing documents to yourself, or firing up
Dropbox to move media from one device to another, when iCloud will–if it works
properly–obviate the need for both by enabling change-on-one-device, update-
to-all computing that’s ostensibly effortless and invisible?"
" Add to that a price point of free and a software-driven ecosystem like the
one Apple’s developed and, well, that’s an offer not easily refused. Not
easily duplicated, either–particularly for more fragmented platforms like
Android"
Hmm. Never used Android before or just paying it back Mr. Writer? Apple patted
him in the back and John is just doing his best in response. WSJ is Apple's
guerilla marketing arm.
------
jsherry
It just seems to me that companies like SugarSync (and maybe Dropbox - I don't
use it) have been doing this for years. I'm confident that Apple will improve
some of the media streaming experience, but their real genius is in marketing
these products b/c this has existed for some time.
~~~
danieldk
iCloud is not (just) a hard disk in the cloud (as Steve Jobs said during the
keynote). More defining is the API that makes it seamless for applications
(and consequently users) to sync data to the cloud.
In that sense, it's not just another Dropbox. In a year, the average iOS app
will automatically sync data across devices using iCloud, while there is no
simple knob you can switch to store it in Dropbox instead.
~~~
jsherry
I will have to see the full implementation of iCloud to understand the
difference. Again, can't speak for Dropbox even though they're the market
leader. But SugarSync has this syncing functionality already and has had it
for at least 2 years.
You can sync to the cloud and access files from the cloud OR you can actually
choose files/folders to sync across hardware. For example, if I say that I
want to sync my music folder across my Macbook Air and my Thinkpad, any time I
make an update on one machine, it flows through to the other machine's hard
drive. Similar with documents. If I choose to sync a Word document across
machines and I edit it and save on one machine, in seconds it updates on the
other machine should I open it there. It's all seamless - happens in the
background without me having to push it from machine to machine.
Re: the API point, SugarSync has had one since 2010:
<http://www.sugarsync.com/developer>. Haven't developed with it at all nor
have I used an app that uses it, so can't speak for its flexibility.
P.s. I swear I'm not a SugarSync employee - just a very satisfied user since
2008 ;-)
~~~
danieldk
_You can sync to the cloud and access files from the cloud OR you can actually
choose files/folders to sync across hardware._
There is a huge usability difference between putting a file in some folder,
and having it synced, and automatically syncing all relevant data in an
application.
This is easy to underestimate for us technical people, but it is very
difficult to explain my mother that she has to put files in, say, Dropbox on
her iPod Touch to be able to access it on her iPad. Do something on the iPod
Touch, have it available nearly instantly on the iPad in the same application,
she understands.
~~~
jsherry
Good point indeed. The functionality is already there, but Apple will surely
simplify things and cause widespread adoption.
------
ThomPete
It's not that others haven't done it before. It's that Apple hasn't done it
until now.
That is the big thing. Not the technology in itself.
------
cph1
It's true; iCloud has the potential to be a massive lock-in mechanism,
ensuring that people will continue to buy Apple devices for years on end
because buying anything else will mean manually moving your data out of iCloud
- which probably won't be easy for the average user.
~~~
peterb
To move your data you will need to sync to a mac and then manually move your
data. Copying from a iOS device is problematic, but that is true today.
~~~
Timothee
That would work for some stuff, but I'm not sure what would happen to the data
stored by third-party apps. iTunes has a section to retrieve documents that
some apps create, as long as the apps themselves are built to take advantage
of that.
However, if an app doesn't provide either that or some kind of export, I'm not
sure if you'd get easy access to that data. And actually that might create an
incentive for some apps not to add the functionality. It makes sense for
Office-type apps to provide a PDF, or Office-compatible format, but I could
imagine very specific apps that can lock you in since you don't get to
(easily) reverse-engineer and convert their data because you don't get as easy
of an access as you get on a desktop.
------
adaml_623
Does anybody else think that the EU is going to jump on Apple eventually the
same way they jumped on Microsoft and browsers and make Apple provide a way
for users to select which storage provider they want to use?
~~~
a2tech
They might try-but why would Apple let them? They can just take their ball and
go home. I couldn't find any hard numbers but a few articles I found were
claiming that European sales make up less than 11% of total Apple sales.
~~~
pavlov
That makes sense in a world where losing billions of dollars of revenue is
preferable to adding an API.
The EU has a population of over 500 million. Apple's presence in Europe
involves much more than selling computers and gadgets.
If they actually were to retreat because of some squabble with the EU
Commission, they'd also be abandoning dozens of telecom operators with whom
they have iPhone deals, tens of thousands of developers who make things for
the iOS and Mac platform, and millions of consumers who buy digital content
from iTunes... Leaving all that on the table in this extremely competitive
market would be nothing short of madness.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Russian Scientist Claims Signs of Life Spotted on Venus - daegloe
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-scientist-claims-signs-life-spotted-venus-070321311.html
======
uncoder0
“Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us
to say that they are living.”
I would have liked a more in-depth explanation and some photos indicating the
morphological features.
This is the only photo I could dig up: <http://i.imgur.com/dfv0m.jpg>
~~~
daegloe
I couldn't dig up any additional details re: the photos in question.
Some are claiming the crab-like object in the photo linked to above is a
fractured piece of the probe's protective shield. The fully intact probe can
be seen here pre-launch: <http://www.myspacemuseum.com/v_venera13i_24.jpg>
------
kia
While he really seems to be a well known scientist, the photo of a "scorpion"
[1] is not the best confirmation of his theories.
[1] - [http://www.mk.ru/science/article/2012/01/20/662678-na-
venere...](http://www.mk.ru/science/article/2012/01/20/662678-na-venere-
nashli-skorpiona.html)
------
PaulHoule
Are this the same scientist who thinks the U.S. shot down the last Russian
mars probe?
------
TheCoreh
Hmm, are this photos the article mentions available to the general public?
------
bendangelo
There has always been life on venus under the clouds. Search for valiant thor.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Does rust have a future? - zabana
======
foldr
I mean, probably? Significant chunks of Rust code are already making it into
Firefox.
I will say that from my relatively limited experience of Rust, it's a language
to use if you're really really sure that you can't use GC. Any time you want
to use a graph-like data structure (which can quite often, in some
applications) you have to do a significant amount of thinking that you just
don't have to do in a language with GC.
I don't mean that as a criticism of the language. Rust makes automatic non-GC
memory management about as easy and flexible as it could be. But it's still a
significant cognitive overhead.
~~~
steveklabnik
You don't have to do that thinking if you use a library which implements one
for you, which is one reason why we made libraries so easy to use.
~~~
foldr
It's true in any language that you don't have to think about implementing a
data structure if there's a library that already implements it. I think that
clearly misses the point of what I was saying, though. Quite often you do have
to implement data structures yourself.
Here's a concrete example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_connected_edge_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_connected_edge_list)
This is a data structure that you're quite likely going to have to implement
yourself. It is, obviously, possible to implement a DCEL in Rust. However, to
do so it is necessary to make a number of decisions (unsafe pointers? indices
instead of pointers?) that you don't have to make in, say, Go or Java, where
you can just use ordinary pointers/references.
Again, that is not a criticism of Rust. It's just an observation about its
design tradeoffs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Call me maybe: MongoDB - iand
http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb
======
nasalgoat
Frankly I was amazed that majority lost as few as it did. If you need atomic
writes, MongoDB is not the place for you.
------
dccoolgai
The only thing that surpises me about this is that people are still nominally
surprised about this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A VNC client for your geeky character terminals (VT/xterm/etc) - howardg
https://github.com/HouzuoGuo/headmore
======
brudgers
If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
------
t0mst0n
I miss the VNC client for your geeky character terminals for Amiga 500 or C64
:D Only then is the geeky.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How long before you leave? - nzk1
If you recently started a new job but you are not enjoying it - how long would you stick with it until you leave?<p>(for sake of discussion - you have enough money to survive a year without working).
======
ndhoa
Frankly, having a job one does not enjoy is the _vast majority_ case. So you
should think of being able to change that as a gamble where the odds are
generally against you.
My opinion is: you should not think of your current job as something terrible
you must leave asap. Make some token efforts to change the working environment
if you have the say in the management or try to fit yourself for a few months.
Trying to change job is good, but you should have a solid backup plan first
because the odds are against you, you are more likely to fail than to succeed
going by general statistics. So you need to plan for failure, you should not
"all in" even if you have a year of saving to spare.
It's really possible to have a shitty job but a good and meaningful life. Job
don't control you, I am the captain of my soul. However especially while we're
young there is no reason to muster a good effort to get a good job. Basically
if you have a shitty job, you can still do quality things with your life,
there is much to one's life outside a job, unless you are at a slavery shitty
job.
Our normal day jobs leave us plenty of room to define our lives in other ways
- how we treat people, who we get to know, what we do in our spare time, what
we see in life and our surroundings. Quality of life is more dependent on self
than on external parameters. Irregardless of your peers and your product at
work, you can believe in causes like FOSS and fight for it in your spare time,
you can get involved in charity and community work, you can read and think and
define your way of life, you can get to know people and treat them in
different ways. The source of happiness to, variedly, helping other people,
being part of something greater than yourself, feeling collective purpose, and
other things in that ballpark and if we believe them, then all of those are
possible in almost any kind of environment
Background: recently finished paying my university debt after 3.5 years.
Started a new job 3 months ago, tried all what I said above but didn't work
out but I made my efforts to change the working environment itself. Text above
are distilled from all the conversations I had with my friends
~~~
wikwocket
While I'm all for making the most of your position, and not defining yourself
by your job, I have to disagree that most jobs are bad and that you should
just serve your time and go on with your life after 5pm. A good career is
energizing, a bad job placement can be totally demoralizing, and _everyone_
deserves to find a career that vitalizes them.
Work/life balance is hard to achieve with a great job, let alone if your job
is soul-crushing, mind-numbing, impossible, badly managed, poorly located, or
in an industry you're incompatible with. So I always advise people to look
around if they're unhappy with their position. Even in a down market, there
are possibilities out there, and you will never know until you look. And with
due diligence, research, networking, etc, you can have some decent assurances
about a potential new job is a good match for you.
Now of course there are situations where it may be better to stay where you
are for a while, to get experience/build your resume/pay off loans/etc. But
life is too short to work in a place that makes you unhappy, and family is far
too important to have a job that robs you of energy which you could devote to
them.
------
singular
I'd give it at least 3 months and really try to assess whether the discomfort
was due to the job being a sucky situation or me being
challenging/experiencing natural discomfort after a big change, i.e. getting
the job, or even potentially due to some outside factor. I'd also definitely
talk things over with friends to get some outside perspective.
After that, if I felt the same way, if I had enough money to survive a year
without working I'd leave immediately, take time off, then prep for interviews
and go for a better job. However this is very situation dependent, I am a
single man with no (serious) responsibilities, ymmv.
------
mnbvcxza
I'd keep looking in my spare time. Why quit before you have something else
lined up? I'd have to evaluate why it was bad, how bad it was, and how well I
could mitigate the problem(s) when determining if I wanted to look for another
job. It would have to be fairly bad for me not to give it at least a month -
more than just me thinking it wasn't quite as cool as I thought it would be. I
don't see how it would hurt your record if you found another job and left
within a month - you could just leave that one job off your resume.
------
sfronczak
I once began looking for a job about a week after I started a new one. I
wasn't completely sold on the company when I accepted the offer - I had some
misgivings about the culture - and later wished I had just declined. After a
week I knew my gut was right and I needed to get out.
Of course it was more difficult to find a new job since I had just started one
but I was honest in my interviews and after 90 days I left for something else.
Trust your instincts.
------
mzarate06
I've found about 6 months to be the cut off point. I never set that time frame
intentionally, and most of my jobs/contracts last much longer, if not for
their full term and beyond. However, in bad situations, 6 months happened to
be the longest I was able to stand all the negativity.
In one case I left after about 3 months, only b/c I knew right away that my
place wasn't in that particular environment, or with that particular team.
If you're asking due to relevant circumstances, what don't you like about the
job, and how long have you been there?
------
jason_wang
Another data point to consider: recruiter fee
If you were hired through a recruiter, the company that hired you will pay 15%
to 25% of your annual salary in fee. In most cases, if you leave within 30 to
60 days, the recruiter will find your replacement for free. If you 1 day after
the guarantee period, then the company that hired you have to pay the full
fee.
Moral of the story, once you know you want to leave, talk to your manager. Be
a nice guy.
~~~
mnbvcxza
> Moral of the story, once you know you want to leave, talk to your manager.
> Be a nice guy.
Before making sure you have something else lined up first?
~~~
jason_wang
I suppose every company or team is different. But almost everyone on my team
told me they are moving on about the same time they started looking.
This is beneficial both ways:
* A smooth transition can be made. They get to wrap up their last project at the company and have enough time to do a proper knowledge transfer
* We get a head start on hiring a replacement. Typically the person leaving gets to help out during the interview process as well.
* I get to help the person leaving on picking out the right next opportunity and more often than not, help the person negotiate his next job offer.
------
jmspring
In the last case where I wasn't happy, it took me about 3mo to convince
myself, it wasn't worth it and about a month to find something I liked. My
tolerance for putting up with a crappy job at the time was pretty high. Even
with the scenario you put forth, it would have probably taken 1/2 to 3/4 of
the time.
These days, I'd probable be gone within a month of such a realization. Time to
transition and move on.
------
runawaybottle
I bounced in my third month at a job that I really misjudged. Cut your losses
and move on, the market is good enough right now.
------
OafTobark
Personally, ASAP or at the latest, when I find a replacement job if I was in
your position if thats what you're looking for.
------
penguinlinux
you don't specify the real reason why you dislike this job.
~~~
muruke
Agreed, it really depends on why I don't like the job. But I generally would
try to stick around for few months more.
Although if I had enough money to live for a year why did I take the job? :)
~~~
greenlakejake
Please note that potential employers don't like seeing resume gaps >6 months.
~~~
sejje
Never been a problem for me, and I have lots of resume gaps like this.
~~~
mnbvcxza
What interesting things are you doing during those gaps?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Quest for the Ultimate Vacuum Tube - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-vacuum-tube
======
imperialdrive
mind getting blown!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why? - aspyct
I've been managing servers for quite some time now. At home, on prem, in the cloud...<p>The more I learn, the more I believe cloud is the only competitive solution today, even for sensitive industries like banking or medical.<p>I honestly fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least for business. Cost-wise, security-wise, whatever-wise.<p>What's a good reason to stick to on-prem today for new projects? To be clear, this is not some troll question. I'm curious: am I missing something?
======
AgentK20
Like many others have pointed out: Cost.
I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who
operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent
players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines
of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us
_an order of magnitude_ more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwidth
costs. Even if we bring our own ISPs and cross-connect to just use cloud's
compute capacity, they still charge stupid high costs to egress to our
carriers.
Even if bandwidth were completely free, at any timescale above 1-2 years
purchasing your own hardware, LTO-ing, or even just renting will be cheaper.
Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic and you're unable to
reasonably commit to year+ terms, or if your team is so small that you don't
have the resources to manage infrastructure yourself, but at a team size of
>10 your sysadmins running on bare metal will pay their own salaries in cloud
savings.
~~~
mmmBacon
A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We
had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS
and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required
transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early
prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I
figured out that we could colocate and rent racks, install HW, hire people to
maintain, etc... for way less than we could use the cloud for. I was shocked
at the difference. I remember saying to my cofounder why does anyone use AWS,
you can do this on your own way cheaper.
Later I worked at a FAANG and remember when Snap filed their S1 when they were
going public they disclosed that they were paying Google $5B and we were
totally shocked at the cost compared to our own spend on significantly larger
infra.
I think people don’t realize this is doable and it’s great to hear stories
like yours showing the possibilities.
~~~
RachelF
Dropbox did the same thing a few years back - moved everything from Amazon S3
to their own storage.
My guess is they did it for cost reasons.
~~~
llarsson
That S3 is eventually consistent with object updates (HTTP PUT) might also
screw up things for a company whose core value is synchronized storage.
~~~
dfsegoat
I don't mean to sound daft, just clarifying my own understanding, but isn't
Dropbox eventually consistent (as a system)?
~~~
llarsson
Oh, sure, but when they think they have written something to S3 and got a
successful HTTP response back from the API, perhaps they want to be able to
tell clients to go fetch the new data from the bucket. But those clients may
not get the new data then, due to eventual consistency.
~~~
lozenge
S3 is immediately consistent for new objects unless the service received a GET
on the object before it was created. It's easy to use this to make an
immediately consistent system.
~~~
ozkatz
S3 ListObjects calls are eventually consistent (i.e. list-after-put). EMRFS
[1] and S3Guard [2] mitigate this for data processing use cases.
[1] -
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-f...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-
fs.html) [2] -
[https://blog.cloudera.com/introducing-s3guard-s3-consistency...](https://blog.cloudera.com/introducing-s3guard-s3-consistency-
for-apache-hadoop/)
------
tgamblin
I work in Livermore Computing at LLNL.
We manage upwards of 30 different compute clusters (many listed here:
[https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms](https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms)).
You can read about the machine slated to hit the floor in 2022/2023 here:
[https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-
capita...](https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-capitan-
projected-worlds-fastest-supercomputer).
All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath
networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. For our workloads on
"commodity" x86_64/no-GPU clusters, we pay 1/3 or less the cost of what you'd
pay for equivalent cloud nodes, and for the really high end systems like
Sierra, with NVIDIA GPUs and Power9's, we pay far less than that over the life
of the machine.
The way machines are procured here is different from what smaller shops might
be used to. For example, the El Capitan machine mentioned above was procured
via the CORAL-2 collaboration with 2 other national labs (ANL and ORNL). We
write a 100+ page statement of work describing what the machine must do, and
we release a set of benchmarks characterizing our workload. Vendors submit
proposals for how they could meet our requirements, along with performance
numbers and test results for the benchmarks. Then we pick the best proposal.
We do something similar with LANL and SNL for the so-called commodity clusters
(see [https://hpc.llnl.gov/cts-2-rfi](https://hpc.llnl.gov/cts-2-rfi) for the
latest one). As part of these processes, we learn a lot about what vendors are
planning to offer 5 years out, so we're not picking off the shelf stuff --
we're getting large volumes of the latest hardware.
In addition to the cost savings from running on-prem, it's our job to stay on
the bleeding edge, and I'm not sure how we would do that without working with
vendors through these procurements and running our own systems.
~~~
zozbot234
> All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath
> networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud.
It's weird that these networking technologies are not used more in "plain"
datacentre settings, since networking latency and throughput has to be a
significant challenge to scaling up non-trivial workloads and achieving true
datacentre-scale computing. We hear a lot about how to "scale out", but that's
only really feasible for relatively simple workloads where you just seek to do
away with the whole issue of keeping different nodes in sync on a real-time
basis, and accept the resulting compromises. In many cases, that's just not
going to be enough.
~~~
alexpotato
There are a lot of people from the National Lab super computer world who end
up in High Frequency Trading for just the reason you describe.
Specifically, how do you optimize a large cluster of computers to operate at
the lowest possible latency. For the National Labs, those computers could be
in the lab or with other labs around the world. For the HFT folks, the
machines could be in an exchange or spread across multiple exchanges around
the world.
Source: I used to be head of Global Latency Monitoring for a HFT.
~~~
j88439h84
I'm curious why you moved to LLNL from HFT?
~~~
eyegor
Money is a safe guess. Research pay scales aren't even close to private
sector, especially not finance.
~~~
dwohnitmok
It sounds like the opposite direction happened here.
------
centimeter
We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M
of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2/3rds of
that every year on power/maintenance/rent/upgrades/etc.
We don't generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for:
* uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we're willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies)
* latency (this is a big one)
* security, to some degree
* if something crazy is happening, that's when we need hardware, and that's when hardware is hard to get. Consider how Azure was running out of space during the last few months. It would have cost us an insane amount of money if we couldn't grow our data centers during Corona! We probably have at least 20-30% free hot capacity in our datacenters, so we can grow quickly.
We also have a number of machines with specs that would be hard to get e.g. on
AWS.
We have some machines on external cloud services, but probably less than 1% of
our deployed boxes.
We move a _lot_ of bandwidth internally (tens of terabytes a day at least,
hundreds some days), and I'm not sure we could do that cheaply on AWS (maybe
you could).
We do use <insert big cloud provider> for backup, but that's the only thing
we've thought it was economical to really use them for.
~~~
H8crilA
Hundreds of terabytes a day is really not that much, depends on what latency
can you accept. I often run computations over datasets that are petabytes in
size, just for my own needs. A big data move would be at least tens of
petabytes or more like hundreds, or thousands.
Also surprised about latency, latency from what to what? Big cloud providers
have excellent globally spanning networks. Long distance networking is crazy
expensive, though, compared to the peanuts it costs to transfer data within a
data center.
Reliability - again, not sure I buy it. Reliability is "solved" at low levels
(such as data storage), most failures occur directly at service levels,
regardless of whether you have the service in house or in the cloud.
The rest of your points make sense.
~~~
centimeter
> Hundreds of terabytes a day is really not that much
How much would it cost to move this across boxes in EC2? I actually don't
know, that's not a rhetorical question. A lot of our servers have 10-40gbit
links that we saturate for minutes/hours at a time, which I suspect would be
expensive without the kind of topology optimization we do in our datacenters.
> Also surprised about latency
We've spent a surprising amount of money reducing latency :) We're not a high
frequency trading firm or anything, but an extra 1ms (say) between datacenters
is generally bad for us and measurably reduces performance of some systems.
> Reliability is "solved" at low levels
To whatever extent this may be true, it's certainly not true for cloud
providers. One obvious example is that EC2 has "scheduled maintenance events"
where they force you to reboot your box. This would cost us a lot of money
(mostly in dev time, to work around it).
Also, multi-second network dropouts in big cloud datacenters are not uncommon
(in my limited experience), but that would be really bad for us. We have
millisecond-scale failover with 2x or 3x redundancy on important systems.
~~~
tstrimple
> How much would it cost to move this across boxes in EC2?
Nothing. You generally only pay for data going out of cloud providers. Not
data going in or data being transferred within the same region.
> One obvious example is that EC2 has "scheduled maintenance events" where
> they force you to reboot your box. This would cost us a lot of money (mostly
> in dev time, to work around it).
You're not going to have a successful cloud experience unless you build your
applications in a cloud suitable way. This means not all legacy applications
are a good fit for the public cloud. Most companies really embracing the cloud
are mitigating those risks by distributing workloads across multiple instances
so you don't care if any one needs to be restarted, especially within a
planned window.
> Also, multi-second network dropouts in big cloud datacenters are not
> uncommon (in my limited experience), but that would be really bad for us. We
> have millisecond-scale failover with 2x or 3x redundancy on important
> systems.
Are these inter-region network dropouts or between the internet and the cloud
data center? You're not going to be relying on a public internet connection to
the cloud for critical workloads.
All that being said, there are plenty of workloads which I don't think fit
well in the cloud operating model. You may very well have one of them.
~~~
iampims
You pay for cross-AZ Traffic in AWS, and that adds up really fast.
~~~
Wintereise
Yep. Got bitten HARD by this recently, $1.5k inter-az transfer charges that we
never saw coming.
Our fault, I suppose -- but multi-az is prohibitively expensive if you need to
run anything data heavy distributed.
~~~
resonator
I'm working on reducing a $50K per month bill for Inter-AZ traffic at the
moment.
> but multi-az is prohibitively expensive if you need to run anything data
> heavy distributed.
If you communicate between your AZs via ALBs, multi-az is effectively free.
Our bill is so high because within our Kubernetes cluster, our mesh isn't
locality aware; it randomly routes to any available pod. 2/3rds of our traffic
crosses AZs.
------
horsawlarway
I'm slowly coming to the complete opposite opinion you seem to have.
I've worked almost entirely for companies that run services in various cloud
infrastructures - Azure/Heroku/Aws/GCP/Other.
I recently started a tiny 1 man dev shop in my spare time. Given my experience
with cloud services it seemed like a no brainer to throw something up in the
cloud and run with it.
Except after a few months I realized I'm in an industry that's not going to
see drastic and unplanned demand (I'm not selling ads, and I don't need to
drive eyeballs to my site to generate revenue).
So while in theory the scaling aspect of the cloud sounds nice, the reality
was simple - I was overpaying for EVERYTHING.
I reduced costs by nearly 90% by throwing several of my old personal machines
at the problem and hosting things myself.
So long story short - Cost. I'm happy to exchange some scaling and some uptime
in favor of cutting costs. Backups are still offsite, so if my place burns I'm
just out on uptime. The product supports offline, so while no one is thrilled
if I lose power, my customers can still use the product.
Basically - cost, Cost, COST. I have sunk costs in old hardware, it's dumb to
rent an asset I already own.
There might well be a point when I scale into a point where the cloud makes
sense. That day is not today.
~~~
tjbiddle
What's the time trade-off?
I've been drawing out my plans lately for a hobby project, all 100% on AWS.
Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out
images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is
secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all.
I can't imagine buying hardware, ensuring my home is setup with proper
Internet, configuring everything here, and then still needing off-site backups
anyway.
Now, keep in mind - I'm definitely coming in from a Millennial point of view.
My entire career was built on cloud. I've never touched hardware apart from
building a computer back when I was 15 or something. I understand virtual.
But being able to build up and tear down an entire setup, having it completely
self-restore in minutes. Can't beat that.
Napkin math has me at ~$50/mo: Full VPC, private/public isolated subnets,
secure NACLs and security groups, infinitely extendable block storage and
flat-file storage, near-instant backups with syncing to a different continent,
5 servers, DNS configurations, etc.
All depends what you're doing too - of course. But for me, just the trade-off
of working with what I know and not needing to leave my cafe of choice, still
not breaking the bank - and if I do, having instant tear down and restore.
Bam.
~~~
tigerstripe
What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to
know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost
$60+/mo
~~~
tjbiddle
Certainly nothing powerful :-) I can get away with t3.nano and t3.micro for
what I'm doing at the moment. But the beauty of cloud, is that I can scale up
when I eventually need it.
5x t3.nano will be ~$25/mo 5x t3.micro will be ~$50/mo
All of my AMIs are EBS optimized and require a minimum of 8GB for the root
drive (Although they only use ~1.6GB. Not bothering to hack around this to
save a buck.) So that'll be 40GB EBS block storage. Plus I want ~20GB spread
across 3 of the machines.
So EBS should be ~$6/mo.
I only need the volumes of those last 3, the others are good to go with their
base AMI or user-data init script. So I only need snapshot backups of ~20GB.
Being priced incrementally and having minimal changes, I'll only be charged
~$1/mo for that + off-site another $1/mo
So, currently experimenting with the t3.nano - Cost is ~$36/mo. One of these
servers will be used as a personal VPN, and I expect ~75GB/mo coming from my
laptop. So bandwidth charges at $9/mo.
Total $45/mo - For what I have planned now, at least.
~~~
tarasmatsyk
That's exactly the reason I gave up on AWS, I need an accountant to do the
math every month :D
Now I rent a 4GB Linux box for 5$/m with no Dockers or whatsoever and happy
that it just works
~~~
Gravyness
I also hate this complexity with a passion. I love cloud, but pricing can be a
real nightmare.
I don't use AWS specifically but when I needed to know the price of some cloud
service or group of services I spin up the service (or services) in a brand
new project and let it run for 24 hours under similar working environment to
see the impact, then after checking the results (the breakdown of each
service's price in that day) I just close the project entirely, no left overs.
So I tend to successfully avoid these strange, terribly organized, cloud-
specific, service-specific calculator where I can easily forget one aspect of
the service that might cost a lot of money absolutely randomly.
Obviously it is a bad strategy if things are expected to reach $200/month
and/or you do 'price evaluation' frequently, but otherwise it is stupid easy.
I barely spent $50 each year doing this (small company and sporadic system
changes)
But the best part is that the final daily price of your system is as precise
as it can possibly be and that is worth something.
------
reacharavindh
University research group here.
Simply, _cost_
Our compute servers crunch numbers and data at > 80% util.
Our servers are optimized for the work we have.
They run 24/7 picking jobs from queue. Cloud burst is often irrelevant here.
They deal with Terabytes or even Petabytes of moving data. I’d cry paying for
bandwidth costs if charged €/GB.
Sysadmin(yours truly) would be needed even if it were to be run in the cloud.
We run our machines beyond 4 years if they are still good at purpose.
We control the infra and data. So, a little more peace and self-reliance.
No surprise bills because some bot pounded on a S3 dataset.
Our heavy users are connected to the machines at a single hop :-) No need to
go across WAN for work.
~~~
dathinab
In germany it's a pretty common think for universities to have some servers
for themself.
1\. Their use case is kinda different. The servers mostly run heavy CS
research related stuff. E.g. they might have heavy CPU load and heavy traffic
between they servers but they have less often heavy traffic to the "normal
internet" (if they have heavy traffic to the outside it's normally to other
research institutes which not seldom have dedicated wire connections).
2\. They might run target specific optimized CPU or GPU heavy compute tasks
going on for weeks at a time. This is really expansive in the cloud which is
mostly focused in thinks like web services.
3\. When they don't run such tasks in the research groups they want to allow
their juniors to run their research tasks "for free". Which wouldn't work with
a payment model as done in the cloud.
4\. They don't want to relay on some external company.
Also I'm not sure are there even (affordable) cloud systems with compatible
spec? (like with 4+TB of _RAM_ , I'm not kidding this is a requirement for
some kind of tasks or they will take way to long and requires additional
complexity by using special data structures which support partial offline data
_in the right way_ , which can be very costly in dev time)??
~~~
RockIslandLine
It's not just CS. The computational chemistry and materials science
crystallography folks can have jobs that run for days or weeks too.
~~~
veddox
I'm at a center for computational biology - our genomics guys have been known
to use 90% of our university's HPC capacity ;-) My own work (ecological
modelling) is not as heavy, but when I run a full experiment, that takes a 32
core machine about two weeks to complete.
------
Groxx
Meta-comment:
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098576)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097812)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098658)
abilities / guarantees:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097213)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090325)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097737)
threat model:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098612)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097896](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097896)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098297)
cost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097215)
That's just the in-order top comments I'm seeing right now. (please do read
and upvote them / others too, they're widely varying in their details and are
interesting)
The answer's the same as it has always been. Cloud is more expensive, unless
you're small enough to not pay for a sysadmin, or need to swing between truly
extreme scale differences. And a few exceptions for other reasons.
~~~
cortesoft
There is also another answer... I work for a CDN, so we can't really use the
cloud when in many ways we ARE the cloud.
Although we do often make jokes about "what if we just move the CDN to AWS?"
~~~
mcny
It is a pity East Dakota won’t make jokes like these. Can you imagine
cloudflare running on aws? What happens when someone tries to denial of
service them while on aws?
On a different note, Netflix still runs “on the cloud”, right? I mean what
does it really mean? Dropbox can still have most of its stuff on aws and do
the expensive part on premises if cost is a concern?
The truly bizarre stuff happens at hybrid cloud.
~~~
ddorian43
Netflix runs it's own bandwidth/cdn. Sometimes it actually has a pop/box
INSIDE your ISP
[https://openconnect.netflix.com/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/).
~~~
mcny
My understanding is the website, the user services such as authentication,
heart beat (not sure what is the proper technical term but the thing that says
where I am in a particular episode). That and internal apps like project
tracker not to mention dev/test.
At least in my imagination. At my work, I'm not even worth throwing an SSD at
my work computer. My manager is powerless to help as the company has some kind
of deal to only buy from HP? No idea what kind of glue procurement is sniffing
at this company...
------
bcrosby95
We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street.
At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of
users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact
by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k
to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we
bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS had no concept of "high
memory" instances and you had to completely pay out your ass for a 32GB
server, despite ram being fairly cheap at the time.
We have no dedicated hardware person. Between myself and the CTO, we average
maybe a day per month thinking about or managing the hardware. If we need
something special setup that we have no experience in, we have a person we
know that we contract, and he walks us through how and why he set it up as he
did. We've used him twice in the last 13 years.
The last time one of us had to visit the colocation center was months ago. The
last time one of us had to go there in an emergency was years ago. It's a 5
minute drive from each of our homes.
So, why exactly should we use the cloud? We have servers we already paid for.
We rent 3 cabinets - I don't recall the exact cost, but I think its around $1k
per month. We spend practically no time managing them. In our time being
hosted in a colo center - the past 19 years - we've had a total of 3 outages
that were the fault of our colo center. They all lasted on the order of
minutes.
~~~
dahfizz
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically
overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team,
it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your
cloud infrastructure.
~~~
wooly_bully
In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development
teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.
~~~
jcrawfordor
I live in a software engineering world professionally but my background is in
traditional "neckbeard" Linux system administration. This ends up making me
"DevOps" but honestly a lot of what I've ended up doing in my career is basic
sysadmin for organizations that get a remarkably long ways before realizing
they need it - things like telephony and video surveillance become really
unreasonably expensive when you end up relying on a cloud service because you
don't have the skillset to manage them in-house.
This is purely my opinion, but I think that 1) there is a strange shortage of
IT professionals (people who are _not_ software engineers but instead
understand _systems_ ) in much of the industry today, and 2) a lot of tech
companies, even those that are currently well functioning, might be able to
save a lot of money if they hired someone with a conventional IT background.
This is a little self-serving of course, but it really does astound me when I
see the bills that some companies are paying cloud services to do something
that is traditionally done in-house by an IT department. And not everything
can readily be outsourced to some "aaS" provider, so on top of that you end up
with things like software companies with multi-million budgets running an
office network that consists of a consumer WiFi router someone picked up at
Fry's - not realizing that they are losing a lot of time to dealing with how
poorly that ends up working.
I think part of the problem rests in academia - at least in my area a lot of
universities seem to have really backed off on IT programs in favor of CS. I
went through an undergraduate program that involved project management,
decision analysis, and finance courses because these were considered by the
college (I would say accurately) critical skills for the IT field. But that
program had an incredible two students and was widely considered inferior to
the CS program with hundreds.
Another part of the problem though seems to rest in industry. The salary
differential between "DevOps Engineer" and "IT Analyst" is incredible when in
practice they end up doing mostly the same thing in a lot of small orgs. So I
end up walking sort of an odd line of "I have a long background in IaC but I
also know about conference room equipment." And I'm not saying that everything
with a Cisco/Tandberg badge isn't overpriced, but Zoom rooms can end up
costing just as much and seem to be less reliable - not surprising for a
platform which, by practical necessity of the lack of IT support in many orgs,
is built on the Silicon Valley time-tested architecture of "five apple
consumer products taped together."
~~~
chillfox
From my experience, large enterprises sabotage the effectiveness of internal
IT with bureaucracy and politics in a misguided attempt to eliminate all
possibility of mistakes being made.
It's usually done with the "let's pretend it is ITIL" process.
Let me give two examples where if I had been the client then I would
absolutely have sprinted for the cloud if I could, or at the very least start
talking it up as much better.
1) System outage, time to fix 5 hours and 3 minutes. The 5 hours was me
sitting in front of my computer with screens open showing the problem and
waiting for various managers/decision-makers to fly by and take a look as they
were ping-ponging around the office panicking about what would be impacted by
the fix. Everything that was going to get impacted was already impacted by the
system not working, and I had to explain that to them multiple times. Towards
the end of the day, I eventually got the go-ahead to do the 3 minutes of work
to fix the system. This system being down had prevented another team from
doing any work for the entire afternoon.
2) Two full days of politics and paperwork to get approval to do 30 minutes of
work, all while the client was impatiently asking "is it done yet" every few
hours.
------
burnte
Yes. Why? Cost, availability, flexibility, bandwidth. For a lot of companies,
on-prem servers are the best solution for efficiency and cost.
One great example. We were paying $45k/yr for a hosted MS Dynamics GP
solution. For $26k we brought it in house with only a $4k/yr maintenance fee.
We bought a rackmount Dell, put on VMWare, have an app VM and a DB VM. My team
can handle basic maintenance. In the past 11 months we haven't had to touch
that server once. We have an automated backup, pulls VMs out daily and sends
them off to Backblaze. Even if we need to call our GP partner for some
specialized problem, it's not $45k/yr in consulting costs.
We had a bunch of Azure servers for Active Directory and a few other things.
When I came in 2 years ago I set up new on-prem DC VMs, and killed out absurd
Azure monthly bill, we were saving money by month three. A meteor could take
out Atlanta and the DCs are our satellite offices would handle the load just
fine until we restored from backups and we'd STILL save money. We've had MORE
uptime and reliability since then too.
If I have a server go down, we have staff to get on it immediately, no toll
free number to dial, no web chat to a level 1 person in India, etc.
Our EMR is hosted, because that's big enough that I want to pay someone to be
in control over it, and someone to blame. However, there have been many times
where I'm frustrated with how they handle problems, and jumping from one EMR
to another is not easy. And in the end they're all bad anyway. Sometimes I DO
wish we were self hosted.
The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines
more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do
you need what they're cutting?
~~~
jedberg
> The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines
> more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is,
> do you need what they're cutting?
They're cutting overhead and getting better deals on hardware than you could
ever get.
Their efficiency is their profit margin.
~~~
Slartie
> Their efficiency is their profit margin.
Last time I checked, AWS had a profit margin in the 40%-50% ballpark.
Sorry, but the semiconductor industry doesn't operate with any kind of markup
that would allow such profit margins from "getting better deals on hardware".
The only one able to make that kind of profit used to be Intel on high-end
server CPUs, and even they are now pressured by AMD and custom ARM silicon
options. Anything else needed for a server, RAM or flash chips or whatever, is
usually selling on thin single-digit margins.
Cloud provider profit margin is perfectly logical and explainable through
lock-in effects keeping their customers paying big markups to stay in AWS
infrastructure. Be it software that was built against AWS proprietary
services, be it having the necessary engineering skills to manage AWS
infrastructure in the team but lacking the skills to manage on-prem hardware,
be it the enterprise sales teams of cloud operators schmoozing CTOs of big
corporations and making them jump on a "going into cloud" strategy as some
kind of magic bullet to future-proof their corporations' IT, be it the
psychological effect that makes "using the cloud" apparently a mandatory thing
to be "cool" in todays' silicon valley culture, and therefore by extension the
whole worlds' IT engineering culture.
The most ironical of them all is this weird effect that drives people to
rationalize these things, writing comments like yours, because nobody likes to
admit they've painted themselves into a corner of lock-in effects. And of
course there's the irony of this all being history repeating itself: anyone
still remembering when IBM dominated the IT industry?
~~~
krageon
> that would allow such profit margins
The percentages don't _quite_ hit that amount of discount, but they are much
much higher than (I at least) expected.
------
throwaway6845
Mostly, headspace. If I run my own server, I just need to apply my existing
Ubuntu sysadmin knowledge. If I use AWS, I have to learn a whole load of AWS-
specific domain knowledge, starting with their utterly baffling product names.
My time is more valuable than that.
Also, sheer cost. Literally everyone I know in my particular part of the
industry uses Hetzner boxes. For what I do, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper
than AWS.
~~~
HatchedLake721
That’s how you get old, when your time is more valuable than a massive shift
in technology.
~~~
henriquez
Nah, we already did mainframes in the 1970s. Renting CPU time only makes sense
if you don’t need CPU time or you like wasting money.
------
shockinglytrue
Try running any service with an average egress exceeding 10 Mbit/s then tell
me cloud still makes sense. By the time you reach 1 Gbit/s the very idea of it
is enough to elicit a primitive biological defensive response.
We don't do on-prem but we do make heavy use of colo. The thought of cloud
growth and DC space consolidation some day pushing out traditional flat rate
providers absolutely terrifies me.
At some point those cloud premiums will trickle down through the supply chain,
and eventually it could become hard to find reasonably priced colo space
because the big guys with huge cash-flush pockets are buying up any available
space with a significant premium attached. I don't know if this is ever
likely, but growth of cloud could conceivably put pressure on available
physical colo space.
Similar deal with Internet peering. There may be a critical point after which
cloud vendors, through their sheer size will be able to change how these
agreements are structured for everyone.
~~~
jedberg
Netflix runs on the cloud and does 30% of all internet traffic.
That being said, 99% of that traffic is served from servers in colos now, but
10 years ago it was all served from CDN providers like Akamai, which is just a
specialized cloud.
~~~
toomuchtodo
This is kind of a big caveat (“Netflix is in the cloud but almost none of the
work is done there”), and something I have to mention to non tech decision
makers when they say “but Netflix!”. I even have a slide for presentations
just for this (“You Are Not Netflix”).
~~~
jedberg
99% of the work is done on the cloud. What comes off of those colo servers is
literally just bits streaming from disk to network. There is no transformation
or anything. No authentication, no user accounts, no database. Nothing.
Just static files served efficiently.
~~~
enneff
> What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from
> disk to network
So... the core of their business?
~~~
jedberg
Not at all. It was so “not core” that it was outsourced.
The core of their business is recommendations, encoding, and authentication.
All of those are done 100% on the cloud.
~~~
sidibe
Sure but probably 99% of the
> 30% of all internet traffic.
is outside of the cloud.
~~~
anshumania
Anyone know the bill Netflix has for running on the cloud ?
------
catlas3r
Why stay on premise?
Cost. On-prem is roughly on-par in an average case, in my experience, but
we've got many cases where we've optimized against hardware configurations
that are significantly cheaper to create on-prem. And sunk costs are real.
It's much easier to get approval for instances that don't add to the bottom
line. But for that matter, we try to get our on-prem at close to 100%
utilization, which keeps costs well below cloud. If I've got bursty loads,
those can go to the cloud.
Lock-in. I don't trust any of the big cloud providers not to jack my rates up.
I don't trust my engineers not to make use of proprietary APIs that get me
stuck there.
Related to cost, but also its own issue, data transfer. Both latency and
throughput. Yeah, it's buzzwordy, but the edge is a thing. I have many clients
where getting processing in the same location where the data is being
generated saves ungodly amounts of money in bandwidth, or where it wouldn't
even been feasible to transfer the data off-site. Financial sector clients
also tend to appreciate shaving off milliseconds.
Also, regulatory compliance. And, let's be honest, corporate and actual
politics.
Inertia.
Trust.
Risk.
Interoperability with existing systems.
Few decisions about where to stick your compute and storage are trivial; few
times is one answer always right. But there are many, many factors to
consider, and they may not be the obvious ones that make the decision for you.
------
strags
Cost and Latency.
My team and I run the servers for a number of very big videogames. For a high-
cpu workload, if you look around at static on-prem hosting and actually do
some real performance bencharking, you will find that cloud machines - though
convenient - generally cost at least 2x as much per unit performance. Not only
that, but cloud will absolutely gouge you on egress bandwidth - leading to a
cost multiplier that's closer to 4x, depending on the balance between compute
and outbound bandwidth.
That's not to say we don't use the cloud - in fact we use it extensively.
Since you have to pay for static capacity 24/7 - even when your regional
players are asleep and the machines are idle, there are some gains to be had
by using the right blend of static/elastic - don't plan to cover peaks with
100% static - and spin up the elastic machines when your static capacity is
fully consumed. This holds true for anything that results in more usage - a
busy weekend, an in-game event, a new piece of downloadable content, etc...
It's also a great way to deal with not knowing exactly how many players are
going to show up on day 1.
Regarding latency, we have machines in many smaller datacenters around the
world. We can generally get players far closer to one of our machines than to
AWS/GCP/Azure, resulting in better in-game ping, which is super important to
us. This will change over time as more and more cloud DCs spring up, but for
now we're pretty happy with the blend.
------
hprotagonist
AI compute is so much cheaper on-prem that it's not even in question.
And there are clients that demand it.
And researchers, in general, like to do totally wacky things, and it's often
easier/cheaper to let us if you have physical access.
~~~
sdan
+1 on this. Get a nice server with some GPUs and you'd save a lot more than
paying the super expensive costs on cloud.
------
jabroni_salad
I'm in rural iowa and you really can't bank on a solid internet connection.
One of my clients decided to iaas-ify all their servers and it works great
except when it is windy out. They're on fixed wireless and the remote mast has
some sway to it. 3-4 times a year they get struck by lightning and have a
total work stoppage until all their outside gear can get replaced. Even their
VDI is remote so all the thin clients just disconnect and they are done for
the day.
Also, my clients aren't software development firms. They are banks and
factories. They buy a software based on features and we figure out how to make
it work, and most of the vendors in this space are doing on-prem non-saas
products. A few do all their stuff in IAAS or colo but a lot of these places
are single-rack operations and they really don't care as long as it all works.
A lot of people in small/midsize banks feel like they are being left out. They
go to conferences and hear about all the cool stuff in the industry but the
established players are not bringing that to them. If you can stomach the
regulatory overhead, someone with drive could replace
finastra/fiserv/jackhenry. Or get purchased by them and get turned into yet
another forever-maintenancemode graveyard app.
------
sdan
Founder of a growing startup:
Started with a cluster of Raspberry Pis and expanded onto an old desktop.
Primarily did this for cost (raspberry pis alone were more powerful than a GCP
$35/mo instance). Everything was fine until I needed GPUs/handling more
traffic than those Raspberrys could handle. So I expanded by including cloud
instances in my Docker Swarm cluster (tidbit: Using Traefik and WireGuard)
So half on-prem half in the cloud. Honestly just scared GCP might one day
cancel my account and I'll lose all my data unless I meet their demands (has
happened in the past) so that half on-prem stores most of the data.
~~~
chickenpotpie
At $35/month though GCP would only have to save you a half an hour of
maintenance for it to be worth it though.
~~~
sdan
Well, given that I am using Docker it doesn't really matter much... but the
bigger issue is: GCP in the past has completely blocked access from accounts
when they detect random things.
Unless I meet their demands, my entire infra is gone/down for days, which I
can't deal with.
------
XCSme
I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS droplet instead of AWS or other "cloud"
service. I only have to host an analytics dashboard (
[https://usertrack.net/](https://usertrack.net/) ), I don't need scaling and
this way I know exactly how much I will pay. The resources are more than
enough for my needs and I don't think it could be much cheaper even on the
most optimized pay-per-minute of use cloud platforms.
I also have some other APIs hosted in the same way (eg. website thumbnail
generation API), for the very low traffic I have and no chance of getting
burst traffic I think the use case of a VPS or dedicated server is perfect.
~~~
chickenpotpie
Whenever I need to host something small and I’m trying to decide between DO
and AWS I always ask myself. Would I rather be surprised by the bill or my
website crashing from too much traffic? I almost always pick DO because I
don’t want to mess something up and lose a few hundred dollars.
~~~
jackson1442
Wholeheartedly agree. I think AWS is moving in the right direction with
Lightsail[0], which is a service very similar to DO droplets and includes
transfer. Nice if you want to use AWS for like one or two other services, but
I tend to still go with DO for small things.
[0]: [https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/)
~~~
XCSme
That sounds interesting. By "moving in the right direction" do you mean that
it's still in beta or not released yet? Or that it's just the first step of
many to come?
~~~
adventured
Lightsail works well now. It's a little over three years old. In the first
year or so after it was released, they were notorious for being slow in most
regards compared to their peers (it launched using rebranded instances from
AWS, and used spinning disks, going up against SSDs their competitors were all
using). They've largely caught up on performance with DigitalOcean, Linode,
Vultr and similar.
That said, I've stuck with DigitalOcean even though Lightsail tests fine. I've
had a great experience over the years with DO and see no reason to leave.
------
michaelt
On-prem makes your cost control proactive, rather than reactive. Nobody gets a
new server without first having a purchase order approved - and the burden to
get that approval falls on the person who wants the server.
In the cloud, at least the way it's generally used, cost control is reactive:
You get a bill from AWS every month, and _if you 're lucky_ you'll be able to
attribute the costs to different projects.
This is both a strength and a weakness: on-premise assets will end up at much
higher utilisation, because people will be keen to share servers and dodge the
bureaucracy and costs of adding more. But if you consider isolation a virtue,
you might prefer having 100 CPUs spread across 100 SQL DBs instead of 50 CPUs
across two mega-databases.
------
doctor_eval
Lots of great insights here, which fully accord with my experience, even in
the small end of town.
About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my
company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS.
We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind
of customers.
My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote
came to $100K; the CEO freaked out. I asked him how much he spent on AWS?
The answer was that they spent $30K __per month __on AWS.
The kicker is that we managed 10x as many customers as they did, our devops
team was half the size, and we were rolling out continuous deployment while
they were still struggling to automated upgrades. Our deployment environment
is also far less complicated than theirs because there isn't a complex
infrastructure stack sitting in front of our deployment stack.
There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem
deployment, and as far as I was able to tell before I quit, the only reason
they used AWS was because everyone else was doing it.
~~~
pickle-wizard
With all the job hopping that goes on in tech, there is a lot of Resume Driven
Development. People want to use AWS because it will help them get their next
job.
I'm finally in a job that I'm happy with and can see myself staying here until
retirement. I have noticed that has changed my technology recommendations. For
example we recently started looking at configuration management tools. Ansible
is the obvious choice from a resume perspective as it is very popular. I ended
recommending Powershell DSC. Why, because our environment is mostly windows,
the team is familiar with Powershell, and for our use case is much faster.
Powershell DSC is not as popular so it won't help me get another job. When it
comes time to expand the team, I can hire someone who understands
configuration management tools or powershell, and get them up to speed in a
day or two.
------
adreamingsoul
Personally, I'd rather have capex than opex.
My observations from working with, and in the "cloud":
The "cloud" does benefit from it's scale in many ways. It has more engineers
to improve, fix, watch, and page. It has more resources to handle spikes,
whales, and demand. Almost everything is scale tested and the actual physical
limits are known. It is damn right impressive to see what kind of traffic the
cloud can handle.
Everything in the "cloud" is abstracted which increases complexity.
Knowledgeable engineers are few and far between. As an engineer you assume
something will break, and with every deployment you hope that you have the
right metrics in place and alarms on the right metrics.
The "cloud" is best suited for whales. From special pricing to resource
provisioning, they get the best. The rest is trickled down.
Most services are cost-centers. Very few can actually pay for the team and the
cost of its dependencies.
It's insane how much VC money is spent building whatever the latest trend of
application architecture is. Very few actually hit their utilization
projections.
------
erulabs
We hear from our customers mostly what has been said here: cost and mental
overhead. There is a bit of a paradox - companies that plan to grow
aggressively are wary of AWS bills chopping their runway in half - they're
very aware of _why_ cloud providers give out a year for free to most startups
- they recoup that loss very fast once the cash faucet opens up.
What really gets me is that most cloud providers promise scalability, but
offer no guard-rails - for example diagnosing performance issues in RDS - the
goal for most cloud providers is to ride the line between your time cost and
their service charges. Sure you can reduce RDS spend, but you'll have to spend
a week to do it - so bust out the calculator or just sign the checks. No one
will stop you from creating a single point of failure - but they'd happily
charge for consulting fees to fix it. There is a conflict on interest - they
profit from poor design.
In my opinion, the internet is missing a platform that encourages developers
to build things in a reproducible way. Develop and host at home until you get
your first customers, then move to a hosting provider down the line. Today,
this most appeals to AI/ML startups - they're painfully aware of their idle
GPUs in their gaming desktops and their insane bill from Major Cloud Provider.
It also appeals to engineers who just want to host a blog or a wedding
website, etc.
This is a tooling problem that I'm convinced can be solved. We need a
ubiquitous, open-source, cloud-like platform that developers can use to get
started on day 1, hosting from home if desired. That software platform should
not have to change when the company needs increased reliability or better air
conditioning for their servers. If its a Wordpress blog or a minecraft server
or a petabyte SQL database - the Vendor should be a secondary choice to making
things.
~~~
sbrother
I've found that Kubernetes mostly solves this problem. I say mostly because
for AI/ML workloads that require GPUs, we still rely on running things on bare
metal locally, and deploying with GKE's magic annotations and Deep Learning
images. But for anything else, I haven't had an issue going all in on k8s at
the beginning, even with very small teams.
~~~
erulabs
Yep! My startup is [https://kubesail.com](https://kubesail.com), so I agree :)
As for ML on Kube, I agree, there have been and still are some rough edges.
The kernel drivers alone make a lot of out-of-the-box Kubernetes solutions
unusable. That said, we've had a lot of success helping people move entirely
onto kube - the mental gain alone from ditching the bash scripts or ansible
playbooks (etC) alone is pretty freeing.
------
dogecoinbase
Yes. Three major reasons:
\- Cost. It's vastly cheaper to run your own infra (like, 10-100x -- really!).
The reason to run in cloud is not to save money, it's to shift from capex to
opex and artificially couple client acquisition to expenditure in a way that
juices your sheets for VCs.
\- Principle. You can't do business in the cloud without paying people who
also work to assemble lists of citizens to hand over to fascist governments.
\- Control. Cloud providers will happily turn your systems off if asked by the
government, a higher-up VP, or a sufficiently large partner.
EDIT: I should add. Cloud is great for something -- moving very fast with
minimal staffing. That said, unless you get large enough to renegotiate you
will get wedged into a cost deadend where your costs would be vastly reduced
by going in-house, but you cannot afford to do so in the short term.
Particularly for the HN audience, take care to notice who your accelerator is
directing you to use for cloud services -- they are typically co-invested.
~~~
PaulWaldman
Regarding the shift in CapEx to OpEx, on-prem servers can also be leased,
keeping their costs in OpEx.
------
reilly3000
I’ve been studying like a fiend to get AWS certs and thoroughly understand the
cloud value proposition, especially for ephemeral workloads and compliance
needs. I’m all for cloud solutions that make sense and love when
serverless/usage-only systems can’t be deployed. That said, I recently started
work on a friend’s system that he has had running in colo for a long time.
It’s absolutely insane how long his systems have been up. There are processes
that have been alive since 2015, with some hosts having uptime linger than
that. He’s got a nice HA configuration but hasn’t had any incidents that have
triggered failover. He recently built a rack for his home with 384gb ram and
gobs of cpu across 3 nodes, with rack, nice switch and UPS for just shy of
$2500 ( he is quite the bargain hunter... ). I did some quick math and found a
similarly equipped cluster (of just VMs, not dedicated hosts) has a 1.1 month
break-even with on-demand costs, no bandwidth considered. Sure, maybe a 1 year
reservation could make it a 2-3 month break even instead, but why? Those
machines can easily give him 3-5 years of performance without paying another
dime.
If you can feasibly run workloads onpremise or colo and have a warm failover
to AWS you could probably have the best of all worlds.
~~~
whatsmyusername
If he has processes that have been up since 2015 how is he patching? That's
one of my biggest gripes with on-prem, it's easy to leave something that works
alone... until it gets popped by a 5 year old vuln.
In cloud I'm constantly looking at what we have because I have good billing
tools in place to see what we're paying for.
------
grantlmiller
I always find it important to separate "cloud" into 2 categories:
1\. IaaS - Which I mainly define as the raw programmable resources provided by
"hypercloud" providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). Yes, it seems that using an IaaS
provider with a VPC can provide many benefits over traditional on-prem data
centers (racking & stacking, dual power supply, physical security, elasticity,
programmability, locations etc).
2\. SaaS - I lump all of the other applications by the hundreds of thousands
of vendors into this category. I find it hard to trust these vendors the same
way that I trust IaaS providers and am much more cautious of using these
applications (vs OSS or "on-prem software" versions of these apps). They just
don't have the same level of security controls in place as the largest IaaS
providers can & do (plus the data is structured in a way that is more easily
analyzed, consumed by prying eyes).
~~~
opportune
What about first-party SaaS? Those can also be big features that bring people
to some cloud providers. Not all SaaS requires you to trust your
data/availability to some random vendor. Of course those first-party SaaS
aren't typically suitable for lift-and-shift by their very nature, and they
can still have some rough edges, but IMO you can expect them to be almost as
reliable as IaaS
~~~
grantlmiller
First-party SaaS meaning things like RDS, DBaaS, queues, LBs etc? Most of that
I would sort of put into a IaaS controlled PaaS, rather than true IaaS SaaS.
Yes, these are generally higher on the trust spectrum as they don't involve
additional vendors accessing/managing/storing data.
~~~
opportune
A major one I'm thinking of is BigQuery, also of course all the various
db/queue solutions outside of your typical S3 clone as you mentioned. That
would make sense viewing them as platforms though
------
dijit
I work for a large video games publisher, as you might expect we use a lot of
windows.
Windows server licenses on AWS and GCP are hundreds of times more expensive at
our scale. Incidentally we actually do have some cloud infra and we like it,
but the licensing cost is half the total price of the instance itself.
In fact, you might not know this but games are relatively low margin, and we
have accidentally risked the companies financial safety by moving into the
cloud.
~~~
whatsmyusername
TBF windows licensing in general is a shit show, to the point where just
handling that is a specialized ability potentially warranting a full time
position.
------
tr33house
I'm a solo founder who's bootstrapped a saas that's in one state. I'd started
out with the cloud then moved to a private cloud in a colocated data center.
Saved more than 80% in monthly costs. Got faster speeds, better reliability
and a ton of extra compute and network capacity. I just bought used servers
from eBay that are retired from big corps. Nothing significant has really
changed in the last five years on compute so I'll happily take their
depreciated assets :)
__Modern__ servers are really awesome and I totally recommend them. You can do
a ton remotely.
------
drej
Many of the stories here are from large companies, where the costs are quite a
different beast. I want to offer an opposite view - from a small company
(20-30 people), which is usually the kind of company best suited for the
cloud.
We ran a number of modelling jobs, basically CPU intensive tasks that would
run for minutes to hours. Investing in on-prem computers (mostly workstations,
some servers), we got very solid performance, very predictable costs and no
ops issues. Renting beefy machines in the cloud is very expensive and unless
you get crafty (spot and/or intelligent deployment), it will be prohibitive
for many. Looking at AMD's offering these days, you can get sustained on-prem
perf for a few dollars.
Three details of note: 1) We didn't need bursty perf (very infrequently) - had
this been a need, the cloud would make a lot more sense, at least in a hybrid
deployment. 2) we didn't do much networking (I'm in a different company now
and we work with a lot of storage on S3 and on-prem wouldn't be feasible for
us), 3) we didn't need to work remotely much, it was all at the office.
Obviously, it was a very specific scenario, but given how small the company
was, we couldn't afford people to manage the whole cloud
deployment/security/scaling etc. and beefy workstations was a much simpler and
more affordable endeavour.
------
snarfy
The idea of the cloud is to only pay for what you use. Your on-premise server
is idle 99% of the time so why are you paying for a full server?
If that's not true, it turns out it's quite expensive to run things in the
cloud. If your workload is crunching numbers 24/7 at 100% cpu, it's better to
buy the cpu than to rent it.
~~~
Polylactic_acid
Cloud servers tend to be more reliable as well if you don't run your own
datacenters. We have lost our internet connection or power 3 times in the last
year in the office. Its not the end of the world since we can go to 4g for our
own usage but if our servers were hosted locally this would be a huge issue.
~~~
dathinab
Don't forget that between cloud and servers in the company there are still VPS
and rented dedicated hardware in a data center.
So you:
1\. Don't manage hardware.
2\. But manage a server (OS+software stack).
3\. Have reliable internet, power and physical security from the data center
you are renting your hardware from (if you trust them fully!).
4\. Have fixed cost but also fixed resources. Tends to be cheaper for many
tasks. Especially CPU/GPU heavy ones.
~~~
Polylactic_acid
I consider VPSs to be cloud servers. Is this not common?
~~~
XCSme
I mentioned in another comment that I use VPS and not cloud services. I think
of cloud as the auto-scaling infrastructure with dynamic pricing. I think of
VPS as just sharing a dedicated machine with others, so each one gets a few
cores and shares other resources. The implementation of VPSs nowdays is
probably more similar to cloud services, where your own space might be moved
around to another physical machine without any downtime.
~~~
Polylactic_acid
So you consider cloud servers to be what most people call serverless
(S3/serverless functions/etc)?
~~~
XCSme
I do hate the term "serverless" as it makes no sense, but I think of cloud as
a system that automatically spins-up/down VPSs based on your current usage.
This means the infrastructure/software also allows for automatically load-
balancing between those VPSs. So I think of cloud as the VPS servers that are
used to host the actual data + the layer on top that does all the scaling,
provisioning, load-balancing, etc.
------
mattbeckman
We spend ~$50k/mo on serverless infrastructure on AWS.
It hurts sometimes, given we were fully colocated about 4 years back, and I
know how much hardware that could buy us every month.
However, with serverless infra we can pivot quickly.
Since we're still in the beta stage, with a few large, early access
partnerships, and an unfinished roadmap, we don't know where the bottlenecks
will be.
For example, we depended heavily on CloudSearch, until it sucked for our use
case, so we shifted to Elasticsearch, and ran both clusters simultaneously
until we were fully off of CS. If we were to do that on-prem, we'd have to
order a lot more hardware (or squeeze in new ES cluster VMs across heavy
utilization nodes).
With AWS, a few minutes to launch a new ES cluster, dev time to migrate the
data, followed by a few clicks to kill the CloudSearch cluster.
Cloud = lower upfront, higher long term, but no ceiling. On-prem = higher
upfront, lower long term, but ceiling.
~~~
brickbrd
If "Cloud = lower upfront, higher long term, but no ceiling. On-prem = higher
upfront, lower long term, but ceiling" is true, then how come the revenue of
cloud companies keeps going up?
That would mean the incoming rate of users who are just starting off and find
Cloud worthwhile is more exit rate of mature users who are finding on-prem
more worthwhile than cloud
~~~
wvenable
If you're spending more than 50k/month on AWS where is the money to move to
on-prem? When they got you, they got you.
------
walterbell
The (startup) Oxide podcast has good history/stories about on-prem servers,
from veterans of pioneering companies. They are fans of open-source firmware
and Rust, and are working to make OCP-based servers usable for on-prem. In one
podcast, they observed that cloud is initially cheaper, but can quickly become
expensive with growth. There is a time window where you can still switch from
cloud to on-prem, but if that window is missed, you're left with high
switching costs and high cloud fees.
[https://oxide.computer/podcast/](https://oxide.computer/podcast/)
~~~
mapgrep
Their co founder Bryan Cantrill gave a talk at Stanford on what they are
trying to do, essentially offer on prem servers comparable to what
“hyperscalers” like Google and Facebook put in their data centers — highly
efficient and customizable (in low level software) iirc.
[https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc](https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc)
------
PaulWaldman
Manufacturing. The cost to a factory if the internet is down is too great.
Each facility has its own highly redundant virtualization infrastructure
hosting 50 to 100 VMs.
~~~
eitally
I was in manufacturing IT before moving to big tech. Our big campuses in the
US & Europe had 40-80mbps internet circuits. The remote facilities in
developing countries often only had 10mbps MPLS connections to a regional hub.
To be 100% honest, we had 10x the outages caused by crappy local
infrastructure than anything having to do with a SaaS service or IaaS/PaaS
provider. Seriously, things like bad storms, a snake (cobra!) sneaking into
the server room and frying itself and a machine it was snuggling against,
utility workers accidentally severing cables, generators failing during power
outages, labor strikes, and so much more. Moving to the cloud -- or even just
hosting everything centrally -- was much more stable than maintaining a fleet
of distributed machines.
------
MaulingMonkey
I work in gamedev. Build servers, version control, etc. are almost always on-
premise, even if a lot of other stuff has been transitioned to the cloud.
There's a few reasons:
1) Bandwidth. I routinely saturate my plebian developer gigabit NIC links for
half an hour, an hour, longer - and the servers slurp down even worse. In an
AAA studio I am but one of hundreds of such workers. Getting a general
purpouse internet connection that handles that kind of bandwidth to your
heavily customized office is often just not really possible. If you're lucky
your office is at least in the same metro area as a relevant datacenter. If
you're really lucky you can maybe build a custom fiber or microwave link
without prohibative cost. But with those kinds of geographical limitations,
you're not so much relying on the general internet, so much as you're
expanding your LAN to include a specific datacenter / zone of "the cloud" at
that point.
2) Security. These servers are often completely disconnected from the
internet, on a completely separate network, to help isolate them and reducing
data exfiltration when some idiot installs malware-laden warez, despite clear
corporate policy threatening to fire you if you so much as even _think_ about
installing bootleg software. Exceptions - where the servers _do_ have internet
access - are often recent, regrettable, and being reconsidered - because of,
or perhaps despite, draconian whitelisting policies and other attempts at
implementing defense in depth.
3) Customizability. Gamedev means devkits with strict NDAs and physical
security requirements, and a motley assortment of phone hardware, that you
want accessible to your build servers for automatic unit/integration testing.
Oddball OS/driver/hardware may also be useful for such testing. Sure, if you
can track down the right parties, you might be able to have your lawyers
convince their lawyers to let you move said hardware into a datacenter, expand
the IP whitelists, etc... but at that point all you've really done is made it
harder to borrow a specific popular-but-discontinued phone model from the
build farm for local debugging when it's the only one reproducing a specific
crash when you want to debug and lack proper remote debug tooling.
...there are some inroads on the phone farms (AWS Device Farm, Xamarin Test
Cloud) but I'm unaware of farms varied desktop hardware or devkits. Maybe they
exist and just need better marketing?
I have some surplus "old" server hardware from one such gamedev job. Multiple
8gbit links on all of them. The "new" replacement hardware often still
noticably bottlenecked for many operations.
------
mrmrcoleman
There's a renewed interest in on-prem bare metal recently with a lot of
different offerings helping to make various parts of the stack easier to
manage.
Awesome bare metal is a new repo created by Alex Ellis that tracks a lot of
the projects: [https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-
baremetal](https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal)
Also we (Packet) just open sourced Tinkerbell, our bare metal provisioning
engine: [https://www.packet.com/blog/open-sourcing-
tinkerbell/](https://www.packet.com/blog/open-sourcing-tinkerbell/)
------
chime
1\. 500TB of storage for 3-6mo of CCTV footage.
2\. Bought a hanful of $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago for 24/7 data
crunching. Equivalent cloud cost was over $3000/mo. On-Prem paid off within a
month!
3\. Nutanix is nice. Awesome performance for the price and almost no
maintenance. Got 300+ VDI desktops and 50+ VMs with 1ms latency.
~~~
junar
> $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago
Can you clarify? I don't think such a product exists as a single chip at that
price point. The Threadripper 3960X costs $1400, and that released less than a
year ago.
Edit: Looking up Intel chips on Wikipedia, I think you might be using
12-core/24-thread chips...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Xe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_\(microarchitecture\)#Xeon_Bronze_and_Silver_\(dual_processor\))
~~~
fiveguys94
I picked up three Dell R900's for an average of $200 each, with 4x Xeon E7450
and 128GB of ECC RAM. No hyperthreading (2011!), it's 24 real cores.
They're noisy and use lots of power, but you can't argue with the value for
money.
~~~
icedchai
I have one similar to this. I don't think it is an R900, but it's an older 1U
rack mount. I forget if it's a 12 or 24 core xeon, but it was dirt cheap, came
with 72 gigs of RAM, and sounds like a jet engine turning it on. I recently
built a Ryzen box with 128 gigs of RAM and it's much quieter...
------
mattmireles
CEO of an AI startup & former AWS employee here.
The cloud sucks for training AI models. It's just insanely overpriced in a way
that no "Total Cost of Ownership" analysis is going make look good.
Every decent AI startup––including OpenAI––has made significant investments in
on-premise GPU clusters for training models. You can buy consumer-grade NVIDIA
hardware for a fraction of the price that AWS pays for data center-grade GPUs.
For us in particular, the payback on a $36k on-prem GPU cluster is about 3-4
months. Everything after that point saves us ~$10k / month. It's not even
close.
When I was AWS, I tried to point this fact out to the leadership––to no avail.
It simply seemed like a problem they didn't care about.
My only question is why isn't there a p2p virtualization layer that lets
people with this on-prem GPU hardware rent out their spare capacity?
~~~
blueblisters
Are TPUs too application specific to replace GPUs? It seems cloud TPUs could
be competitive with GPUs in terms of $ per number of target epochs, provided
you can do data parallelism for your workloads.
Also, IBM offers bare metal pricing which is _somewhat_ cheaper than
virtualized instances attached to GPUs (and faster too).
I think GPU virtualization is not quite there yet because Nvidia does not give
access to core GPU functionality needed for efficient virtualization - you're
stuck with using their closed-source libraries and drivers.
------
kasey_junk
Bandwidth is the big reason to stay on-prem. Good peering contracts can more
than make up for any cloud advantages for bandwidth intensive uses.
Now the hard part is turning those cost advantages into operational
improvements instead of deficiencies.
------
INTPenis
Becuse we don't trust a foreign cloud provider with our client's data. Why is
that so hard to understand?
All the best cloud providers are from the US and as a european company with
clients in european government and healthcare we are often not morally or
legally allowed to use a foreign provider.
The sad thing is that this is an ongoing battle between people on a municipal
level who believe they can save money in clouds, and morally wiser people who
are constantly having to put the brakes on those migration projects.
~~~
v4dok
What about the existing/upcoming technologies of let you use the cloud without
trusting it?
~~~
INTPenis
Doesn't matter because all US companies are subject to US laws and agencies.
Even if the data is in Ireland, they are obliged to cooperate and before you
know it all our patient records are leaked in the states.
And speaking of Ireland, I have a memory of a Microsoft EULA saying that even
if the data is stored in Ireland they can't guarantee that it won't be
transferred to the US.
------
shortlived
Small company here (30 total people, 8 in IT/software).
\- unwillingness to seed control of the critical parts of our software
infrastructure to a third party.
\- given our small team size and our technical debt load we are not currently
able to re-architect to make our software cloud-ready/resilient.
\- true cost estimates feel daunting to calculate, whereas on-prem costs are
fairly easy to calculate.
~~~
aspyct
I agree with the last 2 points. Estimates are hard to get right, and
rearchitecting an existing app is probably not worth it.
What about your first point though? Do you not trust a 3rd party to maintain
infrastructure properly? In what way?
------
janstice
I'm application architect at enterprise-type org. We have a few SaaS
applications, but all the big dogs, including custom dev, run in-house on a
dual data centre vmware environment. It's cheaper for us to spin up more VMs
in-house, so there's no real cloud driver for things that just live on VMs. On
the other hand, our ops team are still working on network segmentation and
self-service, but I regularly get a standard VM provisioned in less than 20
mins. If we had to buy new data centres it might be different.
But the real reason we're not deeper in the cloud is that our business-types
insist on turn of the century, server-based software from the usual big
vendors, and all the things that integrate with them need to use 20th century
integration patterns, so for us migrating to the cloud (in stages at least)
would have drawbacks from all options without the benefits. It's only where we
have cloud-native stuff that we can sneak in under the radar for stand-alone
greenfields projects, or convince the business types that they can replace the
Oracles and Peoplesofts with cloud-first alternatives will things really
change.
~~~
jasonv
Last company I was at was more or less as you describe.
Now.. at a company in a different industry, there's a 5+ year plan to move
100% to cloud. Nascent efforts are about 18 mos old already, no apps are live
yet.
Fortunately, they've been using a container approach for their on-prem stuff
for a while, so some stuff can move over pretty easily, a lot of things will
get a touch-up or more interesting upgrade along the path to the cloud
environment.
Not even talking about de-commissioning the DCs yet, but those will get
defunded as things go on.
------
olivierduval
Security... not against hacker but against provider's government.
I worked for some french or european companies, with IPs and sensitive
informations, and US business competitors. By the US law, US companies may
have to let the US gov spy on their customers (even non US, even on non US
location), so this may be a problem for strategic sectors, like defense for
example.
In that case, sensitive informations is required to be hosted in country by a
company of the country, under the country law.
Of course, it's not against "cloud" in general... only against US cloud
providers (and chinese, and...)
------
MattGaiser
I work on two projects, neither of which use cloud.
For my day job, it is privacy and legal constraints. I work for the government
and all manner of things need to be signed off on to move to cloud. We could
probably make it work, but in government, the hassle of doing so is so large
that it is not going to happen for a long time.
In my contract project, it is a massive competitive advantage. I won't go into
too many details, but customers in this particular area are very pleased that
we do not use a cloud provider and instead host it somewhat on-premise. I
don't see a large privacy advantage over using the cloud, but the people
buying the service do simply because they are paranoid about the data and
every single one of them could personally get in a lot of trouble for losing
the data.
Not my project, but intensive computing requirements can be much more cheaply
filled by on-premise equipment (especially if you don't pay for electricity),
so my university does most of its AI and crypto research on-premise.
------
axaxs
My company moved from all on prem, to all in AWS. Having used both, I'd much
rather go back to on prem. I did architecture, capacity planning, system
tuning, deployments, etc. I knew everything about all of them, and treated
them as sacred. The next generation came in, deciding not to learn anything
about systems and brought in the 'systems as cattle' attitude and everything
that comes with it.
I try to remain objective, there are some pros to AWS, but I still much prefer
my on prem setup. It was way cheaper, and deployments were way faster.
------
sqldba
\- Uptime
The number and frequency of outages in Azure are crazy. They happen non-stop
all year around. You get meaningless RCAs but it never seems to get better,
and if it did, you'd have no way of knowing.
Compare this with doing stuff internally - you can hire staff, or train staff,
and get better. In the long run outsourcing and trusting other companies to
invest in "getting better" doesn't end very well. Just because they moved
their overall metrics overall from 99.9 to 99.91 may not help your use case.
\- Reliability
Their UIs change every day, there's no end to end documentation on how things
work. There's no way to keep up.
\- Support
Azure's own support staff are atrocious. You have to repeatedly bang your head
against the wall for days to get anyone who even knows the basic stuff from
their own documentation.
But it's also difficult to find your own people to do the setup too. Sure,
lots of people can do it, but because it's new they have little experience and
end up not knowing much, unable to answer questions, and building garbage on
the cloud platform. Because there's no cloud seniority, it hasn't been around
for long enough.
\- Security
Cloud providers have or can get access and sometimes use it.
\- Management
I've seen too many last minute "we made a change and now everything will be
broken unless you immediately do something" notifications to be happy about.
\- Cost
It's ridiculously expensive above a certain scale, and that scale is not very
big. I don't know if it's because people overbuild, or because you're being
nickel-and-dimed, or if you're just paying so many times above normal for
enterprise hardware and redundancy. It's still expensive.
Yes, owning (and licensing) your own is expensive too.
For smaller projects and tiny companies, totally fine! It's even great!
\- Maturity
People can't manage cloud tools properly. This doesn't help with costs above.
PS: I don't think any other cloud service is better.
------
TedLePoireau
Not exactly on-premise but we rent 2 big dedicated server (ovh) + install
VMWare ESXi on them. Going to the cloud would cost more, the price would be
unpredictable, only to solve a scale problem we won't have. And customers love
to know their data are hosted in France by a French company, not by Google or
Amazon :)
------
ROFISH
Network storage. MacBooks don't have a lot of space and artists like to make
HUGE psd files.
Bonus points for small stuff like RADIUS for wifi and stuff. Groups charging
$5/user for junk like that is absolutely awful with a high number of staff.
With a staff of 100, a single box with a bunch of hard drives is two months
worth of cloud and SaaS.
TCO needs to come down by like at least 100x before I consider going server-
less.
------
throwaway7281
We own infra because we need to own and control it and also because it's just
vastly cheaper at the scale we use.
Besides, we do have things like our own S3, k8s and other cloud-ish utilities
running so we do not miss out that much, I guess.
------
nemacol
This conversation sounds a lot like the debate around globalization and
outsourcing manufacturing to me. It might be a stretch but there is something
here.
There is room for both Cloud and On-Prem to exist. This endless drive by
industry to push everyone to cloud infrastructure and SaaS, in my humble
opinion, will look exactly like the whole supply chain coming from the east
during a pandemic.
The economics of it look great in a lot of use cases, but putting our whole
company at the mercy of a few providers sounds terrible to me. Even more so
when I see posts on HN about folks getting locked out of their accounts with
little notice.
It does not take much to bring our modern cloud to a grinding halt. For
example, a mistake by an mostly unheard of ISP lead to a massive outage not
less than a year ago(1).
It was amazing to see the interconnections turn to cascading issues. 1 ISP
goofs. 1-2 major providers have issues and the trickle down effect was such
that even services that thought they were immune from cloud issues were
realizing that they rely on a 3rd party that relies on a different 3th party
that uses cloudflare or AWS.
So, even though I think the cloud is (usually) secure, stable, resilient,
etc... I still advocate for its use in moderation and for 2 main use cases.
1 - elastic demands. Those non-critical systems that add some value or make
work easier. Things we could do without for several days and not hurt the
business much.
2 - DR / Backup / redundancy. We have a robust 2 data center / DR fail over
system. Adding cloud components to that seems reasonable to me.
(1)[https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/verizon-dqe-outage-
inte...](https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/verizon-dqe-outage-internet-
cloudflare-reddit-aws.html)
Edit: Spelling and clarity
Edit2: New reasons to stay on prem are happening all the time.
[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsofts-
gi...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsofts-github-
account-allegedly-hacked-500gb-stolen/)
------
throwaway028374
I worked for a famous large tech company that makes both hardware and
software. On stuff that runs on customer datacenters.
There are plenty of companies that run their infrastructure to keep their data
secure and accessible.
It's not the type of companies that blog about their infra or are popular on
HN. Banks and financial institutions, telcos, airlines, energy production,
civil infrastructure.
Critical infrastructure need to survive events larger than a datacenter
outage. FAANGs don't protect customers from legal threats, large political
changes, terrorist attacks, war.
------
sudhirj
The way I think about it this: not using the cloud is like building your own
code editor or IDE after assembling your own laptops and desktops. It may make
you happier and it’s a great hobby, but if you’re trying to run a business you
need to do a cost benefit analysis.
We currently have double digit petabytes of data stored in our own data
centres, but we’re moving it to S3 because we have far better things to do
with our engineers that replace drives all day, and engineering plus hardware
is more expensive than S3 Deep Archive - but it wasn’t until Deep Archive came
out.
We put out hundreds of petabytes of bandwidth, and AWS is horribly expensive
at first glance, but if you’re at that scale you negotiate private pricing
that brings it to spitting distance of using a COLO or Linode/Hetzner/OVH -
the distance is small enough that the advantages of AWS outweigh it, and it
allows us to run our business at known and predictable margins.
Besides variability (most of our servers are shut nights, weekends and when
not required), op ex vs cap ex, spikes in load (100X to 1000X baseline when
tickets open), there’s also the advantage of not needing ops engineers and
being to handle infrastructure with code. If you have a lot of ops people and
don’t need any of the advantages, and you have lots of money lying around that
you can use on cap ex, and you have a predictable load pattern, and you’ve
done a clear cost benefit analysis to determine that building your own is
cheaper, you should totally do that. Doesn’t matter what others are doing.
~~~
nihil75
You're not building everything from scratch on-prem. There are excellent tools
for deploying and managing infrastructure like Terraform, Ansible, Puppet that
funny enough are used to deploy to cloud as well. Add a self-hosted Kubernetes
cluster to that and your on-prem is not that different than a cloud.
As for ops people - you might not need an engineer to replace failed hard-
drives, but you'll need a DevOps person to manage Cloud Formation templates
and such, and they cost more.
------
skiril
One of the reason is a legacy systems. Some companies are too tied up to old
custom made systems built on old software and hardware virtually not
convertible to cloud. You will be surprised but there are big corporation
still using AS400 and not planning to switch anytime soon. If you heard in
recent news US unemployment system was still built on COBOL... In 2020...
Another reason is a cost. I love AWS! Its fantastic to be able to create and
launch servers or the whole farm of servers in the matter of minutes! And
ability to convert physical servers to virtual and upload them to the cloud is
breathtaking! But my monthly bill started at $300 and grew to $18K per month
in less than 3 years. And that was for just a few virtual servers with Windows
OS and SQL. My company realized that we can have a state of the art datacenter
with WmWare and SAN on premises for the fraction of that price. Put second one
on the other coast (one of our other offices) and you have your own cloud with
better ping and six digits figure saving a year. For the last I would name
vendor lock. With vSphere its very easy to move your virtual servers between
AWS, Azure and Google (assuming you can afford all 3 and licensing cost of
WmWare) but have you ever tried to "download" your server back to premise?
It's virtually impossible or made so hard by cloud players trying to keep you
up they're in the clouds. With all said I read that Netflix (I believe its
Netflix) saving hundreds of millions dollars per year by using Amazon instead
of its own servers. I also read somewhere that Dropbox moved away from AWS...
------
bluedino
A job or two ago:
Everything on-site for a couple reasons (50 servers). Mainly because as a
manufacturing company, machines on the shop floor need to talk to the servers.
This brings up issues of security (do you really wan to put a 15 year old CNC
machine 'on the internet'?). Also, if our internet connection has issues, we
still need to build parts.
The other big part of it is the mindset of management and the existing system,
which was built to run locally, does Amazon offer cloud hosted Access and
Visual Basic workers?
------
nitwit005
We're looking at moving from AWS to having some machine space rented in two
data centers. The reason is purely cost.
There are still some computers on site due to equipment being tied to it,
telephony stuff, etc.
My last company was looking at "moving to the cloud", with the idea that its
data centers were too expensive, but found out that the cloud solutions would
be even more expensive, despite possible discounts due to the size. They still
invested in it due to some Australia customers wanting data to be located
there.
------
tcbyrd
I haven't personally done detailed cost analysis lately, but if you have
systems that regularly operate at 80+% of capacity, I can't see how the
operating costs of any cloud operator can be cheaper than operating it
yourself. Their whole pricing model is based on being able to over-provision
compute and move workloads around within a datacenter. As much as people talk
about failing hard drives and other components at scale, failure rates are
still low enough that you could operate dozens of systems at full capacity for
3+ years with maybe a handful of legit hardware failures. To rent that same
compute from any cloud provider would cost significantly more. The cheapest
"Dedicated Host" on AWS will cost you almost $12k over 3 years if you pay for
it on-demand, and it's equivalent in specs to something you can buy for ~$2k.
> am I missing something?
I'd want more background behind what you mean by "at least for business". What
kind of business? Obviously IaaS providers like Digital Ocean and Linode are
are type of business that would not use other clouds. Dropbox and Backblaze as
well would probably never use something like S3. And there are legitimate use
cases outside of tech that have needs in specific teams for low latency
compute, or its otherwise cost and time prohibitive to shuttle terabytes of
data to the cloud and back (3D rendering, TV news rooms, etc). If you're
talking about general business systems that can be represented by a website or
app with a CRUD API, then most of that probably doesn't require on-prem. But
that's not the only reason businesses buy servers.
------
marvinblum
As most have mentioned already: cost
We started out with Emvi [1] on Kubernetes at Google Cloud as it was the
"fancy thing to use". I like Kubernetes, but we paid about 250€/month just to
run some web servers and two REST APIs. Which is way too much considering that
we're still working on the product and pivoting right now, so we don't have a
lot of traffic.
We then moved on to use a different cloud provider (Hetzner) and host
Kubernetes on VMs. Our costs went down to about 50€ just because of that. And
after I got tired managing Kubernetes and all the complexity that comes along
with it, we now just use a docker-compose on a single (more powerful) VM,
which reduced our cost even futher to about 20€/month and _increased_
performance, as we have less networking overhead.
My recommendation is to start out as simple as possible. Probably just a
single server, but keep scaling in mind while developing the system. We can
still easily scale Emvi on different hardware and move it around as we like.
We still use Google Cloud for backups (together with Hetzners own backup
system).
[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)
------
hdmoore
Anything with massive storage and massive compute that doesn't need low
latency is a great fit. I still host ~300TiB and ~250 cores at home because
the cloud cost would be astronomical. Edit: This is for personal stuff related
to internet-wide scan data and domain tracking. See
[https://github.com/hdm/inetdata](https://github.com/hdm/inetdata)
------
desc
1\. Our customers run our software on their own machines for security and
data-control reasons. As soon as something's running on someone else's
hardware, the data is out of your control. Unless you're going to accept the
(often massive) cost of homomorphic encryption, AND have a workload amenable
to that, it's a simple fact.
2\. Everything we do in house is small enough that the costs of running it on
our own machines is far less than the costs of working out how to manage it on
a cloud service AND deal with the possibility of that cloud service being
unavailable. Simply running a program on a hosted or local server is far far
simpler than anything I've seen in the cloud domain, and can easily achieve
three nines with next to no effort.
Most things which 'really need' cloud hosting seem to be irrelevant bullshit
like Facebook (who run their own infrastructure) or vendor-run workflows
layered over distributed systems which don't really need a vendor to function
(like GitHub/Git or GMail/email).
I'm trying to think of a counterexample which I'd actually miss if it were to
collapse, but failing.
------
lettergram
I actually am moving my startups servers from AWS to a home server.
Reasoning:
* We know how much compute is need.
* We know how much the new servers can compute.
* We have the ability to load balance to AWS or Digital Ocean or another service as needed.
* This move provides a 10x speed improvement to our services AND reduces costs by 70%.
For reference, had to call the ISP (AT&T) and they agreed to let me host my
current service. It’s relatively low bandwidth, but has high compute
requirements.
------
ggm
We operate an X509 PKI with a Trust anchor and CA. Its not impossible to run
the Hardware Security Module (HSM) in the cloud but its off the main path. Its
more plausible to run it in a D.C. but it invites security threats you don't
have, if you run it inside your own perimiter. Of course you also then invite
other risks, but its a balancing act and it has to be formally declared in
your Certification Practice Statement (CPS)
We also run some registry data which we consider mission critical as a
repository. We could run the live state off-prem, but we'd always have to be
multi-site to ensure data integrity. We're not a bank, but like a bank or a
land and titles administration office, registry implies stewardship in trust.
That imposes constraints on "where" and "why".
Take central registry and the HSM/related out of the equation, if I was
building from scratch I'd build to pub/sub, event-sourcing, async and in-the-
cloud for everything I could.
private cloud. If you don't control your own data and logic, why are you in
the loop?
------
SoylentOrange
We are a research group at a company with 2000 or so employees. We have a few
GPU machines to train models, which are utilized nearly around the clock.
AWS and co’s GPU-enabled servers are exceedingly expensive. Most of the GPU
models on those machines are also very old. We pay maybe 1/3 or less to
maintain these machines and train models in-house vs paying AWS.
Mind you, we use AWS for plenty of stuff...
------
Blackadderz
I work in R&D for a telecomms/optics company.
All servers are on premises. Not allowed to have a laptop. No access to
emails/data outside of the office. No USB drives, printing documents, etc.
Reason? Protect IP. From who? Mostly Huawei.
Good and bad: When I walk out the door... I switch off. The bad is that
working from home isn't realy an option. Although they have accommodated
somewhat for this pandemic.
------
mrweasel
We sell hosting to large number of different customers who for whatever
reason, mostly legal, are required to keep data within the borders of Denmark.
There is no Google, Amazon, Azure or DigitalOcean data centers in Denmark, so
cloud isn't an option for them.
Regarding cost, well it depends. We try to help customers to move to cloud
hosting if it's cheaper for them. It almost always will be if they take
advantage of the features provided by the cloud providers. If you just view
for instance AWS as a VMware in the cloud, then we can normally host the
virtual machines for you cheaper and provide better service.
You have to realize that many companies aren't developing software that's
ready for cloud deployment. You can move it to EC2 instance, but that's not
taking advantage of the feature set Amazon provides, and it will be expensive
and support may not be what you expect. You can't just call up Amazon and
demand that they fix your specific issue.
------
pmlnr
> The more I learn, the more I believe cloud is the only competitive solution
> today, even for sensitive industries like banking or medical.
Then learn A LOT more and start with mainframes and their reliability.
------
gameswithgo
Our business has had greatly increased load due to COVID-19. It would have
been very nice to buy a 128 core EPYC bare metal server to run our SQL Server
on at this time, to buy us time to rearchitect to handle the load. Instead we
are stuck with 96vCPUs because that is the most Amazon can do.
Its also very very expensive to have a 96vcpu VM on amazon!
------
apetersonBFI
I'm one of two IT persons at a food processor, in a small town. Despite living
in an area where a majority of IT & Programmers work at the hospital or an
insurance company, my boss has run our own networks and servers since the days
of Novell, and we continue to run Windows servers on-premise, instead of the
cloud. It does lead to interesting situations, like finding out a Dell server
shrieking next to you is running max fan speed because the idrac is not
connected.
Neither of us have any experience with the cloud, whereas we have a lot of
Microsoft experience. We still rely on OEM licenses of Office, because Office
365 would be 3x or more expensive. We have a range of Office 2019, 2016, 2013
OEM, and we get audited by them nearly every year.
We use LastPass, Dropbox and Github, but only the basic features, and LastPass
was an addition last year after someone got into our network through a weak
username/password.
In our main location, we have three ESX boxes, running several virtual
servers, and then we have a physical server for our domain controller, file
sharing and DHCP, DNS in other locations. We also switched to a physical
server for our new ERP application server, which hasn't yet been rolled out.
Projects like upgrading our ERP version can take months, but we have a local
consulting team, with a specialist in our particular ERP solution, as well as
a Server and Network specialist, and we also have a very close relationship
with our ISP, who provides WAN troubleshooting.
Our IT budget is small relative to our company revenue, so most cloud
proposals would raise our costs manyfold. We continue to use more services
like Github and Lastpass, and we both have multiple hats.
I'm a developer, in-house app support, Email support, HR systems support, ERP
support, PC setup, and I run our Data Synchronization operation and my boss
runs EDI. I do a lot of PowerShell and Task Scheduler, but I've got familiar
with bash through git bash.
------
mikorym
Here is a stupid example: Excel vlookups work on a network drive, but not on a
cloud service like Dropbox or OneDrive. The absolute path can't resolve if
it's used across multiple Excel users. If the users store the file locally,
each will have a different path on their computers. Excel stores actual paths.
[1]
There is one way around it: Mounting the cloud server as a network drive (some
providers do this by default, but OneDrive is not one of them, neither is
Dropbox).
I don't know of a way of mounting OneDrive as a virtual drive; I would be
interested to know.
It sounds stupid, but the above was a real life scenario.
[1] Only if the files are closed. Excel can change the path if you have the
file open, but it can't change it to multiple option across different PCs. But
as I have mentioned before, Excel doesn't seem to document all of their more
subtle features.
------
jolmg
Unreliable internet.
A retail company may decide that the best place to put up a new branch is
coincidentally (though there might be a correlation) at the edge of what the
available ISPs currently cover. They might have to make a deal to get an ISP
to extend their area to where the store is going to be. However, because of
lack of competing ISP options on the part of the retailer, and the lack of
clients in the retailer's area on the part of the ISP, that service is
probably not going to be all that reliable.
Also, that retail company may experience a big rise in sales after a natural
disaster occurs, when communications (phone/cell/internet) are mostly down for
the area. One tends not to think about stuff like that until it happens at
least once.
It's very important for the ERP/POS systems to be as operational as possible
even when the internet is down.
------
joshuaellinger
On the smaller end of the scale, I have a $12K/mo spend with Azure. I decided
to go back to Coloc.
For under $50K, I have 4 machines with an aggregate 1TB RAM, 48 cores, 1 pricy
GPU, 16TB of fast SSD, 40 TB HHD, and infiniband @ 56GB/sec. Rent on the
cabinet is less than $1K/mo. It's going to cost me about $20K in labor to
migrate.
So the nominal break-even point is six months but the real kicker is that this
is effectively x10-30 the raw power of what I was getting on the cloud. I can
offer a quantitatively different set of calculations.
It also simplifies a bunch of stuff: 1\. No APIs to read blob data -- just
good old files on an ZFS share. 2\. No need to optimize memory consumption.
3\. No need for docker/k8s/etc to spin up under load. Just have a cluster
sitting there.
There are downsides but Coloc beats the cloud for certain problems.
------
busterarm
I'm going to buck the trend and say cloud is great. We do cloud, on-prem and
colo (16 racks in two different DCs).
Procurement is a nightmare especially when your vendor is having problems with
yields (thanks Intel!) and the ability to scale up and scale down without
going through hardware procurement process saves us millions of dollars a
year.
We avoid the lock-in by running on basic services on multiple cloud providers
and building on top of those agnostically.
Spend is in the millions per month between the cloud providers, but the
discounts are steep. We're essentially had to build our own global CDN and the
costs are better than paying the CDN services and better than running our own
hardware & staffing all those locales.
It's a no brainer. We'll continue to operate mixed infrastructure for quite
some time as certain things make sense in certain places.
------
the_svd_doctor
PhD student/researcher. Most of the compute I do are HPC/scientific computing
style and run on University or US National Lab machines. We thought about
cloud, but the interconnect (MPI-style code) is very important for us and it's
not very clear to me what's available there in the cloud.
------
frellus
Self-driving company here. We're doing on-prem because we have a clear
projection on the amount of data we'll need to injest, store and process using
GPUs.
The advantages of running things in a cloud are clear -- and as an
infrastructure team we have challenges around managing physical assets at
scale, however it's clear with the cost of cloud providers that eventually we
would have to pull data into a datacenter to survive at some point.
Co-location costs are fixed, and it's actually easy to make a phenomenal deal
now-a-days given the pressure these companies are under.
The real trick of it all is that regardless of running on-prem or in the
cloud, we need to run as if everything is cloud native. We run Kubernetes,
Docker, and as much as possible automate things to the point that running one
of something is the same as running a million of it.
------
jaboutboul
There is not one clear cut answer on this. It depends on what your company
values, i.e. cost vs. agility. If you are using the cloud for what it was
meant for availability, scalability, elasticity--and those are the things that
your org values--its the right fit for you. If on the other hand you value
cost then it clearly isn't the right fit.
One other point I'll make, the true value of cloud isn't in IaaS, renting VMs
from anyone is relatively expensive compared to the costs of buying a server
and maintaining it yourself for a number of years. The true value of the cloud
is when can architect your solution to utilize the various services the cloud
providers offer, RDS/DynamoDB, CDN, Lambda, API Gateway, etc. so that you can
scale quickly when you need to.
------
jcrawfordor
For hobby projects, I own a moderately outdated 1U "pizzabox" installed in a
downmarket colocation facility in a nearby major city. Considering the monthly
colocation rate and the hardware cost amortized over two years (I will
probably not replace it that soon but it's what I've used for planning), this
works out to appreciably less than it would cost to run a similar workload on
a cloud provider. It costs about the same or possibly a bit less than running
the same workload on a downmarket dedi or VPS provider, but it feels more
reliable (at least downtime is usually my fault and so under my control) and
the specs on the machine are higher than it's easy to get from downmarket VPS
operations.
Because my application involves live video transcoding I'm fairly demanding on
CPU time, which is something that's hard to get (reliably) from a downmarket
VPS operation (even DO or what have you) and costly from a cloud provider. On
the other hand, dual 8 core Xeons don't cost very much when they're almost a
decade old and they more than handle the job.
There are a few fairly reputable vendors for used servers out there, e.g. Unix
Surplus, and they're probably cheaper than you think. I wouldn't trust used
equipment with a business-critical workload but honestly it's more reliable
than an EC2 instance in terms of lifetime-before-unscheduled-termination, and
since I spend my workday doing "cloud-scale" or whatever I have minimal
interest in doing it in my off-time, where I prefer to stick to an "old
fashioned" approach of keeping my pets fed and groomed.
And, honestly, new equipment is probably cheaper than you think. Dealing with
a Dell account rep is a monumental pain but the prices actually aren't that
crazy. Last time I purchased over $100k in equipment (in a professional
context, my hobbies haven't gotten that far yet) I was able to get a lot for
it - and that's well less than burdened cost for one engineer.
------
_bxg1
One of my favorite things (at least for personal projects) about using the
cloud is so-called "platform as a service" systems like Heroku, where I don't
have to get down in the weeds, I just push code and the process starts (or
restarts).
Is there something like that I could use on my own hardware? I just want to do
a fresh Linux install, install this one package, and start pushing code from
elsewhere, no other configuration or setup necessary. If it can accept
multiple repos, one server process each, all the better. I know things like
Docker and Kubernetes exist but what I want is absolute minimal setup and
maintenance.
Does such a thing exist?
~~~
mappu
You're looking for Dokku
Same git push deploys, heroku-compatible buildpacks or Dockerfiles, all on
your own hardware, MIT license.
~~~
_bxg1
This looks perfect, thank you! I knew there was no way I could've been the
first person to think of this
------
frogbox12
After a big cloud-first initiative, several managers left; leaving
implantation to Linux sysadmins now in charge of cloud. Treated cloud as some
colo facility, dump all apps in one big project/account, cloud costs spun
quickly out-of-control and lots of problems with apps not being segregated
from each other. Cloud declared 'too expensive' and 'too insecure', things
migrated back on-prem, team now actively seeks to build and staff colo
facilities with less than 10ms latency somewhere outside coastal California
(Reno, Vegas, PHX) which just isn't gonna happen because physics.
------
annoyingnoob
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) Compliance - much easier to
keep it on site, off-site compliance is costly. Also, cost over time. Better
control of performance requirements for certain applications.
------
otabdeveloper4
We're in the process of moving a greenfield project from AWS to a more
traditionally hosted solution.
AWS turned out to be 5-10 times more expensive; what's worse, our developers
are spending more then half their time working around braindead AWS design
decisions and bugs.
A disaster any way you look at it.
There are good reasons to chose AWS, but they're never technical. (Maybe you
don't want to deal with cross-departmental communications, or you can't hire
people into a sysadmin role for some reason, maybe you want to hide hosting in
operational expenses instead of capital, etc.)
------
Nextgrid
Bandwidth costs.
Most dedicated servers come with unmetered bandwidth so not only is it cheap
to serve large files but your bandwidth costs won't suddenly explode because
of heavy usage or a DDoS attack.
------
TuringNYC
Here is how we went about w/ CSPs (AWS, Azure, GC, Oracle). Thoughts welcome
Getting Started --> Definitely go w/ CSPs. No need to worry about infra.
Pre Product Market Fit + Steady Growth --> On Premise, because CSPs might be
expensive until you find a consistently profitable business.
Pre Product Market Fit + HyperGrowth --> CSPs since you wont be able to keep
up [we never got to this stage]
Product Market Fit w/ Sustainable Good Margins --> CSPs, pay to remove the
headache [we never got to this stage]
Side Note: w/ GPUs, CSPs rarely make sense
------
acwan93
I agree with you OP.
Our company provides on-premise ERP systems to small (we’re talking at most 20
person companies) wholesale distributors.
Pre-COVID, I was pushing for a cloud solution to our product and pivoting our
company towards that model. We’re at a hybrid approach when COVID hit.
What ends up happening with an on-premise/hybrid cloud model is we end up
doing a lot of the sysadmin/IT support work for our customers just to get our
ERP working. This includes getting ahold of static IP addresses (and absolving
responsibility), configuring servers/OSes, and several other things along the
same vein that’s wholly irrelevant to the actual ERP like inventory management
and accounting.
Long story short, these customers of ours end up expecting us to maintain
their on-premise server without actually paying for help or being knowledgable
about how it all works. We keep pitching them the cloud but they’re not
willing to pay us a recurring fee even though it actually saves the headaches
of answering the question “who’s responsibility is it to make sure this server
keeps running?"
I think a lot of these answers here are dealing with large-scale products and
services where the amount of data and capital costs is so massive it makes
sense to start hiring your own admins solely to maintain servers. For these
small mom-and-pop shops who are looking for automation, the cloud is still the
way to go.
~~~
jolmg
Deja vu. I think you totally hit the nail on the head with that last
paragraph. On-premise ERP systems probably only make real sense for (non-
small) companies that wish to avoid relying on the internet (because e.g.
their business strategy requires that freedom) and can hire long-term
sysadmins/programmers that can provide support to those systems.
~~~
acwan93
Have you had experience selling on-premise systems? I’m really curious how
other companies handle the sysadmin and IT support issue.
------
allenrb
Finance space, under 100 people. Most servers are either latency-sensitive or
24/7 fully-loaded HPC. Neither case fits the cloud model. We do use cloud for
build/test, though.
------
Jugurtha
Many organizations do have private clouds.
If by cloud you mean a public cloud like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, then
forget about it; not with these companies piping data directly to U.S
intelligence.
~~~
p1necone
What's the difference between private cloud and on prem?
Does it just mean you let everyone spin up VMs etc rather than requiring them
to go through IT?
~~~
toomuchtodo
Mostly. Cloud is just bin packing compute and data storage. There are many use
cases where it’s cheaper for you to host the hardware you cloud on instead of
a public cloud provider.
------
krageon
You've been managing servers for quite some time but you've never considered
the security implications of hosting all of your sensitive data on someone
else's computer? You say you're not trolling but I genuinely don't see how
those two facts are compatible, except if you work in an industry where the
data just doesn't matter. If that were the case though, you shouldn't feel
compelled to judge what banking or medical institutions are doing.
~~~
aspyct
We use a public cloud, and believe me: we do consider the security
implications. We veeery much do.
------
nikisweeting
Quebec power and internet pricing is really competitive. For residential
services I pay $0.06/kw + $80/mo for 1Gbps fiber with 1ms ping to 8.8.8.8
(USD).
As a result, I run a power-hungry Dell r610 with 24 cores and 48GB of ram with
20+ services on it for many different aspects of my company. All the critical
stuff runs on DigitalOcean / Vultr, but the 20+ non-critical services like
demo apps, CI/CD, cron workers, archiving, etc. run for <$200/yr in my closet.
~~~
blaser-waffle
This is also why there are a lot of data centers in the Greater Montreal area,
FWIW.
------
ex3ndr
We are small team startup and i am personally annoyed about pricing of a
clouds.
I have a 3 smallish VM for build server + managed SQL. It cost 500$/mo. It
doesn't make sense. Having my own VMs on ESXi makes everything very different
- most of the time this VMs do nothing, but you want to make them performant
from time to time, so there are a plenty of resources because all other vms
are too mostly IDLE.
In cloud they are billed as if they are 100% loaded all the time.
I am not really satisfied with latencies and insane price for egress traffic.
I just can't do backups daily since it could cost whooping 500$/mo just for
the traffic. This is just insane, i can't see how it could scale anywhere for
B2C market. For B2B it might work really well though since revenue per
customer is much higher.
We are not moving to our own DC, but just keep realtime stuff in the cloud,
but anything that is not essential is being moved somewhere else. Bonus is
that you need off-site backups anyway in the case if cloud vendor will just
ban you and delete all your data.
Startups might move fast and iterate, but if you don't have your own servers
you always reduce your usage because it could grow fast effectively reducing
your delivery capacity.
------
leroy_masochist
Background: I consult extensively in the SaaS space and ask people this
question all the time in the course of strategy reassessments, transactional
diligence, etc.
1\. Physical control over data is still a premium for many professional
investors. As a hedge fund CIO told me recently when I asked her why she was
so anti-cloud migration, "I want our data to live on our servers in our
building behind our security guard and I want our lawyer, not AWS's, to read
the subpoena if the SEC ever comes for us."
2\. There are a lot of niche ERP- and CRM-adjacent platforms out there --
e.g., medical imaging software -- where the best providers are still on-prem
focused, so customers in that space are waiting for the software to catch up
before they switch.
3\. A lot of people still fundamentally don't trust the security of the cloud.
And I'd say this distrust isn't of the tinfoil hat, "I don't believe SSL
really works" variety that existed a decade ago. Instead it's, "we'd have to
transition to a completely different SysAdmin environment and we'd probably
fuck up an integration and inadvertently cause some kind of horrendous
breach".
------
Scaevus
For our case, the need is very specific as we are working with mobile apps.
Building iOS apps require macOS and even though there are some well-known "Mac
hosting" services, none of them are actual cloud services similar
DigitalOcean, Azure, AWS, etc.
So it is much less expensive and actually easier to scale and configure to
host the Macs onprem.
(Off the record: If it is for internal use only, you can even stick in a few
hackintoshes for high performance.)
------
arghwhat
Quite frankly, "cloud" is a convenience and elasticity service at a steep
premium, with downsides.
Contrary to popular belief, it does not in the slightest save you a sysadmin
(most just end up unknowingly giving the task to their developers). And
contrary to popular belief, the perf/price ratio is _atrocious_ compared to
just buying servers.
For some of the loads I had been doing the math for, I could rent a colo _and_
buy a new beefy server every year with money to spare for the yearly cost of
something _approximating_ the performance in AWS...
------
ai_ja_nai
It's the people cost, not the hardware.
Hardware is super cheap:
-A 40 slots rack, with gigabit fiber, dual power and a handful of public IP addresses, costs on average 10000€/y.
-A reconditioned server on eBay with 16 cores and 96GB of RAM costs 500€ (never seen them break in 3 years).
-A brand new Dell Poweredge with AMD EPYC 32 core and 64GB of RAM will cost 3000€.
-Storage is super cheap: 500GB of SSD costs 80€ (consumer stuff is super fine as long as you wisely plan between redundancy and careful load) and rotational disks are even cheaper. Never seen a rotational disk break.
Once bought, all of this is yours forever, not for a single month. You can
pack very remarkable densities in a rack and have MUCH more infrastructure
estate at disposal than you would ever afford on AWS.
The flip side of the coin is that you need operation expertise. If it's always
you, then ok (although you won't be doing much more than babysitting the
datacenter). Otherwise, if you need to hire a dedicated person, people is the
most expensive resource yet and that should definitely be added to the cost of
operations.
------
dathinab
A company which:
1\. Does "security" critical stuff (like affecting the security of people not
data if breached)
2\. Which besides certain kinds of breaches has lowish requirements to
performance and reliability (short outages of a view minutes are not a big
problems, even outages of half a day or so can be coped with)
3\. Slightly paranoid founders, with a good amount of mistrust into any cloud
company.
4\. Founders and tech-lead which have experience in some areas but toughly
underestimate the (time)cost of managing servers them self, and that _kinda_
hard to do secure by yourself (wrt. long term DDOS and similar).
So was it a good reason? Probably not. But we still went with it.
As a site note while we did not use the could _we didn't physically manage
server either_. Instead we had some dedicated hardware in some compute center
in Germany which they did trust. So no "physical" managements securing etc.
needed and some DDOS and network protection by default. Still we probably
could have it easier without losing anything.
On the other side if you have a dedicated server hardware in some trusted
"localish" compute center it's not _that_ bad either to manage.
------
prirun
I did a startup with a co-founder in 1998, before cloud was a thing. We hosted
at above.net first, then he.net following above.net's bankruptcy. Both were
very good and we never had colo-related problems with either, though he.net
was significantly cheaper.
We started with 2 white-box PC's as servers, 2 mirrored RAID1 drives in each.
We added a 3rd PC we built ourselves: total nightmare. The motherboard had a
bug where, when using both IDE channels, it overwrote the wrong drive. We
nearly lost our entire business. Putting both drives on the same IDE channel
fixed it, but that's dangerous for RAID1.
A few years in, we needed an upgrade and bought 5 identical SuperMicro 2U
servers with hardware RAID1 for around $10K. Those things were beasts: rock
solid, fast, and gave us plenty of capacity. We split our services across
machines with DNS and the 5 machines were in a local LAN to talk to each other
for access to the database server. The machines' serial ports were wired
together in a daisy-chain so we could get direct console access to any machine
that failed, and we had watchdog cards installed on each so that if one ever
locked up, it automagically rebooted itself. When I left in 2005, we were
handling 100's of request/s, every page dynamically generated from a search
engine or database.
Of course it took effort to set all this up. But the nice thing is, you
control and understand _everything_. Some big company doesn't just do things
to you, you have no idea what is happening, and they're not talking. And if
things do go south, you can very quickly figure out why, because you built it.
The biggest mistake we made was in the first few years, where we used those
crappy white-box PCs. Sure, we saved a couple thousand dollars, but we had the
money and it was a terrible trade. Night and day difference between those and
real servers.
------
quanto
> The more I learn, the more I believe cloud is the only competitive solution
> today, even for sensitive industries like banking or medical. I honestly
> fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least for
> business. Cost-wise, _security-wise_ , whatever-wise. [emphasis mine]
Most people here seem to point out cost and utilization. I would like to offer
another perspective: security.
I worked in both of these industries: finance ("banking", not crypto or PG)
and medical (within a major hospital network). The security requirement, both
from practical and legal perspectives, cannot be understated. In many
situations, the data cannot leave an on-prem air-gapped server network, let
alone use a cloud service.
It costed us more to have on-prem servers as we need a dedicated real estate
and an engineering team to maintain. Moreover, the initial capital expenditure
is high -- designing and implementing a proper server room/data center with
climate control, power wiring, and compliant fire extinguishing system are not
trivial.
------
gorgoiler
For business logic at a fairly large school the free and open tools that make
the cloud so productive get used here a lot. We get to leverage commodity
hardware and network infra very effectively for on-premises[1].
You have to have a good recovery plan for when equipment X’s power supply
fails but when deploy is all automated, it’s very easy to overcome swapping
bare metal, and easy to drill (practice) during off hours.
This makes it _much_ easier to meet regulatory compliance: either statutory or
regulations your org has created internally (e.g. financial controls in-org,
working with vulnerable people or children, working with controlled
substances, working with sensitive intellectual property.)
Simply being able to say you can pull the plug on something and do forensic
analysis of the storage on a device is an important thing to say to
stakeholders (carers, carers families, pupil parents.)
I’m so grateful to be living in the modern age when “cloud” software
exists[2], but I don’t have to be in the cloud to use it.
The downside: you need trained staff and it’s completely inappropriate if you
need any kind of bandwidth, power consumption, or to support round the clock
business (which we do not because, out here on the long tail, we work in
single city so still have things like evenings weekends and holidays for
maintenance!)
— [1] Premise vs premises is one of those “oh isn’t the English language
awful” distinctions. Premise is the logical foundation for some other theory
(“the premises for my laziness is that because the sky is grey it will
probably rain so I’m not going to paint the house”) where as the premise_s_
means physical real estate property (“this is my freshly painted house: I
welcome you onto the premises”.)
[2] Ansible, Ubiquiti, arm SBCs like raspberry pi, Docker, LXC, IPv6 (making
global routing for more tractable, IPv4 for the public and as an endpoint to
get on the VPN.)
------
hourislate
If you interested, here is an article about how Bank of America chose to build
out its own cloud to save about 2 billion a year.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-
americas-350-million...](https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-
americas-350-million-internal-cloud-bet-striking-payoff-2019-10?op=1)
------
ps
Cost.
We recently moved one rack to the different DC in the same city and used
Digitalocean droplets to avoid downtime. Services running on Linux were
migrated without high-availability (e.g. no pgsql replication, no redis
cluster, single elasticsearch node...) and we just turned off Windows VMs
completely due to licensing issues and no need to have them running at night.
The price of this setup was almost 4x higher than what we pay for colo. Our
servers are usualy <5 years old Supermicro, we run on Openstack and Ceph (S3,
rbd) and provide VPNaaS to our clients.
AWS/GCP/Azure was out of question due to cost. We considered moving Windows
servers to Azure with the same result - the cost of running Windows Server
(AD, Terminal, Tomcat) + MS SQL was many times higher than the price of colo
per month. It is bizarre that you can buy the server running those VMs
approximately every 3 months for the Azure expenses (Xeon Platinum, 512GB
RAM).
------
majkinetor
There is no cloud solution that lets you ship and forget a system.
Come in 15 years ? It still works. Is that possible with cloud even in short
periods, like 2 years ? No.
Will it ever be possible? No.
Thats primary reason for me. I can use cloud only for stuff that are nice but
not mandatory to have for service to work, like status page.
Plus, work is more enjoyable then using somebodies else stuff.
------
whatsmyusername
Cloud falls over if you have a lot of data egress. I don't work on those types
of workloads (mainly in PCI and a little bit of HIPAA) so I stick to cloud for
the sheer convenience factor (it's easier to fix a security group than having
to drive to the office and plug in somewhere like I had to earlier today).
Dealing with hardware has become a very specific skill set. I have it, but I
don't enjoy it, so I don't look for it.
I still have to build physical networks occasionally (ex: we are building a
small manufacturing facility in a very specific niche that's required to be
onsite for compliance reasons) but the scale is so small that I can get away
with a lot of open source components (pfsense netgates are great) and not have
to use things that are obnoxious to deal with (if I never have to deploy cisco
anything ever again I won't be upset).
------
darrelld
I have a friend who is an IT manager for a large chain hotel in the Caribbean.
I keep asking him about why they still use on premises equipment and it boils
down to:
* Cost for training / transitioning + sunk cost fallacy * Perceived security risk (right or wrong) * IT is mostly invisible and currently "works" with the current arrangement, why change?
------
avifreedman
We're (Kentik) a SaaS company and one key to having a great public margin is
buying and hosting servers. In our case, we use Equinix in the US and EU to
host, with Juniper gear for routing/switching, and the customary transit,
peering at the edge.
One secondary factor is that we've only monotonically increased, and it's way
cheaper to keep 10%-15% overprovisioned than to be on burst price with 50%+
constant load.
But the simplest math is - we have > 100 storage servers that are 2u 26x2tb
flash, 256gb RAM, 36 cores. They cost $18k once, which we finance at pretty
low interest over 36 months (and really last longer than that). Factor in
$200-400/mo to host each depending (I think it's more like $200, but it
doesn't matter for the cloud math).
That same server would be many $thousands/month on any cloud we've seen.
Probably $4-6k/mo, depending on the type of EBS-ish attached. Or with the
dedicated server 'alternate' they are moving to offer (and Oracle sorta
launched with).
It'd be cheaper but still > 2x as expensive on Packet, IBM dedicated, OVH,
Hetzner, Leaseweb (OVH and Hetzner the cheapest probably).
Three other factors for us:
1) Bandwidth would be outrageous on cloud but probably not as outrageously
high as just the servers, given that our outbound is just our SaaS portal/API
usage
2) We'd still need a cabinet with router/switch infra to peer with a couple
dozen customers that run networks (other SaaS/digital natives and SPs that
want to send infrastructure telemetry via direct network interconnect).
3) We've had 5-6 ops folks for 3 of the 6 years, 3-4 for the couple years
before that. As we go forward, as we double we'll probably +1. It is my belief
that we'd need more people in ops, or at least eng+ops mix, if we used public
cloud. But in any case, the amount of time we spend adding and debugging our
infra is really really really small, and the benefit of knowing how servers
and switching stuff fails is huge to debugging (or, not having to debug).
All that said - we do run private SaaS clusters, and 100% of them are on bare
metal, even though we _could_ run on cloud. Once we do the TCO, no one yet has
wanted to go cloud for an always-on data-intensive footprint like ours.
Good luck with your journey, whichever way you go!
And happy to discuss more, email in profile
------
kokey
I think when the economy is hit hard a lot of companies are going to have to
look at what they can do to make sure they remain profitable since investor
appetite has changed. This means some companies will have to look at what is
being spent on cloud providers. Renting RAM by the hour makes sense if you are
optimistic about future revenue growth, but if the market changes and you have
to worry about how you can sustain profits while just keeping your current
customer base then this makes a lot less sense. The cloud vs on prem argument
also really includes all the things in between, e.g. colo, managed servers,
VPSes and also better tooling to manage your own VM and container clusters on
these, which I think will now get increased attention and competition when
people are considering alternatives to the big cloud providers in order to
bring down costs.
------
MorganGallant
I picked up a few refurbished dell servers off Ebay for super cheap a while
back - and usually use these with Cloudflare Argo tunnels to host various
servers. However, since these are just sitting on the floor next to my desk,
usually rely on cloud for any applications with high uptime requirements.
Recently though, I've been working on some distributed systems type projects
which would allow these servers to be put in different physical locations (and
power grids), and still continue to operate as a cohesive whole. This type of
technology definitely increases my confidence in them being able to reliably
host servers. I wouldn't want to be reliant on the cloud for large scale
services though, from my understanding you can get some crazy cost savings by
colocating some physical servers (especially for large data storage
requirements).
------
pavelevst
AWS is one of most expensive options, and far not perfect, I can’t understand
why people consider it as default choice... To compare - dedicated server on
hetzner (core i7, 32gb ram, 20tb network) is cheaper than medium VM on AWS. If
the product is growing, cloud cost can quickly become the biggest expense for
company. Than it will make sense to spend some time make things run in more
cost effective way
I think if you choose cloud hosting that costs about same as renting dedicated
server plus settings virtualization by yourself - than it’s a fair choice (can
check on [https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/](https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/) or
similar)
Another sweet configuration is dedicated servers with kubernetes: good user
experience for developers, easy to setup and maintain, easy to scale up/down
------
bpyne
My employer is a mid-sized university. Cost is the main issue.
Our environment is a mixture of in-house developed apps and COTS. Until
recently, our major COTS vendors didn't have cloud solutions. Now they have
cloud solutions but they're far too costly for us to afford. So we need to
keep them in-house and continue to employ the staff to support it.
Our in-house apps integrate the COTS systems. Our newer apps are mostly in the
cloud. But the older ones are in technologies that need to stay where the
database server is, which is in our server room for the reason stated in the
last paragraph. Rewriting the apps isn't on our radar due to new work coming
in.
Historically, outsource vs. in-source seems to ebb and flow. The clear path is
usually muddied when new technologies come out to reduce cost on one side or
the other.
------
gen220
My SO’s brother works in the studio video recording industry, and is a very
IT-savvy guy. We had a long discussion last holiday season about the state of
cloud adoption in that industry. He told me (this is obviously secondhand)
that most of the movie industry is not only off the cloud, but exclusively
working in the realm of colocating _humans_ and data (footage).
This is for many reasons. The one that comes back to me now is that the file
sizes are HUGE, because resolution is very high, so bandwidth is a major
concern. Editors and colorists need rapid feedback on their work, which
demands beefy workstations connected directly with high bandwidth connections
to the source files. Doing something like this over a long distance network
(even if the storage was free) would be prohibitively expensive, and sometimes
literally impossible.
So the write loads are basically the antithesis of what cloud optimized for:
“random sequential reads of typical short length, big append only writes”. The
big production houses (lucasarts famously) are also incredibly secretive about
their source material, and like to use physical access as a proxy for digital
access.
It leads to some seemingly strange (to me as a cloud SWE guy) decisions. He
pretty much exclusively purchases top of the line equipment ( _hard drives
/ssds_), and keeps minimal if any backups for most projects because there
simply isn’t any room. It’s a recipe for disastrous data loss, and apparently
it’s something that happens quite often to this day. It’s just extremely
prohibitively expensive to do version control for movie development.
I don’t know to what extent cloud technologies can solve for this domain. I
asked him if Netflix was innovating in this area, since they’re so famously
invested in AWS, but he said that they mostly contracted out the production
stuff, and only managed the distribution, which makes sense. The contractors
don’t touch the cloud at all, for the most part.
Again most of this is secondhand, I’d be curious to hear more details or
reports from other people in the movie industry.
------
kgc
We moved all AWS servers to a colo. Saving 80% of the cost.
------
ocdtrekkie
There are very few niches where the cloud makes sense: Namely, where you are
either too small to benefit from a single server and a single entry-level IT
guy (think three or four person companies with low need for technical
competency), or where you are expecting rapid growth and can't really
rationally size out your own hardware for the job (in this case, the cloud is
useful initially, leave it later once your scale is more stable).
In every other case, you are paying for the same hardware you could buy
yourself, plus the cloud provider's IT staff, plus your own IT staff which you
likely need anyways to figure out how to deal with the cloud provider, _and_
then the cloud provider's profit margin, which is sizeable.
------
amq
Surprised no one mentioned a third option: cheap vps providers like
digitalocean or vultr. They've become real contenders to big clouds recently,
providing managed databases, storage and k8s. And their bandwidth costs are
close to what you'd get in colo.
------
cpascal
My company cannot run our infrastructure in the cloud because we do
performance/availability monitoring from ~700 PoP’s around the world.
Not running our infrastructure in the cloud is part of our value proposition.
Our customers depend on us to detect and alert them when their services go
down. We _have_ to be operational when the cloud providers are not, otherwise
we aren’t providing our customer with a valuable service.
Another reason we don’t run in the cloud is because we store a substantial
amount of data that is ever increasing. It’s cheaper to run our own SAN in a
data center than to store and query it in the cloud.
The final reason is our workloads aren’t elastic. Our CPU’s are never idle. In
that type of use case, it’s cheaper to own the hardware.
------
znpy
Many of the customers of my previous employer had hardware on premises,
including the customer that I was handling.
It had both compute and storage (netapp). It had two twin sites in two
different datacenters. The infra in each site consisted basically in six
compute servers (24c/48t, 128gb ram) and netapp storage (two netapp heads per
site + disk shelves).
Such hardware has basically paid itself across its seven or eight years of
life, and having one of the sites basically in the building meant basically
negligible latency.
The workload was mostly fixed, and the user base was relatively small (~1000
concurrent users, using the services almost 24/7).
It really checks all of the boxes, does all it is supposed to do and in a
cheap manner.
------
alkonaut
What do you mean by "servers"? Anything that isn't a client machine, or just
customer-facing infra?
We have a pool of 15 build servers for our CI. They run basically 100% cpu
during office hours and tranffer terabytes of data every day. They have no
real requirements for backup, reliability etc, but they need to be fast. If I
run a pricing calculator for hosting those in the cloud it's ridiculous. We
are moving source and CI to cloud, but we'll probably keep all the build
machines on-prem for the foreseeable future.
For customer facing servers the calculation is completely different. More
traffic means more business. Reliability, Scalability and backup is important
and so on.
------
urza
I would like to add, that even for small teams/projects the cost is the
reason. We have small business project, with only one server, few hundred
customers, with varying traffic (database sync between thick clients, web
portal,..). We were considering cloud, but with the features we needed (few
different databases, few APIs,..) it would be cca $1000/month (with reasonable
response times - could be cheaper but terribly slow). Having our own on
premise server, the price is back just after few months and then just the
minimal cost of connectivity, energy and occasional maintenance.. it just
didn't make any sense for us to choose cloud.
------
adev_
I worked in Switzerland and a reason to use on premise here is _Security_
Many detail banks, asset management company or high security company refuse to
use any public Cloud.
They want to have a strict and traceable list of people who have physical
access to their hardware.
This in order to control any risk of dataleak [1].
In practice they use generally on-premise installation. They ren space in a
computer center and own there a private cage monitored with multiple cameras.
Meaning they know exactly anyone touching their hardware and enforce security
clearance for them.
[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Leaks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Leaks)
------
jordanbeiber
My last three employments have had me and my team build three different
platforms with three different “providers”. Many lessons learned!
Chronological order:
1\. E-commerce, low volume (1000-5000RPM), very high value conversions, highly
localized trade.
We built an on-prem stack using hasicorp here. This place had on-prem stuff
already in place, the usual vendor driven crap - expensive hypervisor,
expensive spoffy SAN, unreliable network. Anyway, my platform team (4-5 guys)
built a silo on commodity hardware to run the new version of this site. This
is a few years back, but the power you get from cheap hardware these days is
astounding. With 6 basic servers, in two DCs, stuffed with off the shelf SSDs
we could run the site and dev teams no problem. Much less downtime compared to
the expensive hyperconverged blade crap we started on at basically no cost.
There’s a simplicity that wins out using actual network cables and 1u boxes...
LXC is awesome btw! Using “legacy” vmware, emc, hp etc for non-essential on-
prem? Cloud is tempting!
2\. Very high volume (Billions of requests per day), global network. AWS. Team
tasked with improving on-demand scalability. We implemented kubernetes on AWS
and it really showed what it’s about! After 6-7 months of struggle with k8s <
1.12 things turned around when it hit 1.12-1.13-ish we got it to act how we
wanted. Sort of, at least. Cloud just a no brainer for this type of round-the-
clock, elastic workload. You’d need many millions up-front to even begin
building something matching “the cloud” here. Lot of work spent tweaking cost
though. At this scale cloud cost management is what you do.
3\. Upstart dev-shop. No rpm outside dev (yet). Azure. About 30 devs building
cool stuff. Azure sucks as IaaS, they want you to PaaS that’s for sure. Cloud
decision had been made already when I joined. Do you need cloud for this? No.
Are there benefits? Some. Do they outweigh the cost? Hardly. In the end it
will depend on how and where your product drives revenue. We pay for a small
local dev datacenter quarterly, which i find annoying.
Just some quick thoughts off the top of my head (on the phone so excuse
everything).
Happy to discuss further!
------
Cthulhu_
Our software runs in core (mobile) network systems, but that's at our
customers. We ourselves have a rack in our office that runs things like Git
repos, project management, virtual machines for development / testing, build
servers, and instances for trainings.
We're concerned about corporate espionage and infiltration, so we can't trust
our servers being out of our sight. Most people don't have the code on their
physical machines either; I'm a cocky breath of fresh air in that regard in
that I prefer my stuff to run locally instead of the (slow, underpowered) VMs,
I trust Apple's encryption a lot.
------
rjgonza
I work for a US Stock Exchange, and some of the technologies that we rely on
are not permitted in the cloud. The performance metrics we need are usually
only achievable on highly tuned bare metal deployments as well so cloud is
usually not an option. I guess it really depends on your workload, but I think
there is a very healthy amount of production being deployed and worked on
businesses own datacenter/private clouds.
------
sokoloff
We have mostly switched to, or are in the midst of switching to, the cloud.
Services that we will continue to run on-premises (as an exception to that
rule) are some machine learning _training_ clusters (where we need a constant,
high-level amount of GPU and cloud provider pricing for GPU machines is very
far off the mark of what you can build/run yourself) and some file shares for
our production facilities where very large raster files are created,
manipulated, sent to production equipment, and then shortly afterwards
deleted.
Most everything else is going to the cloud (including most of our ML _deployed
model_ use cases).
------
DyslexicAtheist
this assumption doesn't consider threat models where the vendor could be part
of your problem. E.g. if you're based in country A and work on super secret
new Tech for an emerging industry, then hosting in country B may not be an
option.
Imagine a company in Europe that decides to host it's files on Alibaba Cloud
in the US.
Imagine the US Department of State hosting it's files with Google.
Imagine an energy company working on new reactor Tech, ...
Imagine a Certificate Authority which has an offline store of root
certificates which need to come online to sync twice a day.
Imagine cases where you need a hardware HSM.
Then there is also Cost as others have pointed out. AWS cost structure is so
complex that whole business models[1] have sprung up to help you optimize the
price tags or reduce the risks of huge bills. that's right: you need to have a
commercial agreement with another partner that has nothing to do with your
cloud just to work around aggressive pricing. The guy who started this ~2
years ago has grown to 40+ people (organically), is based in Switzerland and
is still hiring even in this recession. It should give you an idea of how
broken the cloud is.
Lastly there is also the lock-in. All the hours that you have to sit down and
learn how the AWS IAM works is wasted once you decide to move to another
cloud. The cost for learning how to use the 3rd party API is incurred by you
not the cloud vendor. For people who think lock-in isn't much of a problem
remember your whole hiring strategy will be aligned to whatever cloud vendor
you're using (look at job description that already filter out based on AWS or
GCP experience). Lock-in is so bad that for a business it is close to the rule
of real-estate (location, location, location), only that it's to the advantage
of the cloud vendor not you as the customer.
[1] optimyze.cloud
[2] _" I have just tried to pull the official EC2 price list via JSON API, and
the JSON file is 1.3gb"_
[https://twitter.com/halvarflake/status/1258161778770542594](https://twitter.com/halvarflake/status/1258161778770542594)
------
blackflame7000
If you have a lot of data but not a lot of users, it's prohibitively expensive
to pay monthly hosting and network egress fees when you can buy cheap hard
drives, use ZFS, and whatever server protocol you desire.
------
mcv
I notice all the banks I'm working for are moving to the cloud. A few years
ago they all had their own data centers, sometimes really big, well-designed
custom data centers. But they're all moving to the cloud now.
I've personally been wondering whether that's wise, because financial data and
the handling of many banking processes are a bank's core business. It makes
sense that a bank should be in control of that. And it needs to obey tons of
strict banking data regulations. But apparently modern cloud services are able
to provide all of that.
------
Xelbair
Cloud costs way way more compared to on-prem solution for my company.
We need random access to about 50TB of files, and quite a decent number of
VMs.
For storage on-perm vs cloud: buy was cheaper to have after 3(!) months.
For VMs(some of them could be containerized though): 1 year
It was cheaper to buy second-hand decent server, slap SSDs and just install a
decent hypervisor. Those costs also include: server room, power usage, admins
etc.
We do use cloud backups for the most important stuff.
Cloud is cheaper if your business is a something that is user-based - as in
you might need to scale it, hard.
If you aren't doing anything like that it is absurdly expensive.
------
benbro
Can you recommend dedicated hosting provider that: 1\. Has US, EU and Asia
regions. 2\. Let you rent servers per month. 3\. Has decent pricing. Not
premium, doesn't have to be low cost. I expect excellent egress pricing and
1/2-1/4 cost for CPU compared to the cloud. 4\. Reliable network. GCP premium
network is very good. How does dedicated providers and VPS providers (Linode
and DO) compare? 5\. Easy to use management and dashboard. Experienced really
bad dashboards and hard to use Java tools to install and manage dedicated
servers.
------
lrpublic
\- cost, as well evidenced in other comments here. The hyperscalers are orders
of magnitude more expensive than dedicated hosting or using collocation
providers.
\- lock in, all the hyper scalers want to sell you value add services that
make it hard or impossible to move away.
\- concentration risk, hyper scale providers are a well understood target for
malign actors. It’s true they are better protected than most.
\- complexity, if you think about how little time the hyperscalers have been
operating in comparison with corporate IT they have created huge technical
debt in the race to match features.
------
sgt
We do a hybrid approach which I think makes sense for a lot of companies. Our
mission critical stuff runs in the cloud, but anything that has to do with
staging environments and development we do on-premises. It's pretty easy to
host yourself, if you have a couple of decent engineers looking after it
(depending on scope, of course!).
Redundant power, redundant internet connections, and a few racks of Dell
servers and gigabit switches. Why did I mention Dell? They just don't seem to
die. We used HP for a few years but had a few bad experiences.
------
2rsf
Security (we're a bank)
~~~
aspyct
How is the cloud less secure than your on-prem servers? I would argue that
it's easier to keep track of all the threats with the tools available from big
cloud providers.
~~~
badpun
The big question is - how much do you trust these providers.
~~~
quicklime
I would guess that approximately zero banks own data centers that are operated
by their own employees. There might be a few exceptions to this, but the
reality is that most banks don't view technology as part of their core
business. So this largely gets outsourced to IT consulting firms like Infosys,
IBM, Wipro, etc.
The big question is - how much do you trust _these_ providers, and do you
think they are more competent at security than Amazon/Google/Microsoft?
~~~
dathinab
Or formulate it differently:
1\. Trust a provider which whole existence relies on trust and which you can
audit or at last cross-check the audit and security processes (as a Bank you
are normally not a small customer).
2\. Trust a provider which might 1st be a potential competitions in some
business fields. 2nd is so big that it can easily afford losing you. 3nd for
the same reason doesn't allow you any insights into there internal processes.
etc.
Plus many of the banks having their own hardware also have their own IT team.
So it's often about trusting your own people. I mean either you keep your it
or you outsource _and_ go into the cloud. Keeping local servers but
outsourcing IT at the same time seems kind not very clever tbh.
------
samcrawford
Cost is the sole reason for us as well. We have ~600-700 dedicated servers
around the globe, and generate a lot of egress traffic (~20PB/mo). We last ran
the figures a year or so ago, and it'd cost us around 13-15x in network costs
alone.
A common thread of a lot of the replies to this post is network traffic costs.
If one of the cloud providers can figure out a way to dramatically (and I mean
at least 10x) reduce their network transfer pricing, then I think we'll see a
second wave of companies adopting their services.
------
irrational
It is so so so much cheaper. We moved to AWS and tried setting up our servers
with specs that were comparable to what our physical servers had been. We just
about died after the first month. Our bill was higher for one month than for
multiple years running our physical servers. We had to way dial them back to
get the run rate down to a reasonable number. Now we have serious buyers
remorse. Performance is terrible. The cost is still more per month than we
ever had with our physical servers by a large amount.
------
fpierfed
We do not use the cloud. We operate (24/7) facilities in remote locations
where we do not have super reliable internet connection (we do have redundant
links including three different fibres on distinct paths plus radio links but
still). For this reason alone nothing critical can be in the cloud. In our
experience, however, cloud offerings are not that cheap compared to purchasing
and operating your own machines. Besides, one still needs sysadmins even when
operating infrastructure in the cloud.
------
kjgkjhfkjf
On-prem can make sense where your computing needs are constant and
predictable. You can arrange to have exactly what you need, and the total cost
of buying and operating it may be less than it would be to get comparable
resources in the cloud.
If your computing needs vary over time, then provisioning on-prem for peak
load will mean that some of your resources will be idle at non-peak times. It
may be cheaper to use cloud resources in cases like these, since you only need
to pay for the extra capacity when you need it.
------
blodkorv
Am the CTO of a small company making payroll software. We don't have on
premise servers but we currently are moving away from azure to renting VPSs
from a local provider.
The cost benefits are huge and since our app is mostly a normal web app we
dont need that many fancy cloud things. And i dont see us needing it in the
future.
I really dont understand why a company doing similar things would wanna go the
could route. Its so damn expensive and its not always easy to use and setup.
------
iseletsk
We are software development company. Most of our compute/storage needs are for
build/test cycles. We recently bought ~100K worth of additional hardware to
migrate some of that work off AWS. The storage / virtualization is done using
Ceph & OpenNebula. Including colocation/electricity/networking costs, the
investment will pay for itself in ~9 months. If I would include deployment
costs & work to migrate the jobs off the AWS -- it will pay for itself in 11
months.
------
starpilot
PII and draconian security policies. We are not a tech company, so we can't
fine-tune or have nuanced policies, we just have to build a wall around
everything . In our web password recovery process, we can't tell people if
their login was correct or not, because that might help a brute force attacker
infer they got that right. Even though we have that rate limited anyway. I
don't know why we can't just tell people the login was found or not found like
banks etc.
~~~
vikramkr
What industry? It's good practice to not share information like that in any
context, since attackers that have a bank if email addresses that are trying
to figure out which if a few reused passwords might be used for a given
website would have a harder time if they dont even know if the email has an
account with a given website, or if an alternate email is used instead etc.
------
kkielhofner
Not a company but a personal project:
[https://github.com/krisk84/retinanet_for_redaction_with_deep...](https://github.com/krisk84/retinanet_for_redaction_with_deepstream/wiki)
I haven't analyzed the TCO yet but the bandwidth costs alone from hosting my
curated model of 100GB in the cloud (Azure blob) have greatly exceeded my
total operation spend from downloading the entire dataset and running
training. By an order of magnitude.
------
jll29
The smartest approach is to be able to run anywhere, which is increasingly
practical due to VMs, Docker etc.
(At least funded) startups should start with the cloud as speed to completion
is key, but can later optimize for cost.
Elasticity of the cloud is also great, dealing with peak demands dynamically
without having to purchase hardware.
I'd suggest larger companies to use at leas two cloud vendors to add
resilience (when MS Teams went down, so did Slack - I was told they both use
MSFT's cloud).
------
tpae
Because Elon doesn't believe in the cloud. We were one of the few teams that
got AWS access, and we were told not to rely on it too much because it's
temporary...
------
thecolorblue
Just talking about my side project here: a local server + ngrok is easier to
use and cheaper than anything in the cloud.
In general, I would say any noncritical system I would host on-prem.
------
edoceo
Cost. We're a small company, five person team and we need a development
environment. All our stuff is built around VM and Docker. So scores of little
test nodes that get run, or beta environment in the cloud was costly (>$300/mo
base, sometimes 3x). For $1000 we put a box in the office we all VPN to that
runs all the necessary VM and Docker. The variable, sometimes expensive cost
for Test/Beta in cloud was replaced with low fixed cost.
------
nurettin
Sure, for tiny intel servers it makes sense to rent vms. It won't start to
hurt until 1.5 years later at which point the project needs to become
profitable anyways.
I run a couple of on-premise xeon gold machines with 96 gb ram and 40+ cores
on each. Their total purchase cost was the monthly cost of renting them on the
cloud. Also, you will never get the full benefit of the servers you use unless
they are dedicated instances with no virtualization layer.
------
pachico
It depends on what you have to do. If your stack includes a series of
microservices/monoliths connected to the typical OLTP DB then you might very
well sit entirely on cloud. Things change when you need heavy lifting like
having big ElasticSearch or ClickHouse clusters, or any other operation that
requires heavy CPU and high RAM capacity. In that case using providers like
Hetzner can cost you 1/10 of the bill compared to AWS.
------
AdrianB1
Manufacturing plants across the world controlling production lines: no way to
go in the cloud for that. We put the reporting data in the cloud, no problem
there.
------
Yizahi
"Server" is such a broad term. In our case, aside from cost as others already
mentioned, the distance and latency is very important. The servers must be
located as close to client devices as possible and reasonable, and they are
synced with clients using PTP to microseconds (depends on the actual distance
and topology). Cloud is a no go, and we a using bare metal K8S for graceful
handling of failures and updates.
------
iso1631
Most of my equipment has physical interfaces, video and audio in and out
Some equipment is very latency sensitive -- I'm talking microseconds, not
milliseconds.
More generic tasks need easy access to that specialist equipment (much of
which doesn't quite grasp the concept of security)
Given that we therefore have to run a secure network across hundreds of sites
on multiple continents, adding a couple of machines running xen adds very
little to the overhead.
------
thorwasdfasdf
Well, for one thing: jobs. It takes a lot of IT man-power to manage an on-
premise solution, especially when you run everything on-premise. Just imagine
if the CTO were to switch the company to a cloud based solutions, it would
save the company millions of dollars but also it would mean cutting a lot of
jobs. Gov departments that use on-premise do so for security reasons and to
maintain existing jobs.
------
timbre1234
Amazon/Azure/GCP - they're _businesses_. They charge you 50-70 points of
margin in order to run your computers. If you're R&D-limited, that's not
important to you, but if you're a more mature company that's cost-limited then
it matters a lot. If it's a core part of your business, it'll never be cheaper
to pay another company to profit from you. Period.
------
StreamBright
Yes, some of the leadership thinks that they can build a better cloud than MS
or AWS. It is pretty hilarious to watch how spectacularly they fail.
[https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/01/05/code-wise-cloud-
foolis...](https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/01/05/code-wise-cloud-foolish-
avoiding-bad-technology-choices/)
------
mathattack
We are going to the cloud, but you have to be careful. With on-prem the limit
of the cost is the server. Someone writes inefficient code and it just doesn’t
work. In the cloud there are 1000 ways to overspend and the vendors
purposefully don’t make it easy to track or keep things under control.
It’s kind of like outsourcing. If you don’t know what you are doing, cost goes
up and quality goes down.
------
Mave83
Cloud is only good if you don't care about costs and plan to scale without
looking back.
For example, building a Ceph based Software Defined Storage with croit.io for
S3 comes for 1/10 to 1/5 of the AWS price in TCO. Same goes for any other
product in the cloud.
If you only need it a short time up to 6 months, go to the cloud. If you plan
to have the resources longer than 6 months go to Colocation.
------
gbasin
Cloud will continue to dominate, even if it's more expensive. Why? Because the
best companies are able to focus on what makes them special, and outsource the
rest.
Cost and security are important, but they may not be most important. In a
business, the scarcest commodity is FOCUS. By outsourcing anything that isn't
core to your product, you can excel at what differentiates you.
------
Darkstryder
On top of what others have said, when outside the US the Cloud Act has been a
big one for most previous companies I worked for.
Using AWS / Azure / Google Cloud (even using datacenters from your own
country) implies that the US government can access your data at will.
As soon as you treat sensitive information, especially related to non-US
governments, this becomes a blocking factor.
------
Areading314
In some industries, cloud is not an option. For example, certain privacy laws
like HIPAA preclude uploading data to third parties, in which case, you need
things to be on-prem. There are also a lot of places in the world where
internet access is limited. Sometimes you need to solve problems beyond the
simple "web saas in cloud" use case
------
reverseengineer
Own servers cheaper than cloud. We calculated two years ago, it was up to 4x
for HPC. Best cost-wise option is used servers.
------
sradman
Legacy seems to be missing from the comments. Before the advent of Cloud IaaS
(Infrastructure as a Service) a very large ecosystem of On-Premise hardware
and software flourished. The question needs to be considered in the context of
greenfield vs brownfield systems as the trade-offs involved differ
drastically.
------
Spooky23
It all depends. Outside of SaaS, If you have a mature data center operating
model and truly understand your costs, there won’t be a strong cost savings
story for many types of workflows.
If you suck and don’t understand costs, or don’t automate, or spend a lot of
time eating steak with your Cisco team, you’ll save money... at first.
------
mister_hn
There's a fake believe in my company that all the data must be on premise
because of privacy concerns.
We've never used cloud services and we do not want to use it.
Some are saying it's a matter of costs, but you know? For a dual node server
(hot standby) we were asked 120K € + 50K € only for configuration fees.
------
32gbsd
Cloud servers tend to hide their limitations behind payment tiers which makes
it hard to really know how far you can push things. Also there are various
turns, conditions, cache rules, change management strategies that are hidden
when dealing with someone else's constantly changing box of magic.
------
lvturner
We install in to remote locations - you can't access the cloud if your
connectivity is down so local resources is a hard must.
Though we have adopted something close to an "Edge Computing" solution... I
guess it comes down to "Why not both?" :)
I think it also depends on your definition of "server"
------
sergiotapia
Just want to say I love threads like these. I hope one day where I work we can
have two or three obscenely beefy servers and be done with it. I'm planning
for something similar probably Q2 2021 as our expenses grow too large on a
manged hosting platform like Heroku/Render/Aptible.
------
dahfizz
There are some things you just can't do in a VM.
The company I work for actually develops and hosts an AWS clone for the Linux
Foundation, but with very specific requirements. They have special needs that
requires baremetal machines and "real" networking between them across 6+ NICs
per server.
------
withinrafael
Not many services are available in gov cloud regions, so we're stuck with on-
prem nearly everything.
------
jarym
my 2cents: the 'big' clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and the big-brand clouds
(Oracle, IBM, etc.) are attractive for BigCustomerCo because:
1\. Replace capital expenditure of in-house infrastructure + staff with OpEx
that can be dialled down
2\. Get to benefit from the economies of scale that the cloud vendors get
(those Intel CPUs get a lot cheaper when purchased in the 1000s)
3\. Get to leverage big shiny new tech like Big Data and AI that's
'advertised' as 'out-of-the-box'
My only concern really is that the big cloud players are all fighting for
dominance and market share. What happens in the next 5-10 years time when they
start raising prices? Different kind of lock-in - customers won't have the
expertise in-house to migrate stuff back.
------
trelliscoded
Zseries are a huge deal to move to the cloud; it’s just not worth the risk for
most organizations.
------
icelancer
Yes. Cost of GPUs if you want them on regularly and reliably, and you don't
need 2000 of them. We run small/mid-sized operations on-demand and the latency
of spinning up instances is not competitive and the cost is outrageous to have
them on standby.
------
collyw
There is extra complexity with managing cloud based solutions. Logging in,
setting up ssh keys. Ok it's all automatable but if I want a basic server set
up for doing a simple task quickly it's often a lot easier to run it on an
internal server.
------
dryst
If your product doesn't run connected to the internet, it is difficult to make
the case for cloud development. You need developers who understand hardware,
and abstraction layer cloud provides is a handicap instead of an enabler.
------
julienfr112
I think it depends on what is the alternative and what hardware you are
buying. If you go for top of the line HPE or dell or Cisco hyperconverged
stuff that allow you to be, sort of, your own cloud, you will end up with the
same large bill.
------
skunkiferous
I work for a German company. They run their own DC (unfortunately, I'm not
privy to precise numbers I could share, but we must be in the 1000s of
hardware servers).
Why? Because our (German) clients don't _thrust US cloud providers_.
------
exabrial
Hybrid cloud is the moneymaker solution, but there are no out of box solutions
for it.
------
maltelandwehr
Gigantic Elastic Search cluster - according to Elastic the largest in Europe
(as of 2 years ago) - used in production. Broke again and again on AWS. We
needed more shards than AWS supports. Moved to bare metal again.
------
iamgopal
When cloud computing started, alternative software deployment was complicated,
after a decade, much has been improved. So ease of management is also one of
the factor. Not all need state of the art data and AI.
------
kevlar1818
We use on-prem GPU nodes for training deep learning models. Our group
estimated the cost vs. cloud and it was significantly cheaper to go on-prem. I
can't speak to security-wise and whatever-wise though :)
------
caseyf
We colocate and as a small tech business, I can't imagine doing anything else.
We don't spend more on payroll due to colocating and AWS/etc would easily
double our annual non-payroll expenses.
------
cm2187
One good reason for your list: diversification. You don't want all the banking
systems of a country all running on AWS. It's an unacceptable single point of
failure risk for a country.
------
joaodlf
Like many said, cost.
But also - legalities. Most cloud providers have very unclear rules and what
exactly happen should you be in breach. For this reason, our business prefers
to have most of the control.
------
z3t4
There are several levels, not just on-prem vs cloud. You can for example co-
locate, rent dedicated servers, rent a single VPS, or put your website up on a
web hosting provider...
------
benbro
How do you manage installation and upgrades of dedicated servers? What do you
use for block storage and object storage? Kubernetes and Ceph seems to be hard
to setup and maintain.
------
altmind
to control the costs. after the original purchase, the MRC is a fixed cost for
hosting and for the network access. also, for the total control - the network,
io, cpu performance does not change randomly. with better predictability our
IT team can give more precise SLA.
we're not 100% on-prem, but aws, gcloud and azure are the worst examples of
3rd party hosting - unpredictable and with complicated billing. we're
considering the alternatives to big 3 for the "cloud hosting"
------
manishsharan
I work in a very large financial institution in small tech team. I would give
an arm and a leg to not deal with soul sucking bureaucracy that is our IT
department.
------
PudgePacket
This thread has been illuminating, a lot more non-cloud people than I thought!
Drinking the cloud kool-aid had me thinking cloud was the only realistic way
to go.
------
JoeAltmaier
My client's customers are geolocated (continental US) and their personal data
is sensitive. So their server is in their own firewalled server closet.
------
jerzyt
Client data confidentiality. I know it's a weak argument, but if the contract
requires that we store data in-house, there's no choice.
------
kortilla
It’s not secure if you have air gap requirements or issues with employees from
another company technically having access to all of your data.
------
FpUser
I normally host on prem and also rent dedicated servers elsewhere as standby.
Way cheaper than the cloud and full control the way I want.
------
GaryNumanVevo
We run one of the largest Hadoop clusters on the planet. On-prem is very cost
efficient if you're running jobs flat out 24/7
------
natmaka
Confidentiality. Protecting sensible data (avoiding letting some hostile
obtain or even modify them) seems impossible on the cloud.
------
hans_castorp
We are staying on-premise for security and privacy reasons.
We can't store our data outside of the company (or even worse: outside of the
EU)
------
moonbug
TCO.
~~~
aspyct
Which, all things considered, seems lower on the cloud. Could you give more
details on this answer?
~~~
lazylizard
A 2u asus with 2 xeon silver, 64gb ram and 4 x 2080ti is maybe us$15k?
We'll use it for as long as its producing useful output. Lets say 5 years?
Probably a little longer?
A 60bay 4u western digital with 14tb drives is under us$50k?
definitely got a dell md1280+1u server with 70x10tb 2yrs ago for under us$50k.
Fully populated the following year..
A 2u dell with maybe 20 cores n 128gb ram each should cost less than us$10k.
And we just got 4 or 5 dell switches with 48x10g ports for 50-70k? I'm not
sure.
What's the equivalent in the cloud?
~~~
aspyct
Are you keeping tabs on the cost of the building and associated security?
Video cameras, locks... Also the manpower needed to install and maintain that
equipment.
Similarly, your 70*10tb tells nothing. What's the redundancy on that, how much
of that space did you lose to it, where do you store your backups and at what
cost?
As for networking, having those switches is nice, but you still need your
internet connection if you're serving anything online from this.
~~~
lazylizard
The manpower to run that stuff is already doing desktop support.
Storage is usually a stripe of 10 disks in raidz2 + 2 spares. Then we do a
nightly zfs send..
The internet connection for the hosting is 100mbps. The users share 1gbps of
internet.
We pay only for hardware. Rent and utilities. And the internet connections.
Everything else we can do it ourselves.
I mean. Seriously. Whats the cost of running 100 x 4 x 2080ti in the cloud for
a year? Or storing 500tb(1 instance only,no redundancy) ?
------
leothecool
If your customers still want the system to run air-gapped from the internet,
cloud is basically off the table.
------
mlang23
Cost and data security, while cost actually weights more. It is simply not
true that the cloud is cheaper.
------
totorovirus
I work in a data science company with 30+ engineers. We've spent 80k dollars
on GKE last month only..
------
yread
Yes just moved from 4 servers in AWS costing 700 usd/month to a single
dedicated one that costs 40.
~~~
gizmodo59
Just out of curiosity, what downtime is in acceptable range for that single
server?
~~~
yread
At night noone cares
------
fulafel
Cloud is even more muddled as a term in this space than usual (Hybrid/private
added to the mix).
------
som33
>I honestly fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least
for business. Cost-wise, security-wise, whatever-wise.
Problem is point of failure, many businesses need to be independent and having
data stored in the cloud is a bad idea overall. Because it produces point of
failure issues. Consider if we ever got a real nasty solar wind and the
electric grid goes down, the more we rely on the internet and centralize
infrastructure into electric devices, the more it becomes a costly point of
failure.
While many see redundancy as "waste" in terms of dollars, notice that our
bodies have many billions of redundant cells and that's what makes us
resilient as a species, we can take a licking and keep on ticking.
Trusting your data to out-side sources generally is a bad idea any day of the
week. You always want to have backups and data available in case of diaster,
mishap, etc.
Like no one has learned from this epidemic yet. Notice that our economic
philosophy didn't plan for viral infections and has forced our capitalist
society to make serious adjustments. Helping people is an anathema to liberals
and conservatives / republicans / democrats, so for void to come along and
actually force co-operation was a bit tragically humorous.
As a general rule you need redundancy if you want to survive, behaving as if
the cloud is almighty is a bad idea, I'm not sold on "software as a service"
or any of that nonsense. It's just there to lull you into a false sense of
security.
You always need to plan for the worst case scenario for surviveability
reasons.
------
funny948
At least a few years ago, tons of company were afraid of the 'cloud'.
It does change right now.
------
blaser-waffle
Big public clouds have a genuine purpose but there is a shit-ton of marketing
and FUD being thrown around about them -- I'd bet my hat that's what this post
is, given the phrasing up top.
I'm not a fan. In short:
Cost. CapEx and depreciation vs. OpEx. The numbers look amazing for ~3 years
until the credits and discounts wear off. Then it's just high OpEx costs
forever. Meanwhile I can depreciate my $10k server over time and get some cash
back in taxes; plus it's paid for after a couple years -- $0 OpEx outside of
licenses, and CentOS has no license cost.
Once you have significant presence in someone's cloud, they're not going to
just lower costs either -- they've got you now. What in American Capitalism
circa 2020 makes you think they won't find a way to nickle and dime you to
death?
It's not going to reduce headcount, either. Instead of 14 devops/sysadmins,
now I have 14 cloud admins, sitting pretty with their Azure or GCP certs.
Automation is what's going to reduce those headcounts and costs, and
Ansible+Jenkins+Kubernetes works fine just with VMware, Docker, and Cisco on-
prem.
Trust. The Google Cloud just had a 12-hour outage -- I first read about it
here on HN. AWS and Azure have had plenty of outages too... usually they're
just not as open as Google is about it. You also have to trust that they won't
get back-doored like what happened to NordVPN's providers, and that they're
not secretly MITM'ing everything or dup-ing your data. We (and some of our
clients) compete with some of the cloud providers companies and their
subsidiaries, and we know for a fact that they will investigate and siphon any
data that could give them an advantage.
Purpose. _We just don 't need hyper-scalable architecture._ We've got a
(mostly) fixed number of users in a fixed number of locations, with needs that
are fairly easy to estimate / build for. Outside of a handful of sales &
financial processing purposes, we will never scale up or down in any dramatic
fashion. And for the one-off cases, we can either make it work with VMware, or
outsource it to the software provider's SaaS cloud offering.
If we were doing e-commerce -- absolutely. Some sort of android app? Sure, AWS
or Azure would be great. But it's a lot of risk and cost with no benefit for
the Enterprise orgs than can afford their own stuff.
------
hendry
Bandwidth is the problem. You can't run a Youtube on any cloud provider.
------
alpenbazi
Security. And Independency.
------
aripickar
I work for AWS, so (in the most pedantic way possible) technically yes
------
whorleater
Yes, but we work in financial information so very weird requirements.
------
gramakri
We use servers on the cloud (IaaS) but still self-host all our apps.
------
_wldu
Local caching recursive DNS servers work best close to the clients.
------
Abukamel
Yes online.net and the like companies save costs
------
itworker7
In physics, a gallon of water weights 8.34 lbs. (For this analogy, a gallon of
water is a unit of work.) And the gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs irregardless
if it is sitting on my desk in a physical building, or on your desk, in the
cloud. Same weight, same unit of work. same effort. For a brand new,
greenfield application, the cloud is a no brainer. I agree 100%. But for
legacy applications, and there are so, soooo many, the cloud is just some one
else's computer. Yes, the cloud is more scaleable, yes, the cloud is more
manageable, and yes, you can control the cpu/storage/memory/network in much
finer amounts. But legacy applications are very complicated. They have long
tails, interconnections to other applications that cannot immediately be
migrated to the cloud. I have migrated clients off of the cloud, back to on
premise or to (co-lo) local hosting, because without rewriting the legacy
application, the cloud costs are simply too great.
The essence of IT is to apply technology to solve a business problem.
Otherwise, why would the business spend the money? The IT solution might be
crazy/stupid/complex but if it works, many business simply adopt it and move
on. Now, move that crazy/stupid/complex process to the cloud and surprise, it
is very, very expensive. So, yes, the cloud is better, but only for some
things. And until legacy applications are rewritten on-premise will exist.
One final insight. The cloud costs more. It has been engineered to be so, both
from a profitability standpoint(Amazon _is_ a for profit company) but also
because the cloud has decomposed the infrastructure of IT into functional
subcomponents, each of which cost money. When I was younger, the challenge for
IT was explaining to management, the ROI of new servers, expanded networking,
additional technology. We never quite got it right and often had it completely
wrong. That was because we lacked the ability to account for/track and manage
the actual costs of an on-premise operation. Accounting had one view,
operations had another view and management had no idea really, why they were
spending millions a year and could not get their business goals accomplished.
The cloud changed all of that. You can do almost anything in the cloud, for a
price. And I will humbly submit, that the cost of the cloud - minus the
aforementioned profitability, is what on-premise organizations should have
been spending all along. Anyone reading this and who has spent time in a
legacy environment, knows that it is basically a futile exercise of keeping
the plates spinning. On-premise failed because it could not get management to
understand the value on in-house IT.
As I said, the costs are the same. A gallon of water weighs what it weighs
regardless of location. It will be interesting to see, I predict the pendulum
will swing back.
------
shakkhar
Because we don't trust either amazon or google.
------
loeg
Cost-wise is still a pretty compelling argument.
------
Stierlitz
Annual costs, backups, security and latency.
------
markc
on-premises not on-premise
------
sarasasa28
we are not zoomers
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